The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (5 page)

Much of our cooked rice was ruined by seawater, and a good portion of our fresh water supply was lost overboard in the storm. But at least we were alive. Once the weather cleared, the sun returned in full force and again we faced the choice of being cooked on the deck or crouched below in the dark, stinking hold.

There was no escaping the heat or the people. There was no space to stretch out your legs and arms. Everywhere were sweating, salty bodies with brown, dirty faces peeling from sunburn and slowly darkening.

Dad would cling onto the tiller in the tiny pilothouse and close his eyes for a few seconds, trying to steal a tiny bit of space for his own thoughts, away from the mass of people bearing down on him, asking him questions, depending on him to keep them alive. He closed his eyes and saw his mother’s face, her dark eyes weary and heavy with the sadness of lost children. He saw himself in the canoe with Kiet and Toan, paddling down the canal. He remembered looking back at the shore and seeing his dog, Ki, running along beside them.

That’s funny
, he thought.

When he rowed the canoe to the markets to sell coal Ki had never followed him. But the dog knew. He knew something was different this time. He was a smart dog. In the mornings Dad or his brothers used to throw grain to their chickens and the neighbour’s hens would come running over to eat the grain. Ki knew which chickens belonged to his own family and he would put his paw on the neighbour’s chickens to stop them eating the grain. He never hurt the other chickens, just restrained them long enough, then let them go.

Yes, Ki was a smart dog
, Dad smiled to himself. He wondered what would happen to his mother and his sister back at home.
Would they be okay?
Then he thought about his own family on the boat. He was responsible for the lives of his wife and two young sons, as well as his brothers, in-laws, cousins and all the others on the boat, everyone relying on this twenty-five year old to deliver them to safety.

In the middle of the second night, my father was woken by a scream. ‘The kid’s gone in!’ Dad clambered out of the hold onto the deck. An old lady was overwrought. ‘He just jumped in!’

Loc was a seventeen-year-old boy whose mother, a friend of our family, asked Dad to take him with us when we were preparing to leave Vietnam. She hoped Loc would create a better life for himself, and one day sponsor her so she could leave Vietnam too. After a few days on the boat, Loc became so feverish with all the heat, the dehydration and the vomiting that he started hallucinating and mumbling incoherent thoughts.

‘Where is he?’ Dad screamed.

It was pitch-black and now everyone was woken by the commotion. My uncle was manning the engine and he circled back as thirty-something pairs of eyes searched the waves for the boy, but found nothing. We searched the black water for over an hour. Loc was gone.

Another day passed. Mum carried her two exhausted children up onto the deck. It was swelteringly hot, but she needed a break from the thick stench of the hold—at least the air was fresh up top. Everyone was still and silent, the heat of the sun pushing down on us, making already hungry and thirsty human beings thirstier still, rendering us incapable of speech.

Suddenly, a distant shout broke Mum’s thoughts. She shook her head and returned to the present. Yes, a man on board was shouting and waving his arms. He had seen a boat! And there it was, a small brown speck marring the smooth blue surface of the ocean. Mum’s heart flooded with relief and she felt hot tears on her cheeks.
At last we will be rescued.

Much of our food had deteriorated and our water supply was down to almost nothing, but we had survived.

Thank you God!
Mum prayed silently.

We all started jumping up and down waving for this boat to come to us—thirty-nine pairs of eyes, brightened by hope, watched the brown speck’s progress toward us. As it got bigger we could see it was an old fishing boat, a little larger than ours. It pulled up alongside our vessel.

Fishermen. Thank goodness.
We couldn’t tell where they were from, but from the insignia on their boat, maybe Thailand. We didn’t care. They were going to save us. Before any of our group could figure out what was going on, the fishermen quickly jumped onto our boat.

‘Sit down all of you and SHUT UP!’ their leader barked.

We were quickly surrounded by seven men with knives and guns. They were pirates. They descended on us angrily, striking random faces to assert their intent, yanking off bracelets and rings from trembling hands.

They ordered all of us to take our clothes off, and we did.

Mum was standing next to Uncle Eight who looked over and saw the gold cross Grandma had given to Mum before the journey dangling around her neck. He ripped it off her and stuck it in his mouth, flicking the fake-gold chain into the ocean.

