Escape from Saigon (3 page)

“I have only fragments of memory of what happened after that,” Long says. “For several days, relatives crowded the house. They prepared my mother's body for a Buddhist burial in the village cemetery. They wrapped her in white cloth and put a ball of sweet rice in her mouth. It had coins pressed into it. This was to give her food and money for her journey into the spirit world. There was a funeral procession through the village, and I remember the smell of sandalwood and incense. Everyone was chanting and crying. I didn't understand what was happening.”

Adding to the horror of losing his mother were the whispered concerns of relatives who feared for her soul because she had taken her own life. They spoke of the judgment she was now enduring in the afterlife, and the difficult journey she must make out of darkness. They worried that because she died in a negative state of mind, her unhappiness would travel with her when she was reborn into a new life, and cause her misfortune.

Long was frightened for his mother. Was she suffering? Ba and his aunts and uncles tried to comfort him, but his heart was filled with misery. He had never felt so alone.

“My mother had been my whole world. Once she had tried to give me away. Now she had abandoned me forever. How could she do this to me? Did she really love me?”

Another worry loomed larger than anything else. Without his mother to care for him, he wondered over and over, “What will happen to me?”

2

A N
EW
L
IFE IN
S
AIGON

Soon after his mother's death, Ba told Long she was taking him back to Saigon to live. “I don't know why we left our family in the village,” he says. “Life was difficult for us in the city.”

They moved into a one-room apartment that opened onto an alley. Though Ba was elderly, she worked long hours at several jobs to support her six-year-old grandson and herself.

It was still hard to afford food. Just a year and a half earlier, when Long had lived in Saigon with his mother, the city was full of opportunity. But the United States had not been able to win the Vietnam War. After nearly a decade of trying, the government had yielded to pressure from the American people to bring their soldiers home. They were leaving the South Vietnamese to try to win the war without American troop support. When Ba and Long arrived in 1972, the withdrawal was under way. Many businesses in Saigon had catered to the Americans. As the soldiers gradually left, unemployment increased and inflation slowly drove up prices.

Ba stretched every penny. She was an excellent cook. Long thought she could make anything taste good, and she always made the hot, spicy stir-fry dishes and noodle bowls he loved. But too soon his stomach begged for more than the small helpings she was able to give him.

While Ba worked, Long was on his own. In the mornings, he attended classes at the neighborhood primary school. He was a good student and discovered a special interest in math. When school ended at noon, he hung around the streets with neighborhood boys. They played games like hide-and-seek, tag, and war. They spun tops and played marbles. They went to the river and watched the fishing boats, barges, and ferries. Sometimes on their way to a park where they liked to play, they passed by a movie theater and stopped to look at the posters, wishing aloud that they had a few coins so they could go inside.

More than anything else, Long dreamed of having a bicycle. Then he could go where he wanted, and go quickly. Maybe he would be a cyclo (
seeklo
) driver when he grew up. He would pedal his bike around Saigon all day, looking for customers who would sit on the low seat attached to the front of the bike and pay him to take them where they needed to go.

The streets he liked best were the ones built by the French during the hundred years they had occupied Vietnam. Tall, arching trees banked the wide boulevards, and wrought-iron gates and balconies decorated the pastel-colored buildings. Long admired the Catholic cathedral that dominated one intersection, and wondered what it was like inside.

But he was rarely in that part of the city. He and Ba lived in a very poor area. At least they had an apartment. Some poor people lived on the Saigon River in tiny boats called sampans or in makeshift shanties that clung to the river's banks. Whenever fighting became fierce in the countryside, refugees poured into the city, looking for shelter and food. Many had to crowd into rickety slum apartments already stuffed with people.

Long often saw homeless children living on the streets, struggling to find enough to eat and sleeping anywhere they could. He knew they were orphans, and he felt sorry for them. Because he had his grandmother, it did not occur to Long that he too was an orphan or that, like many of the street children, he was a mixed-blood child—an Amerasian, with an Asian mother and an American father. Nor did it occur to him that these children were even more hungry than he was, even though he sometimes saw them trying to find small scraps of food in garbage cans—something he had never had to do.

With space in short supply, many Vietnamese in the 1960s lived in crowded conditions on sampans or in tiny shacks perched on stilts over the river. This is true even today

But like these children, food was his main interest. He always stopped to watch people order food from the many street vendors whose tiny food stands lined the sidewalks. How he wished he had money to do that. One specialty people ordered was
pho,
a flavorful noodle soup eaten for breakfast and throughout the day. Many people liked their soup served with spring rolls: thin, soft sheets of rice paper wrapped around fillings of fine noodles and slivers of vegetables. Sometimes they were steamed, and sometimes fried crispy. Either way, they were dipped in tiny cups of
nuoc mam,
a spicy fermented fish sauce.

Another street delicacy was squares of custard tied up in strong green leaves so they looked like exquisite little packages. Some vendors sold French bread and soft drinks. Long's favorite street food was a meat sandwich made with fresh French bread. Ba bought this sandwich for him one time as a special treat. Long thought it was one of the best things he had ever eaten. He watched enviously, his mouth watering, whenever he saw someone buying one.

