Children of the Enemy

by Steven DeBonis

  I was the first one through. There were a lot of individual cell buildings spread over on the prison grounds, and I weaved through them, using them for cover. I heard shooting behind me. I made it to the barbed wire fence and got through the weakened area we had made. Other prisoners who were not in on the escape didn’t know that there was a hole in the fence. They tried to climb over and were picked off by the police.

  I ran through the farm fields and into the forest. It was a dark, rainy night. My adrenalin was pumping, I had just been that close to death and escaped. I ran and ran, I never looked back. I was separated from my two partners, and I don’t know if they made it or not.

  The forest was very thick and wide. I had some manioc and sweet potato that I hid and brought with me in the escape, but that was all.

  I made my way into the forest and eventually stopped, climbed a tree, and spent the night there. Then I began to walk. I found some wild fruit and ate that, and when I found clear water, I would drink it, just like wood cutters do. I really didn’t know where I was going. Sometimes I would climb a tall tree, and when I could see the prison camp, I just kept on going in the opposite direction.

  I walked for days, and finally I came to a clearing and a thatch house. It was a small farm. I told the farmer that I had escaped from prison. How could I hide it? I had a prison haircut and clothes. He let me stay and work for him for a while, taking care of his cows. I stayed with him until my hair grew in. When it was time to leave, he let me have a little money, and I went to the road and got a bus to Saigon.

  When I was in prison, some of the other Amerasian prisoners got visitors. Through them we heard of Amerasians being accepted to go to the United States. So after my escape, when I got to Saigon, I applied to go to the United States through the Orderly Departure Program. Meanwhile, I got a job helping a bricklayer and slept on the street.

  When ODP accepted me, I moved to the Amerasian center in Dam Sen. ODP sent me for a medical exam in Cho Ray hospital. The Vietnamese psychiatrist said I was suffering from mental illness, but this is just a way to extort a bribe. They expect you to give them money, and then they will say you are okay. I have heard of many cases like this. I didn’t have any money to give him, so I waited in Dam Sen for six months, and I was called for an examination in Cho Quan hospital. This doctor was American. He said, “Who said that you have mental illness? You seem okay.” I told him that the Vietnamese doctor in Cho Ray did that because he wanted money. So he cleared me, and soon after, I left to come here to the Philippines.

  Charlie came to the PRPC expecting to be on his way to the United States after completion of his five months of schooling, but just as in Vietnam, his life became mired in incidents of petty crimes, rule violations, and imprisonment. Probably most serious among these was his arrest and subsequent imprisonment for his alleged part in the stabbing of Duc, a Vietnamese petty criminal who has himself spent years on administrative hold in camp due to his own legal difficulties and has done time in both Philippine and PRPC jails. Four Amerasians, including Charlie, were arrested in connection with Duc’s stabbing and charged with attempted homicide, “frustrated murder” under Philippine law, frustrated because Duc recovered from his wounds. The suspects spent five months in a Philippine prison in Balanga, the capitol of Bataan province, before Duc reluctantly dropped charges. Raymond and Tuan Den, two of the Amerasians arrested with Charlie in connection with the stabbing, also discuss the incident in their respective narratives in this book. Their accounts corroborate Charlie’s claim of innocence.

  Like many Amerasians, I came to the PRPC alone. I was depressed and lonely. The day before I was supposed to begin ESL class, I was drinking in neighborhood three. The blue guards came and arrested me. They took me in and beat me. I can still remember the guard who arrested me, his name was “Karate.” He is still working here in neighborhood six. [“Karate” is the nickname of a notorious Filipino guard at the PRPC detention center, who has since been transferred to another post within the PRPC. He is well known for his ability to injure a prisoner with blows that damage the internal organs but leave few marks on the body.]

  After the police worked me over, they put me in a cell in the monkey house. Duc was the dai bang there, but I didn’t know anything about him then. He seemed very friendly with the police. They spoke together, but it was in English so I couldn’t understand. He had been in the Philippine jail at Napot for three years and then sent back to the PRPC.

