On one of those mornings when we were sleeping, Binh pulled the curtain open hastily. “Wake up!” she cried. “I have news for you. We have found Diep Van Tien and his family in America, and they have agreed to sponsor you.”
“What must we do?” Our father’s voice was eager. Even the grandmother was sitting up, looking interested.
“Go to the English classes. Prepare yourselves.”
We had known about the classes, but we had not attended them because my father said we should not show that we believed we were going to America. If we were too confident, the spirits might punish us. They would think it arrogant to take such a thing for granted. Kim would not go to the classes. “I already know English,” she said. “Anyhow, I don’t care now.” Thant and Anh and I went to the children’s school, and our father went to a class with other men. I did not expect the grandmother to come with us, but I coaxed our mother. “Why don’t you come? There are classes for the women.”
“No,” our mother said. “I am too old.”
“There are many women older than you are,” I told her. But she would not go to the class. She was too shy, afraid that a woman from a small village would appear foolish in the eyes of the other women. Each afternoon when I came back from class I would show her my workbook and teach her some of the things I had learned. In that way she picked up many words. She laughed at herself, but she was proud of her new skill.
She said, “I must learn so that I can understand when all you children begin to talk together, or in no time you will plot behind my back.” It was true that we often spoke English to one another, for Anh and Thant thought the sounds of the English words very funny.
The days began to go by more quickly. Finally the day came when Binh led us into the office to talk with the woman who was in charge of where everyone went. We could hardly believe that the Americans would take us, that the time would come for us to leave the camp and Hong Kong. We thought if we were lucky enough to be able to go, we would have several days, perhaps weeks to get ready. Instead, a flight was leaving the next day. We were to be on it.
My mother flew to the laundry to scrub and iron all of our clothes. My father took his tools out and carefully cleaned and polished them. Thant and Anh and I practiced our English words. Only Kim and the grandmother were quiet. “Now we are a long way from our village and our ancestors,” the grandmother said. “Soon we will be many thousands of miles farther. How can I rejoice?” Kim said nothing, but I knew she was thinking of how far from her mother she would be in America.
We were ready in our clean clothes long before it was time to leave. We had thought we would have no sadness at leaving Hong Kong. But it was not so. On hearing our good news, our friends from the boat came to say good-bye. Dao and Tho begged us to remember them. Tho was discouraged. No one seemed to want them, and soon all the baby would know of life was the long days spent on his tiny platform in the crowded room. “We wish you well,” Tho said. “We are happy for you, but don’t forget us here. Perhaps you will find a way to bring us to you.”
“We’ll do everything we can,” our father promised.
There were a dozen of us from our camp going to America. Refugees from the other camps in Hong Kong would join us. But even so, we were only a very few. Thousands and thousands would remain behind. It was hard to be happy.
Anh and Thant could only think of riding on an airplane. Sometimes when we were working in the rice fields we would look up at the sky and watch the planes fly over us like strange birds. We never thought we would be in one.
As we stopped at one camp after another to pick up passengers, the bus became crowded. The grandmother had been so troubled by the thought of the long trip, she had eaten almost nothing. Now, sickened by the lurching bus, she became weak and dizzy. Binh saw her trouble and told us not to worry. “I understand that one of the refugees who will be going is a doctor.”
At the next camp people crowded into the bus. Suddenly Kim, who was sitting next to me, jumped from her seat. She fought her way through the aisle toward the door. I ran after her, afraid she was trying to escape the bus that would take her farther away from her mother. In a minute I saw who she was running toward. It was her mother. The bac si pushed people aside to get her arms around Kim. She hugged me too, and then she threw her arms around my mother and father and kissed Anh and Thant. She even kissed the grandmother, who looked shocked but who seemed to be over her dizziness.
Our father could hardly speak. “We thought you were back in Vietnam. How did you get here? How did you know we were leaving?”
“When I got to the detention camp where I was to stay until they sent me back to Vietnam, I pretended I was very sick. Since I am a doctor, it was easy to imitate a sickness. I knew all the symptoms. They took me to the hospital. At the hospital I told my story to the doctors there. I told them how I had tried to help a man who was very ill. How I was punished for that by the guard at our camp. How it was the guard who made them take me away in the middle of the night. How I had to leave Kim so she would not have to go back to Vietnam.
“The doctors were very angry. One of the doctors was a volunteer from a hospital in America. He wrote to his hospital and asked them to sponsor me so that I could come to America. I could not go back to your camp because of the official, who would have reported me, but through the doctors I was able to learn that you were going to America and when you would leave. And here I am!”
The bus was lumbering to a place where there were many large buildings. There were huge fields, and the fields were paved over like roads. On the roads were airplanes so large I could not believe they could fly. Soon, I knew, we would be on one of those planes. I had looked up at the planes in the sky from the rice paddies. From such a distance how small they had seemed! Now we would be up in the sky looking down. Everything we were leaving behind would grow small, but not so small that we would ever forget it.
GLORIA WHELAN is the author of many books for young readers, including The Turning, Listening for Lions, The Indian School, Shadow of the Wolf, Next Spring an Oriole, Once on This Island, and Homeless Bird. She lives with her husband in Michigan.
Gloria Whelan, Goodbye, Vietnam
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