Where the Wind Leads

by Dr. Vinh Chung

  The hospital was at the top of a tall hill, and when Bruce was released, he was still so weak that my father had to carry him. At the bottom of the hill, a kind-looking Chinese man walked up to my father and began to talk to him, but my father doesn’t speak Mandarin and couldn’t understand the man. Once again, a perfect stranger handed my father some money and walked away—this time a US five-dollar bill. And once again, my father used the money to take a taxi home.

  My father remembers those two unexpected acts of compassion, not because the gifts were so large but because the timing of the gifts was so perfect. He was given exactly what he needed, precisely when he needed it, from sources he never expected, and without even having to ask. To my father, that seemed like more than coincidence.

  When Bruce came home from the hospital, life returned to normal—at least, as normal as life in a foreign refugee camp can be. My mother’s day was spent taking care of the children and managing our one-room apartment. There was a bathtub in the communal bathroom across the hall, and since none of us had ever seen one before, my mother used it to wash dishes. When we first arrived at 25 Hawkins Road, we had no money at all, and to make ends meet my mother had to sell off the few pieces of jewelry she had managed to save, most of which she was wearing. She had also crocheted a black handbag before she left Vietnam and concealed a necklace and bracelet in the handle, and while my obedient father had surrendered the last of our family’s money to the Malaysian authorities, my defiant mother held on to that handbag—which she still has to this day. None of her jewelry was expensive—mostly just bits of jade in settings of gold—but there were pawnbrokers in Singapore who visited the camp regularly because they knew refugees often fled with jewelry. The gold used in Asian jewelry was purer than most, and it was profitable to resell as jewelry or just melt down.

  My father went to work right away doing a variety of jobs: farming, plywood fabrication, asphalt roofing, finish carpentry, grocery work—anything he was offered. Every morning a labor organizer would drive a bus into camp and ask the men if anyone wanted to work. My father always received $10 for his day’s labor, regardless of what the job actually paid, and the organizer pocketed the rest as his fee.

  After a while, the UNHCR began to give us $1.50 per person, per day, to help with living expenses, and that’s where a large family came in handy. We were given $15 every day, and though that amount didn’t go a long way with a family of ten, it more than doubled my father’s daily salary. Before long my father had enough money to begin to buy things in preparation for our trip to America, and the shrewd merchants in Singapore offered him lots of helpful advice.

  “Everything is more expensive in America,” they told him. “You’d better buy it now because you won’t be able to afford it there.” It was the taxes, they told him. America taxed everything—that was why everything was so expensive. But there was no sales tax in Singapore, so if my father was smart, he would buy everything he could before he left.

  My father took their word for it and bought everything he thought he might want but would not be able to afford in the United States. He bought the biggest boom box he could find, a high-end rice cooker, some very fancy watches, and sunglasses for all of us. My mother bought a sewing machine, hoping to do part-time work as a seamstress when she got to America, and my father even bought two bottles of Hennessey cognac though he didn’t drink. Might as well, he figured, because he was being paid in Singapore dollars and wouldn’t be able to spend them in the United States.

  The children just had fun. There were twenty-seven children among our group of ninety-three, and some of them were the same age as we were and became our regular playmates. There was a playground at the bottom of a hill that we liked to play on, but we had even more fun rolling down the hill to get to it. We spent hours playing tag, but none of us really understood the concept of the game, so we just ran up to perfect strangers, touched them, and ran away. We had a favorite toy too: a small straw with a tube of some kind of plastic goo. We rolled some of the goo into a little ball, stuck it on the end of the straw, blew into it, and presto—a plastic balloon. It may not sound like much when I describe it now, but it provided hours of entertainment for us then.

  There were vendors who visited our camp every day, and once my father had an income, he would give each of us a few cents to buy something. Our favorite was the ice cream man, who sold ice cream and flavored snow cones—always a treat in a tropical climate. The ice cream man was Chinese and actually spoke Cháo zhōu as we did, so we were able to converse with him and tell him exactly what we wanted. There was also a grocery store nearby, where we used to buy bread and condensed milk, and sometimes sympathetic locals would even give us vegetables and apples free of charge.

  There was a single-room building in the camp filled with donated clothing that any of the refugees could take for free. The room was dark and damp, and the clothing was old and out of style; some of it was even stained and moldy, but we were glad to have it. If whatever we grabbed actually fit, we were lucky; if it was too small, we gave it to a younger sibling; and if it was too big, we just grew into it. “One size fits all” was the Chung family motto, and we lived by it until I was eighteen.

  The UNHCR was responsible for running 25 Hawkins Road, and it also coordinated the details of resettlement for each individual or family. No refugee was allowed to leave the camp without having a sponsor in another country who would take responsibility for them when they arrived and help them adjust to life in their new home. Some in our group were lucky enough to have friends or relatives in other countries willing to sponsor them, and they were able to leave 25 Hawkins Road right away. Others—such as my family—knew no one overseas and could only wait until some anonymous person or group heard about them and agreed to be their sponsor. Some did not even know what country they would be going to; the only reason my family knew we would be going to the United States was because that arrangement had been made even before Seasweep rescued us.

