NINETY-THREE PEOPLE PRESSING SKIN AGAINST SKIN made the boat unbearably hot on our first day at sea. No one said much that day because everyone was still in shock from the realization of what had been done to us the day before. The Malaysians had lied to us. They had never intended to take us to a refugee camp at all, and they told us the trip would take only two or three hours in order to convince us to leave everything behind. Food, water, additional clothing—everything we now desperately needed we had abandoned back on the beach. The Malaysians’ last-minute inventory had been nothing but a ruse to rob us of anything else of value, to keep us from taking it with us to the bottom of the sea. The receipts they gave us were worthless pieces of paper. They were just like the worthless receipts the Nazis gave the Jews when they stripped them of their possessions before packing them into boxcars like cattle. The Nazis understood that bureaucracy has a calming effect when people feel out of control.
No one knew what to do next because there was nothing to do. Our engine didn’t work, and even if it had, we had no fuel. There was no sail to unfurl or even an oar to row with. There was no compass, and even if there had been one, it couldn’t have told us how far we were from land. Without engine or sail the tiller was useless, and without power our boat was at the mercy of the shifting tides and rolling sea. Even if someone aboard had possessed the foresight and navigational skill to take a bearing from the stars the night before, the knowledge would have been useless. Our boat drifted, turned, slid silently down the side of the swells, and turned again. We were pointed in every direction and headed in none of them.
We could have been anywhere. A twenty-hour tow at even a modest nine knots would have put our boat more than two hundred miles out to sea, and once the sun dropped below the horizon, we had no way to tell which direction we were traveling. The South China Sea was a 1.3-million-square-mile body of water, and all we knew for certain was that we were somewhere in the middle of it.
The only food we had was the scraps a few people had stuffed into their pockets, and the only water was a few small cups and containers that some had thought to grab as we left the beach. There was nothing on the boat that could help us survive. It was a fishing boat, not a lifeboat, so it carried no emergency supplies—no food, no water, and no flares or dye markers to help make our tiny speck visible against an infinite sea.
The night we set sail from Ca Mau and journeyed down the narrow Ganh Hao River, irritating black flies had circled our heads and picked at us all night. We had hoped to escape them when we reached the open sea, but we were disappointed to discover that flies inhabit the oceans too. Now they appeared again, and the annoyance only added to our anger and frustration. On the voyage from Vietnam to Malaysia, some of the passengers had become seasick, and that boat was much larger and far more stable than this one; our tiny fishing boat bobbed in the water like a cork, and it wasn’t long before people began to double over and retch.
The other three boats had disappeared from view the previous day, and we could only hope that one of them was having better luck than we were. Maybe one of them would manage to repair their engine, or maybe they would drift to land and send someone back to search for us. We knew it was a remote possibility, but any hope is important in a life-and-death situation.
By the end of the first day, all the water and food had been consumed. Most of it had been given to the children, who suffered most from the heat and couldn’t understand the reason for their misery. My mother tried in vain to nurse the twins, but her body was thin and frail, and the stress of the last few weeks combined with her recent hemorrhage and hospital stay had caused her milk to dry up completely. At eighteen months old the twins needed more than milk to survive, but milk had been a significant addition to their meager diet, and now it was gone.
All we could do was sit and wait, and the heat that slowly increased through the day turned the boat into a floating slow cooker. The children found it intolerable to have to remain seated for long hours in a rigid and cramped position, and they longed to move and stretch their legs—but there was no room to move and no place to go. The elderly moaned because of their stiff limbs and aching joints, but there was no relief for them. The real agony was that no one knew how long we would have to endure these conditions or if rescue would ever come at all. No one dared to say what everyone was thinking—that we were all just waiting to die, and the process could be long and terrible.
We had no relief at all until sunset that first day. Even then the temperature dropped only a few degrees, but at least we had a brief reprieve from the baking sun. When the sun disappeared below the western horizon, the blue-gray sea turned inky black, and the sky settled over us like a shroud. During the daytime, the sea had looked infinite and made us feel that we were nothing but a microscopic speck of living dust, but at night the darkness closed in around us and somehow made us feel larger but even more alone—as though we were floating in a dark room with no way to reach the walls. Our sleep was fitful and constantly interrupted by the cries of children and the shifting of aching bodies struggling to change positions.
