We Go Together in One Boat

By Roger Rosenblatt

Weep for me, whoever has charity, truth and justice! I did not come on this voyage for gain, honor or wealth.

--Christopher Columbus

Most of the children met so far have known what they want out of life, and their desires are connected to the violence around them. The Belfast children long to get away from that violence, even if it means not seeing their country again. The Israelis want peace with victory. The Palestinian children seek redress for wrongs done their people. The Cambodians yearn for tranquillity. Within their various desires, they show great kindliness and generosity and a high sense of fairness. This generally applies to the children of Viet Nam as well. Most of these children seek a little of each of the things sought by the others--escape, honor, victory, peace. They also display the same basic goodheartedness of all children of war.

Yet technically they are not children of war--not of war as it is fought in Belfast, Nahariya, Ramallah, Beirut, or in the jungles outside Phnom-Penh. There are no gun battles or street riots in Viet Nam any more. One side has won, one has lost; and the children of the losers have the choice of "re-education," hunger or the sea. The children of Viet Nam have known war, and they have also known the consequences of war. They thus offer an opportunity to pose the one question that has been hovering over all these children, which is a question about the future.

So you ask the priest: "Do these experiences--the war, the voyage--do something permanently worthwhile for the children? Or will the children change as they grow older? Will they eventually become like any generation of warriors?"

"Who can tell?" the priest shrugs. "Some of these children have been through hell. It will depend on what their memories do to them."

On this hot, blue Sunday morning, on this pontoon in Hong Kong harbor, on a crate marked PRECISION EXPLOSIONS, LTD., the priest sits safely. He has just arrived from Haiphong with 28 others, who five weeks ago slipped aboard too small a junk and trusted themselves to the South China Sea. Behind him the junk bobs crazily in the harbor, giving an idea of how it must have rolled in open swells. His fellow refugees huddle together on the pontoon, staring straight ahead, as if posing for a formal family photograph, and sipping water from an orange plastic bucket passed from hand to hand. Three women group under a tent made of shirts to keep the sun off. They pay no attention to the gawkers in fresh-painted yachts who swing close by for a look. A woman nurses a baby so small it can be mistaken for her own forearm.

Around the pontoon, boats chug and cruise--police boats, water taxis, sampans piloted by women in straw hats, ferries, tugs, dredges, schooners. Freighters with exotic names lie at anchor. In the background, the office buildings of Hong Kong Island stand pressed against Victoria Peak. Trinh Thi Nuong, 8, gazes at the city in open wonder. She is told that she looks lovely.

At that she becomes selfconscious, and her eyes fill up with tears. She says that she is thinking of her father who was left behind in Viet Nam.

Tomorrow their junk will be towed to Gin Drinker's Bay, the place designated by the Hong Kong authorities as an elephants' graveyard for the vessels of the boat people. There it will either be burned straight away or await burning with other wrecks on a jetty directly across the water from a hill of gray gravestones and a blue columbarium. The engines, which do not burn, lie heaped like brown skulls beside the remains of tillers that were made with welded pipes. Only a few boats rest in Gin Drinker's Bay now, smoldering near the scavenging dogs. There were hundreds here once--boats that packed people in holds that were intended for fish. The boats are ruins. For the priest, Trinh and for tens of thousands to date, all that is left of Viet Nam are these boats.

From this point on, the refugees will follow a set procedure, one established by those who came to Hong Kong before them. Unlike the Thais, the Hong Kong authorities do not consider these refugees illegal entrants, and in effect have given them a status close to citizenship. For six days they will undergo health examinations. Then they will be placed in the Jubilee Reception Center, where all refugees must be processed before going off to any of four camps: Argyle 3 and 4, or Kai Tak East and North. Like the Jubilee center, all are located on Kowloon Peninsula. In the camps the children will go to school, kill time, and wait for a sign from France, England or America.

In this respect, their situation is not terribly different from the Cambodian children at Khao I Dang--except that their hopes of resettlement are justifiably higher. But in temperament the Vietnamese children seem quite different from the Khmer. Generally they are wilder and more independent, either because of their greater freedom in the camps or because of something characteristic. Argyle 4 used to be a storage depot for Hong Kong's armed forces. Now it looks like a teen-age canteen, the kids loitering under the fluorescent lights like teen-agers in any poor city neighborhood, their self-possession equally dopey and sinister.

