Indefinite Ocean: Adventures of a Fifteen-Year-Old Vietnamese Fugitive

By D. J. Trinh

Imagine growing up in a land where your government proudly tricks and imprisons its own citizens where city officers rob and confiscate their citizens houses out of greedlegally where the local authorities monitor not only how much food each family can eat, but what they will eat.

After four years of living under the brutal Vietnamese Communist government, one brave young girl has had enough. At fifteen, she sets out for the most unforgettable journey of her life, all alone and with only three sets of clothes to her name. Her faith, optimism, and humor give her the strength to fight for her freedom. Generous strangers step up to help her through the many dangers she faces, both from the elements and other people who do not want to see her escape.

For one courageous young Vietnamese woman, hers is the adventure of a new lifetime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462017171

D. J. Trinh

D. J. Trinh was born and raised in Vietnam, fleeing the country after the Vietnam War. After immigrating to America, she earned her bachelor’s degree in architecture from California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. She is currently working on her master’s degree in gerontology. She is married and has two wonderful children.

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Part 1

Surviving in Hell on Earth

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Chapter 1

The Beginning of the End

It all started on the morning of my eleventh birthday, the eighth day of April in 1975. The day started out very much like any ordinary day. I was in fifth grade attending an all-girls’ Catholic school run by a French convent inside Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam. That morning, I was really excited to pass out candies to my classmates to celebrate my birthday. My mind was so full of excitement I could hardly concentrate on the lecture.

My math teacher was standing by the blackboard trying to explain how to find the time two speeding trains would meet if they started out at two different times going in two different directions at two different speeds. She was a very sweet teacher who was in her third trimester of pregnancy. Her stomach protruded so much that it often blocked my view of the blackboard, and today was no exception. I gave a deep sigh. As excited as we were about her pregnancy in the beginning of the school year, her new figure had been slowly distracting me from listening to my favorite subject, for I could not see even half of what she was trying to explain when she used the blackboard.

My eyes drifted away from the blackboard out the window. I sat in the front row near the window on the left side of the classroom; thus, it was always easy for me to be distracted by chirping noises of a whole flock of sparrows trying to peck on the dates dropping from a date palm next to the windowsill. The large white Plumeria tree in the middle of our playground bloomed beautifully this year with more buds than I ever remembered, although I was never fond of its sap and fragrance. The sun’s glare that morning was very peculiar, with a very dull yellow glow. (Now that I live in California, where we have quite a few wildfires, I understand what that glare was. It was the glare of the sun shining through the smoke of fire.)

My teacher talked away, jotting down numbers on the blackboard, where her giant stomach was again covering most of my view. I tried to sit up straight and concentrate on the last part of her explanation, hoping to catch the last few phrases to help me understand what I had missed, yet her belly was still in my way. I finally gave up and continued to drift off back to my home, where I would have a birthday cake tonight and blow out the eleven colorful candles. I would make a big wish and gulp the biggest gulp of air, to make sure I could blow all eleven candles out at the same time.

VROOOOOOM!

Suddenly, a frighteningly loud roar of an aircraft startled us as it scooped down close to the top of our school—so close we thought it was going to land right on top of our school building. My daydream instantly disappeared. All of us turned our heads toward the window, trying to figure out what was going on. Within a few seconds and before we could figure out what was going on, we were attacked with another series of deafening explosions.

BOOOOM! BOOOOM! BOOOOM!

The blast of the air pressure from the explosions sent all of our papers in the air. What had happened? Were we all dead? No! We were still sitting here in the classroom. I looked around shocked; and to my surprise, all my classmates had the same stunned look, until fear crept onto their faces. My teacher screamed at the top of her lungs, Get down under the tables, children!

I quickly scooted down under my desk and covered my ears with both my hands. The following series of explosions sent everything we had in the class in all different directions. (In my school, all of the classrooms had two rows of giant windows on opposite sides that were fully opened to let fresh air in. Thus, we had no protection when it came to outside noises.) Even when the explosions stopped, the noise continued. The shutters banged loudly against each other, ready to come off their hinges. The three ceiling fans shook violently over the tops of our heads, swinging with such force that I could imagine them flying down and chopping us up. It seemed like forever before all those frightful noises stopped. Then, I heard my deskmate start to cry.

Are you okay? I asked.

