THE LAST THING MY MOTHER COULD REMEMBER WAS sitting on the beach and a vague sensation of being lifted—after that everything was a blank. Now she found herself lying on her back on a comfortable bed, staring up at a man who was speaking a language she could actually understand, and that had not happened since she left Vietnam.
Where could I possibly be? she wondered, but she was too weak to even open her mouth to ask.
“I need to do a procedure on you,” the man told her. “I’m going to give you something to make you sleep.” And with that, he slid a needle into her arm, and everything went black.
When she woke up again, she was finally clearheaded enough to understand she was in a hospital room, but she had no idea how she got there or how long she had been gone from her family. She had no sense of elapsed time at all; to her, it seemed as though she had closed her eyes one minute and awakened the next.
A man entered the room and walked up to her bed—the same man who had spoken to her before. Now she could see that he was a doctor and that the reason she had been able to understand him was because he was Chinese.
“You miscarried,” he said bluntly. “I performed a D & C, and you should be all right now. But you can’t have any more children—your blood is too thin.” And to make certain she followed his advice, he informed her that while she was unconscious, he had taken the liberty of implanting an IUD, free of charge.
To the doctor’s credit, he allowed my mother to remain in the hospital until she recuperated, and she had lost so much blood that recovery was a slow process. Nine days passed before she was strong enough to leave, and when she was finally released and went to get dressed, she discovered that the blood-soaked clothing she had worn to the hospital had turned putrid. The nurses had to scrounge up something for her to wear back to the beach, and the clothes they gave her would have fit loosely on a woman twice her size.
The same military transport that had brought her to the hospital returned to take her back again, and as she climbed into the back, she realized she had no idea where the hospital was located or how far it was from the beach. Since the driver didn’t bother to ask her for directions back to her family, she assumed he knew where to take her, and if he didn’t know, there was nothing she could do to help.
The trip back took far longer than she expected, and the longer they drove, the more worried she became. The driver didn’t seem to know where he was going. From time to time he pulled over and stared at the trees for a moment, then drove off again. To make matters worse, it was already evening and getting dark fast. If the driver couldn’t find her family in the daylight, he wasn’t going to do any better in the dark.
My mother began to see patches of sky through the palm trees, which told her they must be nearing the beach. A few minutes later the driver abruptly pulled over, tapped his horn, and pointed to a small break in the trees. Thirty seconds later he roared off again, leaving my mother on the side of the road. She almost ran to the beach, eager to see the looks on all of our faces when we first spotted her walking toward us.
But when she stepped out of the palm trees, she saw nothing but sand and sea. She looked up and down the beach, and as far as the eye could see, there were no groups of refugees anywhere in sight.
It was the wrong beach.
Her stomach began to twist into a knot. She had no idea where she was or where her family was. Each day our family had been forced to march farther down the beach, but it had always been a random distance, and each place we stopped looked exactly like the one before. There were no distinguishing landmarks anywhere—just water on our left, palm trees on our right, and sand in the middle. And our group could have been moved several times in the last nine days—we could have been anywhere by now.
Then another thought occurred to her: A boat of refugees had arrived before we did, and a second boat arrived the day after. That meant we were not the only refugees wandering up and down the beach—there were hundreds, maybe even thousands, and locating one family among them could be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. And even if she did know where we were, how was she supposed to get to us? This wasn’t Soc Trang, where she could just wave down a pedicab and tell the driver, “Take me to my family.” The truck was gone, and she was stranded.
Nine days ago she was part of a refugee family. She knew all the dangers her family might encounter when they left Vietnam, but she always thought they would face them together. This was a situation she had never even considered. She was alone, and the thought terrified her.
The sun disappeared below the trees behind her, and the tall palms covered her in deep shadow. In a few more minutes she would be alone in the dark.
Then she heard sounds from somewhere behind the palm trees, and in the deepening darkness she could make out lights. She followed the lights through the trees and discovered a large warehouse-type building in a gravel-covered clearing. The light she had seen was coming from the building’s windows, and when she stretched up on her tiptoes and peeked in, she saw row after row of wide bunk beds lined up from one end of the building to the other. It was a military barrack, and it was temporarily housing a large group of refugees.
