The first time I nearly drowned occurred just off the southern coast of Malaysia, east of Melaka, a popular seaside city for tourists who want to retreat from the congestion of Kuala Lumpur. Somewhere along that coast with its crystal blue waterfront was where I landed, not as a tourist but as a refugee of war.

I was five years old then, drifting for days at the bottom of a wooden boat with my mother, father and older sister. We were all crouching around the porthole –there wasn’t enough room to lie down or stand up-looking out at the water and the sky merging as one in South China Sea, as if we were floating in space, looking for a friendly place to land, to find a new home. We pissed into the clear plastic bags, tied at the top with rubber bands and hurled them out of the portholes. I remember the sound it made as it hit the sea and the way it bobbled up and down as our boat moved forward, barely making a ripple. I still recall the human smell of sweaty bodies amidst the heat and humidity and the smell of soggy wood.

It’s night and the sea is calm. Someone yells out and points to the horizon, to a distant light. It’s another vessel.

“It’s American,” someone yells. “We’re saved.”

A murmuring of voices runs through the boat, as the hopeful news gets passed along.

“No, turn off the lights,” an older voice warns. “Pirates, they’re looking for a boat to rob and kill. Put out all the lights. We mustn’t be seen.”

More voices, louder ones this time, protests that this would be our last chance to be saved. No, they’ll kill all the men and take the women and children as slaves.

In the end, we put out the lights, protected by the vastness of the sea around us, waiting silently for the other distant light to disappear altogether. Even the people who thought of calling for help cannot deny that there is some comfort in the known. The water around us, the stars eerily reflecting off the water’s surface, our small group of 200 odd people crammed into a wooden boat and wanting to live. That is what we know.

Thirty years later, I am standing on the balcony of a Mahkota Resort Hotel, on the eastern edge of central Melaka, overlooking the sea and the strip of white beach stretching out in front. To the east, numerous high rises are being built, skeletons with steel beams sticking out on all sides. As a tourist, I am pampered by the hotel staff like royalty. My travel companion complains about the poor air conditioning, the size of the bathroom, and the stain in the corner of the carpet. I open the glass doors that lead into the balcony and strain to see as far as I can to the east, but the buildings under construction are blocking my view. It’s there though. I still see it in my mind and try to visualize what the scenery would look like from the sea looking in towards the land.

My mother lost two of her brothers somewhere in these waters. Although there was no official confirmation regarding their disappearance, the story my mother tell us fills in the void of not knowing.

The story goes like this: The boat, not very different from ours, was poorly built in haste as the Viet Cong tightened their grip over Saigon. It soon floundered against the unforgiving sea and started taking in water. My two uncles, both younger than I am now, are in their early twenties, doing whatever they can to keep the boat from sinking, comforting the wailing woman with the babe in her arms, while their young daughter clings to her father who is crying in agony;he knows that they will all die. A storm descends and the vessel capsizes and sinks taking over a hundred men, women and children to their watery graves. The circumstances of their deaths will never be known to their families except in a story, retold again and again.

But I survived, as people would say, as if I had anything to do with it. I was just carried along from one event to another, swept along the tide of history.

We see land. A white sandy beach. Did we all die after all and end up in a tropical Eden? Palm trees line the shores, so permanent and still, as our boat is taken up and down by the rough tide. Soon, a military truck arrives, spoiling the scene with camouflaged soldiers pouring out of the back with automatic rifles over their shoulders. It seems we ran away from war to find another war.

I hear a splash just outside. A brave young man from our boat is swimming to shore to make contact with the soldiers on the beach. He wades up to one of them, a twitchy new recruit who panics as he sees a strange figure crawling out of the sea, gesturing wildly with his arms and speaking in an unknown tongue. The soldier, like a reflex, swiftly brings his rifle up and fires a cluster of three shots into the young man’s chest.

No, it couldn’t have happened like that. Why would the soldier shoot at someone, almost naked and dripping wet from head to foot? Didn’t the solider know that this man had already seen death in the face? But why then is that image of that brave young man falling backwards into the fine white sand so vivid? Perhaps this was an early lesson of how transient life really was, how easily peace can turn to war. How life is nothing more than a struggle to run away from death, like a game of cat and mouse, only to find yourself crouching and powerless in a sinking boat, sick with a high fever, just waiting for the next ordeal to come upon you. It made sense that someone had died, someone had to be sacrificed, a little death to save the rest of us. Fate then would be pleased and we could all go on living. So, yes, that Brave Young Man had to die so that the soldiers’ anger could be appeased. We were no invaders, just worthless war refugees with nothing of value except the clothes on our back and our little tin containers, empty of food. Why waste your precious bullets? If you want to kill us, just let us float away, back into the sea so that nature can take care of us once and for all.

