by Thuy Rocco
© Thuy Rocco 2018
Print ISBN: 978-1-54393-312-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-54393-313-0
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Introduction
I dedicate this memoir to those who are refugees, immigrants, victims of sexual abuse, survivors of depression and suicide, victims of bullying, racism, discrimination, and prejudice, and those who suffer in poverty and oppression. I walk hand in hand with all of you.
I love my parents, who gave away their country and home so their children could enjoy freedom; I love my mother who seven times carried me in her arms through death camps, poverty, and war so I could escape persecution and death; I love my stepfather who worked in a textile factory for three dollars an hour to feed my family; I love my brother who left high school to put us through college; I love the charities of America that gave us food and clothing when we arrived with nothing; I love my teachers who gave me the tools to read and write; and finally, I love my friends and the everyday people I meet who make my life extraordinary. I am grateful to be alive because of them.
I share these stories in the hope that I might make someone a little braver. I want to speak up for those who are silenced. I hope that someone who is facing dark times finds a glimmer of light. I hope that someone can survive, as my mom and I survived. I hope that someone finds hope in the depths of darkness, as we did.
Contents
Introduction
Legal Notes
1.Surviving the Escape
7 Journeys
Prison
Lives Lost
In memory of
Ghost in the streets
Revelation
Pirates
A good swimmer
One last drop of blood
2.Surviving the Camps
SECOND CHANCE
Attempted Rape
Possessions
Disease and Malnutrition
Corruption
Walk in Refugee Shoes
3.Surviving America
LOSERS
Oblivious
Dumpster Diving
Tide
Freeloaders
Green Alien Card
Nashville
Pets
Culture Clash
Belle Meade
Paper Piano
4.Surviving the American Dream
MY MOTHER’S HANDS
Child Interpreter
Mr. Mustache
Bullying
The Predators
Rags to riches to rags
The Nail Shop
Odd Jobs
Elementary
5.Surviving My Mom
THE CALL
The Secret
Chopsticks
Raging Machine
Karaoke
Sacrifices
Thief
Bargain Huntress
Never Good Enough
Game
3 Vacations
Being Catholic
Collision Course
AMERICA
Uneducated
6.Surviving Me
Why am I Alive
Hit the Nail
Mrs. Robinson
WHAT ARE YOU?
Blood
Knives in the Drawer
The Responsible One
Child’s Play
Nine Lives
Small Things
WHEN A BUTTERFLY DIES
7.Recipe for Surviving
Everything is important
Give Help
Convert your energy
Love in the cracks
Okay, cry
Live, Alive
Lean On
Remove Negativity
Share your story
Fight
Don’t Let Them Win
Powers Activate
My Recipe, Your Recipe
About the Author
Legal Notes
This memoir is a collage of stories from my mom’s reflections; my interaction with people, places, situations; and events from personal experience. The stories are recollections to the best of my knowledge. Names and identities have been changed to ensure privacy. Perhaps it is best to consider this as a story that I want to share with whomever wishes to listen.
Chapter 1
Surviving the Escape
What makes people desperate enough to leave everything behind, to gamble with their lives on a small fishing boat, and escape to a place that does not want them? The Vietnam War had no winners. When we lost our country, we lost our culture, our freedom, and our voice. We abandoned everything we knew and risked our lives to escape to a new world in the hope that we could regain our freedom.
7 Journeys
“Do you want to buy some fish?” asked the scout. “If you do, follow the man with the red-ribboned straw hat.” My mom gave the scout four gold sticks (now worth about $2000). She met the man with the straw hat, who whispered, “If you want to buy fish, meet me at the north beach in two nights, and there will be a boat waiting for you.” Two nights later, my mom carried me and a small bag of personal items to the north beach, but she suddenly heard the voices of communist soldiers who were guarding the beach area. She ducked under a bush and a torrential rainfall started. We hid in about a foot of mud until the voices faded. About four hours later, my mom heard a small ferry boat engine coming to shore. A man with a flashlight walked up onto the beach. My mom looked carefully and recognized the scout’s face. She picked me up and ran toward him.
“Do you still want to buy some fish?”
My mom said yes.
“Well, you have to pay.”
Confused and angry, my mom shouted, “I already paid the price!”
The scout responded, “If you don’t pay, I will report you.”
My mom pleaded with him. She lifted part of her shirt to reveal a purse taped to her body. The scout snatched the whole purse and started shouting, “Guard, guards!”
Suddenly a whole fleet of communist soldiers appeared in the water.
“They are trying to bribe me to escape!” shouted the scout.
The soldiers immediately pushed my mom onto the ground and tied her hands with a rope. “You are under arrest for being a traitor and for illegally leaving the homeland!” said the soldier while he pushed her face into the sharp beach rocks.
