by Aimee Phan
The grandchildren returned to playing in the waves with the other children, while Hoa walked toward Trinh. Of all her daughters-in-law, Hoa felt furthest from Trinh. Though she’d attempted many times over the years to welcome Yen’s young wife into the family, the girl proved sullen and impossible to please. Only Sanh’s wife, Tuyet, seemed to get along with her.
“Where are your sisters?” Hoa asked, standing over Trinh.
The girl barely looked up. “Ngoan and Tuyet went into town for supplies.”
“Have the children had lunch?”
“We just came from the mess hall.”
“Did they eat enough? They served chicken. Cam hates the chicken.”
Trinh removed her sunglasses and reluctantly faced her mother-in-law. “They’re fine. They’ve eaten enough.” She reached inside her blouse and pulled out a creased gray-blue envelope. “This is from Yen.”
Hoa snatched the letter from her hands. “When did you get this? Why didn’t you tell us right away?”
“I’m telling you now. I didn’t think it was urgent.”
“How would you know?” Hoa asked. The girl could barely read.
“If it was,” Trinh said, turning to face the ocean again, “he would have addressed it to your husband.”
Hoa opened the envelope and squatted in the sand. She looked up at her daughter-in-law. Spoiled child. Most wives in the camp would have sacrificed a week’s rations for a letter from their husband. And such a kind letter, Hoa realized, her eyes lingering upon the declarations of devotion and confessions of his sleepless nights worrying over his family.
Her son’s idealistic attachment to Trinh had always baffled Hoa, and it had no doubt blossomed during their years apart. She wondered what would happen when they finally reunited. Yen wrote mostly of his work, his neighborhood in Paris, his Catholic parish, questions about the rest of the family. The last page was a letter to Xuan asking his son to take care of his mother and promising to bring them home soon.
“Anything important?” Trinh asked, more absorbed in picking off the crusty mud from her heels.
“He wants to make sure you’re doing well.”
“Well,” Trinh repeated, her eyes returning to the children on the beach. “That’s nice.”
The fishermen nearby had completed their gutting and stood, whispering to one another, gaping at Trinh. Hoa cleared her throat and glared at them pointedly until they turned away.
“Why don’t you cover yourself up?” Hoa asked. “It’s indecent the way they look at you.”
“It wouldn’t matter,” Trinh said, briefly looking back at the fishermen. Her sunglasses hid her expression. “It’s too late.”
So impudent, ignorant. They’d warned Yen about the pitfalls of marrying a country girl. Hoa realized again why they needed to leave the camp soon. She didn’t know how much longer she could continue looking after this one.
The children were shrieking, but not in their usual playful manner. Hoa glanced toward the commotion. On the other side of the beach, a crowd began to form, pointing to a matchbox in the sea. Wordlessly, Trinh and Hoa shuffled their feet through the sand, their eyes never leaving the object.
As the matchbox swayed closer to the shore, everyone’s suspicions were confirmed: a fishing junk. The yellowing boat was overcrowded with salt-crusted refugees—some draping their arms and legs over the splintered sides. They looked haggard, starved, relieved, afraid. The Malay soldiers on duty yelled at the boat, perched on the boulders overlooking the bay, pointing their rifles. Hoa had lived on Pulau Bidong long enough to understand their few words.
Go away. No room here. Go somewhere else. We won’t take you. We will shoot.
But the Vietnamese already standing on the beach worked fast. Two men had already run back to the community center to find a United Nations worker. Others yelled instructions to the refugees on how to sink the boat.
“Hammer out the floor!”
“Rip off the sail! Throw it in the water!”
“Throw everything in the water!”
“Come closer! Keep coming, they won’t shoot, they’re bluffing!”
For several long, frustrating moments, the passengers on the fishing boat could only stare. Hoa wondered if they looked that dumb and stunned when their boat first arrived.
The junk swayed toward the boulders near the dock. The soldiers still pointed their guns, spitting their vicious threats. When the boat bumped against the rocks, one of the soldiers attempted to push it back with the butt of his gun. But the refugees were already pulling out of the sinking boat, weeping, trudging through the dirty water for shore. They wore rags, unrecognizable as clothing. Some of the children were naked. Once they touched dry land, their legs gave out, and they collapsed on the beach.
