We Are Here

by Cat Thao Nguyen

  She did not realise that she was pregnant. Another refugee said that all pregnant women were permitted to have extra rations of food. My mother went to the central office to see whether she could get an extra ration for Văn. They did a pregnancy test and discovered that she was indeed pregnant.

  One of the refugees at the camp was Lieutenant Colonel Cnh, a former military doctor with the South Vietnamese Army. He asked the Thai guards whether he could use a small space in the guard’s office at the camp to deliver me. The office was situated under a large tree on the western side of the camp. The birth was swift and the labour did not last long. The doctor was assisted by two Japanese volunteer nurses. It was there that I was born, two months premature after only two hours of labour: a tiny baby weighing two kilograms. Minutes after I drew my first breath, I was wrapped in the same sarong that the Cambodian man had given my mother. This simple stained cloth was woven with an unknown man’s legacy of compassion, courage and integrity, a physical connection to a man’s memories of his dead wife and child as he escorted my mother through the jungles. The Japanese nurses paraded me around the camp after I was born, chanting, ‘Princess of Thailand, Princess of Thailand.’ Later, when my father sent photographs to Vietnam from Australia, he would date and write a brief description on the back of each photo. Whenever I was in them, he would affectionately refer to me as ‘Princess of Thailand’.

  Occasionally there was entertainment at the camp. A lady by the name of Bùi Th Tuyt Hng, who was the wife of a senior Norwegian official, came from Norway and arranged for presents, concerts and sometimes an outdoor cinema. Hundreds of refugees would lie on the ground under the stars staring at the screen. For a brief hour, as voices of enlarged characters stretched against a dark sky, bellowed across the hills surrounding Sikhiu, they felt the dignity of being human.

  Many French and Thai Christian priests came to visit the camps and they gave the refugees money. The generosity and immense compassion they exhibited was disarming. Neither my mother’s family nor my father’s had any Christian tradition, but it was these Christian priests who helped my mother to pray, to ease the pain of being alive while her brother lay murdered somewhere in the Poipet jungle. They coaxed her senses back to life. It was the gentleness and concern of these quiet Christians that rescued her sanity. She didn’t know who Mary was, or what Jesus looked like, but she was thankful that these strangers prayed for her. She appreciated the fact that they listened.

  As diplomats from all over the world visited the camp to help resettle the refugees in third countries, my parents met with Australian representatives. The Canadians processed refugees the fastest—people could generally leave within a month—but rumour spread throughout the camp that it was a chokingly cold place, which didn’t appeal to those who were used to the humidity of South Vietnam. The US was out of the question, as my father still resented the Americans for leaving South Vietnam undefended. Australia had the advantage of being relatively close to Vietnam, and my father’s brother had already arrived there, having travelled by boat. It was decided: we would go to Australia.

  An Australian government representative who interviewed my father had left behind a magazine about Australian lifestyle, encouraging the refugees to look through it. My father savoured the coloured pictures. He turned to a page that had a large bearded man sitting at a country pub with a beer. The man wore a sleeveless shirt and was covered in tattoos. This was my father’s first visual representation of Australia. He was terrified! One of the Christian volunteers gave us the address of a Vietnamese Catholic priest living in Adelaide. We could write to him and he would help connect us to the Catholic community in Australia.

  My family moved to a transit camp near Bangkok in readiness for our departure to Australia. There were rats the size of cats which bit many unsuspecting arrivals, but we were immensely glad to be there. We stayed at that camp for one month, during which there were no rations for water. The distribution of food and supplies was disorderly. Văn, having spent half of his young life at the previous camp, surrounded by men and women who cherished him, cried to return. At close to two years old, ‘Sikhiu’ was one of the first words he connected to an extended family of circumstantial uncles and aunts who had given him snacks and taught him how to sing Vietnamese children’s songs. But while Văn howled ‘Sikhiu, Sikhiu ’, my parents savoured their reprieve, knowing we were one step further away from the carnage they still so vividly remembered.

