War Baby (21 page)

But my mother was a strong person, she was never sad for long. She said we would just have to sell more dishes and make back all the money we had lost.

And that is what we did. One day my mother told me she had met a man who had a boat and it would take us away, to freedom, to America. We did not have quite enough money but my mother said the man who owned the boat was very kind and he was taking some people even though they could not pay.

So we went back to Vung Tau.

We got on the boat late one night. I remember there were a lot of people and the boat was very small. No one had any food, and I was very hungry. But I did not mind so much anymore. I was very happy because my mother said we were going to America and we would have a fine house and a nice car and live a good and happy life. She was very excited and I was very excited too.

When we set off the sea was rough and everyone was very sick so it did not matter there was no food. But then we ran out of water. The man who was in charge of the boat got lost I think and a week went by and we still could not see land. Some people went crazy with thirst and threw themselves in the sea and we never saw them again.

Then one night there was a terrible storm. Our little boat tossed on the sea like an angry water buffalo. I heard screaming. Some people had fallen out of the boat.

My mother held on to me very tight but I could feel her trembling and I knew she was as afraid as I was. When the morning came the sky was still very dark and our boat was lying over on its side. Another big wave crashed over us and I was sure we were all going to die.

Then someone cried out that they could see land. We thought we were saved But then there was a jolt and a terrible noise came from underneath the boat. Everyone started screaming again. There was another big wave and it was like a giant dog was shaking us in its teeth. Then the deck pitched right over and I fell in the water. I reached out for my mother but she was not there.

I cannot swim. I felt myself go under and my mouth filled up with water. Then someone grabbed me and held my head above the waves. I was still shouting for my mother. I could see the hull of the boat turned right over on top of the water and heads bobbing up and down in the sea. But my mother was gone.

I saw a big piece of wood and wrapped my arms around it. I clung on as tight as I could. The person who was holding on to me - I don’t know who it was - let me go. I never even thanked them for saving my life. I had no thought of anything else, I just held onto the wood and screamed for my mother.

The waves dragged me over some coral. The pain was very bad but there was nothing I could do. Suddenly the sea became much calmer and I saw a tiny island. I realized the water was shallow and that I could stand up.

When I reached the shore I walked up and down the beach all day, and the next, looking for my mother. Some other people were washed up on the sand too but they were all dead. Bits and pieces from the boat were thrown up by the waves and I found some bits of canvas and draped them over bushes to make some shade. There was also a big tin drum. That night there was another storm and the drum filled up with rain. If it was not for this drum I would not have survived.

Then finally I found my mother, lying face down in the shallows. I dragged her up on to the sand and I sat next to her all that day, talking to her, hoping she will come alive. But then the smell of her body, and of all the other bodies, is too bad and I have to go and sit on another part of the island.

And that is how I lived until the fishermen found me.

When she had finished the three men sat for a long time in shuffling silence.

The girl looked perfectly composed, as if she had just recited her favorite bedtime story. There was something wrong here, Webb thought, something that didn’t quite make sense. The little girl had round eyes, she was Eurasian, yet she had claimed that both her parents were Vietnamese. Also, there was something about her home as she had described it. A child would surely remember how it looked from the inside; the toys, the garden, the smells. Phuong had described only what someone might see form the outside.

‘Thank her for telling me her story,’ he said to Marquez. ‘Tell her I am very sad she has suffered so much. Then please ask her which of her parents had round eyes.’

The lieutenant looked uncomfortable, but he dutifully translated Webb’s question. He watched the girl’s reaction, and he knew immediately that his suspicions were correct.

She looked down at her lap and refused to answer.

There were tens of thousands of round-eye children left behind by American servicemen during the war; the
bui doi
, the dust of life that the new republic of Vietnam did not want. The chances of finding her again were slim. And yet: he had visited so many refugee camps in the last few months, the odds were no longer
that
long. Or did he just need to see that woman and that child wherever he went?

‘Do you know her mother’s name?’ he asked Garcia.

Garcia consulted the file in his lap. ‘Ngai Dieu-Quynh. It is a very common name.’ He arched one eyebrow in curiosity. ‘Should this be important?’

