Crossing the Mekong: In Search of Lost Memories

1.

It was around one in the afternoon when we arrived at the ferry terminal at An Hòa, the sky clear except for a few clouds sailing low on the horizon. A ferry was just leaving, its floating platform loaded with what looked like a crush of motorbikes frozen in traffic. Green rafts of floating weeds, the water hyacinths, bobbed up and down in the wake, and small waves of yellowish-brown water overwhelmed the concrete landing.

We bought a ticket for our passage from one of the many uniformed attendants, and from a toothless grandma, a lottery ticket. When our driver, Nam, reminded us that our driving route that day involved two ferry crossings, Ba received the news with boyish delight. All the new roads and bridges across the delta were fine, but the ferry crossings reminded him of bygone days. There was still something romantic about crossing a river by ferry, the stuff of poetry. Ba recited a clutch of Vietnamese verses as if to illustrate his point—something about sorrow flowing like a river.

It didn’t take long before the line filled with other vehicles, the motorbikes swarming around us. The next ferry arrived and lowered a rusty gangway. As soon as we boarded and parked, Ba and I got out of the car, walked over to the railing at the bow, and looked at the river.

Ba called the Mekong by its Vietnamese name, “Sông Cửu Long.” It meant River of Nine Dragons, named after its serpentine branches that snake through the delta before reaching the sea.

Here, the wide brown watery expanse suggested a lake, the specter of the other shore floating like a thin island in the haze of light. It was not particularly picturesque. Even so, I was elated because I thought I was seeing the mother of rivers for the first time.¹The Mekong is born some 4,000 km away high up in the Tibetan Plateau, the roof of the world. Fed by melting snow, the river begins its long journey from headwaters in the upper Himalayas, flowing through Tibet and Yunnan Province in China, where people call the cold, crashing waters, “Lancang Jiang,” or Turbulent River, because there it is very steep and rapid. The river flows south, sliding between what we call Myanmar and Laos, then Laos and Thailand, forming their natural borders. When the river flows into Laos, it is called “Mae Khong,” Mother of Waters, Mother of Rivers, a name that will carry through seven Thai provinces. In Cambodia, the mother of rivers becomes “Tonle Thom,” Great River that Flows. Down through Việt Nam, something dramatic happens. The mighty river shapeshifts and becomes many rivers and tributaries, forming a vast fertile delta before emptying into the sea. During our drive, Ba pointed out how we Vietnamese called the Mekong “Sông Cửu Long,” or “River of Nine Dragons.” Google told me that by the time the Mekong empties into the South China Sea, it has only seven branches, or mouths, and that two others have silted up over the years. But nine is a most lucky number and dragons are a most powerful symbol. When I zoomed out on Google Earth, the delta shimmered with a thousand silver and gold threads strung to the Nine Dragons.

Never mind what Heraclitus said about not being able to step into the same river twice. I hadn’t even stepped into the Mekong once.

2.

Earlier in the fall, I had asked Ba to come with me on a birdwatching trip to Việt Nam and he had enthusiastically agreed, though of birds he knew little. It would be just the two of us, traveling together as adults for the first time in a long time. He was in his seventies, and I was in my forties. I felt like it was an important thing to do for reasons I couldn’t yet name.²Let me emphasize, all this was out of the ordinary for me: the international birdwatching trip, the leisurely travel through Vietnam, the travels with my father. I had only recently gotten into birdwatching, a pandemic coping hobby turned daily practice. Stateside, I mostly stuck to local parks and nature reserves, seldom driving more than thirty minutes to take a walk with my binoculars. Since the spring of 2020, birding helped me cultivate a greater sense of place and belonging in the American Midwest. I began to wonder, could a birdwatching trip to Việt Nam help reconnect me to the country of my birth? I thought I could create new memories for my parents, too, by inviting them on my journey. The thing about birdwatching is you have to focus on the thing with feathers in front of you and nothing else, at least for a few seconds. It makes you remember the present.

This was two Januarys ago, the dry season in the southern delta region. With sunny days and mild evenings, the weather had been exceptionally comfortable, especially in light of the fact that a week before I was in Iowa scraping ice off the windshield of my car.

I was hoping the birds of Việt Nam would show us an altogether different side of the country, one less tethered to memories of war, familial obligations, and the past. I had the notion that by birdwatching together we might assign new meanings to Việt Nam.