She felt a surge of hope as she opened the door and stepped in—but when she scanned the faces of the refugees, she didn’t see a single face she recognized. She began to wander around the room, asking if anyone had seen or heard about her family, and before long she ran across two sisters in their early twenties who were from her hometown of Bac Lieu.
“Where are you going?” my mother asked them.
“To France,” one of them said. “We have sponsors there.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Tonight, at ten o’clock. You can come with us.”
“I can’t,” my mother said. “I have to find my family.”
“Well, you can’t stay here.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re alone. Sometimes the soldiers come and take women at night. There won’t be anyone here to protect you, and if you’re alone you’re going to get raped.”
My mother stared in disbelief. In just a few hours this entire group was going to leave for France, and she would be left at the mercy of the Malaysian soldiers. There was no law to protect her—the soldiers were the law. As a refugee her life was worth nothing, and the soldiers could do anything they wanted. They could even kill her when they were done with her, and one refugee among thousands would never be missed. She was thirty-seven, attractive, and barely healed from a hemorrhage that had almost killed her. She couldn’t just abandon her family and board a plane for France, but she couldn’t find her family either; she couldn’t bear to go, but it wasn’t safe to stay. What was she supposed to do?
Then the second sister said, “Only Jesus can protect you now.”
My mother looked at her. She had heard of Jesus before but only as one enlightened being among many. Household shrines in Vietnam commonly included an image of Jesus along with the Buddha and honored family ancestors. But this young woman spoke of Jesus as if He were God himself, a powerful and loving being who strengthens the weak and protects the defenseless—and considering my mother’s situation, it was no surprise that she found herself eager to listen. The young woman’s words touched something deep inside her, and before long my mother was on her knees, praying for protection and deliverance.
At ten o’clock the soldiers came—but only to notify the group that plans had changed and they would not be leaving for France that night after all. My mother was greatly relieved and wondered if the last-minute change of plans was her first answered prayer.
An hour later one of the soldiers announced, “Lights out!” and promptly switched off the lights, throwing the entire barrack into darkness. Everyone immediately found their way to their beds, and my mother was left standing alone in the middle of the barrack.
“Come with us,” she heard a voice say. A man and woman who looked to be in their midfifties, motioned for her to follow them and led her to a lower bunk, where two other figures were already reclining. They were the two young sisters from Bac Lieu, and the man and woman were their parents.
“Take the middle,” the man told her. “You’ll be safe there.”
My mother lay down in the center of the bunk while the two sisters reclined on either side of her. The woman lay down beside one of her daughters, and her husband took the opposite side—five adults in one narrow bed. My mother spent the entire night with a compassionate Christian family surrounding her like human parentheses—the mother and father protecting their daughters and the daughters protecting her.
My mother didn’t sleep much that night. From time to time the door would squeak open, and a few minutes later some young woman would be heard whimpering, “No, no,” followed by silence when the soldier dragged her off or just climbed on top of her in her bunk. No one dared to intervene, and the next morning everyone wondered who last night’s victims had been—but the poor souls refused to identify themselves out of shame. I’m sure that event haunted each of them for years to come—not only the brutality of the rape itself but the sense of utter powerlessness that a refugee feels when she learns that sometimes even her body is no longer her own.
To my mother’s great surprise, early the next morning the driver who had mistakenly dropped her at the wrong beach returned for her. He told her through a translator that he had only left her there because he had been ordered not to return with her and had to leave her somewhere—but he had been searching ever since and had managed to find our family and returned to take her to them.
Before she left, my mother thanked the family of sheltering angels who had slept surrounding her the previous night. She never saw that compassionate family again; she never would have met them at all if not for a driver’s poor sense of direction. It was a mistake, an error, an accidental encounter. She was there for only a single night, but that night was a turning point in my mother’s life, just as my father’s loss of wealth and power was a turning point in his. The simple prayer she prayed the night before was more than a desperate cry for help—it was a response to something beyond her, the beginning of something that would stay with her for the rest of her life.
My grateful mother was told she would soon be reunited with her family, but the driver failed to mention that one day earlier her family had been loaded onto fishing boats to be towed to an island refugee camp—without her.