We began the second day exhausted and weak from the day before, which shortened tempers considerably. Everyone stared at the horizons, hoping to spot a passing ship that could help us. Maybe the Malaysians had abandoned us somewhere near a commercial shipping lane; that would have been the compassionate thing to do though the night before the Malaysian sailors had not demonstrated much compassion. If our boat happened to drift near a big commercial shipping lane, like the Singapore–Bangkok line, a passing freighter might spot us and come to our rescue. But the odds were against us because we were just a flyspeck in the middle of an endless sea. A crewman standing on a freighter’s deck thirty feet above the water could see only about seven miles to the horizon, and seven miles is a microscopic margin of error in the vastness of the South China Sea. And even if a ship did happen to pass within seven miles of us, these were commercial ships with schedules to keep and cargo to deliver. Why would they be any more compassionate than the Malaysians had been?
Still, it was possible that a ship would pass by, and searching for one at least gave us something to do. But no ship ever appeared, which added a feeling of hopelessness to our fear, frustration, and anger.
On our third day at sea, we spotted a rocky outcropping, about twice the size of a house, protruding from the water. It was much too small to be called an island but more than large enough to reduce our boat to tinder if we happened to crash into it—there was a strong wind that day driving our boat directly toward it. We assumed our boat had been floating almost motionless for the last two days, but the rock was a true stationary point; when we saw it, we realized that our boat actually had been drifting fast.
Our boat had been abandoned in an area known as the Sunda Shelf, a region of the South China Sea so shallow that geologists wonder if it was once a land bridge that allowed ancient travelers to walk dry-footed between Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula. When the Titanic went down off the southern coast of Newfoundland, it sank in two and a half miles of water, but the water under our boat was fewer than a hundred feet deep in some places. That was more than deep enough to drown in but shallow enough to allow rocks like this one to poke up from the bottom. Our boat began to rush directly toward the rock, but for some reason we would veer off at the last moment and pass by unharmed; then the strange current would turn us around and force us to make another pass. Each time we thought we were about to crash into the rock, our boat would narrowly miss it and drift on. It was a strange experience that added a touch of terror to an otherwise monotonous day.
By the fourth day people were so hungry and thirsty and weak from constant exposure to the sun that they just slumped against each other in exhaustion. Some began to hang over the sides of the ship and stare into the water, where they saw slender silver fish gliding back and forth beneath the boat. One man came to the conclusion that the fish were tiny sharks; and he warned us that if there were baby sharks near the surface, there must have been a monstrous mother shark lurking down below that was waiting to eat us. No one bothered to argue with the man because by that time none of us was thinking any more clearly than he was.
My mother and father began to have fantastic nightmares that bordered on hallucination; my mother had a vision that the eighteen-month-old twins were rowing our boat and working as hard as they could to rescue the rest of us. My mother started to display the first signs of heatstroke, and nine-year-old Yen actually passed out from the heat. My father had to slap her to bring her out of it, and my mother had to pry her mouth open and place tea leaves on her tongue to help her produce saliva. Bruce sat farther forward in the boat than the rest of us, and because he was a growing boy, he struggled the most with hunger. When his hunger pangs became unbearable, he would beg our mother or grandmother for nonexistent food, and the only way he could get to them was to crawl around the railing of the boat. My mother was always terrified that he would slip and fall into the sea.
Then someone shouted, “Look! A ship!”
On the horizon we saw two ships, a larger one and a smaller one, and they seemed to be traveling together. A few of the men struggled to their feet and summoned all the strength they had left to wave the ships down—and to our indescribable relief the ships saw us and turned in our direction. The larger boat came first; it was a big commercial fishing boat, almost the same size as the boat we were in when we left Vietnam and more than large enough to take all of us aboard. It had two pairs of booms that pointed to starboard and port and trawl lines that were dotted with cork-colored buoys. As the ship drew closer, we could see some of its crew standing along the ship’s railing, watching us. One of the men was enormous; he had a huge potbelly, and he was wearing a colorful sarong. He was shouting something to us that no one could understand—and then he opened his sarong and exposed himself.
