Hunger Pains

Madeline Chen

It’s May 1, 1975. You are nineteen.

Three months ago you were dumped off a raft, starving, onto the shores of the nearby Cambodia. There, the jungle was a maze of vine and tree you’d never traversed. Your heart was as porous and bloody as the ground you’d left behind. Three months ago you found out by way of bodies that your family was shot dead by the very people meant to save them. You grabbed what you could and ran. You made it to sea, then to land, then back to water with a group of strangers running just like you. Looking for a new home. Looking for a place where life was viable. In America, they said, life was paradise. There, you would be free. There, you would never starve and you would find a new family. You would never dream of death again.

“Kim Dương,” you rasped when the people on your raft asked for your name. You starved again. You prayed to Buddha on one hand and to God on the other that respite would come. Promised not to eat meat again. Promised you would go to church. Promised you would forget the grasp of the bullet sprays.

It rained. The cool of the droplets across your skin danced as they do, always, fluttering among the ocean. You wondered, should lightning strike you down, would you go peacefully? Your house burned down twice before you left. You thought to yourself painfully, even water made you think of the guns.

The Americans hear of you now, floating hapless at sea with a bedraggled group of stick and bone strangers. Finally, you think. They have come to save you. Then you remember what those saviors looked like when they asked your parents if they were commies; Viet Cong rats, they whispered, and shot them at eye level when your frightened parents nodded because they didn’t know what English babble meant.

You push away those thoughts. Anything is better than this damned boat. Food, you hope. Hunger turns you into a ravenous, primal monster.

“Kim Dương,” you choke out when the imposing men ask you your name in broken Vietnamese. A bad translator asks you to spell it on a paper. They cross out the accents. You don’t question it.

“Food?” you try, but the translator looks over your head at the next boat coming. Your stomach growls. The sailors cackle, seemingly ignorant to the drizzle that’s starting to accumulate.

“Xin chú cho em đồ ăn,” [Please sir, give me food,] you beg. You are lightheaded now. You have been drinking seawater for sustenance. Your so-called crew haven’t fared much better, starved frames of wilted plants. A promise broken is nothing new from these fickle people. Your graveless parents tell the tale.

“...Food…Girl…Yes?” You catch spatters of English atop troves of gibberish. One man tosses you a hard brown cracker and a pouch of food you’ve never eaten, half soggy noodles wrapped in brown plastic and a coffee. You miss your home and realize in a backwards afterthought that you have no home. Vietnam is a hellhole of aerated ground pellets and ghosts haunting the bridge your mother once peddled on.

They give you a bunk. It stinks of mildew but it’s better than the half standing and no sleeping you did on the tiny raft, not knowing if all four limbs would ever experience dryness. Not knowing if you were to face a watery grave. There must be remnants of the agent orange in your lungs or else why does it hurt to breathe?

You try to sleep.

You don’t.

In your dreams lie the ghosts of your parents, clutching your arms with holes in their heads. They curse you sometimes and cry out your name, begging you not to leave them. Your brother clings to the bars of a cell as they drag him away. All for taking a job in the government. 

In some amount of time you haven’t tracked, because its passage becomes warped and frayed on the waters––an ouroboros of day eats night and circles of pain, you are on land. You’ve forgotten what walking on ground that didn’t rock from waves felt like. You’ve even forgotten that America doesn’t speak Vietnamese.

It rains in the West too. You are cold. Hungry. Broken. You think they will save you. They don't care.

They load you into a line with the rest of “your people” and send you off to customs. You’ve never been cargo before. You marvel at the terror of the buildings as tall and sharp as needles. So beautiful it’s fearsome.

“Asylum seeking?” the man at the window asks you.

“I no–I no speak– Englit–” you stutter, unsure of yourself. 

He scoffs, makes a check, gives you a form and tells you to sign, though you only know this because he takes the pen and waves it in your eyes like it’s a weapon. He gets ink on your face. You flinch at the touch of metal’s kiss against your shrapnel dusted skin. It feels like a droplet of water on your nose. Or maybe so hot it's cold to the touch; the impact of an intercepting missile.

One time on that American boat you tried to drown yourself. You made it to the deck of the ship and peered overboard. You heard your mother’s voice. “Lai đây con!”[Come, my girl!] she whispered. You got halfway down. Another boat girl came towards you and grasped your wrist, desperate.

She doesn’t even know me, you thought. Let me die in peace. Without war. Without pain.

“Tại sao?” [Why?] she murmured, voice low as the dim, clouded sky. Why? You didn’t know how to respond. You climbed back up robotically. You closed your eyes. It started raining. Eventually it becomes easy enough to pretend it doesn’t matter—even when it does, even when they ask your name and you start to know the word “you” means me, and you put together stupid strings of phrases. You learn to palate their disgusting preserved food that tastes nothing like the thit kho, roasted pork and rice your mother once made in the spring.

