How could she joke about such a thing? Mai still remembered her father’s photo on the altar those five years, the incense and prayer, the hurt daily refreshing in her mother.
“You must miss him,” said Mai. “Truong’s father.”
Quyen nodded.
“When were you married?”
“Nineteen seventy-two,” Quyen answered, “in the middle of everything.” For a moment her expression emptied out, making her seem younger. “I was your age then.”
“Maybe more accidents will happen,” Mai said, swallowing quickly through her words, “when you see him again. When we reach land.”
Quyen snorted, then started laughing. Her face had recomposed itself now—was again knowing, shrewd, self-aware. She was pretty when she laughed. “Maybe,” she said. She prodded Mai. “And what about you?”
But the mention of land—coming even from her own mouth—canceled out any joke for Mai. She had been trying not to think about it. From every quarter everyone now discussed, obsessively, their situation: they were on a broken-down junk, stranded in the Eastern Sea—here, or maybe here—an easy target for pirates—everyone knew about the pirates, had heard stories of boats being robbed and then rammed, of women being taken, used, dumped. On top of that they were starving, some of them beginning to get sick. No one, however, gave voice to the main fear: that they might not make it.
Mai pushed the dread down. Desperate to change the subject, she said the first thing that came to mind. “Wasn’t it dangerous to escape,” she asked, “with Truong so young?”
Her laughter subsiding, Quyen settled into a smile. “It was because of him,” she said at last, “that I decided to escape.” The smile hardened on her mouth.
They both turned toward him again. It had been three days. Watching him—letting in the thought of another day, and after that, another—Mai realized that Quyen’s determination, as much as she tried to take part in it, felt increasingly superficial to her. She studied the boy’s face. Above his awkward body it remained as stony and impassive as ever.
In Rach Gia, in the milling market, Mai had been met by a man with a skewed look who talked to a spot behind her shoulder. He called her name by the coriander-selling place. She was waiting for him, her hat on, next to a grease stand, petrols and oils and lubricants spread out like lunch condiments.
“Mai,” she heard, “Mai, ha?” and, still sick from the lurching trip—it had been her first ride in a bus—she was swept up by this man, who hugged her, turning her this way and that.
“Child has the letter?” he grunted into her ear.
She was confused. He said it again, thrust her out at arm’s length, and glared straight at her for the first time. She tried hard not to cry.
“Heavens,” he said, hastily letting go of her and stepping back. His face spread in an open, unnatural smile before he walked away. All at once Mai remembered her mother’s instructions. The folded paper. She ran after him and pressed it into his hand. He read it furtively, refolded it into a tiny square, and then he was Uncle again.
The first hiding place was behind a house by the river. Uncle told her to climb to the top of a plank bed and stay there, don’t go anywhere. She lay with the corrugated aluminum roof just a few thumbs above her head, and in the middle of the day the heat was unbearable. The wooden boards beneath her became darkened and tender with her sweat.
A few days later Uncle came to get her—it was after the worst of the afternoon heat—and made her memorize a name and address in Rach Gia in case anyone asked her questions. She felt light-headed standing up.
“When Child reaches land,” he told her, “write to Child’s mother. She will say what to do next.” She nodded dumbly. It was the first and final confirmation of her life’s new plan: she was leaving on a boat. He looked at her and sighed. “She said nothing for Child’s own protection.” He gave her another abbreviated hug. “Does Child understand?” He wasn’t, in all likelihood, her real uncle—she knew that now—but still, when he left, she felt in her stomach a deep-seated fluster. It was the last she saw of him.
The second hiding place was a boat anchored beneath a bridge on the Loc Thang River. Mai stayed down below deck for days and days, with sixty people maybe, among cargo sacks of sweet potatoes. No one talked; every sound in the dark was rat made. She caught herself whimpering and covered her mouth. Once in a while the owner brought a few kilos of rice and they cooked it with potatoes over low kerosene flames and ate, salting their bits, chewing quietly. People coughed into their sleeves to muffle the sound. Parents fed their babies sleeping pills.