  On the day we were to leave, I came down with diarrhoea. My mother didn’t dare take me to the clinic or tell anyone, for fear we wouldn’t be allowed on the plane. She wiped me clean as best she could and wrapped me tightly in the old sarong. Even though I was heavy with excrement I didn’t cry. Together with four other Vietnamese refugee families, we boarded the Qantas plane. There were no other Asians aboard.

  This was my family’s first plane ride and it was a one-way trip to an unknown land. We took off, and my parents watched as the land beneath us shrank smaller and smaller like a fading winter shadow. We flew high above lost stories in the Killing Fields, the barbed wire and landmines, and away from Hng Khanh. Sitting on the plane heading towards Australia, my parents didn’t yet feel relief. They didn’t allow themselves to become complacent about the risks of returning to the horrors of Cambodia and Vietnam. They had faced and survived peril after peril. Nothing was certain, even now. So they all sat in apprehensive silence as the white people around them chatted politely. They were frightened that at any moment the shred of possibility they were so delicately sitting on would be disturbed. It seemed that even as a baby, Văn understood this. He was quiet and still throughout the journey.

  When the flight attendants served us food, my parents panicked, fearing we had to pay for it. They had nothing except the clothes they were wearing and the sarong in which I was wrapped. With the meal was served a can of Coca-Cola. When the Americans had come to Vietnam, as well as bringing military support for the South they had brought this strangely delicious luxury drink. Many South Vietnamese consumed it only during the sacred Lunar New Year festival of Tt. After the war ended in 1975, my mother hadn’t seen a can of Coca-Cola again. Now, five years later, on a Qantas plane, an Australian flight attendant gave her a can. She stared at it. It was in this moment that she finally believed that the terror and the crippling waiting were truly over. The red and white can which she had not seen since the fall of Saigon meant freedom. The new life that beckoned them manifested itself in an aluminium can. It meant they were away from the contamination of prison camps, brutal rapes, guerrillas and constant, devouring fear.

  It was only from this moment that my mother was finally filled with relief. It was as though she had been holding her breath for years. Clutching the Coca-Cola and her three-month-old baby, my mother wept, almost in disbelief. We were alive.

  CHAPTER 3

  Jesus will help us

  Even though it was the end of a typical Australian spring, my parents felt a fierce and chilly wind. It was 13 November 1980. We had arrived in Australia as one of the first few refugee families who had travelled by foot across Cambodia into Thailand. My mother remembers later being interviewed on radio, prodded with questions about the remarkable journey.

  Our first port of entry into Australia was Perth airport. The air was crisp; the blanket of humidity common to South-East Asia had been left behind. My parents froze in their inadequate clothes. In the transit lounge, there were a couple of Australian women in overcoats waiting for their connecting flight. They looked at us. Our skin was tanned, our clothes worn. We were mute, frightened aliens. My father would never forget the compassion and pity he saw in their eyes. He had seen other eyes from jungles and prisons—violent, angry and lustful—and though the women did not speak, he knew in his heart their eyes were welcoming and that his family was safe in Australia. Together with the other four Vietnamese families, we were then transferred to Sydney.

  Upon arriving in Sydney, we were met by two representatives from the D
epartment of Immigration and then transported by a small bus to the Villawood Migrant Hostel. Years later this facility would become notorious as the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, surrounded by tall barbed-wire fencing to contain asylum seekers as if they were vicious animals. On the bus ride to the hostel, my mother gazed in absolute awe at the clean, wide streets and the large beautiful houses. The spring blooms had started to open and displayed their stunning petals to her like a thousand glistening ballerinas. She was intoxicated and realised just how far from Vietnam they were.