The soldiers scrambled after the new refugees, surrounding them, attempting to isolate the group in one area. A young woman tried to reach out to Hoa, begging for food, but a soldier shoved her back into the crowd. Several children cowered in the sand, screaming at the sight of guns pointed at them. Ignoring the soldiers’ orders, some people pushed bananas and star fruits into the hands of the new refugees. Hoa dug into her pockets and found some candy she’d been saving for her grandchildren. She easily slipped into the chaos, and pressed them into the hands of the young woman, who cried out gratefully, stuffing the still-wrapped confections into her mouth.
A soldier grabbed Hoa by the back of her shirt and threw her into the sand.
“Hey!” Trinh yelled, helping a dazed Hoa to her feet. “Don’t push an old woman!”
“Barbarians!” someone yelled. “They’re pushing the old ladies!”
More screaming, more shoving back and forth. The same soldier stumbled in front of them, his back toward Hoa. She kicked him solidly in the shin, then quickly hid behind a taller Vietnamese man, her gaze fixed in the opposite direction.
Several UN workers arrived on the beach, pushing past the onlookers, and tried to restore order.
“You are all safe,” a UN worker named Betty yelled in broken Vietnamese to the terrified new refugees. “No one is going to shoot you. But you need to be quarantined and examined by doctors. Please stay calm.”
This had to be repeated several times by other Vietnamese so that the refugees finally listened to their instructions. They warily clung to one another’s elbows, blinking suspiciously at the Caucasians. Betty and the other UN workers assembled the new refugees into a group to head toward the health clinic.
“Welcome to Bidong!” several people shouted as the new refugees filed past them.
“Don’t be afraid of the doctors. They are very kind.”
“But be careful of the Malay guards. Protect your valuables.”
“Don’t eat their chicken! It will make you sick. Wait until you get into camp to eat.”
“You made it! The worst is over!”
After the new refugees left, the crowd thinned. The tide was growing stronger, sending most of the bathers back to their shelters. Some of the children, including Cam and Xuan, loitered behind to poke around the boat wreck. Xuan attempted to climb into the wreck, eager to reenact the earlier excitement. Cam scrambled up the rocks, pretending to be a Malay soldier, while Xuan balanced on the sea-soaked planks, pleading for sanctuary.
“Get out of here, you stinking Vietnamese,” Cam growled. “Go back to Vietnam.”
“I have nowhere else to go,” Xuan squealed. “Please save me.”
Hoa warned them not to cut their feet on the splintered wood. They leaned against the rocks, as Trinh cuddled a sleepy Lum in her arms. The children’s giggling and playacting faded with the crashing waves. The first boat to arrive at the camp in two weeks, it reminded Hoa that beyond the horizon, more boats floated aimlessly in the South China Sea, their passengers desperately hoping to shore up at a refugee camp. Not all of them made it. You had to be lucky.
“They won’t stop coming,” Hoa said, staring out at the water, which now reflected the orange in the sky. She wondered
what kind of place Vietnam would become with so many of its people escaping.
“Someone should warn them,” Trinh said.
“About what?” Hoa asked.
“That it’s no better here.”
“We’re not going to be here for much longer,” Hoa said, surprising herself at how much she sounded like Hung.
“How are we so sure it will be better somewhere else?” Trinh asked. “Every new place, we assume it’s going to be better. We left Vietnam for something better. I don’t see any difference yet.”
* * *
Yen and Trinh had wanted to marry before his departure to France, but Hung and Hoa spoke against it. In order for Hung to help pay for his education in Paris, Yen had to follow his father’s conditions. No marriage, not even an engagement. If they still wanted to marry after Yen finished school and returned to Vietnam, Hung and Hoa would provide their blessing and support. This was Hung’s strategy. He hoped in those intervening years Yen would meet someone, even a French woman, who would change his mind about this daughter of a drunk.
