Where the Wind Leads

by Dr. Vinh Chung

  Ed raised his hand. “How many Black Panthers are there?” he asked.

  “Eighty-one,” Hoover replied.

  Ed shook his head. “If eighty-one Black Panthers could plan the disruption of New York, could not eighty-one people plan the construction of New York?” That was Ed’s philosophy: even a small number of dedicated individuals can produce radical results.

  Ed got involved in community relief work at all levels, and he didn’t hesitate to get involved in politics when it served the interests of the poor. At different times he served as chairman of the Los Angeles City Housing Authority, chairman of Economic Development, chairman of the Los Angeles City Fire Commission, and vice chairman of the Los Angeles Department of City Planning and Zoning. He was happy to work with anyone who shared his burden for the underprivileged, and he was willing to cross traditional lines to get things done—politically, ethnically, and even religiously. “I’m a born-again Christian,” he once said, “but I’m willing to cross religious lines for the good of the whole of the community.” That was an unusually flexible attitude at the time, and it earned him a lot of criticism from some circles.

  It was also an attitude he shared with Stan Mooneyham. Stan was a Christian, too, and a former pastor. Stan’s goal was to provide relief for the poor and hungry all over the world, and just like Ed, he understood that to accomplish his goal he would have to work across political, ethnic, and religious lines. World Vision was a Christian organization, but many Christians at the time placed a greater emphasis on meeting spiritual needs than physical needs. Stan wanted to combine them. In order to work across political lines, he refused to be identified as either a conservative or a liberal, and in the politically polarized Vietnam era, that approach earned him criticism from both sides of the aisle.

  Both men were products of the Great Depression, both had experienced poverty and suffering, both possessed boundless passion and zeal, both were deeply committed followers of Jesus, and both were determined to express their faith by helping the poor and suffering wherever they found them and in any way they could. Though they couldn’t have looked more different, Stan Mooneyham and Ed Hill could not have been more alike.

  So when Ed tossed the Los Angeles Times across the desk, Stan picked up the paper and looked at the photo. It was a picture of a terrified Vietnamese woman and her unconscious daughter cowering under a canvas in the bow of a small boat. The article said they were refugees who had risked their lives to flee Vietnam, and though their boat had managed to make it safely to Thailand, the authorities there would not allow them to land, and they were waiting to be pushed back to sea, where they would most likely die. “Boat people,” the article called them, and it said there were thousands more like them, and the number was increasing every month.

  Stan was stunned by the photograph. “The agony on the woman’s face wrenched my heart,” he said later, and he was dismayed that though he was president of an international relief organization, he had never even heard of the boat people. Stan had spent most of that year in Africa, where World Vision was expanding its work. Somehow he had failed to hear about this tragic development in Southeast Asia.

  Now he knew—but he had no idea what he was supposed to do about it.

  He looked up at Ed. “Why me?” he asked.

  “Why not you?” Ed replied with a shrug.

  “It’s not my responsibility,” Stan countered, but he had heard that excuse from others so often that he couldn’t believe he just used it himself.

  Ed just looked at him. He had heard that excuse a thousand times, too, and it carried no weight with him.

  “It’s too big for us,” Stan went on. “World Vision is a young organization. We don’t have the budget or the manpower for something like this—it could cost millions.”

  Ed said nothing, so Stan kept going.

  “We’re an army, not a navy—we have no experience with operations like this. Besides, it’s too political. We’ve got projects going on all over Asia, and if we put our foot in the middle of something like this, we could be risking everything.”

  Ed still said nothing, and it was making Stan angry. Ed wasn’t known to be a man of few words, and when he said nothing, he was trying to make a point. Stan knew that Ed didn’t have to argue with him because Stan was arguing with himself. His reasons for not getting involved with the boat people were good reasons, logical reasons, practical reasons—but somehow none of them could stand up to that poor woman’s photo.

  “I’ll look into it,” Stan mumbled, “and I’ll pray about it.”

  That was all Stan agreed to do, but Ed smiled and nodded, and Stan knew why. The two men could not have been more alike, and that sly old fox knew that in his heart, Stan Mooneyham was already committed.

  Thirteen

  NO TURNING BACK

  THE DAY OF OUR DEPARTURE WAS THE FIRST TIME MY family had ever seen the boat on which we were to sail across the world’s third-largest sea. None of us knew who supervised the boat’s repair or whether he knew what he was doing; no one knew for sure whether the boat would spring a leak and sink the first time everyone climbed aboard.

  But it was no river barge. The boat looked enormous, bigger than any of us had expected, but in reality it was only about seventy feet long and thirteen feet wide, just barely large enough to hold all 290 of us and without an inch to spare. The boat was constructed entirely of wood and painted in a color so innocuous that no one in my family can remember what it was. It was flat in the back and came to a point in the front and curved up a little, in the style of Asian fishing boats, with the number 0726 painted across the bow. There were two decks, an upper and a lower, and a hatch and ladder allowed passengers to move between them. There was a small captain’s cabin near the boat’s stern, and near the bow was a covered section that looked like a carport, where the women, children, and anyone else who needed shelter from the sun could sit. In front of the covered section, there were two large tube-shaped vents intended to allow plenty of fresh air to circulate to the coach-class passengers down below.

