In the house they put us all into one huge room. It was as huge as half a soccer field. It had no furniture except old mattresses in the corner which were ripped and full of blood marks. The window was hidden behind a dark curtain. The people in the room were terrified, tired, confused, hungry and God knows what else. Impatiently we waited for the next instruction. All of a sudden there was screaming, howling, you couldn’t even understand what was happening. The next thing I saw was the young girls and boys (from the age of twelve) being put into the corner where the dead mattresses were. As a seven-year-old I just stood there questioning what was happening: why are they separating kids away from their mothers, why are they crying so much? But the questions didn’t seem like they were going to be answered for me.
Suddenly my mum grabbed my brother and me and pulled us close as if someone was taking us away from her. My brother was the victim. A monster, so he looked to me, was pulling him away from us. ‘He’s only eleven, what do you need him for?’ a loud voice above me shouted at the monster. In all that confusion I realised that we were pushed in a small group into a tiny room that looked more like a garage with a double door instead of a roller door. All you could see in that room were handbags thrown onto the ground, which was covered with blood marks.
There were three men standing, all in their army uniforms, armed from head to toe. The guy on the door captured my eyes as I realised where I was. He had a long beard running from his upper lip down to his chest. The worst thing that made me even more scared was seeing the blood dripping down his beard. Around his waist he had a gun, a knife, a baseball bat and other things a criminal would have.
One of them approached my mum. He was asking for all the money and gold she had. Her trembling hand reached into her pocket and pulled out everything she had to satisfy him, but no, it wasn’t satisfactory, and he smacked her with a bat and asked for more. As she got into a disagreement, he said to the guy at the door to take my mum away, take all her clothes off, and if he found anything to slaughter her—but was slaughter the word or was there more to it? In that moment my brother and I started crying, begging him to leave our mum alone, but he couldn’t care less about us, or maybe he would take us as well. As another group was pushed into the room, my mum was pushed on the side, giving her the opportunity to take the rest of the money and gold out of her pants. I don’t know how she managed to approach him with the rest but she did and he replied, ‘I knew you have more, there is no need to lie, Muslim b****.’ Then he took his bat and smacked her again across the back. I don’t know how she managed to stand on her feet, but she did. She grabbed my brother and me and dragged herself out of that house. The walls were made of bricks like every house in Bosnia. The floor was dirty with no carpets and on the side there were only packing crates. The whole house stank like there were dead bodies lying around. As we stepped out into the fresh air the guy that caught my eye hit my mum one more time and tried to threaten her. He grabbed me and yelled, ‘where do you think you are going with those earrings in your ears?’ As my mum pulled me towards her he grabbed my ear and all I could see was blood. The pain was stronger than when I had my ears first pierced. Outside there were two trucks waiting for us to be transported to another house about two hours drive away.
Despite all the humiliation my mother went through she maintains her dignity. She is a dignified woman. She is a strong woman but my brother and I made her even stronger. She knew she had to fight to be able to protect us and some day, with or without our father, provide a stable home. The strength she had I’ve never seen. Seven days without eating, giving me and my brother the last crumbs she found in her pockets, drinking poisoned water and being beaten and still she managed to stay straight on her feet. It was admirable.
That night we settled into a house that they provided for us. It was located in bush with many trees and uncut grass. It looked like a jungle, which I have only seen in cartoons. The house was built out of bricks but wasn’t finished yet. There was nothing inside. The walls weren’t even painted; you could feel the air coming through. We would have to sleep on the cold floor or on the little clothing we had taken with us. But unluckily my mum forgot the bag outside in the garden where we had spent the day, so we couldn’t even sleep on our clothes. It was a warm sunny day: if only we lived in peace. But at least we met a nice guy. He showed us where to find clean water and he also told my mum a secret.
My mum asked a guy in the house to go get the bag from where she left it. He said I’ll open the door and you can go get it, I’ll come with you. That’s when it clicked in my head and I started crying. My mum ran back to me to see what was wrong but I couldn’t tell her because that guy was looking. I begged her to stay and not to worry about the bag but she was determined to get it. She started walking with that guy towards the door, when my aunty called her back and offered herself to go get the bag. She was an older lady in her sixties. As my mum came back she gave up thinking about the bag and realised that our lives were more important.
The house was full of women and children and since we were one of the last ones in, we had to sleep under the roof. It was very unsafe where we tried to fall asleep. We lay next to an open area, which looked down onto the first floor. Since the house wasn’t finished it didn’t have a fence on the stairs or that area where we slept. The noise of grenades and guns made it impossible for us to fall asleep because they were basically falling somewhere near us. You could feel them and sometimes it felt that bullets were knocking on the roof, which was right above our heads. I was lying there on the cold floor, covered by my mother’s body, praying to God that one of those grenades or bullets wouldn’t hit through the roof.
