YOU HAVE ARRIVED

Just like that, 37 years went by. It was a cold night in New York City, just like tonight. Maybe colder since my family just came from tropical Singapore. Sure, we had a stop-over in Belgium but we stayed inside the airport the whole time so we didn’t know what the outside temperature was. An uncle on my mother side, a first cousin of hers on her father’s side, was the sponsor. He met us at JFK Airport with winter jackets for all of us. Uncle lived near the intersection of Neptune Avenue and Brighton First Street in the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn. We were to stay with him for a short period of time so technically our first home in the U.S. was in Brooklyn. Uncle probably drove us home along the Belt Parkway West but I don’t remember anything from the car ride. Except that I threw up at the end of the trip. Unlike other family members, I don’t easily experience motion sickness, whether on airplane or on boat, but for some reason the car trip from JFK did it.

We stayed with Uncle perhaps for a week before the refugee agency found us an apartment in the Fordham Road section of the Bronx. Again I have few fragments of memory of the stay. I do recall being introduced to cheese pizza and most likely Sprite or 7-Up. It was sweet, bubbly, and white, that much I’m sure. I also remember being a bad guest by taking too long a bath. It was the first time I bathed in a tub, the tub filled with water and bubbles, and there was my younger cousin’s toy aircraft carrier, perhaps other toys too. So I got carried away. Auntie had to gently knock on the door to tell me to finish up.

We arrived on a Thursday so perhaps on Monday someone, perhaps Uncle and his son, accompanied me to some school perhaps to register. Maybe the plan at the time was for us to stay there a few months so Uncle thought I should be enrolled in school. I took one year of English before leaving Viet Nam but had no actual experience of using the language. Maybe my Uncle walked his son to school and thought it would be nice for me to come along to see the school. I am sure I went to some school shortly after arriving in the U.S. but for what reason I am not sure now.

I vaguely recall my late father saying that he made sure Uncle understood that he would like us to have our own place. That he didn’t want to burden Uncle any more than necessary. Of course it all depended on how quick the refugee agency can find us a place. Perhaps the refugee agency already prepared things ahead, or it was 1980 and apartments were plentiful in the Bronx, we had our own place shortly. Maybe by then the effect of jet lag wore off or I already gotten used to the new environment, I do have more clearer memories of the place. We did stay there for almost half a year. Next time, I’ll try to dig up some memories from that time.

Berhala Hut

My sister CH visited my family a few days after Tết. Mother made a big meal and we talked afterward about many topics. Eventually we gravitated toward our refugee experience again. The question was, "How long were we at the various islands?" There was no calendar to tell the day, the weather was always hot, and there was no TV to watch our favorite show to make reference to a particular event. Hmm, remember one night some drunk set his hut on fire? Luckily his neighbors quickly put out the fire, lest it spread to their huts too. It was a Thursday because I was watching Naruto Shippuuden on the PowerBook. Yeah, right.

With the need to record more of this memory before it is all forgotten, I am resuming my "memoir" of the experience. It also helped that I received a positive feedback for my entry earlier about my refugee experience.

The drawing above is what I remember of my home on Berhala Island. As you may recall, my family was lucky enough to meet Grandaunt "Luck" to inherit the hut from her. Granny's family were scheduled to leave Berhala for Galang Camp when we arrived. They were among the first on Berhala Island and they did a great job of putting the hut together.

The view in the drawing is that from outside the "window". It's just a big, rectangular opening in the wall. Next to the window, there was a pair of chairs with a table in the middle. I don't know for sure if we had a teapot and cups on that table. There were two openings to get into the hut - to the left of the big column in the picture and to the right of the "window". The left "door" would be for getting to the street while the right one would be for entering the yard. Taking up a big portion of the hut was the bed. I don't recall us having pillows. I made believe we stuff some luggage bags with clothes for use as pillows. At night, my two sisters and I would share the bed. My parents and brother would sleep on the floor, on some tarp, to the right, while my uncle lie along the space between the bed and the tea table. In the right corner, we had our own shower room complete with a door that swung to the right. Water was stored in a metal drum and a scooper would float on top of the water. There was probably some long groove in the ground to drain water to the ditch in the back of the hut. We had our own well to draw water from, Granny Luck really made it easy for themselves and then us. The "kitchen" consisted of a hole in the ground with three bricks. There was plenty of trees on the island to supply fuel for the kitchen. I drew the "range" deeper into the hut, but in reality it was much closer to the "wall" of the hut, in the foreground and not shown. I think there was a sheet of metal to keep the occasional long tongue of the flame from setting the wall on fire. There was a shelf against the right wall and is not shown in the picture. We probably kept kitchen stuff like pots and pans, ceramic bowls and plates, spoons, chopsticks, etc. I drew those things near the kitchen, as if they were ready for washing, but in reality they would be cleaned in the yard. The ground was just dirt and the walls, as well as the roof, were fronds, perhaps from the many coconuts trees on the island. Other than the metallic barrel (thùng phi) in the shower room to hold water and the nails to hold the furnitures together, we were living in the Wooden Age.

