by Thuy Rocco
A few hours later, my mom awoke to the sound of a boat. It was the Thai navy. Many countries had pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars to help the Vietnamese refugees. However, the amount was not enough to guarantee a rescue every time; many times the Thai navy would tow the refugee boats back out to sea. Again, it was another miracle that they decided to tow us to shore. Everyone was emaciated and my mom could not walk. Her legs were weak from days of not eating, and her skin was overcome by a staph infection. The Thai soldiers carried her to shore.
And me? I walked my bare toddler feet on the sands of Thailand. We had survived the escape.
A good swimmer
From childhood, my mom used to dive for oysters and crabs to sell in the markets. In her teenage years, she would pull a seven-foot raft full of fruit (coconuts, durians, mangos, bananas, etc.) by a rope tied to her waist, swimming through whirlpools and turbulent waters. She could easily swim across rivers and lakes. She would carry large buckets of water from the river and go door to door to sell water for pennies. She would free-dive into the depths of the ocean to fish out clams, crabs, fish, and anything that she could sell to earn money. She loved the water and could even have been called an olympic-standard swimmer.
On the day she lost her children, her husband, and her sister, my mom came to hate the ocean. She came to hate and distrust many things.
One last drop of blood
“You are the last one, the last surviving child; you are the last drop of blood from your father’s bloodline.” I weighed barely two pounds when I was born. I lived in an incubator for a month in a French-affiliated hospital in Saigon. My length, head to toe, was the size of my mom’s small hand. I was so tiny that she actually nicknamed me Thi-Thi, which means tiny-tiny. My mom barely ate when she was pregnant and so I came into the world a few months early. She told me she saw my dad’s shadow in the hospital room. He walked by her bed and then she was able to push me out easily.
My whole name means “river with a direction.” When my mom held her two-pound, prematurely born baby girl in the palm of her hands, she saw tears running down my face like a river. For my mom, water symbolized innocence and purity. I was a diamond in her arms, and she would never let go.
Chapter 2
Surviving the Camps
What does it mean when a refugee loses her country? You leave everything behind: your friends, your family, your belongings, your language, your culture, and your identity. Then you are “rescued” by countries who help resettle you into your new home, except your new home is a makeshift tent and there are thousands and thousands of other people stacked next to you like sardines. Your water is tainted with feces, urine, and trash. Your food can barely feed you, not to mention any children you have with you. You are treated worse than second-class citizens; you are outsiders living on borrowed time and land. The only reason you are allowed to stay is because the world is feeling sorry for you and is sending funds, hoping to help the “refugees.” The natives who have accepted you are jealous of your right to travel to any country because you lost your country.
You have lost your country only to arrive in another hell.
SECOND CHANCE
Firmly grasping the fishing pole and string,
I look down
standing on the moss
decomposing
on the flesh of the rock
under the silver sky;
I slip and fall
plateau to the sea—the waves hit me,
smack me in the face,
and the wind dries
the lost strand of my hair—but
something pulls me back.
A frosty hand grabs the back of my overalls,
and I turn around,
seeing nothingness in a suit and tie.
Attempted Rape
My mom arrived at the first refugee camp in Thailand with three nuns who shared the same boat. There were lots of Thai soldiers who were laughing loudly and leering at all the women who had just arrived. One of the nuns understood Thai, and she warned my mom and the other women that the soldiers were planning to come into their tent during the night. So instead of sleeping in the tent that night, they bribed some of the monks to let them stay in their small temple. The next day, the men who slept in the tent meant for the women were severely beaten by the Thai soldiers who were wondering where all the women had gone. Every single night, my mom had to come up with a plan to make sure we were safe.
Possessions
The refugee camp was like a giant prison without bars. My mom literally was in rags when she arrived. She hadn’t been able to bring any pictures, family heirlooms, or comforts of family and home. She had sewn a couple of pieces of jewelry into her shirt and was able to sell them to some of the wealthier Thai families for food and clothing. Whenever she could sneak out of camp, she begged the street vendors for a part-time job sewing, housekeeping, or selling goods. One Chinese family took her in as a house servant. She would clean, cook, and do everything she could to earn a little money to buy some clothes and good quality milk for me. One night she was caught sneaking back into camp; the guards took her money and pocketed it for themselves. She begged them, grabbing on to their pants, saying that she needed the money to care for her only surviving baby. The guards laughed and pushed her off, leaving her sobbing on the ground. They told her she was lucky they didn’t drag her off to prison because it was illegal for refugees to leave the camps.
And all that didn’t matter because when she came home to our tent, I was there. I ran up to my mom and gave her a giant hug. With mud all over me, she looked at me, her most precious gift, and said, “Let’s get washed up. Tomorrow, I will bring you a new shirt and good food. I will be smarter tomorrow.”