His plan was to hide the cross under his tongue but, as the pirates made their way towards him, he could see them ordering people to open their mouths, so he swallowed it.

Once they had everything of value they could see, the pirates readied to leave, except for one angry moustached pirate, who called out obscenities from the back. An old lady, Bao, had a beautiful jade bracelet that was tight around her wrist. In Vietnam it is tradition for young girls to receive one of these bracelets on their eighteenth birthday—they would put it on and never take it off. Naturally, as the girl got older, the bracelet would get tighter until it was impossible to slip beyond the hand. The pirate was tugging so hard Bao’s knuckles were white, but the bracelet would not budge. He grabbed her arm and stretched it over the side of the boat. Another pirate raised his machete high up into the air… 

My Aunty Huong stepped in and greased the old lady’s wrist with a handful of day-old vomit, a makeshift lubricant. The bracelet slipped off reluctantly and Aunty handed it to the pirate in a begging stoop. They took the bracelet; they took everything, even our engine. Then they were gone, just like that.

All was still. The silence was broken only by waves lapping at our boat and an old lady’s weeping.

In the back corner of the hold, covered in old rags, was one thing the pirates had missed—the second engine that had broken down during the chase. Miraculously, they’d overlooked it. Dad pulled it out and looked at the broken down motor, trying to figure out a way to mend the snapped rubber ring. He’d fixed old engines before, but without tools and equipment it all seemed hopeless.

Just then Uncle Eight wandered over to see how it was all going. Dad looked down and noticed the old pair of sandals his brother was wearing.
That’s it!

Using a knife, Dad cut a hole into the rubber sole of one of the sandals and made a round hoop, roughly the same size as the snapped rubber ring. He tested its elasticity and with a bit of shaping and re-shaping, stretched it over the engine’s motor and made it fit.

Everyone watched as Dad pulled the starter cord. The engine roared to life and we all cheered. This time Dad didn’t tell any of us to be quiet… he cheered loudest of all.

Uncle Eight was staring at the blue horizon, thinking about his mother whom he’d left behind, thinking about food, and thinking about how he was going to retrieve the cross he’d just swallowed. All of a sudden he yelled out, ‘Boat!’

We all squeezed onto the deck again and looked out across the blue. This time the thirty-nine bodies dressed in dirty clothes were stiff with fear. We had no weapons and nowhere to hide. We were an exposed pimple on the vast face of the ocean. But there was still a chance, still a small amount of hope that the boat approaching us was benevolent. We might be rescued. We waited.

As the boat got closer we realised they were also pirates, but Dad could do nothing. The vessel rammed into ours and within minutes a gang of nine men were on our boat waving guns in the air and screaming.

It was too much. We stood there silent and numb, like sheep awaiting slaughter. We were forced to strip off our clothes again, and the pirates stalked up and down the rows of naked bodies, inspecting opened, trembling mouths, occasionally pulling out a gold capping. My father stated what appeared to be obvious, ‘We have nothing left.’

A pirate with black front teeth leered at Aunty Huong. He muttered something and then without warning, grabbed her arm and dragged her onto the other boat.

‘Huong!’ Uncle Thanh screamed and lunged for his wife. A rifle butt cracked him across the back of the head. With the tip of a gun sticking into her lower back, my Aunty was pushed into the pilothouse on the pirate vessel. Black teeth was breathing heavily on her naked flesh and words tumbled from her mouth:

Hail Mary, full of grace,

The Lord is with thee.

Blessed are thee amongst women,

And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, mother of God,

Pray for us sinners, now

And at the hour of our death …

Back on our boat one of the pirates grabbed hold of the smallest child. He lifted up the baby and ripped open the child’s nappy. A tiny slice of gold fell out. The pirate picked up the metal and wantonly dangled the baby over the side of the boat, threatening to throw the infant in. My father screamed at the top of his lungs, ‘We must save the child! We will fight to the death to SAVE THE CHILD!’

Suddenly guns were lifted and machetes raised. The robbery now turned into a full-blown standoff: nine men with weapons against thirty-seven starving refugees, a baby dangling over the ocean, and a naked woman awaiting hell.