One night the owner appeared with another man, who came in and tapped her on the shoulder. He tapped five other people as well. They all followed him out of the boat into the hot, dark, strange openness. A rower waited nearby and after some hesitation and muted dissent they climbed into his canoe, sitting one behind the other, Mai in the middle. The new man—the guide—instructed the rower to cross to the other side of the river. But he didn’t, he kept on paddling downstream for what seemed to Mai like hours and hours. At one point she found herself falling asleep. She woke to the sound of wood tapping hollowly against wood. They were pushing into the midst of a dark cluster of houseboats. The rower stopped, secured a lanyard to one of the boats, and leapt aboard. He lit a small lantern and began passing large drums reeking of diesel into the canoe. Moments later they moored against the riverbank. The rower crept onshore with a hoe and exhumed something long and gray from beneath a coconut grove.
“Detachable sail,” someone whispered.
Mai turned around. The speaker was a young woman. She sounded as though she might have been pointing out bad produce at a market stall.
“It’s a detachable sail,” the woman repeated.
Mai began asking her what that was when the rower turned, silencing them both with a glare. A moment later Mai felt a cupped hand against her ear.
“My name is Chi Quyen.” The woman used the word chi, for “older sister.” She reclined, smiling grimly but not unkindly, then leaned forward again. “Chi too is by herself.”
Mai nodded. Shyly, she lifted a finger and crossed her lips.
For a long time they glided soundlessly, close to shore, and then they entered a thick bed of reeds. They stopped. The rower turned around, shook his heavy head, and made the sign for no talking. It was dark. He struck a match and lit an incense stick and planted it in the front tip of the canoe. After a while Mai became confused. No one else seemed to be praying. When the stick burned down, the guide asked the rower, in a low voice, to light another one. At least an hour passed. Occasionally Mai made out the rower’s profile, hard and somber. She took the dark smell of sandalwood into her body.
The canoe swayed. “Maybe they’re waiting,” a new voice whispered gruffly. “Move out of the reeds so they can see the signal.”
“Keep your head down!” the rower spat.
At that moment Mai realized the incense stick—its dim glow, its smoke, perhaps—was their signal.
Someone else said, “They won’t wait.”
“Move out of the reeds,” the man repeated.
Mai felt a hot breath in her ear: “If they come, follow Chi, nha? Jump out and swim into the reeds. You can swim, no?”
“If who comes?”
“Fuck your mother, I said keep your head down!”
Someone behind her hissed and the canoe rocked wildly from side to side. The rower whirled around. Then, through the reeds, a light like a car beam flashed on and off. Fumbling, the rower lit a new incense stick, planted it at the canoe tip, and paddled, swiftly and silently, back out. They saw it ahead, barely visible in the weird, weakly thrown light from the banks. An old fishing trawler, smaller than she’d imagined—maybe fifteen meters long—sitting low in the water. It inched forward with a diesel growl. A square pilothouse rose up from the foredeck, a large derrick crane straddling its back deck, and the boat’s midsection congested with short masts and cable rigs. Two big eyes painted
on the bow. The canoe drew alongside and three men leaned over the gunwale above them and pulled them up, wrist by wrist. Everyone was aboard within a minute. Before being ushered down the hatch, Mai looked back and saw the canoe, abandoned in the boat’s wake, rocking on the dark river.
Inside the hold, the stench was incredible, almost eye watering. The smell of urine and human waste, sweat and vomit. The black space full of people, bodies upon bodies, eyes and eyes and eyes and if she’d thought the first boat was crowded, here she could hardly breathe, let alone move. Later she counted at least two hundred people, squashed into a space meant for fifteen. No place to sit, nor even put a foot down; she found a crossbeam near the hatchway and hooked her arm over it. Luckily it was next to a scupper where the air came through.
Quyen settled on the step below her, whispering to a young boy. She caught Mai’s eye and smiled firmly.
The boat continued its creeping pace. People padded the engines with their clothes to reduce the noise.
