Around midnight the ship’s engines started up for the first time since our rescue, and as we dropped off to sleep on our blankets, we could feel the floor rumbling beneath us.
Twenty-Six
SINGAPORE BOUND
THE NEXT MORNING WATER LINES WERE OPENED ON Seasweep’s decks, and they gushed like fire hydrants while the refugees gratefully bathed in freshwater for the first time since arriving in Malaysia more than three weeks ago. Three weeks without a bath—it was every parent’s worst nightmare and every child’s dream. Clotheslines were strung everywhere to allow clothing to dry; before long the deck corridors looked like laced tennis shoes, and the cargo hold closely resembled a Chinese laundry.
When my father learned that Seasweep was headed back to Singapore without searching for the other three boats, he was heartbroken. His mother and other family were on one of those boats, and he didn’t know if they were even still alive. He thought back to our boat’s six days at sea, and he wondered if things had been as terrible for his family as they had been for us. Grandmother Chung, his brother and sisters, his nephews and nieces—would he ever see any of them again?
Now that we were all safely aboard Seasweep, Stan Mooneyham had to figure out what to do with us. It was not an easy decision. He was sailing toward Singapore simply because that was the ship’s home port, but the authorities there had made no promise that they would accept his new passengers. The Singapore-based members of Seasweep’s crew had been threatened with fines and penalties if they attempted to return with refugees, and Captain Samudra had even been told that he would lose his pilot’s license—and that would have meant the end of his career.
There were places other than Singapore where Stan could have dropped us off, but there were not many, and none of them was certain. There was one port in Thailand that was a possibility but not a very good one. Guam was a good option because it was a US territory; but it would have taken fourteen days to get there, and the ship didn’t have enough fuel, so Guam was rejected. That turned out to be a very good decision because exactly fourteen days later Super Typhoon Hope was spawned just southeast of Guam; it was a Category 4 typhoon with winds that eventually reached 150 miles per hour.
Hong Kong contacted Stan at sea before the refugees had even been taken aboard to warn him that Seasweep would not be allowed to enter Hong Kong Harbor with refugees aboard, and if their warning was ignored, the ship would be confiscated and the captain and owner would each be fined $20,000 and sentenced to five years in prison.
That crossed Hong Kong off the list.
That left only Singapore; and after a couple of hours of soul-searching and discussion, the captain and crew agreed to take their chances at their home port while Stan agreed to do everything he could to negotiate with the authorities en route.
It took four days for Seasweep to make it back to Singapore. The adults spent most of their time resting, recovering, and tending to daily necessities while the children spent their days exploring the ship and being entertained by the crew. Stan’s seventeen-year-old son, Mark, was aboard, and he was a favorite among the children because he organized games and activities for us and could do magic tricks and make balloon animals. My sister Nikki especially liked Mark; on our first day aboard, he accidentally kicked her and made her cry, and he felt so bad about it that he carried her around for the rest of the trip. My brother Thai remembers the bread that was served on board because it was so thick and fluffy. Someone dropped a piece of it on the filthy deck, and Thai hurried over to pick it up and eat it, but before he could reach it, a crew member tossed it overboard. Thai was shocked—he couldn’t imagine how anyone could throw away a piece of food.
The crew handed out Vietnamese-language magazines that had been brought along just for the refugees, and small, blue Vietnamese-language Bibles were offered to anyone who wanted one; after three weeks of monotony and boredom, the refugees devoured everything they could read. A worship service was held on deck one day, and anyone who wished to could take part. My mother was busy below deck with the children, but my father decided to attend, along with most of the other refugees.
My father was not a particularly religious man, and he wasn’t sure why he attended that service. It was mostly because someone in Seasweep’s crew had invited him, and he thought it might have seemed like an insult if he declined after these people had been so kind to his family. There was another reason he attended: he hoped these people would explain why they would go to so much trouble and expense to save the lives of people whose own country didn’t want them and the rest of the world valued less than dirt.
