WHEN MY FATHER RETURNED FROM THE HOSPITAL, he told us our mother would have to remain there until she was well. He did not know how long that would be, but he was sure she would be fine and would come back to us soon. That was what he told us, but I wonder if he was really thinking something more like, Your mother bled the entire way to the hospital, and she was unconscious when I left her. I didn’t know a woman that size had that much blood in her. She could be dead by now, and I would have no way to know. If she does die, I’m not sure if anyone will even bother to tell us.
But that would not have been a very good way to comfort eight frightened children, so he just reassured us that everything was going to be okay.
For nine straight days my brothers and sisters and I stood at the edge of the rope and watched anxiously for our mother to return. We were worried about her, but we had other concerns that helped distract us—like staying alive. Our family had marched so far down the beach that the UNHCR no longer made regular food deliveries and we had to scavenge whatever we could to eat. My aunt walked up to the rope one day and beckoned for one of the guards to come closer, then pulled off one of her gold rings and handed it to him while she gestured to her mouth. The guard weighed the ring in his hand and held it up to examine it, then nodded his head and walked away—and a few minutes later he returned with a loaf of bread and a few bananas. It was extortion, but when you’re starving, a loaf of bread is worth its weight in gold.
Someone donated three big sacks of rice, but the rice had been stored so long it had turned hard and yellow with age. We ate it anyway. We ate anything given to us and stretched it as far as possible; whatever it was and no matter how small the portion, it had to feed eight children and an adult. Whenever we complained to the guards that we didn’t have enough food, they just pointed to the children and said, “Eat them.”
Water was a bigger problem. It continued to reach ninety degrees every day, and we desperately needed water to replace what we were losing to sweat. The soldiers began to escort us to a small well where we could draw water, which was little more than a hole in the sand near the palm trees where we could lower a can attached to a long rope and dredge up whatever water we could find. The water was always dirty and hot, and with 290 people drawing from the well, it sometimes went dry. The guards quickly tired of escorting individual refugees back and forth from the well, and instead set a specific time period each day when everyone was allowed to draw water. People waited in long lines, hoping to get their chance before time ran out. Jenny and Bruce had the job of fetching water for our family, and they waited in line each day with Jenny holding one of the twins on her hip while Bruce stood behind her in his red-checkered shorts. When the allotted time ran out, the guards just shouted, “Go!” They fired their guns into the air, and everyone scattered, whether they were still thirsty or not. Go was the first English word Bruce and Jenny ever learned. Apparently it meant, “Run, or I’ll shoot you.”
On the morning of the ninth day, the guards fired their rifles to get our attention and announced we were leaving. That concerned my father because we had not been forced to march since he took our mother to the hospital, and he had been hoping we would be allowed to remain where we were until she returned. If we moved, how would she find us? The thought of our mother dying had terrified him, but the thought of her living and never finding us again didn’t seem much better.
But when a line of trucks pulled up to the beach, my father realized we were not going to march—we were being taken somewhere by truck, and that meant it would probably be more than just a few miles down the beach.
“Everybody on the trucks!” the guards shouted.
But the sudden change of routine was so unexpected that no one moved.
“Where are we going?” my father asked.
The guards were not interested in discussion. “On the trucks!” they shouted again, and when they started to aim their rifles at us, everyone jumped to their feet and began to gather anything they had managed to collect since the storm.
“Leave everything,” they ordered. “You won’t need it. We’re taking you to a refugee camp a few hours away, and you’ll have everything you need there.”
At that news everyone began to talk excitedly. We weren’t just moving down the beach; we were leaving. After fifteen days of useless waiting, we were finally being taken to a refugee camp where our lives could start again. Everyone was thrilled—except for my family.
“My wife is still in the hospital,” my father pleaded with one of the guards. “She hasn’t come back yet.”
“Nobody stays,” the guard said with a shrug, and then he raised his voice so everyone could hear: “Leave everything—there won’t be room for it. We’ll take an inventory of everything you have and give you a receipt. You’ll get it all back later. But you have to report everything—money, jewelry, personal possessions—everything. If you fail to report one single item and we find out about it, you won’t go—we’ll leave you here to die.”