They were Thai pirates.
Everyone sat down in shock. No one could imagine what pirates could possibly want from a boat as small as ours. We had nothing they could desire: food, water, fuel, money—even our women were emaciated and near death from four days without water or food. The attack was beyond our comprehension, and all we could do was sit and wait for them to tell us what they wanted.
But they never said a word to us.
The smaller ship was much lighter and faster than its partner. The two ships were most likely working together using a fishing technique known as “pair trawling,” in which two ships sail side by side, hauling a net between them and catching everything in their path. The larger ship carries the net and stores the catch while the smaller ship serves only to drag the other end of the net.
The smaller ship pulled out from behind the trawler and began to circle our boat quickly. As it sped around us, we could see that it was towing a large rope behind it and that the other end of the rope was tied to the trawler. By the time the small boat had made a half circle around us, the rope had slid under our bow, and when the rope was directly beneath us, the small ship gunned its engines and turned away from us, pulling the rope taut and lifting the bow of our boat out of the water.
Everyone began to scream and cry. I was too young to understand what was happening, but when I heard the screams and saw the looks of terror on my family’s faces, I began to cry too. Jenny looked over the side of the boat and could see daylight between our bow and the water. We were tipping over backward; and if the overloaded hull didn’t break in half from the strain, it would dump us all into the sea and slam down on us like a massive wooden mallet.
There was no time for anyone to try to jump clear; all we could do was hold on and wait to be poured out like rice into a boiling kettle. The children would be the first to die because they would hit the water and sink like rocks. The adults who had no ability to swim would struggle for a few seconds before they slipped beneath the surface, and those who were able to swim a few strokes, like my father, would last the longest—just long enough to watch his entire family perish before he succumbed to exhaustion.
Then something happened that no one expected: the rope snapped, and our boat came crashing back down to the surface and plunged so deep that it looked as if water might pour over the sides of the bow and sink us. There was utter panic because no one knew exactly what had happened, and we feared that the boat had broken in half. As everyone gradually realized our boat was still intact, we began to stare up at the pirate trawler and wonder what would happen next.
But nothing happened next, for at precisely the same moment that the rope snapped, the smaller ship’s engine broke down.
There was no apparent reason for the breakdown. The smaller ship’s engine had been working just fine a few seconds before, and considering our distance from land, it must have been working for the last several hours—but the moment the rope broke, the ship’s engine shut down and refused to start again.
It was hardly remarkable that the rope broke when it did. I’m sure the rope was never intended to lift the combined weight of a fishing boat and ninety-three passengers; it probably just reached its breaking point and snapped—no explanation necessary. What is remarkable is that the ship’s engine broke down exactly when it did. If the smaller ship’s engine had not broken down, the pirates could have tried again with another rope—or with a chain. But it takes two ships to accomplish what they were trying to do, and the moment the smaller ship’s engine died, they were out of luck. If that engine had waited just fifteen minutes longer before dying, the pirates would have had time to try again, and their second attempt might have proven successful. When the rope broke, we were only given a temporary reprieve; it was the perfect timing of the two events that saved the lives of everyone on our boat.
There are times when an apparent coincidence is so incredible and so perfectly coordinated that it forces us to wonder whether there must have been purpose behind it. My father considered that event a true miracle, and it wasn’t the only one my family witnessed during our journey. To my father, that event was just one more indication that something or someone seemed to be guiding our family’s fate.
When the smaller ship broke down, the pirates lost interest in us and turned their attention to repairing their engine. Fortunately for us they were unable to repair it. They used the broken rope to tie the two ships together, and we all sat and watched the trawler tow the smaller ship away while the fat man in the sarong cursed at us at the top of his lungs.