They did not take to the idea of school in the beginning. In Argyle 4 a gang of six welcomed a new American volunteer teacher with fistfuls of stones thrown through the classroom window. Many Vietnamese children in the refugee camps have never gone to school, or quit very early. Many are country kids. Many have been used to running wild back home, and have never conformed to an institution. Yet some are catching on rather well. A fine pencil drawing of a classroom shows open books resting on four desks in neat rows, with the teacher's desk elevated in the rear.

Generally, the artwork of these students has made the same progress as that of the Belfast, Israeli and Khmer children-starting out with pictures of bayonets and bombers, then, as their distance from danger increases, graduating to faces and to houses in fields. One boy drew an elaborate marketplace, complete with shops and a clock tower, and he crayoned VIET NAM in red block letters over the entire scene. When given a free hand, the children usually draw Viet Nam in serenity--a dinner scene with mother, father and child seated at a large round table covered with small dishes of food. But there is less serenity in the children themselves, in the older ones especially, who unlike the Cambodians do not interpret revenge as the exercise of moral persuasion.

Trung and Ha are brothers, 16 and 14 respectively, and they are alone. Their father, a former officer in the South Vietnamese army, was thrown into a "reeducation" camp; their mother did not make it out of Viet Nam. Trung wears an oversize watch and a rugby shirt. He cracks his knuckles as he talks. Ha broods and talks less, but he has ambitions "to study hard and grow up and return to take revenge on the Communists." Trung preaches love and compassion, yet asserts that revenge is the duty of all the Vietnamese people, and it is his own wish in particular. Both boys would like to be doctors eventually, but when faced with a question similar to that posed to Ahmed in Lebanon--whether, as a doctor, he would treat a wounded Communist as an enemy or a patient--Trung does not hesitate to say "enemy."

"But you both are Buddhist, and Buddhism prohibits the taking of revenge."

"It is not against Buddhism to take back the happiness that belongs to you."

They both remember the war, in fragments. An explosion in the marketplace in Chuong Thien in 1972; a soldier running away; "in the morning I saw 35 V.C. corpses." Asked why he thinks men make war, Trung avoids the generality and cites the Communists: "They were too poor and too savage, so they sought a fight." Do all men have the capacity to be savage? "No, only some." Does it feel good to hate the Communists? "No. But it gives you a kind of strength."

It is hard to tell if this relentless anti-Communism is heartfelt or geared to please Americans with whom these children hope to live. Many of the children have no political opinions whatever, but those who do are consistent. Dang is 17 now, and was eight and living in Hanoi during the December 1972 bombing. He remembers his family sitting around and talking together--"telling intimate things, sentimental things." (Dang uses "sentimental" to mean tender, emotional.) Then they heard the air-raid warning on the radio. Other families ran down to the shelters, but Dang's father said that it was not necessary for them to go anywhere. "If it is your fate to die, you die. If it is the family's fate to die, better to die together." They survived. Dang would not have obeyed, had he not trusted his father's judgment.

Like his father, Dang is headstrong, proud of his stubbornness. Of the Communists he has no doubts: "The entire population wants to rise up against them. But there is no leadership, no organization." Asked if he has the capacity to become such a leader, he replies that he would need guidance, but that he feels he has the necessary courage.

Some of his courage has been shown already. At 14 Dang wanted to join a national soccer team, so he left home, working his way up to a class B league by the time he turned 16. Then he returned to Hanoi, but the police came around to sign him up for the draft. "I did not want to become a soldier for the Communists." Eventually he left the country and his "sentimental life" behind, hiding aboard a junk that barely held 93 refugees, and that suffered, among the standard hardships, a terrifying storm, and a doldrum in which Dang remembers sitting soaked to the skin as the boat spun in circles on the still sea. Yet he contends that he was never afraid. "Life consists of difficult moments," he says. "In order to earn a happy time, you have to suffer hardship."