The threat of being left behind to die was an effective incentive, and everyone began to reach into secret pockets for lumps of gold and jewelry they still concealed. To look at our haggard and sunken-faced group, you wouldn’t imagine there was a dollar between us, but it was astonishing how much money was produced once life itself was on the line.
The guards went from person to person and catalogued every item they received. Each family was given a written itemization and was instructed that without their receipt they would be unable to claim their possessions later on. At that point, a single piece of paper became the most valuable item that any of us owned.
My family took one last look at the palm trees in hopes that our mother would show up at the last moment, but she didn’t. We had no choice but to join the others on the trucks and pray that she would catch up with us later.
The trucks drove for a long time before stopping again, and when they did we realized we were still at the beach and there was no refugee camp anywhere in sight.
The guards banged on the sides of the trucks and ordered everyone out.
“Where’s the camp?” someone asked.
“We’re taking you to the camp,” one of the guards replied.
“In those?”
Lined up side by side in the water were four derelict fishing boats that looked battered and worn and probably hadn’t been used in years—and for good reason. Paint flaked off everywhere, revealing patches of weathered gray wood. One of them had a crack in its stern so large, we could see through it into the boat.
“What happened to our boat?” someone called out.
“We heard it sank,” a guard called back. “You should be more careful next time.”
There was nothing we could say. We had scuttled the boat ourselves to avoid being pushed back to sea, and consequently it was unavailable—but even if our boat had been in perfect condition, it was doubtful the Malaysians would have returned it to us. Our boat was worth money, and these fishing boats clearly were not.
“The refugee camp is on an island,” one of the guards explained. “It isn’t far—only two or three hours. But there won’t be much room, so again—leave everything behind.”
Our group of 290 divided by four—each of the fishing boats had to carry more than seventy people, and none of the boats was more than thirty-five feet long. A fishing boat that size was probably designed to carry a crew of half a dozen men. How would seventy people ever fit? And how many people could it hold before it sank like a rock?
“Load up!” the guards shouted, but instead of heading for the boats, everyone began to scurry around like ants, waving and shouting to each other. This was not a group of strangers; it was a group of families and in-laws and distant cousins, and everyone wanted to make sure that all of their personal connections boarded the same boat. The guards couldn’t have cared less about our family connections—all they wanted was to make sure the boats were weighted evenly. We were just heights and weights to them.
As everyone divided into families and scrambled aboard the boats, my father had to make a decision. He was a member of two families, one by birth and the other by marriage. On my mother’s side were her mother and father, her younger brother, his wife and their two children, and one of her younger sisters who was still single. That made just seven on the Truong side of the family.
On my father’s side of the family was Grandmother Chung, my uncle, his wife and children, and my three aunts, along with their husbands and children. The Chung family was more than twice the size of the Truongs, and numerically it only made sense for our family of nine to balance out the numbers by boarding with my mother’s family. But loyal son that he was, my father chose to stay with Grandmother Chung, and the nine of us squeezed into a boat along with my father’s family and took up almost half the available space.
It took quite a while for everyone to decide on a boat and board. Some had connections to several families and could not decide between them; they kept jumping back and forth between boats until the guards finally ordered them to stay where they were, and even then one or two of them made last-minute changes.
When the boats were fully loaded, there was barely room for anyone to breathe. Everyone sat cross-legged, wedged in like matchsticks in a box; no one had room to lie down or stretch out, regardless of size or age. Older children sat beside their parents while toddlers sat on their parents’ laps. We were all hot and miserable, but at least we could be comforted by the thought that the trip would only last a couple of hours.
My entire family kept staring at the beach, hoping against hope to see one more truck roll up at the last minute and let our mother out. But that truck did not come, and we kept glancing at our father and wondering if he would really leave without her. He had no choice; no one was allowed to remain behind except to die. We were really going without her, and we cried when we thought we might never see her again.
Everyone else sat looking out to sea, waiting for something to happen. So did the guards—but apparently something went wrong. A connection wasn’t made, or a phone call was never received, or someone wrote the wrong date on a calendar. We were never told exactly what the foul-up was, but a couple of hours later we were ordered to get out of the boats and load onto the trucks again. The guards drove us back to the same spot we had left from that morning, and once again we flopped down on the sand while the guards roped us in for the night.
Everyone was tired and disappointed, but the eight Chung children couldn’t have been more relieved.