Except for Mark, who had already met her, Nguyen Binh Ky wasn’t much like anyone expected. She was tiny, as Mark had said, and she had long, black hair. Most of them had their impressions of Vietnamese women from their own experience, and one impression was that they were pretty shy, but this kid didn’t have much of it – she was smiley, bubbly, and outgoing. And, as Mark had said, if you closed your eyes you could hear a tall Scandinavian blonde in that Finnish accent. There were some other accents going on there, though – a couple of guys caught a hint of California “Valley Girl,” and everybody could pick out some Boston, of all things.
She charmed everybody on the spot.
“Pleased to meet you, Co (Miss) Binh Ky,” Gil said with a smile, exhausting about a tenth of his remaining Vietnamese vocabulary on the spot.
“Oh, just call me Binky,” she smiled. “Everybody else does.”
“I’m pretty sure Mark has been over all of this with you,” Gil said, “But just so everybody’s on the same track, most of us know at least a little Vietnamese. Not much, and probably some of it we shouldn’t use around you anyway. But, we all want to get at least a little of the language and practice it, if nothing more than being able to ask where the bathroom is, maybe order dinner or something. But, if anybody shows much of a talent for the language, we’d want them to work with you enough that they can at least follow the thread of a conversation and have a pretty good idea of what’s being said. That’s obviously going to take more work.”
“It’d be a pleasure,” she said. “I don’t get to use it much anymore myself. There’s a couple Vietnamese families down in Camden, and I try to get down there every now and then, just so I can use the language. I find that I can forget it, too.”
“That’s just exactly the problem with us,” Gil said. “Some of us used to know, well, a little more than we do now. But none of us has used it in nearly ten years, and it’s longer than that for most of us, so it’s just about going to be starting from scratch.”
“I’ve got to be honest,” Binky said, “I’m not a language teacher, and I don’t know where to start. About all I can do is teach you Vietnamese the way I learned English, and that’s by using it and practicing it, listening to the words and how they’re used, and sometimes puzzling out the meanings. But I was just dumped into it. I didn’t know any English when I came to Albany River, not a word. And, nobody knew any Vietnamese. But, I’ve learned it pretty well, I think.”
“You sure have,” Gil said. “I strongly doubt that any of us could learn as much Vietnamese and speak it as well in three years as you do English.”
“Thanks,” she said, “I try. Let’s get started with a few simple words and phrases, just so you’ll have some words to work with. But first, why don’t you all introduce yourselves. Mark, I know, and he told me you’re Gil Evachevski, but who are you?” she said, pointing at Steve.
“Steve Augsberg,” he replied in what little Vietnamese he remembered, “Pleased to meet you, Co Binh Ky.”
She shot a fast-paced string of Vietnamese back at him. “Hey, not so fast,” he said in English. “I think I caught a couple words there.”
Binky said the phrase over again, more slowly.
“I think I got about half of it,” he said in English. “You asked how long it’s been since I’ve been in Vietnam, right?”
“Yes,” she said in Vietnamese.
“Uhhhh . . . damn, I can’t do it. 1972.”
She told him how to say it in Vietnamese, then switched to English. “You seem to remember some of the language. That’s not bad for not having been there in so long.”
“I never really learned that much,” Steve said. “I figured as long as I was there, I ought to at least try to learn a little. I’m surprised I remember that much.”
She went on around the group, but it soon proved that Steve was the only one left with even a smattering of the language, so she started in on simple words and simple phrases. It was clear that it was going to be a long and difficult process that was going to take a lot of practice.
By the time an hour had passed, it was pretty clear that Steve was the only one that was making any degree of progress in actually learning the language. Mark was getting a little, but most of the rest of them were just parroting phrases. They might be able to break through with practice into actual use of the language, but it was clear it was going to take a lot of work.
Finally, Gil called a halt. “Binky, I think you’ve given us all headaches, except maybe for Steve,” he said. “We must be pretty hopeless, I guess. “
“Oh, I think you can pick up a little of it,” she said. “But, if you’re looking for someone who can really use the language, well, right now, I think Steve’s the best bet.”
“Will you work with me?” Steve said slowly in haltingly mangled Vietnamese.
“Yes,” she said, in Vietnamese, “Of course.”
Over the next few months, Steve really got into the language lessons. Binky lived with an older Finnish couple down at Albany River, the Sarrinens, who were much like the Toivo family that Steve had known so well while growing up. They had a thick accent, which obviously accounted for Binky’s.
