Anh Nguyen Austen

I think I was definitely scared.

I was walking with my auntie and then my mother was holding on to my sister and then my brother was walking with my father.

And there were checkpoints, you know, where...

I would see guards and then my father would have to bribe or negotiate with them.

And then we just kind of walked through.

And in a child's mind, you know, it's a jungle to me.

You know, it's large and scary and dark and very wet.

So it was not fun anymore.

Well, I think the beautiful thing about childhood memory is that it protects you and so you can only get flashes or kind of reconstructions from their telling of events.

So I don't remember the immediate fear of it, but I certainly remember some of the scary parts of the journey.

Oh, so my mom, you know, thinking about it now, she made a lot of sense.

Maybe she knew how children's imaginations worked.

But she told me that there are ghosts in the water and that I shouldn't go to the edge because they would, like, claw their way up and grab you and you would drown.

So it was a very good way of telling you not to go to the edge.

No, most people really didn't swim.

And I definitely, you know, have known a lot of Vietnamese with swimming phobias.

I myself could probably pass the test for college, but in no way was that a natural thing.

So a lot of people struggled and some drowned before they even got on to boat.

Yeah, there were so many people that were hiding in the marsh and that had jumped on.

You know, our boat was designed for about 40 people.