In the morning as I woke up the first thing I noticed was that my mum wasn’t there. As we reached the door my mum entered. She hugged us both and whispered, ‘lucky I didn’t go out last night, there are three women missing.’ They went out for a smoke, which they were given by those horrible people, and never came back. We were ordered to get out of the house as quickly as possible. No one knew what was going on. As we all stood there in front of the house, they started giving us instructions where to go. No one knew where we were going to or what to look forward to. Exhausted, famished, dehydrated … we headed through the biggest war zone on that side of Bosnia. It was 30°C and we were without food or water. The closest village was twenty kilometres away. There were old women dying on their feet. We couldn’t do anything about it then, just leave them on the side of the street and save ourselves. I walked with my mum, brother and some other relatives through the emptiness of the village, city, world, whatever you want to call it. I’d never seen such things before. Even my mum said she never saw such an inhumanity in this world, even in the movies. There were dead bodies lying everywhere and some even hanging down the fences. But the thing that caught my eye wasn’t the people who had died because I’d seen my grandmother dead: it was the people who were slaughtered and the babies that a dumb person could tell were killed with bare hands.
My father was taken away before this experience. Now our thoughts focused on his destiny. We knew that he was taken to a different camp with the rest of the men from the town we stayed at, but if he was alive no one knew. We heard that there were a few camps set up, but that from one of them, no man came out alive. All we could hope for was that he wasn’t taken to a death camp. Every day we asked ourselves if he was suffering from pain. Or did he manage to escape from wherever they took him? Maybe he was back at home but that wasn’t safe either.
I didn’t know that it would take six months to see him again, nor did I know that my new home would be Australia.
Journey to Freedom
by Hai-Van Nguyen, aged 18
155980, 155981: My parents hold the numbers, scrawled hurriedly in the impermanence of chalk, across their chests. The camera flashes come in methodical succession, and in a brief moment they become mere faces attached to numbers. There had been many before them and there would be many after them. Away from the sha
rp focus of the lens, my parents blur into insignificance—indistinguishable faces in a crowd that is a common statistic.
My parents recite the numbers precisely to me as we sit around the kitchen bench. My mother sits across from me, having not had time to remove the apron from her chest. My father has just arrived home from work, the front of his shirt drenched in the fumes of assorted chemicals. They’ve come a long way from having had a number held across their chests and it amazes me they recall them so easily. ‘It’s something one never forgets,’ my mother says. ‘You wear it in your mind,’ she says, ‘long after the chalk has been erased.’ A prisoner never forgets his number.
Society is obsessed with numbers. Long after the human atrocities have occurred, all we remember are the numbers. We remember there were six million victims of the Holocaust and one million casualties during the Vietnam War. More recently, we hear about the ‘765 people’ who are ‘unauthorised boat arrivals’ and the ‘228 detainees’; currently in ‘detention’ in Woomera. We’re hearing politicians justify their actions with phrases like ‘Australia is accepting an ample number of refugees for an industrialised country.’ As usual issues involving human lives become overshadowed by numbers that relegate people to the status of mere statistics. We remember the numbers, but we forget the human faces behind them. We forget that people, whether they be refugees or not, are mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sons and daughters.
History books and newspapers purport to telling the facts, but facts do not only consist of numbers. Human experience is real; human suffering is real, and so are the stories that capture them. We need stories to restore the human face to such atrocities. Stories, in capturing the triumphs and sorrows of each individual’s experience, will serve a wider purpose of giving a collective voice to all humanity. They capture humanity’s innate sense of endurance and the human spirit’s capacity to survive. Numbers become concrete and meaningless. Stories, in essence, are timeless, transcendent. We need these stories to give human faces, not numbers, to the refugees who arrive on our shores; to refugees used as numbers in an unbalanced political and social equation. This is one of those stories.
My parents have been in Australia for almost fourteen years, but scarcely does the number come up. They measure the years not by days, but by the experiences that have accumulated during their long ‘Hanh Trinh Tim Tu Do’*—the tears, the laughter, the backbreaking work and the triumphs. Throughout my childhood, I have heard fragments of our experience fleeing Vietnam, like snippets of an old, barely visible movie. My memories are few and far between, but my parents recall it with vivid accuracy. On that Thursday evening, they told their story for the first time. (*Amongst Vietnamese people, these are the words many refugees use to describe their experience. It means ‘Journey to freedom.’
My father said the trip had been planned for months. The vessel that would take us to our freedom was a dishevelled, barely sea-worthy fishing boat about twelve metres long and three metres wide. It could only hold about forty people, but would be forced to hold twice its capacity. The night we left my mother recalls having never said goodbye to my grandparents—she could not even tell them we were going. It was a heartbreaking deception, but much like what we experienced as refugees, it was done out of necessity, not choice. Before we left, the boat was loaded with cargo, in the hopes that it would hide the human cargo it was to contain. At that time, many were still fleeing Vietnam and the authorities fiercely guarded the coasts. Only several years earlier, if you were caught trying to escape you would have been shot. At the time we chose to leave, if you were caught, you were captured and imprisoned.