  Though we knew we would eventually be going to America, we had no idea where or how long it would take before someone would agree to sponsor us. There was an intercom system in the camp, and when a refugee family had found a sponsor, the UNHCR would ask that family to come to the office. Whenever that intercom came on, everyone in the camp held their breath, and when the name was announced, everyone cheered for that family—but also felt bad that it wasn’t them.

  Imagine sitting by an intercom, waiting for your name to be called, knowing the sponsor assigned to you would determine not only where you might live for the rest of your life but also what language you would speak, the traditions and activities you would take part in, and the culture your children would adopt. The consequences of that one decision are so far-reaching, they boggle the mind, yet the decision was often made without the refugee’s slightest knowledge or consent.

  Individuals and small families seemed to find sponsors quickly, and my father and mother began to worry that no one would want to sponsor a family as large as ours. Day after day we heard other names called and said good-bye to those families as they left for their new homes. My parents had heard horror stories about refugees who had floundered in refugee camps for years without ever finding a sponsor, and they hoped our family would not become one of them.

  Gradually everyone left, except for us. Even my mother’s family left for America before we did. My grandparents had a distant relative in Falls Church, Virginia, who agreed to sponsor them, and Uncle Lam, his family, and my aunt asked to go with them. The relative in Falls Church was sponsoring seven Truongs, and it was too much to ask him to take ten Chungs, too, so our family decided to remain in Singapore to wait for a sponsor of our own.

  Exactly one hundred days after our arrival at 25 Hawkins Road, we heard the intercom crackle and a voice say, “Thanh Chung, please come to the office.”

  Then we really cheered. Somewhere in America, someone had been kind enough and generous enough and maybe even crazy enough to sponsor a f
amily of ten refugees who didn’t have a dime between them and didn’t speak a word of English. Whoever they were, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

  But then, neither did we.

  Twenty-Eight

  ACROSS THE PACIFIC

  WHEN MY FAMILY LEFT OUR HOME IN THE MEKONG Delta of Vietnam, none of us had ever seen the ocean, another country, a cargo ship, an elevator, or even a bathtub—so imagine what it was like for us to board a 747.

  The date assigned for our departure from 25 Hawkins Road was October 25, 1979. On that day we dressed in our best moldy clothes and our flashy new sunglasses, loaded up all the treasures my father had shrewdly purchased in Singapore, and boarded a bus for Paya Lebar Airport, about ten miles away. Since we were the last ones to leave the camp, no one was there to say good-bye to or bid us a fond farewell, but we felt no disappointment because we were going to America.

  Paya Lebar Airport was sprawling and modern, big enough for even the Concorde to land, but the airport itself was nothing compared to what we saw when we stepped out onto the tarmac and beheld our waiting transport. The 747 was even longer and taller than Seasweep, and when they told us it could fly, we knew anything was possible. The 747 had room for more than four hundred passengers, but when we boarded the plane, we were surprised to find we were the only ones there. The plane’s cabin was the size of a subway tunnel, and the children all ran around until a flight attendant pointed to our seats to let us know it was time to buckle up for takeoff.

  You would think my brothers and sisters and I would have been frightened to fly for the first time, but we didn’t give it a second thought. After all the wonders we had already witnessed, we just took for granted that a 190-ton chunk of metal could hurtle across the sky at five hundred miles per hour carrying us in its belly. Why not? If the pilot had told us we were going to make a quick stop on the moon, we probably would have believed him.

  Since no one spoke our language, no one could tell us how long our flight would be, so we were surprised when the plane started down again, less than an hour after takeoff. We were landing in Malaysia—we just couldn’t seem to get away from that place. In Malaysia a large group of refugees boarded the plane and joined us. This time when we took off, we looked out the windows and saw water below us. We knew then we were finally on our way.

  Actually, we were only on our way to Japan, where we had to refuel before making the long hop across the Pacific to the West Coast. The flight from Malaysia to Japan took about seven hours. No additional refugees boarded there, so as soon as the plane was refueled, we took off again. Everything about flying was fun for us, but the best part of all was the food—they kept bringing it to us on little plastic trays. One of the entrees was pizza, which my father had never seen before. He took one look at it and said, “What’s that mess?” But the rest of us loved it. I don’t think my brother Bruce would have cared if we never landed.

  The flight from Japan to the United States took almost eleven hours; we landed at Travis Air Force Base, about fifty miles northeast of San Francisco. Due to the bizarre mathematics involved in flying east across the International Date Line, we actually arrived in America five hours before we took off from Japan, which our minds found fascinating but our bodies found unconvincing. The clock on the wall told us that we had been flying for only six hours, but our exhausted bodies insisted that we had really been flying for twenty-one.