We had already spent two memorable days in Đồng Tháp Province at Tràm Chim National Park, a protected wetland in the once-vast Plain of Reeds. We stayed at the Wildbird Hotel and birdwatched in the park’s flooded grasslands, melaleuca forest, canal systems, and open marshes, where we encountered five kinds of kingfishers, four kinds of herons, three kinds of cormorants, two kinds of bitterns, and, to my amazement, one pied harrier floating like a giant black and white butterfly over the marshland.³This being just a short list of the more than 300 bird species, including the sacred Sarus Crane, that have been recorded in Tràm Chim National Park, a Ramsar Site wetland of international importance. The park comprises a 9,000-hectare portion of the approximate 1,000,000-hectare freshwater floodplain marsh known as the Đồng Tháp Mười, or the Plain of Reeds. The Mekong has been called the lifeblood of the Plain of Reeds, as every summer the waters flowing south in the river combine with the monsoons to flood the plain and deposit essential nutrients. During the war, the Plain of Reeds was heavily contested territory, its maze of canals, streams, and wetlands serving as a strategic base and natural refuge for the Việt Cộng guerilla forces operating in the south. For this reason, U.S. and South Vietnamese military forces targeted the area, draining the canals and burning the vegetation. Since 1985, concerted reforestation and conservation efforts have helped the wetlands recover, though they continue to face risks posed by the intensive agriculture surrounding the entire park. When I was planning the trip, I thought Tràm Chim, described as a birdwatcher’s paradise, would make for an ideal first destination for Ba and I, not realizing how familiar he already was with Đồng Tháp Mười.

From Tràm Chim, we planned to continue west toward the river town of Châu Đốc near the border with Cambodia. Along the way, there were places that Ba wanted to show me, sites of old navy bases and skirmishes, stretches of canal and riverways that his river patrol boat unit once defended—part of what he called “my old territory.”

Once I realized, while we were birdwatching in Tràm Chim, just how close we were to some of the places where Ba had served as an officer in the South Vietnamese Navy, I proposed a side trip to see the landscapes of his wartime experience in the “brown water navy,” or at least what had become of them. That’s why Ba and I were on that ferry crossing the Mekong, headed deeper into the delta.

3.

The ferry served my birdwatching needs just fine as a moving observation deck. The bird life was nothing spectacular, but it was pleasant to stretch the eyes and scan the horizon, to see who the avian regulars were along and above this section of the Mekong. Cormorants perched on top of pylons and pier moorings with that particular look of black crosses. A couple of bitterns burst out of the reeds and flew onto a tangled green mat of water hyacinths, one after the other with panic-stricken flapping. High above, in the sunny haze, a lone hawk—or maybe it was an eagle—circled on the thermals.

Meanwhile, standing next to me, Ba quietly stared off into the distance, his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. He was wearing one of his standard U.S. Navy-themed baseball caps, this one navy blue and emblazoned with a circular seal depicting a bald eagle with outstretched wings gripping an anchor in its talons.

Had I been a different son and he a different father, I might have asked him what was on his mind, what this stretch of the Mekong stirred in him, the river surely snaking its way through currents of memory and feeling, shoring up long-neglected thoughts. Did his patrol boat travel the length of this river? What had it been like? How did locals from the delta respond? We could have spoken at length.

Instead, I got out my phone and took a few photos. For Mẹ, I said. He happily obliged, as I knew he would, striking a stern unsmiling pose as if he were commanding a fleet of gunboats. With his white hair and thin frame, he looked like a wizened old sailor.

I wondered aloud how Mẹ was spending her quiet days at home in Georgia and wished once again that she would have relented and agreed to come with us to Việt Nam. Perhaps I gave in too quickly when she said she was happy to have the house all to herself and that I should go with Ba, who needed no convincing to return. Mẹ would have loved seeing all those waterbirds at Tràm Chim, the white storks sailing down from the sky like winged seeds.

4.

A cool breeze came over the bow and carried river odors and river sounds. The water was now the color of dull jade with gentle ripples over its otherwise smooth and untroubled surface.

It felt strange to me that I was seeing the Mekong for the first time because the river had exerted such an imaginative, cultural, and psychological pull on me growing up as a Vietnamese refugee kid in America.⁴Over the past forty-something years, I’ve returned to Việt Nam only a half dozen times, mostly to visit family and pay respects to our dead. I’ve crossed the Hàn River in Đà Nẵng on the back of a motorbike or in a car. In Huế, I’ve looked out across the Perfume River from the ancient pagoda, with its flowering trees. I’ve taken the high-speed ferry from Hồ Chí Minh City to Vũng Tàu, passing by container ships, river boats, and under new bridges. I’ve probably seen the Mekong without knowing it gazing down from an airplane window, unable to untangle it from the maze of silver waterways meandering through emerald green and through the clouds. But I can’t recall a time in which I’ve laid eyes on the mother of rivers. The mighty river flowed in the background of so many stories I heard, in the old songs my parents listened to, through the paintings that hung on the walls of Vietnamese restaurants.