My mom cried desperately, “Please don’t hurt my baby!”
Another soldier grabbed me and said to the other soldier, “Take them to prison.”
We were the lucky ones. We did not get raped or shot because the soldiers that night decided to have mercy on a mother and her daughter.
We tried seven times to escape from Vietnam. Like every other Vietnamese Boatperson, we were conned, robbed, blackmailed, and imprisoned. We faced death.
Prison
“Trying to escape again…? Aren’t you afraid to die?” asked the captain.
This was the sixth time our faces appeared in that prison, the size of a meat locker and stinking of the piss and feces rotting under our feet. The hunger and thirst from days of running had taken a toll on my mom. As she breastfed me in prison, she fainted. The captain told the guards to unlock the doors. He brought in some water and two rice buns.
The captain was my aunt’s childhood friend, who happened to also be in love with her, so he was lenient with our sentence. We should have been in front of the firing squad, but the captain helped us. He gave us food, and he let us go free each time. “It’s time to give up,” he said. “Think about your baby.”
My mom nodded
in agreement; her heart and soul were already gone. Why keep trying?
Lives Lost
No one wins in war, especially when the face of the enemy is your own people—a neighbor, a friend, a relative. Even though the Vietnam War had ended, it continued to take many lives. Since my family worked very closely with the American army, we were identified by the Communists as traitors. After the fall of Saigon, my family quickly prepared to flee the country.
Escape would mean leaving everything behind, everything, and facing heavily guarded torrential seas, starvation, pirates, and death. My father took the first treacherous trip with my three brothers, my sister, and my aunt. At the time my mom was pregnant with me, so she was forced to stay behind. Only a few weeks later, the news arrived that the makeshift fishing boat that carried my family had capsized in a storm. That day the sea took twenty-three lives, including my family whom I had never seen or known. After losing her husband, her daughter, her three sons, and her sister, Vietnam was no longer my mom’s home; she had lost her country, her family, and her everything. There was only me left.
In memory of
When I asked my mom why God had taken away my father, brothers, and sister, she replied, “God takes good people early. Some good people finish their journey early, and some good people must be here for life to continue.”
When a flower bud falls from the branch before it blooms, it sacrifices its beauty and its life so the tree can survive.
Trinh (my dad): One rainy afternoon, my dad and a few of his military colleagues were drinking coffee at a café, and they saw an old man pulling a giant crate of water with his oxen. The wheels of the cart sank into the mud. Then a young lady ran out and tried to lift up the wheel. When the wheel finally broke free, the mud splattered on her face and clothes. All the men laughed except for my father. He told the men, “She is going to be my wife.” My dad got up, ran to the woman, and offered her his handkerchief. The old man was my grandfather and the lady my mom.
My mom tells me that my dad had the most gentle soul. “If there was only one broom left in the house, he would give it away to whoever needed it. I used to scream at him for those kinds of things.”
A son of a wealthy family, he always wore a fancy suit and tie. He was afraid of leeches. His children would swarm all over him every time he came home from work. He could never discipline my brothers or sister, and if he did, he would just spank them with a small comb. My mom would often ask him if he was “spanking mosquitos” because that comb could only hurt mosquitos.
My dad did not know how to cook rice. After my mom had given birth to my sister, she was bedridden. Even though they had cooks and maids, my dad personally cooked some rice for my mom. My mom took one bite of the burnt rice and threw the bowl to the ground.
She tells me how much she regrets being so mean to him.
My mom tells me that the small hairs on my toes are exact replicas of his toes. I look at them all the time and smile.
Tuan (my brother): “He was an altar boy and destined to become a priest. He played the most beautiful hymns on the violin.” Before the sun rose, my brother Tuan would take the long walk to the village Catholic church. He would sweep the courtyard, trim the flowers, and prepare the wine and bread for mass. Putting on his white robe, he would recite a couple of Hail Marys and hum some Vietnamese hymns. After making sure everything was in place at the altar, he would pick up his violin and start practicing all the songs for that day’s mass. My mom tells me his face was so bright, and he would come to her in her dreams like an angel descending from the sun.
Hung and Phong (my brothers): My mom tells me that they were too young to have stories and that I should not ask about them. She said that she did not get to see the bulbs bloom. Their lives were so innocent that they did not leave footsteps behind.
Ngoc (my sister): Born breech, my sister’s legs were injured during the birth. She walked with a limp, so all the neighborhood kids called her a cripple. She would be so angry at times that she would wait by the fence for my grandfather to come home and tell him how mean the neighborhood kids were.
My face is a mirror image of my sister. My mom tells me that it was hard to look at me sometimes because it reminded her of how much she lost.