Stan Mooneyham spoke that day, and the same man who had first greeted our boat with the South Vietnamese flag on his Windbreaker translated the sermon so everyone could understand. To my father’s surprise, Stan didn’t talk about his noble organization or the selfless crew of Seasweep or even the details behind the rescue. Instead, he talked about Jesus: about His love for the unloved, His compassion for the helpless, and His heart for all those whom society sweeps into the gutter. He healed the lame and blind, He wept over the dead, and He wrapped His arms around the untouchable. His greatest act of love was to die for us, Stan said, and He returned from the dead to offer love and forgiveness to everyone who would accept it. It was that great love that brought Seasweep here, Stan told everyone. His great love compelled His followers to love and care for others. He loved, so we love; He gave, so we give back.
My father was riveted by those words. It was as though Stan Mooneyham was explaining his own life to him in a way he had never understood before. He suddenly recognized that all the seemingly random events of his life had a purpose, and the terrible and bewildering events of the last few weeks all had meaning. He had no way to articulate that meaning and purpose or even to fully comprehend it, but the assurance that it was there gave him an overwhelming sense of peace.
There is an expression the Chinese use when asking for forgiveness: “Let’s drop it in the ocean.” At that moment my father felt his entire past had been dropped into the South China Sea—he was free; he was released; he was forgiven. Now he knew the Creator God had a name and a face, and my father knew he would never be the same again.
At the conclusion of Stan’s sermon, someone suggested singing a hymn, but none of the refugees knew any Christian hymns, so instead, they sang the South Vietnamese national anthem, which includes these words:
No danger, no obstacle can stop us.
Our courage remains unwavering in the face of a thousand dangers.
On the new way, our look embraces the horizon.
The words could not have been more appropriate to the occasion, and I doubt any song could have better expressed what was in everyone’s heart.
That night, when we were about to go to sleep, someone called down to the cargo hold, “Whoever wants to see the boat one last time come on up!” Most of us were already sound asleep, and those who were still awake couldn’t have cared less about our old boat now that we were safely off of it. But Bruce was curious, and he went topside to see what was going on.
He followed the crew to the stern of the ship and looked over the railing. Our boat was being towed behind Seasweep exactly as it had been towed behind the Malaysian patrol boat, but Bruce had never seen the boat from this vantage point. This is how our boat must have looked to the Malaysian sailors, he thought. For six days Bruce had been jammed into that little boat, but as he watched it bobbing up and down in the ship’s huge wake, he found it hard to believe it had ever happened.
Then as Bruce looked on, the boat began to fill with water until it quietly slipped beneath the surface, and Seasweep was left towing nothing but a rope.
Stan Mooneyham was also watching as the boat filled with water, and when it finally disappeared, he shook his head in disbelief. That boat had managed to stay afloat for six entire days, supporting the weight of ninety-three human beings, yet with no one at all aboard, it sank. The Vietnamese translator had told Stan the boat ha
d been towed behind a Malaysian naval ship for twenty straight hours—how was that even possible?
To Stan, it was nothing less than miraculous, but the miracle wasn’t just that the boat had stayed afloat—it was the fact that Seasweep had managed to find it at all. After three solid days of searching more than six hundred miles of ocean, this was the only refugee boat the crew had been able to find. Only one pair of eyes had managed to spot it—Burt Singleton’s—and only because he happened to be standing on the bridge, where he could see a mile or two farther than anyone else. Ten miles to the horizon—that was as far as you could see from the tallest point on the ship. A ten-mile margin of error in a body of water twice the size of Alaska—what were the odds? If the boat had drifted just a few miles farther, if Seasweep had varied its course by a single degree, if Burt Singleton had even blinked . . .
On the fourth day Seasweep passed Horsburgh Lighthouse at the entrance to the Straits of Singapore. The ship dropped anchor outside Singapore Harbor because we didn’t dare enter until Stan received official permission to do so. The Straits were named after Singapore alone, but the ten-mile-wide waterway is actually bordered by both Singapore to the north and Indonesia to the south, and both countries take an active interest in any foreign ship that wants to pass through. Two hours after we anchored we were buzzed by two different patrol planes and approached by an Indonesian customs ship and three coastal patrol boats from Singapore, one of which was heavily armed and kept circling us like a hungry shark.
