THE NEXT MORNING WATER LINES WERE OPENED ON Seasweep’s decks, and they gushed like fire hydrants while the refugees gratefully bathed in freshwater for the first time since arriving in Malaysia more than three weeks ago. Three weeks without a bath—it was every parent’s worst nightmare and every child’s dream. Clotheslines were strung everywhere to allow clothing to dry; before long the deck corridors looked like laced tennis shoes, and the cargo hold closely resembled a Chinese laundry.
When my father learned that Seasweep was headed back to Singapore without searching for the other three boats, he was heartbroken. His mother and other family were on one of those boats, and he didn’t know if they were even still alive. He thought back to our boat’s six days at sea, and he wondered if things had been as terrible for his family as they had been for us. Grandmother Chung, his brother and sisters, his nephews and nieces—would he ever see any of them again?
Now that we were all safely aboard Seasweep, Stan Mooneyham had to figure out what to do with us. It was not an easy decision. He was sailing toward Singapore simply because that was the ship’s home port, but the authorities there had made no promise that they would accept his new passengers. The Singapore-based members of Seasweep’s crew had been threatened with fines and penalties if they attempted to return with refugees, and Captain Samudra had even been told that he would lose his pilot’s license—and that would have meant the end of his career.
There were places other than Singapore where Stan could have dropped us off, but there were not many, and none of them was certain. There was one port in Thailand that was a possibility but not a very good one. Guam was a good option because it was a US territory; but it would have taken fourteen days to get there, and the ship didn’t have enough fuel, so Guam was rejected. That turned out to be a very good decision because exactly fourteen days later Super Typhoon Hope was spawned just southeast of Guam; it was a Category 4 typhoon with winds that eventually reached 150 miles per hour.
Hong Kong contacted Stan at sea before the refugees had even been taken aboard to warn him that Seasweep would not be allowed to enter Hong Kong Harbor with refugees aboard, and if their warning was ignored, the ship would be confiscated and the captain and owner would each be fined $20,000 and sentenced to five years in prison.
That crossed Hong Kong off the list.
That left only Singapore; and after a couple of hours of soul-searching and discussion, the captain and crew agreed to take their chances at their home port while Stan agreed to do everything he could to negotiate with the authorities en route.
It took four days for Seasweep to make it back to Singapore. The adults spent most of their time resting, recovering, and tending to daily necessities while the children spent their days exploring the ship and being entertained by the crew. Stan’s seventeen-year-old son, Mark, was aboard, and he was a favorite among the children because he organized games and activities for us and could do magic tricks and make balloon animals. My sister Nikki especially liked Mark; on our first day aboard, he accidentally kicked her and made her cry, and he felt so bad about it that he carried her around for the rest of the trip. My brother Thai remembers the bread that was served on board because it was so thick and fluffy. Someone dropped a piece of it on the filthy deck, and Thai hurried over to pick it up and eat it, but before he could reach it, a crew member tossed it overboard. Thai was shocked—he couldn’t imagine how anyone could throw away a piece of food.
The crew handed out Vietnamese-language magazines that had been brought along just for the refugees, and small, blue Vietnamese-language Bibles were offered to anyone who wanted one; after three weeks of monotony and boredom, the refugees devoured everything they could read. A worship service was held on deck one day, and anyone who wished to could take part. My mother was busy below deck with the children, but my father decided to attend, along with most of the other refugees.
My father was not a particularly religious man, and he wasn’t sure why he attended that service. It was mostly because someone in Seasweep’s crew had invited him, and he thought it might have seemed like an insult if he declined after these people had been so kind to his family. There was another reason he attended: he hoped these people would explain why they would go to so much trouble and expense to save the lives of people whose own country didn’t want them and the rest of the world valued less than dirt.
Stan Mooneyham spoke that day, and the same man who had first greeted our boat with the South Vietnamese flag on his Windbreaker translated the sermon so everyone could understand. To my father’s surprise, Stan didn’t talk about his noble organization or the selfless crew of Seasweep or even the details behind the rescue. Instead, he talked about Jesus: about His love for the unloved, His compassion for the helpless, and His heart for all those whom society sweeps into the gutter. He healed the lame and blind, He wept over the dead, and He wrapped His arms around the untouchable. His greatest act of love was to die for us, Stan said, and He returned from the dead to offer love and forgiveness to everyone who would accept it. It was that great love that brought Seasweep here, Stan told everyone. His great love compelled His followers to love and care for others. He loved, so we love; He gave, so we give back.
My father was riveted by those words. It was as though Stan Mooneyham was explaining his own life to him in a way he had never understood before. He suddenly recognized that all the seemingly random events of his life had a purpose, and the terrible and bewildering events of the last few weeks all had meaning. He had no way to articulate that meaning and purpose or even to fully comprehend it, but the assurance that it was there gave him an overwhelming sense of peace.
