Goodbye, Vietnam

And why only one person? I wondered. Where were all the others?

  As the boat drew close, we were shocked to see that it was a boy, not much older than Kim and I. The boy was staring at our boat at though it might be a vision that would suddenly disappear, leaving him all alone again.

  My father cast a rope overboard, calling to the boy to tie it around his waist, but the boy was either afraid to let go of the bit of wreckage to which he was clinging or he did not understand what my father said, for he only continued to stare at us with blank eyes.

  A second rope was tied around my father and he was lowered into the water. I closed my eyes. The sea was so large I didn’t trust it. My father began to swim toward the boy. When my father reached the boy and began to circle his waist with a rope, the boy suddenly let go of the wreckage and threw his arms around my father, nearly strangling him. They both disappeared below the water. I heard my mother cry out.

  A moment later they bobbed to the surface, a tangle of arms and rope. The boy was flailing out at my father, who was trying to get the rope around him. I clutched at Kim, nearly as scared as the boy. My father finally got an arm loose and slapped the boy’s face so hard we heard the sound of it on the boat. The boy went limp and my father slipped the rope around him and began to swim back to the boat, an arm slung around the boy’s body.

  Hands reached over the side to haul at the ropes. The boy was hoisted into the boat, followed by my father, who climbed aboard panting and spitting water but proud of his catch. He laid the boy onto a mat.

  Everyone pushed close to get a look at him. Kim’s mother pleaded with them to keep back. The boy was shaking with fear. Bac si Hong ran practiced hands over the trembling boy and turned to the captain. “There are no bones broken, but he’s badly sunburned and in shock. He’s also suffering from dehydration.”

  Anh and Thant were sent to beg dry clothes for the boy. My mother handed him a cup from our ration of water. “Not too much at one time,” Kim’s mother cautioned.

  Captain Muoi wanted to question the boy, but Kim’s mother said “No!” in so strong a voice that the captain retreated without another word. At last the boy fell asleep, but it was a restless sleep. Several times during the night he woke the whole boat with screams that sounded as if ten thousand devils were after him. We didn’t dare think about what nightmares he was having—or worse, that they might not be nightmares at all but memories.

  8

  I was awake early the next morning. The first thing I did was to look for the boy to be sure I hadn’t dreamed his rescue. He lay curled up on a mat, his arms crossed over his chest, his legs bent at the knees and pressed against his body as though he were trying to curl up into the smallest shape possible so that nothing could get at him. His face was badly sunburned, but even so, I thought his high cheekbones and the curve of his mouth quite beautiful.

  As I sat there staring at him, thinking it was surely a miracle that in all that sea our boat had found him, he opened his eyes and looked right at me. Quickly I looked away, embarrassed to have him catch me staring. But the boy did not seem to mind. He sat up. At first he appeared quite calm and looked around the boat as though he had been there for days and everything was familiar. The next moment a look came over his face of such terrible fear I could not bear to watch. He began to wail and scream, beating his hands and head against the deck.

  Everyone was awake by then and scrambling to see what had happened. Captain Muoi ran from the cabin, stepping on a dozen people in his rush to get to the boy. Kim’s mother had taken something out of her bag and I saw her jab a needle into the boy’s arm. It wasn’t long before his screaming stopped and the boy fell back onto the mat, silent and asleep.

  Kim and I sat beside him all day, wanting him to awaken and tell us who he was but afraid that when he did awaken we would have to hear more of the terrible screams. We tried to guess what dreadful thing might have happened to him. The grandmother was sure the ma da, the ghosts of the water, had been after the boy and that even now they might have followed him and be all around us waiting to take us into the sea. At this, Anh began to cry and my mother had to beg the grandmother not to frighten her.

  It was nearly evening when the boy awoke again. He was drowsy from the injection, but he no longer trembled and he seemed to know where he was. My mother offered him a little rice gruel, which he ate at once.

  “Can you tell us your name?” Kim’s mother asked gently.