Looking at the Mekong, I thought of the Mississippi, not only because it was the most familiar frame of reference for me as far as the world’s great rivers are concerned, but also because the Mississippi became a kind of throughway to Việt Nam: from the small rural town in Wisconsin where I grew up, my parents and I crossed this iconic American river on a near-weekly basis to visit Vietnamese groceries and restaurants, our Twin Cities lifeline to the country we escaped. When our car approached the interstate bridge and Old Man River could be seen flowing between the steep bluffs, I knew there would be Vietnamese food and Vietnamese people on the other side.⁵This was thanks to the Vietnamese refugee community who made Minnesota their home. The Twin Cities were where we went for Vietnamese groceries and food, where we visited my parents’ Vietnamese friends and my uncle Dan, where we occasionally attended Vietnamese cultural events for Lunar New Year. In order to get there, we had to drive just thirty minutes to University and Snelling Avenues in St. Paul. Sometimes we drove further to Minneapolis, which would take about forty-five minutes but would involve a different selection, new possibilities. My parents both relished being in these grocery stores with their distinctive aromas of fermented fish, dried squid, herbs, and sweets. I remembered how Mẹ would shop carefully, studying each piece of fruit, each bundle of herbs, selecting what to her was the best one. In these moments, she seemed endowed with special powers and a keen sense that I didn’t possess, since most of the fruits and herbs looked the same to me, exotic compared to the apples and oranges but also familiar. Ba specialized in certain fruits and treats, while Mẹ was a generalist, getting stuff she needed to plan and cook our family meals. While I always had to ask my parents to remind me of the fruits’ names in Vietnamese, I had no problem eating everything and anything they excitedly put in the little shopping cart (even the shopping carts were different from American grocery stores): lychee, rambutan, mango, jackfruit, durian. Whether these fruits actually came from Việt Nam or elsewhere like Thailand or Mexico I can no longer remember, and it actually did not matter—we still imagined that they had come from Việt Nam, that they grew on the fertile soil in the Mekong Delta, fed by the Mekong river, nourished by the sunshine and heat of Việt Nam and the rains of the wet season. These grocery trips were exciting not only because they meant getting out of our small town for a day and enjoying the offerings of the city but also because they meant we would likely eat lunch or dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. In this way, I came to associate the Mississippi with Việt Nam. The restaurants we visited were often named after the places where the owners had come from. Before I became familiar with the place names myself, I might ask my parents what such-and-such meant, and they would say it’s a beautiful seaside town in the south, or it’s a town in the highlands famous for its waterfalls, pine forests, and cool climate. The names were always places in southern Việt Nam. Sài Gòn. Nha Trang. Cam Ranh Bay. Hà Tiên. Đà Lạt. Paintings of idyllic and pastoral landscapes adorned the walls: Rice paddies. A lone boat moored by a dock. A clock in the shape of Việt Nam. The three red stripes and yellow background flag of the Republic of South Vietnam. A boy on a water buffalo. A woman with long flowing black hair in silk áo dài. These were images of an idealized, romanticized Việt Nam, a Việt Nam that existed only in people’s memories and fantasies, a Việt Nam in which there had not been war. But these were the images I grew up around. I looked up at them while slurping bowls of phở and listening to adults speak Vietnamese while snow fell on the cold avenues outside.

In my geography of imagination, the Mississippi shared a secret confluence with the Mekong. And as we were being ferried across the river, I even had the strange sense that perhaps I was presently at that very confluence. It was a silly, magical thought, but there was a strange sensation in me of being neither here nor there, of being on both rivers at once, or perhaps being conveyed upon their great convergence, on a river without a name.

5.

Bits and pieces of knowledge about the river floated into my head. Books I had read and old stories I had been told. Images I had seen in paintings, photographs, and movies. News items I had recently come across while preparing for the trip. I remembered images of sampans and junk boats moored on the riverbanks, the pale sun above simple homes on stilts, the moon above the exotic tree line. I remembered colorful photographs of river markets and floating villages with people in conical hats selling fish and fruit. I wondered what kinds of strange fish species were presently swimming deep below us, unseen—maybe one of those whale-like Mekong Giant Catfish, an endemic species and one of the largest freshwater fish in the world.

My latest encounter with the Mekong was literary. In the weeks leading up to the Việt Nam trip, I found myself rereading The Lover by Marguerite Duras, searching for descriptions of the river and the delta landscape which I vaguely recollected from earlier readings, and was pleased to find them everywhere.⁶In my recollection, I watched the movie adaptation first, before reading the paperback book with that subtle cover featuring a girl’s hypnotic face. I probably felt drawn to the story for its tantalizing adult content, the tale of forbidden love between a white French girl and a Chinese man, both of whom were living in a version of Việt Nam that was strange and exotic to me. They were also the first depictions I recall encountering in literature or in film of an Asian male who was sexually desirable, though my younger self didn’t feel the need to interrogate the colonial context or twisted power dynamics. But what lingered after the entangled bodies were the steamy descriptions of the Mekong, the intimate knowledge of the landscape and climate. I read The Lover with a kind of jealousy. Jealous of the woman who remembers a childhood in Việt Nam that included bathing in the river, hunting black panther in the marshes of the estuary, crossing the Mekong by ferry. How was it possible that this white French colonial girl who became the writer Marguerite Duras knew more about my country of birth than I did? We both seemed in our very different ways accidents of geography. Rereading the novel, I felt all over again the vitality and power and mystery of the Mekong. The river appeared with more frequency and intensity than I remembered. The sultry and mysterious river was not only a backdrop to the obsessive tale of forbidden love but perhaps the source of the novel’s undeniable force, its forward momentum, its deeper and more dangerous undercurrents, its headlong motion from an ancient source spilling forth toward the sea, the future: “All around the ferry is the river, it’s brimfull, its moving waters sweep through, never mixing with, the stagnant waters of the rice fields. The river has picked up all it has met with since Tonle Sap and the Cambodian forest. It carries everything along, straw huts, forests, burned-out fires, dead birds, dead dogs, drowned tigers and buffalos, drowned men, bait, islands of water hyacinths all stuck together. Everything flows toward the Pacific, no time for anything to sink, all is swept along by the deep and headlong storm of the inner current, suspended on the surface of the river’s strength.”