The soldiers, knowing the senselessness of killing unarmed civilians, or abhorring the idea of having to clean up putrid bodies filled with holes, unwillingly accept the whole lot of us stinking boat people and motion for us to come onto shore.

Another story goes like this: The soldiers, very aware of the exodus from Vietnam, the coming of the boat people, accept that Brave Young Man into their country, shaking his hand and slapping his back, congratulating him on his bravery. They welcome us all in their beautiful country and accept us as one of their brethren. Come, come, they say, tell the others to come on land, a land of beauty and peace.

There is no dock here, just a stretch of sand from one horizon to another. The boat can’t get close enough to the shore. We all have to swim for it. It doesn’t matter if you can’t swim, just kick your legs until you feel the ground underneath you. You’ve been sitting there on the boat, waiting for death, but now that freedom is just a hundred yards away, you’re just going to freeze up? Even a rat in his right mind would know to abandon a sinking ship.

So I jumped overboard.

Or was I thrown?

There’s a moment, seconds of the free fall, infinitesimally broken into epic proportions. I notice every movement of my body as it falls through the air, each limb and finger accurately choreographed, each frame of motion zoomed to see the details that I had missed entirely in my former life. A life on firm ground, a sense of controlling the world around me. The sky, the vast sky, frightening, pushing down on me. And as my body twists in the air, I get a glimpse of a woman holding tightly to the gunwale about to make her jump. Head first, I plunge into the sheet of water.

I felt the same sensation years later. I was twelve then at a birthday party, looking at a pool, blue and clear, familiar and enticing. There was Shawn, the birthday boy, over there doing a cannon ball off the side of the pool. A few others were already in the water, splashing about, laughing and smiling in their innocence and youth. There was a line up by the water slide on the other end of the pool. I waited for my turn, anxious to get into the water with the rest of the boys so that I too could laugh and smile like the rest of them. There was no fear as I went down the slide and into the water. It was only when I touched the surface of the water that the memories of Malaysia flooded my mind, as I began to sink in the water. Kick like you’ve never kicked before, son. While one part of my mind was frantic and horrified by the water entering my mouth, nose and ears, another part of me, a calmer part, got a strange sense of déjà vu. This was it for me, I thought, the pull of the sea too strong to resist. Fate had followed me from the coast of Melaka, all the way to Canada, desalinated itself and transformed into a pool of chlorinated water. I’d escaped once but no, actually, I should have drowned there thirty years ago.

The birthday boy’s father yells for everyone to empty the pool and throws me a life buoy. Grab on to it, he shouts. My arms thrash wildly for it and finally get hold of it. I clutch it to my chest, fingers white with tension. But now, the laughing and the smiling are gone. Everyone’s doing the best they can to put on a smile and flippantly brush off the incident. Nothing to worry about, he’s fine now, aren’t you son? But no, I knew then that I wasn’t fine at all. I knew I was different. I couldn’t just jump into the water, splashing carefree with the others, to enjoy the summer of youth and innocence. It had already been taken from me all those years ago as I struggled against the tide off the coast of Melaka.

Kick, boy, kick! As soon as I hit the clear tropical waters, I scream for help. I am going down. The water’s too deep. I try to keep my head up. A strong arm grabs on to me. It’s my father and he tells me to get up on his back. If I were any older and bigger, I would’ve probably pulled him down with me. The beach looks so close now and many of our people -our people - are already struggling up to the shore. Once my feet touched the bottom, I knew that everything had changed. Out the waters like a babe out of its mother’s womb, I was reborn. That frail five year old boy that I once knew had died shivering with malaria on the boat or sinking into the warm coastal waters off Malaysia. He had to die so that I may live.

We’re all herded onto convoy trucks and taken to a refugee camp. It is here that my memory fades. I don’t remember much about living in the camp, nor much about flying halfway around the world to Canada. Without suffering the trauma of drowning, I don’t know if I would’ve remembered being on the boat or the desperate fight for life, floating in the sea or struggling against the tide as it tried to pull me down. It would take another drowning thirty years later in quiet, tranquil suburbia to finally cement the first experience.

The afternoon sun burns my arm and face as I look out to the sea from the hotel balcony. There is no one around outside at this time of the day. Before I make my way back into the hotel room, I take one more look. Somewhere along this edge of beach, further out east from Melaka, was where we landed. A place perhaps where development has not yet reached its pristine shores, where those same palm trees who witnessed the whole event are still bearing fruit and dropping it onto that silky white sand. Where that Brave Young Man died or did not die. Where my uncles’ bones and a hundred others may have found their way up on shore. Where their sacrifice is told and retold.