She Weeps Each Time You're Born

by Quan Barry

  The very first structures they were forced to build were a series of small boxes barely big enough for a man to stand up in. The first man put in the box was a former student leader named Nam. But I protested against Diem, Nam said over and over as they dragged him in one morning. Don’t listen to him, the guard said. He is a traitor who has been to the great enemy. I have been to the United States, Nam conceded, but to lecture against the war. He said he’d been flown to America by anti-war organizations to speak with students in a place called Berkeley, another called Madison. The guards got his arms in and closed the door. A piece of wood shot through a bolt in the front to keep it closed. All morning in the hot sun they could hear Nam’s cries at first like a small child, then like a wounded animal, and then nothing. The guards made a show of taking him out that night when the others came back from clearing the jungle. When they opened the door, he fell on his face, his body shaking, mouth white with foam. Two men were ordered to carry him over to the spot where they all slept out in the open. By morning he was dead. Why, someone whispered as they walked into the jungle at the start of the day. To show us the power of the box, someone said. Why him, someone asked. Because he was weak and they didn’t need him. No, someone else said. The man speaking carried a length of rope coiled around his arm, his voice a deep baritone. This is how he was meant to serve, the man said. Nobody said anything. And with that, they began to suspect one another.

  In less than a week they’d built two barracks. The floors were dirt, and they were told not to hew any windows into the walls. The hardest part was cutting down the trees miles away in the jungle and dragging the logs to camp. They didn’t understand why they had to use trees from so far away, but they didn’t question it. The first night the men slept in the new barracks, the guards came around and bolted the door. By the end of the night the heat of fifty men created condensation on the roof, and the ceiling began to drip. There was a plastic bucket in the corner. In the long night if one of the men suffered from runny stool, it smelled as if they were all wallowing in it. Nobody said anything because they knew in time it would happen to them.

  During the day there were various teams of twenty. Building was the best assignment. After a few weeks an architect arrived in one of the trucks, but the guards didn’t care. Nobody is better than anyone else, they said. One of the supply sheds collapsed during a thunderstorm. For a while two of the barracks looked rickety until the men shored it up at the urgings of a newly arrived engineer. Even when someone needed medical attention, the guards didn’t turn to the numerous doctors in camp, three of them surgeons trained in France. When a man accidentally had two of his fingers cut off with an adze, he died within the week from a combination of infection and blood loss.

  Clearing and logging were among the worst tasks. Each group had a daily quota. If you didn’t make it, your group got less of the sandy red rice they served for dinner. It was just an excuse to feed them less. Everyone knew the loggers would never make their numbers. The trees they were expected to fell were impossibly old, many as tall as city buildings, the jungle so dense you didn’t know what would happen once you brought one down, how it would fall, what it would bring down with it. Their tools were inadequate—hand axes and some rope. One of the men was an old fisherman who had been denounced by one of his sons’ wives because he had willed his boat to another son. The second week, the man was crushed by a falling tree. The worst part about it was that he was alive the entire time as they tried to get the tree off of him. He kept asking for water, but there was none to give him. It took all of them to move the trunk a few inches so that one of them could slide him out, the blood welling in his extremities, legs puffed up big as tires. When they got him out at last, the men cheered. Then he died.

  For the first month An worked logging. It became more dangerous when one of the groups discovered that the river was the only chance they had to even possibly make their quotas. It took six men to carry a log the half mile to the river. Then they would throw it in and tie it up. When they had six logs in place, they would let them go. Each man was tied to one, logs round as fifty-gallon drums, the inner wood pale as sand. It was each man’s job to guide his log the two miles downriver, making sure it didn’t get snagged. It was dangerous, because you could get caught up in someone else’s rope. There were also places where the trail they’d hacked became treacherous, the jungle growing so fast they had to constantly cut it, or one day there might be a vine or a root that wasn’t there the day before. Sometimes if a log got swept away in a current, you could be pulled into the river before you had a chance to cut yourself free. When it happened, you were dragged who knows where, maybe all the way out to sea, your body washing up onshore a thousand miles away. The worst part was the place they had chosen to pull the logs back up on land. It was the closest spot to camp, but the waters were strong. Every week someone got pulled in somewhere along the route, his body battered among the logs. Depending on where you got pulled in, you might survive with several broken ribs, though more likely your throat would be crushed.

  After three months Trinh Thi began to look like a camp. There were ten barracks, each housing fifty to one hundred men. There were houses for the guards, a proper kitchen, a small medical clinic that was used sporadically, mostly when a government official was coming to visit or when a place was needed to store someone until he died. There were two other buildings, which they used for interrogations. Every time you were interrogated you were handed a yellow legal pad and told to write out your confession. The men who couldn’t write were told to draw. If they couldn’t draw, then someone was assigned to write it down for them as they spoke. They all began to look forward to the interrogations. Written confessions could stretch twenty, thirty pages, a good three hours, an uninterrupted period of time when you weren’t working in the jungle, a moment of privacy. After a few weeks they began to add literary flourishes. The Americans’ soulless eyes pale as opals. The plane with its trail of white fire screaming through the air. The northerners brave as hornets. Ho Chi Minh with his capacious love deep as the ocean.

