Only the Heart (11 page)

11

BREATHING DARK

TOAN'S STORY

Kieu was my friend.

Her family — or what was left of it — had been on the island for a few months when we arrived and she was about the first kid my own age that I met. Kieu lived in one of the most run-down areas of the camp with her older brother, Diem. Diem was about twenty-one — fifteen years older than Kieu — and he'd fled the country with Quyen, his wife, and his little sister when the new authorities began snooping around asking questions about the black market.

So they were at the camp, and we were at the camp, and Kieu became my friend.

We played together, swam in the sea, and even took our afternoon naps together during the heat of the day, sometimes on the mats inside her brother 's hut, but more often in the small shed of a dwelling my father had managed to “buy”, just off the main west-east alley of the camp. It was a cramped, single-room tin shack, with the numerous cracks sealed using old rags and papers that kept out the wind and leaked in anything but the lightest rain. But it was home.

Often Linh joined us for our sleep-time. At eight, she was probably getting to old, but I think in a way she was jealous of my new friendship. In Rach Gia we'd always had lots of friends and there had never been any question of jealousy, but the camp was different. The trip had thrown us together in a way that our old life never had, and I guess, after all that had happened, she was feeling a lot more vulnerable. At the time I didn't notice any change, except that she used to boss Kieu around.

Kieu was pretty. Even at six years old, my mother said, you could tell she was going to be beautiful — in spite of the scar. It was a vivid, crescent-shaped slash across her right cheek, which she hid instinctively by allowing her long hair to hang loose over her face. She was only a baby when the shrapnel tore through the side of her parent's hut in Long Hai, killing her mother and father and leaving her screaming in her cot — a two-year-old victim whose life was tom apart in that instant even more permanently than her flesh.

Her brother was lucky. He was seventeen and in the army, trying to avoid getting killed around U Minh. Otherwise she might have had no one left in her family at all.

And she was lucky she had him. He cared for her like a father, and made sure she never went hungry. And he always seemed to have something new for her to wear. Not always
brand
new, but clean and pretty. I remember wondering how he could manage to get hold of things that many people in the camp only dreamed of, but that was only until my father took us on our first trip out of the camp …

Pulau Bisa was about ten minutes from the mainland by boat, but when the tide was low the water was so shallow in parts of the strait that you could walk to shore in about half an hour. Of course, the guards had to be looking the other way, but no one really took to much notice. For them it was just a job and we kept them pretty well supplied with comforts, so it wasn't a job they took all that seriously.

After all, it wasn't as if we actually had anywhere to go if we got off the island. Not anywhere permanent. We might make it to the city and trade our small treasures for some extra supplies, but no one in the camp had the kind of wealth that could have supported them for any length of time in the real world. Even if you knew enough Malay or Chinese to pass as a native, eventually you'd have to make your way back.

You see, for all its drawbacks, the camp was really the only place where a refugee could survive. It wasn't flash, god knows, but we were given survival rations and some clothing — and not always by the government. The wealthier Chinese-Malaysian families would often donate supplies, sending them by boat to the camp wharf, and handing them out to the lucky families who happened to be in the right place at the right time. And at least everyone at the camp spoke the same language.

So the strict isolation of the island was only cosmetic for popular consumption. And there was a constant stream of the more adventurous “inmates” who made the trip across to the mainland, either by boat, if they could afford the bribes, or by foot, if they wanted to risk the tides.

And they all knew the unwritten rules: Back before eleven, leave a donation at the guard-post; nothing said. Back after eleven, expect a beating. Whether it was because the guards. were a little more drunk around midnight, or because they figured that the unofficial “ curfew“ kept their charges from getting too adventurous, drawing down official attention on them, I don't know, but I remember seeing Kieu' s brother one morning after he misjudged the curfew, and it wasn't pretty.

But like I said, I wasn't aware of any of it, until my father decided to take us along on one of his excursions.

Now I knew that my parents disappeared at times, though they didn't mention where, and I knew that things sometimes appeared in the hut in the evening that hadn't been there when I'd woken up that morning, but what can I say? I was six years old. At that age you don't think about things too much. It was only when they decided to take us with them that I realised where they went when they left us with Quyen for the day.

We boarded the boat in the early morning. For me it was a great adventure. I looked back at the boat's wake, stretching away in the direction of the island, then I ran back up to the front and watched the approaching mainland.

Linh sat rigid in the centre of the boat, and for once she allowed my mother to caress her hair. Maybe “allowed” is the wrong word. She looked so scared that I wonder now if she even realised it was happening. Loking back, I think the only reason she came withu sat all was that she was scared we might not come back, and she was more afraid of being left alone than she was of drowning in the sea.

I still don't know why my father took us along. Perhaps he'd grown more confident, perhaps he just wanted to giveusa treat-a day away from the smells and the over-crowding. As it turned out,it proved to be good training fora later trip;one that would prove far more important than a minor shopping excursion.

*

LINH'S STORY

Toan was excited. As I sat there rigidly, staring straight ahead, feeling Aunt Hoa's comforting hands rubbing my scalp and the off shore breeze cooling the sweat on my face, he kept drifting in and out of my field of vision, muttering to himself and stopping occasionally to stare out over the railing at whatever caught his attention.

I
wasn't excited. I was scared. Partly it was the water and the memories that it conjured up. Recent memories that had ruined forever the pleasure I used to get out of spending time on the sea. But it was more than that.

We were going ashore, leaving the island, and I'd heard the stories — what happened tothose who were caught away from the camp.

Kieu' s brother, Diem, was still carg the reminders of his conversation with the camp guards after one of his excursions, but that was only minor compared with the tales of what happened if the villagers or the local authorities realised where you were from.

