1


November 1978—Vung Tham, Vietnam

There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies—everything in between is speculation.

In the years to come, Thi Anh would let the harrowing memories of the boat and the camp trickle out of her until they were nothing but a whisper. But she would hold on to that last evening with all her might, from the smell of the steaming rice in the kitchen to the touch of her mother’s skin as she embraced her for the last time.

Her mother, she would remember, preparing her daughter’s favorite dish, caramelized braised pork and eggs, humming “Tous les garçons et les filles” by Françoise Hardy. The French had left Vietnam twenty-five years prior, but their music still lingered, the yé-yé melodies filling the homes of the village of Vung Tham. Anh was filling her backpack in the bedroom next door, debating what to bring and what to leave behind. “Pack lightly,” her father had told her. “There won’t be much room on the boat.” She held her school uniform to her chest, a pleated skirt and a white shirt whose sleeves were too short for her sixteen-year-old arms, and placed it in her bag.

Her brothers Thanh and Minh were doing the same in the bedroom across from hers, their belongings scattered across the tiled floor, and she could hear them arguing. They had to share a backpack between them, and Thanh maintained that because his clothes were slightly smaller, as he was ten and Minh was thirteen, Minh should pack fewer items than him. “Your clothes take too much space. It’s only fair if I pack more than you.” Their mother went to the room to investigate the noise, the smell of the caramelized pork following her. As Thanh began to explain the problem to her, his voice faded, her exasperated face quieting his trivial concern. “Sorry,” he muttered as Minh looked at him with a triumphant smile. “It doesn’t matter.”

Through her opened door, Anh saw their younger brother Dao watching the quarrel unfold from the edge of his futon. He fiddled with his blanket anxiously, his blue T-shirt too big for him, a hand-me-down from Thanh. He didn’t like his brothers arguing, Anh knew, anxious about having to pick a side and vexing one or the other. Of all her siblings, Anh worried about Dao the most. She worried about life for him in America, that his shyness would make it hard for him to make friends once there. She had spent the past few months trying to break open his shell, encouraging him to play Đánh bi or Đánh đáo with the other children of the village by the banyan tree. “No, please,” he would say, half hiding behind her. “I’d rather stay with you.” Their mum pulled him up from his bed, his hands outstretched and holding on to hers. “Come on, Dao,” she said as she picked him up. “Your brothers need to finish packing.” Together they left the brothers’ bedroom, and as they passed Anh’s, the mum said, “Are you done? I could use your help with dinner.”

“Yes, Ma,” Anh said, stuffing her backpack with the remaining pieces of clothing spread out on her bed. She followed them into the adjacent kitchen, and her mother dropped Dao off her arms. “Can I help, too?” he asked. His mother gently brushed the hair off his face and said, “No, there’s no tasks for little boys tonight. You can go in the living room with your father.” He nodded, disappointed, and after glancing at Anh with his round eyes, he went up to the living room. Anh suspected that her mother had wanted a moment alone with her in the kitchen, to treasure an instant with her eldest daughter before her leaving.

Her baby brother, Hoang, was asleep in his cot, lulled by the rhythmic sounds of his mother’s cooking, clinking pans and simmering oils. Anh stirred the pork as her mother chopped the fermented cabbage into small chunks, a tremble in her hand. It was as if they were acting a scene, a normal midweek evening, the kitchen their stage and their pots and pans their props. But as the two of them moved around the small space, they avoided each other’s gaze, their usual chatter reduced to the occasional instruction, “Make sure you get the scraps at the bottom of the pan” and “Add a bit of nước chấm.” At several instances, Anh could see her mother opening her lips as if to speak, as if to let out a thought that had been weighing on her, but only sighs would come out.

Her younger sisters, Mai and Van, were setting the table, carefully juggling stacks of bowls and plates in their small hands, their long hair flowing behind them, the tap of their bare feet scarcely audible. While doing so, they revised their school lessons of the day. “Four times four, sixteen, four times five, twenty, four times six, twenty-four,” they recited in a singsongy voice, one of them making the occasional mistake, the other one telling her off for it. “Twenty-eight, not twenty-six,” Van said to Mai as they made their way back to the kitchen. Anh plated up the pork, steam rising from the pan, and handed them each a dish. They liked bringing the food to the table because they could snatch a few bits along the way, crumbs on their white vests giving them away. Sure enough, once they were out of sight, Anh heard Mai say, “That’s too big a piece,” while Van shushed her.