You are in America now. Hunger was supposed to stop haunting you here, like the military propaganda told you; instead it’s sharper, so close and so far. Before the war they said this place was filled with cushy jobs and opportunities. Here you can barely find a place that understands you when you ask for hiring. 

You find yourself in a place called District of Colombia, where a marble house is drowned out by shadow. You witness multiple fights built with fists that crackle like fire as you wander about with the girl on the boat that claims she saved you from a sure death she doesn’t understand you crave, fresh out of Customs.

You get a job as a housekeeper at a Marriott that gives free lunch for people who work overtime. You think about what else you could be doing with your free time. Then you remember your family is gone and sign the contract with a dead stare and those pangs in your stomach that seem to do all the thinking before you can stop them. You hope things will change here. You doubt you ever will. Life and death. Dreams of war.

On your first paycheck you find a grocery store with beer and a pack of cigarettes; hold up a one and then a nine with shaky fingers when they ask you for age and then point at numbers when you don't understand. You spend all ten dollars of 2.25 per hour on your fix. The smoke makes you tired. The beer is Heineken. You decide you never want to live life fully sober again.

You fall asleep on the sidewalk because a home costs too much and you have no family but the girl on the boat, who told you dying is too selfish so you should live for your brother who may be locked in a cage for the rest of his life. You dream worse with the smoke still heady in your brain. You decide you’ll never smoke again. Your stomach growls. Your mind empties too.

Three months ago you left your country gripping the yellow and red striped flag to an aching heart that bled out twenty times over with the sound of each grenade. Your brother was ripped from home and imprisoned by the soldiers. You left him. You left him. You left him.

Now you have a new country with a new flag and a new language but no home. You crave what you ran from. How bad, you wonder, if you returned? You can pretend away the war, pretend away the damage, forget your brother and his pitiful cries even though he is two years older and they stole him to the North and for all you know he may be dead. What if he’s not? One day you will fix this. You will pay for his arrival. You must.

A woman curses you out in the middle of the street.

“Go back to Vietnam, you abomination,” she screams, “YOU KILLED MY SON!”

As if you killed her son. As if it isn’t her prized Lyndon B that sent her son to meddle with things that shouldn’t have been meddled with. As if your parents and all the things you used to love aren’t decomposing aboveground atop your old house burnt to ash. This is your home now. Life is survival from paycheck to paycheck. What happened to a life of freedom? Independence is a shadow of their rumors. You are trapped.

On your twentieth birthday you rent a musty apartment labelled “low income housing” with the boat girl. Her name is Anh. You never asked. She goes to the store and spends precious bills of Lincolns and Hamiltons on material to make you food like home. You barely taste it as you shovel down the pile of ash rice and ash soup and metal egg rolls down your throat to keep the wolf in your gut from clawing it apart.

She practices English with you.

“Hao ahh you?” 

“Good. I lie you food.”

“Cảm ơn chị,” [Thank you,] she says, breaking the cycle. The silence is deafening. She gets up for work as a janitor on night shift. You look out the grime covered window as she leaves. The ping of a fat water droplet rattles your eardrums as the clouds convulse in agony.

When you were nine your mother forbade you from going to school. She needed farm hands for the rice paddies. Your brother was exempt. Every morning before the sun rose you cried as you lugged pails of water across miles of wet land. It rained. You weren’t yet scared of the rain. You wondered why life wasn’t fair then, born a girl versus boy. Eventually you cooked and cleaned too. Then you matured and in the blink of an eye they are dead you are alone you are afraid you are—

Fifteen years have passed and they gave you citizenship on a piece of paper that claims you are a true American now. You’ve moved to the suburbs and you have a daughter and a husband but the dreams haven’t stopped. You think they never will. You can speak English much better now—smoother than broken but never Vietnamese. You feel as though you have everything. Even the pains that drove you to a new land have quieted. Is this fulfillment? This was the life you always wanted. Something is still missing.

You swear your daughter will never know hunger the way you did. You cry more than her when you yell and suddenly it’s a gun against her head but the gun is you and you are evil. You promise to never do it again. Then another nightmare hits. You hide, a frightened lamb, from the rain.

“Allo?” a voice calls softly on your landline.

“Hi, who is it?” you respond, eyes askance as you search for a spoon to stir your coffee with. The rice and fish sauce porridge on the stove must be boiling over soon. You tell yourself to finish this call fast.

“Anh là Đanh Dương. Tên của em anh là Kim Dương. Phải em không?” [This is Ðanh Duong. My sister’s name is Kim Duong. Is it you?]

Your knees go weak. Your heart begins to pound. You have half a mind to call over your family to the phone. A stuttering noise, a muttered affirmation. You may explode. A raindrop releases its grasp on your eye.

Healing was always something far off and never accessible. What is it now? Plaster pastes your cracks. Your brother. Safe and alive, you imagine paying his passage to you, America, the suburbs—to home.

You look outside the kitchen window. For the first time in years you see the sun.