We Are Here

by Cat Thao Nguyen

  I remember the giant Australian flag and the large bronze statues of Australian soldiers by the front wall at the club’s entrance. The statues were frozen in time, saluting. They wore the slouch hat, iconic of Australian soldiers. The Southern Cross constellation was in the background. Many people who came home to Marrickville on the train passed by the statues. I wondered what those soldiers would have made of the stream of people alighting at the station, a diverse mix that over the years would come from Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Asia. The soldiers’ watchful, reserved gaze would also see the streets change. Buildings would be torn down and developed into offices and community centres. Ultimately the RSL itself, together with the gallant bronze soldiers, would be demolished, giving way to high-rise modern apartments.

  Our neighbours in Marrickville were also refugees from Vietnam, although they had left by boat like many others. They were three little boys and their mother and father, along with a teenage aunt. They kindly inducted us into life in Australia. My mother did not have any technical skills. Our neighbour taught her how to sew and piece bits of pre-cut fabric together. Once my adaptable mother had learned to recognise the staple pieces that formed pants, shirts and dresses, our neighbours helped her to find work sewing in a factory.

  I remember her leaving to go to work for the first time. I was left in the care of our neighbour, the young aunt. My mother snuck out of the house via the side entrance. It was a long and narrow path that was unevenly paved with tosses of stone. The world away from my mother’s proximity, the safety of her smell, was terrifying—the cars, the beetles, the wet tissues and plastic bags that gathered in the gutter after the rain, the roar of the trains erupting over the railway bridge. I don’t know how I knew she was leaving, but I sensed that raw moment of initial separation from my mother. The disappearance of the film of her proximity was palpable, like the sudden departure of a spring sun shower, or that brief second when you know you’ve lost the battle with the wind and the kite string slips from your grip.

  I evaded the babysitter’s feeble attempts at distraction and escaped her grasp, running down the long side entrance to glimpse my mother’s silhouette exiting the left side of the house. Screaming with a lungful of desperation, I ran down the sidewalk. Everything seemed too big. Beyond the door was a blinding white confusing mash of world. All I saw was my mother at the cusp of it all, about to melt into the vortex. Behind me a voice yelled, ‘Cat Thao! Come back! Let Mum go to work! She has to go to work!’ I didn’t know what this Work was. Nor did I care.

  My mother snuck off successfully that time, but she wasn’t always able to leave without tiny arms and fingers having to be prised from around her neck through storms of weeping.

  As it turned out, though, my mother wouldn’t work outside the home for very long. Common with most Vietnamese refugee mothers, she would spend the next twenty years as an outworker operating a sweatshop in one of our rooms. The Singer sewing machine and Juki industrial overlocker would become as familiar to us as family members. Wherever we moved, they came with us, like precious heirlooms. They watched over us like the ghosts of ever-present ancestors. There is a photo taken on my fourth birthday. Văn and I are wearing animal party hats. His was a smiling crocodile; mine was a yellow giraffe with a brown tuft of hair. Văn isn’t smiling. My mother is also in the photo, dressed in her St Vinnies clothes. Arranged in front of us on the coffee table are a bottle of Fanta, a packet of chocolate éclairs and a birthday cake. I have a bandage on the inside of my right elbow covering an outbreak of the terrible eczema I suffered from growing up. Standing impassively in the background of the photo is the Juki overlocker: sombre, firm, disciplined, reliable. Like a grandfather clock.

  Two years later when I turned six, Văn and I resumed our positions, this time in front of the Singer sewing machine. Văn has a faint smile this time. I stand erect and attentive, albeit with a cheeky grimace. We are again wearing animal party hats. Remarkably, I still have the giraffe, while Văn has changed to a frog. He’s much taller than in the previous photo whereas I seem not to have changed much. Knowing my mother, she probably kept all the hats and candles from the previous birthday, along with the fake white and yellow daisies and chrysanthemums in a vase on the coffee table. There is another birthday cake, probably from the same bakery in Marrickville. An owl-shaped children’s blackboard is leaning against the Fanta bottle. A stack of plastic cups sits beside it. Large rolls of black thread have been inserted in the rods of the Singer. There are piles of pre-cut fabric on the table beside the machine. Even now, I can tell from the photo that it is a combination of satin and chiffon—delicate and hard to sew.

