That first telephone call knocked at the deep yearning for home that my parents buried daily. It was as if they had awoken from a restless slumber in this new Australian life. And when the receiver was replaced in its cradle, the silence ravaged them.
My parents continued to work hard and their thrifty lifestyle enabled them to accumulate some money. They found a small business for sale: a shop selling newspapers and magazines. My mother’s entrepreneurial flair had resurfaced, and the loans and papers had all been processed; all they needed to do was sign. But on reflection, my mother told my father that she couldn’t do it. Her children needed her, and if they bought the shop, it would absorb all her time and her attention on us would drift. No. We had to stay close together for as long as possible. This new home was a big world of Australian uncertainty and she wanted to be there for us, for as long as she could.
But to my distress, it wasn’t possible to remain always and forever in my mother’s company. Reluctantly, I started preschool with fears of all-encompassing abandonment. I was to be left in the care of smiling Australian ladies with blue eye shadow and permed hair and I was terrified. I didn’t speak any English and I couldn’t even tell them I wanted to go to the toilet. But my squeaky sandals made me braver. They made a noise with every step I took so my mother would be able to hear me. Văn, who was always strong and fearless, left preschool for St Brigid’s primary school. We were both to be in Catholic schools for most of our primary and high school education. With our baptisms came my parents’ relentless determination to school their children at expensive Catholic schools. Like their parents before them, our parents were firm believers in the value of education. They were determined that we would go to good schools, no matter what the cost. Jesus would help us.
CHAPTER 4
An Australian dream, a Vietnamese garden
After several years of sewing garments, day and night factory shifts, and Vietnamese prayer, my parents had saved enough for a deposit on a house. My mother had a cousin who was living in Punchbowl, a suburb ten kilometres southwest of Marrickville. The cousin had left Vietnam by boat and arrived in Australia a few years earlier. Eager to be close to family, my parents bought a house in Punchbowl on Beauchamp Street. We pronounced it Bee-chum and none of us ever figured out where the punch bowl of Punchbowl really was. I loved our five years there. The house represented our piece of the Australian dream. There is a photo of us all standing out the front: my mother and father, Hi and my uncle, the poet, Văn and I. We are all proudly perched against the café latte–coloured Datsun 120Y my parents had bought when we moved to Punchbowl. The car is parked behind my uncle’s 1979 mustard-coloured Corona. My mother is wearing a second-hand jumper with a picture of Halley’s Comet on it and my father has a Clark Gable moustache. I am in pink patent leather shoes far too large for me. I remember begging my uncle to buy me those pre-loved shoes at the Flemington flea market one Saturday morning. In the photo, the sun is shining. My father has his hands on his hips and is standing tall, holding in his pockets Stitched-Together-Patches-of-Possibility. Dreaming just enough.
The house was on a quiet leafy street. It had whitewashed walls and our number was painted white inside a black oval on the right-hand side of the entrance. My father planted hydrangeas, bougainvillea, poinsettias and daisies in the front garden, which had a concrete path that curved into the patio. On the left was a side entrance leading to the backyard, which was enclosed by a tall white picket fence. The yard at the back was an enormous wonderland. My father decided to grow his little patch of Vietnam all the way at the end of the yard in the right-hand corner. There were clumps of lemongrass, mint, shallots, purple perilla leaves and coriander, as well as orange, lemon, peach and banana trees, and vegetables on vines that climbed, sprawled and twisted into themselves. It was an enchanting plot that he was proud of. The vines and tendrils created a substantial canopy over the few square metres. I would pass through an imaginary wall and find myself on the other side, emerging underneath a cool shelter of lush leaves with webbed rays of sunlight filtering through. I would stand on the naked earth, perfectly raked, ready for me to ruin. There is a photo of Văn standing in the garden. He must have been about eight. He is wearing brown corduroys, a white striped shirt and a broad smile. His right arm is outstretched and poised, his hand cradling a cluster of fruit—the first of the season.
We had seven cats. They kept breeding. We had no idea about desexing. Occasionally as the darkness descended on a thick summer evening, my mother, father, Văn and I would pack the Datsun. I would be clutching a few of the scrawny kittens, pacifying them in the backseat with tender strokes. Every now and then my father would hear a yelp from me as the kittens clawed into my hand. We would cruise through the unlit streets of Punchbowl like stealth hunters. Sometimes we would lurk in the surrounding suburbs. When my father spotted a backyard he deemed dark enough he would slow down the car. But I always argued against the first choice, declaring it was not a good enough home. When we finally settled on a place, I would hold my breath, my heart smacking against my chest, as we dropped the meowing kittens over the fence. But no matter how long it took, sometimes many months, they would always find their way back home.