One sentence in particular continued to run through my head as I was seeing the Mekong with my own eyes: “My mother sometimes tells me that never in my whole life shall I ever see rivers as beautiful and big and wild as this, the Mekong and its tributaries going down to the sea, the great region of water soon to disappear into the caves of the ocean.” Beautiful. Big. Wild. That was how I saw the Mekong, or wanted to see it. And I recognized the muddy light of the river in which Ba and I stood on the ferry as the same “muddy light of the river” that enveloped and silhouetted the young Duras as she leaned against the railing that fateful day on the ferry crossing the Mekong. I could not picture the Mekong without seeing it through Duras’s eyes. I read The Lover in Barbara Bray’s fluid translation, a meandering river of words in English because I did not have French and I had more or less lost my mother tongue, Vietnamese. The Lover left the earliest, greatest, and still most lasting impression of the Mekong, and Duras gave me a sense of the temperature, the sensuality, the terrific heat of the delta. Indeed, it was as if the very particles of air were her words.⁷In actuality, the Mekong I saw coursing before me looked little like the Mekong that rushed through the pages of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. For one, my Mekong was too peaceful, too tame. There were no dead dogs or birds, no drowned tigers or buffaloes, no forests or huts, no human bodies being carried along in its brown water. There was no lover, only my seventy-four-year-old father. But there were still the riverborne weeds, the water hyacinths riding the brown water. And the same muddy light that shined in passages such as this: “The girl in the felt hat is in the muddy light of the river, alone on the deck of the ferry, leaning on the rails. The hat makes the whole scene pink. It’s the only color. In the misty sun of the river, the sun of the hot season, the banks have faded away, the river seems to reach to the horizon. It flows quietly, without sound, like the blood in the body. No wind but that in the water.”

I glanced back at our fellow passengers. There was no girl wearing a man’s fedora hat and gold lamé shoes. There were locals wearing dusty helmets and face coverings bestride sturdy motorbikes laden with various goods. There was the toothless grandma selling lottery tickets. There was a makeshift concession area with small plastic stools and tiny tables empty beneath sun-bleached umbrellas with faded Tiger Beer logos. I wondered what Ba and I looked like, the only ones standing at the bow, leaning against the railing, whether others guessed us correctly as father and son, a couple of overseas Vietnamese returning to the homeland.

6.

The ferry was midstream now, the water darkening with fast deep currents. There were far fewer vessels than I expected—only a half-dozen distant barges, a few covered sampans, some large junk boats, and one tiny canoe presently being rowed by three adventurous and perhaps foolish little boys.

While our road trip had been terrific so far, being on the water stirred a new desire in me to experience the Mekong Delta by boat, not just to cross it by ferry but to follow its length for days on end, perhaps all the way to Phnom Penh.

“Next time,” I said aloud, “we should do a Mekong river cruise.” Ba smiled wistfully at the idea. I silently wondered when that would be and if there would be a next time.

“Earlier,” I asked Ba, “what was the poem you remembered?”

“Oh, the poem is called, ‘Đêm qua bắc Vàm Cống.’ It’s by Tô Thùy Yên, one of the best poets from the south.”⁸Tô Thùy Yên was the pen name of Ðinh Thành Tiên (1938-2019). He studied at Sài Gòn University shortly before dropping out. In 1963, he enlisted in the Army of the Republic of South Việt Nam where he served in PSYOPs. After 1975, he was imprisoned by authorities three times, serving a total of 13 years in “re-education camps.” Before 1975, he was one of the editors of “Thế Kỷ 20” or 20th Century in Sài Gòn (1957), and he was an active member of the “Sang Tao” Literary Group. He was one of my father’s favorite poets. In 1993, he immigrated to the U.S., he and his family initially resettling in St. Paul, Minnesota, of all places. Ba remembers bumping into the poet once in a little bookstore in St. Paul where you could find works written by poets and novelists from south Việt Nam, many now living in the diaspora. Another convergence: the poet and I share the same birthday.

He briefly attempted to give me the gist of the poem in English— someone leaving on a ferry boat and looking back on his youth with longing and regret—but made the speaker sound too emotive and nostalgic. I gave Ba the benefit of the doubt and reminded myself that good poems resist our attempts to summarize them.

