by Laura Lam
Later, at my desk, I pretended to work. Though I kept watching for the first glimpse of a Chinese man. I imagined him materializing all of a sudden by my side and whispering my code name. But the morning dragged by and he didn’t appear. I kept glancing at the clock, arguing with myself. It was perfectly logical, wasn’t it, that Mr Law Keung wouldn’t show up in the morning? Would a boat leaving Sai Gon for Hong Kong, smuggling passengers, dare embark in broad daylight? Surely he would come in the afternoon, maybe even the late afternoon.
Just in case, though, I decided not to go out for lunch. I went quickly across the street and picked up a sandwich and a Coke from the café. Back at my desk I reread Andrew’s letters, because there was no work to do. For many days, the foreign businessmen whom we served had stopped coming to the office, and the staff at the main counter sat there solemnly, doing nothing.
The afternoon crept away. At some point, a woman colleague came over to chat. I remember her talking and talking about the period she’d spent as a student in Australia. As I half-listened, I wondered if she had escape plans of her own.
If she did, she kept them to herself as I did, with mine.
By seven that evening Mr Law Keung still hadn’t come. Undeterred, I stayed where I was. Couldn’t he, I rationalized, have been waiting for people to leave the office and the crowds on the street to thin out? In fact, the other employees had long since left the office, all except for the security guard. Now, using the pretext that there was still work to do, I convinced him to go home and give me the keys. I promised to lock up and deliver the keys to a woman who worked at the Brodard Café and whom we both knew.
Then I was alone.
I waited, numb, in semi-darkness, refusing to admit the truth. Maybe Mr Law Keung had been detained? What if he’d been detained and had no way of getting a message to me? He could still be coming, couldn’t he? Besides, Andrew hadn’t given me a specific time, only the date. What if I left the office and found out later that he’d shown up? What if this was my last chance? What if there would be no other way out?
It must have been sometime near nine o’clock when I got up from my desk, walking to the front door like an automaton. I must have turned out the lights, locked the door and given the keys to the woman at the café across the street but I’ve no memory of it. The only image I have of myself is standing in front of the almost empty café, staring up and down Tu Do Street one last time. Just in case.
The traffic on the street had thinned out. The night curfew would begin in less than an hour.
I hailed a taxi – a terrible extravagance, but I couldn’t face being seen in public. Sitting in the back seat, the tears came, sudden and overwhelming. Tears of panic, tears of frustration. I glimpsed at the traffic moving steadily outside the window, but to me it was like a current being pushed and pulled by an invisible storm, and the storm was my own despair.
* * *
One week later another letter arrived from Andrew. The cargo ship had to be cancelled at the last minute. Because of the war closing in on Sai Gon, cargo traffic on the river was now considered unsafe.
I told the whole story to Nu, a few days later when she picked me up at work. She was my oldest friend in Sai Gon, nicknamed Kim Thanh, or Silverbell, back in our school days, just as I, in my family, had been given the nickname Hoa Lai, or Jasmine at birth. Nu had parked her mini-motorcycle a few blocks away, and we walked down Tu Do Street to the river and sat on a large stone bench. Behind us there was a concrete arch covered in massive clusters of dusty pink bougainvillea flowers. We were both dressed in our usual ao dai – the long tunic over trousers, which was the traditional Vietnamese dress. Nu’s was grey, mine was white. My colour was always white, whether I wore an ao-dai or a Western-style dress. I had made one exception in the previous month, when, to please Andrew, I’d acquired a silk ao dai in deep pink and also some blouses and skirts in other colours. My tailor, a highly skilled woman whom I had known for several years, was surprised that I suddenly decided to wear coloured clothes. I returned to white after Andrew left Sai Gon.
Nu had become a devout Buddhist following the sudden and tragic death of her father. She dressed in subdued pastels, and even with her long hair and small frame, her appearance was rather tomboyish. She let her hair grow without doing much to it, and sometimes the heat and wind made it unkempt and brittle. On the other hand, she had an admirable, almost steely, determination, and she was as rigorously honest a person as I had ever known.