Not all the children here are as willful as these three. An 18-year-old boy named Vu believes that "wars just happen." He only left Saigon out of obedience to his parents There are others who are too confused and shaken to know what they think--swearing vengeance in one sentence, promising forgiveness in the next. Thanh, who is 16 but could be any age for the wildness of his appearance, rails against war: "The big shots never want things to calm down!" It is known for a fact that Thanh was caught directly in the Christmas bombing, but when asked to describe the experience, he denies that he was there. His eyes fill his bony face. His hands leap first to his long straight hair, then to the T shirt with the palm tree on it. He shouts in a babble that he has never seen war.

When you see the frenzy in a face like Thanh's, you begin to feel that the Vietnamese children, while not in the thick of war at the moment, may in fact have suffered more than the other children of war, at least in terms of variety. Like the Belfast children, they have known civil war; like the Khmer, terrorism and guerrilla war; like the children of Israel and Lebanon, they have seen bombing raids and artillery attacks; and their land, like that of the West Bank children, is now occupied. Beyond these, they have also experienced a personal, internal war over whether to leave their families and make an escape on their own. Children like Trung, Ha and Dang had to decide between home and freedom at a very young age, and having chosen in favor of freedom, or a chance of it, they have imposed the most damaging effect of war on themselves. They have opted for separation, for a loss of love.

In doing this they immediately embarked on yet another war, the war in the boats. For a month or more, many of these boats became island civilizations, moving through a truncated history. The people who started out full of hope soon grew fearful and suspicious. The cooperative became selfish; the healthy sick; the sick dead. Some of the passengers grew dangerous as the voyage progressed. Some were dangerous to begin with. Locked in among them were the children, sitting body to body with strangers, in a stoic silence, all watching for a change of weather, or a change of mood.

Under such conditions, it is no wonder that a story like Be's is jumbled. The other children at Jubilee center call Be "Buddha" because he has the face of a Buddha, and Be says that he would like to have Buddha's serene mind as well. But Be's mind is troubled, and his story never comes out the same way twice. First he says that his father, who died on the journey, was buried at sea. In another version his father died of starvation on a small island with a lighthouse on it, and was left there by the others. Then Be claims that he saw the boatmaster knifed to death by two men. Soon Be contradicts himself again, saying that he did not actually see the boatmaster being killed, but only heard him groaning in pain in the hold. So it goes. When asked if he was afraid after his father died, he says no. Nor was he sad. He smiles wanly at this. He says that only his current loneliness makes him sad.

Be relates his voyage in a Jubilee classroom, hunched over a white-topped bench like a player at halftime. It is doubtful that this classroom existed when the Jubilee center was first built in 1935, the silver jubilee year of George V, for which the center was most likely named. Like Argyle 3, Jubilee served as a Japanese P.O.W camp from 1941 to 1945 for British and Chinese soldiers. After the war, the Sham Shui Po camp, of which Jubilee was a part, reverted to its original function as British army barracks. It became a refugee center in February 1979, and since December 1980 has been administered by the Hong Kong prison department, whose clipped-voiced officers inadvertently give the place the feel of a prison. A door is marked Superintendent Detention Camp. Windows are barred. The air is soaked with antiseptic. At the water's edge stands a high chain-link fence, its upper portion bent outward at an angle to prevent entrance or escape.

The place is big, but compact. Its current population of 1,500 lives in 24 four-story blocks. Filled to capacity, the center can hold 6,500. It sits on approximately two acres of land at the edge of Kowloon, directly across from Hong Kong Island. The center abuts a fish-processing plant, and the children scoop for eels that escape into the sewers. The children at Jubilee are a fairly close-knit group, and they know all about Be's adventures.

But Be's story, confused and tragic as it is, does not hold their attention nearly so well as the story of Pham. Pham's story is not at all confused. Nor does anyone at Jubilee doubt its authenticity. For one thing, there are witnesses to it--not many, to be sure, since only five of the original eleven voyagers survived. Those who made it verify Pham's account, if somewhat reluctantly. The two parallel gashes also serve as supporting evidence. Even after two months, they stand out like a reddened equals sign on the top of Pham's head.