I preferred just hearing him read a few remembered lines. Even though I couldn’t understand them all or catch the nuances, I could at least appreciate the sound and rhythm of the poetry. As I hoped he would, Ba recited his favorite lines by heart: “Mối sầu như nước sông / Chảy hoài mà chẳng cạn … Chiếc bắc xa dần bến / Đời xa dần tuổi xanh … Nước tách nguồn về biển / Sầu lại chảy về hồn.”⁹From what I understand, the title of the poem “Đêm Qua Bắc Vàm Cống” loosely translates as “Night Crossing Vàm Cống,” implying that the speaker is crossing the Mekong via the Vàm Cống at nighttime. I might translate the lines my father recited as: “Sorrow like the river / flows on forever never running dry… The ferry moves further and further away, life runs fast beyond youth… Water always returns to the sea, sorrow flies back to the soul.” Named after the hamlet situated on the Hậu River (or Bassac), “Vàm Cống” invokes the well-known ferry crossing in southern Việt Nam, connecting the two provinces of Đồng Tháp and An Giang, that runs from Lấp Vò to Long Xuyên. At least it used to. Since 2019, the same year that the poet of “Đêm Qua Bắc Vàm Cống” died, travelers wanting to get more quickly between Cần Thơ and Đồng Tháp can now cross the six-lane cable-stayed Vàm Cống Bridge.

When we crossed the bridge from Cần Thơ, it was our driver Nam who momentarily played the tour guide, beaming with pride about this fairly recent example of Việt Nam’s infrastructure development and modern transformation, not missing the long wait time at the old ferry terminal. I knew from stories that Ba had to cross that ferry when he was sent to Đồng Tháp, down in the Mekong Delta, to fight during the war. Tô Thùy Yên’s poem must have transported him back to that time and place.

“Is this my first time on the Mekong?” I suddenly thought to ask Ba, wondering to myself why I didn’t know with any certainty. He looked a little caught off guard by my question.

“You didn’t remember…” he replied, trailing off for a long moment.¹⁰“You didn’t remember” sounded like an unintended accusation, though I knew that Ba simply meant I was too young to remember. Nevertheless, it was like my father was saying I had failed to remember a significant day or event in our family’s history, the way someone might accuse you of forgetting their birthday or an anniversary. How could I forget something so significant? My father has been speaking English for well over fifty years now. English was his second language. During my childhood and youth, such linguistic slips and grammatical errors by my parents were sometimes a source of comic condescension, for my English was better than theirs, and sometimes a source of embarrassment and shame, with their unwelcome reminders of our differences from the white Americans who were our neighbors, classmates, colleagues, and friends. This was further compounded by the fact that my father, against my mother’s desires, stopped nurturing Vietnamese at home, since English was seen as a key to success. This was the Reagan era and we lived in an overwhelmingly white small town in the conformist Upper Midwest, mind you. Nowadays, however, I no longer have any ugly feelings about my parents’ sometimes broken English, with their occasional slips and abiding accents; instead, there is a newfound quality of endearment. I have more shame now about my Vietnamese tongue and the way English is being used and abused by those holding the highest offices in the land. The slips help identify them, make them unique. This tense confusion had the added quality of provoking thought about memory. My father saying “You didn’t remember” itself will help me remember our trip to the delta. Ba continued, “Your first time was actually in 1981, when we tried and failed to escape. You were just thirteen months old. We took the bus from Sài Gòn to Cần Thơ. Back then, you still had to cross the Mekong by ferry.”¹¹ I knew we had attempted to escape the country three times. The first time hardly counted, Ba told me, since the plan fell through before we could leave the house. The second time was the failed attempt that November of 1981, whose details were strangely coming to light only now that we were crossing the Mekong. The third time, over a month later in December, was when we successfully escaped on Christmas Eve. I think one of the reasons I hadn’t known about my first time crossing the Mekong was because the story we always told in my family, the story I always asked for because my parents were so good at telling it and because it was indeed a powerful story, and a true one, was the story of how we escaped the country by boat, survived ten nights and ten days at sea, and spent months in refugee camps in Malaysia and the Philippines before coming to America and a making a new home in a place called Wisconsin. Perhaps the story of the failed escape ran the risk of dwelling too long on another branch our lives might have taken, as if by following the river of that memory and its oxbows, we might wander too far into deep, still pools and, like a meander loop cut off by a sudden flood, never return to the central current again. The failed escape was simply a footnote to the refugee memory, providing additional information and more context—i.e. we attempted to escape three times and on the third time we succeeded—but without interrupting the narrative flow.

I couldn’t help but laugh a little. Here I was in Việt Nam in search of new experiences and new memories, and Ba was telling me I had already crossed the Mekong by ferry before.

Now that this fact had risen to the surface, I was seized with a need to know more. About that day. About crossing the Mekong. About the failed escape.

Ba’s tongue is never so loose as when it’s speaking about the distant past, and his memory never so lucid as when he’s trying to illuminate a dark time. And so, I asked him to tell me what he remembered, so I could in my own way try to remember, even though I didn’t remember, even though I could never remember.

I looked at the river again, whose color had changed from yellowish-brown to a surprising bluish green, but it was no less opaque.

7.

