SOME OF THE MEN ON OUR BOAT ACTUALLY TRIED TO wave the ship down because at that distance there was no way to tell what kind of ship it was. Pirates were not the only ones operating in the South China Sea; the ship might have been a commercial vessel that could replenish our dwindling water supply or point us in the direction of a refugee camp.
But as the ship came closer, the men stopped waving. It was a fishing trawler, easily twice the size of our boat, with a wooden hull that was black from years spent at sea. The ship had a forward deckhouse and an aft working deck, where twin wooden outriggers projected from the mast like a pair of antennae. A knotted gray trawl net draped from each of them, and cables crisscrossed everywhere like the strands of a spider’s web.
The ship approached from the east at high speed, apparently hoping to overtake us before we could speed away, but if they had known how old and feeble our engine was, they could have taken their time. My father stood and watched as the ship drew closer, and he caught a glimpse of a name on the ship’s bow. He couldn’t read the name, but his familiarity with Asian languages told him it was written in Thai.
Everyone on our boat held their breath as the ship approached; there was no way to be sure of the ship’s intentions. The fact that it was a Thai fishing boat meant nothing. There were honest Thai fishermen, too, and everyone prayed this would turn out to be a crew of good Samaritans stopping to offer a helping hand.
But their intentions became clear when the trawler did not slow down.
It rammed us amidships with a tremendous thump and rocked our boat hard to starboard. The loudest screams came from below deck because the coach-class passengers didn’t see the ship approaching and had no way to anticipate the impact. They were completely blindsided, and their screams grew even louder when a spray of water began to shoot through a crack in the hull.
As the stern swung around and the ship came alongside ours, we saw men lined up along the gunnels, clinging to the steel rigging with one hand and holding knives in the other. Some were dressed like ordinary fishermen, in fish-stained shorts and tattered T-shirts, while others were shirtless, their dark-skinned shoulders and chests emblazoned with tattoos that looked like scrolling veins. Some of them wore bandanas pulled back tight, and many had painted their faces with bright zigzags and symbols to make them look as frightening as possible. They waved their knives in the air and shouted, and when their ship drew close enough, they began to pour onto our boat like rats.
Fifteen pirates boarded our boat, and when they did, everyone began to scream and cry. Some of the women were wearing gold necklaces, and they quickly slipped them off and tucked them under their legs to hide them while others removed their own earrings and held them out in cupped hands to keep the pirates from ripping them off their ears and taking flesh with them.
My mother was worried about more important things than gold.
Jenny was twelve, and Yen was only nine, but pirates had been known to assault girls even younger, and my mother knew both of them were in danger. The women on our boat had all heard about the tricks that other refugee women had tried to avoid being singled out and raped. Some had tried smearing their faces with diesel oil, to make themselves look dirty and unappealing, while others tried basting themselves with a repugnant fish sauce, called nuoc mam. But pirates knew those tricks, too, and all they did was demand that the woman bathe first.
My mother pulled Yen in close and shoved her down to make her look smaller, and she covered Jenny’s head with a towel to try to disguise her as an old woman in a shawl. Some of the single women grabbed for other women’s children and held them in their laps, hoping that a mother might be shown more compassion—but pirates were not known for compassion. Other women pretended to be seasick or ill or anything else they could think of that might make a pirate pass them by. Women who had spent their entire lives making themselves as attractive as possible were now frantically trying everything they could think of to make themselves unappealing.
The pirates waved their weapons and shouted demands, but no one on our boat spoke Thai or could understand a word they were saying. But the pirates didn’t wait for someone to translate; they just charged around the top deck, jerking the jewelry from women’s necks and ears and demanding rings and watches from the men. One of the pirates ducked under the covered section, where my family was huddled together. When my mother saw him coming, she quickly pulled off her earrings and dropped them into her bra, but it was too late—the pirate saw what she had done and grabbed at her shirt to get the earrings back. But retrieving my mother’s earrings was apparently more trouble than they were worth, and when the pirate noticed that Yen, sitting beside her, was wearing earrings, too, he shoved my mother aside and pointed a knife at Yen’s throat instead. When my aunt saw what was about to happen, she pulled one of the earrings from Yen’s ear and handed it to the pirate, who then ripped off the other earring himself.
The pirates worked quickly, almost frantically, screaming and shouting as they rushed around the deck, grabbing any shiny thing that caught their eye. They searched my father and ripped his pants in the process, but for the most part the pirates took only what was easily accessible. When they found books or paper, they ripped them apart and threw them on the deck, acting as if they planned to start a fire and torch our boat before they left. That was the most terrifying thought of all because our boat was more than a means of transportation for us—it was life itself. While we were at sea, our boat was our country and our home. If it stayed afloat, we lived, and if not, we died. The thought of being trapped in a flaming tomb started a panic, and the women began to beg for mercy and plead with the pirates to take whatever they wanted and go.
