THE WOMEN DID THEIR BEST TO RELIEVE THE MISERIES of the children while the men stared blankly at the horizon, hoping to see some sign of land—but even if they did spot an island on the horizon, there was no guarantee our boat could reach it. Without power we would probably sail right past it; the prevailing current wasn’t likely to deliver us directly to a tiny spot in the middle of a vast sea. Some of the men fashioned makeshift sails from T-shirts and tarps they found on board; but there was very little wind moving, and the pathetic sails hung as limp as retired flags.
After yesterday’s encounter with the Thai pirates, no one was particularly eager to encounter another ship because there was no guarantee it would have any better intentions. Yesterday’s pirates were the most cold-blooded kind of all. They didn’t want to rob us or assault our women as did most of the predators who prowled the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea; these pirates just wanted to overturn our boat to watch us drown, and if their rope hadn’t broken at the last possible moment, they would have succeeded.
In the seclusion and anonymity of the South China Sea, the human heart was free to turn its darkest, and predators knew that even the worst atrocities could be hidden beneath the water. Those Thai pirates were trying to kill us just for the pleasure of doing it, which seems like an incomprehensible thing for one human being to do to another. But refugees were not human beings; when they left their home, no list was made of who they were, when they left, or where they were headed. No nation mourned their departure, and no country awaited their arrival. There was death at sea but no death toll; there was heartbreak but no history. Refugees were unwanted, unclaimed, and unnamed—invisible people. They were just some country’s former problem, and the moment the problem was gone, they were forgotten—out of sight, out of mind.
If the pirates’ rope hadn’t broken, we would have died; if their boat hadn’t broken down, they would have tried again. That was two minor miracles in a single day. But that was yesterday; it’s hard to give thanks for yesterday’s grace, and no one on our boat was feeling grateful today.
We were dying of thirst.
We left Malaysia without food or water, but food was not the critical concern. If necessary we could have endured for more than a month without food, but the human body requires water to survive—a lot of it. Every cell of our bodies contains it, and every day some of that water is lost. In a temperate climate the body loses between two and three quarts of water per day, but our boat was adrift just a few hundred miles north of the equator. In that kind of tropical climate, the body perspires, but sweat won’t evaporate. The body loses water but can’t cool down, and hyperthermia can occur. The very young and very old are especially susceptible, and my family included both the oldest and some of the youngest aboard; my grandfather was well into his seventies while my twin brothers Anh and Hon were only eighteen months old.
On the South China Sea in July, the temperature can reach a sweltering ninety degrees with 90 percent humidity, and the sun shone brightly every day we were at sea. There was never a cloud in the sky to block its rays and grant us a few merciful hours of relief, and despite the suffocating humidity, there had not been a single drop of rain. In those extreme conditions at least one member of my family should have died two days ago—yet there we were, still hanging on to life after five long days at sea.
There was a pregnant woman on board who suffered greatly from the heat. I cannot imagine what the ninety-degree temperatures must have added to the incubator she already carried inside her. There was a young man on board, probably in his early twenties, who seemed to have been afflicted by some form of mental illness. He occupied his time by grabbing at the black flies that swarmed over our boat like a cloud, and whenever he caught one he ate it—a revolting habit that made the children frightened and nauseous.
Not that nausea was a cause for concern; after five days without food or water, there was nothing left to vomit. That had not been the case for the first day or two, when plastic bags filled with vomit and feces had to be passed from the center of the boat to the gunnels, where they could be emptied into the sea. The stench on board was unbearable at first, but after five days we had grown almost immune to it. During those first days at sea the adults sipped seawater and let the children drink their urine, but after five days there was no urine left to pass and the saltwater only leeched more fluids from our bodies and made the dehydration even worse.
Mild dehydration begins when the body loses 1 or 2 percent of its water reserves. We reached that point after a single day at sea, when everyone began to complain of thirst and headache and fatigue and the mood on board changed from one of fear to anger and irritability.
Moderate dehydration occurs when the body’s water loss reaches 5 or 6 percent, and general irritability gives way to lethargy and extreme sleepiness and people begin to complain of dry mouth and a swollen tongue that cleaves to the roof of the mouth.
Severe dehydration takes over when the body’s water loss reaches 10 to 15 percent. At that point the muscles begin to contract involuntarily, vision dims, and delirium begins.
After 15 percent, you’re dead.
By the fifth day we had clearly reached severe dehydration. Anh and Hon became increasingly agitated; they began to bite at my mother while one of them banged his head against the boat rail in frustration. They kept moaning the term mum mum over and over, a Vietnamese child’s way of asking to eat or drink, and my mother had to hold them tightly to keep them from crawling over the side of the boat and into the sea. They couldn’t comprehend why their own mother would not let them slake their thirst when they were surrounded by water as far as the eye could see.
My elderly grandfather turned to my grandmother and said, “I’m going to the kitchen for a glass of water.”
“That’s not a kitchen,” she told him. “That’s the ocean, and if you go out there you’ll die.”
“Let me go to the kitchen,” he kept pleading, and they began to argue. His water-deprived brain had begun to hallucinate; fortunately for him my grandmother was still a bit more clearheaded.
One man had almost gone blind. His corneas had been scorched by the unrelenting sun, and his eyes were crusted over with a yellowish excretion that oozed and ran down his face. My sister Nikki had a similar experience. Every morning when she awoke, she found her eyes sealed shut by a crust from the salt spray that constantly misted over the boat; she had to scrape the crust away and pry her eyes open before she could see.
