We Are Here (10 page)

The days ran into weeks as they waited for the world to recognise them as legitimate refugees. At the camp, there were interpreters who had worked for the Americans. They loved listening to the BBC and Voice of America on the radio. One day, there was an announcement by US president Jimmy Carter. As the English-speakers hovered around the radio, the other refugees were going about their routine activities, cooking, sleeping, praying. My mother remembers the sudden thunderous outbreak of joyful cries. The men ran around the camp shrieking the news. President Carter had officially recognised those Vietnamese who had travelled by foot to be refugees. The camp erupted in elation. The ecstatic roars of the crowd were deafening. People shook their heads in disbelief. Tears streamed and knees trembled with joy. People slumped to the ground with hands cupped in prayer.

Slowly, diplomats from all over the western world came to interview the refugees, including my family. Gough Whitlam, former prime minister of Australia, declared that he did not want anti-Communist Vietnamese refugees coming to Australia. Many would never forget his famous statement: ‘I’m not having hundreds of fucking Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political hatreds against us!’ Fortunately, he was no longer prime minister at the time, and he no longer determined Australia’s immigration policy.

My family was moved to Sikhiu refugee camp, situated in a mountainous region of Thailand. It was a former women’s prison,
converted into a camp to house the thousands of Vietnamese refugees flooding into the country, including numerous unaccompanied minors. All had travelled by foot through the sinister and dangerous jungles of Cambodia. The camp gathered people from all classes and ranks, with diverse stories and hopes. From criminals to CIA-trained intelligence officers, clergymen and scholars, one single fact bound them in solidarity: that no matter how, no matter why, they had survived. Within the four walls of this former prison, people ate, slept, studied, wrote, found love, gave birth and died. The cycle of life went on here just as it did in any other community in the world.

Though we were away from the mayhem of Cambodia and the oppression of Vietnam, Sikhiu refugee camp was not a complete haven. Every morning, all the refugees had to line up and salute the Thai flag while the Thai anthem played over the loudspeaker. Those who were too weak and hungry to attend were beaten. Sikhiu was notorious for the mistreatment of refugees. At night, the camp’s Thai guards along with other local men broke into the camps and raped several women. The refugees were always on the alert.

In the camp everyone lived in makeshift shelters within a large compound. Each family sectioned off a little space with some wood and fabric. It was intensely crowded and at night there was literally no room to turn. Every day people would line up to get rations of water, rice, meat and oil so they could cook their own food among themselves. There was never enough food and water to go around.

H
i’s mother had sewn pieces of gold into the hemline of his shirt and he was under strict instructions not to reveal the gold under any circumstances. Even when the smugglers abandoned him in the jungle, he held onto his gold. At the camp, it was H
i’s gold that gave my parents enough capital to start a small enterprise. My mother cooked a variety of noodles and rice dishes and my father ground soya beans into soya milk. My mother, a natural entrepreneur with a warm smile, drew customers from all over the camp. They came with their money and with their stories. Women who were raped by guerrilla soldiers in the jungles of Cambodia spoke to her of their sense of shame. Young single men asked her to write faux love letters to potential suitors in America hoping to get money sent to them. Married men with families back in Vietnam came to her for advice because they had fallen in love with women at the camp. There were tabs with customers all over the camp who promised to pay. Some did, some didn’t. With her exceptionally fair skin, European features and compassionate disposition, my mother was a source of support to many.

She did not realise that she was pregnant. Another refugee said that all pregnant women were permitted to have extra rations of food. My mother went to the central office to see whether she could get an extra ration for Văn. They did a pregnancy test and discovered that she was indeed pregnant.

One of the refugees at the camp was Lieutenant Colonel C
nh, a former military doctor with the South Vietnamese Army. He asked the Thai guards whether he could use a small space in the
guard’s office at the camp to deliver me. The office was situated under a large tree on the western side of the camp. The birth was swift and the labour did not last long. The doctor was assisted by two Japanese volunteer nurses. It was there that I was born, two months premature after only two hours of labour: a tiny baby weighing two kilograms. Minutes after I drew my first breath, I was wrapped in the same sarong that the Cambodian man had given my mother. This simple stained cloth was woven with an unknown man’s legacy of compassion, courage and integrity, a physical connection to a man’s memories of his dead wife and child as he escorted my mother through the jungles. The Japanese nurses paraded me around the camp after I was born, chanting, ‘Princess of Thailand, Princess of Thailand.’ Later, when my father sent photographs to Vietnam from Australia, he would date and write a brief description on the back of each photo. Whenever I was in them, he would affectionately refer to me as ‘Princess of Thailand’.

Occasionally there was entertainment at the camp. A lady by the name of Bùi Th
Tuy
t H
ng, who was the wife of a senior Norwegian official, came from Norway and arranged for presents, concerts and sometimes an outdoor cinema. Hundreds of refugees would lie on the ground under the stars staring at the screen. For a brief hour, as voices of enlarged characters stretched against a dark sky, bellowed across the hills surrounding Sikhiu, they felt the dignity of being human.

Many French and Thai Christian priests came to visit the camps and they gave the refugees money. The generosity and
immense compassion they exhibited was disarming. Neither my mother’s family nor my father’s had any Christian tradition, but it was these Christian priests who helped my mother to pray, to ease the pain of being alive while her brother lay murdered somewhere in the Poipet jungle. They coaxed her senses back to life. It was the gentleness and concern of these quiet Christians that rescued her sanity. She didn’t know who Mary was, or what Jesus looked like, but she was thankful that these strangers prayed for her. She appreciated the fact that they listened.

As diplomats from all over the world visited the camp to help resettle the refugees in third countries, my parents met with Australian representatives. The Canadians processed refugees the fastest—people could generally leave within a month—but rumour spread throughout the camp that it was a chokingly cold place, which didn’t appeal to those who were used to the humidity of South Vietnam. The US was out of the question, as my father still resented the Americans for leaving South Vietnam undefended. Australia had the advantage of being relatively close to Vietnam, and my father’s brother had already arrived there, having travelled by boat. It was decided: we would go to Australia.

An Australian government representative who interviewed my father had left behind a magazine about Australian lifestyle, encouraging the refugees to look through it. My father savoured the coloured pictures. He turned to a page that had a large bearded man sitting at a country pub with a beer. The man wore a sleeveless shirt and was covered in tattoos. This was my father’s first visual representation of Australia. He was terrified! One of
the Christian volunteers gave us the address of a Vietnamese Catholic priest living in Adelaide. We could write to him and he would help connect us to the Catholic community in Australia.

My family moved to a transit camp near Bangkok in readiness for our departure to Australia. There were rats the size of cats which bit many unsuspecting arrivals, but we were immensely glad to be there. We stayed at that camp for one month, during which there were no rations for water. The distribution of food and supplies was disorderly. Văn, having spent half of his young life at the previous camp, surrounded by men and women who cherished him, cried to return. At close to two years old, ‘Sikhiu’ was one of the first words he connected to an extended family of circumstantial uncles and aunts who had given him snacks and taught him how to sing Vietnamese children’s songs. But while Văn howled ‘Sikhiu, Sikhiu ’, my parents savoured their reprieve, knowing we were one step further away from the carnage they still so vividly remembered.