It wasn't like we'd been given any reason — not directly, at least — to fear the Malaysians. In fact, apart from the guards, who sometimes took their role a bit too seriously, the only real contact we'd had with the Malaysian people since we'd arrived were the occasional visits from politicians and officials and the irregular boatloads of supplies donated by the government or the local families.

But that didn't stop the rumours. A camp is like a small town, and what someone overheard someone telling someone about what they heard someone else say … Well, you get the idea. It stopped a lot of the inmates from taking the risk and making the trip across.

The one we were making.

It hadn't stopped Diem, and it certainly hadn't stopped my aunt and uncle, and if I'd been old enough to think logically about it, the fact that they considered it safe enough to bring us along this time should have clued me in to the idea that maybe the stories of beatings and robberies were exaggerations. In the end, most stories are.

But it didn't, and all I knew was that we were headed for Janganoon. And I was scared.

Janganoon was like a strange new world. Although we'd been right next door to the city when we were in the staging camp, it was the first time that Toan or I had actually been there. I'd been to Saigon many times, but suddenly there were things all around me that had never been a part of my old life. Huge shops, supermarkets where people served themselves and the goods were organised in aisles. It was so unlike my grandfather ‘s store, where everything was everywhere and a customer just pointed to what they wanted and you served them.

Here, you served yourself — if you could afford toand the choice was amazing.

Anyway, we weren't there just to shop. On the long bus-ride from the coast, I'd overheard my uncle whispering to Aunt Hoa. They were sitting in the seat directly in front of mine, trying to keep their voices down, and speaking in Chinese instead of Vietnamese so that they wouldn't standout. It seemed like half the population of Malaysia could speak Chinese, but Vietnamese …That would have been a dead give away. Growing up with my grandparents, we had all been bilingual from the day we could speak at all, and I guess that was the only reason they had been able to risk bringing us along in the first place.

I was listening, but my uncle caught me in the corner of his eye and stopped in mid-sentence, winking at my aunt and changing the subject. Whatever they were discussing was a surprise, and eavesdropping was going to do me no good. So I just sat back in my seat and concentrated on not being bus-sick.

Now, surrounded by the sights and sounds and smells of the city, I watched them bartering with a gold-dealer, trying to raise the price he was offering for one of my aunt's last precious pieces. It was a buyer's market and my aunt looked disappointed, but they accepted the money and left the shop. There was really no alternative.

The supermarket was like something out of a story. I don't suppose it would have been anywhere near as big as your average K-mart, but to my eight-year-old eyes, which had never seen a K-mart, it was magical. I kept stopping in the middle of the aisle to stare at all the rows of products they had for sale, and my aunt had to keep moving me along. Toan was more interested in rung up and down the polished floor and sliding to a stop.

I watched my uncle smiling, and I noticed the look he gave my aunt. There had been so little time to enjoy just being a family. And I guess they were savouring the thrill we were going to get when they unveiled their surprise. The real reason they had brought us along.

That afternoon was the first time Toan or I ever saw a movie …

*

28 July 1977
Janganoon, Malaysia

TOAN

Up on the screen, giant faces shout in Chinese. The film is a comedy and very funny, if the reaction of most of the audience is any indication, but in the centre of the eighth raw, surrounded by the shadowy figures in the darkness, two young children sit silently, mouths open, oblivious to the laughter all around them, staring at the apparition that appeared out of nowhere a few minutes earlier.

With an effort of will, Toan tears his eyes from the vision and stares at Linh. She is rapt, barely breathing, and he can see the coloured reflections dancing in her eyes, and moving like living shadows across the pale skin of her face. They have stepped out of the real world of hunger and death, and left their fears at the door. Here in the dark is a world of magic and warmth and laughter. And escape.

A chord is struck, a connection forged.

The villain falls, the audience cheers. And as Toan turns back towards the huge, grimacing figure, the seed is sown. The audience laughs, he laughs with them, but the magic is at work within him, growing …

*

TOAN'S STORY

I don't know when I first thought I might like to try acting. It wasn't something I grew up thinking about, even though I was totally hooked on movies.

Funny thing is, I was never particularly impressed with the tv but that was where I ended up getting my start. I watched it, of course; it was one of the first things my parents bought in Australia, once we'd set ourselves up in our new home.

As usual, my father had his reasons for buying it, apart from just entertainment.

“If we are going to fit in,” he told my mother, “we have to speak the language, and the sooner the better. I want the children surrounded by it, at home as well as at school. They have to hear it spoken all the time.”

So we got tv. And we watched it even before we could understand a word of what was being said. It even became our electronic babysitter, at times, when my parents were working in a factory eighteen and nineteen hours a day in the early times, desperately trying to set up a future for us all. But for all the time I sat in front of it, between doing the chores and the compulsory hours of homework, it never affected me the way movies did. I never forgot the effect of that first experience in Janganoon, and I never lost the thrill of hiding inside the breathing dark of the theatre and giving myself willingly to the world of dreams that came to life on the wide screen before me.

There must have been some grain of a desire there somewhere, because I remember the feeling, like a movement in the pit of my stomach, when I read the ad in the Vietnamese newspaper.

My dad was always keen for us to fit in, to speak English as well as anyone in the street, but that didn't mean we were allowed to skimp on our own languages. We had classes on weekends, we read the Vietnamese newspapers, and we had to be able to quote from them on demand. My father took after
his
father; he had never believed in the concept of free time.

That was how I came across the ad. Stuck in between offers of “by the hour“ piece-work in home sewing or ironing that the slave-drivers of the clothing trade used to hook their desperate victims, this ad stood out, because although it was in Vietnamese, like the others, the paper had run it under an English logo:
Creative Casting and Management
.