  Once the land had been cleared, they began to plant things. The months before their first harvest, at lunchtime they would eat whatever they could find. Wild berries. Animals the traps they’d set the night before had managed to catch. Patches of tapioca left by northern soldiers who had traveled for years along the tapioca trail running north-south along the Cambodian-Laotian border. It was how the NVA had managed to penetrate the length of the country. Each time a soldier pulled up a root, he would plant two tapioca seeds in the very same spot for the next soldier coming through, the plants both nourishment and a trail marker. A whole army had traveled south on tapioca and nothing else.

  They would work from sunup to sundown. At the end of the day the men out in the farthest quadrant felling the trees had to stumble home in the dark. Then each night after their dinner of rice and fish sauce, the red sand in the rice slowly grinding their teeth down, they would attend a meeting. Often the meetings were self-directed. Each group had a leader, someone the guards randomly assigned. The team leader’s job was to keep count of the tools, make sure each ax made it back into the shed. Mornings he double counted, confirming that everyone was in line by six. Nights the group leader kept them on topic. What were your errors, brother? In the future what will you do right?

  For the most part they would sit around a small fire and try not to fall asleep. The mode was confessional, the favored form the self-critique. You had to talk about your daily performance, your work in the jungle, the reasons why capitalism would fail, the shadows that lingered on the surface of your heart. Often someone was assigned to give the daily reading. A citizen recognizes that a society is only as good as its citizens. A son must love his country first, his father, and then his mother. The meeting always ended with the singing of a patriotic song. An missed the old songs, the love songs about schoolgirls with flowers trailing the length of their white ao dai. They sang out as loud as they could. There w
as a constant worry about moles. You had to go through the motions, look as if you meant every word.

  Ba, said Son on the roof of the pilothouse. The rain was beginning to come down harder. The moon had been utterly erased from the heavens, and the winds were picking up. Soon they would have to go below deck. Say something. An felt the water on his face. Where was he? How could this be happening? Everything he’d ever wanted for the last four years was right here on this flimsy boat in the middle of the South China Sea, which was about to turn on them. How could he have gotten this close? We never laughed, An said. I never remember laughing.

  Some days, right before an official visit, they were allowed to write letters. They were each given a square of rice paper the size of a man’s hand, the thing fibrous and tough, and told to share pencils. Most of the men wrote to say they were alive and somewhere in the highlands. They asked their families for letters in return, clothing, cigarettes, a better knife. They knew the guards were reading, so they kept it simple. Once a man was scolded because his love for his wife was deemed improper. He had used the word beloved six times on his small sheet of paper. After a while they all knew their letters didn’t go anywhere. One man found his flapping in a bush beside the river with excrement smeared on it.

  The dysentery. The malaria. The fevers that would never break. The lack of protein. The sun. The rain. The expected and the unexpected. The monotony. The lack of privacy. The self-critiques. The constant acting. Pretending you were ashamed of yourself when you weren’t.

  Time passed. Men died. Somehow An held on. He wasn’t the strongest or the bravest or the most resolved. When someone told him a year had passed, even he didn’t know how he’d done it.

  The first time he got put in the box it was a mistake. Even the guards knew he wasn’t the one who had killed the hen out of spite. The eggs were strictly reserved for the camp chief. Comrade Ngu was a slight man with a lisp and no mercy. There was talk he had spent the war in China keeping the supplies flowing. When the hen was found with its neck snapped lying at the foot of Ngu’s house, even the guards shuddered. Among the prisoners there was already a rumor circulating that one of the guards had done it because he was tired of watching Ngu eat eggs every morning while the guards had none.

  They were trying to get someone to confess. The door to one of the punishment boxes was gaping open. Barrack by barrack the prisoners were lined up. The guilty one was told to step forward or there would be repercussions for all. The last time they had been threatened with group punishment they had been denied water for two days. Four of the older men had died out in the jungle. They were already late to head out. It meant none of them would make their quotas. Maybe they wouldn’t get anything to eat. An looked at Mr. Lu standing to his left. Lu was in his sixties. He had once been a professor of law at Saigon University. He had helped negotiate the Paris Accords. An wasn’t really thinking when he stepped out of line. He walked up to the front of the box. Behind him hundreds of men were holding their breath. Up close it wasn’t even as deep as his arm, the thing an upright coffin. He closed his eyes and stepped inside. The guards stood staring at one another. Well shut it, someone said. The door creaked shut behind him, hinges groaning as if with pain. He could hear the sound of the bolt being rammed home. Inside there wasn’t even room to turn around or raise his arms.

  Later he tried to tell the others it hadn’t necessarily been unpleasant. That when the discomfort came you had to settle into it. You had to make peace with the ants crawling up your leg, the smell of urine and feces as if you were steaming in them because essentially you were, the sweat trickling into your eyes and the sting that became a blurring. He tried to remember the orange-robed monk from those first days in the holding cell in Qui Nhon. The monk whole worlds away, his robe caked with shit. He began to see colors. He could hear the sounds of the sea. Each time his blood coursed through his body, he felt the tiny kick as his heart whooshed it through. There wasn’t even space to fall down. Before he blacked out, he knew if he came out of the box alive, he would make it through absolutely everything. It was out of his hands. The world would decide if he should live or die. He was starting to merge into an even greater darkness, heart shuddering like a drum, somewhere the ocean swelling like a graveyard. He knew somewhere someone was crying for him.