  The boat was moored at a wooden dock in the city of Ca Mau, an inland port in the southern Mekong Delta near the juncture of the Ganh Hao and Bay Hap rivers. Just a few miles south of Ca Mau the two rivers diverge, with the Ganh Hao turning east toward the South China Sea while the Bay Hap snakes its way west to the Gulf of Thailand. Easy access to both great bodies of water is what made Ca Mau an important shipping center and a logical point of departure for my family.

  Transporting our whole family to Ca Mau had involved an intricate ruse. Though we had official permission to leave Vietnam, it was still crucial that no one suspected we were going. Refugees had become not only a big business for the government but an easy target for anyone wanting to make a quick buck. A refugee lived in a kind of limbo; he was no longer a citizen of his home country but not yet a citizen of any other. The government had taken almost all of his life savings, and the moment he stepped out his front door for the last time, he no longer owned a house or property. He owned nothing, he belonged nowhere, and no one liked him—they were either angry that he would leave his native country or jealous that they could not go with him. Worst of all, everything the refugee had left in the world, he was carrying with him—and everyone knew it.

  There was an even more important reason to leave secretly: if something went terribly wrong on our voyage, we would need a home to return to, and “terribly wrong” was a definite possibility.

  For months prior to our departure, we did everything we could to make our daily routine look as normal as possible. The younger children—Yen, Nikki, Thai, and me—had been told that we were going on a trip, but nothing more. We were excited because our family was going on a sea voyage; what could be more fun than that? A child who had never seen the ocean had very little idea what a sea voyage entailed, but we didn’t care. We knew that Mom and Dad would be with us, so what could possibly go wrong?

  But Jenny and Bruce were old enough to understand t
he risks involved. They had overheard our aunts trading dark stories about refugees who had gone insane from thirst or become so hungry that they turned into cannibals and ate their children. For some reason, Jenny and Bruce didn’t seem quite as excited about the trip as the rest of us were.

  In the weeks before our departure, my mother gathered rice cakes, dried fruit, and other nonperishable food for the journey, and she made a mixture of powdered lemon and sugar that we could mix with water to drink. We packed clothing but left almost everything else behind, and just before we departed, my mother invited my father’s mistress to come to the farm and take anything she wanted. Considering the nature of their relationship, I find that a remarkable act of kindness; many women in my mother’s position would have burned everything first.

  Jenny and Bruce continued to go to school right up until the day of our departure, not for the sake of their education but to avoid raising suspicion. Every night at dinner my mother and father sternly warned them to say nothing about our plans in school. One careless comment to a friend might be repeated to a parent, and before long everyone in town would be asking questions my family didn’t want to answer.

  We left the farm in small groups because we knew that a family of ten, all leaving at the same time, would look about as inconspicuous as a wandering herd of water buffalo. Grandmother Truong took the older children, my aunts took the ones in the middle, my mother kept the twins, and my father traveled alone because women traveling with children raised fewer eyebrows. Ca Mau was a well-known port, and everyone knew it was a common point of departure for refugees; so to conceal our destination, we divided our trip there into three legs. First we traveled from the farm to Bac Lieu, which we hoped would look like nothing more than a regular visit to my mother’s family home. From Bac Lieu we traveled by bus in the direction of Ca Mau, but we took the precaution of stopping halfway there in case anyone on the bus recognized us; we even spent the night in a temple instead of staying with friends to avoid starting any rumors about our plans. The drive from Soc Trang to Ca Mau takes less than two hours, but my family was so cautious that the trip took us three days to complete.

  We arrived in Ca Mau late in the morning of June 12, 1979. The temperature was already approaching ninety degrees and the humidity was over 80 percent and rising. The air was barely moving, and our fellow passengers were dripping with sweat as they stacked their precious possessions in teetering columns all over the crowded dock. Either no one got the memo about baggage restrictions or they chose to ignore it. People seemed to have brought everything they owned: steamer trunks, bedding, pots and pans, rice cookers—even furniture. It was hard to blame them since they were leaving Vietnam for good and knew that anything they left behind would become the government’s property. Everyone knew they should bring less, but apparently everyone thought they would be the only ones to bring more.

  The families who arrived first began to board the vessel, dragging all their worldly goods behind them; but it quickly became apparent that not everything would fit, and angry arguments began to break out over who had brought too much and what should be left behind. The boarding process ground to a halt, and it looked as if the issue might take days to resolve, but we didn’t have days; we had only a few hours to get everyone aboard so that we could depart at night while the river level would be high enough to allow our heavily laden boat to reach the sea without running aground on a sandbar. Under the cover of darkness our boat could slip away without being noticed, and avoiding attention was still important; it was never too late for some local bureaucrat to foul things up.