The fact that Binky was a lovely girl with an exotic, engaging personality may have had something to do with Steve’s interest in those early days, but, if so, he covered it up pretty well.
Steve hadn’t had a lot to do with women in ten years and more, and wasn’t real sure he wanted to get back in that game at all. His friends had started calling him a confirmed bachelor, and maybe there was some truth to it. About the only dating he’d done in that time was with Jan Mackey. While Jan was a nice person and they got along pretty well, it wasn’t long before he could detect that a spark had struck between Ed Snyder and her, and it really didn’t bother him that much.
About the time he’d been going with Jan a little, he ran into his old high school girl friend in the Super Market one evening. It was hard to recognize her; she’d put on a lot of weight, and had let herself go generally. She had three screaming brats with her, and when she told Steve she was divorced and hinted she was available again, Steve had told her he was going with someone, even though Jan was tailing off by then and there were no prospects. He walked out of the store shaking his head, reflecting once again that in the long run, getting drafted had been one of the luckier things that had happened to him.
That may have kept Steve’s romantic fires banked, and probably helped in the early days with Binky. They met two and three nights a week over the next month or so. The early language sessions were mostly down in the Sarrinen home in Albany River, sitting on the old-fashioned front porch in the waning heat of the summer evenings.
Steve soon discovered Binky had graduated from Albany River High School in the spring – a little old, as high school graduates go, but she’d only gone there for three years and had started from scratch in the language. There had clearly been some bending of the program in the early years to accommodate her, but her senior year, she had all A’s, except for a B in trig. Steve, who had been an A and B student in college but a C student in high school, was impressed. She was planning on commuting down to the community college in Moffatt in the fall; it wasn’t clear in her own mind if she’d really deserved the grades she’d gotten, especially in the early years at Albany River, and wasn’t sure she could handle college work.
They talked about a lot of things those first evenings. Steve told her a lot about Henry Toivo, about growing up with him, sometimes in English, and sometimes in a steadily improving if still patchy Vietnamese. He told her a lot about himself, too.
She told him quite a bit about her experiences since she’d come to Albany River, but Steve never got more than the briefest thumbnail sketch of what had happened to her before that. She’d been going to a Catholic school in Saigon before the fall, but the communists had closed the school. Her father and mother were dead, and she’d come out of the country on a fishing boat, and had been lucky enough there to meet the brother of the Baptist preacher in Albany River. The preacher and the preacher’s brother had made arrangements for the Sarrinens to take her in, with the church – and Mark’s church, in Spearfish Lake – covering part of her expenses. That was about all Steve learned; clearly, there was more there, but she obviously didn’t want to talk about it.
Steve eventually met the preacher, a man named Roger Hunter, who had a thick Boston accent. It turned out he’d been a medic in Vietnam about the time Bud was there, and had learned a fair amount of the language and remembered enough of it to help Binky over the first of her learning English. Steve never did figure out where the California “Valley Girl” in her accent came from, but figured TV must have had something to do with it.
As time went on, they started to do other things, still more or less in the context of language lessons. There was a Vietnamese family down in Camden that the Sarrinens had turned up through the Baptist network. Boat people like Binky, their English was considerably more patchy, but they had been a big help during Binky’s early days, when she literally hadn’t known a word of English. The couple ran a small Vietnamese restaurant, and Binky took Steve down there for dinner, at least to let him hear someone else speaking Vietnamese. Steve didn’t much care about Vietnamese food, but figured he’d better learn to like it, and eventually some of it began to taste fairly good.
When Binky started college they had to cut back the language lessons so she could have time to study. They still got together an evening each week, and on either Saturday or Sunday they’d make the trek to Camden. One time, Steve suggested that as long as they were down there, they might as well catch a movie, and Binky agreed, a little to his surprise. After that, a movie or other activity was usually part of their Camden trips. They’d become friends, and it was sort of like dating a little.
One Saturday along in October was particularly nice. The air had a little chill to it, but it was warm and sunny. The colors were crisp and clear, and both of them knew there would not be many more days like them before winter. “I’ve got to get out and get some fishing in tomorrow,” Steve said in Vietnamese as the two of them drove back from Camden on Saturday night. “The nice weather won’t last.”
“Can I come with you?” Binky asked. “It’d be nice to get out.”
“Sure,” said. “You want me to pick you up?”
Steve went to early Mass the next morning, then went down to Albany River to pick up Binky, and drove her up to his home on Hannegan’s Cove, which by now was fixed up pretty well. It was the first time Binky had been there. He gathered up an armload of fishing gear from the garage, and headed out to the dock where his bass boat was tied up.
