MY BROTHER BRUCE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A BIG EATER, yet for more than two weeks on the beaches of Malaysia, he had been forced to survive on little more than crackers, lima beans, and uncooked rice. When the Malaysians abandoned us at sea, there was nothing to eat at all, and Bruce spent the entire six days begging for something to fill the aching void in his stomach. We were all starving, but Bruce seemed to feel the pangs of hunger more than anyone, and the moment he set foot on Seasweep, he started making up for lost time.
By the time we reached Singapore, Bruce was almost eleven, and looming adolescence was stoking the furnace of his metabolism. He ate anything he could find, and it didn’t much matter what it was; if it was edible, Bruce ate it. That kind of indiscriminate palate can get a boy into trouble, which is why less than one day after we arrived in Singapore, Bruce was close to dying from food poisoning.
After clearing Customs, Immigration, and Quarantine, it had taken the buses about an hour to drive us the fifteen miles from the docks of Singapore Harbor to our refugee camp on the north side of the island. Singapore is an island nation-state that sits at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, like the dot at the end of an exclamation point; the entire nation is smaller in area than Lexington, Kentucky. On the northern side the island is bordered by the Johor Strait, and just across the water is the nation of Malaysia. Ironically, after being towed out to sea by the Malaysians and left to die, my family found the Malaysians living just a stone’s throw away.
Our refugee camp was known as 25 Hawkins Road, and it was located in the suburbs of an area known as Sembawang. The camp had once served as a British army barrack, which was easily recognized by the stone memorials and cannons that dotted the grounds. When Singapore declared its independence from Great Britain, the facility had been abandoned and left unoccupied until it was opened again in 1978, to serve as a refugee camp. Aside from our miraculous rescue by Seasweep, my family’s assignment to 25 Hawkins Road was our first good break since leaving Vietnam five weeks previously. The conditions in refugee camps throughout Southeast Asia varied widely, from the horrific cesspools of island camps such as Pulau Bidong to decent camps like 25 Hawkins Road.
We were assigned to Camp 14, which was one of many pleasant-looking two-story buildings with narrow white siding and red tile roofs. Because our building had formerly served as a barrack, it was laid out to suit that purpose: the bottom floor was a single open room that had once been lined with rows of metal bunk beds for enlisted men, and the upstairs was divided into separate rooms for officers. The upstairs rooms lined one side of the building, and across a long hallway there was a communal bathroom with showers and a bathtub that everyone had to share.
A single upstairs room was assigned to my entire extended family—the ten members of our immediate family, my maternal grandmother and grandfather, Uncle Lam and his wife, their five-year-old daughter and four-year-old son, and my unmarried twenty-two-year-old aunt. My mother had two sisters, but only the older one was accompanying us as the younger sister had left Vietnam on her own in the first wave of refugees back in 1975, when she was only eighteen.
Seventeen people sharing a room that measured eighteen-by-eighteen feet—and there was nothing in the room. No furniture, no beds, no kitchen—just an empty space barely big enough for everyone to lie down, but we were grateful for it because it was the first time we had slept under a real roof in five weeks.
When we first arrived, my family signed in at the office, and we were required to register by male heads of household. My father signed for our household, and my grandfather and Uncle Lam each represented their own. Our group of ninety-three was assigned the name Seasweep One, which apparently meant that we were the first group of refugees rescued by Seasweep to be taken to 25 Hawkins Road.
As soon as we were assigned a room, my brothers and sisters all raced upstairs to see it, and because Bruce was the fastest, he got there before everyone else. He found the room empty, but on the window ledge Bruce saw a couple of unopened cartons of orange juice and some cookies someone had left behind—apparently for good reason. But Bruce didn’t know that, so he immediately downed the orange juice and gobbled the cookies.
By the next morning Bruce had severe diarrhea and uncontrollable vomiting, and before long his skin grew clammy and cold, and his body began to stiffen. When Bruce’s fingers started turning blue and his eyes rolled back in his head, my father decided it was time to get help, so he hoisted Bruce onto his back and ran to the camp office with Jenny right behind him. He was hoping to find a nurse or at least some kind of medicine that might be able to help him, but the office staff took one look at Bruce and told him, “You have to take this child to the hospital.” But no one in the entire camp had a car to drive him there, so they just led him outside and pointed to the road.