There is an expression the Chinese use when asking for forgiveness: “Let’s drop it in the ocean.” At that moment my father felt his entire past had been dropped into the South China Sea—he was free; he was released; he was forgiven. Now he knew the Creator God had a name and a face, and my father knew he would never be the same again.
At the conclusion of Stan’s sermon, someone suggested singing a hymn, but none of the refugees knew any Christian hymns, so instead, they sang the South Vietnamese national anthem, which includes these words:
No danger, no obstacle can stop us.
Our courage remains unwavering in the face of a thousand dangers.
On the new way, our look embraces the horizon.
The words could not have been more appropriate to the occasion, and I doubt any song could have better expressed what was in everyone’s heart.
That night, when we were about to go to sleep, someone called down to the cargo hold, “Whoever wants to see the boat one last time come on up!” Most of us were already sound asleep, and those who were still awake couldn’t have cared less about our old boat now that we were safely off of it. But Bruce was curious, and he went topside to see what was going on.
He followed the crew to the stern of the ship and looked over the railing. Our boat was being towed behind Seasweep exactly as it had been towed behind the Malaysian patrol boat, but Bruce had never seen the boat from this vantage point. This is how our boat must have looked to the Malaysian sailors, he thought. For six days Bruce had been jammed into that little boat, but as he watched it bobbing up and down in the ship’s huge wake, he found it hard to believe it had ever happened.
Then as Bruce looked on, the boat began to fill with water until it quietly slipped beneath the surface, and Seasweep was left towing nothing but a rope.
Stan Mooneyham was also watching as the boat filled with water, and when it finally disappeared, he shook his head in disbelief. That boat had managed to stay afloat for six entire days, supporting the weight of ninety-three human beings, yet with no one at all aboard, it sank. The Vietnamese translator had told Stan the boat had been towed behind a Malaysian naval ship for twenty straight hours—how was that even possible?
To Stan, it was nothing less than miraculous, but the miracle wasn’t just that the boat had stayed afloat—it was the fact that Seasweep had managed to find it at all. After three solid days of searching more than six hundred miles of ocean, this was the only refugee boat the crew had been able to find. Only one pair of eyes had managed to spot it—Burt Singleton’s—and only because he happened to be standing on the bridge, where he could see a mile or two farther than anyone else. Ten miles to the horizon—that was as far as you could see from the tallest point on the ship. A ten-mile margin of error in a body of water twice the size of Alaska—what were the odds? If the boat had drifted just a few miles farther, if Seasweep had varied its course by a single degree, if Burt Singleton had even blinked . . .
On the fourth day Seasweep passed Horsburgh Lighthouse at the entrance to the Straits of Singapore. The ship dropped anchor outside Singapore Harbor because we didn’t dare enter until Stan received official permission to do so. The Straits were named after Singapore alone, but the ten-mile-wide waterway is actually bordered by both Singapore to the north and Indonesia to the south, and both countries take an active interest in any foreign ship that wants to pass through. Two hours after we anchored we were buzzed by two different patrol planes and approached by an Indonesian customs ship and three coastal patrol boats from Singapore, one of which was heavily armed and kept circling us like a hungry shark.
As soon as the ship anchored, Stan took a launch ashore to meet with Singapore’s foreign ministry to try to obtain permission for Seasweep to enter the harbor and off-load her ninety-three refugees. Negotiations had not gone well for Stan en route; he hoped things would go better when he could negotiate face-to-face, but the fact that we had arrived on Friday the thirteenth should have tipped him off that things would not go as smoothly as he hoped. It took three days of negotiation and an actual letter from the American Embassy, promising the United States would take full responsibility for the resettlement of all ninety-three refugees before Singapore’s foreign ministry would relent and allow us to enter the harbor.
Late at night on July 16, Seasweep finally sailed into Singapore Harbor. All incoming vessels had to be cleared at anchor by separate boats from Immigration, Customs, and Quarantine. When we were finally cleared to go ashore, slow-moving launches shuttled back and forth between the ship and the pier until all of us had disembarked. It was an incredible thrill for the children to ride the launch across the harbor with the wind blowing in our hair; and the breathtaking sight of thousands of glittering lights from downtown Singapore reflecting off the water made us feel as if we had just sailed into Neverland.
Stan Mooneyham was there to watch as we boarded a row of chartered buses that were waiting to take us to a refugee camp. At the time, we were all too preoccupied to think about shaking his hand or thanking him for what he had done; but looking back, it almost seems like a crime that we didn’t. Operation Seasweep was an international effort that involved the labor and sacrifice of hundreds of individuals, but it was the compassion and tireless dedication of one man who got it started and saw it through to the end despite the enormous obstacles he faced.
There is a Vietnamese proverb that says, “When you eat the fruit, remember who planted the tree.” We owe our lives to Stan Mooneyham, and so do hundreds of other grateful refugees.