  Within the hostel compound were refugees from all over the world—Vietnam, Cambodia and Iran. Like us, they had journeyed thousands of kilometres from the ancient lands of their ancestors to finally converge in this suburban facility. Some of their children had sad and worn eyes, others played naively. The adults were supportive of each other through broken bits of English. My father recalls a pleasant and hopeful atmosphere. Most of us had already been processed as refugees offshore. There was no barbed wire, and people moved about freely inside and outside the facility. Christian volunteers visited regularly, providing the residents with clothes and other essentials. My parents were overwhelmed by the warmth and generosity of the nuns and volunteers from the Catholic charity St Vincent de Paul. My mother and I would later become devoted fans of their second-hand stores. No matter where we were in Sydney, we could always count on a nearby St Vinnies, as they became affectionately known, for daywear, furniture, kitchenware and party costumes.

  On our first night at Villawood, we were allocated sleeping quarters. My mother, Văn and I were in one room and my father and Hi in another. We didn’t know if we would be given meals or when dinner time was, so we sat quietly in our rooms, creatures that had been buffeted and weathered into submission—afraid that any questions or movements would upset the fragile tranquillity we had found. Dinner time came and went. Familiar hunger pangs bellowed. Finally, other Vietnamese refugees who had arrived earlier realised we weren’t at dinner and came to our rooms to see what was wrong. They saw us waiting placidly. On realising what had happened, they went back to their own rooms and brought us instant noodles. As we ate, my mother, full of uncertainty in this new land and already anxious about how to support her family, asked them whether they knew how Vietnamese people could make money.

  ‘What will we do here? How do we make a living?’

  ‘Don’t worry, there’s plenty of work. You can sew, work in a factory, clean. That’s what I hear from the settled ones. It will be alright.’

  Summer arrived with an unfamiliar blistering dry heat. We were going through the process of creating a new life. The first step was to be disease free and so we were taken to a hospital to get vaccinations. The next thing was banking, even though we had no money. Representatives of the major banks came to Villawood to encourage the refugees to open bank accounts. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia was the first to market to us so that’s who earned our loyalty. (Years later when Văn and I needed to open bank accounts, naturally the Commonwealth Bank of Australia was our first choice.) We were free to stay at the migrant hostel until we found housing and were ready to go. During the day the refugees left when they needed to and came back in the evenings. There was no pressure to leave.

  My uncle, Thanh, who is my father’s brother, and his wife had arrived in Australia earlier, having left by boat. They were all reunited when Uncle Thanh and his wife came to visit us at the hostel. It was a surreal moment when the brothers saw each other for the first time in years, knowing that they had both cheated death and were now meeting on foreign soil in a land without gunfire or random incarceration. The last time they had seen each other was at home—a whole dimension away in time and place. They spoke of their sisters in Vietnam, their countless nieces and nephews working in the rice fields. They thought of their mother, dressed in her southern Vietnamese peasant pyjamas, so far from her only sons.

  Ever since my father had seen the image of the tattooed Australian man in a pub in the magazine in Thailand, it had haunted him. One of the first things he asked Uncle Thanh was: ‘Are Australian men scary? Are they violent and mean?’

  My uncle laughed heartily. ‘No, that’s just on the outside. They’re very kind.’

  It was true that my parents’ first impressions of Australians were that they were immensely hospitable and compassionate. Australia had truly welcomed them. Their only complaint was the food. Dinner at the hostel was the typical Anglo meat-and-three-veg combo. Although they were extremely grateful to be fed, they missed the taste of home—of lemongrass, garlic, chilli, fish sauce and mint. After the immediate nightmares and trauma started to melt away, the culinary desire for home came back.

  One night, asleep in our room at the hostel, my mother sensed a strange presence. When she awoke, she saw a dark-haired white man standing at the foot of the bed. He was completely naked. She grabbed Văn and me tightly and screamed. The man ran outside. After this incident and riddled with familiar fear, she insisted to my father that it was time to leave the hostel and venture out to find a home of our own, away from the full-time support of helpful Australian hostel staff. Hi went to live with my aunt and uncle who had settled earlier. Like the other four families who came from Thailand with us on 13 November 1980, we each dispersed from the migrant hostel and settled across Sydney to dream another narrative—leaving behind Sikhiu, giant rats and regular Anglo meals.