My father started running toward the road with Bruce jostling half-conscious on his back. “Wake up! Wake up!” he kept shouting over his shoulder, but Bruce did not respond. My father had no idea how far away the hospital was or how long it would take him to run there with the weight of a ten-year-old on his back, but he had no choice—he didn’t have enough money to even take a bus.
On the way to the road, my father passed a woman he had never seen before. She stopped him, took a look at Bruce, and said something to my father in a language he didn’t understand but recognized as French. Then the woman opened her purse, handed my father a few dollars, and without a further word went on her way.
My father had no idea who the woman was or why in the world she would hand him money—but he didn’t care. Money was exactly what he needed right then, and he waved down a taxi to rush him to the hospital and used the French woman’s money to pay for it.
My father was hoping to have Bruce treated as an outpatient and return home with him because he had no money to pay for a hospital stay. But the moment the doctors saw Bruce’s condition, they admitted him, and within minutes they had a bottle of saline dripping into his veins, and they were rolling him into an elevator—which was the first elevator Bruce had ever seen.
Hypovolemic shock was the probable cause of Bruce’s condition—a serious decrease in blood volume that can be caused by excessive diarrhea and vomiting. Without enough blood reaching the body’s extremities, they can turn purple or blue; in extreme cases, the patient can even die. Bruce’s condition was serious enough to require a three-night hospital stay. My father returned to 25 Hawkins Road to take care of the rest of us while my mother took his place at the hospital. Officially, family members were not allowed to stay overnight, but they bent the rules for my mother, and she slept in a chair beside Bruce’s bed every night until he was allowed to go home.
The hospital was at the top of a tall hill, and when Bruce was released, he was still so weak that my father had to carry him. At the bottom of the hill, a kind-looking Chinese man walked up to my father and began to talk to him, but my father doesn’t speak Mandarin and couldn’t understand the man. Once again, a perfect stranger handed my father some money and walked away—this time a US five-dollar bill. And once again, my father used the money to take a taxi home.
My father remembers those two unexpected acts of compassion, not because the gifts were so large but because the timing of the gifts was so perfect. He was given exactly what he needed, precisely when he needed it, from sources he never expected, and without even having to ask. To my father, that seemed like more than coincidence.
When Bruce came home from the hospital, life returned to normal—at least, as normal as life in a foreign refugee camp can be. My mother’s day was spent taking care of the children and managing our one-room apartment. There was a bathtub in the communal bathroom across the hall, and since none of us had ever seen one before, my mother used it to wash dishes. When we first arrived at 25 Hawkins Road, we had no money at all, and to make ends meet my mother had to sell off the few pieces of jewelry she had managed to save, most of which she was wearing. She had also crocheted a black handbag before she left Vietnam and concealed a necklace and bracelet in the handle, and while my obedient father had surrendered the last of our family’s money to the Malaysian authorities, my defiant mother held on to that handbag—which she still has to this day. None of her jewelry was expensive—mostly just bits of jade in settings of gold—but there were pawnbrokers in Singapore who visited the camp regularly because they knew refugees often fled with jewelry. The gold used in Asian jewelry was purer than most, and it was profitable to resell as jewelry or just melt down.
My father went to work right away doing a variety of jobs: farming, plywood fabrication, asphalt roofing, finish carpentry, grocery work—anything he was offered. Every morning a labor organizer would drive a bus into camp and ask the men if anyone wanted to work. My father always received $10 for his day’s labor, regardless of what the job actually paid, and the organizer pocketed the rest as his fee.
After a while, the UNHCR began to give us $1.50 per person, per day, to help with living expenses, and that’s where a large family came in handy. We were given $15 every day, and though that amount didn’t go a long way with a family of ten, it more than doubled my father’s daily salary. Before long my father had enough money to begin to buy things in preparation for our trip to America, and the shrewd merchants in Singapore offered him lots of helpful advice.
“Everything is more expensive in America,” they told him. “You’d better buy it now because you won’t be able to afford it there.” It was the taxes, they told him. America taxed everything—that was why everything was so expensive. But there was no sales tax in Singapore, so if my father was smart, he would buy everything he could before he left.