Eating at an outdoor stall is still a daily treat for many Vietnamese

His favorite place to visit was the large open-air market near his neighborhood. Few people had refrigerators or freezers, so they bought fresh food every day at the street markets. There were always dozens of kinds of fresh fish, and even live eels, snakes, turtles, and pigeons—all considered delicacies. “Dee-licious!” the vendors called out to shoppers.

Long usually stopped to watch the caged pigs and the ducks, geese, and chickens tied together in bundles. He wondered if they knew they were destined to be someone's dinner. Once the animals were purchased, some customers took them home alive. Others made a selection, and the vendor butchered the luckless creature on the spot. This was accompanied by an explosion of squawking or squealing, followed by the pungent odor of blood. Long was repulsed and fascinated all at once.

He enjoyed watching customers haggle over purchases. He knew from shopping with Ba that no one ever expected to pay the asking price, and he waited with anticipation when the bargaining started. People always stopped to watch, and some even participated in the often heated negotiations. Once both sides agreed on a price, everyone was full of smiles.

Nothing tantalized Long's senses as much as the market. He loved all the colors, smells, and textures. He inhaled the scents of all the different spices and herbs, like lemon grass, ginger, cilantro, coriander, cinnamon, and mint. He liked the interesting textures of the mounds of rice and coffee beans, and all the varieties of handmade noodles. There were many types of chilies, tofu, and vegetables. The fruits, with their varied colors, shapes, and textures, were his favorite. He could name them all: longans, jackfruit, coconuts, kumquats, melons, papayas, pineapples, mangos, lychees, persimmons, rambutans, and many types of bananas.

But the market always increased his hunger. When his friends were with him, sooner or later one of them snatched something, usually a piece of fruit. When that happened, someone would yell, “Run!” and they would all take off, shrieking with laughter. Later they shared the stolen gem, rarely getting more than a small bite each.

“The fun part was being chased by an angry vendor,” Long says. “We never got caught.”

Sudden rainstorms were a daily event, even when it wasn't the rainy season. They began with no warning, dropping sheets of rain that sent everyone scurrying for shelter. Vendors quickly covered their stands in plastic. Cyclo drivers hastily draped coverings over passengers, and anyone with an umbrella pulled it out. Long and his friends either huddled under a store awning or played in the warm rain. It would stop as suddenly as it had started, and the boys would go about their business.

All the moisture kept flowers blooming and grass a lush green. But the high humidity slowed everyone down, and sometimes in the heat of the afternoon, the boys looked for hidden places in the bustling city where they could take naps.

When his grandmother came home, always exhausted from her day, Long greeted her, and they settled into their evening together. Long helped her prepare dinner and then clean up. As their room grew shadowy, Ba lit the large oil lamp and Long did his schoolwork. He enjoyed talking to Ba about her day or about things he had seen on the street. Although he missed his mother very much, he grew increasingly attached to his grandmother.

When it was Tet, the three-day New Year's celebration that occurred in late January or early February, Ba made sure Long had a new outfit of colorful silk. Ba wore her
ao dai (ow zai),
the traditional high-necked, long-sleeved tunic, slit to the waist on both sides, and worn over full silk slacks. The two of them said extra prayers at the temple and also at the small altar in their apartment, for at Tet, the belief is that the ancestors come home to visit, and Ba wanted to make them welcome.

In the city, Tet was far more elaborate than it had been in the village. “Tet was like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July, all rolled into one,” Long says. “We had celebrations and parades, sparklers, fireworks to ward off evil spirits, ringing bells, and special foods. My very favorite event was the elaborate dragon parade. We all wore costumes for that. On the actual New Year's day, everyone—no matter when they were born during the year—celebrated his or her birthday and officially turned another year older.”

Whenever she could, Ba took Long to the neighborhood temple. “I liked to see the large statue of the Buddha and hear the chanting of the monks,” he says. “My grandmother taught me the Buddhist beliefs—that you strive always to be good, that you show compassion toward others, and that you practice patience in all things.”

Long realized that patience might ease, but did not eliminate, their struggles. “I knew Ba was concerned about our situation. We were trying to stretch our rice further and further. But even though we sometimes went hungry, we took food offerings to the temple, where we lit incense and prayed for my mother. I did not have a clear understanding of where her soul was or whether she was struggling, but I hoped I was helping her by leaving the food. I was angry at her for leaving me and very sad that she was dead.

“I would have done anything to bring her back. I could feel a hole in my heart in the place where she should be.”

*   *   *

For more than a year, Ba and Long lived in the tiny apartment and managed to get by. But times grew harder.

“I could see the worry in my grandmother's eyes,” Long says. “With the American soldiers gone, many in South Vietnam feared a takeover by North Vietnam. No one knew just what that would mean for us. The city seemed safe, but who really knew? We saw jeeps and military trucks and soldiers all the time. We had to be off the streets by eleven at night because we had an enforced curfew. Most nights, we heard shelling outside the city.”