  The first place we moved to was a room below a staircase in Alexandria Street, Newtown—an inner-city suburb four kilometres southwest of Sydney’s central business district. The lodging was a basement of some sort. It was cheap, dark and damp. We had one uncovered mattress to sleep on and, courtesy of St Vinnies, a black and white television. Many years later, I would drive my family back to Newtown, where my parents pointed out the old terrace house in which we’d lived. When my parents told me of the staircase, I remembered a children’s pop-up book where a lion or some other wild creature lived underneath the stairs unbeknownst to the family. In the book the space below the staircase was a magic entranceway to another world of wonderful fantasies and new pleasures. I wondered what the occupants above the stairs must have thought of us: a dishevelled non-English-speaking Vietnamese couple with a four-month-old baby and a two-year-old son. They were wild things from another realm. By-products of a war that many young Australians visibly protested against. Here they were below the stairs. What to do. What to do.

  My mother was still in deep despair from the lingering tragedy of losing Hng Khanh. It was six months before she could eat properly. Anxiety and sorrow buried themselves in her stomach and she suffered constant cramps and pains. Somehow, the doctors who treated her concluded the problem was with her teeth, so they decided to take them out. At twenty-seven years old she had a full set of dentures. Without a word of English to object and without the energy to protest, my mother let it all happen. But the dentures did not help to bring her back from the dark pit of despair. Recalling the comfort she had derived from the prayers of the Christians at the Sikhiu camp, she decided that was what we needed.

  My parents wrote to the Catholic priest in Adelaide whose address we had been given at Sikhiu. He put us in touch with Father Dominic Nguyn Văn Đi, also a refugee and one of the very first Vietnamese Catholic priests in Australia at the time. We did six months of lessons at a local church. With very little English my parents tried hard to comprehend Jesus and how to be good Catholics in this new land. The priest in Adelaide contacted some lovely Australians to be our godparents. Once Father Dominic was settled, he travelled the country to baptise Vietnamese people and to hold mass in Vietnamese.

  The hour of mass was a sacred and treasured timeslot that allowed fragmented and ruptured souls to come together as a community. Once a month clusters of Vietnamese clung to each other over prayers in Catholic churches around Sydney, relishing the sound of the Vietnamese language being spoken and celebrated. We would pray for salvation, for our brethren back home, for extra shifts, for bett
er days. When we were ready, Father Dominic came and baptised us in the sight of our godparents. I was christened Catherine. My mother was Mary, my father Paul and Văn became Peter. Later, after my younger brother was born, he was christened John Bosco. So began my parents’ spiritual journey towards some sliver of healing.

  Eventually we left the little space in Newtown because it was ridden with fleas and other microscopic parasites. My small body was covered in bites. Marrickville, three kilometres southwest of Newtown, was our next destination. The suburb was home to the calloused knuckles and weathered foreheads of migrants from Greece, Vietnam and many places in between.

  My earliest recollections are of our life in Marrickville. We moved into an old brick split-level terrace house on Illawarra Road. The house had a huge driveway which inclined upward like a concrete sea serpent. It rose gradually until it formed a horizon with the government housing commission flats that always seemed to me to be suspended from somewhere in the sky behind us. One of my first memories is of playing hide and seek with Văn and some neighbourhood children, looking up towards the flats and then skywards, distracted by the fast movement of the bloated clouds. The sky was darkening and a wind had blown up. Leaves were dancing around the yard. I remember being lost in those moments just before the impending storm, in the curious quiet on the verge of mayhem.

  Our terrace was opposite the Marrickville branch of the Returned and Services League (RSL club). The RSL is an organisation set up to support men and women who served or are serving in the Australian Defence Force. Licenced clubs were created as a place where war veterans could meet. They serve subsidised drinks and food and a lot of revenue comes from the poker machines installed inside the clubs.