  Duc had the keys to all the cells. Why the police gave him the keys, I don’t know, but he came into my cell and beat me badly, really badly. He hurt me inside. I vomited blood, shit and pissed blood, after he got through with me. He was the dai bang, so there was nothing I could do; but I kept revenge inside my heart, and I never forgot the beating.

  After I was released from jail, I asked some of my friends to keep an eye on Duc, to let me know when he was going to be let out. Three months later I found out he was going to be released and there was going to be a party for him in neighborhood nine. I planned my revenge, to go there with a friend, Minh, and stab Duc for what he had done to me.

  I went to Duc’s billet in neighborhood nine. When I got there, he had already been stabbed by Tuan Den. I didn’t know Tuan Den at that time, but I learned that him and Raymond had heard about the things Duc was doing to Amerasians in the monkey house and had planned to “take care of him.” So Tuan Den stabbed him, and by the time I got there it was all over.

  Three months later I was arrested. The blue guards [PRPC security guards] came to my ESL class and told me to get in the car. They drove me directly to Balanga. They never told me why or where we were going. They just took me out to Balanga jail. I’m not sure why they arrested me but I think that Duc’s friends saw me there and identified me as part of Tuan Den’s group. But that is not correct, I had nothing to do with them. I had planned to stab Duc, that’s true, but Tuan Den did it before I got there. Duc has many enemies.

  Tuan Den was arrested first, then Raymond, then Minh, then me . . . all separately. I spent five months in prison, and then Duc dropped the charges and we were released.

  I came back to camp and finished my ESL class, but JVA put me on hold, and my departure for America was delayed. So I just waited, nothing to do, just hang around. There was a black girl living nearby, an orphan. I had heard that a black Amerasian guy was bothering her, coming by and beating her. One day I saw him knocking her around in her billet, and I stopped him. There was a fight, and I wound up back in the monkey house [PRPC jail] for a month.

  When I got out, I was still on hold, nothing to do but wait, wait till they would let me go to the United States. I became more and more despondent.

  One day I was down by the stream in neighborhood four, and a Vietnamese threw a stone at me. I had been waiting for such a long time already, and I was so depressed that I became furious. I was seething, but I didn’t do anything about it then. I went to see him in his billet later. I asked, “Why did you throw that rock at me?” He said, “Why, what are you going to do about it?” He started cursing me, and I punched him in the mouth and knocked out a few of his teeth. And I was back in the monkey house again, this time for six months.

  Tuan Den, the black Amerasian who was in prison with Charlie in connection with Duc’s stabbing, had become Charlie’s close friend. However, shortly after Charlie’s last release from the monkey house, they had a falling out, caused in part, like so many of Charlie’s woes, by alcohol.

  Tuan Den and I were depressed, we were tired of waiting around here. We were sitting around, drinking, both of us were drunk. We got into an argument, and we decided to settle it by fighting it out. We were both drunk. I said, “Let’s go out to the mountain and fight there, where we won’t get into any trouble, and nobody will stop us.” Tuan Den said okay, and we both got clubs. I turned around and started walking towards the mountain as we had agreed, when he hit me from behind and ran away. I was drunk and upset, and I swore that I would never trust in another fr
iend again. In anguish, I took a knife and sliced off the tip of my pinky.

  I just hope I can get out of here soon and go to the United States. I’d like to study and work when I get there, but I have no skills, so I know that I must start at a low position. I can’t even read or write, though sister Margarita used to come to the monkey house and teach me a little. I hope I can become fluent in English and work at a job where I can move up and make enough to survive. I would like to join the army, like my father.

  I don’t want to live with Vietnamese in the United States. They have always meant trouble for me. The fewer Vietnamese the better.