Prior to the Berhala hut, our home was a top-floor condo with indoor plumbing and electricity. The floor was tiled and the walls were solid. The kitchen, interestingly, used firewoods, too, so that part of our life wasn't too different from the refugee experience. It was a big change for the worse to go from the condo to the hut, but I still consider ourselves lucky. We didn't have to spend any money to get the hut. We got food from some relief agency periodically, but we still had to provide for other expenses. I think we got by mostly from the jewelries that my mother sold, one by one.

Without electricity, cell phone service, or iPod, how did I spend my days on Berhala Island? That is a topic for another drawing on another day.

Google Docs Redux

I originally played around with Google Docs just to see if it can really someday replace Microsoft Office. I'm among those who love to see Microsoft's monopoly be broken to bring them down. I hoped that Google Docs would succeed one day, but didn't see how that would come about.

Recently, I have the idea of trying to collaborate with my siblings on documenting our journey from Viet Nam to the U.S. Lots of time when we get together, the talk would gravitate to how we managed to survive the boat trip out of Viet Nam, the living condition on the various Indonesian islands served as refugee camps, and our early days in America. Naturally, as we got older the details got murkier. So, before we all become senile, we decided that we should write it all down. Easy said than done. Surely, I can type up something, and I believe I did write it in my PDA. But then one of my sisters live in another state and can only visit us once a year at most. We need a mean for us to collaborate over the Internet and Google Docs is the answer.

My out-of-state sister already has a Google account so it was easy to send her an invitation to our Great American Novel that I've started. I'll just have to help my other sister and my brother open a Google account and then it's all up to them to contribute to the project.

The project will have details like exact dates, or as exact as we can recall, and other personal info, so it's highly unlikely I'll ever publish it for the general public to see. It'll remain a personal project for the four of us to read/edit. No need to give all those crooks on the Internet additional info.

However, from time to time, I'll share some snippets like the one below. Refer to the picture above for the physical features of Berhala Island as described in the text.

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Of all the Indonesian islands that we stayed at, to me Berhala is probably the most memorable. It was the first island that we had a place to call home. We were lucky to bump into Grandaunt Luck, whose family was scheduled to be moved to Galang. Instead of selling the hut that they've built for themselves, they let us have it for free. It wasn't much of a home, but there was a front yard with a well to draw water from, a wooden bed for us to sleep on, a shower, and a kitchen area. Everything was made of some forms of woods and coconut leaves covered the roof and the "walls".

The hut was in a dead end street. A few times native Indonesians who wandered into the cul-de-sac would pretend to be visiting and stand around and engage us in broken English. Broken English on both sides, of course, because we ourselves only had a year of English before leaving Viet Nam.

Not too far from us was a stretch of sandy beach that, on the left (if you face the ocean), led back to the boat landing area. Unlike the neighboring Letung Island, Berhala was too small and insignificant to have its own dock. Rowboats would just beach themselves to let the passengers off, then the rower would push the boat back into the water and hop on the boat as the boat reached deeper water. To the right of the beach is one of the two mountains on the island. One time, along with a few other kids of the same age, I went all around both mountains. The mountain nearer to our hut, in whose shadow we lived, ended at the public toilet facing the Tulai Island. I'll arbitrarily call this toilet #2. There's a smaller stretch of beach there, but with the public toilet right there, I doubt if anyone ever bother to wade into the water. The second mountain started where the short beach ended and ended at the other public toilet, the one that faced Letung Island. Again, I arbitrarily assign the #1 designation to this toilet. Somewhere between the toilet #1 and the boat landing was an underwater walkway. On low tide, adults and teenagers could walk from Berhala to Letung. At the deepest point, the water was up to my chest. Back then I had to be already at least five feet tall. I used that walkway at least once. The island's natural beauty was pretty much intact and I was able to see the coral underwater in many places along the walk.