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Once the proud son of a well-to-do businessman, dressed in crisply ironed shirts, he now found himself with a small baby, living off the proceeds of his labour on the pepper plantation. The rice wine soothed his nightmares and eased his fears.
    Not long after, rumours circulated around the village that the authorities were searching for my father. The authorities had determined that, without any training or equipment, he was going to be assigned to de-mine fields ridden with landmines. The news shook him deeply. Tremors of dread burrowed their way into his marrow and began to consume him. For many years, despite a changed reality, the dread would stay with him. He knew that death was upon them. When my father told my mother, she looked at him. He was not just her husband, the result of a hasty marriage: he was now also the father of her son. She made a choice. All around her, men of the former southern regime continued to be persecuted and they each began a slow death as indignity decayed them. She could see no future for their family here. In 1979, my parents decided to leave Vietnam.
    Living as they did in a landlocked province, they had no access to a boat. For them, the quickest way to get out of Vietnam was through Cambodia. My mother’s family had a friend who agreed to smuggle them across the border. Mr Twas my grandfather’s god-brother and a trusted family friend; he was like an uncle to my mother. He was the only reason they decided to leave via that route and at that time. They paid him ten taels of gold upfront, which was an incredible amount at that time; today it would be close to A$17,000. Many families could never imagine obtaining such an amount of money in their lifetimes.
    Mr Thired various smugglers to take my family through Cambodia all the way to Thailand. In the group to leave was my mother, father, twelve-month-old brother, fifteen-year-old cousin and fifteen-year-old uncle. Each smuggler would take them to a certain rendezvous point and there hand them over to the next person. By then, the Khmer Rouge, under the dictator Pol Pot, had been ravaging Cambodia for four years from 1975, ultimately committing genocide. More than two million Cambodians perished in the name of his futile attempt at social re-engineering towards an agrarian-based Communist society. All those suspected of being educated were slaughtered. These included people who wore glasses, indicating they were able to read. Mass graves with severed heads and limbs were later found, as were the graves of babies who had been smashed against trees in order to save bullets. The site of these graves would later become known as the Killing Fields. The mania of Pol Pot was stopped only when the newly unified Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in 1979 to oust the Khmer Rouge. Within Cambodia, Vietnamese refugees were fleeing the new Vietnamese government, Khmer Rouge soldiers were fleeing the Vietnamese forces and there were random paramilitary Thai soldiers lining that country’s border with Cambodia. Refugees were also being kidnapped and traded to international humanitarian organisations in return for bags of rice.
    In this time and place of utter madness and amid this terror, my parents embarked on their exodus through Cambodia. Later, reports would state that as many as half of all those who left Vietnam by boat died. But out of every four people who tried to flee Vietnam over the Mc Bài border into Cambodia, three were shot. Later still, some researchers estimated that only ten per cent of those who undertook this journey by foot survived.

CHAPTER 2
    A simple sarong
    In the middle of the night in late 1979, my mother sat silently, steeped in sorrow, in the house where she had given birth to her son and before the ancestral altar where she had been married. The flood waters had long receded and the river was calm. Her mother, father, sisters and youngest brother wept in silence for fear the neighbours would guess my parents’ intentions