Disease and Malnutrition
Imagine the sewage and trash from the hundreds of thousands of refugees squashed together in the camp, and then add starvation and malnutrition. This was another level of hell for us. I was a toddler then, but I caught tuberculosis and dysentery. Very little medicine was available in the camps, especially for young children. My grandmother and mom were both holistic healers in their village, so my mom would make a hot mixture of ginger and lemongrass to steam under a blanket with me. Somehow my immune system fought off both diseases. My mom said I was very lucky; she told me she saw many of the people in neighboring tents bury their little ones because of the same frightful ailments, but it was also common for refugees to die from very treatable diseases.
Another challenge was starvation and lack of nutritional food. My mom and I would wait in very long lines to get a small bowl of rice. Most of the time, someone would forcibly take the food from us and we would have nothing to eat. My uncle, who was rescued by a German charter boat, safely arrived in Germany several months before we escaped Vietnam. He was able to mail us a box of milk and some cash once a month. My mom snuck out of the camp at night with me to buy some real food in the Thai street market. We would hide all the food under our bag of dirty clothes, so the stench would hide the smell of the food. Despite all of that, I remember always being hungry. I remember at one point my mom giving me a branch of lychee (a tropical fruit) to last for the whole day while she tried to bargain for more food and milk. I did not eat it because I was alone, scared and worried without my mom, so instead, I held that branch of fruit and cried the whole day until I saw her face again. I did that often when she was gone.
Corruption
Millions of dollars were donated to help the Vietnamese refugees, but none of us really got the benefits. My mom told me that some of the Thai officials would steal all the meat that was donated or bought for the refugees. She said one soldier cooked the meat in front of her and laughed at her. The vegetables and meats would always magically be gone when we were in line, and we would only receive plain rice. Clothes and supplies sent by our families in Germany and America would be divvied up by the soldiers and officials. They would play dice or cards to see who would get what. If we dared report anything, we w
ould receive even less food, and we would get unfavorable processing (very long wait times) for our final resettlement.
Walk in Refugee Shoes
Let me give you a scenario in real refugee reality.
Say you and your family have been hiding for seven years from communists who have been killing your innocent friends and family. Finally, a safe zone is set up for you to escape with your family, but no one is going to help you escape. You have to carry your children, all your stuff, and walk for miles until you are rescued by a group of volunteers or UN soldiers. Then you camp for five years in sewage and disease, with thousands of others with similar stories.
You apply for asylum to a foreign country, the culture or language of which you know nothing; you get interviewed; you get medically scrutinized to make sure you are fit to make it to America. You wait for two years for your friends, family, or some official who might know of your case and review it, to give you a lottery chance of getting to your new sanctuary.
Finally clearing all security and interviews, you are granted refugee status and entry into your new homeland. You arrive with only the things you can carry.
The government lets you borrow $900, and you have to pay it back in three years. Catholic charities or World Relief or some kind neighbor or human soul gives you clothes, food, and a place to stay with several other families in a two-bedroom apartment, much like the projects.
You spend two more years following all the rules so you can secure your permanent resident card or green card. Only then might you be able to leave the country or state to visit your loved ones. You have to be eighteen or older to take the citizenship test after five years of holding your green card. You have to be crime free. You take a civics test that poses questions most Americans who are born here couldn’t answer. Your interviewer may look at you and judge you, then fail you eight times because you look foreign or nervous or they don’t understand your English. You spend one more year fixing your accent to sound American so you can pass the citizenship test. After passing the test, you are still at risk of getting your citizenship revoked if you commit a crime that is treacherous to America.
You finally move out of your refugee apartment into a neighborhood. A neighborhood with people who terrorize your race and bully your children. You go to school or work and people call you racist names because you don’t know English like a native speaker or you look like a terrorist or communist. From the age of seven you spend years studying and working, selling sodas at a flea market because your parents who can’t speak English can’t get better jobs than a housekeeper or working in a factory for $2.15 an hour.
This is our story, this is every refugee story.
Chapter 3
Surviving America
We left the camps with literally just the clothes on our backs. I remember eating the bland airplane food, gulping down rice and shrimp. It was a long, tiring ride; it felt like we had been on that plane since we set foot on the fishing boat that took us to the shores of Thailand. That plane was to our future, to our new home.
LOSERS
My homeland was taken away,
in a war without mothers, without me,
on that boat where bodies decay.
No bed at night, no friends at day
on that plane to Lady Liberty
my homeland was taken away.
So my mother would not say,
War deserted my daddy,
on that boat where bodies decay.
No rice, no toys, no place to play,
under that tent of camp refugee
my homeland was taken away.
Why run, why hide, why not stay?
For the reason that losers weep
on that boat where bodies decay.
