We Are Here (5 page)

At the time, my father’s family still had hidden wealth. They pulled together sufficient money to bribe officials to release him. While physically he’d survived his two years of imprisonment, the horrific experience would forever change him. I have never learned the details of what happened to him during that time, and I have understood never to ask.

Meanwhile, all the males in my mother’s family except for her father and her youngest brother, who was only fourteen years old, were imprisoned in re-education camps. Their lineage meant harsh persecution by the new authorities. Within a short period of time, the four remaining children—the three eldest of whom were daughters—were charged with the family’s survival. The hardships they experienced in the early years after the war are almost unfathomable. For example, the three sisters shared one pair of pants between them and therefore only one of them could
leave the house at a time. This sole pair of pants was patched again and again and again in a ridiculous ensemble of brokenness.

As the implementation of Communist reforms gathered momentum, almost everything was controlled and rationed by the government. The production, supply and movement of commodities were strictly monitored. Official government outlets were set up to trade approved goods. Trade outside government channels was prohibited given that, now in the new Vietnam, private enterprise was illegal. Each individual was permitted to purchase rations of essentials. Registered households with proper documentation accounting for each individual in the residence were permitted to pool their rations. Every month, families, clutching their residence registration documents, would line up outside government warehouses to purchase small quotas of essentials, such as sugar, salt, rice and MSG. There were severe shortages and often after lining up for hours there were no products left to purchase. Naturally, a black market emerged.

My mother, with her entrepreneurial and audacious spirit, decided to trade in unrationed produce. Goods could not be transported outside a delineated area of production. What was produced in Gò D
u had to remain in Gò D
u. This included meat and rice. With unrationed raw pork tied to her belly underneath her clothes, she would ride the buses that ran between Gò D
u and Saigon, where she sold the meat to black market vendors in the city at higher prices than those set by the government. She became known to the drivers and the bus inspectors on key routes, and they offered her sympathy and protection. (According to my
aunt, being a pretty unmarried girl in her early twenties didn’t hurt; that rule is the same everywhere!) After she handed over the meat trade to her sisters, my mother moved into operating an illegal rice trade. At night, the rice farmers would hide in the darkness in small boats on the river. From the back of her house along the riverbank, my mother would keep a lookout. When it seemed safe, she would light a lamp as a signal. The boat would quickly emerge from the darkness, and head towards the shore to deliver the rice to her for distribution. It was a risky exercise, each and every time, an uncertain dance of luck and danger, as capture would have meant imprisonment.

On one occasion, she lit the lamp as usual. The river was still and she waited for the black patch to take shape before her. The nearby bridge was quiet as curfew was still in place. But suddenly, from the shadows, she heard: ‘I’ve got you!’ She withdrew quickly into the unlit house, frozen with terror, unable to breathe. She listened in the placid darkness to the conversation between the rice farmer and his captor. The captor was just a civilian, but someone who had aligned himself with the new regime. The police were called and the farmer was imprisoned. Knowing the police would interrogate the farmer, demanding to know the name of his accomplice, my mother left immediately for Bien Hoa province to visit one of her brothers who had been moved to another re-education camp. Her father was working several kilometres away in the family’s rice fields, which had been taken over by the state. He travelled out from the fields to join her in Bien Hoa, but they decided not to stay overnight as they usually
did on their visits for fear that the farmer would betray my mother to the authorities, who would then come for her sisters back home. My mother eventually discovered that the farmer was held for a long time. He was brutally bashed but he never disclosed her identity. The integrity and courage of this ordinary man would stay with her, to surface in unexpected moments when she was an older woman, standing in an unassuming kitchen in Sydney or while she waited to pick up her small children from school—it would call to her like valiant drumbeats from a distant past.

Despite the incident, my mother continued her black market trade. While her older brothers were detained indefinitely in re-education camps, as the eldest in the family she was responsible for her three younger siblings. She existed like a wounded animal, near death, moving on instinct and desperation. At night, she boarded small trucks to take the bags of rice from Gò D
u to central Tây Ninh, passing various checkpoints. Again in a dance with danger. The script was set. The characters knew their roles and their lines. Finally, the enterprise fell into a routine rhythm. The nimble impulses of survival again found a way. For some time she succeeded, passing through various checkpoints unhindered, but inevitably there came a day when she was stopped by an inspector.

