My Mother

By: David Lee
Translated by: Christi Publishing Inc., USA
Edited by: De Tran, USA

I remember Mum as a loving and devoted mother of seven children.  She enjoyed cooking, cleaning and making clothes for us.

After the fall of Saigon, things changed drastically for our family under the communist regime.  Wanting a better life for their children, my parents decided we would escape from Vietnam by boat, but not all together.  Their reasoning was that, if a tragedy struck at sea or anywhere else, the family’s losses, although still heartbreaking, might be fewer.

The first to go were two of my sisters, aged nineteen and twenty-two.  They escaped in February 1979 and soon sent word back that they were safe in Malaysia.  Gaining confidence, my parents then sent me together with two other sisters.  I was eleven; my sisters were thirteen and twenty-four.

You can imagine my parents’ consternation when, only two days after we left, they heard a rumour that our boat had sunk and there were no survivors.  But the three of us did make it to Malaysia.  My older sister tried to get the news through to our parents, but they did not receive it.  They had not given up hope, however, and after two months without hearing from us, they felt compelled to do something about finding us.  A big factor in this decision was that my mother had been diagnosed with cervical cancer and she feared she might never see us again.

Their plan was that Mum would escape from Vietnam with my youngest sister, who was aged seven, while Dad stayed behind with my brother in case we returned.  So in June 1979 the two of them and Mum’s older sister set off from Vietnam on a 24-metre wooden boat packed with more than two hundred people.

During their fifteen days at sea this group suffered brutal and shameful experiences and lost five people, including two children.

The engine of the boat failed early on their fourth day at sea and, now driftung aimlessly, they were easy prey for pirates.  The second of the three attacks they experienced was the most vicious.  On this occasion the pirates, who numbered around twenty, forced all of the men off the escape boat and onto their own vessel; then, in full view of the women and children, they stripped the men naked at gunpoint, lined them up, and forced their jaws open.  When they found gold teeth, they yanked them out with pliers.

After this grisly work, a few pirates kept guard over the men while their cohorts returned to the escape boat and herded the women and children down onto the lower deck, where, to their horror, the pirates harassed and repeatedly raped the young women for hour after hour.

The pirates returned to their own boat towards late afternoon and sailed away, pushing their prisoners overboard as they went.  It was up to them to swim back to their own vessel – if they could.  One survivor later reflected: ‘As evening fell, the sea was calm and the stars were bright in the sky, and yet we felt so despairing.  That night our boat was filled with mourning and pain.  It was horrible.’

After that, Mum had nightmares in which her three missing children – my sisters and I – endured a similar fate.  She prayed and prayed for our safety.  Huddled and sobbing in the hold while clutching her fragile and exhausted little daughter, she admonished herself over and over for sending us on such a perilous journey.

On their fifteenth day at sea a Norwegian naval ship found them and gave them food and water.  Then, during a violent storm, they towed the boat to Kuku, an uninhabited island in Indonesia.

It was a terrible situation for Mum.  The complete lack of communication with the outside world meant she now had no way of finding out about her missing children, or even of letting Dad know she had made it to Indonesia.

While they were drifting Mum had fallen ill, and she died within weeks, on 31 July 1979, at the age of forty-three.  Her physical pain had been dreadful, but the pain of losing some of her children, as she supposed, and the guilt over leaving her little daughter with seemingly no prospects for a better future, were agonising.

For many years, my family dreamt about Mum, and soon after hearing of her death I formed the desire to find her grave.  For more than ten years, I sent letters to organisations in Indonesia trying to get some information about the island, and how I might get there.  Finally, in 1995, I received a letter from the Tracing Service of the Indonesian Red Cross with the advice that it would be impossible to find the grave because the names on the grave markers that had been placed there in 1979 were now indecipherable.

I had told many people of my desire to find my mother’s grave, and one day a member of my staff showed me a website that told the story of a Vietnamese woman named Carina Hoang who had escaped in 1979 and had been living on Kuku Island when my mother was there.  Furthermore, she had returned to Indonesia in 1998 to find the remains of one of her cousins, who had died there at about the same time as Mum.