‘No, it’s not important.’ No, because this could not be
that
Phuong. That Phuong and her mother had been killed by rocket fire in Saigon on 28 April 1975.

He leaned forward again. ‘Lieutenant Marquez, will you ask her again what nationality her father was, please?’

Marquez shrugged his shoulders and translated the question.

The little girl shook her head. ‘She says she would like to go now.’

Webb wanted to shake her. Tell me the truth! This, after all, was what he had been looking for all along. The book was the logical sequel to
Goodnight, Saigon
and his publishers thought it would sell well. But the real reason he was writing it, he knew, was it gave him cause for one last vain search. What if they had survived the rocket attack? What if they were still alive?

‘You wish to talk to this girl anymore?’ Garcia asked him.

Webb shook his head. He thanked her in her own language, but she did not reply. She stood up and left, without a word. He knew that he had shamed her; it was not the Asian way to expose a lie so baldly. She had lost face.

He thought about the bombed out apartment in Cholon after the rocket attack, the woman dying among the charred ruins, he and Crosby searching the hospitals. What if she had survived?

* * *

He spoke to four other refugees that afternoon, more flotsam thrown up on the Filipino beaches eight years after the war; there was a woman, almost catatonic, who had seen her two sons drown in front of her eyes; an old man who had lost his sons, his daughters, his wife and his grandchildren, one by one, first to the war, then to the Zones and finally to the sea; a young boy hoping to find his sister in Australia; another young girl, around the same age as Phuong, whose parents had fallen from their leaking boat during a storm, leaving her orphaned and alone.

So many tales of misery and unimaginable grief, equally as harrowing as Phuong’s. Yet when he flew back to Manila later that afternoon all he could think about was a bony little girl in a ragged Russian Olympics T-shirt.

A week later he was back in New York and an insane idea insinuated itself into his mind. Finally he picked up the phone and dialed the number of the Philippines Embassy in Washington to ask for sponsorship forms. The chances that the girl he had interviewed was
her
no longer mattered.

The point was it that it
could
be her. He could no longer stand to one side and take photographs of other men’s wars. He could take photographs so that the world would start to care, but the world didn’t care. It was down to him. He finally had to get involved.

Phuong was flown to a place called Camp Pendleton where white soldiers sprinkled DDT powder on her head, and men in uniforms gave her a form that said she was a refugee with parole status. From there she was put on another plane.

She was given food on a plastic tray. She put some into her mouth but promptly spat it out. It was inedible. She looked at the magazine in the pocket in front of her; there were glossy photographs of animals she had never seen before, from a place called Africa. The advertisements astonished her, all the expensive watches, cameras and motor cars. Is that how everyone in America lived?

A middle-aged American businessman sitting in the seat next to her gave her a book. On the front cover was a picture of a man with a beard standing on top of a very tall building. The American told her the man’s name was Jesus. Phuong remembered this name. Her mother had told her that Jesus was God. The American said that he spoke to Jesus every day and that if she did this as well the man with the beard would help her with anything she needed, anything at all.

Perhaps this is why they all have expensive watches and cameras and motor cars in America, Phuong thought. All they have to do is ask Jesus for one. But then why didn’t they get Jesus to help them beat the communists in Saigon?

The man asked her for some money to give to Jesus and she gave him the ten United States dollars that Commander Garcia had given her when she left Puerto Princesa.

They flew into a storm and she hid under her seat. Jesus’s good friend vomited noisily in a bag. A lady in a uniform came and coaxed Phuong from the floor and buckled her back into her seat. Then she held her hand until they were out of the storm again. When it was over Phuong felt ashamed to have been so frightened. It was not anywhere near as bad as being on the boat.

When they landed, the lady in the uniform took her to another plane. She said she was going to a place called JFK in New York. She asked her if JFK was in America. She said that it was.

She wished her mother was with her. This was where she had always wanted to go.

* * *

She emerged from the arrivals hall wearing the same Mishka the Bear T-shirt she had been wearing the day he first saw her on Puerto Princesa. Her bell-bottom jeans were tom and frayed at the cuffs. She was holding a copy of
Watchtower
in her right hand, and she was shivering with cold. Everything she possessed was zipped into the flight bag draped over her shoulder.

