The train stopped at a station on the way to Saigon. The city had a new name now: Hồ Chí Minh City, named after a man much maligned among us.
I slept and then woke to the singsong voice of a girl on the train. “Cigarettes and dumplings!” She was a young teen with her hair in two plaits. She was wearing a simple floral blouse.
A few men bought cigarettes then fell back asleep. She stopped in front of me.
“How about you, chú?” she asked, referring to me as uncle. “Would you have a pack of cigarettes?” She handed me a Hoa Mai pack.
“I don’t smoke, cháu,” I said, handing it back.
“How about some dumplings, chú?” She smiled. Her dimpled smile cheered me up.
“I’ll take two.”
She told me how much each was and I paid her. She put another wrapped dumpling in my hand. “Chú can have it. No charge.”
I shook my head. “I can’t take it, cháu.”
“It’s free, chú.”
“Then how d’you make money by giving these away?”
“It’s fine. My dad’s tù like chú. He’s not home yet.”
Yes, we were reeducation prisoners. Something stabbed me and I could not speak. “What did he do before the war?”
“Mom said he taught the Viet Cong men to become better men. They used to be bad and they surrendered to us.”
“He was with the Chiêu Hồi Program?” I asked, then smiled. “I know what he did.”
“His name is Lê Quang Minh. Have chú ever met him?”
“Was he sent to the North?”
“Yes, chú.” She counted her fingers on one hand, then lay down the tray and counted them on the other hand. “Many years now.”
I simply shook my head. His bones were likely rotting in one of those stark places in the North. I said to her, “Someday he’ll be back. Like me.”
I lay awake. The girl had awoken a memory.
***
Yesterday was a day just like any other when we were called into the reeducation camp’s meeting hall. On the podium the chief warden was reading out names of those to be released. I heard names I recognized. In that moment, I felt tremors in my hands. After fifteen years, did my hope of release ever die?
Back in my shack I sat down on my cot. Finally, I could breathe. Afraid to read what was on the piece of paper, I simply sat there. After regaining myself I peeked at the paper. I felt a sharp jab at the first words “Order of Release.” I was actually being released. I breathed. The paper said my crime was being an intelligence officer of the Central Intelligence Office. I knew it was not an error. In fact, our careers under the ngụy regime, American enslaved puppets, as the northern communists called us, were classified as transgression regardless.
Revived, I let myself come face to face with a fact: I was a man in his prime at thirty-five when I went to prison. My daughter was only three when I left. She was now eighteen and living in America with my wife who had left me.
Outside the shack a cold norther was blowing. This ash rain falling, falling. In my hand a blemished potato, more precious than gold. I had lost count of those fallen sick. Most would not last this stark winter. Me, a walking skeleton. Have mercy, Sir Winter. I fantasized about rice. I would bow to the ground, this gray-haired head dropped, and sing, Hail to the holy rice. I would chew slowly like a toothless senior masticating. But why did this stomach still feel empty?
I thought of a dear friend of mine. He died only a month back, not lasting this winter to see his release. Before he died he handed me a piece of paper. “Don’t leave it out in the open,” he whispered into my ear. “For you to read,” he said, then tapped the side of his head. “I have it locked in here.”
I hoped his parents would read this poem and know that he was a man, not a maggot:
They learned from chairman Mao: / Intellect is worse than a clump of feces
They reform us the inmates / and we transformed feces into rice
We killed our self-respect slowly / through endless hard labor
until one day we lost / all our humanity
In the end they have succeeded / in transforming us
into what they are / the maggots.
Outside I sat down leaning against the shack’s wall. Distant stars, just dots, like in a child’s eyes. Yet what I saw was simply blackness.
Of all the eyes watching the sky this night, how many naked eyes welled up with tears?
***
At sunset the train arrived at the station in Hồ Chí Minh City. My final destination. I recognized the surroundings as I stood on the platform, my knapsack on my back, watching passengers calling out to those who had been waiting for them. Had I been here before?
I shook hands with my companions and we wished each other well. One asked me where I was headed in the city. I said I didn’t know and he looked at me as if I’d had a memory lapse. I said I needed some time to reacquaint myself with it. All anyone, including myself, had in his pocket was a Certificate of Interim Release to return home to live in a bigger prison. We had no identification cards, belonged to no family registers, could work only menial jobs.
