by Loung Ung
For three months, we live our lives this way in Bat Deng. Then one day, a lady comes in to town looking for Eang. She is Chinese and in her thirties. She says she has come from Vietnam to search for Eang. When Eang sees the woman, her face wrinkles up and bursts into tears. It is one of her sisters! They rush into each other’s arms and hug for a long time. They stand there, crying and saying very little to each other.
“Mother and father are alive and well in Vietnam,” she tells Eang, “as is your oldest sister. Our brother is missing and believed to be dead. During the evacuation, we went over into Vietnam and have been living there ever since. We thought you were dead!” The next day, Eang and Meng leave for Vietnam. The economy in Cambodia is bad and Meng thinks maybe there will be work in Vietnam. With or without Eang, he says, he will return in a few days.
The days pass slowly as we wait for Meng’s return. Our family continues to live as before, with the men working on the farm and the girls selling food in the market. At night, Chou and I sit outside the hut looking at the road until the sky darkens and our aunt orders us in to go to sleep. Each day that Meng is gone, my anxiety grows, and I wonder if he will ever come back. Sensing my fear, Kim tells me the route Meng took to Vietnam is very safe, and does not cross any Khmer Rouge zones. Still, I worry. But true to his word, he returns alone four days later. Sitting inside the hut with the family, Meng talks excitedly about Vietnam, Saigon, and Eang’s family. Most of all, he talks about leaving Cambodia and going to America.
Meng tells our uncles that many Cambodians are leaving the country for Thailand in search of new life and to escape the war. Furthermore, they fear the Khmer Rouge might come to power again and kill more people until no one is left. Many Cambodians are trekking on foot to the north, crossing dangerous mined fields and Khmer Rouge control zones, with little food and water, to go to Thailand. Many people step on landmines and die on the way or are captured by the Khmer Rouge.
He says the safer way to go to Thailand is via Vietnam. In Vietnam, Meng explains, the human smuggling operation, or leaving the country without papers, is illegal. If we are caught being part of the operation as either an abettor or a refugee, the Vietnamese government could take our gold and throw us in jail for five years.
“It will be very costly,” he informs us. “We cannot all afford to go. It costs ten ounces of gold to buy a seat on a small boat that will take us from Vietnam to the Thai refugee camp. He says Eang’s family knows the person running this human export operation. With money from the rest of the family and after selling Ma’s remaining jewelry, we only have enough money for two to go.”
Uncle Leang puts his hand on Meng’s shoulder. “Your Pa is gone, Meng, so you are now the head of our family. Your life is not your own anymore. You have a family to take care of,” he says quietly.
“Uncle, I am doing this for the family. I will take Loung with me. She is still young enough to go to school, get an education, and make something of herself.” Though the younger children studied French in Phnom Penh, Pa made Meng and Khouy study English. As a result Meng is already fluent in English. Once in America, Meng’s plan is to work hard and send money to the family. He will save and build a home, and in five years send for the rest of the family. Uncle Leang still has his doubts, but it is decided that Meng and I will leave at the end of the week.
At the rooster’s cry, our family gathers outside the hut to say good-bye to us. While Meng says farewell to our relatives, I stand with Chou, holding on to her hand. One by one, our aunts and cousins come up to me and touch my hair, my arms, and my back. Meng ties our bags onto the backseat of his bicycle and lifts me up onto it. I straddle our bags, finally as tall as the adults, and look down at Chou. She stares up at me and cries, her lips quivering and her face crumpled. Our hands reach for one another and we hold on a few seconds more. I do not know how to say good-bye, so I say nothing. No matter what, I am determined not to cry. Chou has this luxury; everyone expects her to. I am strong, so I cannot cry. I will never understand how Chou ever survived the war.
