We Are Here (9 page)

The man pedalled faster to get away from H
i. ‘He’s drawing too much attention,’ he said to my mother. ‘He’s yelling in Vietnamese. If we stop we will all die!’ My mother, unaware of what had happened to her youngest brother, understood what the man was saying and held on in frozen silence as they rode. The image of a screaming fifteen-year-old boy alone in a jungle, becoming smaller and smaller as they rode away, would haunt her forever.

The man gave my mother his sarong to wrap Văn in. It was a thin frayed cloth in stripes of black, green and brown with streaks of white. My brother Văn was fading. The man searched for the makeshift camp near the border where the Red Cross had established a small clinic in a tent. Instead of trading my mother for rice like the guerrillas did with my father, the man did not leave until he found a doctor. Somehow he contacted his uncle, who lived in the area. The uncle was fluent in French and
there were French Red Cross personnel working in and around the area. With the uncle’s help they found the clinic and the medical staff treated my brother. The uncle then asked a Red Cross officer whether my father was in the camp. My mother followed the two Cambodians and the Red Cross officer through the camp until they saw my father. Without a word, the man and his uncle left, leaving my mother reunited with my father, clasping the sarong tightly, speechless, hardly daring to believe she and her son were still alive; that amid the savagery of the jungles, soldiers and the smugglers, a lonely French-speaking Cambodian man had saved her.

To her relief, they were soon also reunited with H
i, but her pleasure in the reunion turned to mind-numbing grief as H
i described what had happened to H
ng Khanh.

When my mother received the news, her senses evaporated and formed a tomb above her. She suffered an aching, wrenching numbness as she imagined her stoic teenage brother blindfolded and surrounded by strange armed men in his last moments.
I should not have taken him
, she agonised.
It’s my fault. I killed him. It is my fault he suffered such a brutal death.
At other times she persuaded herself that maybe H
i had been mistaken; that it wasn’t her brother he had seen. Maybe he didn’t get struck. Or maybe, though captured, instead of being killed he had been forced to become a child soldier. He was tall. Maybe he lived. The swirl of thoughts twisted around her and remained for a long time. Every so often throughout her life, these thoughts would revisit her and force her to once again taste the anguish, to smell
the shame, to feel the sorrow, to hear guilt, to see the loss of her brother. She was the older sister; she had been responsible for him. Her own mother had pleaded with her to not take him but H
ng Khanh adored my mother and insisted on going where she went. My mother often said it was fate that it was H
i and not she who had witnessed what happened. Instead of fleeing as H
i did, she would have run to her brother and most likely been killed herself, along with Văn. She would have turned back.

As there were no official refugee camps in the area, the Red Cross moved my family to a Thai military camp. Here all the men, including my father, were ordered to dig trenches for the Thai soldiers engaged in border skirmishes with Cambodia. They were then moved to a prison that held Thai soldiers who had committed serious breaches of military codes. The prison was located on the Thai side of the Thai–Cambodia border in a district called Aranyaprathet. There were a few more Vietnamese people there but not many. At that camp, my father and H
i were made to clear the surrounding trees. The Thai prisoners were chained by their feet and they wore a metal ring around their necks. In the dark of the night, as the prisoners crawled and moved, the sounds of their rattling chains filled the air. The Thai guards who managed the prison regularly beat the Vietnamese as well as the prisoners, just for pleasure. Everyone was afraid the women would be raped, and the fear kept them all awake. My mother heard the grotesque, wild and violent sounds of random beatings and she tried hard to not be sick each time she heard human flesh being pounded. Some French-speaking
Vietnamese wrote on a small piece of paper about the fear of rape and beatings. Finally, when the Red Cross officers came to see them, these small notes were slipped into their hands.

Not long after, they were moved to an official refugee camp called Khao I Dang, twenty kilometres from Aranyaprathet. At the end of 1979, the United Nations had cleared the forest to make a camp for the Cambodians who were escaping the Khmer Rouge. It was administered by the Thai government and the United Nations. Ten out of the twelve sections of the camp were occupied by Cambodians; the remaining two housed Vietnamese.

The Cambodians in Khao I Dang were either hoping for resettlement to a third country or waiting for the situation to become safe for them to return home. There were rations of water, rice and canned fish. Though quantities were extremely limited, the rations were precious. So too was the relative peace; they could no longer hear the gunfire of the jungles or the screams of people being beaten. But although they had found refuge, the Vietnamese in the camp faced an uncertain future. At the time, no government had recognised as official refugees the Vietnamese who had left their country by foot; those in the camp were in limbo, with nowhere to go. My mother watched as people smashed their own heads against stone walls in desperation. It was the not knowing that became their new enemy. Some people’s families offshore sent them money. Others were completely alone with no links to anyone. They could only hope that the faceless, nameless Powerful would soon decide that they were
genuinely running from persecution. That they were running towards freedom.