At the back of the living room, her father sat by the home altar, his back hunched, while Dao watched him attentively from the worn-out leather sofa. The altar was adorned with framed photos of their grandparents. There were Ông nội and Bà nội standing in front of their house and looking sternly at the camera, a newborn Van in their arms. In the background was their neighbor’s chicken roaming on Vung Tham’s dry and dark soil, their laundry hanging between their kitchen window and the nearby palm tree. There was Bà ngoại, posing by an ornate staircase at her daughter’s wedding, small heels on her feet and her hair in a bun. And there was Ông ngoại, looking like an old Hollywood star in his close-up portrait, his white teeth showing and his hair barely gray. The four of them had died successively in the last three years, after Saigon had fallen and the last soldiers had gone back to America, like a gust of wind rippling through waning leaves. By then, they were old and weary, and their deaths hadn’t come as a surprise. But the rapid pace made Anh wonder if the war had had something to do with it, if hope could be a source of life and its vanishing a foretelling of death.

With the back of his sleeve, Anh’s father wiped the dust off the portrait of his mother, inspecting the frame by the candlelight. Once he was satisfied with its cleanness, he put it down carefully next to the others and lit some incense. He held the burning stick in his hands as he prayed, and soon her mother emerged from the kitchen to join him. She struck a match and lit the incense with it, and as they prayed together Anh heard them murmuring her name alongside those of Thanh and Minh, pleading for safe travels and calm seas. Dao stood up from the sofa and approached them, pulling on his mother’s shirt. “Can I have one, too?” he asked, and she handed him her incense stick, lighting another one for herself. Anh watched as his timid voice joined his parents’ prayers, the three of them on their knees, their ancestors watching over them. After a few minutes, her father stood up, clasping his hands. “Time for dinner,” he said.

* * *

Dinner, she would remember. The moonlight illuminating the room with its soft glow, the smoke of the steamed cabbage and incense mingling together. Baby Hoang’s small snores emerging from his cot, and their mother occasionally leaving her seat to check on him as he drifted in and out of sleep. The table, which was normally a place for raucous laughter and shouting, was instead shrouded in a nervous stillness. Their father’s worn-out eyes looked down at his watch every few minutes. Their mother cut Dao’s meat into smaller pieces, telling him it was time he learned how to use chopsticks properly. “You’re not a baby anymore,” she said, as he hung his head in embarrassment. “It’s okay,” Thanh whispered to him. “Sometimes I struggle with the big pieces of meat, too.” Mai and Van, usually bursting with stories of their day at school, pushed the food around their plates, leaving it uneaten. Though they weren’t exactly sure what was at stake, something about their parents’ tense movements informed them that this was an unusual and somber evening.

To break the silence, Anh asked her father to repeat the plan one last time, and Minh let out a moan. “Again? We all know it by heart already.” It was true. The plan was a simple one that her father had told them countless times, that she recited each night to herself before falling asleep, like she was studying for a test. She, Thanh, and Minh were to leave tonight for Da Nang, where a boat would be waiting to take them to Hong Kong. “There, you’ll spend some time at a camp for people like us,” her father said as Dao tried to operate his chopsticks the best he could, pieces of meat falling halfway between his mouth and his bowl. Her sisters had their elbows on the table, heads leaning on their hands, bored by this tale they had heard myriad times. He had already taken care of the payment to the boatmaster, twelve pieces of gold for each of them. “So you don’t need to worry about that,” her father said. “The rest of us will join you at the camp in a few weeks, and together we’ll leave for America and meet Uncle Nam in New Haven.”

He always explained the plan without a hint of a doubt in his voice, and Anh wondered if he had been masking his worries or if his conviction was real. She looked at him as he described the journey once more, in between sparse mouthfuls of pork and rice, his fingers drawing a map on the table. It hadn’t occurred to her to question his authority or how much he really knew. It hadn’t occurred to her that his brother and the smugglers may have fed him lies, omitting to mention the towering numbers of risks involved. Before the end of the war, her Uncle Nam had gone on the same journey with his wife and two children, sparking in her father the desire to leave Vietnam. Soon the spark grew into a wildfire, fed by each letter Nam sent, adorned with a stamp of the American flag and detailing his lavish new life of giant supermarkets and Fords and Chevrolets. The idea had become an obsession, deafening him to the concerns of their mother and blinding him to the hardships that surrounded the journey.

Because Anh, Minh, and Thanh were the three oldest children, their parents decided that they would travel ahead on a separate boat, dividing the family in two. It hadn’t occurred to Anh that this breaking in half was the first sign of peril, the first clue that her father knew that one of the halves might fall.