Now half of me shares the American way.
But when I cook my rice, I still believe,
my homeland was taken away,
on that boat where bodies decay.
Oblivious
Our brave new world, from the slums of a third-world refugee camp to the pristine skyscrapers of Los Angeles, CA. I was always hungry as a child. When I walked through the sliding doors of Walmart, I was overwhelmed by the sheer surplus of everything. I thought it was a food processing center for the whole world, but it was just for our neighborhood.
Our social worker took us to a fast food restaurant. There was so much food that I could only eat half a hamburger. The drink was bigger than my head. It wasn’t homemade food or Vietnamese food, but it was better than refugee-camp plain rice filled with pieces of insects.
I didn’t know such places existed. I didn’t know there were so many choices. I felt sick because I really wanted to ship everything I saw back to all the refugees who were still stuck in the diseased swamp hell.
Dumpster Diving
When I was eight or nine, I remember going on an adventure with my stepbrother every weekend; we would dig through huge dumpsters to find furniture to fill our small home. One day, we found two trash bags full of stuffed animals and toys; it was like finding the X on the treasure map. We could not believe what people would throw away; they could have given the toys and stuffed animals to Goodwill or something! I would love to have a certificate that says “My first toys were from a big-ass dumpster.” My childhood lovey is from that dumpster, a stuffed E.T. (from the movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial). I called him Rockystar, because I liked rock music. I put a baby shirt on him and drew thunder on the side of his head because it was cool then to have shapes drawn into your hair. I even found thread to put hair on his bald head. I tried to make E.T. fit into my era. I played all kinds of imaginary TV shows with him: “The Rockystar and Friends Show.” After 266 episodes, I think Rockystar retired to be a normal teddy bear in my bed. He kept away all the scary monsters who lived under my bed, in the closets, and in any dark crevice.
Rockystar still lives at my mom’s house, and he always helps me remember the good times in poverty.
Tide
The first time my family went to the store we were overwhelmed by the variety of goods available. My mom could not read any English at all, so she identified the function of things from the pictures. I remember taking many showers and baths with Tide detergent because my mom thought the soap that was used to wash clothes should be the same soap to wash everything else, just like in Vietnam. For a long time, I never figured out that the soap that burned my eyes and turned my skin into a scaly desert was a detergent just for clothes. I found out later that there is a soap for every single body part and for every single little thing.
Freeloaders
When we picked up food from the food bank, I could see in their eyes that we all looked like we are living off the government. I could see that people wanted the food to go to their “own people,” not foreigners. I could hear their whispers: Those chinks take all of our stuff. Why can’t they get their own food? We got so many hungry people here. They need to get jobs. They need to speak English. Why do they have so many kids? They have all those children so they can freeload off our tax money. They need to go back to their country. I don’t why we were even in the Vietnam War. They have it so good with free food and foodstamps.
I learned early on the meaning of freeloading.
Green Alien Card
I first learned the word “alien” from my all-time favorite movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It was the first American movie I watched. I really did not feel any different from E.T. I was in an alien world being kept in an apartment with several other families (sometimes as many as six), constantly trying to escape the crowded bedroom.
When I first saw the plastic card that had my alien registration number with an expiration date, I thought my time eventually would expire in this new world. I looked at my picture, a pig-tailed girl half-smiling with a giant seal of approval on top. I often wished that E.T. would take me away on his spaceship.
Nashville
A long time ago, I asked my mom why we moved to Nashville, because after watching 90210, I thou
ght LA was way cooler. She simply told me, “Because I didn’t want you in the Asian gang!” I was so confused by her answer and really didn’t know what gangs were. My ten-year-old self went to the school library and looked up “gangs” in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Besides the violence, I thought a group of brothers and sisters taking over territory was a good idea. Eventually, I found out they did a lot of illegal stuff that would probably get my green card denied and me deported.
So my family moved from LA to Nashville where my aunt and cousins were also resettled by Catholic charities. We did not get to choose which country or which state or city, but we did get to stay close to wherever our other family members resettled. That is how we got to the country music capital.
Pets
My mom had a weird definition of pets. We lived in the inner city and we could have pets, right? We had a few rabbits, a few chickens, and even a few ducks. They lived within a wire fence right outside our duplex. One day, a rabbit disappeared. I counted six rabbits, but there were only five the next morning. I asked my mom what happened to the white rabbit. She said, “You had it for dinner. You know, the bamboo with meat and vegetables.” This broke my little heart. I think I even cried a couple of nights over that rabbit, and then I realized that was how we lived. That was how we could afford food. Eventually, the codes department found out and we had to get rid of all our pets. I pleaded with my mom that one day I could have a pet that we actually loved and took care of in the house. She looked at me, perplexed, and said, “Whatever you would like.”