A few weeks after Yen’s departure, the servant boy opened their front door and led a visibly pregnant Trinh into the sitting room. She held an envelope in Yen’s unmistakable scrawl protectively over her rotund belly. Trinh was having their grandchild. Yen and Trinh had eloped a few nights before he left. Yen requested, in that beautiful, cursive penmanship Hoa had been so proud of, that his family care for his new wife and child until he could return to Vietnam.
“He outsmarted us,” Hung admitted, setting the letter on his desk. They whispered in his study while Trinh remained in the sitting room, a small nylon knapsack by her feet, chatting with their youngest son Sanh.
“How can you take this so lightly?” Hoa demanded. “Your plan failed.”
“It is too late to dwell on that,” Hung said, folding up the letter and putting it in his desk drawer. He turned to put on his coat and hat. “There’s a child now. She can take Yen’s room.”
“Where are you going?” Hoa asked. “To another one of your poetry readings?” Hung turned and looked at her. She’d long ago given up caring about Hung’s lady companions. “Only a few weeks ago you said this girl could ruin Yen’s life. Now that she’s done it, you’ve decided to reward her?”
Hung waved a hand in annoyance. “I don’t give a damn about the drunk’s daughter. I am taking responsibility for my grandchild—your grandchild. Once the baby is born, she can leave, which is what she’ll probably do anyway. But the child will stay with his family.”
He was wrong. After Xuan’s birth, Trinh didn’t leave, but by that time, Hoa no longer wished her gone. She’d fallen in love with her first grandson, whose joyful chatter and boisterous laughter reminded Hoa that children were the best of them. Pure, harmless, benevolent. People only soured as they aged. Xuan, along with his older cousin Cam, kept their family smiling and hopeful, distracting them from the ugly climate festering outside their doors.
* * *
The first Thursday of the month, the camp put on a Vietnamese cultural show. After dinner, the UN volunteers erected a small stage behind the mess hall and brought out metal folding chairs from the cafeteria. On Saturday nights, they used the same space to play old film reels from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Although most of the younger people preferred to watch Malaysian soccer games on television in the community center, the cultural shows still attracted enough people that latecomers sat in the aisles and huddled around the stage.
Hoa and her daughters-in-law arrived to the show alone, the men summoned by the French delegation before dinner. Hung assumed they would return quickly. Two hours had passed since then.
That evening, the children were performing The Tale of Kieu. A young, beautiful girl from an educated family is cursed by destiny to a life of poverty and prostitution. Hoa had memorized verses of the epic poem in school. She wondered what would happen when they moved to France, whether the children would remember these verses she still could recite by heart.
Cam and Xuan played Kieu’s sister Van, and her haggard father, Old Vuong. The children shouted their lines through decorated paper bags covering their faces, while the Christian missionaries motioned for them to look out to the audience instead of the floor.
With Lum in her lap, Hoa leaned forward in her chair, straining to hear some of the shyer children mumble their verses. She had been annoyed upon arriving at the performance that the only empty seats were located in front of Bac Nhut. He stared at her, silent, blinking his slow dumb eyes, as they exchanged pleasantries with his thankfully better-mannered children. When she and her daughters-in-law took their seats, Hoa truly believed her skin itched from the old man’s eyes skimming her neck, her back, her toes. She wished she could change seats, but that would have attracted unwanted attention.
The crickets clicked in the grass. In the evenings, the high tide pushed in a warm breeze that barely relieved the humidity. Hoa gingerly pressed her limp hair bun, which sagged heavily with perspiration. The flimsy palm fronds Ngoan fanned in her direction offered little comfort.
On stage, another corrupt man had duped poor Kieu. The young girl playing Kieu raised her hands to the sky, asking again why such misfortune had fallen upon her.
“What is taking them so long?” Phung’s wife, Ngoan, asked, peering behind them, her square jaw clenched, making her plump face look even more serious than it usually did. “The show is almost over.”
“It may be a good sign,” Trinh said, fighting off a yawn. “Perhaps the French delegation said yes.”