“Steve,” she said with a voice that reeked of alarm, “You didn’t tell me we were going in a boat.”
“That’s usually what we fish from,” he said gently, detecting the panic in her voice.
“Do we have to?” she asked. The panic was even more clear, now.
“No, we don’t have to,” he said. “Are you uncomfortable with boats?”
“Yes,” she said, tears running down her face.
Slowly, over the course of a couple hours, the story came out, disjointed, partly in English, partly in Vietnamese when Binky couldn’t make herself say something in English; Steve soon realized he was the first one to hear it all.
Nguyen Binh Ky had grown up a Saigon girl. Her father was a merchant, some business that Steve wasn’t very clear about, but apparently the family was moderately well off. The war and the political turmoil had managed to not affect them very much. The family was Catholic, and Binky had gone to a Catholic school, run by nuns, some Vietnamese, some French.
When Saigon fell, things went to hell. Steve could remember it on TV, the frantic crowds trying to get out of the country before the communist takeover, the helicopters on the roof of the Embassy. He’d been at the Embassy a few years before, and remembered it well, and he’d been vaguely aware that there were reports of lots of political turmoil.
That was merely the tip of the iceberg, Steve now found out. Binky’s father and her brothers, one as young as twelve, disappeared into the “re-education camps,” and she never saw any of them again. But Binky and her mother went through hell, especially in those first weeks when the NVA soldiers rampaged through the city. They never got sent to a re-education camp, but what happened may have been worse. They’d been cornered by a group of soldiers, beaten and raped, not once, but a lot. After some time the soldiers had apparently gotten tired of them and let them escape. What followed was a string of terrible days, terrible weeks, that Steve never did get a full account of. They were hidden for a while by friends, were captured again, beaten and raped again, and got away again. They spent days trying to get to a small store of gold coins that her father had hidden for such an emergency, and finally managed it in the dark of night. With the help of an old customer of her father’s they managed to get out of the city, with her mother and Binky each carrying part of the gold coins. They were taken in by relatives who lived poorly in a small village near Saigon. It was at least an island of comparative security; there wasn’t quite the madness there that had been in the bigger city, and they stayed there a year and a half.
There always was a little communication between the re-education camps and the world outside, and a year or more after the fall of Saigon, the word came through the grapevine that her father was dead, and so was at least one of her brothers. But, her father had sent word to get out of the country if they could.
That seemed like a pretty decent idea to them. Since the very beginning, people had been escaping the country on whatever boats they could find, and Binky’s mother began to ask around for a chance to get on one. Finally, in early 1977, the chance came. Binky and her mother had to walk for several days to get to a small fishing village named Thang Hai, up the coast from Vung Tau. The boat was nothing to speak of; it was old, wooden, rotten, leaked a lot – and not much larger than Steve’s bass boat. It had a wheezy little one-lung engine, and it took all of their remaining gold coins to get on it, two of eighteen people. None of them knew anything of the sea, except you couldn’t drink the water; they had a few bottles of water, and a little food. The only thing they had to navigate with was a compass that a former ARVN lieutenant named Vinh had salvaged from a crashed helicopter. They had no maps, although Vinh had gotten a chance to study one.
Vinh also knew a lot of people had taken boats out of Vietnam in an effort to reach Thailand, but had been set upon by pirates and marauders who robbed the refugees of their meager possessions, and often raped and killed them. Vinh’s plan was audacious: rather than risk the pirates of the Gulf of Siam, he proposed to head straight out into the South China Sea, heading more or less east to the Philippines. It was six hundred miles, and he thought he had enough gas to make it, or, perhaps be picked up by a ship somewhere.
Not long after her seventeenth birthday, in the dark of a moonless night, Nguyen Binh Ky and her mother climbed aboard the desperate little boat, along with sixteen others. Vinh got the little engine running, and they headed out to sea. When the morning came, there was no land in sight behind them. For the first days all went well, but the old boat leaked a lot, and they had to keep bailing it out with a bucket. Then the wind came up, and a storm began to blow; the waves got large, and all Vinh could do was steer the boat into the seas to keep it from upsetting while everybody had to bail the boat out even harder. After a day or more the storm died down, the waves went down a bit, and Vinh turned the boat back toward the east. They kept going for several more days. Vinh had brought along several cans of gasoline, and one by one they were emptied into the engine and were used up, until none were left, and the little engine quit, leaving them floating helplessly in the middle of an empty sea.
