The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,92

from the nearby village of Ky Ha would use this pier to unload fish. But on this dark evening, it was the repository for refugees’ abandoned possessions, personal items that had been chosen from a household and a lifetime to be brought with them as they left their native land—clothes, miniature Buddha statues, trinkets, photographs, books, diaries, and a host of other things that had significance only to those who once owned them. Also in those bags were valuable commodities that could be sold in Hong Kong or anywhere else in the world: gold bars and other gold jewelry well in excess of the two taels that the Cong An (the police) permitted each person to take out of the country; thick and fragrant barks of cinnamon trees grown in the jungles of Vietnam that when ground would produce the finest quality cinnamon in the world; and barks of sandalwood that were valued for their perfuming and medicinal powers and could command significant sums of money.

“Don’t take my bag! It’s not heavy!” a gray-haired woman shrieked, half in protest, half in plea, at one of Brother Can’s men. They stood only a few bodies away from where my mother and I sat, me on her lap and she on the wooden deck. After a futile tug-of-war, Brother Can’s man wrestled the bag, which was twice the size of the woman’s torso, out of her hands, threw it overboard, and then turned to find his next victim.

My mother leaned more heavily against the one bag she had packed for us, pushing it that much harder against the wall at her back, trying to shield it from the man’s reach. My grandmother sat next to us, leaning against her own bag and the wall. My mother could see my brother sitting next to my father on the bench that ran along the back of the boat. She could see Grandpa arguing with one of Brother Can’s brothers. My grandfather had brought along a dozen two-foot-long barks of cinnamon, tied together and stuffed into a woven sack that was supposed to protect them. Only after my grandfather reminded the man that he had done his part to make this trip possible did the brother relent, allowing my grandfather to keep half of the cinnamon bark and throwing the other half onto the pier.

From her position on the floor, off to Brother Can’s right, my mother watched the surreal scene unfold in the dim glow of the two bare bulbs that swung freely from the boat’s canopy. It was already nine o’clock, past dusk. The Cong An were forcing many boats carting ethnic Chinese to leave at night, fearing that sightings of refugees in flight would encourage the ethnic Vietnamese in their attempts to flee. And so here we all were, maneuvering about in the dark save for the boat’s few weak lights. My mother witnessed the yelling and shouting and arguing and negotiating and pressing together of more and more people everywhere; she looked upon the cast-off shreds of people’s lives and life savings hurled into the air to lie helter-skelter on the pier where they would be picked over by scavengers by morning. None of this seemed real, not the people being forced to abandon what little they had left after the Communists had already taken so much—some left with just the clothes on their backs—nor the water threatening to drown this tiny, overcrowded boat that was supposed to take three hundred refugees to Hong Kong, more than a thousand miles of open sea to the northeast.

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Maybe because it is now winter, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ghosts of our migration, and of Tobacco Woman, and Grandfather Spirit. And maybe that in turn is a result of not such good scan results, and more recently my bout of severe diarrhea that led me to feel like death.

In Vietnam, on the road outside our house, a Vietnamese woman sold tobacco every day, squatting on the dirt before a cloth that displayed her wares. The spirit of Tobacco Woman’s deceased grandfather would sometimes return, and when he did, she would send word to my paternal grandmother. The Grandfather Spirit would often tell my grandmother what numbers to pick in the local lottery—she was an avid gambler—and she would win. But his spirit also advised on much more serious matters, matters of life and death.

My sister, who is six years older than I, developed cataracts at an early age.