“Quiet,” an angry voice shushed downward. “We’re near the gate.”
But no one had been speaking. Through the scupper Mai peered into the night: their boat was gliding into a busy port. Pressed hard beneath her was the body of the boy Quyen had been talking to.
“Natural gate a hundred meters long,” she heard suddenly. The water carried the low sound clearly. Then she realized the voice came from above deck, so subdued the person might have been talking to himself. “About ten meters wide. On the rising tide.”
Then another voice under the wind: “Vietcong … manned with two M30s—”
“Automatic, no?”
“Machine guns.”
“What did Phuoc say about the permit?”
In the darkness, thought Mai, to feel against you the urgent flutter of a child’s heart. The hopped-up fragility of it.
A tense sigh. “Even with the permit.”
“Leave at night and they shoot. They shoot anything.”
The speakers paused for a short while. Then a voice said, “We’ll find out soon enough.”
She settled forward against the young boy, not wanting to hear any more. Trying to block it all out: the voices, the smell. It was unnerving to think of all those other bodies in the darkness. Black shapes in the blackness, merging like shadows on the surface of oil. She crouched there, in the silence, beneath the hatchway. Spying on the bay through the scupper. Gradually, inevitably, the dark thoughts came. Here, in the dead of night, contorted inside the black underbelly of a junk—she was being drawn out into an endless waste. What did she know about the sea? She was the daughter of a fisherman and yet it terrified her. She watched as Quyen reached back and, with a surprisingly practiced gesture, pressed her palm against the boy’s forehead. From above, watching the set of his grim face, Mai thought of her father. Their last meeting. His blindness. He’d taught her not to blame the war but how could she not?—all the power of his own sight seemed still intent on it.
Through the crack of the scupper the land lights, like mere tricks of her eyes, were extinguished one by one. Someone cut the engines.
She pulled the young boy’s body closer to her; it squirmed like a restless animal’s.
“Truong,” a voice whispered sharply from beneath them.
She peered down. It was Quyen.
“Don’t be a nuisance, Child.” Quyen looked up at Mai, then said ruefully, “This is my little brat. Truong.”
“Yours?” Mai frowned. “But—”
From the deepest part of the hold, several voices shushed them. In the silence that followed, even the tidal backwash seemed loud against the hull. Then a grind of something against the boat. Mai had never heard a sound so sudden and hideous.
“What is it?”
“A mine? I heard they put mines—”
The metal shrieked each minute movement of the boat.
“Heavens!”
“But boats pass here, must pass here every day—”
Fiercely: “Quiet!”
The sound sheared off—leaving behind a deep, capacious silence. Mai stiffening at every creak of the boat, every dash of water against its rotten sidewood. Then, without warning, the call and fade of a faraway voice. She crushed her cheek against the crown of the young boy’s head and for the first time felt him respond—both of his small fists clamping her forearm. She shut her eyes and trained herself to his frenzied heartbeat, as though its pulse—its fine-knitting rhythm—carried the only possible thread of their escape. Long minutes passed. The boat glided on, pointed headway into the swell. Finally the fierce voice coughed: “We’re safe for now.”
Murmurs rose up. The hatch was lifted. Under the sudden starlight Mai could see the whole of the boy’s face, arching up to meet the fresh air.
“Child,” said Quyen, “greet Chi. Properly.”
He looked up at Mai—his eyes black and clear and unblinking. “Chao Chi,” he said in his reed-thin voice.
All around them people’s faces were untensing, bodies and voices stirring in restless relief. But Mai, clutching this strange young boy, found herself shivering in the warm night, relief only a sharp and unexpected condensation in her eyes.
Once the storm passed, six days out, everything changed.
Fishermen on the boat agreed that this storm had come on faster than any they’d ever experienced. It destroyed the caulking and much of the planking on the hull. The inboard was flooded, and soon afterward, both engines cut out completely.