The most persuasive piece of evidence, however, is Pham himself. Unlike Be or Thanh, Pham is neither wild nor demonstrative. His hair, cut short and jagged around the wound, looks like a washed kitten's. His height is average for a Vietnamese 15-year-old--about 5 ft. 2 in. His build is average. His face is mouth-open flat, without expression, except for the eyes, so brown as to seem black, which cannot exactly be said to have expression either. They are their own depth, the vessels of what they have seen. It is what they have seen that makes Pham stand out at Jubilee.

He has taken Be's seat in the classroom, and he is sitting beside Loc, a thinner boy with a narrow face, who appears to be his friend. Pham accepts Loc's presence, but alone, when asked if Loc is his friend, there isn't any qualification in his no. Loc may wish to be Pham's friend now, but he was on the wrong side during the incident at sea. When the boys landed, in fact, they squared off for a fight, and for weeks they hurled challenges at each other. They may reconcile eventually, but Pham, who has a tendency to forgive, has a way to go before forgetting what happened in the boat.

Climbing aboard was easy. Pham, who was out by himself fishing one day, simply saw the junk take off from Haiphong, and on he hopped.

He did not say goodbye to his three sisters and brother-in-law, and there was no one else to consult--Pham's mother having died in 1976 of something in the stomach that "pricks and hurts," his father having died of a stroke two years later. Both parents were fishmongers, and Pham knows boats. The one he boarded was 13 meters long. They were 52 days at sea. They had 20 kilos of rice on board and 40 liters of water.

When both gave out, they used their fishing nets, and that was when the trouble started. A few men, "taking advantage of the others," fished for themselves at night. The boatmaster fought with them. Four people "fell" overboard. Seven remained.

The story is interrupted by the sounds of sawing and drilling where they are expanding the Jubilee center, and by a metallic female voice giving instructions over a loudspeaker at frequent intervals. Pham must be asked to let the noise abate. He would speak straight through it.

"Why were you hit on the head?"

"The boatmaster wanted to eat me."

"How do you know this?"

"The boatmaster told a boy who was a neighbor of mine to take a hammer and hit me on the head, so that they might eat my flesh. The boy told me."

"Why did you believe him? Did you see such a thing before?' "No. But earlier in the voyage the boatmaster wanted to kill someone else for the same purpose. The man was so scared, he committed suicide; he struck the boatmaster on the head with a wooden bar, and then leaped overboard." That left six.

"And how did they try to kill you?"

"They put a shirt over my head, and they hit me with something hard. I felt the men coming over to lift off the shirt. But I was still conscious. I heard the boatmaster order another man to cut my throat. (Here Loc interjects that he was powerless to help. Pham offers no consolation.)

"At the moment they took the shirt off my head, they saw that I was conscious, and that tears were on my face. I did not know what they were thinking. Then someone said: 'Pham, do you want to live?' And I said: 'Yes, of course I want to live.' So they untied me and took me into the cabin."

You see the sequence as if you were present: the selection of the uninteresting, solitary boy; the logic of it; the low-whispered plotting; the appointment of the assassin; the blow; the raising of the shirt and the surprise. But then what? What, in fact, were those men thinknig that held them back from murder? Mere pity? Or was it the recognition of Pham's tears as their own, the knowledge that the boy was not weeping to save his own skin, but theirs, that he was weeping for all those who did ever, or will ever, or do now devour their young? Jubilee is suddenly noiseless. No sawing and drilling. No amplified announcements. The sun is frozen in the lowest pane of the classroom window. "What did you think when you realized that they were going to let you live?"

"I only thought I would die eventually, because the next day the boy who used the hammer on me was himself found dead. After the body was discovered, the boatmaster pulled it out of the hold. Then he cut up the body. Everyone was issued a piece of meat about two fingers wide."

Pham was told to eat for strength, and he did. But he remembers thinking that if the people on the boat ran out of food again, he planned to jump overboard. He is afraid of the boatmaster still. Thanks to Pham's testimony, the boatmaster was jailed by the Hong Kong authorities. Pham is terrified that the man will be released and come after him.

For his part, he feels no hatred for the boatmaster whatever, only disapproval. He understood the necessity of eating the dead boy, and he observes that the fear of starvation may have driven the boatmaster to behave with unnatural cruelty. Unlike the Cambodian children, Pham acknowledges that there is the capacity for good and evil in everyone.