As soon as the ship anchored, Stan took a launch ashore to meet with Singapore’s foreign ministry to try to obtain permission for Seasweep to enter the harbor and off-load her ninety-three refugees. Negotiations had not gone well for Stan en route; he hoped things would go better when he could negotiate face-to-face, but the fact that we had arrived on Friday the thirteenth should have tipped him off that things would not go as smoothly as he hoped. It took three days of negotiation and an actual letter from the American Embassy, promising the United States would take full responsibility for the resettlement of all ninety-three refugees before Singapore’s foreign ministry would relent and allow us to enter the harbor.
Late at night on July 16, Seasweep finally sailed into Singapore Harbor. All incoming vessels had to be cleared at anchor by separate boats from Immigration, Customs, and Quarantine. When we were finally cleared to go ashore, slow-moving launches shuttled back and forth between the ship and the pier until all of us had disembarked. It was an incredible thrill for the children to ride the launch across the harbor with the wind blowing in our hair; and the breathtaking sight of thousands of glittering lights from downtown Singapore reflecting off the water made us feel as if we had just sailed into Neverland.
Stan Mooneyham was there to watch as we boarded a row of chartered buses that were waiting to take us to a refugee camp. At the time, we were all too preoccupied to think about shaking his hand or thanking him for what he had done; but looking back, it almost seems like a crime that we didn’t. Operation Seasweep was an international effort that involved the labor and sacrifice of hundreds of individuals, but it was the compassion and tireless dedication of one man who got it started and saw it through to the end despite the enormous obstacles he faced.
There is a Vietnamese proverb that says, “When you eat the fruit, remember who planted the tree.” We owe our lives to Stan Mooneyham, and so do hundreds of other grateful refugees.
Twenty-Seven
25 HAWKINS ROAD
MY BROTHER BRUCE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A BIG EATER, yet for more than two weeks on the beaches of Malaysia, he had been forced to survive on little more than crackers, lima beans, and uncooked rice. When the Malaysians abandoned us at sea, there was nothing to eat at all, and Bruce spent the entire six days begging for something to fill the aching void in his stomach. We were all starving, but Bruce seemed to feel the pangs of hunger more than anyone, and the moment he set foot on Seasweep, he started making up for lost time.
By the time we reached Singapore, Bruce was almost eleven, and looming adolescence was stoking the furnace of his metabolism. He ate anything he could find, and it didn’t much matter what it was; if it was edible, Bruce ate it. That kind of indiscriminate palate can get a boy into trouble, which is why less than one day after we arrived in Singapore, Bruce was close to dying from food poisoning.
After clearing Customs, Immigration, and Quarantine, it had taken the buses about an hour to drive us the fifteen miles from the docks of Singapore Harbor to our refugee camp on the north side of the island. Singapore is an island nation-state that sits at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, like the dot at the end of an exclamation point; the entire nation is smaller in area than Lexington, Kentucky. On the northern side the island is bordered by the Johor Strait, and just across the water is the nation of Malaysia. Ironically, after being towed out to sea by the Malaysians and left to die, my family found the Malaysians living just a stone’s throw away.
Our refugee camp was known as 25 Hawkins Road, and it was located in the suburbs of an area known as Sembawang. The camp had once served as a British army barrack, which was easily recognized by the stone memorials and cannons that dotted the grounds. When Singapore declared its independence from Great Britain, the facility had been abandoned and left unoccupied until it was opened again in 1978, to serve as a refugee camp. Aside from our miraculous rescue by Seasweep, my family’s assignment to 25 Hawkins Road was our first good break since leaving Vietnam five weeks previously. The conditions in refugee camps throughout Southeast Asia varied widely, from the horrific cesspools of island camps such as Pulau Bidong to decent camps like 25 Hawkins Road.