Dusk fell, and I walked the streets inquiring about overnight lodging. In an alley a woman answered the door of a yellow-stuccoed dwelling. I asked for an overnight stay.
“Where’s your travel pass?” she asked.
“I don’t have it,” I said, standing in the dimly lit doorway. “I have my release paper though.”
“You were tù, weren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Give it to me in case they do a house search.” She scowled. “Another way to make extra money for them. Understood?”
Again I nodded.
“You pay in advance.” She told me how much and I paid. “First room upstairs on the left. You’re responsible for your belongings. Make sure to lock the door of your room and tuck in the mosquito netting. We have roaches and rats here.”
As I mounted the stairs I heard her from behind, “Don’t forget to get your release paper back from me in the morning.”
Thinking of the dumpling girl again, something struck me. I turned to ask her, “Are there any buses going to Sóc Trăng during the day?”
“Two. One leaving at eleven, the other at two. Walk five blocks, turn left and go six blocks toward the river. That’s where the train and bus station is.”
***
The desolation of the train station had a jaundiced look in the morning sun, bronzing the tiled roof of a shack built for the stationmaster. Having heard about the prisoners’ release, more than a dozen women vendors milled around, squatting on their haunches, waiting for the train. On their trays were dumplings, baguettes, and yellow bananas. Most of them only pined to glimpse a familiar face behind the train’s window. A son. A husband. To know that they were still alive after all these years.
At eleven I boarded a bus. I ate the three dumplings I had bought on the train the day before. Afterward I slept. I woke and slept again, my body aching. Once I smelled a muddy odor of a river and woke and slowly gathered myself to watch the landscape of mangrove swamps lying beyond the river, and on the loamy riverbank cajeput flowers were white in brushlike bunches.
Sometime in the afternoon it rained and then stopped. The bus turned and followed a canal silty red in the afternoon sun. Along the banks were dense groves of bananas and papayas, green and dangling with fruits. The noise of the bus stirred some cormorants to wake and from deep in the groves a flock of painted stork took to the air. The bus arrived at an open-air market and the sun, now a red orb, hovered over the western horizon.
I got off the bus and asked the driver how far to the sea from the market town. An hour’s walk, he said. I asked if he knew a reform camp half an hour on foot from the Hậu river. It was no longer there after 1977, he told me, then said, “Aren’t you a reform tù?”
“How d’you know?”
“I know. When I was released many moons ago I was dressed just like you. Always walked around with a backpack.” He offered me a light blue Bastos cigarette which I declined. In the North, most of the men — inmates and cadres — smoked Điện Biên or Vàm Cỏ cigarettes, which they disliked for their flat taste. He took a quick puff. “How long were you detained?”
“Fifteen years.”
He said nothing. Then he frowned. “You must be very bad.”
“Or badly reformed.”
He cracked a grin. “If you want to find a place to stay, ask the woman in that café over there. If you want to unwind after all these years without a woman, ask her too.”
I thanked him and left the market. The streetlights had come on when I arrived at the café. It overlooked the river; beyond the opposite bank was an island. Sampans and boats glided up and down, their lanterns hung over the bows flickered yellow and made reflections in the water. It got dark quickly after sunset. In the shrubbery of bear’s breeches and threeleaf derris blinked white dots of fireflies.
I ate a bowl of caramel pork cooked with a hardboiled egg and thin slices of coconut. There were a few customers. The woman owner asked me if I was passing through and I did not know if I was. In fact, I had no place to go to. “Sis,” I said to her, “I was just released from a reeducation camp.”
“You have family here in Sóc Trăng?” she asked and pulled out the chair across from me. She looked in her forties and was wearing a red-and-blue polka-dotted blouse, her hair rolled up inside a headscarf.
“No, sis.” I leaned back in the low-backed chair. “I used to have a family in Saigon, though.”
Hearing the tone of my voice, she did not press. “I understand. I’ve seen many men like you. Came and left. Like migratory birds. Yeah. Those birds sometimes fall and die halfway on their journey.” She watched me play with the empty bowl. “You want something else? Café sửa đá or plain black?”
“Just black, sis. What time do you close?”
“I close whenever I feel like. Usually late. Do you have a place to sleep tonight?”
“No, sis.” I looked quickly over the café. It was fairly small, with barely half a dozen tables. The interior behind the eating area was dark, curtained by a square sheet of blue cloth. “Do you live here?”