My father took their word for it and bought everything he thought he might want but would not be able to afford in the United States. He bought the biggest boom box he could find, a high-end rice cooker, some very fancy watches, and sunglasses for all of us. My mother bought a sewing machine, hoping to do part-time work as a seamstress when she got to America, and my father even bought two bottles of Hennessey cognac though he didn’t drink. Might as well, he figured, because he was being paid in Singapore dollars and wouldn’t be able to spend them in the United States.
The children just had fun. There were twenty-seven children among our group of ninety-three, and some of them were the same age as we were and became our regular playmates. There was a playground at the bottom of a hill that we liked to play on, but we had even more fun rolling down the hill to get to it. We spent hours playing tag, but none of us really understood the concept of the game, so we just ran up to perfect strangers, touched them, and ran away. We had a favorite toy too: a small straw with a tube of some kind of plastic goo. We rolled some of the goo into a little ball, stuck it on the end of the straw, blew into it, and presto—a plastic balloon. It may not sound like much when I describe it now, but it provided hours of entertainment for us then.
There were vendors who visited our camp every day, and once my father had an income, he would give each of us a few cents to buy something. Our favorite was the ice cream man, who sold ice cream and flavored snow cones—always a treat in a tropical climate. The ice cream man was Chinese and actually spoke Cháo zhōu as we did, so we were able to converse with him and tell him exactly what we wanted. There was also a grocery store nearby, where we used to buy bread and condensed milk, and sometimes sympathetic locals would even give us vegetables and apples free of charge.
There was a single-room building in the camp filled with donated clothing that any of the refugees could take for free. The room was dark and damp, and the clothing was old and out of style; some of it was even stained and moldy, but we were glad to have it. If whatever we grabbed actually fit, we were lucky; if it was too small, we gave it to a younger sibling; and if it was too big, we just grew into it. “One size fits all” was the Chung family motto, and we lived by it until I was eighteen.
The UNHCR was responsible for running 25 Hawkins Road, and it also coordinated the details of resettlement for each individual or family. No refugee was allowed to leave the camp without having a sponsor in another country who would take responsibility for them when they arrived and help them adjust to life in their new home. Some in our group were lucky enough to have friends or relatives in other countries willing to sponsor them, and they were able to leave 25 Hawkins Road right away. Others—such as my family—knew no one overseas and could only wait until some anonymous person or group heard about them and agreed to be their sponsor. Some did not even know what country they would be going to; the only reason my family knew we would be going to the United States was because that arrangement had been made even before Seasweep rescued us.
Though we knew we would eventually be going to America, we had no idea where or how long it would take before someone would agree to sponsor us. There was an intercom system in the camp, and when a refugee family had found a sponsor, the UNHCR would ask that family to come to the office. Whenever that intercom came on, everyone in the camp held their breath, and when the name was announced, everyone cheered for that family—but also felt bad that it wasn’t them.
Imagine sitting by an intercom, waiting for your name to be called, knowing the sponsor assigned to you would determine not only where you might live for the rest of your life but also what language you would speak, the traditions and activities you would take part in, and the culture your children would adopt. The consequences of that one decision are so far-reaching, they boggle the mind, yet the decision was often made without the refugee’s slightest knowledge or consent.
Individuals and small families seemed to find sponsors quickly, and my father and mother began to worry that no one would want to sponsor a family as large as ours. Day after day we heard other names called and said good-bye to those families as they left for their new homes. My parents had heard horror stories about refugees who had floundered in refugee camps for years without ever finding a sponsor, and they hoped our family would not become one of them.
Gradually everyone left, except for us. Even my mother’s family left for America before we did. My grandparents had a distant relative in Falls Church, Virginia, who agreed to sponsor them, and Uncle Lam, his family, and my aunt asked to go with them. The relative in Falls Church was sponsoring seven Truongs, and it was too much to ask him to take ten Chungs, too, so our family decided to remain in Singapore to wait for a sponsor of our own.
Exactly one hundred days after our arrival at 25 Hawkins Road, we heard the intercom crackle and a voice say, “Thanh Chung, please come to the office.”
Then we really cheered. Somewhere in America, someone had been kind enough and generous enough and maybe even crazy enough to sponsor a family of ten refugees who didn’t have a dime between them and didn’t speak a word of English. Whoever they were, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into.
But then, neither did we.