Over the next year the plight of people trying to escape Vietnam, mostly by boat, worsened. The Communist regime governed with an iron fist, appropriating land, homes, and, of course, money through taxation. The situation was so dire that many Vietnamese people, particularly those in the cities, were starving. Either there was not enough food available, or people could not afford it. The Communists were vengeful as well, using minor pretexts to arrest, punish, and even execute anyone they labeled a traitor to the state. The government began eyeing hostilities, perhaps even another war, with Cambodia, where dictator Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge allies were doing unspeakable things to its citizens.
Who were these Communists? Tâm didn’t recognize the former North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. They weren’t the idealistic recruits with whom she had trained. Their motives had been pure. Noble. They had been fighting for the common man, whose rights and welfare had been crushed by a corrupt system. But the new government sounded just as corrupt as the Thiệu government and the Diệm regime before it. The oppressed had become the oppressors.
South Vietnamese ex-officials and military officers who settled in America harbored a bitter hatred of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. When they encountered someone they didn’t know, most would launch a series of questions until they were satisfied that person was the friend of a friend or a relative, or offered tangible proof they were indeed on the right side—the South’s side—of the war.
If it could be proven that someone had lied about their wartime activities, their life would be miserable. They would be ostracized from the rest of the community. They would be unemployed or fired if they were working. Their homes would be vandalized. News of fatal accidents, sometimes assassinations, would surface. She’d believed that once Vietnamese refugees settled in the U.S., the old animosities between them would be forgotten. She’d been wrong. Even in America, it was a dangerous time for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.
So far Tâm had managed to conceal her wartime activities. She hailed from the Mekong Delta, and her village had been destroyed by the Americans, two facts that boosted her credibility. When she was asked what she did during the war, she stretched the truth by extending the time she worked at the Saigon Café as well as her “studies” at the Cao Đài temple in Tay Ninh. But she was always cautious, prepared to flee or hide if someone from her fighting days showed up.
It happened one night in October after her English class. Tâm was climbing down the stairs on her way out of the building when a woman, on her way up, suddenly stopped when she saw Tâm.
“Hey!” the woman said. “Don’t I know you?”
Tâm stopped and stared at the woman. Her pulse started to race, and goose bumps broke out on her arms. She knew this woman. She was the one who, after Bảo was killed by the tunnel rat, told Tâm she couldn’t stay with the Long Hair squad. That Tâm was an interloper, a mere concubine for Bảo, and was not to be trusted or welcomed. She was part of the reason Tâm had gone after the tunnel rat who may have killed Bảo. Her grief at Bảo’s death and fury at this woman’s insolence had driven her to action.
How had this woman escaped Vietnam? And what was she doing here, at the same night school Tâm attended? A flash of recognition lit the woman’s face, and they exchanged hostile glances. Then the woman’s expression morphed into a malicious smile, as if she had just realized she had the upper hand.
“We must talk, you and I. I know who you are.”
Panic washed over Tâm. Was this woman now hunting former North Vietnamese fighters? Had she convinced the South Vietnamese in the U.S. she was worth more to them as a spy than an enemy? Was it her job to turn in people like Tâm? Perhaps the woman was even more treacherous. Perhaps she had been staking her out, waiting for the opportunity to confront Tâm.
Tâm didn’t stick around for answers. She clattered down the rest of the stairs and hit the door at a run.