When he saw his future wife Kien in Saigon, he remembered the child in her and that is what he loved. Knowing that she had spent the four years selling cloth in this new city, while he was in hell. Life had gone on here, while for him it had stopped. When he first entered the marketplace, it was so teeming with life that tears filled his eyes. These people had lived through a war, but they had not fallen off the edge of the world as he had.
‘Old Aunt! Old Aunt!’ He heard a voice calling his mother by her former title, when she was head of the factory. Two beautiful young Vietnamese women were heading towards them.
As they came closer, he realised their faces were very familiar. One was taller than the other and she was more outspoken. ‘Old Aunt, remember us? We used to work in your plastic-bag factory! You gave us our first job.’
He remembered now. They weren’t Vietnamese girls at all, they were girls from back home. The taller of the two was Ly, and the shorter girl, her sister Kien. But how they’d grown up! What a difference the intervening years had made. What luxury lay in a beautiful woman who had not been through what he had, the wonder in liquid eyes and the throbbing of life that was watchful and not half-wasted. He couldn’t stop looking at Kien.
The next day, he fell so ill that his brother and sister had to take him to hospital. ‘Malaria,’ the Vietnamese doctors declared, because slave-camp survivors didn’t succumb so soon to madnesses of the heart. He was in hospital for a week. It was a proper state hospital that gave free healthcare to refugees. He spent a week gazing up at the ceiling, alternating between feeling as though he were submerged in freezing water and being broiled in an oven, while his inflamed brain seemed to have a separate heartbeat.
During that time, Kien came to visit him. She brought some rice cakes and handed them to him, embarrassed. She was so serious, so quiet, a girl just a few years into her twenties. While Sokim’s silences had reminded him of all that was lost, Kien’s rectitude reminded him of what could be regained.
When he recovered, he spent the next few months courting her like crazy. He picked her up on the back of his fourth-hand bicycle and took her through the streets of Saigon. He bought her strips of dried squid to snack on, and cola the colour of fish sauce that had been made in a communist collective.
He took her to the zoo. They stood side by side, looking at the animals. There weren’t many left. Some half-bald birds, stoop-shouldered primates and a handful of deer with dusty antlers.
‘I can count all the ribs on that tiger,’ Kien finally said, as they gazed through the iron bars at the cowering creature. ‘How very sad to trap an animal like that.’
Looking at her in her unassuming yellow dress, feeling sorry for a scrappy sad tiger, he felt an indescribable tenderness well up inside. He could not believe that this was the child who had worked at his factory when she was thirteen. She had a scar on her leg from an accident with the plastic-bag cutter, which he pretended not to look at when they were together, but it was things like that little mark that melted him inside.
‘Better that it’s in this zoo and not roaming around in the jungle,’ he said, ‘because we don’t want to run into such animals when we leave.’
By then, he’d won her over. She was going to leave with him. Of course there was a life after death. If there was anything he now believed in, it was this.
*
Already rumours were circulating like sugarflies about a new refugee camp run by the United Nations at the Thai border that would allow Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees to get into Western democratic countries. But to get to the camp, they would have to go back through Cambodia. What on earth made him want to go back into the country he had vowed never to see again? It was the only way out to the other side. Life in Saigon was becoming more perilous. In the evenings the Vietnamese authorities would come around to arrest and resettle the new arrivals. They would be sent into the countryside and given a plot of land on which they had to build a house. Rice would be distributed to them. But this way of life seemed suspiciously similar to Year Zero all over again, and there was no way he was regressing to that.
So, to evade the authorities, every evening his family left their rented house and stayed over with Kien’s family, who had been in Vietnam longer and were not in immediate danger of forced resettlement. He and his mother and sister slept on the floor of Kien’s tiny family home, in tight lines like salted fish.
They hired a guide to take them to the refugee camp – he, his mother, his sister and his new wife. Kiv and his family had already left. On the morning of their departure, they woke up and packed only a change of clothes so as not to arouse any suspicions. Kien sewed pieces of flattened gold behind the buttons of his shirt, and bid farewell to her family. Their guide arrived in the afternoon with two cyclos. He and Kien sat in one, his mother and his sister in the other.
The cyclos went as far as they could go, to the edge of the jungle. Then they had to set out on foot to cross the border between Vietnam and Cambodia. Although it was dark, they were not frightened – lines and lines of other people were also crossing, mostly traders. They walked all day and were exhausted, collapsing in an empty house. He slept at the feet of his mother, wife and sister, as their sentry. Throughout the journey the guide would take them to the houses of his relatives and friends, where his charges would be fed and have a place to sleep.
At one point they were smuggled into Battambang in cargo trucks covered with tarpaulin. Refugee women in one truck and men in the other. It was dark and suffocating. Kien later told him that her pregnant friend in the truck vomited on her.
Another leg of the journey involved sitting in the back of a cattle truck with other refugees, where he got the hairy eyeball look from a middle-aged Khmer woman because Kien was leaning her head on his shoulder. Khmer couples never showed such affection in public, but he and Kien were now on their first adventure together and they didn’t care. It was exhilarating.
Sometimes they had to sleep in the open fields, on rattan mats with mosquito nets hanging from the trees for a covering. After they arrived in Battambang, a boat took them across the Tonle Sap Lake. The last stretch of their journey was traversed by bicycle, and then by foot. How many months had this taken? He had lost count of time. To him, it had just been one continuous honeymoon with his new wife.
When they reached the border, they saw thousands upon thousands of people in a flat field, with mosquito nets hitched up. This was Kao I Dang refugee camp. They lay down on their mats and waited for sleep to come. The next morning, a black-clad soldier came and took a long lascivious look at Kien, and at that moment it seemed that during the night the moon had seeped all its shade into her face. ‘Pale,’ the soldier muttered, ‘not like a Khmer.’
Kuan got up and ran to the Red Cross tent. He was not taking any chances. He stammered in French to the white woman there: ‘Un soldat demande mon épouse!’ Immediately she told him to bring his family over. That was how he got his family into the tent. It was staffed by kind white people, just like the future world into which he had delivered his family – his mother, his sister, his wife.