She glanced back to the interior and nodded. “I’ll get you coffee.” As she rose to her feet she pointed toward the river where some boats had docked for the night. There were lantern lights inside their rattan domes. “Some of them rent a cot for an overnight stay. Just ask them.”
She brought me a cup of black coffee with no saucer. As she cleaned the table she peered at me. “You need a companion for the evening?”
I looked at her. She smiled a friendly smile. Then after some thinking I nodded. “Drink your coffee,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
I sat back and sipped. I could hear the sound of bamboo clapping as a boat glided downriver. It must be a vendor boat selling something at night. The breeze came in and brought a fresh smell of vegetation after the late afternoon rain. Soon the woman returned and with her was a girl in her twenties. The girl was slender. Her short hair was cut on a slant along her jawline and her oval face was tanned and fresh. She caught my gaze and smiled. I noticed her eyetooth, which made her smile all the more charming.
The woman seemed to appraise me with her gaze. “You like her?”
I nodded. The girl blinked. She was dressed in a simple collarless lemon-yellow blouse and white pantaloons. The woman gestured toward the interior behind the cloth curtain. “The room on the right,” she said. “Just follow her.”
I rose. “How long can I stay?”
“As long as you want,” the woman said. “As long as no one else asks for her.” She nodded toward the girl. “She’s popular.”
The room was dark. The girl pulled a cord in the center of the room and light came on from a low-wattage single naked bulb. A cot padded with a thin pallet sat low in a corner. The girl sat down. I lowered myself to sit next to her when she took my hand and put it on her belly. “Be gentle, anh.”
Suddenly it hit me. I understood. “How many months?”
“Three.”
“What’s your name?”
“Bích Nhi.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
I glanced at her belly. “You’re not married?”
“No, anh.”
I did not want to ask what did not concern me.
Sometime in the evening, when I lay with her in the dark, hearing the clap-clapping bamboo of a downriver boat, I heard men’s voices and the woman’s voice. The girl told me it must be some local bộ đội seeking pleasure for the night. I listened and heard one man asking the woman, “Is she available tonight?” He had a northern accent that I detested, even though I was born there.
“No, she’s in there with a customer.”
“Get him out. I want her.”
A silence. Then I heard the woman again, softer this time. “She’s with a senior lieutenant. He just arrived from Hồ Chí Minh City.”
“The whole night?” The northern accent had an edge in it.
“Yeah. He paid for the whole night.”
They left. I lay in the dark with her head on my shoulder. She was soft and gentle and she asked me where I was headed, and I said I needed to find someone in the vicinity and described to her the area where I used to travel on foot from that nameless camp — my first camp — and how I would cut through the dunes to go across the salt flat to a commune. The girl said she knew the commune and had heard of the reform camp once there. “I was only ten.”
There was something so poignant about the idea of these children living in this iniquitous society, that I couldn’t sleep thinking about it. I told her I wished I could stay with her all night and she said she would ask the woman. She rose and went out and then came back and said I could. “Just pay her a little extra,” the girl said as she lay down in the dark beside me. “She’s closing for the night.”
I must have drifted off to the sound of the rain. I could smell it, the rain-soaked earth and vegetation. The seaside air would smell like this in my first camp, perhaps more briny and moist, more acrid and thin, and the air would echo with the calls of shorebirds, and out on the sand-brown beach there would be sanderlings, and, far out on the sandbars, the high-pitched cries of willets. After a rain the air was cool and fresh. The morning was gray, a steely gray of water and sand. In the early light one could not tell where the calm water’s edge met the sand. The shallows brought skimmers from the sandbars where they had rested; the air rang with the birds’ harsh sounds. Ha-a-a-Ha-a-a! I pictured them as migrants who had flown south through Vietnam to escape the cold in the North. I envied them, their freedom, coming and going with the seasons. Mornings when we would come through this coastal flat from that nameless camp, I could see far out in the ocean beyond the clanging buoy and imagined a ship to take me there away from shore where the bitter tang of the sea was the smell of freedom.
***
On one of those mornings in my first camp, I met a little girl selling dumplings. She would cross the beach in the early morning light on her way to the commune market, half an hour on foot away. She carried a bell and upon hearing it, I would know who was coming.
She said to me she was ten-years-old, four years older than my little daughter who was only three when I left. That morning, I gave her two Lu Petit Beurre biscuits I had brought with me during our excursion to the commune where we would trade the produce of our camp for meat and rice. I told her the next time I would give her a book to read, if I could lay my hands on one.
