In the meantime, tragedy struck. Tam's younger brother was the blurry face in the photo on the altar. It was the only tangible memory of an ambitious young man who, forever marked by his past in the South Vietnamese army, chose the perilous seas over the half-life of a future in his homeland. Then one day he joined one hundred and fifty-seven similarly desperate souls aboard a wallowing and waterlogged refugee boat bound for America. Most of these ships steamed over the horizon and disappeared without a trace, the victims of poor weather, pirates, or starvation. This boat made international headlines when it drifted into the path of an American naval vessel. The Navy captain offered food and water to the disabled refugees but refused to throw a line and tow them into port. In despair several of the Vietnamese jumped overboard to swim the distance between the two boats, and drowned. Others threw the corpses of their dead into the sea in a last-ditch effort to prove their desperate straits, in vain. The American ship steamed away.

But this refugee boat didn't fall prey to pirates, or sink beneath the seas. It washed up unexpectedly on a Philippine island with a few skeletal survivors still lucid enough to tell their tale. Over half their fellow passengers had died, and there had been incidents of cannibalism among those who lived to speak of it. Tam's brother was not among the survivors.

For eight long months the family knew nothing of his fate until a tattered note arrived from a camp in the Philippines, written by a friend who had watched him die. For nearly a year Tam kept the news from his mother, afraid that the ravages of peace would tear her apart as the war never had. Every year since that day they celebrated a mass on June 14th, the date of the boat's final rescue and fulfillment of what had been their brother's dream.

MARRIAGE · A FATHER'S DEATH