They didn’t make it into Vietnam because of a car. If not for that car, perhaps they would have been spared the four years of the fields. The car wasn’t even a flash one, it was a boxy yellow thing that someone had abandoned beside the road because it had run out of fuel, so they came up with the idea of sitting Suhong in the car and pushing her along. She was so large with child that she couldn’t even see her feet to walk. All the things they held in their hands were loaded in the car, and the two children crawled in next to their mother. ‘Ready for a ride?’ Kuan asked them before he closed the door. He, his brother and Chicken Daddy walked to the boot and pushed the car along from the back. Chicken Daddy’s three teenage children trailed behind.
Soon they came to a bridge that crossed the Mekong River. The bridge was teeming with people. Some of the hundreds of Vietnamese fishing boats that had moored beneath the bridge were peddling trips to Vietnam – he later found out that Kien’s family gave away some gold and that’s how they ended up in Saigon instead of living through Year Zero.
But they could not push the car over the bridge, so they kept following the other city exiles who walked straight ahead as the soldiers directed them, prodded along like cattle by heavily armed cowherds.
While pushing the car, he couldn’t see much in front of him except hot metal and glass. It was a sad little float made of a mother and her two children and all their earthly possessions, propelled by the muscle-force of three skinny men, and they kept pushing for many days.
When night fell, they would stop walking and find a place to sleep. When it grew dark, little Wei would cry about going home. When are we going to go home? Why don’t we go home? I want to go home and all possible variations on that dirge, even after he didn’t have to walk anymore and could just sit in the car. In the end, the wailing became comforting. It was as if the boy was venting all of their anger through a very thin reed. It allowed them to feel a little sorry for themselves.
Sometimes Kuan slept on the roof of the car after the metal had cooled down, because the heat of the days seeped into the skin and swelled inside his skull; and on the roof he could see the stars, which seemed to take him outside his head.
One day a Khmer Rouge truck was driving slowly alongside them. His sister-in-law stuck her head out of the window: ‘Ay, why don’t we ask the soldiers if they can pull us along?’ She hobbled to the side of the soldier’s vehicle and waved her arms. Because she was a woman with a sweet voice and a distended belly, the soldiers stopped for her. They tied the car to their truck and dragged them along for the rest of the journey. People weren’t monsters or gods. People were just people, he thought.
He, Kiv and Chicken Daddy had their hands free now. As they walked, they pushed their shoulders up to their ears and swung their arms to loosen those muscles that had been set stiff by pushing the car; it was a strange form of walking Tai Chi.
When they arrived at their destination village, the Khmer Rouge cadres got out of their armoured vehicle and helped them unhook the car. The soldiers wore rubber shoes made from car tyres.
‘This is where you’ll settle,’ they were told.