She knew many of my secrets, including my earlier failed attempts to leave the country. Sitting on that bench by the river, after I’d finished describing the day I’d spent waiting for the Chinese man, she looked at me and asked, “How long are you going to go on doing this?”
“What do you mean, doing this?” I said.
“I’m talking about the end of the road,” she said. “Have you ever thought of what you’re going to do when you get there?”
“What do you mean by that?” I replied, beginning to grow anxious. “The end of what road?”
Nu had been born in the Year of the Dragon. To those of us who believe in Eastern astrology, as I did, this meant she was inclined to be dynamic and vocal, even aggressively so.
“You’ve tried and tried to get out,” she went on. “Nothing’s worked. What if we end up trapped or captured. There’ll be no one to save us then. What if we know we’re going to be raped, to be tortured and murdered and thrown in the gutter with the garbage, and that there’s absolutely nothing we can do to stop it. That’s the end of the road I’m talking about. What are you going to do then? ”
“I’m not going to give up!” I cried out. “I’m going to keep trying to get out, no matter what!”
“That’s all very well, but what if you fail? And it’s over? And there’s nothing left?”
At that, I burst into tears.
For a moment, she stopped talking, and stared at me, deadly serious. I’m sure she disapproved of my tears. Then she became agitated. Her face darkened as she talked on about rape. Rape at the hands of plundering men, the age-old fear of Vietnamese women, had come violently to the fore once again in the terrible wars of the mid-twentieth century. The subject had a particular resonance for all of us. Once, in our ancient history, Vietnamese society had been organized on the Matrilineal Tie System (Che Do Mau Quyen), but women had been debased and discounted under the thousand-year Chinese domination and had lost most of their rights. At the same time the Chinese rulers had also insisted upon female chastity before marriage. If a young, unmarried woman was violated, she became totally worthless, condemned and rejected not only by society at large but by her own family. The same tradition lingered on in contemporary Viet Nam, wreaking psychological havoc on those of us who were trying to survive at a time the social fabric was being torn to shreds. We had no mental health services, no psychological counseling, no crisis hotlines. Given the choice between rape and suicide, most Vietnamese women would have chosen suicide. A high percentage of rape victims did in fact take their own lives immediately after the trauma.
That was what Nu insisted on talking about, that day by the river. We talked about drowning, the easiest and quickest method for us because neither of us could swim very far. We discussed overdoses of medicine but how would we know how much we had to take? And how could we do it if we were already in the hands of our aggressors? We talked about self-inflicted violence with a knife or a gun, if we could get our hands on one. But I was afraid I lacked the courage to pull a trigger.
“But what if there’s no other way?” she kept repeating. “What if you know you’re trapped? What if you know you’re going to be raped and murdered?”
I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know what I’d do. I don’t think I wanted to know.
She got up abruptly from the bench.
“I can’t stand sitting here any longer,” she announced, glaring down at me. “Come on, we’ll go for a ride.”
We went to retrieve her little motorcycle from the p
arking lot. The machine kicked into life, and Nu gunned us along Cong Ly Avenue, passing the Presidential Palace, shooting up clouds of dust behind us while I, behind her, clung to her waist for dear life. The conversation had struck fear into my heart, not just because of me but what would happen to our families if we ever did lose our own lives? A few years before, a girl in our high school had hanged herself in the school’s toilet and her death had created an enormous scandal in the community. People had blamed her death on a failed love affair. I couldn’t speak for Nu, but I knew there were things in my own life, things I’d done when desperate and frightened, that I’d never told her or anyone, things I could barely allow room for in my consciousness.
We drew near the Vinh Nghiem pagoda, Nu braked and we got off. I looked at the eight-storey tower with its Japanese-influenced architecture. Knowing that Nu often sought comfort in Buddhist temples, I suggested we go inside. To my surprise, she refused.