She shook her head but did not say a word. I patted her back and looked down. I suddenly understood why she cried—it was not because of the explosions, but because she had wet her underpants. I quickly helped her out from underneath the desk and she ran off to the bathroom, both hands covering her face in embarrassment. When we got back, we found the whole class was in chaos. We were so busy wondering what had just happened that we did not notice the teacher had been very quiet.

Finally, one of our classmates spotted her under her desk; her eyes and mouth were wide open in horror. It took four of us to help her out from under her desk since she was so unbalanced due to her large stomach. She was completely terrified and trembled violently. One of my classmates ran to get her a glass of water.

Outside the window, the dull yellow sun rays were no longer yellow. Instead, they were black with thick smoke, and the air had an overwhelming odor of gunpowder.

A few minutes later, the class resumed. My teacher had finally gotten herself together again and said, Children, we will start our lesson again. Whatever it was, we will find out soon enough; but for right now, I need all of you to concentrate on our lesson.

She started her lecture again, except her voice seemed to be distracted, which did not help us to concentrate on the lecture at all. One by one, we started seeing chauffeurs and maids and parents coming over to pick up their children. It was then that we learned what was going on. Our Independence Hall (like the White House here where the presidents live) was being bombed by the Viet Cong (VCs), the Vietnamese Communists; and our school was less than a mile away from it. By noon, school was dismissed.

I packed my schoolbag and followed my best friend Anh out to the gate. Anh was the smartest kid I knew in class. She was very tall and skinny, with her hair always braided in one long braid in the back. It revealed her tiny, fair face that was way too small for her big brain. We stayed quiet walking next to each other for a long time, for each of us was busy trailing our own thoughts. After awhile, I asked her, Do you know what I am thinking?

Being the smartest kid in class, Anh always thought carefully before each sentence she spoke—unlike me, who just spits things out before my brain can double-check what I say.

I think you think the war is coming to an end, and I agree with you, totally. If they bombed the president’s house, wouldn’t you think that would be their last successful target?

I looked at her and nodded my head. I did not want her to know that the war had never occurred in my mind this whole time. What I was really thinking was that the birthday cake I was supposed to get tonight probably wasn’t going to happen. I hated Anh every time she sounded so smart like that. I pondered, trying to find something equally smart to answer her. All I could come up with was, I know. But why do they have to come and make a big bang right on my birthday?

Anh looked up and gave me a look as if saying, "In this serious situation, all you think about is your birthday?

I gave her an embarrassed smile and continued walking without daring to look at her. Maybe she was right. The war that we had been having forever was finally ending. The victory side was getting clearer in the picture now, and I knew it would not be our side. My father had been retired from being a high officer in the military on the Republican side of Vietnam for a couple of years now, and war was something we never discussed at home although we lived with an officer who had dealt with it since before I was even born.

Anh probably felt guilty about her dirty look earlier because she patted my shoulder and said, Don’t worry. You will have a birthday as usual tonight. She smiled as she turned away onto her street.

My family lived in a complex reserved for the high military officers who worked for the telecommunication division of the Vietnamese Army, and their families. It was a two-story structure on the right side, linked to a one-story building in front, making it into an L-shape. Right in the middle of it was our playground, the largest open ground in our neighborhood. We lived in one of the middle complex units on the second floor, looking down into the playground. All of the second-floor complexes were linked by a large walkway about ten feet wide. That was where my two brothers and I spent most of our time riding our little bikes and toy car from one side of the building to the other side, using it as our street.

Once I got home, I found my two brothers, Nhat-Dien and Thai-Dien, and my older sister Lam-Dien home with our live-in maid. We had all had similar experiences with the incident in the morning, for all our schools were located in the same vicinity. My mother was still at work. For a very tiny lady of four feet ten inches tall and weighing no more than eighty pounds, my mother was the toughest worker in the bus union to which she belonged. She owned a bus franchise that operated on a route inside Saigon. Her days started out at three or four o’clock in the morning and did not end until eight or nine at night. She worked harder than any of her employees, who were mostly men. And for that, they really respected her, regardless of her tiny size.

Mother was the main anchor of my family. She was very practical and functional, and ran the family like a tight ship without any frills or laces. As busy as she was, she would not rest on her days off. She would either run around helping her less fortunate older brother’s family or make clothes for us. I hardly knew what it was like to wear store-bought clothes, yet I never appreciated her work then until I became an adult. Self-indulgence and enjoyment never seemed to exist in my mother’s life.

