We Are Here (6 page)
Authors: Cat Thao Nguyen
When my father was released from the re-education camp in 1977, he returned to the small village just outside Gò D
u where he had spent his childhood. He soon realised that my mother was one of the few educated women left of marriageable age and a
similar class, and he decided he would marry her. It was not an extensive courtship and there wasn’t anything romantic about it. A week after they met, my mother accepted my father’s proposal because he fulfilled her two conditions—he was educated and he was not disabled from the war.
They were married on 16 November 1977, two and a half years after the war ended. My father and my mother each had toiled through their own traumatic episodes. Each soundlessly suffering, forcefully containing it within.
My mother borrowed a wedding dress from one of her sisters-in-law. My father slit the throats of his family ducks, de-feathered them and helped to cook his own wedding feast. My mother’s father borrowed money from relatives in order to host the celebration. At the wedding, they were given just enough money by the guests to pay back the loans. There wasn’t even enough left over to make a pair of pants. Looking at my parents’ black and white wedding photos, I’m struck by the lingering sadness they exude. My mother is smiling in only one of the pictures; at the prompting of the photographer, she is feeding my father cake. She wore the only pair of shoes she had—tired old black sandals. A portrait shot of her illuminates her beautiful features, reminiscent of a French–Vietnamese blend. But enduring melancholy seems permanently trapped in her eyes. She was a young girl becoming a woman in postwar Vietnam, too often tarnished and defeated with no one to hold her. She stares at the camera—demure, on the brink of a future so terrifyingly uncertain.
Not long after the wedding, the river began to swell like the belly of a malnourished child. It was a cruel bash at open wounds of a village trying to simply stay alive. The flood engulfed the market a hundred and fifty metres from the riverbank. My mother’s belly was swollen too; she was about to give birth to her first child. She slept on two beds stacked one on top of the other, elevated above the water’s flow, gritting her teeth in silent, excruciating pain. A son was born and she clutched him in her arms as the bitter, pernicious flood forged on.
After the birth, my mother stayed with her parents so they could help look after her and the baby. They could not afford for everyone to eat rice so while my nursing mother ate rice, everyone else lived on cassava roots. My father went to work on my late grandfather’s pepper plantation, trying to remain inconspicuous. He rarely went to the central part of the village for fear of identification and further persecution by the authorities. My father never spoke of his time in the re-education camp to anyone, not even my mother, choosing instead to submerge the memories in drink, often in the company of peers whose life had taken a similar turn. Discarded men who were draped with the same cloak of disillusionment. Once the proud son of a well-to-do businessman, dressed in crisply ironed shirts, he now found himself with a small baby, living off the proceeds of his labour on the pepper plantation. The rice wine soothed his nightmares and eased his fears.
Not long after, rumours circulated around the village that the authorities were searching for my father. The authorities had
determined that, without any training or equipment, he was going to be assigned to de-mine fields ridden with landmines. The news shook him deeply. Tremors of dread burrowed their way into his marrow and began to consume him. For many years, despite a changed reality, the dread would stay with him. He knew that death was upon them. When my father told my mother, she looked at him. He was not just her husband, the result of a hasty marriage: he was now also the father of her son. She made a choice. All around her, men of the former southern regime continued to be persecuted and they each began a slow death as indignity decayed them. She could see no future for their family here. In 1979, my parents decided to leave Vietnam.
Living as they did in a landlocked province, they had no access to a boat. For them, the quickest way to get out of Vietnam was through Cambodia. My mother’s family had a friend who agreed to smuggle them across the border. Mr T
was my grandfather’s god-brother and a trusted family friend; he was like an uncle to my mother. He was the only reason they decided to leave via that route and at that time. They paid him ten taels of gold upfront, which was an incredible amount at that time; today it would be close to A$17,000. Many families could never imagine obtaining such an amount of money in their lifetimes.
Mr T
hired various smugglers to take my family through Cambodia all the way to Thailand. In the group to leave was my mother, father, twelve-month-old brother, fifteen-year-old cousin and fifteen-year-old uncle. Each smuggler would take them to a certain rendezvous point and there hand them over
to the next person. By then, the Khmer Rouge, under the dictator Pol Pot, had been ravaging Cambodia for four years from 1975, ultimately committing genocide. More than two million Cambodians perished in the name of his futile attempt at social re-engineering towards an agrarian-based Communist society. All those suspected of being educated were slaughtered. These included people who wore glasses, indicating they were able to read. Mass graves with severed heads and limbs were later found, as were the graves of babies who had been smashed against trees in order to save bullets. The site of these graves would later become known as the Killing Fields. The mania of Pol Pot was stopped only when the newly unified Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in 1979 to oust the Khmer Rouge. Within Cambodia, Vietnamese refugees were fleeing the new Vietnamese government, Khmer Rouge soldiers were fleeing the Vietnamese forces and there were random paramilitary Thai soldiers lining that country’s border with Cambodia. Refugees were also being kidnapped and traded to international humanitarian organisations in return for bags of rice.
In this time and place of utter madness and amid this terror, my parents embarked on their exodus through Cambodia. Later, reports would state that as many as half of all those who left Vietnam by boat died. But out of every four people who tried to flee Vietnam over the M
c Bài border into Cambodia, three were shot. Later still, some researchers estimated that only ten per cent of those who undertook this journey by foot survived.
In the middle of the night in late 1979, my mother sat silently, steeped in sorrow, in the house where she had given birth to her son and before the ancestral altar where she had been married. The flood waters had long receded and the river was calm. Her mother, father, sisters and youngest brother wept in silence for fear the neighbours would guess my parents’ intentions and inform the authorities. No one could be trusted and everyone wanted to appear to be supporters of the new Communist officials so betrayal by neighbours was not uncommon. Her two sisters held her tightly, sobbing violently into their hands cupped against their mouths in the pitch-dark. There was no way of knowing whether the group would survive the journey ahead of them. My mother’s lips trembled.
The next day, they left the only world they had ever known, uncertain of when and if they would ever return. The carnage, trauma and pain of the journey would be inconceivable.
It was late in the afternoon during the wet season. The rice crop was almost ready to be harvested. It was unsafe to travel all together, especially with a woman and baby. At the time, most of the refugees, particularly those who travelled by foot, were men who left alone. My father took his nephew, H
i, and my mother’s brother, H
ng Khanh – both fifteen – to the M
c Bài border crossing. Posing as merchants, they arranged for bicycle taxis to take them to the Cambodia border town of Bavet. Traders frequently crossed the border, and they were not questioned. They stayed overnight in Bavet with a smuggler, waiting for my mother.