  Often I would come home from school, whether it was second grade or seventh, and help my mother unstitch hundreds of incorrectly sewn garments. When some designer from an upmarket Surry Hills studio decided to be adventurous with their line, producing highly complex designs, my mother would spend hours unstitching the sample and slowly piecing it back together. It would result in something that would be draped over a half-starved model paid several hundred times what my mother would earn for an hour’s work and, accordingly to the life insurers, the model’s life was worth so much more than ours.

  Sitting atop a large pile of fabric, I would listen with my mother to the Vietnamese program on the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) radio station, specifically established to serve the needs of ethnic communities. She would work late into the night. On many occasions when I couldn’t sleep or I awoke suddenly, I would find her underneath the orange spotlight, asleep at the machine, its constant hum buzzing in her ear like a lovely monsoon mosquito. I would always try to press the off button quietly so as not to wake her. I held my breath and put gentle pressure on the button. But the action, no matter how careful I was, would always jerk her awake.

  ‘Mum, go to sleep.’

  ‘What are you doing up? Go to sleep. I have to finish this. There’s a deadline.’

  I remember the times when one of the machines would break. My mother, ever graceful, calm and never in a moment of panic, would get her kit of tiny Phillips-head screwdrivers and screws and try to fix it. As a six-year-old, I learned how to change broken needles and worn out bits of the machine. I could thread the Singer skilfully and change its oil. Opening up the machine to reveal the small sunken pool of machine oil was a fascinating expedition. It was like an unmasking of a mysterious story character. My wild imagination would lead me to stand beside the machine in a hypnotic trance. I would daydream, watching the droplets of oil build up in weight, then descend with a plop into the pool below. I imagined an allied machine wounded in the battle to rescue my family from local government inspectors or vicious landlords. Or picture microscopic ballerina fairies, which everyone else would only see as specks of dust through the Venetian blinds, slicing and swimming through the humid air above the pool of oil.

  I would always fall asleep to the regular sound of my mother sewing—the coded sounds of the rapid fire of the needle as she stepped on the pedal, then the quick click of the end of a consecutive series of stitches as she snapped her heel. Sometimes her eyes were so tired and the scent of sleep so seductive, she would place her fingers too far in and the needle would stab into the nail of her forefinger. Through gritted teeth, she would tend quickly to the wound with Eagle Brand green medicated oil and keep going. The tune of the sewing machines, like the regularity of rust and rain, became the lullaby of my childhood. Delivery-day deadlines became the milestones upon which each week was measured.

  Shortly after we moved to Marrickville, my father went to the Commonwealth Employment Service office to look for work. Manual labour didn’t require much English so he was able to get a job swiftly. He worked as a sander at a carpentry factory in Sydenham, only one train station away. But to save money my father walked to work and back each day. At the factory he met another Vietnamese man who was leaving for a better-paying job at Lidcombe, several kilometres west, with a company called Sigma Industries. It m
anufactured air-conditioning systems for trains. The man got my father a job at this factory, and he began to take the train to work. My father was overjoyed as the pay was great. At the time my mother was making $162 a week at the sewing factory. They were able to buy a second-hand Mazda for $300. It was the first asset they could call their own, earned through toiling with their hands and feet, an acquisition which gave them a whisper of pride. They didn’t dare aspire to own any other luxuries; in those days, an apple, a uniform, an automatic car and a living family were enough.