  “Vu Loi,” the boy answered.

  “What happened to you, Loi?” Kim’s mother’s voice was soft. “Should we look for other survivors?”

  Everyone waited, hardly daring to breathe. Loi shook his head. “No. There are none.” Tears fell from his eyes, but he seemed unaware of them, letting them fall on his chest and arms, making no effort to brush them away. “We were on a boat,” he said in a lifeless voice, “not so large as this. My uncle’s fishing boat. We were ten people, all escaping from the same village. For many months my uncle and father planned the trip. Every week for many weeks they put aside a little gasoline. They couldn’t buy too much gasoline at one time or the government would be suspicious. They had to buy some on the black market and were afraid they would be found out. But finally we had enough.

  “Some of us hid in the boxes where the fish were kept, and they put a piece of wood over us and ice on top as though they were going out for several days to fish. It was very cold, but we could not leave the chest until we were out at sea. Then we came on deck.

  “When we were three days out we saw another boat. We thought they were people like us trying to escape. So we waved to them. When the boat came close, we saw that the men had long hair and axes and guns. We knew they were pirates. We tried to get away, but they rammed into our boat.” Loi’s hands began to tremble and his voice was only a whisper.

  Kim’s mother put a hand on his arm to let him know he did not have to continue, but now that he had begun it seemed he could not stop.

  “They climbed into our boat and wanted gold, but we didn’t have any. We were only fishermen. We tried to explain, but they were angry and began to chop holes in the boat. They took all our food and left us to drown. When the boat sank, we clung to what bits of wood we could find. We tried to stay together but …” He couldn’t bring himself to say what had happened to everyone else. He hid his face in his arms.

  As Loi told his story, the others had crept close to hear what he was saying. Now everyone was silent. We did not dare look into one another’s faces. We had heard tales of the pirates who preyed on boats, but we had pretended not to believe them. We all slipped back to our places on the boat, trying to keep our eyes from the great empty stretch of water around us.

  My grandmother rocked back and forth moaning softly to herself. “They will come and find us,” she cried. “They are waiting out there for us. We are lost.”

  Kim thought the grandmother meant the pirates, but I knew she was speaking of the ma da, the ghosts of those who drowned on Loi’s boat and who would not find peace until they had lured other victims to drown in the sea and take their place.

  9

  I was sure Loi would never want to look at the sea again, but it was not so. The next day he was feeling much stronger and he begged Kim’s mother to let him move to a part of the deck where he could look out at the water. At first I thought he was hoping to see someone else from his boat, but it was really just the empty sea he was staring at.

  Kim, who wasn’t as shy with Loi as I was, asked him, “Doesn’t the sea frighten you now?”

  Loi said, “The sea is my home. I’ve lived all my life on a fishing boat. Someday I will have my own fishing boat. What happened was not the fault of the sea.”

  I never got tired of looking at Loi’s face. Some faces are ugly when they are sad, but his was beautiful. I was careful, though, that he didn’t catch me at it. I wished I could speak as easily with Loi as Kim could. But I didn’t dare to. My grandmother muttered under her breath that a well-brought-up girl would never
look a boy in the face and speak boldly with him as Kim did. I thought that Kim was lucky and that her mother would probably let Kim marry anyone she pleased, while my parents would tell me whom I ought to marry. A hundred times I had heard my grandmother say, “Children must sit where their parents place them.”

  That afternoon everyone was still talking about Loi and what had happened to him when we were shocked to see my grandmother clutch her duck’s neck and wring it. The squawks of the poor duck were terrible to hear. At first I thought all the food had run out. For several days the passengers had looked hungrily at the duck and begged my grandmother to kill it so they might all have a taste of meat or a bit of broth from the bones. They resented the rice it took to keep the duck alive, even though it came from my grandmother’s small ration.

  When I heard the duck’s squawks I was frightened, but my mother had a smile on her face, the first one I had seen in a long time. “Don’t you know what day it is?” she asked me.