“What kind of book, chú?” she asked.
“Any book. Reading is good for a child your age.”
“Books are useless,” she said, pouting.
“They are not. Why would you say that?”
“The new regime said if things are not edible, they’re useless.”
“And you believe them?” I was not surprised. The propaganda of the North had begun its strangulation of the South in every aspect of life; schooling was no different. It was disturbing to see a girl her age who already had a sour outlook on life.
“Flowers are useless too, chú,” she said, as if having read my thoughts on this topsy-turvy society. “I used to sell flowers after school. Now I’m selling dumplings.”
“Your mommy made these?”
“Yes, chú. Would you buy some?”
“I don’t have money.”
“It’s fine, chú. Tù like chú don’t have anything.”
I did not have to guess. She could read the initials “CT” for “Cải Tạo” on the back of our shirts that branded us as reform prisoners.
“Daddy is tù,” she said, brushing her hair on her forehead. “Mommy said the regime sent him to the North. Very far away.”
“What did he do before?”
“He was a soldier. He’d lost a leg during the war, but they still sent him away.”
That morning she could not sell us her dumplings; we were penniless. However, one time we pooled the rare amount of money we had between us and bought the whole tray. It was more a treat for her than to us. Most of the time when we met on the beach, she would follow us to the commune. Some days she could sell the whole tray, but most of the time she would carry back the tray half empty, and her dejection would make me sad.
One afternoon as she followed us back from the commune, we rounded a dune and walked upon the faint footprints of some shorebird.
“Chú, look!” She pointed out a fox a short distance ahead of us. A red fox. I held her hand, kept her still. It took but a moment before I knew what the fox was after.
“Clever fox,” I said to her, and explained in a low voice that the fox was following the footmarks to a bird’s resting place. I added that if the bird had been smart, it would have walked on the wet sand and never left a print of its feet. The fox, impervious to the cries of shore birds, kept on trotting after the track, its fur ruffled by the wind that carried the clear bell note of a plover.
On those trips we had had guards escorting us to the commune and back. After one year we had gained enough trust from the camp, so that our team, all twelve of us, guarded only by two bộ đội youths, was tasked to leave camp early in the morning and carry our homegrown produce to a commune near the seaside. In the afternoon we would return, bringing back with us the provisions we often lacked such as sugar, salt, cooking oil, and, at times, rice. By mid-morning, after leaving the camp, we could smell the brine in the breeze and the ground was rough with fine bits of shells. Bent under a burlap bag stuffed with the camp’s produce, each man labored in his climb to cross the dunes. I weaved my way between clumps of low-lying saw palmetto and crested the dune ridge among nodding sea oats. The long climb sucked the air out of my lungs. The salt laden breeze was warm on my face, and the sea boomed below. We took a short break, sitting on the sand, away from the waxy looking pear cactus. Some plucked the red fruits and ate them. I never tried it, though some the men said it was sweet.
The last time we were in each other’s company we saw a one-legged sandpiper. The little girl stood transfixed by the bird’s determination as it probed and jabbed at the water’s edge, where the white foam was a sign of mollusks carried in by the waves. The wader retreated, hopping away from the swift surf only briefly before skipping again toward the water’s edge. It did not have the nimble movement of the normal birds of its kind, their legs twinkling as they flitted about on the sand.
“Chú,” she said, as she looked up at me, “can you make his leg normal again?”
I was surprised she did not ask, What happened to his legs? I shook my head. A pause, then, “I can’t. Nobody can. I don’t know what’s injured him. A trap might’ve hurt him, or a fox might’ve gotten him. He might heal again, or he might not, ever.”
Thinking of her, I could not help imagining the precarious lives of the sea creatures, and those of humans like hers and mine.
That afternoon we came back through the coastal flat. It dawned on me that I had not even known the little girl’s name. Something told me it was the last time we would see each other, and I felt empty as if she were my own daughter about to say farewell to me for the last time. We were walking above the tide line, sometimes kicking up litter of sticks and seaweeds and shells, catching sight of crows pecking at dead crabs and sea refuse. The air was full of sounds of the stirring of wings, the sound of bird voices, of sweet pipings, and the occasional cries, like laughter, of newcome birds squeaking across the empty sky. These sounds marked the passage of time for me. Yet, for us, time was indeed measured by the sound of camp gongs, morning to dusk; for these shore creatures it was the rise and fall of tides.