“No,” she said, “not today.” Then, seeing the uncomprehending expression on my face, she added, “How can we go in, the way we are, with suicide filling our minds and hearts?”
At that she stalked off, pushing the motorcycle in front of her past the temple, alternately biting her lips and letting out angry words that, given the way the wind was blowing, I couldn’t really hear. I followed her mutely. Her face was again so dark, her hair so completely disheveled, that in my mind she had become transfigured into some sort of Angel of Death.
We crossed the avenue to a gray concrete bridge that spanned the river and bore the same name as the avenue, Cong Ly. Underneath the bridge, in semi-darkness, bobbed some unattended sampans.
“Cong Ly” in Vietnamese means “Justice.”
Justice Avenue.
The Justice Bridge
And my old friend Nu – Kim Thanh – with tears of rage now streaming down her face, cried out at the river below, “Where is justice in this world?”
Difficult as she was, I loved her still and on the bridge that day she made us swear to a solemn pact. If it came down to it, we would kill ourselves and we would do it the only sure way there was, by biting through our tongues and fighting off anyone who tried to stop the bleeding. There were many legendary stories – I had heard them as a child – of women in the revolutionary forces who had committed suicide this way. One of them was the wife of General De Tham, who had been imprisoned with forty other nationalists on a French warship in the early days of the colonial regime. En route to French Guyana for deportation, she committed suicide by biting her tongue. And then, during the first women’s uprising against the French regime in 1930, a Vietnamese spy named Ca Chuong was captured by French troops in Hon Gai. They punished her by hanging her upside down and pulling out her nails, then beating her. Ca Chuong bit her tongue in half and bled to death – and so became a legendary heroine of Vietnamese history.
But I wasn’t going to be another Ca Chuong. I may have made the pact with Nu but I wanted to live and was determined to escape.
* * *
I confided in a sixty-year old woman I had met under unusual circumstances, Mother Chin. She was physically small but with a stern expression on her face. Her hair was completely white, and she always wore round eyeglasses. She was talkative, highly judgmental, and was difficult for other people to get along with, but having no family of her own, she was always concerned about me. I had introduced Nu to her too, and sometimes the two of us were invited for lunch at her place.
One morning, listening to the Voice of America, I heard that a United Nations organization had arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and was taking a certain number of refugees out of the country. I also heard through the grapevine that there were Vietnamese living near the Cambodian border who had made their way on foot across the frontier, hoping to be accepted as well. Although I had no concrete details about the UN evacuation and no idea how long it might continue, I was desperate enough to take the risk. I talked it through with Mother Chin, and in the end she decided that she herself would escort me to the Cambodian border. She said we would need to go as soon as possible.
Nu and I had agreed, that day on the bridge, to escape together. However, if either found an opportunity to leave without the other, she was to take it without hesitating. I sent a letter to her home, asking her to join me and telling her to get ready.
I waited for three days but there was no answer. I had no other way of reaching her so, on the fourth day, I wrote a second letter and hired a neighbour, a young man with a motorcycle, to deliver it to her house. He came back without having seen her, but he claimed to have given the letter to Nu’s grandmother. In this second letter, I told her to come to my office that very day. If she couldn’t, I said guardedly, then she was to see Mother Chin, who would explain everything.
I learned afterwards that my first letter had not reached her until the following week and by the time her grandmother gave her the second one, it was already evening and too close to the night curfew. Nu and her family lived on a farm outside Sai Gon, at least an hour’s ride away. Having no news from Nu, I decided she’d changed her mind and wasn’t coming.
The following morning, telling no one else what was happening, I left for Mother Chin’s place as soon as the curfew was lifted. Over a breakfast of chicken noodle soup and jasmine tea, she packed some bananas, cold meat, and a loaf of French bread. We then took cyclos to the Tay Ninh bus terminal in Tan Binh district and boarded a large bus heading toward the Tay Ninh province, about one hundred and thirty kilometres northwest of Sai Gon. The bus was full of people, a few men sitting on the rooftop, struggling to hold onto their belongings. When the bus stopped at Long Hoa village, our destination, many Cao Dai worshipers also got off with us.