  Kim and I looked at each other, but we couldn’t guess. It seemed like just another day of floating on the endless sea under a hot sun. My mother opened her basket. Anh and Thant pushed close. We had all wondered what she had in her basket. She reached inside and took out a small package, which she asked to have passed along to Captain Muoi.

  At first Captain Muoi looked impatient, as though one more puzzle had been put into his hand. When he saw what it was, his frown disappeared. He reached into his pocket, and while everyone watched, he took out a packet of matches. A moment later there was an explosion overhead and the sky was filled with sparks. Firecrackers! Everyone on the boat began to call to one another in their excitement. We knew what the firecrackers meant. It was the first day of the lunar new year. The festival of Tet! That was why the duck had been killed. We would all have a taste of delicious meat—the first meat we had tasted since the trip began. My mouth watered hungrily as I thought of all the good food I had had on other Tet celebrations: pickled bean sprouts and sweet soybean soup and once a taste of bacon.

  Everything in the boat changed. Neighbors who had been quarreling over a bit of space or a portion of rice made courteous apologies to one another. You never carried bad feelings into the new year. All debts and all arguments had to be settled. An angry word spoken on Tet would bring bad luck for the whole year.

  Mother told us we had to clean ourselves up and wear the best clothes we had. The whole boat came alive. Le Hung plucked the duck. Feathers flew every which way over the railing and out onto the sea, where they rode the water like tiny boats. People called to one another with invitations to be the first visitor. The first visitor to your home on Tet must be someone who is well respected. My mother and grandmother were whispering together and I could tell they were trying to decide whom to ask. My grandmother was carefully avoiding looking at Kim’s mother for fear she would be the one to give us our first Tet greeting. Finally they invited old Quang. He made a great ceremony of stepping the few inches from his own mat onto one of ours.

  Not everyone felt about Kim’s mother the way my grandmother did. One of the passengers whose son had been cured of a bad case of dysentery by Bac si Hong invited her to give them their first greeting. Our grandmother was scandalized that a woman would be chosen as the first visitor.

  The captain with the help of my father was raising a cay neu, a tall bamboo pole that was meant to look like a tree. If we had been back in our village a cay neu would have stood in front of every house. My grandmother gave a precious betel nut to go into a basket attached to the top of the pole as a gift to the god of the new year.

  The duck was cooking on the stove, and the smell of the roasting bird was delicious. With the bamboo pole up and the duck roasting, it was time for the giao thua, the welcoming ceremony. The god of the old year was sent on his way and the god of the new year was welcomed.

  Pleased to be the center of attention, my grandmother called out noisy instructions to Le Hung on how to divide the duck. Father and Thant were each to have an entire wing for themselves. A bit of skin and a morsel of meat were to go to me, to Anh and our mother, to Quang and his family, and to Captain Muoi and Loi. I knew my grandmother was in a good mood because she allowed Kim and even Kim’s mother bits of skin and a morsel of meat—although they were to be smaller portions than ours. Le Hung was to have the same “and whatever he could lick from his fingers,” the grandmother said.

  Kim and I and Loi tried to guess what the grandmother would have for herself. “A whole leg,” Kim guessed. “The neck,” Loi said. I could see he was thinking of all the juicy shreds nestled between the neck bones. I guessed it would be the liver, crisp on the outside and pale pink and smooth on the inside.

  But when we asked my grandmother, she shook her head and looked haughty. “It is my duck and I choose to give it all to the others. It will be added to the rice and everyone will have a taste.” A murmur of awe went around the boat. Everyone was impressed. Our grandmother held her head high. The admiration of the other passengers tasted sweeter than the tender breast meat of the duck would have. After all the passengers had their rice and the lucky ones had found pieces of duck among the grains, the grandmother allowed Le Hung to coax her into accepting the drumstick of the duck to suck. “Only if you are sure all the meat is off of it,” she said.

  When Le Hung handed it to her I thought I saw a good-size chunk of meat on the bone, but my grandmother popped the drumstick into her mouth so quickly I could not be sure.