Grandmother Chung shouted at the men to leave everyone alone, but they ignored her. She was clutching a framed image of Quan Âm, a Chinese goddess of compassion, mercy, and kindness. When the pirates snatched it out of her hands and threw it on the deck, it broke apart, revealing jewels my grandmother had hidden inside.
Oddly enough, the pirates never bothered to go below deck, though half of our passengers were down there, and the pirates could have doubled their take by doing so. But that was more than a simple oversight on their part. There was a reason they worked so quickly: they were afraid too.
These pirates were young. Most of them looked to be in their twenties, and some were even teenagers. They were doing their best to puff themselves up to look and sound as terrifying as possible, but they were too young and too skinny to be physically intimidating. Some of them carried knives, but they were small boning knives that fishermen used, not the infamous long knives that Thai pirates used to mutilate their victims. Some of the pirates weren’t wielding knives at all—they were carrying screwdrivers. These pirates were not only young and skinny but underequipped, and with limitations like that, the only way they could terrify and intimidate was to bluster and bluff.
My father noticed that one of the pirates looked different from the others and seemed to be their leader. The man did not look Thai; he looked Chinese, and he was the only one who had not painted his face. When the man noticed my father staring at him, he turned and said under his breath, “Don’t be afraid. It’ll be okay.” My father began to realize we were being threatened with only hand tools and the pirates who wielded them were almost as frightened as we were.
There were only 15 of them and more than 290 of us, and our party included some strong young men. My father and uncle and the other men began to whisper back and forth about the possibility of fighting back and throwing the pirates off our boat. Looking back, my father thinks they could have done it; they could have overwhelmed the pirates with numbers, disarmed them, recovered all the stolen jewelry and gold, and probably could have stolen their ship.
But no one did a thing because it was not the pirates they feared—it was the stories.
They had heard so many stories about confrontations between pirates and refugees that ended in horrifying ways—with men forced to watch while their wives and daughters were abused and mothers forced to watch while their babies were cast into the sea. It didn’t matter if the stories were true—they were true to us. The only source of information about pirate atrocities came from interviews with survivors who made it to refugee camps and recounted their ordeals. Their stories were terrible, but there was no way to know if they were typical. Did all pirates commit violent atrocities? Our timid pirates didn’t seem to want to harm anyone; were they the exception or the rule? Were all pirates monsters, or did they turn into monsters only when they were resisted? Some said that half of all refugee boats never made it to land—what happened to them? Did vicious pirates ram and sink them all, or were some of them lost in storms? Did some of them have second thoughts, turn around, and return to Vietnam, leaving those waiting for them to imagine the worst? Or did some of the leaky old boats that desperate refugees were forced to take to sea just gradually take on water until they disappeared beneath the waves? So little was really known, and the less that was known, the more there was to fear.
The men on our boat did nothing because they didn’t dare. It wasn’t what did happen that paralyzed them with fear; it was the thought of what could happen. That fear is something all refugees experience because refugees are forced to sail across pirate waters all their lives. So many things can go wrong for a refugee, but it’s the fear of what could go wrong that haunts us.
Fifteen minutes after the attack began, the pirates scrambled back onto their trawler, carrying handfuls of stolen booty, and the ship roared its engines and sailed away. Everyone wondered if the pirates were really leaving, and we waited to see if the trawler would come back and ram us again and again until our hull cracked open and we sank into the sea. But they just continued on until they were once again a speck on the horizon.
When the attack was finally over, no one said a word. It was as though a bomb had gone off and sent a shock wave through the ship that left everyone stunned and mute. Those on the top deck were the ones who had been robbed and threatened, but the experience had been almost as terrifying for those below. All they could do was stare up helplessly at the open hatch, listen to the feet stomping on the planks over their heads and the women pleading for mercy, and imagine what was happening to their fellow passengers—and wonder if they would be next.
No one knew what to say because no one knew what to think or feel. What had just happened? We had been robbed, but we were alive and unharmed. The women had been traumatized, but no one had been assaulted. Our hull had been cracked, but the leak was repaired quickly. We had been attacked by Thai pirates, but our pirates turned out to be inexperienced amateurs. Should we celebrate or weep? Had we been blessed or cursed? We didn’t even know if our ordeal was over. Were our pirates working alone, or were they part of a ring that would send other ships like a pack of wild dogs closing in on a wounded animal, each one tearing off a piece of our flesh until nothing remained?
What we did know was that if we had been attacked once, it could happen again—and if it did, there was nothing we could do about it. That was the realization that left us stunned: we were helpless. Even a bunch of skinny teenagers armed with nothing more than screwdrivers could walk onto our boat and take anything they wanted—and we didn’t dare do anything about it.
My father looked at the horizon. There was no sight of land.