Before we crossed the dune, where we parted ways, and she would get on home, going straight down the flat, I stopped and said to her, “I don’t know your name.”
“Hải Yến.”
Her voice was innocent, and she did not look surprised when I asked for her name.
“Pretty name,” I said, picturing the graceful swallow known for its tireless wings.
***
In the early morning I woke and went outside. The woman was not in the café. In the rear, Bích Nhi was washing herself by an earthen vat. The morning breeze was fresh. Her bare shoulders had a gentle slope as she bent to pour water over them. There was a scent of holy basil on the breeze. It came from the water she had boiled in a brass pan. She let me use the rest of it to wash myself. It was getting bright now and the kapok blossoms were crimson red against a blue sky. Something I had thought during the night while I dried myself came back to me.
“Is there anything around here I can do to make some extra money?” I asked her.
She wrapped herself around the shoulders with a towel. “In the marketplace, anh,” she said and pointed back over her shoulder toward the river. “Plenty of boats carry stuff to the market every day. They always need a helping hand to load and unload stuff.”
I thanked her. She said, “Anh can find a place to sleep at night in one of those boats.” She added that it was safer to sleep there, because the local security rarely searched the boats for those who possessed no travel passes. “When does your release paper expire, anh?”
“Soon,” I said. “I don’t intend to go back to Hồ Chí Minh City.”
The girl said goodbye and left after the woman owner returned. The woman told me which boat would take me to the seaside. By boat, she said, it would take half an hour.
As the boat pulled out she stood at the door waving. Over her the sign in red lettering said, “Pleasure Café.” I was thinking of some simple, down-to-earth name to replace it, then realized I was no longer living in the traditional society which I’d left all those years ago.
Toward the sea where the river emptied itself, the turbulent water roiled red. A mist was veiling the water. Heat was rising. In the bushes along the riverbank birds were keeping themselves away from the heat. One or two would fly out, hovering over river hemp shrubs yellow as corn.
It was eight in the morning when I found my way to the seaside and saw the dunes. Years before, I would arrive here about this time and rest on a dune, and the little girl who sold dumplings would soon appear. Now I sat alone, breathing in the briny air.
Wouldn’t it be a miracle to see Hải Yến, the little girl, crossing the sand flat, her bell tinkling? After all these years, was she still selling dumplings? I pictured her, an adult now, crossing the beach, a bell hung on her shoulder pole so that, upon hearing it, people would know who was coming. After a while I went down to the sandy flat when the sun was high. The green weed covering the rocks began to dry, turning the weed white and stringy, and the gulls stirred awake from their slumber and stepped gingerly along the cove’s rocks, probing for crabs and snails under the crinkly heaps of weed. An acrid odor hung over the drying rocks.
I waited for a long time until the sun became too hot and I returned to the town. To save money, I walked back.
For days I loitered in the marketplace and found odd jobs that paid me a modest sum. At night I slept in a boat whose owner was a man in his fifties. He ferried farm produce from those who grew crops year round. Sometimes I helped him load up his boat from a distant farmhouse and then unload sacks of produce at the town’s market. There were days I did not have time to visit the seaside, but I always thought about it. There were also days I sat on a dune with the sun in my eyes and watched the beach for the girl. She must be Bích Nhi’s age now. I would listen to the sound of the bell but hear none. The boom of waves came and went, a brief lull, and I could hear the soughing pine needles in the wind.
One early morning I found myself back on the beach after the high tide. There was no sign of rock-dwellers — the barnacles, the snails — only the gulls perching on ledges of rocks above the tide mark, their shapes white, yellow bills tucked into their breasts, dozing in the sun. I sat for a long time on a dune until my shirt became dried of sweat and my eyes tired from watching the empty white sand. Then, in the breeze, came the sound of a bell.
A girl shouldering two round baskets balanced on a pole appeared around the bend of a dune. She walked quick-footed, the bell clinking.
I left the dune and went down. I stood on the shore, feeling the spray of crashing waves on my face and on the sand several crabs were washed out of their burrows and kicking in the liquefying sand.
The girl came toward me. Her bell tinkled. She wore a bright orange blouse the color of the stains on the sea-facing rocks. She lifted her gaze and I could see her face now. I recognized her.
Image: Halongbucht by Horst Krieger, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Ask the Sea - June 6, 2023