  But after six months, work at the air-conditioning factory dried up and my father was unemployed. Soon after, he got a job at Crown Corning’s glassware factory in Waterloo, a few kilometres south of Sydney’s CBD. It was shift work. Every three days the shifts would change, moving between afternoon, day and night shifts. My mother was still working at the factory and there was no one to look after my brother and me. My father looked for another job and found work as a kitchen-hand and dishwasher at Eastern Suburbs Leagues Club near Bondi Junction, not far from the famed and stunning Bondi Beach. It gave him a glimpse into a different class, a world where men wore collared shirts and sliced their knives through juicy steaks. My father was off Tuesdays and Thursdays and could work out a schedule with my mother to look after us. The hours were good but there wasn’t any parking for non-members of the club so my father had to park about a twenty-five-minute walk away. He left to work as a machine operator for F. Muller, a company which manufactured refrigeration units. He stayed there for over fifteen years.

  During the time my mother worked at the sewing factory, the ritual of hide and seek continued while I cried and pleaded each morning. One day, seeing how much her Princess of Thailand needed her, my mother stayed home. For good. My father rotated through day, afternoon and night shifts at the factory while my mother sewed at home. They mastered the routine and rhythm of a new life, hoping it would be as predictable and steady as possible.

  One of my mother’s older brothers, Uncle Căng, was finally released from the re-education camp and he too left Vietnam. Uncle Căng migrated to Australia via the Sikhiu refugee camp and came to live with us. He was dark and unshaven, with an unruly moustache. My first memory of him was when he and my mother were walking towards the intersection of Marrickville and Illawarra roads, my mother carrying me. He stretched out his arms to hold me, but I turned away violently and gripped my mother, fearful of this scary-looking person.

  I would later discover that this strange dark man was a broken-hearted poet and an imprisoned former police officer of the South Vietnamese government. For the next eight or so years before his wife and three daughters were sponsored to come over to Australia, with each payday from his factory job he would buy fish and chips for Văn and me. Thursday afternoon would come around and I would sit on his knee as we tore open the deep-fried packets of salty goodness wrapped in a single sheet of paper. It was always an eagerly awaited divine ritual of delight.

  As a man with charisma and clear leadership capacity, my uncle would ascend from being a simple factory worker to production manager of an entire factory plant which produced a variety of industrial netting. In his lunch breaks, he would compose traditional Vietnamese poetry. Sometimes, within the confines of his backyard, among the polystyrene boxes in which he grew mint and shallots, he would sorrowfully recite these compositions. His tone was always mournful, his songs always yearning for yesterday. They were always performed on drunken occasions accompanied by nostalgic cigarette smoke rings which appeared and faded abruptly like a look of knowing in a lover’s eyes.

  Later, when I was old enough to appreciate the irony and tragedy of his life, he would give to me what he described as his life’s treasures—the collection of handwritten poems of an unremarkable Australian life, composed over decades on the loud factory floor. That day, tears welling in my eyes as I cradled in my hands his memories, his songs, a man’s lifetime of love and loss, I felt unworthy of the privilege—to be the keeper of this compilation of bitter hopes, solitary moments and hushed, brave dreams.

  Before Uncle Căng’s wife and daughters arrived, he and father would meet regularly with the few other men from Tây Ninh province now living in Sydney. Each week, the blue plastic sheet taken from the excess stock at my uncle’s factory was laid down on the concrete in our backyard, the housing commission flats still supervising the curious activity below. My mother would make food that went well with lingering laughter and iced beer. Back in Vietnam most people didn’t have fridges, so beer was drunk with ice to keep it cool. Here in Australia, even with fridges, somehow the subconscious ritual of plonking cubes of ice into beer beamed them back to the familiar land of their ancestors. I would always watch on with a sense of hesitation and splendour.

  One Christmas, my uncle built a manger out of crumpled paper, sprayed with silver paint to look like stone. He took coloured netting from the factory and decorated the manger with Christmas baubles and other found objects. Then he added porcelain statues of Baby Jesus, Joseph, Mary and smiling sheep, purchased from—of course—St Vinnies. Looking back, the haphazard attempt to recreate the nativity scene must have been hideous bordering on blasphemous.