* * *

Once dusk had settled, Anh kissed Hoang’s forehead and hugged Mai and Van and Dao goodbye, all barely awake and longing for bed. She wished she could hold on to them longer, that she could squeeze them so tightly that a piece of their soul entered her heart. But she knew that there was a long night ahead, that the boat wouldn’t wait for them in Da Nang, so she let go and turned to her mother. “Look after your brothers,” she told her, handing Anh three lunch boxes containing the rest of the meal. Into her other hand, she slipped a small family photo taken by their neighbor the previous Tết. Anh took the photograph and examined their stern expressions. They were all sitting tightly packed together on their living room sofa and dressed in their best áo dais, Mai and Van and Anh in matching pink and the boys in pale blue. Their parents were on opposite ends, their mother heavily pregnant with Hoang. Mai and Van sat on their laps while Dao was on Anh’s at the center of the photograph, shifting his head so as not to hide hers. Thanh and Minh were at their sides, arms around their younger sisters. They had been trying hard to obey their father’s pleas not to move or blink, unable to afford a second shot. Anh stared at each of their faces intensively, afraid that if her focus waned she would cry. “We’ll see you in a few weeks,” said her mom, as Anh looked away from the photograph and placed it in her backpack.

She gave her parents a final embrace and waited for Thanh and Minh to do the same. She would remember the stoic demeanor they had each adopted, how she had thought that any show of emotion would render them unable to let go of one another. “Always stick together no matter what,” her father said, and she heard the urgency in his voice, that this was not an instruction but an order. He gave Minh a final pat on the shoulder and gently rubbed Thanh’s hair, looking at his two oldest sons as if he were seeing them for the first time, taking in their features, engraving them in his mind. “Be good to your sister.”

Dao grabbed their mother’s arms as he sucked his thumb, and Mai let out a small yawn while waving a timid goodbye. “Are you scared?” Van asked Anh, looking out at the night that awaited her three older siblings with apprehension and distrust, scarce stars watching over their village, the leaves of the trees dancing slowly in the wind to the crickets’ chirp. “It’s so dark outside.” Anh hesitated for a moment. “I’m not,” she said. “Everything will be alright, you’ll see.” And she would always regret that her last utterance to her family had been a lie, false and useless words of reassurance. After a final nod to her parents, she took hold of Thanh and Minh’s hands, and together they left their home and walked along the dusty road, headed north. Their family watched the three eldest children go, until the darkness of the night swallowed them completely and only the shadows of Vung Tham remained.

* * *

Three months later, Anh stood on a beach on the south coast of Hong Kong, her feet hot on the sand despite the early morning’s breeze, the officer’s intrusive yet reassuring hand on her shoulder. A doctor peeled back the sheets covering the bodies lying in front of them, one by one. She scanned the faces that revealed themselves underneath, aligned neatly on the sand, until she fell on those of her parents and siblings. She confirmed to the officer and doctor that they belonged to them. Sometimes, later in her life, she became resentful that they had fished them out at all; the absence of bodies had meant infinite possibilities, the possibility of life, of reunification and bliss.


2


Dao

The boat was crowded and reeking. I was sitting on my father’s lap. Droplets of the sea had landed in my eyes and made them itch; my clothes were wet and sticking to my skin and making me cold. My sisters were on either side of my mother, clutching her arms as she held baby Hoang to her chest.

* * *

We’d left Vung Tham four days before in the pitch-black night and started on the long walk north. By the time we reached the coast of Da Nang the next evening, our feet were bleeding and covered in blisters, so much so that we tainted the boat red as we stepped into it.

* * *

Of course, I’d heard ghost stories back when I was alive.

There was the ghost of Ông ngoại, my grandfather, for whom we left mangosteen

and cigarettes

next to his portrait and burning incense on the altar at home.

There was Thần làng, the village ghost,

whose dripping clothes could still be heard

by children playing near the shore of the lake

that had swallowed him whole

a century prior.

* * *

But I always pictured ghosts as old, wise, playful souls, with lengthy beards and wrinkly skin. It hadn’t occurred to me that there could be seven-year-old ghosts,

and yet, here I am.

I don’t recall much about my death. There had been a storm the night before; the crashing waves rocked the boat and stiffened the baby’s cries. I remember the next day, the boatmaster told us that we had drifted off course toward the south, and that it would take an extra day to reach Hainan.

I remember fishermen,

speaking a foreign tongue,

the blades of their knives glistening

in the dawn’s sunlight.

* * *

Next, there was weightlessness. As I left my body and gravity left me, I drifted on an ocean of white that was surrounding me, until I was joined by my little brother and father, and by my sisters and mother. Then, the whiteness dissolved like fog when it sees the daylight approaching,

and I could see the boat from above,

except now it was sunk beneath the waves,

and bodies were floating all around it.


Copyright © 2023 by Cecile Pin