Now if there was ever anyone you’d bet would never get mixed up in any way with a gang, it would have to be Phuong. But she did, and for a while it looked like the family might lose her completely.
If you’re not quite fourteen and you’ve been through everything that she’d been through, I suppose it could have an effect on the way you viewed things, but you’d have to wonder just what she was looking for, to become so fascinated with a bunch of teenage thugs, standing over their own people and making a bad situation just a bit worse for everyone.
Cang was the leader of the gang on Pulau Bisa. And I guess someone like Cang isn’t too hard to understand. Eighteen years old, living alone on the streets of Saigon from the age of thirteen, you’d learn to survive — any way you had to. And you wouldn’t have a whole lot of respect for the generation that put you there.
Then you find yourself in the camp, with a whole bunch of kids who find themselves in the same situation.
My uncle always reckoned a lot of it has to do with families. Or rather, what happens when families cease to exist. For the Vietnamese — and the Chinese — family was everything. Two, sometimes three generations in the same house, all teaching the kids what to do, how to behave. Passing on the culture, you might say. But then comes the war-and the peace-and a lot of the families are broken up. And those that manage to escape as a family might not all make it to the camp.
The lucky ones, like Phuong and me, might score an aunt and an uncle or some other relative to love them and look after them, but what if there was no one?
For some of the kids the gang was … family, I guess. And family makes the rules.
Only, the old ways are dead and the new rules are street-rules …
*
30 May 1977
Pulau Bisa
PHUONG
She is there again. Standing in the shadows, watching.
Cang leans against the flimsy wall and studies her without appearing to look in her direction at all. It is a trick he perfected half a decade ago on the streets of the capital, when speed and surprise were the greatest weapons, and it didn’t pay to let your victim know you were watching.
She is very beautiful, even though she never smiles. Beautiful, but just too young to consider …
It crosses his mind to wonder why she would come so often just to stand and watch. He has seen her family; how close they are. How respectable. She just doesn’t fit the usual pattern.
Shoving his hands deep into his pockets, he moves towards her. For a moment it seems as if she will turn and run, but she resists the fear, and remains, watching as he approaches. She is like a wild animal caught in the light.
“I don’t think your father would like you hanging around here.” He smiles as he speaks. She does not smile back. “He’s my uncle, not my father. My father died in the war.” He nods, and she continues, “And she’s my aunt. My mother is …”
The words run out, but she stares at him defiantly.
“It’s not for them to decide.” She turns away and looks across at the other members of the gang sitting on the ground or lounging against a couple of the makeshift walls.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“What’s yours?” she replies …
*
TOAN’S STORY
The thing is, there really isn’t any explanation.
You can love someone like they’re one of your own children, care for them, hold them when the demons come in the night. Tell them things aregoingto be alright. But you can’t change what’s happened to them and you can’t know how it’s affecting them deep inside where the words don’t reach. And when you’re stuck in are fugee camp, with barely enough food and water, you can’t just call up achild psychologist or a qualified trauma-counsellor. All you can do is give them your love and hope for the best.
Which may not be good enough.
Phuong began to change soon after we arrived at Pulau Bisa. Before that, from the moment her mother disappeared, she’d been like a wind-up doll. Point her in the right direction and she’d walk, ask her a question and she’d talk, but there was nothing there. It was like the life had drained right out of her, out there in the middle of the ocean. Linh was quiet too sometimes-lots of times but not like that.
With Phuong, it started with little things.
She took to carg around one of her mother’s shirts. She took it everywhere with her, and at night she slept with it clutched in her hand. My mother made the mistake of trying to talk to her about it.
It was over the evening meal one night, and Phuong was sitting with the shirt on her lap. Mum suggested that she might put it down, at least while she was eating.
That was the first time Phuong snapped.
“You’re not my mother,” she shouted. “You can’t tell me what to do!”
It took my mother by surprise. I don’t think she could remember Phuong ever raising her voice. Maybe that was why she followed up with an even bigger mistake.
“I know I’m not,” she said, gently. “But your mother is gone, and we-”
She never got any further.
“We don’t know that! She might have …”
The words trailed off and she froze, as if voicing her secret hope might have doomed it. I think that was the first time anyone realised that she was still holding on to the dream that somehow her mother might survive; might come and find her.
I was watching my father’s face. He was as shocked as my mother.
“Phuong —” he began, but she turned on him, and the look she shot across the room was like … hatred.
“It’s your fault!” she shouted. “If it wasn’t for you, we’d still be safe in Rach Gia. She wouldn’t have come without you. And you’re not my father, so don’t think you can take his place. He was a hero. He didn’t hide away in an office in Saigon …”
I guess the look on my father ’s face stopped her. She stood up and walked out of the hut, still clutching her mother ’s shirt. And without looking back.
From that day on I never saw her with the shirt again. But she changed.