What food had been left was spoiled. Water was short. Anh Phuoc, whose authority was never questioned, took charge of rationing the remaining supply, doling it out first to children, then the infirm, then everyone else. It amounted to a couple of wet mouthfuls a day.
The heat was unbearable. Before long the first body was cast overboard. Already a handful of people had been lost during the storm, but this was the first casualty witnessed by the entire boat. To the terrible drawn-out note of a woman’s keening, the bundle was tossed, a meek splash, into the water.
Like everyone else, Mai looked away.
After the storm it seemed to Mai that a film had been stripped from the world. Everything became more intense—the sun hotter, the light more vivid, the sea darker, every word a discordant affront to the new silence. The storm had forced people into their privacies: the presence of others now assailed each person’s solitude in facing up to the experience of it. Children turned introverted, playing as though conducting conversations with themselves.
Even time took on a false depth: the six days before the storm stretched out, merged with memory, until it seemed as though everything that had ever happened had happened on the boat.
A man burned his clothes to let up smoke. He was quickly set upon, the fire smothered—the longer they drifted, the more fearful they became of pirates. That night another bundle was thrown overboard. Minutes later they heard a thrashing in the water. It was too dark to see anything, yet, still, everyone averted their gaze.
Thirst set in. Some people trapped their own urine. Some, desperate for drinkable water, even allowed themselves the quick amnesia and prayed for another storm. It was fantastic to be surrounded by so much water and yet be dehydrated. Mai soon realized she wouldn’t make it. The day following the storm she imitated some of the other youth, hauling up a bucket tied to the bowline. Under the noon sun the seawater was the color of amethyst and looked delicious and refreshing.
She drank it. It was all right at first. It was bliss. Then her throat started scalding and she wanted to claw it out.
“You stupid girl,” Quyen reproached her, demonstrating how to use her fingers to induce vomiting. She hugged her fiercely. “Heavens, you can’t wait? We’re almost there.”
But what did Quyen know? Mai had heard—how could she possibly have not?—that other boats had successfully made the crossing in two days. She tried to sleep, to slide beneath the raw scour of pain in her throat. They’d been out seven days. How much longer? Her father was persistent in her thoughts
now—all those weeks, even months, he’d spent on this same sea, in trawlers much like this one. He’d been here before her.
That afternoon, when she awoke, her muscles felt as though they had turned to liquid. She could feel her heart beating slurpily. She followed the weakening palpitations, counterpointing them to the creak and strain of the boat, the occasional luff of the sail. The sun brilliant but without heat. She was even thirstier than before.
“I’m not going to make it,” she said. Saying it touched the panic, brought it alive.
“Don’t speak,” said Quyen. “Go back to sleep.”
Mai struggled into a half-upright position. She made out a small group of children next to the bulwark, then pressed her imagination to find him again, little Loc, turning with a snarl as he growled, “Dragon!” She smiled, bit back tears. Behind him, her old school friend Huong was selling beef noodles in front of the damp, stink-shaded fish market. Straight through the market she followed her daily route, picking up speed, past fabric stalls and coffee yards, the dusty soccer field where sons of fishermen and truck drivers broke off from the game to buy cigarettes, and then to the wharf, her main place of business, among the taut, hard bodies crating boxes, the smell of fish sauce, the rattling talk of men and the gleaming blue backs of silver fish, ice pallets, copper weighing scales bright in the sun, the bustle of docking and undocking, loading and unloading—
A bare-chested man turned around and looked directly at her.
“Ba?”
It filled her with joy to see him like that again: young and strong, his eyes clear and dead straight. He looked like he did in the altar photograph. It was her father before the war, before reeducation, hospitalization. Back when to be seen by him was to be hoisted onto his shoulders, gripped by the ankles. His hands tough, saltish with the smell of wet rope. She moved toward him; she was smiling, but he was stern.
“Child promised,” he said.
During his long absences at sea she had lived incompletely, waiting for him to come back so they could tell to each other each moment of their time apart. He spoiled her, her mother said. Her mother was right and yet it changed nothing: still he went away and still, each time, Mai waited.
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