  One of my cousins decided to take charge of the baggage dilemma and devised a simple solution that solved the problem but at the same time made him the most hated man on the boat: he simply walked around the dock, grabbing random suitcases and slinging them into the river. He didn’t bother to ask each family which precious heirloom they would prefer to part with; he just grabbed and heaved, and before long the boat was surrounded with suitcases bobbing in the water like pieces of pork in a stew.

  My mother was furious that our own cousin had thrown some of our most valuable belongings into the river. Almost everyone lost something precious in the baggage-reduction process—that is, with the exception of Grandmother Chung. Anyone who tried to throw her luggage into the river was likely to find himself treading water beside it. Grandmother Chung even managed to bring her wicker throne along, and she set it beside the captain on the top deck and planted herself on it for the entire voyage.

  The dock was crowded with local merchants and vendors who had built their businesses around refugees. It was a shrewd business strategy, since refugees often brought the last of their Vietnamese currency with them and this would be their last opportunity to spend it. While the boat was still loading, my parents handed stacks of money to Jenny, Bruce, and Yen and let them go ashore to buy anything they wanted. Our family had been dirt-poor for the last four years, and none of my brothers and sisters was experienced in handling money, a fact the vendors quickly recognized and took full advantage of. Jenny, Bruce, and Yen were overcharged and shortchanged for everything they bought, but it didn’t really matter; if the vendors didn’t take the money, it would soon be useless anyway.

  Yen found a vendor selling pineapples. He held one out to her and quoted a price.

  “How much for all of them?” Yen asked, and she handed the man a stack of money. She lugged an entire box of pineapples back to the boat, and one of our aunts sliced them up and passed them around.

  Jenny felt dusty and sticky from our journey to Ca Mau, and she found an entrepreneurial vendor who had constructed a makeshift shower with a wooden stall and a water barrel and hose hanging over it. Jenny asked the price and the vendor told her, “Five thousand dong,” so she handed over a stack of money and took the most expensive shower of her life.

  Bruce was always hungry, so he bought corn, sugarcane, and anything else that was edible and brought it back to the boat to share with the rest of us. We all stuffed ourselves until our mother warned us that if any of us got diarrhea, we would not be allowed to go on the trip. We didn’t believe that threat, but the thought of getting diarrhea was sobering enough to make us stop eating. Our boat was originally designed to carry cargo, not passengers, so a few niceties had been left off—like bathrooms. Several days at sea, 290 passengers, and no bathrooms; I’m not a naval architect, but I think that was a bit of an oversight.

  An agent from the Public Security Bureau met us on the dock to take a final head count to make sure the government wasn’t being cheated out of any money. We had paid all the required fees and appropriate bribes, but there was also a law that allowed each refugee to take no more than two taels of gold with him when he left the country; any amount he possessed beyond that was required to be turned over to the government. When the PSB agent reminded our group about that law and also reminded us of the severe penalty for disobeying it, some of the passengers began to surrender money they had hidden away.

  But when the communists first came to power, each citizen had been required to declare every one of his assets, and those of us who had refused to report them then were not about to hand them over now. My uncle had instructed the people who repaired our boat to hollow out a section in one of the beams below deck, where we could hide things that we didn’t want the government to see—like gold. My uncle’s intent wasn’t simply to defy the government; he just wanted to take enough money along to allow our family a fresh start in a new country; and after losing our house, our furniture and possessions, two rice mills, cars, and our school, my uncle thought the government already had taken enough.

  My mother agreed. A seamstress by training, she put those skills to work by sewing jewelry into hidden pockets in our clothing and the hems of our caps. She even sewed American hundred-dollar bills into the lining of my father’s pants without telling him. My mother knew Grandmother Chung had raised him to obey authority without question, and if her husband was ever ordered to
surrender all of his money, he was likely to do it. My father was a kind and generous man whose kindness could border on compliance, and compliance is not a quality that a smuggler needs. My mother knew the only way to protect the money was for my father to carry it without knowing it was there. My father was a mule—but then, everyone in our family was a mule in one way or another. Even the twins were carrying hidden bits of jewelry or gems; a full diaper makes a terrific hiding place.

  It was evening by the time everyone was on board and ready to depart. There were no seats or benches on the boat, so we all sat cross-legged on the rough wooden decks and squeezed in as tightly as possible to make room for everyone. The lucky ones had something to lean against, and the rest just took turns leaning against each other.

  Before the boat even left the dock, the passengers below deck had already begun complaining. They were packed together like cattle and forced to share what little space they had with the baggage, food, and fuel. The twin air ducts that were supposed to funnel fresh air to them had no fans; they were nothing more than gaping ducts that were useless until the boat started moving, and even then the antiquated engine would not push the boat faster than seven knots. What the poor souls below deck needed was a brisk sea breeze, and unfortunately for them we were still a long way from the sea.

  Because my family was considered the boat’s owners, we were allowed to sit on the upper deck. Jenny, Yen, and Nikki sat with our mother and aunts under the covered section while Bruce and my father wandered free. I was only three and a half years old, and I snuggled beside my mother while she held one of the twins in each of her arms.