So it is November 1981.¹² In November 1981, my parents would have been living hand-to-mouth in Sài Gòn as illegal residents, recently smuggling themselves into the city from Kon Tum. Sài Gòn had been officially renamed Hồ Chí Minh City for five years. Their daughter Bebe, the firstborn child, would have been dead nearly four years by then. Ba would have been out of re-education camp for nearly two years. For over a year and a half, they stayed with Ba’s parents in Kon Tum, a provincial town in the Central Highlands where my father’s parents moved the family from seaside Đà Nẵng in the spring of 1968, after the Tet Offensive. In Đà Nẵng, they couldn’t afford to send eight kids to school and college. So Ba’s parents moved the family to Kon Tum and opened up a jewelry store. There was good business to be had there since the province near Vietnam’s border with Cambodia and Laos was full of soldiers and military personnel. The family was still living there in 1979 when Ba got out of re-education camp. Back in Kon Tum, Ba was under probationary house arrest and had to report to the local authorities every day, like a parolee serving the rest of his sentence under supervision, and worked for menial wages in a co-op, while Mẹ bought and sold what she could at the Kon Tom market and used her teaching background to teach free evening literacy classes for her mandatory civic duty. Amid all this, Mẹ gave birth to me in Kon Tum Hospital in October 1980. At some point, it all became too much, or not enough. They lost their individual freedoms under the Communists, as I heard when they talked about the story of our escape. Speaking of those post-war years, Mẹ would often say to me: “You cannot understand. You could never understand unless you lived through it yourself.” One day, Mẹ took me to Sài Gòn under the pretense that I was sick and needed medical attention, and later requested a temporary travel pass for Ba to join us. They had their doctor friend, the obstetrician who delivered me, make up and sign a note. Once in Sài Gòn, they had no intention of ever going back to Kon Tum. In the sprawling city it would be easier to hide and go unnoticed, to figure out how to leave the country. They lived in the house that my Ba’s parents had bought just a couple months before April 30, 1975, when North Vietnamese troops and tanks entered Sài Gòn and triggered the desperate, chaotic evacuation of the last Americans along with thousands of South Vietnamese. The house was located in District 3, on Lê Văn Duyệt Street, near Hòa Hưng Market. Ba’s days were spent gathering information and planning their escape while Mẹ’s days were spent taking care of me and trying to make a little money on the black market. Whenever they heard that local police were knocking on doors at night and checking for people’s identification papers, they would go to Ông Khuê’s house in Thủ Đức and stay there for a week or two to be safe. Ông Khuê, my father’s maternal uncle, was a colonel in the North Vietnamese Army, or NVA. The police would not suspect a colonel in the NVA to be sheltering unreformed “puppets of the American imperialists” who did not have official residency papers to be living in Sài Gòn. Uncle Khuê, as my father referred to him, had gone North to join the Vietnamese Communists and fight for the revolutionary cause while his sister—my paternal grandmother—remained in the South, a staunch supporter of the young Republic of South Vietnam. After the end of the war, Ông Khuê was given the villa in the affluent neighborhood of Thủ Đức—a house that was abandoned when its former owner and occupant, a lieutenant colonel in the vanquished Republic of South Vietnam, fled the country in that first mass exodus following the Fall of Saigon. It was a reward for his years of military service to the revolutionary struggle, for to the victors go the spoils of war. And so for most of 1981, my parents divided their time between the houses in District 3 and Thủ Đức. When my family returned to Việt Nam for the first time in 1999, we paid a visit to Ông Khuê. I remember an ebullient old man with a youthful face and smiling eyes, how he spoke to me in a stream of Vietnamese that I had difficulty following. I vaguely remember Ông Khuê saying something about me and shadows, either I was scared of shadows or I liked to chase them when they appeared on the wall. And I remember that he said I liked playing outside in the little courtyard, which he pointed to through the French doors, their sunlit red silk curtains billowing in the warm wind of that afternoon. I’m thirteen months old. We are crossing the Mekong on the ferry in the great plain of mud and rice of the delta. There are four of us: Ba, Mẹ, one-year-old me, and cousin L. We are leaving Việt Nam because we can no longer stay. We are travelers. Of a sort. If anyone asks, we are visiting relatives in Cần Thơ. That’s what Mẹ or Ba will say.

I won’t remember any of this because I was too young. Mẹ won’t remember either because she has experienced too much already. But Ba will remember. He remembered the ferry boat. It was not like the simple one-deck boat we were currently taking but a much bigger two- deck ferry. On the first level you could park numerous buses and small vehicles, and the second level was restricted to foot passengers. He remembered that the crossing was relatively short, about half an hour or so, though this did not account for the wait time at the ferry terminal.