My father was a totally different person. He was a well-built man, athletically and intellectually, with a temper on a short fuse. Up until the middle of 1973, my father was a lieutenant colonel for the telecommunication division of the Vietnamese Army. Occasionally, he would bring home some American friends. We would usually hide in our bedrooms when that happened, because we were so afraid of not knowing how to communicate with them. Father also had a lot of soldiers working for him. Somehow, those soldiers were much closer to us than Father ever was, and we often treated them like part of our family.

In the beginning of 1973, four parties—the National Liberation Front Party, called Viet Cong (VCs), and the conventional Communists of North Vietnam from the North; and the South Vietnamese Republican Party and the Americans from the South—got together for the Paris Conference in order to stop the fighting. My father was assigned to be the South Vietnamese Republican Party’s representative. After the cease-fire agreement was signed (which was also called the Paris Peace Agreement), the Americans could finally completely withdraw from Vietnam and so could the Communists from the north—leaving the two parties, the National Liberation Front and the South Vietnamese Republican Party, to deal with each other to finalize the details.

After sitting in the same room day in and day out, my father became friends with the representative of the Viet Cong’s party. This raised a dangerous alarm for the South Vietnamese Republican Party because they could not believe my father would be able to negotiate a fair deal once he turned his enemies into friends. They decided to fire my father and forced him into an early retirement. After my father left, the two parties’ tensions elevated to a maximum level. They stopped communicating, and the war resumed as if the Paris Peace Treaty in 1973 had never occurred.

Although he had retired from the military service two years earlier, my father still had the attitude of a high-ranking officer and continued to give commands to everybody around him. My father was extremely stubborn and argumentative; I knew very few people who could come out of an argument with my father as a winner, regardless of whether they were right or wrong. My father did have a soft side of his personality, though. He was very passionate and loved arts, including philosophy, language, poems, music, and visual arts.

Another love my father had was the love of celebrations. No matter what was going on in our lives, he never forgot our birthdays or his and my mother’s anniversary. And that day, as usual, my father continued his tradition by making sure my birthday was not forgotten.

When I arrived home, I found my birthday cake had already been picked up by my father and was inside our refrigerator, although he was nowhere to be found. It was not until late that afternoon, before South Vietnam’s early curfew, when I finally heard my parents at our door, arguing.

I am telling you, the VCs are coming. We are going to lose our country! Mother told him.

You are wrong! I know my army. We are not going to lose to anybody, Father replied.

Then how do you explain the incident this morning, where the VCs came and bombed Independence Hall? Mother challenged him.

They were not VCs. Those were probably some dumb guerrillas trying to terrify us! he argued.

Mother rolled her eyes and walked into the room, mumbling, Guerrillas, aren’t they being run by the Communists as well? But she did not want to continue the argument since she knew she could never win an argument with my dad, although she was right.

The house was quiet again. I knew this was the time I should mention my big event before it was too late. Thank you so much for getting my birthday cake, Ba, I told my father.

My father turned around and grinned, Yes, of course, let’s celebrate my little girl’s birthday.

Mother came out and helped me get the cake and candles. For the next few minutes, my family put the earlier incident out of their minds and focused on me. I turned into the happiest little girl on earth, being the center of attention for at least fifteen whole minutes—until my father turned on the news while we were eating the cake.

School resumed the following day, but many of our classmates were missing. The atmosphere was heavy and tense, so there were more distractions than usual. My four teachers came in and talked about nothing but what had happened and predicted what was going to happen, rather than the usual subjects they were supposed to teach. Both my French teachers announced that most of the French nuns were already packed and leaving. They were going back to France, leaving the remaining lessons for the school’s curriculum. The whole school seemed to be in an atmosphere of total distress. No student had any desire to learn, and no teacher had any desire to teach.

It remained the same for the following few days, except that more and more students were missing every day. Every morning, we started out with roll call, trying to see who was missing, because we knew we might never be able to see them ever again, unlike when they were out sick. My downstairs neighbors, whose daughter was also my classmate, left on the twelfth of April. I knew something was wrong since they did not come back at night; instead, their grandmother and aunt came over to stay for a while.

