Black Water

What is your favorite thing to play with? Take a look at your life right now. What does your world look like? Do you live in a home with painted walls, running water, electric lights, and convenient appliances?

We barely had electricity in our village. So naturally, there were no electronic toys like we have today! We didn't have carpet or tiled floors in our home. We didn't have running water. For a period, I didn't even have a dad.

I was born in a thatched hut in a war-torn country. The war had just ended, and everyone on each side had lost. The country was bleeding. People were hungry, desperate, lost, angry, vengeful, and confused. Death was a common visitor in our small village — and in any village, for that matter. People were fleeing the country in droves even though they had little chance of surviving the flight.

My family was caught in the middle of this. This is our story.

* * *

My name is Cam Hu'ò'ng, which means "pink jade" in Vietnamese. I was born in 1978 — a few years after the Vietnam War officially ended. Our home was a small, thatched hut with dirt floors, and it was located in a village in the province of Cà Mau. Cà Mau means "black water" in the Khmer language. The walls and roofs of the humble homes were made of thatch, a weaving of straw, palm leaves, reeds, or similar material. This seaside village was surrounded by water that was heavily mixed with dark-colored silt, which made the water dark. Our home was in the southernmost part of the village, which itself was located on the very southern tip of Vietnam, where the South China Sea meets the Gulf of Thailand.

When I was born, I was loved and surrounded by family. At two years old, I was wandering in and out of homes around the village. My parents lived with my grandma and grandpa Huynh, my dad's parents. My two uncles and four aunties also lived with us in our little thatched hut. Our cousins and other relatives lived in similar huts nearby.

My parents taught me to address everyone I met as an aunt, uncle, or cousin, whether they were really related to me or not. In the small village, everyone knew my parents, and every adult in the village helped look after me and the other children. The adults kept an eye on the kids and reminded them to hurry home when it was mealtime.

My favorite person of all, however, was my dad. He was strong and hardworking, as well as quiet and often contemplative. Dad was slim, of medium height, and very gentle. At nineteen, he was already married to my mom. Their parents had arranged their marriage. I was born when he was only twenty. To me he was always loving, kind, and sincere.

Like all the poor villagers in the area, my family made a living by fishing. My dad went out to sea for several days at a time. Whenever he came home in his small boat, I looked forward to holding him tight and talking to him, telling him about everything that had happened at home and in the village while he was away. I followed him like a shadow and talked nonstop as he worked and listened. I was only two years old at the time. We were inseparable.

There was always something happening in the village. The dirt roads — everything was dirt, just dried-up dirt — were narrow. Just the narrow roads separated the homes. From the homes, the smell of prawns and dried fish filled the air. The air itself was humid and thick, like a hot kitchen where housewives cooked soup. The sounds of babbling housewives and playing children mixed with the scented air. Because the walls were just thatch, the sounds, scents, and energy traveled as freely from home to home as the pets and children did. Thus, every home was a part of the homes around it.

Every home had the same basic necessities. Each had a few large terra-cotta pots of water, which the women filled at the local water source using buckets. The women balanced these buckets on long bamboo sticks on their shoulders. As the woman carried their water and did their cooking, cleaning, and household chores, they seemed to be copying the village culture they had observed others engaging in. They even dressed the same. All the women in the village wore pointy straw hats when in the sun and simple outfits called aó bà ba made from lightweight fabric, usually featuring dark colors and black pants. The men wore shorts, and the children wore similar outfits. All day long, the village was filled with activity.

In contrast to the vibrant day, the night brought thick darkness. As darkness fell, the families gathered to mend fishing nets, talk, and reminisce about the events of the day. For many families, lamps and candles provided the only light at night. These lights, however, also presented a danger in the thatch houses: fires could easily occur in any home.

When I was two weeks old, our family narrowly escaped from such a fire. It happened one night when my mom and auntie had been lying on a bed and talking late into the night with the lamp on. When she married, my mom had gone to live with the family of her husband, as was the custom. My aunties, my dad's sisters, and my grandma all helped raise me. In Vietnamese culture, we don't refer to our aunts and uncles by their given names. We call them Auntie Eight or Uncle Two, corresponding to the order of birth in their family. So there I was with my mom, Auntie Eight, and Auntie Seven in a bed together in the home of my grandma and grandpa Huynh. I was a fussy newborn that night, so they had stayed up later than normal to settle me. Exhausted from a long night, the women had then fallen asleep and neglected to turn the lamp off. The wind swept through the thatch house and tipped the oil lamp over, which started burning the mosquito net that protected us from mosquitoes as we slept.

For some reason, my grandma was awake in the middle of the night, and when she came in and saw the flames, she screamed. She pulled on the mosquito net to disconnect it from the walls. The burning fabric fell on us and burned us — especially my chest, my tummy, and my mom's leg. The scars from that incident are still on our bodies to this day. But Grandma Huynh saved our lives that night.

Life was very fragile in Vietnam at the time. War between the North and the South had led to the death and displacement of many families. Families moved from place to place to find safety and to start a new life, sometimes several times over. My grandpa Huynh — my dad's dad — and his family had just moved to the fishing village from a farming village only a few years earlier. My grandpa Mai — my mom's dad — and his family had moved to the village only a few years before my grandpa Huynh's family.

The war, the moving, the displacement, and the destruction were why people in the village, and in many parts of Vietnam, were poor and didn't get a good...