Did we stay on the bus or did we get off and walk up to the second level? I was hoping he was going to say the latter because I wanted to picture us standing by the rails and looking at the river, a young family on their way to visit relatives and taking the opportunity to see the country. At first he wasn’t sure, but then he found another detail in his memory. He saw the image of faces looking out and hands reaching through the small, opened windows, and he heard the voices of the vendors on the ferry boat mingling with those of the passengers. He remembered the way the vendors shouted what they were selling and passengers shouted back what they wanted to buy. He remembered that Mẹ bought hard-boiled eggs for me to eat because I was a hungry boy.¹³Later, after we returned from our Việt Nam trip, when I was visiting my parents in their little single-level home in Georgia on my break, I asked Mẹ if she remembered anything about crossing the Mekong and the failed escape. We were probably sitting at the kitchen table, watching the backyard birds through the big picture window as we always do, the sunlight shining through the loblolly pines and the yellow-throated pine warblers singing from the treetops. She retained no distinct images or impressions she could share about the day’s long journey. She said she didn’t remember, it was all too long ago, and that she forgot many things about those years. It was a common refrain of hers, “I don’t remember.” “I’ve forgotten so many details about those years.” “It’s lucky I didn’t lose my mind also.” She didn’t remember if she’d bought the hard-boiled eggs, though she remembered that I was a hungry boy, that they were always feeding me, sometimes feeding me their portion. All her energy, she said, was focused on watching over me. I couldn’t let you out of my sight, she told me in Vietnamese, as if in the blink of an eye I might disappear, as if my one-year-old self bore some small responsibility for her amnesia. “Ask your dad—he’s good at remembering things that happened a long time ago,” she said with a subtle humorous wink toward Ba’s absent-mindedness. She confirmed that it would have been her first time seeing and crossing the Mekong. She had no relatives or friends in the delta, had no real reason to go, and certainly no time. I wondered if she happened to remember crossing the Mekong and seeing the river. But that memory too was lost. He remembered that she was wearing the black cotton pants she always wore when she went to buy and sell things on the market, the kind that women in the south often wore. She kept their money in her pockets for safekeeping. Had Mẹ seen the Mekong before? Ba remembered that it was her first time going that far south, that it would have been her first time seeing the Mekong. What a terrible way to see your country, I thought, just as you were leaving it for good.

We arrived in Cần Thơ a little after three in the afternoon. From there, someone would take us another six or seven kilometers east to a little hamlet on the banks of the Hậu River, the southernmost and largest main branch of the Mekong. We rode in a three-wheeled tuk-tuk truck, the four of us sitting together in the covered wagon. That’s what Ba remembered. The plan was for us to wait in a safe house by the river until nightfall. Around midnight, we would board a simple sampan that would taxi us further downstream to the fishing boat that would be used for the escape. There would be other passengers already waiting on board or arriving from separate safe houses. In the early morning, around the time when the local fishing boats moored along the banks upstream would make their way downstream toward the river’s mouth, our fishing boat would join the general river traffic and head another 40-50 km to the sea gate, and then out to sea. That was the plan.

8.

The river flowed on and Ba continued. “But once we got to the house by the river, they split us up. They put you and your mom in the first house,” Ba recounted, “while they moved me and your cousin in another house, about two kilometers downriver.” They said not to worry, it was a precautionary measure. It wasn’t safe to put too many unfamiliar faces in the same place.

Untrusted locals might notice and snitch to the police, and the police could make everyone’s lives even worse.

And so we waited in the respective houses, connected and separated by the same river. They said we would wait until midnight, and a sampan would take us upstream to the fishing boat. In the meantime, they fed us and mostly left us alone. “They seemed nice,” Ba added.

They came by in the evening and said we had to pay in advance. According to Ba, they first went to Mẹ for the money, who told them they had to check with her husband. When they then went to Ba, he said he didn’t have the money, his wife did. They were clearly annoyed and frustrated, Ba recalled with a chuckle, with all this back and forth, paddling up and down the river between the two houses. But they eventually prevailed and got the money from Mẹ.¹⁴ This is not quite how it went down according to Mẹ. Ba must have had some doubts about his account because after the Việt Nam trip that January, when we had returned to our various lives in the U.S., he asked Mẹ about her recollection of the failed escape. He then let me know by e-mail that what he had told me was incorrect, that actually Mẹ demanded a signature from the smugglers. When I went to visit them over break, I wanted to hear directly from Mẹ her own account of those events. I was somewhat surprised to hear that this correction had come from Mẹ, who so often claimed that she could not remember anything of those terrible years. Perhaps Ba’s misremembered account placed just enough false blame on Mẹ for handing over the money that something in her memory flared in self-defense. When I asked her later about her experience of these events, Mẹ said she never gave up the money so easily, as might be interpreted from Ba’s version. The only way she was going to give them the money, she forcefully recalled, was if they brought back a piece of paper with his signature and permission. There was something redeeming about Mẹ’s version of the events, not only because they wrested minor agency and retrospective humor from the abiding sense of helplessness, desperation, plunder, deceit, and victimhood but also because they were her memories. Here she was remembering something. It was proof that she hadn’t forgotten everything about that period in her life. This happens occasionally. Mẹ will remember some small details when probed.

No boat came the first night or the second night. On the first night, they said police were patrolling the area, best to wait another day. They said the same thing the second night. On the second morning, they came by the house with grave faces and told Ba it’s broken, it’s all fucked. Police had discovered some of the others who were waiting to escape. They told us to go back to Sài Gòn ASAP. They would call as soon as another boat was ready.

Desperation masks deception. Ba asked for their money back, but the organizers said that would be impossible, they’d given it to their boss, and besides, it could be used for next time.