  For refugees arriving in America from Southeast Asia, Travis Air Force Base served the same purpose Ellis Island had for immigrants from Europe a generation before. At one point in time, five hundred refugees were arriving at Travis every day to meet with immigration officials, make sure all their papers were in order, and most important of all, find out for the first time where they would be living in America.

  We were given boxed lunches when we arrived, and each one was packed with exotic American delicacies we had never tasted: fried chicken, a biscuit—none of us knew what it was—and even a big, beautiful red apple. An apple for each of us—we couldn’t believe it. In Vietnam an apple was a luxury that would have been cut into small slices and savored by an entire family. Everything tasted so good; we couldn’t have felt more welcome if the governor of California had shown up to shake our hands.

  The refugees from our plane gathered in a group while a Vietnamese-speaking translator announced each family’s assignment, and my father noticed that regardless of the location, the translator always added the same comment:

  “Oh, that’s a wonderful place. You’ll like it there.”

  The translator wasn’t just trying to encourage us; that was what he believed. He told my father later, “In America, to make money is difficult, but to starve is even more difficult.” In other words: “You’re in America now. How bad can it be?” Most refugees had very little knowledge of America before their arrival; their goal was only to get here, and after that one city or state was the same as another. They were all just names on a map to us, and the only names that sounded familiar were the places that had large Vietnamese populations, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Philadelphia, and New York. Those were the assignments everyone hoped for though no one had the slightest idea what the climate was like there or whether the landscape would look anything like Vietnam. Those things didn’t really matter because for an unemployed refugee with no language skills, community meant a lot more than geography or climate.

  We finally received our assignment: Kansas City, Missouri—though the translator pronounced it Misery. We had no idea what the word meant, so we were elated—we were going to live in Misery. But we had barely begun to celebrate when we were informed that, for some reason, our assignment had been changed. We were not going to spend our lives in Misery after all; we were going to Fort Smith, Arkansas.

  Where?

  After completing all the necessary paperwork, we were taken by bus to a small hotel near the San Francisco airport, where we were told we would spend the night before flying out the next day. The ten of us were assigned to a room with one king-size bed, which looked luxurious to us after our empty room at 25 Hawkins Road. My brother Thai turned on the television and saw the first of many wonders we would see in America: a commercial that showed slices of bacon flying through the air from a frying pan to a plate. Who would have known—in America even the food could fly.

  My father had just taken off his shirt when there was a knock at the door. It was the same man who had just dropped us off.

  “Let’s go,” he said to us. “We have a plane for you now.”

  We were rushed to the San Francisco airport and told we would be taking an American Airlines flight to some strange place called Dallas. We had never heard of Dallas before, but we liked the name of the airline and remembered it because the flight attendants gave us all little plastic wings to wear on our jackets.

  While we were hurrying to the gate in San Francisco, a strange man stopped me, smiled, and slipped a piece of paper into my jacket pocket. At the gate I said to my father, “Look what someone gave me,” and pulled from my pocket an American hundred-dollar bill—another mysterious act of compassion by a perfect stranger.

  It took another three hours to fly to Dallas, and the moment we stepped off the plane and into the terminal, we were told that we had to hurry to catch another flight at the opposite end of the airport. A gate agent pointed the way, and we hurried as fast as a family of ten could—which wasn’t very fast at all because Anh and Hon were almost two years old by then, and after twenty-four hours cooped up on an airplane, they insisted on walking while my parents insisted on carrying them. We must have made quite a sight: ten frustrated and exhausted Chinese arguing with each other in Cháo zhōu while we hurried across the airport like a column of army ants.

  The terminals in Dallas were shaped like two half circles with a long straightaway in between, which made us feel like hamsters on a treadmill. We managed to get lost once along the way, and that made my mother very anxious because the closer we got to our f
inal destination, the greater her fear that something would go wrong at the last minute—an emotion I would feel many times over the next years. We finally found the correct gate and boarded the flight—our fifth for the trip and, mercifully, our last one.

  Our final flight lasted less than an hour, and with every mile our anticipation grew because our next stop would be more than just another connection—it would be our new home. Each step of our journey had presented us with another wonder: Paya Lebar with its two-mile runways; the flying cargo ship called the 747; a flight across the world’s widest ocean; the sprawling city of San Francisco glistening below us; and the Dallas airport with its Texas-size terminals. If those were just the wonders along the way, what would our final destination be like? It had been almost five months since we left Vietnam, and we had journeyed more than eleven thousand miles. At last we were coming to the end of the Silk Road, and we were about to see the Imperial City of Fort Smith, Arkansas, for the very first time.

  It was late October, and we arrived around eight o’clock at night: it was dark and cold when we stepped off the plane. The temperature had reached eighty degrees that day, but it would drop to thirty-nine before the night was over; that was the coldest temperature any of us had ever experienced, and we were wearing only light jackets. The Fort Smith airport was just one small building with a single door marked A on one side and B on the other; after successfully navigating DFW, we had no trouble finding our way inside.