Every day was an armed truce. She’d stay away for hours at a stretch. Nothing my parents did or said was right. The boys were in trouble if they breathed wrong; even Linh and I knew to stay clear of her most of the time. It scared me. She was so totally different from the Phuong I’d grown up with.
That was when she developed her fascination with Cang and the pack of alley-trash he controlled.
Looking back, I think there might have been an element of guilt in the whole drama. I mean, think about it, Aunt Mai sacrificed herself to save her daughter from the pirates. Phuong was thirteen, and old enough to know what that meant, and why it had happened. So she blamed herself.
Sure, she could deflect it onto my parents — even onto us — but in the end she saw herself as the cause of what had happened to her mother. If the monster had taken her instead …
I guess Cang and the mob were the nearest thing the camp had to a boatload of pirates, and something deep down inside her tortured mind made the connection.
I discussed it with Linh once, much later, but she said I was talking through my ear; that I wasn’t a psychologist and I didn’t know squat. And besides, nothing was ever that simple. That was when she suggested I stick to finger painting and leave the thinking to those who were equipped for it Linh has a way with words, and she often uses them to hide what she doesn’t want to face.
But I guess she’s right. Nothing is as simple as we’d like to kid ourselves it is.
Still, it was a nice theory, and no one has come up with anything better to explain Phuong’s actions. Certainly not Phuong herself.
*
14 June 1977
Pulau Bisa
PHUONG
The girl is an enigma. Hai leans over her, watching her eyes, but he cannot read them. She is young and she is scared, but she will not look away, will not retreat from him. He leans closer.
“Hai!”
Cang’s voice. He tears his eyes from the girl and looks across at the gang-leader, warned by something in the older youth’s tone.
“Come here … Now.”
He feels the girl’s breath on his chek as she sighs, perhaps with relief, but his eyes are fixed on Cang. There is nothing difficult about reading him. Slowly he straightens up and obeys.
“No one touches the girl,” Cang speaks the words in a whisper, watching her in his usual oblique manner. She has slipped down into a crouching position against the wall, a few metres from the main group, her gaze focused somewhere in the middle distance.
“I thought you preferred them older.” Hai masks the sarcasm with a knowing smile, but finds himself staring into the dark spaces behind Cang’s eyes, and the smile dies on his lips.
“I said no one.”
He watches as Hai rejoins the group, then switches his attention back to the girl. There is something in her eyes that captivates him. She is drawn to the group, to him, by something she cannot fight, but there is no respect there — at least not the unquestioning kind that he sees so often in the eyes of the others. She is young and yet she is older than them all. She is beautiful and yet she is untouchable. Unreachable.
She has sought out the wild-side, but refuses to discard the shield of her innocence.
And when he looks into those eyes, he sees reflected something of himself, the way he was before …
He drives the thought away. There is no profit in remembering; he has built a wall around those areas of his emotions. But still, the girl disturbs him and he cannot say why.
11
BREATHING DARK
TOAN’S STORY
Kieu was my friend.
Her family — or what was left of it — had been on the island for a few months when we arrived and she was about the first kid my own age that I met. Kieu lived in one of the most run-down areas of the camp with her older brother, Diem. Diem was about twenty-one — fifteen years older than Kieu — and he’d fled the country with Quyen, his wife, and his little sister when the new authorities began snooping around asking questions about the black market.
So they were at the camp, and we were at the camp, and Kieu became my friend.
We played together, swam in the sea, and even took our afternoon naps together during the heat of the day, sometimes on the mats inside her brother ’s hut, but more often in the small shed of a dwelling my father had managed to “buy”, just off the main west-east alley of the camp. It was a cramped, single-room tin shack, with the numerous cracks sealed using old rags and papers that kept out the wind and leaked in anything but the lightest rain. But it was home.
Often Linh joined us for our sleep-time. At eight, she was probably getting to old, but I think in a way she was jealous of my new friendship. In Rach Gia we’d always had lots of friends and there had never been any question of jealousy, but the camp was different. The trip had thrown us together in a way that our old life never had, and I guess, after all that had happened, she was feeling a lot more vulnerable. At the time I didn’t notice any change, except that she used to boss Kieu around.
Kieu was pretty. Even at six years old, my mother said, you could tell she was going to be beautiful — in spite of the scar. It was a vivid, crescent-shaped slash across her right cheek, which she hid instinctively by allowing her long hair to hang loose over her face. She was only a baby when the shrapnel tore through the side of her parent’s hut in Long Hai, killing her mother and father and leaving her screaming in her cot — a two-year-old victim whose life was tom apart in that instant even more permanently than her flesh.
Her brother was lucky. He was seventeen and in the army, trying to avoid getting killed around U Minh. Otherwise she might have had no one left in her family at all.
And she was lucky she had him. He cared for her like a father, and made sure she never went hungry. And he always seemed to have something new for her to wear. Not always brand new, but clean and pretty. I remember wondering how he could manage to get hold of things that many people in the camp only dreamed of, but that was only until my father took us on our first trip out of the camp …
Pulau Bisa was about ten minutes from the mainland by boat, but when the tide was low the water was so shallow in parts of the strait that you could walk to shore in about half an hour. Of course, the guards had to be looking the other way, but no one really took to much notice. For them it was just a job and we kept them pretty well supplied with comforts, so it wasn’t a job they took all that seriously.