Aunt #6: She spoke English very well. She wrote for the newspaper and also was an interpreter. My grandmother said that my aunt was very pretty, like a famous Hong Kong actress or singer. She was very talented and could sing any folk song, dance to any style, and spoke many languages. On my first trip back to Vietnam, my grandmother tells me I have a “ghostly” resemblance to my aunt.
Ghost in the streets
All the fears that parents have are for their children: what if they are injured or contract a disease, what if they are not smart enough, what if they lose their way?
What if?
What if you lost everything that mattered to you all at once: a wife who lost her husband and a mother who lost all her children. There are no words that can describe the devastation my mom endured. She walked the streets like a soulless woman. She stopped sleeping and eating. She forgot about herself and about the baby living inside her. My grandmother would find her wandering in the rain and take her home. She tried to bathe her, she spoonfed her and reminded my mom that she was pregnant, but it was useless. My mom was an empty shell with no spirit, and her mind could think only of death.
After many weeks, she finally found something that she could live on: anger. She went to a communist military office and started cursing at them, throwing her shoes and saying she would kill all of them. The same captain who freed my mom later in our escape attempts, encouraged her to go home and take care of the baby inside her. He even took her home and told my grandmother that there wouldn’t be any problem because the soldiers just thought my mom was some crazy pregnant lady. From that moment on, my grandmother became very active in trying to convince my mom to leave the country.
My grandmother, a very devout Catholic, kept praying that my mom would overcome her grief so she could save her baby and herself. My grandmother told my mom, “The dead will not sleep and cannot go to heaven if you do not take care of yourself and your baby. You have one last drop of blood (a saying for one last surviving child). You must do everything to protect her, and you must leave and make a new life somewhere else. You cannot live here. You will get yourself and the innocent life inside you killed.”
Something sparked inside my mom. “I’ve lost everything. I’ve got nothing to lose,” she told my grandmother. All her anger and energy became the fuel for her to start a new life. She had to survive because she had already paid the steepest price. Every single fear that my mom ever had came true, so there was nothing left to fear. The only other thing she could lose was her life and her baby’s life, but even if that happened, she would not lose because either she would be united with her dead family or she would take me to a new world where we could live—and my father, brothers, and sister could watch over us.
Revelation
With every ship and every tide under the stars, she prayed to God and the angels of lost souls. And her answer came in a dream: This is the one. As the waves of night washed over her tired limbs, she swam toward the ship with her baby cradled on her shoulder. Hidden under tons of cargo with hundreds of shadow-faced people, she placed her baby near her heartbeat. Her back surrendered to the inches of salt water like the sand of the shores, and her disheveled hair seem to turn to stone after days and days of nausea. Finally, the ship sailed to the shore of freedom. The milky bamboo stalks and towering coconut trees of Thailand seemed to welcome her and her baby. Tears ran red down her cheeks, singing the song of freedom.
She could not walk after lying in salt water for several days strangers carried her to the shore. As she lay there, a light of hope glimmered in her darkness. It was a tiny shaft of light that streamed from a tiny baby, toddling up the shore with hands waving toward the sky. She lay there, smiling; her baby’s first steps were in a sanctuary of freedom.
Pirates
Thai pirates killed, mutilated, tortured, robbed, raped, and brutalized many Vietnamese refugees. They would purposely ram refugee boats to sink them; they would watch in amusement to see how long it would take for the waves of death to take the people flailing in the ocean.
Halfway through our ocean escape to Thailand, our boat engine died. We floated like a toy boat in the sea under the scorching sun for three days. A large ship approached our little fishing boat. My mom and the other thirteen drifters were not elated because they knew the flags and markings of the ship indicated that it was a pirate ship. As the giant ship came within several feet of our fishing boat, my mom looked up into the dark faces of the pirate crew. She prepared for the worst; she would rather jump into the ocean and die than to be captured, raped, sold into prostitution, or even killed. A close friend of hers was raped to death by pirates; the story was recounted by one of the survivors whose boat got towed back to sea after being robbed by the pirates.
My mom was about to jump, but a rain of rice came down. The pirates looked down at her holding me (still a young baby) and threw a couple of bags of cooked rice and water. Then they started their engine and roared away. My mom and the rest of the refugees were so confused and relieved. My mom thought that maybe somewhere in their brutal hearts they decided to help, maybe somehow her prayers were answered, or maybe my family in heaven was watching over us after all.
Whatever happened, it was a miracle, but our fishing boat was still floating endlessly without a working engine. For three days the boat operator could not figure out what was wrong, but after the pirate shock, he found that the engine had some debris stuck in the cooling hole, which was causing the engine to overheat and the fuel to leak. He was not able to fix the fuel leak, but he was able to start the engine again. We would be able to travel for a couple of hours. After reaching international waters, our boat engine died again, this time for good. There was no fuel left. We were sitting ducks at sea once more. Starvation, dehydration, and the blistering sun continued to torture everyone.