Though almost everyone on our boat left the beach without food or water, one family had the foresight to grab a gallon jug of water as the Malaysian soldiers were hurrying us aboard. That family concealed the jug of water from the rest of us, and when it was eventually discovered, they refused to share. My uncle Lam began to plead with them—not for himself but for the younger members of our family.
“These are children,” he told them. “They need water or they’ll die. You have to share.”
So they did. They removed the cap from the jug and carefully filled it, then passed the tiny capful of water across the boat—one capful for each of the children.
When I think back on this event, I can’t help but marvel at the selfishness of the human heart. You would think that our common suffering would have bonded all ninety-three passengers into one devoted family—a true band of brothers. But hearts are not always softened by difficult circumstances; sometimes they are hardened into stone. Though everyone on our boat faced the same likelihood of death, for some inexplicable reason one of our families was determined to hang on to life just a few hours longer than everyone else.
Others aboard the boat were more humane. Some of the mothers began to quietly make arrangements for the care of any children who might survive the voyage.
“If you die, I’ll take care of your children,” they told one another. “If I die, you must promise to take care of mine.”
Some of the women, having lost all hope of survival, began to discuss the possibility of drowning their children to spare them further suffering. “If death is a foregone conclusion, why let the children suffer? And why put ourselves through the torment of having to watch them die? Wouldn’t the loving thing be to end their misery now?” They began to consider the unthinkable: wrapping the youngest children in strips of cloth to bind their struggling arms to their sides and slipping them into the sea.
Then something happened to my father—something none of us could see. A thought presented itself in his mind, like the flare of a match in a dark room. It could have been just a hallucination of his own, but he didn’t think so; he described it later as a moment of clarity. Something had spoken to his soul, and he knew what he needed to do. He picked himself up from his cross-legged position and, to everyone’s surprise, knelt down near the center of the boat and began to pray aloud.
“I know there is a Creator God,” he called out. “I know You created us and don’t want us to die like this. So if You’re listening, please send rain.”
Then he sat down again.
It was not the first time my father had ever prayed, but there was something very different about this prayer. There were no memorized words, no ritualistic postures, no petitions for help from enlightened beings or benevolent ancestors. It was an elemental prayer, stripped of all pretext and formality, just a creation speaking to its Creator. Thanh Chung had never prayed like this before, but something within him—or something from without—had told him that the only one who could help him was the Creator God.
Within minutes of his prayer a dark line appeared on the southwestern horizon. Some thought it might be land because the peaks and valleys looked like a range of mountains, but the peaks began to rise and grow and reach out toward our boat like fingers, darkening the sky as they came.
Then, without lightning or thunder, the heavens opened and it began to rain.
It was a torrential downpour. Everyone’s first instinctive response was to lean back and open their mouths to the sky to feel the first cool drops of water on their swollen tongues. But drops of water were not enough to satisfy, and everyone began to scramble to find something, anything, that could capture and store this gift from above. My father and my brother Bruce grabbed a dirty canvas tarp and spread it out, hoping to catch the rain and direct it into something that could hold it, but the soft canvas absorbed more water than it channeled—so each of the children leaned back like baby birds while my father twisted and squeezed the water from the tarp into our waiting mouths. The tarp was so filthy that the water that came out of it was almost black, but none of us cared. It was water, and after five days that was all that mattered.
There wasn’t an empty bucket or container anywhere on board, so the best we could do was to drink all we could while the rain continued. We could drink, but we couldn’t store; we had water for today, but as soon as the rain stopped, there would be no more. But no one was thinking about tomorrow because we were too busy enjoying this manna that fell from the sky today.
Until the boat began to sink.
The rain came down so hard our boat began to fill with water, and when that happened, everyone stopped drinking and began to bail furiously. “Too much of a good thing” has never been a better description. If the rain hadn’t started, we would have died, but if the rain wouldn’t stop, we were going to die. Sometimes you just can’t get a break.
To make matters worse, the sudden storm brought violent seas. The swells began to rise until they looked like dark hills that rose and fell around our boat. Then we were facing two threats: water from above and water from below. Our boat was shallow; when Jenny dangled her arm over the side of the boat, her hand could touch the water. All it would take was one good wave to spill over the side of our boat, and we would all be headed for the bottom. Everyone began to panic.
When my father saw what was happening, he knelt down again.
“Creator God, I know that You heard me because You sent rain,” he prayed aloud. “If You hear me again, please make it stop.”
Within minutes the sky lightened, the storm moved on, and the seas became calm again.
Now everyone began to pray.
Buddhists appealed to the Absolute Refuge, Taoists invoked the immortals, and ancestor worshipers sought the intervention of loved ones long since dead. Some tried to cover all the bases—my grandmother admitted later, “We prayed to Buddha; we prayed to our ancestors; we prayed to Jesus. We prayed to anyone who would listen.”
Apparently Someone did.
Our fifth day at sea ended with a ray of hope—not because we now believed we would be rescued but because we had begun to hope that maybe, just maybe, there was Someone out there who actually cared whether we lived or died.
But a single rainstorm cannot replace the lost 15 percent of a body’s water. We were refreshed but not replenished; we were hopeful but far from healed. The next day would bring the sun again, and with it the heat and humidity. Tomorrow would be our sixth day at sea, and it was likely to be our last.