He crouched down. ‘Hello, Phuong,’ he said.

She did not answer. He had been told she had been learning English at the school at Puerto Princesa and that she had proved an exceptional student. Perhaps she simply did not know how to address him. He could not ask her to call him Father. And calling him by his first name would be considered impolite by a Vietnamese. ‘You can call me Uncle,’ he said.

She nodded, grateful for his guidance. ‘Hello, Uncle, how do you do today?’

He embraced her and felt her stiffen. The wrong thing to do.

‘Are you cold?’ he said.

‘Yes, it is cold today,’ Phuong said. ‘I think it may rain.’

He took off his leather jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders.

‘Let’s go home,’ he said.

A watery April sun hung low over the fields. Phuong sat quietly in the passenger seat, gaping at the cars and the flat, empty fields. They turned on to the Lincoln Cove turnpike and ten minutes later they were in the main street.

Lincoln Cove was an old whaling village, now mostly a tourist town. It was still early in the season and there were just a handful of tourists on the sidewalks, braving the cold in shorts and sweatshirts that bore the ubiquitous Lincoln Cove cartoon whale.

Webb drove with the window down. A salt wind jangled the halyards of the yachts in the marina, and he heard laughter from the Whalers Hotel where a group of yachtsmen were drinking beer in bentwood rockers. He turned down a narrow lane towards Bayberry Cove and pulled over a hundred yards from the point.

‘Here we are,’ he said.

There was a mailbox with ‘Webb’ hand-painted on the tin. An old cedar shaded an unkempt lawn. He opened a creaking gate and she followed him up the shell-grit path. The house was white clapboard, with cedar shingles on the roof. The tangle of mimosa that grew over the veranda was just coming into bloom.

Phuong followed him inside; cedar paneling on the walls, French windows the length of another wall, a view over the cove. The oak floors were covered with oriental rugs and there was a coal fire burning in the stone fireplace.

She stared, her mouth open. She looked so tiny; the leather jacket he had put around her shoulders in the terminal hung almost to her knees, a pair of sparrow-thin shins protruding. She had cheap rubber sandals on her feet.

Her left hand was still balled into a tiny fist.

He took the flight bag off her shoulder. It was very light. He looked inside. Her lifetime’s possessions amounted to a tin spoon, an in-flight magazine and the tom half of a file card stamped by the United States Immigration Service. There was also a dossier form provided by UNHCR that was supposed to contain her family history, but most of the names and dates were recorded as ‘unknown’.

‘Are you hungry?’

She shook her head. ‘I am very tired.’

‘I’ll show you your room.’

* * *

When Phuong woke the next morning Webb was sitting out on the deck with a cup of steaming black coffee. His breath left wispy clouds on the damp air. Gulls and jays wheeled over the water and disappeared, screeching, through the mist.

‘Good morning,’ he said.

‘Good morning, Uncle, how are you?’

He smiled. ‘I am very well, thank you, Phuong. Did you sleep well?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

He had a bowl in front of him, Phuong noticed, and in the bowl was some gooey brown slop and some milk. ‘Do you want breakfast?’ he asked her.

She was starving. ‘No, thank you, I have just eaten,’ she said, remembering a phrase from her lessons at Puerto Princesa.

‘What have you just eaten?’

‘I am sorry. My English is not so good. I mean I do not have hunger.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ he coached her.

‘Yes, sorry, I am not hungry.’ She had forgotten so much of her English. She remembered a time when it was all she spoke at home, before the communists came.

‘This must be very hard for you,’ he said. He put down his coffee cup. ‘Phuong, you must try and think of me as your family now. I know that won’t be easy, and it won’t happen today or next week. But eventually perhaps. This is your home now, do you understand?’

‘Yes, I understand, Uncle,’ she said, but she thought: You can never be my parent. I will never show you my heart. Perhaps you are a nice person, but one day you will leave me or you will get hurt. I don’t want any more parents, I just want to live here in America and have an easy life, like my mother said.

She looked around, at the garden, at the big house, the water. It seemed unreal. Last night, before she fell asleep, she had thought: When I wake up in the morning someone will come, someone in a uniform, and they will say:
Sorry, this is all a mistake, you must come back to Saigon now. You are a criminal and you must go to a Zone.