“They couldn’t have agreed so quickly,” Sanh’s wife, Tuyet, said. Hoa’s youngest daughter-in-law was no doubt the most beautiful of the three women, with a clear complexion, a straight, attractive set of small teeth, and large, haunting eyes. Tuyet was pregnant again, but had begun to show only recently.
“Why not?” Ngoan asked. “It’s happened before. If we’re lucky, we could leave as early as next week.”
Tuyet shook her silky head of hair. “You’ve been saying that for months.”
“It might be true,” Ngoan sniffed. “Don’t you want to leave?”
“It does no good speaking like that, especially in front of the children. You’ll get them excited over nothing.”
“Well, you don’t want your child born here, do you?” Ngoan asked, staring pointedly at Tuyet’s small belly bump. “Or is France not good enough for your baby?”
“Stop creating problems,” Trinh spoke up.
“Girls,” Hoa finally warned, conscious of the irritated glances from their neighbors.
The women resumed watching the show, now approaching its sentimental climax: Kieu reuniting with her long-suffering, devoted lover Kim. The children embraced flamboyantly, giggling into each other’s shoulders. All the children scrambled back to the stage to sing the national anthem of the South Vietnamese government. Emotional members of the audience joined in, their deeper voices soon drowning out the children’s.
Ngoan shifted restlessly in her seat, the palm fronds lying flat against her thigh. As the first daughter-in-law, Ngoan was several years older than Trinh and Tuyet, and inevitably more traditional. A matchmaker had affianced Phung and Ngoan when they were still children. Though their marriage turned out successfully, Hoa’s younger sons refused the same kind of arrangements. Ngoan often complained of her younger sisters’ lack of manners and parenting skills, but Hoa suspected she secretly envied their youth, their friendship, their beauty.
“I’m not the problem,” Ngoan finally said during the applause. “Phung told me what your husband is trying to do.”
“Will you be quiet?” Trinh asked.
But Hoa could see the uncertain expression on Tuyet’s face. “What is Ngoan talking about?” she asked her youngest daughter-in-law.
“Phung saw Sanh talking to the U.S. immigration officer last week,” Ngoan said.
“So what?” Trinh said, waving her hand. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
Hoa’s eyes remained
on Tuyet, who didn’t respond, instead only glaring at Ngoan.
“Don’t be stupid,” Ngoan sneered. “We know who is always talking about America. We know where she really wants to go.”
Tuyet stood, reaching her hands out for a sleeping Lum. The boy whimpered as he left Hoa’s arms. “I don’t need to sit here and listen to this,” she said.
“Tuyet,” Hoa said, touching the woman’s arm, but Tuyet quickly brushed it off.
“I don’t care if she’s the oldest sister. She can’t talk to me that way.”
“Am I lying?” Ngoan asked, her voice rising.
“I’ll leave with you,” Trinh said, standing and waving to Xuan, who still stood on the stage. He and Cam, still in costume, waved back at the family and ran toward them.
“We’re walking back with Aunt Tuyet,” Trinh said to her son.
“Right now?” Xuan asked, removing his paper mask, his face crumpling in a scowl. “But Cam and I were going to play tag with the other kids.”
“It’s getting late,” Trinh said.
“The lights won’t turn off for another hour,” Xuan cried, stamping his foot. “Please, I don’t want to go back there right now.”
“Let him stay, please, Aunt Trinh?” Cam asked. “He can spend the night with us, right, Mother?”
“We can take Xuan back later,” Ngoan said.
“No!” Trinh cried, then stared at the ground. “Thank you for offering, but Xuan should leave with me now.”
“I don’t understand why you isolate yourself like this,” Ngoan said. “Tuyet isn’t the only person who can help you. We’re your family, too.”
Trinh glared at her. “I know what you say about me.”
“Do you see this, Mother?” Ngoan asked. “They turn against me, and claim that I’m the bad person.”
“Be quiet, all of you,” Hoa muttered, recognizing her husband and sons’ shapes approaching. She watched her boys come closer, thankful she bore males, siblings who rarely argued with one another. The children ran to embrace their fathers, while Xuan wrapped his arms around his grandfather’s legs. Hoa smiled, trying to look happy.