  Postscript: On a blistering day in May, an Amerasian teenager came to see me outside my office with a lament, “Charlie, he in hospital, die soon, die soon.” In the peculiar twists that language takes when being learned, “die soon” in PRPC vernacular has been transmuted to “dead already.” When I arrived in the drab surgery ward of the PRPC hospital, however, Charlie was quite alive, though looking dismal as death while a bevy of Amerasian visitors comforted him. He had been slashed four times with a “bolo,” a Filipino machete, and had been brought here to have his wounds stitched. Although bloody, they were not serious.

  Despite his condition, he gesticulated angrily when describing the incident that had put him in the hospital. His irate movements stretched the I. V. drip line stuck into his left arm, and his description revealed the deep disdain with which South Vietnamese generally regard people from the north of their country. “I was walking past the market when this northerner, this Communist, ran out and attacked me. I don’t know why. I didn’t do anything. ”

  The doctor who had sewn Charlie up supplied me with details. Ngoc, a refugee from North Vietnam who has been detained for years in the camp on suspicion of being a Communist, has a gold business near the market. A group of bandits held him up and relieved him of sixty thousand pesos [approximately $3000] and an unspecified quantity of gold. When the robbers fled, Ngoc grabbed a bolo and ran out after them. He came upon Charlie, whom he accuses of acting as the lookout for the bandits. In the ensuing scuffle, Ngoc slashed Charlie four times, and he himself suffered minor wounds in the fray.

  Ngoc had offered to drop charges in return for the cash and gold, but Charlie refused to cooperate, insisting he had no part in the robbery and was merely passing by when Ngoc attacked him with the bolo.

  The following day I came by the hospital again, but Charlie had been sent home, still protesting his innocence. Several days later he was brought to the monkey house, and then, along with another suspect in the robbery, to Napot jail, a small Philippine facility a few kilometers from the PRPC. The charge was larceny.

  Three months later Charlie was back in camp, rail thin and very pale. The gold and cash had not been recovered, but charges had not been filed in Philippine court, and seemingly the affair had played itself out to no conclusion. Charlie had been released, but was still on hold, and once again was living alone in his billet, with nothing to do but wait.

  MOTHERS AND CHILDREN

  That year, everybody, all Vietnam, had American children, and some people threw their babies away. Some people told their children, “Go out.”

  Mai, mother of an Amerasian son

  School in Vietnam hurts a child who has an American parent.... They learn that they are the children of the army of the enemy.

  Tuyet, mother of an Amerasian daughter

  Hoa and Loan

  “The man come, he say, ‘What are you drinking?’ I say, ‘Saigon tea,’ and I sit together with him.”

  “Yeah, drink Saigon tea, many, many.” Hoa is laughing, and her classmates join in. A number of the fifteen students in this ESL class are, like Hoa, veterans of the GI bars in Vietnam, where they earned commissions for coaxing the troops to buy them the watery concoction known as “Saigon tea.”

  Later that week, when we meet in her billet for the first of numerous interview sessions, Hoa is more circumspect. She requests that I not use her real name, but refer to her as “Hoa,” as she was called in the Vung Tau bars. She asks that we leave the billet to speak, preferring that the neighbors not know about her past, nor of the “gold” arrangement made with the “husband” of Loan, her black Amerasian daughter. This man, in exchange for the marriage of convenience to an Amerasian which provided him a ticket to the United States, paid the bribes necessary to expedite the family’s departure from Vietnam. Hoa and Loan had little choice but to accept this bogus suitor. Lacking the funds with which to grease the wheels of Vietnamese officialdom, their application to leave Vietnam had been languishing for seven years in a bureaucratic limbo.

  For the last fifteen of Hoa’s forty-three years, she has been homeless. Sent to prison camp for two years and denied identification documents upon her release, she supported her two Amerasian children and ailing mother through meager commerce, buying and selling rice. When the police confiscated her goods, she turned to prostitution to get the capital to begin again. Lacking the means to secure housing, her family slept on the street. Her children grew up there, and her mother died there. The billet in the PRPC is the first home her daughter Loan has known.