By mid April, almost a quarter of my class seemed to have disappeared. The class was quiet and depressed; every one of us felt like our little world was ripped apart into pieces, and there was no miraculous solution that could mend it back together to where it had been before. The threats of disaster were so obvious in the air that, as little as we were, we knew there was something terribly wrong going on around us. Finally, on Friday the eighteenth of that month, the schools called for an early summer vacation since the world around us was getting more chaotic as each day went by.

Although school had ended for an early summer vacation, none of us were excited about the news. Our last day was extremely heavy and depressing; each one of us lingered in each other’s sight, not knowing who else would be missing in the next few days, and especially not knowing how many of us would be left by the time school resumed in September.

When I got home that day, Mother greeted us with more depressing news: my live-in maid had also left and gone back home to be close to her family. As for us, my siblings were all I had besides my parents. Dead or alive, we were in it together.

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Chapter 2

My Siblings and I

Up until now, I have not mentioned much about my three siblings. My siblings and I were inseparable. I do not know how my mother raised us to be like that. I loved my siblings as if they were part of my life and I was part of theirs. They were like parts of my body, my arms and legs. Without them, I knew I would survive yet I would be handicapped. Growing up we were so complete together, the four of us. Although my parents were always around, they seemed to fade into the background. We revolved around each other, and nothing else mattered.

We learned our first fraction number before we could even count—the ¼ fraction. Everything would be divided into four, which could be easily made with two cuts. If mother gave us four apples, instead of dividing one apple for each, we only took one apple at a time, cut it into four pieces, and shared it with each other until we finished all four. When my friends in school passed out candy for their birthday, I always saved it until I got home so I could cut it into four pieces to share with my siblings. I don’t remember what made us do that, but that was how we functioned together for as long as I could remember. Although we did not look at all like each other (Mother always teased us that she picked us up from four different corners of town!) and our personalities were definitely very different from each other, we fit together nicely, like a four-piece puzzle placed neatly in a frame.

My sister Lam-Dien

Lam-Dien had always been the apple of my parents’ eyes since she was their only child for three years. They were very interested in her growth changes, and they paid a lot of attention to her needs. She shone like a star everywhere she went. Her beautiful, tall, slender figure, her very velvety, light skin, and her sweet, beautiful face caused many boys’ hearts to ache since she was as young as twelve or thirteen. I remembered counting to myself that in three years’ time, when I would be as old as she was, I would have a lot of suitors like she did (and I am still counting).

Lam-Dien’s personality was almost as sweet as she looked. She was very mellow, and it took a lot to make her angry. Even then, she would not show it, and so her opponent would not know whether she was mad or not. One day, my next-door neighbor, who was also her schoolmate, stomped over to our house screaming at the top of his lungs at her (the boy really had an anger management problem). He was so frustrated because a lot of his classmates had used him as an excuse to come and visit (which had wasted much of his study time since he was a bookworm) when he knew that their real intentions were to come by and try to talk to Lam-Dien. My sister just sat there listening to him without saying a word. I was so mad that I wanted to jump up, yell at him, and tell him to go back home, for he had no right to yell at my sister like that. But she motioned me to be quiet, although I was steaming. The more the boy screamed at her, the more steamed I got—yet my sister just sat there silently and let the boy talk until he had no more words to say, let him scream until he had no more energy to scream. And before long, he realized he was very rude since he was the only one that did the yelling and screaming, so he calmed down and apologized to her.

After he left, Lam-Dien looked at me and said, You see, there’s a way to make people apologize without you having to say anything.

I guess that was my first life lesson, although it would be very hard for me to do with my big mouth.

As for us, we knew she did not walk on water. Since she was so much older than the three of us, she loved to trick us so she could get what she wanted, and we fell for it almost every time until we got older and wiser. She also behaved like our second mother, ordering us around, telling us many things to do, and treating us like we were little kids and had to obey her. We always felt very little connection with her during this time because of the age difference. By the same token, however, as bossy as she was, she always made sure that we were under her protection; she always stood up for us.

There was another side of my sweet sister that she hardly revealed to anybody except to those very close to her—her sense of humor. My great grandmother came to live with us for almost three years until she died in 1978. She was a very beautiful and healthy lady except for her very bad eyesight and horrible hearing. As much as we loved her, my great grandmother became the instant target for a lot of our pranks.