I emailed Carina immediately to ask her how I could get to Kuku.  She explained that when she and her brothers had gone to Kuku ten years before they were lucky to be in the right place at the right time.  Like me, they were not able to get any information about Kuku before they took their trip, but once they were in Indonesia they were given lifts by military pilots, by navy captains and by fishermen – just ‘by luck’.  She promised to contact me when she had any new information.  Carina had been very helpful but had not been able to point the way for me, and I was disappointed once again.

A year and a half later, I was surprised to receive a call from Carina inviting me to join her and a group of Vietnamese people on a journey to Kuku.  I accepted immediately.

The trip was being organised for April 2009 by a non-profit organisation, based in Melbourne, Australia.  There were twenty-two people including my father-in-law and me.  We were all boat people, now living in America, Australia, France, and Sweden, and most of us had lived on Kuku.  The others were also searching for graves of their loved ones.

During the months of waiting for the trip, I was very anxious.  The same questions kept coming into my mind: Would Mum’s grave still be there?  How could I find it?  How would I recognise it?  I asked my little sister, but she had no idea where the grave was because she had been too young to attend the burial.  I asked my aunt, but she could not remember much: the whole experience had been so horrible that she had chosen not to think about it.  She was able to tell me, however, that Mum had been buried beneath a big tree standing on its own with many bushes around it, and that it was the only grave at that spot.  She had written Mum’s name on a little wooden plaque.

The day finally came.  I met Carina for the first time at Singapore International airport.  We hugged, and it felt as if we had known each other a long time.  Her warmth and confidence made me feel a lot less apprehensive about the whole enterprise.  Carina’s sister Mimi was also part of the group.  She had lived on Kuku with Carina when she was twelve years old and had not been back.  We got along very well; both of them were very friendly, helpful, and caring.

Two of the families had themselves buried their loved ones on Kuku, so they knew what the graves they were seeking looked like, but even so, they were worried that they would not be able to find them.  After hearing that, I said to Carina that I felt my chances of finding Mum’s grave were very slim, but at least I would have been to the place where she died.  Carina encouraged me not to give up hope, and suggested that I pray to Mum and ask her to guide me to the grave.

I had brought with me many items such as paper money and gold paper to be burnt for the people buried there who had not been prayed for since the island was abandoned, so that they could reincarnate.

The day we started our search we were divided in three small groups, each with the task of helping a family find the grave they were looking for.  Carina and Mimi were in my group, which had the aim of finding my mother’s grave.

Carina suggested that we head for the creek, as she recalled that many boat people were buried around there when refugees first arrived on the island.  We became tired from walking through the jungle in the heat when we decided to have a rest in an open area that we came upon.  There we saw five graves, all in a mess and none with a tombstone.

Then Carina noticed another grave behind a tree in a corner of the clearing, away from the others.  She went to see if there was a name, but all she could find was an arrangement of smooth stones.  A few minutes later, as we were about to leave the area and continue our search, Carina decided to go back to the grave in the corner.  This time she carefully examined each stone and noticed that one of them was partially buried in the ground and was rectangular in shape rather than round like the rest of them.  My father-in-law noticed her struggling to pull this rock out of the ground and dashed over to help her.  They found that it was indeed a tombstone, with Chinese characters engraved on it in red.  Carina poured some water over it to clean it, and my father-in-law read out the name, which neither of them recognised.  I heard him say the name, but was not absolutely sure I’d heard it correctly, so I ran over and asked him to repeat it.  There was no point in my looking at the stone, as I could not read Chinese.

When he read it again, I pulled out of my backpack a piece of paper that my older sister had sent me with Mum’s name and her birth and death dates written on it in Chinese characters.  All the characters on the paper matched those on the tombstone.  I fell on my knees and wept.

I learned later that this tombstone, which of course we had not known about, had been set up by a cousin of Mum’s who paid someone to do the engraving.  The cousin had been in another refugee camp on a nearby island.

As we excavated the grave, I recognised Mum’s clothes.  I took them to the ocean and washed them.  For so many years, my mum had washed my clothes for me, and now I was doing it for her.

I had done it! After twenty long years, I had finally found Mum’s grave!

David owns restaurants.  He lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and three children.
David Lee

This story excerpted from the book "Boat People, personal stories from the Vietnamese exodus 1975 -1996" edited by Carina Hoang