She approached the checkpoint. My mother tried to look nonchalantly sombre—a look that many of the other tired travellers wore. But the man stopped her and she was inspected. The other passengers watched in silence as she dropped to the
ground and cowered on all fours, begging them like a slave child for lenience.
Forgive me for being poor, kind sirs.
The salty warm tears of shame and anger rolled down her cheeks. She stared at the boots in front of her, refusing to meet the eyes of her new masters. Finally, she was permitted to leave but her precious contraband was taken. It was yet another wrenching setback.

My mother moved on to another initiative. Taking the family’s entire savings, she decided to go to Saigon to buy contraband coffee and other items to bring back and sell in Tây Ninh. But as she was walking through the city to meet the trader, she was pushed to the ground and robbed. All the family’s cash was gone in one decisive stroke. My mother could not fathom facing her family. There was nothing left. She stood there, her patched pants mocking her. The usual chaos swirled around her as she contemplated the classroom she used to sit in not long ago. The slow despair crept inside her bones. She was twenty-two years old. A hummingbird inside an engulfing storm cloud that devoured her. She wanted to stop flapping. She wanted to stop fighting. No more white noise. No more guessing. No more frightening episodes of army boots approaching, crawling for safety at night and scrambling for shreds of life in the day. For a long time, overwhelmed by defeat, she thought about the nectar of death. How peaceful it would be. Its seduction lingered on and my mother struggled to resist. But the faint lining of consciousness came back. A forced rational reality interrupted her thoughts, demanding her to come back to her family. She eventually awoke to the stark knowledge that her family needed her. She made her way back home.

Not long after, my mother’s tenacious will to live returned. She decided to trade trash. Bottles, duck feathers, tin cans, pieces of board, steel—for anything reusable, there was a buyer. But capital was required. My mother took the clock from the wall, the radio, the rice cooker, tables, chairs and lights, and sold them. She pawned my grandfather’s ring numerous times. Like many Vietnamese women, my grandmother had a solid jade bangle. Jade is precious, and once you put a jade bangle on your wrist you are never meant to remove it because it has protective powers. As it is meant to sit snugly around a woman’s wrist, it is shatteringly painful to put on but even more excruciating to take off. My grandmother’s jade bangle was the last reminder of better times. As my mother soaped her mother’s hand, she pulled violently at the bangle until bruises swelled and hand bones neared breaking point. They sat on the floor of the wooden house, now empty of belongings and quickly filling with storylines of vast sadness. The river looked on in curious quiet. As they held the soaped jade, both women wept through throbbing pain and splintering heartache.

With the money she had amassed, my mother gathered together a group of family, friends and villagers and gave each a little bit of money to source goods. They would reassemble with a collection of trash, which she would on-sell to a distributor. But some of the desperate women took the money and never came back. When my mother went to collect it, she found them starving. She not only forgave the debt but bought them rice. It was another failed venture that stabbed brutally at her.
In an emerging empire of ruthless savagery, her kindness was her downfall. Her sweet student disposition could not compete against the torrential hustle of this new reality.

With what little money she had left, she set up a small packaging operation. Under the new Communist regime, all books and documents related to the old South Vietnamese government had to be destroyed. History was to be rewritten. Street names were to be changed. My mother went to schools and purchased their history books, geography books and any other books that contained unpermitted knowledge. She then set up a production line of neighbourhood kids who cut and glued the paper into foldable bags of various sizes and sold them to market vendors who had not yet been stopped by the authorities for trading outside the system. The vendor would fill the 100-gram, 200-gram and 500-gram bags with sugar, rice and other products. At the same time, she regularly went to Black Lady Mountain, thirty kilometres away, to buy custard apples to distribute to children to sell on buses and at bus stations. The kids would each carry a tub of heavy custard apples, weaving in and out of the buses like swift hungry mosquitoes. Each child bulging with wit, tragedy and grime.