  In a subsequent visit to their billet, I found Loan sitting at the table, studying English with a young neighbor. Hoa came inside from the back, she had been out tending her small vegetable garden. I suggested that we shoot some photos, and Loan walked upstairs to put on a fresh blouse. Once she had left, Hoa fretted about the color of her daughter’s skin . . . . “She’s very dark, isn’t she?”

  Hoa is well aware of America’s racial problems. “It’s harder for black than white in Vietnam,” she says, “I have black baby and white baby so I know. I think your country be same. “She fears that the prejudice her black daughter experienced in Vietnam may continue in the United States.

  Her son, Phi, scheduled to leave Vietnam with them, was delayed due to a lung problem, probably tuberculosis. He is waiting in Ho Chi Minh City, taking medication under a doctor’s supervision. Hoa continuously broods over her son, “He’s twenty-one, he’s sick, and he have to live outside on the street again.”

  In the billet, on an altar on the wall, a framed picture of a middle-aged lady is surrounded by traditional Buddhist offerings of joss sticks, fruit, and flowers. “I had a friend here in the PRPC, she go to America already,” Hoa explains. “I don’t know her very long, maybe three or four weeks. She know I don’t have money, and she send me twenty dollars. You know, my mother die one year today. I am very happy I have money so I can make the offering.

  Hoa’s English, learned in Vung Tau bars and from a succession of American “husbands,” though not grammatically perfect, is powerfully expressive. In recalling events of profound sadness, especially the departure of Mac, her first American husband, emotion often would choke her voice, and we’d switch to another topic to let the pain subside. In relating her treatment by the government after 1975, her bitterness was evident. In one instance, I asked how a policeman could be aware that her mother was sick. Her eyes narrowed and her voice tensed with contempt. “How he don’t know?” she whispered. “They know everything you do.”

  Hoa: I am forty-three years old. I was born in Hai Duong, near Hanoi. My father was twenty-five years older then my mother, that’s what my mother told me. When I was six months old, he died. In 1954, I went to Saigon with my mother and my older brother.

  I went to school only two years, but I don’t like it. When I come home, my brother ask me questions about the lesson. If I don’t know, he hit me, so I don’t want to go to school no more. I was very stubborn, so my mother take me to help her sell at the market. I can read Vietnamese, but write not so much.

  I help my mother in the market until I was about sixteen. We sell fish, rice, many things. Then I go to work in bar, Melody Bar, in Vung Tau. I have a friend, she live behind my house, she go to Vung Tau to work. She say she make bu cu money. She say she only sit in bar for drink with man, and she don’t do nothing. So I go and work bar together
with her.

  I never tell my mother nothing. I just left the house and didn’t come back. I couldn’t tell her that I was going to work bar, she be ashamed. She looked for me in too many places, she never know where I go. At the bar, so many people come, everybody is happy. I liked that. I didn’t think about my mother, I was too young, I didn’t understand.

  The customers were all American GI’s. They buy the girls Saigon tea, and they drink whiskey or something like that. If one Saigon tea be . . . how much . . . I forget, sixty dong maybe, I get forty. Saigon tea is tea and titi whiskey. Sometime, if I drink too many I get drunk. That’s no good, I don’t like that. Some don’t care what I drink, but some men they taste the tea. If there is no whiskey, they don’t pay, because tea is free in the bar. So they put in whiskey, and sometime I get drunk.

  Saturday, Sunday, I drink many, many Saigon tea, because too many people come to Vung Tau then. They work all week and Saturday take holiday, and they have much money and buy me many Saigon tea.

  You know, I work bar about two years before I have boyfriend. I be a “cherry” girl, I sit down and drink Saigon tea. I don’t go in the back, I don’t do nothing. I don’t go home with the man. Some girls, if they want to go, they go, but I just drink Saigon tea. Too many “cherry girls” before, they go to school in the daytime, nighttime they work bar, talk to GI, don’t go to bed with the men. It’s not the same now. Every night you have to sleep with the man. Before, many girls, they just talk. If the man want to go home with us, we say, “No, cannot go,” and we bring him to another girl that does that. I be “cherry girl” then, just sixteen or eighteen, and I never have no man.