One day, she complained about her bad eyesight and wished she could do something about it. Lam-Dien turned around and saw the frames from my grandfather’s old pair of glasses that he had given to Thai-Dien for a toy. She handed the frame to my great grandmother and said, Would you like to try on Grandpa’s old glasses? He could see very well with these glasses, whether he read newspapers or looked out on the street.

My great grandma was so excited and asked, Yes, sure, can I try them?

Of course! Lam-Dien answered, putting the frames on her face.

I think Great Grandma was so desperate to see that she really thought she could see much better with those frames. She said, Oh wow! I can actually see so much better now. Look! I can even see the lines in my palm. As she looked at her hand, she continued, What kind of magical glasses are these?

She got her answer instantly as she held up the frames and realized there were no lenses in them. We roared out laughing. Great Grandma was very sweet; she simply scolded us, but was never upset.

My younger brother Nhat-Dien

Nhat-Dien was fourteen months younger than I. He was our parents’ true pride and joy, heir after their two daughters. Nhat-Dien was also very calm and mellow. His disposition was somewhat like Lam-Dien’s; he was not too much of a talker. He was the smartest kid out of the four; and for that, he made my father very proud.

At the age of five, he discovered how to use screwdrivers. From then on, he opened every single electronic toy he got, just to fulfill his curiosity of seeing what was inside it. He always managed to put the toys back to their original form, though, which I thought was very good as young as he was then, except he left a lot of spare parts outside and, thus, the toys never worked again.

His obsession was to make kites. He learned how to make his first kite at age three with Lam-Dien’s homework paper and toothpicks, stringing it with my mother’s brand-new spool of thread, for which he got in deep trouble. Once he was able to make his first kite, the rest was history. We had big kites, small kites, all different colors, sizes, and shapes, littered everywhere in the house, which made Lam-Dien really mad, since she was a clean freak. She forbade him to make any more kites. This did not stop him since he found a secret spot (between our front door and the screen door) to continue making them. One day, he took Mother’s sewing scissors and went behind the screen door to make his kites. When Lam-Dien found out and yelled at him, he ran out, sticking the scissors into the screen door, thinking he would keep them there until he came back.

Later that day, we played hide-and-seek with each other. Nhat-Dien ran into his secret hiding place, completely forgetting that he had tucked Mother’s scissors in the screen door. Somehow, the scissors fell down halfway through and poked one side of their blades through the screen door, which poked him as he rushed in without paying any attention and gave him a deep cut, with blood gushing everywhere.

That still did not stop him from making kites. As he got a little older, he followed our older neighbors, who showed him how to make real kites with bamboo sticks. His goal was to find a way to make his kite fly the highest of all of the kites in the air. (That explains why he graduated later with an aeronautical engineer degree.) Since we lived in a complex and our playground was not large enough for his runway, he followed the big boys in the neighborhood and climbed onto the complex’s roof, where they could fly their kites. He got spanked many times for that.

Although Nhat-Dien was thirteen months older than Thai-Dien, the two of them were very close, as if they were twins. He was much more mature than Thai-Dien and always catered to Thai-Dien, as if Thai-Dien was much smaller than he. Nhat-Dien rarely fought with his brother. If they got into a fight, he would rather give in and let his brother beat him than to fight back. If we ever saw Nhat-Dien attacking Thai-Dien, we knew Thai-Dien had gone way over the limit of Nhat-Dien’s tolerance. But they always made up quickly. After every fight, they would go wash their faces and come out hand in hand again, playing as if nothing had happened.

My baby brother Thai-Dien

Thai-Dien, my youngest brother, was twenty-seven months younger than I. He did not get attention from our parents alone; he also got attention from all of us as well. It was not because Thai-Dien was the baby of the family that we catered to him, but because he was a very sick baby. Thai-Dien spent a lot of his time in the hospital for surgeries, starting with his first one when he was only several weeks old, having a hernia operation. Upon his recovery, the doctors instructed my mother to not let him cry, for crying would open his incision and they were not so sure if he could go through another operation being as little as he was. From then on, the boy never knew how to cry. He never needed to since he always got what he wanted on the first command to any of us. Although he was spoiled rotten by his family, he was not too much of a brat; he was very polite to the elders and minded us if we told him to do things.

Thai-Dien’s biggest obsession was money. His