We were assigned to Camp 14, which was one of many pleasant-looking two-story buildings with narrow white siding and red tile roofs. Because our building had formerly served as a barrack, it was laid out to suit that purpose: the bottom floor was a single open room that had once been lined with rows of metal bunk beds for enlisted men, and the upstairs was divided into separate rooms for officers. The upstairs rooms lined one side of the building, and across a long hallway there was a communal bathroom with showers and a bathtub that everyone had to share.
A single upstairs room was assigned to my entire extended family—the ten members of our immediate family, my maternal grandmother and grandfather, Uncle Lam and his wife, their five-year-old daughter and four-year-old son, and my unmarried twenty-two-year-old aunt. My mother had two sisters, but only the older one was accompanying us as the younger sister had left Vietnam on her own in the first wave of refugees back in 1975, when she was only eighteen.
Seventeen people sharing a room that measured eighteen-by-eighteen feet—and there was nothing in the room. No furniture, no beds, no kitchen—just an empty space barely big enough for everyone to lie down, but we were grateful for it because it was the first time we had slept under a real roof in five weeks.
When we first arrived, my family signed in at the office, and we were required to register by male heads of household. My father signed for our household, and my grandfather and Uncle Lam each represented their own. Our group of ninety-three was assigned the name Seasweep One, which apparently meant that we were the first group of refugees rescued by Seasweep to be taken to 25 Hawkins Road.
As soon as we were assigned a room, my brothers and sisters all raced upstairs to see it, and because Bruce was the fastest, he got there before everyone else. He found the room empty, but on the window ledge Bruce saw a couple of unopened cartons of orange juice and some cookies someone had left behind—apparently for good reason. But Bruce didn’t know that, so he immediately downed the orange juice and gobbled the cookies.
By the next morning Bruce had severe diarrhea and uncontrollable vomiting, and before long his skin grew clammy and cold, and his body began to stiffen. When Bruce’s fingers started turning blue and his eyes rolled back in his head, my father decided it was time to get help, so he hoisted Bruce onto his back and ran to the camp office with Jenny right behind him. He was ho
ping to find a nurse or at least some kind of medicine that might be able to help him, but the office staff took one look at Bruce and told him, “You have to take this child to the hospital.” But no one in the entire camp had a car to drive him there, so they just led him outside and pointed to the road.
My father started running toward the road with Bruce jostling half-conscious on his back. “Wake up! Wake up!” he kept shouting over his shoulder, but Bruce did not respond. My father had no idea how far away the hospital was or how long it would take him to run there with the weight of a ten-year-old on his back, but he had no choice—he didn’t have enough money to even take a bus.
On the way to the road, my father passed a woman he had never seen before. She stopped him, took a look at Bruce, and said something to my father in a language he didn’t understand but recognized as French. Then the woman opened her purse, handed my father a few dollars, and without a further word went on her way.
My father had no idea who the woman was or why in the world she would hand him money—but he didn’t care. Money was exactly what he needed right then, and he waved down a taxi to rush him to the hospital and used the French woman’s money to pay for it.
My father was hoping to have Bruce treated as an outpatient and return home with him because he had no money to pay for a hospital stay. But the moment the doctors saw Bruce’s condition, they admitted him, and within minutes they had a bottle of saline dripping into his veins, and they were rolling him into an elevator—which was the first elevator Bruce had ever seen.
Hypovolemic shock was the probable cause of Bruce’s condition—a serious decrease in blood volume that can be caused by excessive diarrhea and vomiting. Without enough blood reaching the body’s extremities, they can turn purple or blue; in extreme cases, the patient can even die. Bruce’s condition was serious enough to require a three-night hospital stay. My father returned to 25 Hawkins Road to take care of the rest of us while my mother took his place at the hospital. Officially, family members were not allowed to stay overnight, but they bent the rules for my mother, and she slept in a chair beside Bruce’s bed every night until he was allowed to go home.
Where the Wind Leads Page 20