And so we returned to Sài Gòn the way we came—on the bus from Cần Thơ, on the ferry crossing the Mekong. Not until they returned to Sài Gòn did it fully dawn on Ba that they’d been conned. There was never going to be a boat, never a next time. It was all an elaborate ruse with its own careful planning and execution. The smugglers knew how badly we wanted to escape, Ba reflected, and that we wouldn’t think through all of the details.

I was impressed by his ability to recall these events from over forty years ago. I wanted to ask Ba how he felt falling victim to such a deliberate scam knowing that those who had robbed them were ordinary people from the delta, but instead I asked how much the gold leaves were worth.

The amount totaled nearly $800 in U.S. dollars, Ba replied. A lot of money back then, all the leftover gift money from their wedding, essentially their entire savings. I winced, picturing their youthful, beautiful faces in the few photos that still remain of their wedding.

For a moment, we both said nothing. The waves continued to slap loudly against the sides of the boat. It was difficult to read the expression on Ba’s face in the hazy light of the river. My hands ached from gripping the rail more tightly than necessary, so I released them.

9.

Slowly, then swiftly, the other shore swung into view. A wave of relief washed over me. It pained me to think about that excruciating bus ride back to Sài Gòn and having to cross the Nine Dragons River once again.

Just as we were about to step away from the railing, Ba’s face appeared to brighten with another memory. He was remembering one last thing about that day. He said that while we were in Cần Thơ waiting to board the bus to Sài Gòn, an older woman came up to Mẹ and whispered something in her ear. Mẹ twisted around to inspect her black cotton pants. There was a big rip in the seat, a piece of fabric flapping like a black flag.¹⁵Mẹ didn’t remember this, it was one of those details about her life in Việt Nam that other people reminded her about. But she remembered something else that has helped me in writing this all down. Months after returning from Việt Nam, when I asked her about the so-called safe house where she and I stayed for two nights waiting for the boat that never came to take us away, and that never was going to come, when I asked her to describe anything she remembered about the house, she said it was just one of those traditional stilt houses in the delta. That was all she needed to say. Thanks to my recent travels through the Mekong Delta with Ba, I could see very clearly the kind of house Mẹ referred to. I had seen them with my own eyes, driven by them, had seen them from the ferry boat and the small boats. I could now picture the stilt house by the river, the wooden stairs leading down to the water, a simple sampan tied to one of the bamboo beams, the roof made of dried palm leaves, and the palm trees and banana trees bursting bright and green from the side facing the river, the water smooth and murky. I could even envision the small clearing, like a little courtyard, on the other side of the house, the privacy afforded by the trees and other plants that grew in the delta such as I had seen, the sling of a hammock, washing pails, clothes drying on a wire, a few chickens clucking quietly in the background and scattering, and a little boy—he is stumbling from one curiosity to the next, in an unfamiliar place and encountering so many things for the very first time, watched over by his mother, as they wait in that house by the river. Because I saw birds in the delta that January, I could picture the same birds in the trees by the little boy and his mother. Perhaps a sunbird, yes, an iridescent sunbird, flying to a big drooping trumpet flower, and also a glossy black bird with a racket tail, and fluttering butterflies of the sort that occur there. I add all of these to the minutes, to the hours, that neither the boy nor the mother can remember. Maybe she sang him a song to calm him and to soothe her own soul. I could see the colorful birds now and the tropical trees and the stilt house, but somehow I still couldn’t get a clear picture of my mother or even myself. We are just uncertain figures in green shadows, hidden even from ourselves, hidden for safekeeping. As it should be, as it can’t be otherwise. When I think of that one-year-old boy now, I wish he wouldn’t have cried so much and so loudly, that he would give his parents an easier time. At one, I would have understood that objects still exist even when they can’t be seen, heard, or touched. I would have been able to follow simple instructions, like follow Mẹ, come here, don’t cry. I would have engaged in simple pretend play, like we are going on a trip, we are going to the sea, we are going on an adventure. If you showed me pictures of my family, I would have been able to recognize their faces, my aunts and uncles, especially the ones who held me, who played with me, who watched over me. I would have been able to recognize common objects and perhaps even attach words to them. I had a few words I could use, beyond Mẹ and Ba, like boat, tree, bird, but mostly I babbled. I was beginning to learn the names of things. And I understood more than I could say.

So it is January 2024. I’m forty-four years old and have just crossed the Mekong again. The same river, moving with different waters. Beside me is Ba, Mẹ in spirit. This time we’re heading further west, deeper into the Mekong Delta. We’re tourists, we’re not pretending to be anything or anyone else.

I raised the binoculars to my eyes and saw cloudy swarms of swiftlets wheeling above. Not for the first time while we were traveling in Việt Nam did the thought occur to me that these same birds would have been swirling in the skies over the country beyond my recall, diving that November when we tried and failed to escape. I watched them fly around and about, stitching the present to the past.

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Hai-Dang Phan is a poet currently writing an environmental memoir, Operation Laughingthrush, about his travels through Vietnam in search of birds and his family’s past. He teaches at Grinnell College, and lives in Iowa City.