‘You’re quite safe here,’ he said.

She lowered her face, appalled that her thoughts could be so transparent.

‘Did you sleep in those clothes?’

Well, of course, she thought. How else should one sleep?

He stood up. ‘Come with me.’

She followed him back inside. He went into her bedroom. She stood to one side, waiting until he had finished his inspection. Everything was as it had been the night before. She had been careful not to touch anything. He must not think she was a thief, or a bad person.

‘You didn’t sleep in the bed,’ he said.

He picked up the clothes laid out at the foot of the bed. ‘I left a nightgown for you. These are for you too. A T-shirt and jeans and some underwear. I had to guess your size.’

‘This clothes belong to me now?’

‘Yes, they’re yours. You can’t wear these old things any more. Take them off and give them to me. I’ll throw them away.’

‘Take them off . .. now?’

‘Well, no, not now. Later.’ He went into the bathroom that led from the guest bedroom and turned on the shower. ‘Look, this tap makes the water hotter, this one makes it colder. Okay?’

Phuong stared at the steam rising from the shower cubicle. Another miracle.

‘Here’s some soap.’

He unwrapped the soap and gave it to her. It smelled sweet. Perfumed soap! A luxury beyond imagining. Surely this was only how very rich people lived.

‘I’ll wait outside. Okay?’

She searched her memory for the right phrase from her English book on Puerto Princesa. ‘Thank you very much, kind sir.’

He grinned at her, as if she had made a joke. ‘Oh, that’s quite all right, good lady,’ he said, and went out.

* * *

They got in his mandarin-red Jeep Wagoneer and drove into town. There was a flagpole in the centre of the lawned traffic circle at the end of Main Street and Old Glory snapped in a brisk morning breeze. They drove over the bridge and headed north on Scrub Pine Road.

Phuong stared out of the window, amazed by the beautiful houses and shiny new cars. But the people were so ugly. Everyone was so fat! A man ran up the hill, his face red as betel-nut juice, his belly shaking like jelly under his T-shirt. The women were worse. You could see their bottoms wobbling in their tight jeans.

Webb parked the jeep on a bluff overlooking the cove. The wind raised white caps on the water. Below them a ketch, its hull painted sky blue, cut through the bay towards the narrows.

Webb sat for a long time in fidgeting silence. Phuong sensed there was something very difficult that he needed to say to her, and she waited for the blow to fall. Perhaps he had changed his mind about her and wanted to send her back to U-5. She remembered how he had asked her, on that first meeting, about her parents not being Vietnamese. He must have guessed her secret.

‘Will you tell me about your mother?’ he said.

She was right. He knew she had lied. But she would lose too much face to change her story now. ‘She was very beautiful lady,’ she recited, ‘very kind. From a very rich family ...’

‘No, tell me the truth, Phuong. Please.’

Phuong smiled in the oriental manner, the proper response to a question too difficult or too embarrassing to answer. ‘I do not understand, Uncle.’

‘Yes, you do.’

His hands were tensed around the steering wheel. She had done something wrong, she had made him angry.

‘Please, you are going to send me back to U-5?’

‘No, of course not. No one’s going to send you back. This is your home now. I’m your family. But I must know the truth about you.’

Phuong lowered her head. ‘My father was an American,’ she mumbled.

‘You’re sure?’

‘He was very bad. My mother was very unhappy. He went back to America and never come back for her.’

‘He was a soldier?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Please. Try to remember.’

‘He worked for the government, I think.’ She stared into her lap, hoping this interrogation would soon be over. Why had he shamed her this way?

‘Do you remember when the communists came?’

What was the correct answer to such a question? What was it he wanted to hear? If she told him everything she knew, it might be wrong, and he would send her back to U-5 anyway.

‘I don’t remember,’ she said.

His fingers drummed on the wheel.

‘To hell with it,’ he said, finally. ‘Are you hungry?’

She nodded.

He looked at his watch. ‘You’ve been in America nearly eighteen hours and you still haven’t had a hamburger. We’d better fix that.’

He started the engine and they drove back into town.