Fiction

ESCAPE FROM ASIA IN CRISIS (Part 1)

By Lily Bond

Editor's Note: Born in New Zealand, the author lives and teaches in Thailand. This is part of a work in progress that may become a future book. Although partly fictionalized, the story closely follows real-life experiences of two Asian immigrants.

Preface

By 1979, the New Zealand government and many others recognized a crisis in Asia. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees had languished for years at refugee camps in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. Seeing the need for a repatriation program, the United States, Canada, much of Europe, Australia and New Zealand began to allow groups of refugees to settle within their borders.

To help the Asians assimilate, New Zealand adopted a “pepper-pot policy” that sent families to small towns across the country.  While the planners probably meant well, their grasp of Asian culture proved dismal. Imagine a family from a tropical climate and a place brimming with people arriving in a remote town of about 1,000 people nestled in the foothills of southern New Zealand. Within five years, most newcomers had left the outlying areas and migrated to bigger urban centers with better work prospects and where they found compatriots. Within 10 years, more of them migrated to Australia for even better opportunities.

At the time, my church was part of a sponsorship program organized by the International Council of Churches. We were linked with a refugee family from Vietnam. My brother-in-law joined a committee to assist the families being resettled into Invercargill, almost the world's southern-most city. He volunteered me as their English teacher since I taught English at a local high school. Once he told me about the refugees' needs, I reluctantly agreed. As it happened, I knew some Cantonese vocabulary that I'd learned at university from Chinese friends, and that helped.

So it was that I first met Ha'ng in May 1980. A thin waif, aged 15 years, she wore clothes provided by the refugee service. Frost covered the ground, and the trees were bare. The shops closed on weekends, and the streets looked empty of people. After rain fell, puddles turned into solid ice at night. Icicles hung from the eaves of houses. I'm sure she thought that she finally had arrived in hell, and it had frozen over.

For 30 years, I've wanted to tell her story, but now it's more. It's also the tale of another girl, Linh, who lived a near-parallel existence until they finally met. Ha'ng and Linh, a Vietnamese and a Cambodian, both were born in 1964 descended from Chinese people who had fled from the Communists in 1949. Their combined tale reflects courage and hope against appalling odds. Ultimately, it's about how two remarkable women found peace and prosperity in a new land. (Names have been changed to protect their true identities.)

Prologue

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, April 17, 1975 -- The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, occupied Phnom Penh.

The odor of fear suffused Linh's nostrils.  Even at age 10, she sensed tension in her home.

For years, the war in Vietnam and leadership struggles in Cambodia had dominated talk around the low living-room table in their comfortable, modern house. Three of her older brothers studied in Macau, long since sent away to a “safe” place.

Now living with her parents, two brothers only a little older than her and a much older sister, Linh listened to the fear in her parents’ voices. The “liberation” of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge was not what her educated family had wanted. She wondered what the future held.

SAIGON, Vietnam, April 30, 1975 -- North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon, smashed a tank through the Presidential Palace gates and accepted South Vietnam's unconditional surrender. After almost 20 years of continuous fighting, the Vietnam War had ended.

Ten-year-old Ha'ng listened again to a family discussion about the chances for better lives in America for her and her older brother. Repeatedly, her parents and grandparents mentioned the same words: freedom, opportunity, education and wealth. She felt hope tainted with anxiety. Was this dream possible? Did it mean leaving all that was familiar? Admittedly, the stench of smoke, sounds of guns and explosions and her haphazard education so far weren't worth clinging to when imagining gold-paved streets. She felt ready for whatever it took to attain the dream.


Linh's Story

Pol Pot ordered every family out of Phnom Penh and into the countryside to learn to live off the land. The once-lively capital city became a ghost town.

Each family was allocated a village in which to live. There, every move was watched by “comrades” and every word potentially reported to the men in charge. Fear and deprivation became normal. Former teachers, doctors, scientists, lawyers and business people had to work in rice paddies, despite being inadequately prepared. Hunger and disease became constant companions. Any complainers were taken to the village's edge and shot. Mass graves surrounded every community.

One day when Linh's father, Bao, struggled with blistered feet and infected hands, her older sister, Chi, a law graduate, lost her temper. She cried out a string of expletives against Pol Pot, “Big Brother Number One", his ignorant regime and attendant thugs. Hot tears soaked her sunburned cheeks as she sobbed out her helplessness.