Meng gets on his bike and slowly begins to peddle, breaking Chou’s hold on my hand. They are all in tears now as they wave good-bye to us. I do not turn around. I know they will not leave until we are out of their sight. I grit my teeth and fight back the tears. “Five years,” I think as we ride away. “In five years I will see them again.”
from cambodia to Vietnam
October 1979
I return to Phnom Penh on the back of Meng’s bike, my heart beating wildly as I absorb the sights and sounds of the city. Nothing looks the way I remember it. The buildings are charred from fires and their walls riddled with bullet holes. The streets are covered with litter and filled with cavernous potholes. There are many bicycles and cyclos but few trucks. Gone are the tall, leafy, lustrous flowered trees that lined the wide boulevards. Instead, tall brown palms and coconut trees provide little shade for the dry, crumbling city. Though the palm trees are heavy with fruit, I see no people climbing to get it. People say the Khmer Rouge buried corpses next to them and now the palm milk is pink like thin blood and the fruit tastes like human flesh. Makeshift tents, no longer confined to the poor areas, sprout all over the city. There are people living everywhere, in alleys, in streets, in crumbling buildings and tents. Many are farmers and rural villagers. They moved to the city to look for work because their land is littered with landmines. They come to Phnom Penh to escape the Khmer Rouge, who still control parts of the countryside. They arrive and take up residence in the deserted homes. The memory of our life here comes flooding back to me.
“Eldest brother,” I call out to Meng. In the Chinese culture, young children never call their elder siblings by name as it is considered improper and disrespectful. “Eldest brother, will you show me our old house?”
“It’s not what it used to be. It is broken down with bullet holes everywhere, but we will go there,” he answers and continues peddling. He tells me he went to see it when he came through the city with Eang and her sister on their way to Vietnam. He says someone is living in our apartment now. There are no documents kept on people’s property from before the takeover in 1975. So whoever arrived first and set up residence in houses or apartments can claim them as theirs. He says it is no longer our home. Still, I want to see the place where I remember feeling joy and happiness. I want to ask him more about our former home, but Meng is quiet now, lost in his own thoughts. The stench of the city and its trash seeps into my nose making me want to pinch it, but I do not. Instead I hold on tight to Meng as he steers the bike abruptly left and right to avoid the holes in the road.
We arrive at the water port late in the afternoon, but the sun is still hot and beats down on us. Meng holds the bike for me to jump off and tells me stay where I am as he disappears into a crowd of people with his bike. Vendors yell out their products to people passing by. In the sun, the fish scales on the seafood vendors’ arms and faces sparkle and shimmer, reflecting the sunlight. On the rows of tables, big and small fish alike flap their tails on blocks of ice underneath them. It is October: the end of the rainy season and start of the dry season. Meng says that when it’s hot, the water in the ocean goes down, so the fish move farther out to sea and are harder to catch; therefore, the fish displayed here are more expensive than usual.
Meng returns a few minutes later with a Youn fisherman, and they quickly usher me onto a small boat. Once in the boat, he hands the fisherman the small gold nuggets he received selling his bike and we take off. The boat looks no more than fifteen feet in length and perhaps five feet wide. Its wooden body is worn and old as the small engine chugs slowly along the Mekong River. As far as my eyes can see, there is water covering much of the land. The bright sun transforms the otherwise green lush scenery into a magical land of silvery lakes. In it, long black canoes slither like alligators, navigating themselves gracefully on the water. On the other side of the Mekong River, I see orange and gold pointed temple roofs and towers erected on muddy red topsoil. The fisherm
an sits beside a small pile of fish, steering the boat. I sit in the middle with my hair whipping about my face in all directions, the wind cooling my skin. My eyes drift toward the port and all its cacophony. I am leaving Cambodia on a Youn boat, with a Youn fisherman, going to Vietnam. Meng forgot to show me our old home. Then suddenly, a picture of Met Bong lunging at the fisherman’s throat with her sickle flashes before my eyes. I quickly shake my head free of the image. I’m leaving all this behind.
Many hours later as we approach Vietnam, the fisherman, in broken Khmer, tells us to lie on the floor and keep our heads down. He unrolls a sheet of blue plastic and covers us with it, leaving a small opening for our heads to stick through, and then piles fish on top of the plastic sheet and motions again for us to keep low. Underneath the plastic sheet, covered with fish, I enter Vietnam. I fight to breathe without choking on the stench of the fish. Once near the port of Chou Doc, the fisherman peels back the sheet and allows us to breathe in fresh sea air. Once we dock, Meng finds a bus station and buys our fares with the Vietnamese money he has saved from his last trip. We are on our way to Saigon!