The village of Long Hoa was the main centre for the Cao Dai religious sect. A huge and elaborate religious complex contained the Great Temple, a famous herbal medicine hospital and clinic, administrative offices, and residential quarters for the priests. Cao Dai followers believe in combining Eastern and Western religions, and they are liberal in their approach. There were prayers four times a day. During weekdays, only a few hundred priests attended services, but during major festivals there would be several thousand, all dressed in white ceremonial gowns. Visitors to the temple were expected to dress respectfully.
The Great Temple had nine levels, representing the nine steps to Heaven. Above the front portico was the “Divine Eye”, the supreme symbol of Caodaism. Within the sanctuary there were eight plaster columns entwined with multi-coloured dragons supporting a dome that represented Heaven. We arrived at the Great Temple just in time for the noon ceremony and we knelt on the floor among many other visitors. We were wearing traditional Vietnamese dresses, mine white and hers blue-floral. Near my knees was my small soft leather bag containing a white blouse, a pair of moss green trousers, a set of underwear, a cosmetic sac, and my old purple umbrella, packed tightly together. I wore sunglasses and kept a smile fixed to my face as though I hadn’t a care in the world.
But I was unable to concentrate on the prayers. Mother Chin had already advised me to slip out while the service was still in progress, when there would be less chance of someone observing. The joss sticks were still burning heavily at the altar when she signaled me with a nod. I inhaled the pungent smoke and got up quietly.
Changing my clothes in a bathroom, and satisfied that I looked sufficiently like a peasant, I went out and into the surrounding countryside of fields and forests. I headed in what I knew was the general direction of the frontier. Within minutes I’d left the village behind me, and, looking back, I saw women washing their clothes at the side of the last house.
I entered the jungle, its thin, dry trees interspersed with occasional crop fields and crossed by paths of beaten earth. It was hot under the full sun but this was interior hill country and much less humid than the coast. I was following what appeared to be a well-used track. Only a rare farmer in a field, or a boy with a buffalo, came into view.
Soon I ca
me within sight of the barbed wire border fence. This was unknown territory to me, in more senses than one. I stopped in my tracks, working up courage. All I could see was the fence. It didn’t seem the most formidable of barriers, not when my freedom was just on the other side.
How naive I was! To think I could simply climb through a barbed wire fence! That escape was so easily won!
I approached the fence and saw men standing on the far side. They were armed troops, soldiers in the Cambodian army. Suddenly they seemed everywhere. I kept on walking toward them. One of them raised his head and saw me.
He looked very young, and decent enough. I signaled to him that I wanted to cross through. He shook his head. I tried to speak to him but he again shook his head.
Suddenly, another soldier with bloodshot eyes realized what was going on. Immediately he held up his rifle and pointed it directly at me. I froze. Then I signaled that I wanted to speak. He shouted back at me in perfect Vietnamese:
“Di ve ngay! Neu khong toi ban”, “Go back! Or I’ll shoot.”
Other soldiers at the fence had targeted me too, a hard, callouslooking bunch. It was a shock to realize that they were capable of shooting me without a qualm. I looked back at the first soldier, beseeching, but he just waved his hand, signaling that I should get away from the border.
The second soldier’s rifle was still pointing at me. I wanted to beg them, but something stopped me, some instinct, and for all I know this saved my life. I slowly turned from the barbed wire fence and walked away as calmly as possible. I was too afraid to look behind me, but I felt them watching me. The moment I reached the trees and was out of their line of vision, I turned. Maybe, just maybe, there was an unguarded place to cross over further along in the forest. But as I trudged along, my nerve went. Wasn’t I taking a horrendous risk, wandering around along the frontier with little idea of where I was and knowing no one? Suddenly, the whole notion – that one could simply get on a bus, ride to Long Hoa, walk to the frontier, walk across…and then what?