Binky was vague about how long they floated in the little boat like that; her mind had already shut itself off from some of the agony and the horror that followed. But what she told Steve that afternoon in his front yard on the shore of Spearfish Lake was enough to give him bad dreams for many years to come. But the story was simple: first the food ran out. Then, the water ran out. And then, people began to die.
One of Vinh’s little girls was the first to go, and others soon followed. Ships passed, sometimes close, but no one ever stopped. The boat still leaked, and still had to be bailed, but they fell behind as their strength ebbed. By some miracle Vinh was able to kill a seagull that landed; they shared out its meager meat as best they could, eating it raw, but that only prolonged the agony. Vinh’s other daughter died, then his son, then his wife. Half crazed with thirst, Binh Ky’s mother tried to drink sea water; it only made her sick and delirious, and finally, with Binh Ky holding tight to her, she died as well. The few remaining no longer had the strength to bail the boat out, and slowly it sank lower in the water. Finally, only Binh Ky and a man by the name of Thout were left alive. Binh Ky was too delirious by then to know, but she guessed Thout must have been in a little better shape, enough to weakly wave a rag as a distress symbol, but she didn’t have any memory of that. She did, however, vaguely remember darkness alongside the sinking boat, and realized it was a ship. She remembered a strong man picking her up and putting her into another boat, and remembered seeing a flag on the ship. It was full of stars.
Some years after that day on Steve Augsberg’s lawn, Binky got a proselytizing pitch from some evangelical Christian, and she told him, “I’ll tell you what it’s like to be born again. It’s having your dying body being picked up by an American sailor and carried up to heaven.”
Heaven, in this case, was the USS Morton, a destroyer heading back to the states via Hawaii after a stop at Singapore. And, from the moment her nearly-unconscious body was carried aboard, she truly began a new life. Binh Ky learned later that there was some discussion of leaving her and Thout in Manila, but they were in very bad shape, and no one knew what kind of hospital treatment they’d receive, so the captain decided to keep them on board while they went to Hawaii. All she knew at the time was that she woke up feeling a little better, with tubes in her arm and a hospital corpsman hovering over her. Soon she was able to eat a little oatmeal, a very little, spooned to her by the big, gentle black man. The only person on board who knew any Vietnamese at all was the chaplain, who had served with the Marines in Vietnam for a while, and Binh Ky learned more from the sound of his voice than from his words that things were going to be all right, now. Binh Ky was short and slender when Steve first met her, and he found that she only weighed ninety-five pounds. They weren’t able to weigh her on the Morton for several days, due to her being so fragile, but after she improved a little and they did weigh her, she weighed sixty-two pounds. But, she put on a little weight, and was able to get some of her strength back as the Morton sailed halfway across the Pacific, and, with the chaplain to steady her, she was able to walk down the gangplank onto American soil at Pearl Harbor.
Only there were they able to find someone able to speak enough Vietnamese to get a few facts out of her, like the facts Binh Ky was only seventeen, was an orphan, knew absolutely no one, and had no idea of what to do. In that period, though, the American government was quick to accept boat people who had escaped from Vietnam, and the chaplain – she only there learned his name was Ted Hunter – took her case in hand. “I can find a family for you to stay with,” he told her through the interpreter. Binh Ky took his offer, and a few days later, after he got her papers in order, flew with her to San Francisco, where she first met the chaplain’s brother, and, after another plane ride, Mr. and Mrs. Sarrinen. By then, Binh Ky knew she was going to face some hard and strange times, with strange people in strange places in a language she didn’t know. But she knew it was going to be easy after what she’d been through.
It was getting late in the afternoon when the story finally wound down. “Binky, I never knew any of that,” Steve told her gently. “If I had, I wouldn’t have asked you out in the boat with me.”
“That’s all right, Steve,” she said, “There’s no way you could have known.” She was silent for a moment. Then, considering the story he’d just heard, she said one of the bravest things he’d ever heard anyone say: “Steve, would you take me out in your boat?”
“I will if you want me to,” he said, “But I understand if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to,” she said, “But maybe going out in the boat with you will help me to put it behind me a little more.”
“Then we’d better do it before you change your mind,” he said, taking her by the hand to help her get up. They wound up in an embrace – nothing long or romantic, just an affirmation that each other was there and they cared.
She got into the bass boat, and Steve cast off the lines and cranked up the motor. Fishing was the furthest thing from his mind now; he just wanted to give her a nice ride. He opened the throttle, and the boat got up on a plane and went scooting down the lake, Binky’s long black hair waving behind her, a broad grin on her face as the setting sun made the colorful autumn leaves even richer.