From the windows of the bus, Saigon is a prosperous and bustling city. The streets are crowded with men and women in straw cone-shaped hats. The women are wearing red lipstick and colorful snug-fitting long dresses that split at the side over loose, flowing pants. In the streets, they talk openly to one another and laugh without covering their mouths. They do not avert their eyes nor do they glance from one side to another. Their shoulders are not slumped and their arms not held close to their sides. Taking long, casual strides, they walk without fear as we did in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge. On every block, there are stores displaying wristwatches with flowered bands, black radios blasting Vietnamese songs, televisions projecting hand puppets talking to happy young children, and red traditional dresses on headless mannequins. The streets are crowded with many more bicycles, motorcycles, and compact cars than in Phnom Penh. The food stalls and carts look bigger, cleaner, and are painted in brighter colors than what we had in Cambodia. As in Phnom Penh, people sit in alleys and side streets slurping noodle soups, biting into crispy fried spring rolls and egg rolls wrapped in lettuce. I only wish that someday Phnom Penh will be as happy and rich as Saigon.
We live in Saigon for two months with Eang’s mother and father in their small one-bedroom apartment. Meng, Eang, and I sleep in the attic. Eang’s sisters live in their own place in the city. With no job, Meng and I live off of the generosity of Eang’s family. Eang and her parents speak fluent Vietnamese because they lived in a Vietnamese community in Phnom Penh. They are now able to meet people, go shopping, and not be so isolated. Eang’s family is very nice to us. Unlike Meng and me, they are raucous and laugh loudly when they eat, and especially when they drink alcohol. Meng and I do not speak Vietnamese, so spend our days watching people, and trying to learn the language.
A week after we get there, Eang tells me we are going to the salon to get our hair permed. It has been many months since Aunt Keang in Krang Truop cut my hair. Sharing a cyclo with her, we weave around the city as the driver maneuvers us through the traffic. I laugh and point out to Eang the neon signs and billboards of movies, and giggle in anticipation of having my first professional haircut in many years.
Finally the cyclo stops in front of a salon. While Eang pays the driver, I stare at the poster-sized pictures of beautiful women and men with curly brown hair, straight jet-black hair, short wavy hair, and hair piled high in a braided bun on top of their heads. Inside, the walls are covered with mirrors and more pictures of beautiful people. Vietnamese music plays continuously on the radio as women snip and clip at their customers’ hair. One woman seats me in a chair and proceeds to put my hair in small rollers. Then she pours acidic-smelling lotion onto my hair. After twenty minutes, she removes the rollers and leaves me with a head full of small ringlets instead of my old straight hair. Staring at myself in the mirror, I laugh and pull at the curls, thinking they are beautiful. That night I sleep on my stomach, afraid to crush the curls, and I dream about Keav.
In the evening, I sit on Meng’s lap as he reads and translates to me stories about America from an English book he bought in a nearby store. He describes how snow falls in flakes covering the land in a white, soft blanket. I cannot envision snow because the only two kinds of ice I have ever seen are either the blocks we use to cool our meat or the crushed ice we use for snow cones. He says it is more like the ice for snow cones but softer. I see myself making snow cones and getting rich selling them to American children. Then I can help send money home too. Meng tells me I should call the Youns by their proper name, Vietnamese. He says Youn is a derogatory name and since we are living in Vietnam, we should not use it. In Saigon, Meng’s face grows fuller each day from the spring rolls and soups that Eang makes. My body is also filling out my clothes everywhere, though my stomach is still bigger than my hips.