  Uncle Căng and my father unfolded the blue plastic sheet and the rhythm of the evening began to set in. The men sat and started to gulp the Fosters with a Vietnamese count of ‘One, two, three—down!’ Glasses clinked as the past crept in to join them.

  My cousin Hi had come to stay with us during his summer holiday from school. My mother had prepared and hid presents for Văn and me inside the house. Close to midnight Hi and my mother ran outside and said to me, ‘Santa is here! He’s inside!’ I stood with Văn at the door, petrified. I did not want to see a fat white man in a red outfit that didn’t have matching red shoes, even though I was fairly sure he wouldn’t eat me. Finally, after what seemed like a very long period of hovering on the threshold, paralysed by fear, Văn ran into the house and then out. But Santa was too fast for Văn. Hi pointed to the sky and said, ‘There he goes! Look!’ I strained with all my strength to see him fly off but I must have been too slow. Was it because my parents couldn’t speak English and he wasn’t sure whether we could speak English either? Later I would wonder why Jesus, Santa and the fairy godmother, as well as the cast of Home and Away, were all white.

  When my first tooth began to wobble I became excited at the prospect of being visited by the tooth fairy. I wondered whether her fluttering would sound like a mosquito near my ear. The evening after I had pulled out the tooth, I placed it under my pillow hoping for at least one dollar. With that, I could buy three bags of liquorice at the school tuckshop. I examined the tooth carefully, making sure all the blood was cleaned off the crown and the root. In the morning, I looked underneath the pillow. The tooth was still there. Maybe the tooth fairy had forgotten. Or maybe she hadn’t come because I wasn’t white. On television, the kids that were visited by the tooth fairy were white with white parents. I kept my tooth in a little box in the top drawer of my desk. Just in case.

  The night was coloured a blackish blue. As I pondered how fast Santa had disappeared, I noticed my father and his friends growing more and more inebriated. My mother and I would soon come to recognise this pattern which became a motif in our lives. First there were the loud voices, followed by roaring belly laughs, and finally some sort of song. The songs all centred on the old days, on their beloved Vietnam. Afterwards, when the Past had flirted with the men and danced her way out with the smells of the night, my mother would pack away the glasses and clear the dishes. Some of the men stumbled home, others sprawled on the floor of the living room of our rented house. If my father was still conscious, my mother would attempt to scold him for drinking too much. But in his state of bliss, there was no more gunfire, no more camps, no more dirty factory earplugs, no more day and night shifts. All that was left was the peaceful hymn of a temperamental river in Gò Du, far, far away.

  It was 1984. We had been in Australia for four years b
ut we still didn’t have enough money for a telephone because the monthly landline fees were very high. Every single surplus dollar was sent back to nourish our relatives in Vietnam. Aching with the need to hear the voices from a distant homeland, my mother went to the post office to send a telex to the family in Vietnam to arrange a date for a phone call. Ten family members in Vietnam travelled for an hour and a half from Gò Du to the ornate French-built post office in Ho Chi Minh City, the only place within a day’s travel that had telephones permitted for international connection. Hundreds of people came from provinces all over South Vietnam to wait for their One Phone Call. They sprawled on the ground, floating in and out of sleep, eating the small packets of food they had brought, too scared to move in case they were called. Hours went by. In Sydney, we gathered at the home of a friend who owned a telephone. We dialled. In Ho Chi Minh City, the family was called. We were connected. The muffled voices and sobs of relief, nostalgia and joy seeped through the crackling line. Through tears, my mother yelled, ‘Stop crying! We’re wasting the minutes!’ But no one was able to adhere to this instruction. Even if it were merely cries, for a few brief minutes, my mother could hear the cherished voice of her own mother through the telephone’s umbilical-like cord. She could imagine the humidity, the shards of green rice and the malnourished frames of her brothers and sisters. It had been five years since she had heard the voices of her siblings and the slur of her mother’s speech from years of chewing betel nuts.

  My father trembled as he spoke to his mother. They were both more softly spoken than the relatives on my mother’s side.