We left just after the last drops of light had trickled from the horizon. The final glimpse any of us got of our homeland was of a large black mass of land and the distinct silhouette of wind-ruffled coconut palms. I was four, my sister was eight and my bother was ten. My parents shielded me from the pain of the experience through deception, much in the same way they had my grandparents. Each time I asked, ‘where are we going’, my mother would assure me we were simply ‘going to Saigon’. Her words did not subdue my childish sense of curiosity—every few hours I would ask ‘why is it taking so long?’ and every time she would reply ‘it only seems long’.
The next morning we were out of Vietnamese waters and well on our way across the South China Sea. We had overcome the first obstacle, but any security we felt was brief because we knew of the potential dangers that lay ahead. The greatest fear confronting all Vietnamese refugee boats at that time was having to cross the waters of Thailand and come across a Thai fishing boat. These boats were occupied by people whose brutal acts had earned them the title of pirates. They deliberately sought out Vietnamese fishing boats, knowing we were vulnerable. They were most interested in our belongings, but that was not all they stole. Girls were kidnapped, raped and eventually sold into slavery or prostitution. Approaching the waters of Thailand, we knew many of the stories we’d heard could easily become a reality. It was the sight of a boat in the distance that made my father choke with fear. He urged the captain to connect the spare motor and make the boat go faster. Below deck fear spread quicker than the lice that infested our bodies. The women shrivelled up, fearing that their short, cropped hair and masculine clothes would not be enough to pass them off as men. Eventually our boat sped away from them, but had we been an inch too slow, many of us would probably not have been here today.
The boat, with its human cargo of eighty, was stuffy and unstable. On numerous occasions, giant waves hurled over the sides and splashed onto the decks—we were almost certain the boat would capsize. Three days into our voyage we came across a large cargo ship. We screamed from below deck, with what little energy we had, hoping they would take us aboard. They never did.
All we had to eat were these strange cakes made of dried rice coated with sugar. Oranges were a luxury.
The odour was unbearable—the smell of urine and vomit mingled with the smell of fear. At times you would wake up the next morning to find someone else’s vomit in your hair. It was hard, but we had to keep reminding ourselves that we were all in the same boat, literally and metaphorically. Bodies were entangled, overlapping so you no longer knew where somebody else’s arm started and yours ended. For the brief time that some of us got to go on deck, all that met our gaze was a hollow sky and an empty sea. We were but a tiny speck of life wedged between a sandwich of two equally brutal and unforgiving forces. The sea that encircled us promised everything and nothing at the same time. Our freedom was the deadly kind.
After five days and four nights we finally reached Malaysia. At that point, anything, even a refugee camp, was better than the unstable confines of the ocean. Of the boats that headed towards this very place, most never made it. To say that we were lucky is an understatement. We were put onto a desert island called Bidong and placed in an area enclosed by barbwires. The camp was a virtual prison, so for months we were forced to serve a prison term, not knowing what offence it was we had committed. We, like many others, found ourselves living by a tight routine—work by day and sleep by night—not knowing that the word refugee had take on the same meaning as the word criminal. Food and water were strictly rationed. All we were given to eat was rice and each person was given only a gallon of water each day for drinking and washing. There was never enough to go around, and if you missed out, well then … you missed out.
The water flows abundantly as my mother stands there washing up the dishes. My father sits across from me, cleaning up the last grains of rice on his bowl until there is nothing left. As soon as he is done, he lifts up his shift to show me the scars that are still faintly but permanently carved into his back. ‘I got these while trying to steal some water,’ he says, almost laughing. One time some of us missed out on water rations so he and my uncle attempted to steal some from the supplies reserved for the following day’s handout. When they were caught, they were beaten by Malaysian guards.
During the day, my parents did farm work. They har
vested crops, planted and raked the soil. They, like so many others, struggled to grasp the irony that they had come all that way only to relive the very lives they had been trying to escape. There were some who were forced to pass the time by fishing instead. Most never returned from their week-long, sometimes month-long trips, and so were inevitably lost to the same sea they thought they had overcome.
Six aching months passed, and still there was no word as to what would happen to us, but uncertainty was nothing new. It could be years before we were accepted. Or worse, we could be denied acceptance and simply be shipped back to where we had come from. Finally, our number was called. MC249. It was the number of our boat. My parents remember that number too. Finally, we were no longer nobody, we had become a number. The joy of finally being accepted however, was overshadowed by the grief of those who were left behind, and even worse, of those who were forced to go back.
The running water drowns out my mother’s tears, but I can see her wipe her eyes as she tells me of the haunting images still vividly emblazoned in her mind. ‘Some prayed at the feet of authorities. Some set themselves alight. Others cut their stomachs open in protest. Thousands fainted as they were dragged back onto ships to be transported home. There was a family who lived in the cabin next to ours—two parents and two children. They committed suicide when they were told they could not go forward. That was the worst.’
Dark Dreams Page 17