  Today all over Cholon in Ho Chi Minh City there are small plaster statues of the Lady of a Thousand Eyes, an eye nestled in the palm of each of Her thousand hands. When you can’t hear yourself screaming over the rancor of the waves, She will hear you. And even if She doesn’t hold out Her various arms to you like the branches of a tree, be comforted in the fact that She hears and sees everything.

  TU WAS RIGHT. AN HOUR PASSED BEFORE THE WEATHER HIT. The ship groaned through its joints. All but a few of them were crammed in the hold. Body on top of body on top of body on top of the calamitous waves, the water a foot deep and rising. Rabbit was lying on top of Qui. Even amid the turmoil, she could smell the sweet milk sloshing back and forth in Qui’s chest. With each thirty-foot wave, the cold waters rushed straight down the stairs. Water like dark hands looking to drown them.

  Just before the four of them had scrambled down off the pilothouse, Rabbit had seen something off in the distance twinkling like a star on the ocean. Ba, she said, pointing. Tu had been looking at the sky and remembering the sounds of men being lined up and shot. He wondered if the karma was now bearing down on them. Then across the thronging waters he could see something in the troughs of the waves, a tiny light cutting through the darkness. It was another boat. He realized the boat he was on must look like that, a mote in the vastness. He hoped for the distant ship’s sake it wasn’t a boat just like theirs, a vessel stuffed to the rafters with refugees. On the other hand if it were anything else and if they escaped the jaws of the storm, there would be it to deal with.

  On their way off the roof, Tu and Rabbit stepped into the pilothouse to point out the distant boat to Duc. Duc was standing at the wheel. Beside him Hai was shouting directions—when to speed up the side of a wave, when to ride it back down. In the chaos of the small room Rabbit’s head suddenly filled with a silvery light. Her ears began to itch. She felt dizzy as the voice grew stronger. Someone had died right there in the pilothouse. It had happened recently. And now someone was trying to talk to her, a spirit desperate to be heard. She closed her eyes. Please, the voice said. Take whatever you want, then the sound of a fishing knife punching two holes in the side of the throat, the air hissing out red. Rabbit could hear a body slump to the floor, blood pooling around it like a halo. I hear you, she said. Already Tu was ushering her out the door and down into the darkness.

  In the hold the smell of urine and vomit was overwhelming. They had to crawl over the others to find Huyen and Qui nestled up against a wall. Qui pulled Rabbit to her chest, and Rabbit let herself be held there among the sweetness. Just this time the day before they had been gliding down the Mekong, the Harvest Moon like a lantern. Now they found themselves counting the seconds it took to crest a wave.

  They were still counting their way up one. In the hold there was utter silence as the boat ascended. Even the smaller children kept still. The way up seemed interminable, the time lengthening, then longer. Huyen thought of the night she had wriggled the abraded cone of the cypress tree up inside her granddaughter. How she had told Qui it was a trick to ensure the birth of a boy, the cone oblong like a penis. All night Qui had stayed curled up by the fire with what Huyen told her was the pain of creation, Mother Dragon in the same pain when she had thrashed over the formless waters and created the earth, Mother Dragon’s drops of sweat diamonding the sky and turning into stars, that inner space burning until Qui wanted to claw it out with her own fingers. In the morning Huyen had tugged on the fishing line she had tied to the cone. The wet thing slipped out sending the dark blood gushing. In Huyen’s mind it was the only course of action. Wartime was no place for a child to have a baby. Parts of the cone came out in gelatinous pieces, though Huyen didn’t see
the thing itself.

  They were nearing the top of a wave, the monster close to fifty feet. At the top there was a cusp between states as the boat shifted momentum. They found themselves waiting for it, that split second of balance, the neither coming nor going, the worst over, the worst yet to come, the blood darker and more plentiful than anything Huyen had ever seen. When would it stop? Qui lay hot as a tick in the light of the fire. They hit the top of the wave. At one point Huyen looked down at her hands, her palms as if someone had dipped them in blood.

  Like a waterfall, the great wave crashed on deck. Boards splintered. The front window in the pilothouse blew out. Duc slammed into the wheel, pulled the rope tighter that lashed him to it. Their one compass and all their maps were washed out to sea. The door to the hold caved in. Water cascaded down the stairs. Phuong grabbed the sack, the last thing she’d removed from her floating house, the one that clattered when she walked, and cradled it in her arms. The engineer slogged his way to the opening, taking his family up above. He yelled they would drown down there, but no one could hear him. People sat dazed in the cold. The other families followed the engineer up into the outer dark, the children in their parents’ arms. Qui started to move, but Arun reached out and shook his smiling head. The doctor also sat back down. Later when they left the hold, everyone who had gone up on deck was gone.