A neighbor heard it all. Keen to win favor and maybe a reward, he sneaked off to report a “traitor” in the village. Within minutes, a group of Khmer soldiers arrived at the shack where Linh's family lived.

Villagers crowded around in the dusty front yard, silently watching and waiting to see the punishment.  A young thug climbed the shack's rickety wooden steps and grabbed Chi by her hair. Roughly, he dragged her down the steps and hurled her onto the dust.

In the palpable silence, sweat drenched everyone's brows. Chi sat up straight and stared defiantly at her assailant.

Linh clung to the sarong of Tran Anh, her mother, as both parents, shaking fearfully, peeked out the doorway. Luckily, her two brothers were working in the fields and knew nothing of what was happening at home.

Pol Pot's thugs disliked defiance. They preferred for people to grovel and beg for mercy. They loved to see their victims whimper and shake in anguished terror.

Signs of firm resistance from this woman enraged the soldiers. Abruptly, they swung her over their shoulders and carried her to a nearby tree. An agile young man scrambled up the trunk while another threw him a rope. Chi soon swung from an outstretched branch, her neck broken.

Not yet content, another soldier slashed her stomach with his bayonet-tipped rifle and her entrails spilled out. Blood pooled in a hollow by the tree roots and then trickled along the dust in a stream of pain and sorrow.

Barely breathing, the villagers numbly watched. Linh's mother shook with silent sobs as her eldest daughter died in front of her. Her father hung his head, stunned. Linh felt like a statue, petrified in a spot behind her mother. It was as if time stood still, freezing them in moments of grief too big to handle.

The soldier in charge laughed gruffly and warned the villagers: “Let this be a lesson to all of you pathetic whiners!” Then snapping his fingers to the band of gangsters, he walked off, and his troop swaggered after him.

No one else moved. A collective sigh caught on a little breeze and rustled leaves in the deadly tree.

Finally, one by one, the villagers shuffled home. Linh and her parents held each other and wept.


Ha'ng's Story

Anh Em Bà Ngoại poured green tea into small cups placed on the table around which her whole family knelt. She and her husband, Dung, had fled from China, fearing the Communist advance and takeover in 1949. As young newly-weds, they had settled in Saigon to start a new life and a family.

How Anh Em's fortunes had changed! Dung's first wife, she hadn't produced children. Soon tired of waiting, her husband moved on to a new wife. At age 55, Anh Em long ago had been relegated to servant-status. No one really noticed her, unless she failed to have the meals ready on time or to pour tea into their cups.

Ha'ng fidgeted as the family conference went on endlessly. Outside, silence seemed odd after years of constantly rattling guns and frequent bomb-blasts. Ha'ng never had experienced such silence. Never before had she noticed the chirping of cicadas and occasional croaking of frogs. Rising, she went onto the apartment balcony and crouched there, listening with pleasure.

Enthralled by the peace, Ha'ng no longer noticed time pass. Eventually, Anh Em came out and beckoned the girl back to the table. The family had reached a consensus.

Ha'ng knelt by her younger sister and listened as her father outlined the plan. Since Dung and his wife, Ha'ng's real grandmother, had died, Anh Em would take Ha'ng and her older brother, Phat, along with their maternal grandmother, Me Bà Ngoại, to the coast where boats took people to camps in Malaysia and Indonesia. From a camp, they surely would be taken to America and could arrange for the rest of the family to join them. They would put the dream into action.

Since they needed few possessions and had no way to carry more than a change of clothes, it took just a day to prepare to leave. Mental preparations were the hardest part. Ha'ng loved her little sister, Ba, and had helped to look after her many times while her parents sewed late at night. But she adored Phat, her hero, and felt ready to go anywhere with him, knowing the family would reunite.

After a breakfast of boiled-rice soup with some chewy chicken strips in it, the four adventurers departed: two young people and two old ladies. All their hopes hung on Phat.

They walked in the dust and heat, surrounded by many others moving in the same direction. Everyone held a small suitcase or bundle of possessions tied in cloth, maybe with some trinkets of sentimental value, a dearly loved garment, a toy to keep a baby happy, some dried food scraps – nothing more.