In December, Meng tells me we will relocate to Long Deang to live on a houseboat with one of Eang’s sisters and her family in the lower end of the Mekong Delta. When we arrive at the port, Eang’s sister picks us up in a small boat to take us to our new home. On the water, there appears to be a city of houseboats with many hundreds of them docked closely together. Some are forty feet long with two levels, sturdy wooden walls, brightly painted roofs, and strands of colorful beads hanging over the doors. Others look like makeshift cloth tents or small thatched-roof huts floating on the water. Out on the decks, women cook food in clay ovens and converse loudly with their neighbors. Little children sit on the decks with their feet dangling in the water as the boats rock gently back and forth. Laughing, one little girl splashes water into the faces of her siblings who bob up and down in the water beside their boat.
I stare at the girls with envy, and think about waiting another five years until I can see Chou again. The small boat slows as we approach our destination. Our two houseboats are twenty feet long and ten feet wide and are docked side by side. The wooden walls and roofs are aged and gray from the rain and sun but otherwise sound. Eang’s sister and her five boys live in one boat. Meng, Eang, and I live in another with a Vietnamese man who is part of the operation. His job is to watch us and keep us safe. As our front man, he speaks for us whenever our neighbors ask about our background, why we are there, or what other part of the river have we lived at. He is in his early twenties and seems nice enough, but still I don’t quite trust him.
Living on these boats allows us to blend in with other people since it is not unusual for the houseboats to change locations often. It will not arouse suspicion if we disappear one night and head for Thailand. While sitting outside on the deck, we are not to speak Khmer or Chinese—only Vietnamese—and we cannot make friends or form bonds with anyone outside the family.
Day after day with nothing to do, I learn to fold origami and to speak Vietnamese. On the small deck, the boys and I make paper kites and fly them in the wind. When it gets hot, I dive off the houseboat into the murky water, taking care not to drink it. The water looks yellowish and often I swim away from the dead animals, garbage, and feces that float by.
For three months, we live slow, uneventful lives with our boats docked in the same spot. Then, in February 1980, another Vietnamese man joins us on our boat. One night the Vietnamese crew directs us to go inside, and in the dark we sit nervously as the boat moves slowly away. Suddenly, loud voices call out to us, asking us to stop. My heart lurches to my throat.
“We’re only a fishing boat,” our front man says.
“We want to see what kind of fish you have,” the voice persists. After a few minutes of exchange, our man succeeds in bribing the intruder to go away with his gold watch, and all is quiet again. Our boat continues to move steadily, and I fall asleep. Hours must have passed, for when I wake up again, we are in the middle of the ocean. All around me I see nothing but miles and miles of water. Soon, many hands pick me up and lead me to a rope ladder hanging off the side of a larger boat floating alongside
ours. Quickly I climb the rope onto the other boat. On the deck of the thirty-foot boat, seven crewmen are busy pulling people onto the boat and hustling them under the deck. All through the morning, many more small boats arrive to deliver their passengers and by late afternoon, ninety-eight people are onboard, each having paid for their escape in five or ten ounces of pure gold. They crouch underneath the deck, ready to make their way to freedom.
For three days and two nights we ride the ocean waves in the Gulf of Thailand, swaying and rocking as if in a wooden coffin. A crew member sits by the small doorway that leads to the deck, to make sure people stay below. “The boat must stay bottom-heavy,” he says, “or it will tip over.” Beneath the deck, the lucky ones sit leaning against the side while the unlucky ones crouch in the middle, their heads between their knees. The air is stale and smells of sweat and vomit. Wedged between Meng and Eang, I hold my breath as people retch all around us. Soon it grows dark and through the deck opening I steal glances at the bright stars as they twinkle gaily at me. I crawl over to the opening and stand, basking in the glow of the moonlight.
“Sir, please, may I come up?” I whisper to the guard. His face peers down at me, then nods his head. Slowly I climb the steps and sit beside him. The breeze is cool as it fans my body. The guard smiles at me and points his finger at the sky. It is so beautiful: black, never ending, and brightened by billions of stars. It is so breathtaking I wish I could stop time and exist in this dreamland forever. Everywhere around us the sky meets the water, creating a clear separation of heaven and earth. Somewhere up there in heaven, I hope Pa, Ma, Keav, and Geak are watching over me.