After all, it wasn’t as if we actually had anywhere to go if we got off the island. Not anywhere permanent. We might make it to the city and trade our small treasures for some extra supplies, but no one in the camp had the kind of wealth that could have supported them for any length of time in the real world. Even if you knew enough Malay or Chinese to pass as a native, eventually you’d have to make your way back.
You see, for all its drawbacks, the camp was really the only place where a refugee could survive. It wasn’t flash, god knows, but we were given survival rations and some clothing — and not always by the government. The wealthier Chinese-Malaysian families would often donate supplies, sending them by boat to the camp wharf, and handing them out to the lucky families who happened to be in the right place at the right time. And at least everyone at the camp spoke the same language.
So the strict isolation of the island was only cosmetic for popular consumption. And there was a constant stream of the more adventurous “inmates” who made the trip across to the mainland, either by boat, if they could afford the bribes, or by foot, if they wanted to risk the tides.
And they all knew the unwritten rules: Back before eleven, leave a donation at the guard-post; nothing said. Back after eleven, expect a beating. Whether it was because the guards. were a little more drunk around midnight, or because they figured that the unofficial “ curfew“ kept their charges from getting too adventurous, drawing down official attention on them, I don’t know, but I remember seeing Kieu’ s brother one morning after he misjudged the curfew, and it wasn’t pretty.
But like I said, I wasn’t aware of any of it, until my father decided to take us along on one of his excursions.
Now I knew that my parents disappeared at times, though they didn’t mention where, and I knew that things sometimes appeared in the hut in the evening that hadn’t been there when I’d woken up that morning, but what can I say? I was six years old. At that age you don’t think about things too much. It was only when they decided to take us with them that I realised where they went when they left us with Quyen for the day.
We boarded the boat in the early morning. For me it was a great adventure. I looked back at the boat’s wake, stretching away in the direction of the island, then I ran back up to the front and watched the approaching mainland.
Linh sat rigid in the centre of the boat, and for once she allowed my mother to caress her hair. Maybe “allowed” is the wrong word. She looked so scared that I wonder now if she even realised it was happening. Loking back, I think the only reason she came withu sat all was that she was scared we might not come back, and she was more afraid of being left alone than she was of drowning in the sea.
I still don’t know why my father took us along. Perhaps he’d grown more confident, perhaps he just wanted to giveusa treat-a day away from the smells and the over-crowding. As it turned out,it proved to be good training fora later trip;one that would prove far more important than a minor shopping excursion.
*
LINH’S STORY
Toan was excited. As I sat there rigidly, staring straight ahead, feeling Aunt Hoa’s comforting hands rubbing my scalp and the off shore breeze cooling the sweat on my face, he kept drifting in and out of my field of vision, muttering to himself and stopping occasionally to stare out over the railing at whatever caught his attention.
I wasn’t excited. I was scared. Partly it was the water and the memories that it conjured up. Recent memories that had rui
ned forever the pleasure I used to get out of spending time on the sea. But it was more than that.
We were going ashore, leaving the island, and I’d heard the stories — what happened tothose who were caught away from the camp.
Kieu’ s brother, Diem, was still carg the reminders of his conversation with the camp guards after one of his excursions, but that was only minor compared with the tales of what happened if the villagers or the local authorities realised where you were from.
It wasn’t like we’d been given any reason — not directly, at least — to fear the Malaysians. In fact, apart from the guards, who sometimes took their role a bit too seriously, the only real contact we’d had with the Malaysian people since we’d arrived were the occasional visits from politicians and officials and the irregular boatloads of supplies donated by the government or the local families.
But that didn’t stop the rumours. A camp is like a small town, and what someone overheard someone telling someone about what they heard someone else say … Well, you get the idea. It stopped a lot of the inmates from taking the risk and making the trip across.
The one we were making.
It hadn’t stopped Diem, and it certainly hadn’t stopped my aunt and uncle, and if I’d been old enough to think logically about it, the fact that they considered it safe enough to bring us along this time should have clued me in to the idea that maybe the stories of beatings and robberies were exaggerations. In the end, most stories are.
But it didn’t, and all I knew was that we were headed for Janganoon. And I was scared.
Janganoon was like a strange new world. Although we’d been right next door to the city when we were in the staging camp, it was the first time that Toan or I had actually been there. I’d been to Saigon many times, but suddenly there were things all around me that had never been a part of my old life. Huge shops, supermarkets where people served themselves and the goods were organised in aisles. It was so unlike my grandfather ‘s store, where everything was everywhere and a customer just pointed to what they wanted and you served them.
Here, you served yourself — if you could afford toand the choice was amazing.
Only the Heart Page 10