  10

  In the days that followed Tet we often thought about the taste of duck, for our food and water were running out and land was nowhere in sight. There was only one meal a day, and that was a small one. I tried not to think of my empty stomach. When night came I was too hungry to sleep. Without food and with only a few sips of water, Dao did not have enough milk to give her baby, and the baby cried and hiccuped most of the night.

  The first thing everyone looked for on waking in the morning was a thin dark line on the horizon that would mean land. But the horizon was as empty as our rice bowls. One morning Loi went about the boat collecting bits and pieces of string. Kim and I watched him knot a fish net. His fingers moved quickly, forming loops. When he finished a set of loops, he ran string through each one of them. When he pulled all the strings tight—there was a square of mesh.

  At last the net was ready to be lowered into the water. I kept thinking of the big catfish we sometimes caught in the stream that ran through our village, but Loi said there were no catfish in the sea. Each time he drew up the net I was sure there would be something in it, but each time it was empty. “There is nothing for bait, and besides, the movement of the boat frightens the fish,” Loi said. But we could not stop the boat. With our food and water nearly gone we had to find land in a hurry.

  I was getting tired from standing in the glare of the hot sun and dizzy from not eating. The small ration of water everyone had been given that morning had left me thirstier than ever. I was looking at the cool green sea, wondering why there had to be so much water with salt in it, when I saw something floating on the surface of the sea. “Loi,” I called. “Look. What is that?”

  “A turtle!” He quickly drew up the net and threw it out just in front of the swimming turtle. The splash of the net frightened the turtle, and it veered away from the net, coming closer to the boat. I could see its brownish-green shell shaped like a great upside-down bowl. It had a thick head and hooded eyes. Its flippers worked slowly, pushing it along. Without taking the net out of the water, Loi slid it under the turtle and gave a quick jerk. The turtle rose out of the water with the net under it like a sling. Its head and feet disappeared into its shell. The flippers worked back and forth trying to swim out of the net into the air.

  Loi swung the bamboo pole that held the net toward the boat, but just as the turtle was almost within reach, the tip of the pole, bent by the weight of the turtle, cracked, and the net and turtle fell into the water. In a second Loi was over the side of the boat and holding on to the t
urtle. I screamed for help. Someone threw a rope, but instead of tying it around himself, Loi wrestled it around the struggling turtle. “Pull!” he shouted.

  Hands reached for the turtle, and the rope was cast out again to Loi, who used it to pull himself up to the boat’s edge where the men could boost him onto the deck.

  The turtle was at least three feet across and ugly. As hungry as I was, I didn’t think I could eat anything that looked like that. “They’re delicious,” Kim told me. “We used to make soup from them.”

  I decided cities might not be such special places if that was what people ate. I couldn’t watch the men pry the turtle’s shell apart to get at the meat. I kept thinking of how much I had felt like a turtle without its shell when I was leaving our house. That made me sorry for the turtle, but when the time came to eat it, I was so hungry I took a small piece. It tasted like chicken, and I ate it greedily.

  “I told you so,” Kim said.

  But the little bit of food only sharpened everyone’s appetite. The insides of the turtle had been carefully saved for bait. Loi and some of the men made fishing lines and threw them overboard. They thought they were sure to catch something until they saw a sharp black fin skim the surface of the water. “Shark,” Loi said. “He’s after the bait and the hooks are too small to hold him.” A moment later the bait was gone.

  As the afternoon grew hotter, Bac si Hong warned Kim and me not to move around so much. “Stay on your mats,” she said. “Movement makes you warm and that makes you perspire. It’s important that you should not lose any water from your body when there is so little water to replace it.” But sitting with nothing to do made you think about how thirsty you were.

  There was talk over how the small amount of water we had left ought to be divided. Some thought it ought to go to the old people, who seemed to feel the heat the most. Others said it should go to the children. “To the boys,” our grandmother said. “They will carry on the family name.”