"Then would you kill a child in order to survive?" "No," he says, "We go together in one boat. If we die, we die. I would not kill in order to live."

Pham's future? He does not guess. When he was at home living with his sisters and brother-in-law he used to watch them repair boat engines, and he thinks that it might be nice to do that work some day. Then he considers for a moment and says that car engines would be even better. "Yes, I could work as an apprentice in a small shop. If he should ever have children of his own, he will teach them "to be diligent and to love each other and to be kind and understanding." He turns his gaze toward the window. "What do you think about when you look at Hong Kong Island?" "I see lots of lights which are beautiful. And boats." "What do you think when you see all the boats?" "The boats have lights too, which are also beautiful." "What else is beautiful?" "Everything is beautiful."

Pham does not do much with his free time at Jubilee. There is not a great deal to do. The children watch TV or play table tennis out under an eave on the harbor side. They crowd around who occupies the bunk next to his. Pham has trouble falling asleep at night, so this man, who reminds Pham of an uncle, tells him stories. Pham favors one in particular: A fable of a coconut that turns into a person and falls in love. Pham knows that his friend tells him these stories to help him sleep but Pham al ways gets interested, and he stays awake to the end.

Until he is claimed by the U.S. or any other mysterious place, this will be his life. Lonely as it is, it is the life of most war children--lived partly in the world, and mainly outside. In Belfast, Paul rides his five-speed racer, Keith studies diligently, Elizabeth goes to the disco. In Israel, Nimrod worries about the plight of the American Indians, while Dror concentrates on math, and Nabil on tennis. In Lebanon, the baby Palestine will soon begin to reach for objects, and Ahmed courts the lovely Jomaneh. At Khao I Dang, Kim Seng dreams, Nep Phem paints, Meng Mom dances.

These are the children of war, but they are also simply children--a 4-ft. and 5-ft. civilization with books and lunch pails, dressed in school uniforms and preposterous T shirts, sitting in the backs of cars, camping at the windows and watching. Outsized by adults, they are not yet a constituency, so they go about unnoticed. They pose no threat. Besides, the adults have more to worry about than children. In the few months that Pham has been at Jubilee, Poland has been taken over by the military, Anwar Sadat has been assassinated; the US has agreed to send AWACS to the Saudis; Israel has annexed the Golan Heights; and a Member of Parliament has been murdered in Belfast. Compared to such main events, the children are negligible. Since they know this to be true, they are free to think as they please.

Will Joseph join the terrorists? Will Boutros? For that matter, will Heather and Hadara continue to crave peace? No one knows, least of all the children themselves, who have seen enough of change to respect it. Disappointing as it would be to his father the colonel, even little Samer may turn out a peacemaker, so violently do children turn on their elders. Tiny Palestine may grow up to lead a raid on Qiryat Shemona, or she may decide to rear children and grow bananas outside Tyre.

For the moment, these children are in the hands of others. They are moved from place place, the led and hidden, the dragged along and swung into the sky, the hugged, the tickled, the slapped, the taught, the scolded, teased, praised--and sometimes the shot at, and sometimes the decapitated and the killed for food. All that can be done to them is done, and they do what they are told. But not forever. One morning the streets through which they skitter now will be theirs to command. They will not think what to do; they will already know. Whatever becomes of them and of their countries will have been decided in some absolutely innocuous moment during these innocuous years, a moment they will not be able to trace. Their thinking done, they will rule largely by reflex, just as their parents did before them. Even Pham. Even Pham will rule by reflex.

Not that he thinks of such things now, of course. Pham has never heard of the I.R.A. or P.L.O. or Israel or Lebanon. The name Ireland has no meaning to him, nor Poland, nor any other distant place except America, which has no particularly clear image for him either, other than that country where it is said one may be happy. His immediate wishes are sufficient; to get a bit more sleep, and to rid himself of the nightmare that the boatmaster will break out of jail and once again go for his head. Whatever else he thinks he does not say--sitting by himself in front of the television set, or pacing the walkway beside the fence, or facing the harbor full of boats that sail the world where everything is beautiful.

By Roger Rosenblatt

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