What We All Long For

for half a day, and we arrived at a place by the water, a bay, where we waited for a boat. This boat didn’t come. We waited two weeks in the back room of a house. There were many other people waiting in that house. My father paid extra money to get me milk, which I liked. My parents loved me. My sisters loved me. I was loved. One day my father told us we would travel in two more nights. My parents prepared. My sisters were terrified, but I was only a small boy; nothing terrified me. I would have been frightened if my mother and my father weren’t there. I only ever had nightmares about not seeing my family.

No one would suspect I had diamonds in the belt around my waist. That was almost all of my parents’ savings. It was a cloth belt, and my mother had sewed the diamonds into the seams.

At the boat site there were many people. Some of them had been waiting for weeks. Only two boats arrived. There wasn’t enough room. Some of the goods and some of the people would have to be left behind. My sisters walked in a small knot, holding each other, my mother held me, my father held me, they passed me between them time and again. One of them put me down. I won’t say who. The water was cold and lapping. People were pushing. There was that quiet fighting-pushing people do when it’s dangerous to make noise. I was swept along, my feet were getting wet. It was dark. It was night, of course. The sea was humid. The air was humid. I jumped up and down looking for my parents. I made out my father’s legs. I followed him. Someone lifted me into a boat. I sat next to my father’s legs. I said nothing. I put my lime to my nose. The boat sailed, and I fell asleep. It was cold. It rained sometimes.

We were in the middle of what I later knew to be the South China Sea when I understood that I was alone. I was a small boy, so I cried. The sea was endless, it was like travelling to the sun. I drank water from the ocean and my belly hurt and my lips cracked. The lime in my hand hardened. It was eight days before the boat arrived at Pulau Bidong, but I didn’t belong to anyone on board. I followed the legs I had mistaken for my father’s.

It was fortunate, I learned later, that I wasn’t thrown overboard by the others. Though I was mistreated, beaten back when I reached for the good water or when I cried for food. Well, it would surprise some, I suppose, that people running to democracy are capable of such things. Why? You would think I would’ve turned out better myself. I didn’t.

This is how I lost the diamonds. On the fourth day of that ugly sea we were boarded by Thai pirates. Six of them. They had three guns and many knives. They were disgusting men. They separated the men from the women, and a few of them raped the women while the others searched the rest of us. They found my belt and wrenched it from my waist. My poor father and mother didn’t know this was a well-known hiding place. The pirates pulled me around like a rag. One of them said he would take me with them to make me a whore. I didn’t know then what a whore was. They decided to take some women too, and the girls. What did I know about these things? I only know that I saved myself by biting one of them and getting knocked unconscious for it. When I woke up I was still on my way to the place I didn’t know yet was Pulau Bidong.

After they left, the boat was a sick place. All the food was gone and people were more depressed, so I was an even worse liability. Human kindness is supposed to set in now, and it did, though it wasn’t human, just chance. We reached the place called Pulau Bidong. From there on I was treated with a mix of goodness—some would call it disinterest but at the time I thought of it as goodness—and brutality. I never knew who would bring me which.

When you look at photographs of people at Pulau Bidong you see a blankness. Or perhaps our faces are, like they say in places, unreadable. I know how you come by such a face. I was paralysed when we unfolded what was left of ourselves onto the shore of Bidong. I felt like you do with sunstroke. I felt dried out, though, of course, a child doesn’t have these words, but don’t give me any sympathy for being a child. I grew up. I lived. I’ve seen the pictures. We look as one face—no particular personal aspect, no individual ambition. All one. We might be relatives of the same family. Was it us or was it the photographer who couldn’t make distinctions among people he didn’t know? Unable to make us human. Unable to help his audience see us, in other words, in individual little houses on suburban streets like those where he came from. Had he done it, would it have shortened my time at Bidong?

In one photograph you can see me stooped at the dress tail of a woman who could be my mother. She had two sons, and in the photograph I look like a third. Staring together into the camera’s lens, perhaps by then we knew we were transformed into beggars for all time. I for sure had none of what you would call a character. Pulau Bidong was a refugee camp. A place where identity was watery, up for grabs. Political refugees, economic refugees—what difference? I was too young then for beliefs and convictions, thank heavens. Only at first I looked for love, for goodness,