Departure
Phanat Nikhom Refugee Camp, in Chonburi Province a couple of hours by bus southeast of Bangkok, is a temporary home - a sojourn - for 15,000 people, escapees who made their way into Thailand through the jungles from Cambodia, across the Mekong River from Laos, by sea from Vietnam. It is separated from the world outside by a barbed-wire fence, through which no one may enter or exit without proper documentation. At the gates are armed security personnel; and standing at certain points around the perimeter are wooden guard towers, to prevent unauthorized traffic into or out of the camp. Under Thai law, the purpose of the camp is containment and segregation, the people inside being considered illegal aliens. Here, they wait for passage onward - for departure - in shacks made from tin and plywood and cardboard; on narrow, dusty streets with signposts named for their dreams: California Street, Texas Road, New York Avenue. Here, they can say, they already have an address in America.
Vinh is a young man, aged twenty-one, from Saigon. He lives in the camp with his mother, and a sister aged nineteen. His father is dead, killed in the last year of the war. He never knew his father, except as a black-and-white face in old photographs with his mother. In one photo, he looks a great deal like Vinh looks now, in a white shirt and black trousers, hair combed back, sunglasses and a cigarette like a French movie star from the 1950’s. Vinh’s mother, much younger than today, is dressed in a flowery white ao dai and smiling softly. Together in front of the Hotel Continental, they lean against the seat of a Lambretta motor scooter, holding hands in black and white. This photo, Vinh keeps in an envelope in his shirt pocket, always.
Today at Phanat Nikhom, he sits across the table drinking iced coffee, smoking a cigarette - without pretense - in much the same way as Rudolph Valentino might if he were sitting in a refugee camp; and speaking in slow, measured English that makes even his grammatical errors seem elegant. He, his mother, and his sister have been in the camp now for three years. When he was eighteen, they escaped Vietnam by boat, from a point along the coast near Vung Tau. On the sea, they were blown off course in a storm; and without food or fresh water they drifted for days and nearly died. Spotted by a passing freighter, they were guided into port on the Thai coast, where they were taken into custody and brought to Phanat Nikhom.
Not long after their arrival here, Vinh was arrested and interned in the camp jail for three weeks, after failing to show proper respect to a duly-appointed official of His Majesty’s government. In jail, his head was shaved and he was beaten almost daily, until his sister came and talked the guards into letting him go, somehow - he wonders, how she managed to convince them. Next to his left eye, there is still a scar from a Thai boot. Now, he says, whenever he hears anyone speaking the Thai language, it reminds him of the guards in the jail, beating him; and laughing from behind as he and his sister walked away.
It could have been worse, he says - other people have seen much worse. One girl he knows of here in the camp, only sixteen years old, was on a boat that was attacked by pirates off the Thai coast. She was raped by twelve different men. Now, she talks to no one. Another woman he heard about, in a different attack on a different boat, was raped while her husband was forced to watch. When he tried to stop the men from raping her, they cut off his head in front of her; then continued. Later, after she arrived at Phanat Nikhom she hanged herself.
Vinh hopes that he and his family will be going soon. He has an uncle in New Orleans, Louisiana who is sponsoring them to go, he says, so it shouldn’t be long. He feels sure it won’t be long. He seems to already know a great deal about America. He has read a lot about it, he says, about places and people in America; and he likes American music, especially Elvis. “In Vietnam,” he says, “even people who have never been anywhere know about Elvis.”
Each morning, he and his sister go and stand with the others at the bulletin boards to look for their names on the departure list. Each afternoon, they go and wait in line at the postal window, to see if there is any news from their uncle. He feels sure that their names will be on the list soon. He feels sure they will be going soon.
Vinh takes a long, deep draw from his cigarette, and looks out at the trucks and bicycles passing on the road just beyond the fence. At a table nearby, a girl in a pink dress is humming a song from America in 1963.
“When I get to America,” he says, “I want to go to Memphis and see Graceland.”
NEXT>>>