The childless couple next door adored me. The wife would watch me play. She told me she had had seven miscarriages, though at the time I didn’t understand what a miscarriage was. She tried to explain it to me over the fence one day. I couldn’t understand how a baby got inside a tummy in the first place, and then how it could disappear. Did it explode into a thousand bits of glitter? I shrugged and went back to playing Monkey Magic with Văn. Monkey Magic was a TV series on the ABC based on the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West and featured a monk, a pig monster obsessed with lust and gluttony, a water monster who was a reforming cannibal and a magic monkey. Together they went on a pilgrimage to fetch the Holy Scriptures, battling demons and monsters along the way. The Japanese-produced show had been dubbed into English by the BBC. Văn and I were fascinated with the stream of crazy characters and jumped around the backyard with broomsticks, doing karate chops and spins. Văn and I were always going on adventures. We would sneak down the back laneway and slip through a gap in a neighbour’s fence to steal berries from a tree.
As we settled into our own glimpse of Australian dream, my parents still carried their old home with them in their mouths—from conversation to cuisine. Inside the house, we spoke, ate and lived Vietnamese. Sometimes when I got home from school I would be greeted by two little black and orange moths on the doorstep, both comfortably perched on the incline facing one another. I would step over them and head to the kitchen, which would be filled with the aroma of fried salted lemongrass fish. I would hover around my mother like a kitchen god’s silent prayer. I would tell my mother over the sizzle of fish that the ancestors had come to pay us a visit and she would remind me never to step on them. To this day, I’ve never crushed a moth—just in case.
Vietnamese people started arriving in greater numbers, some from Tây Ninh province. My parents started a money-lending syndicate. In developing countries, where collateral for bank loans is usually scarce, families or groups of close friends rely on informal money-lending syndicates. Funds are pooled together and loans are given out each month. A $500 syndicate of twenty people would yield a potential monthly loan pool of $10,000 with differing interest rates each month. The interest rates were a way to fairly determine who each month’s borrower would be. It was simple: everybody would secretly write down the interest they were willing to pay on the loan if they were granted it at that month’s meeting. Everyone’s piece of paper would be folded up and then placed on the dining table in a clear vertical line. My mother would then unfold each one in front of the participants. The person willing to pay the highest interest, and therefore the most desperate person for the loan, would be granted it that month. As the organisers of the syndicate, my parents could access the pool of loan funds interest-free. There were no contracts, no way
to enforce repayments of the loans; there was only one sacred rule: trust.
Each month, my parents would host the syndicate meeting which consisted only of close family and friends. We Vietnamese had to stick together and leverage our network. Each month the women would cook a variety of food. Some couples went to farms far out in Western Sydney to buy fresh ducks to make congealed duck blood salad. It was always a special occasion when a live duck was bought. Everyone participated in a stage of preparation, whether it was roasting peanuts, grinding peppercorns, slicing the mint, making the fish sauce or holding the bowl of blood. There was a communal festive air in the momentum of production, like we were celebrating in some village in the countryside of Vietnam—but instead of mud huts and rice fields there were tiled floors and local council regulations to adhere to.
The duck, its feet and beak tied together, would flap wildly as it was brought into the kitchen to be killed. I would feverishly watch as it was clamped between the knees of one of the men. With one hand the man would hold back the wings, while another man would pluck the fine neck feathers from a small area. Each motion was resolute, precise. A small area of pink on the duck’s neck would grow larger and larger with each jerk of the hand, like a multiplying organism. The throb on the patch of duck skin would be fierce and ready to bounce out rolling onto the floor. After the patch was clean, a sharp blade would be produced and a small white china bowl would be held in place. Then, with one swift slice, the duck’s neck would be cut, the blood draining directly into the bowl, bubbles forming on top. The blood would be evenly poured into and shared among a number of plates. Lemon, mint, peanuts and pepper were sprinkled on top just as the blood began to congeal. Then the duck was plucked, cleaned and quickly boiled. Its flesh was used as broth for the rice porridge. The science was all in the timing. The scene could not be complete without lots of women running around, fussing, chopping and gossiping. The men, meanwhile, stood around talking about the size of the duck, which farm to go to, the best part of the neck to slice, and when and where they’d had the best congealed blood duck salad in Vietnam.
At the time, as the blood oozed from the live animal, I somehow did not register that it was in fact bleeding to death. Maybe I expected more sound. More flapping. More resistance. But towards the end of the duck’s life, it seemed calm, resigned to its fate. As a child, this act of submission in the face of killing and annihilation seemed somehow natural.
After the food had been prepared, the familiar blue plastic sheet would be taken out again and unfolded in the backyard. It became a reliable old friend who, over the years, would come to bear witness to trails of beaming banter, silently recording the gradual weariness of these men, these story keepers. The beer cans would form a symphony of mixed song and the garden sprites of Bee-chump Street would tumble out of their roots to whiff at the commotion.
Growing up, my father seemed quite remote to me; a functional character who was head of the household, he existed mostly to provide and enforce rules. On these fleeting drunken occasions, though, I would catch glimpses of a spirit long buried. My yearning to be held by this spirit, to be nurtured by him, to know and understand him, was only compounded by his stoic character. My concept of my father over the years was a tapestry of these drunken, vulnerable and precious moments when he would tell stories of the old days of old Vietnam, and sing in French to me a lullaby that his father sang to him—a song sung from a child’s point of view about his father’s beautiful garden and all the lovely plants inside this space and time of freedom where all things flourished. My father would clap jovially in time with the vibrant backbeat of his song, sometimes still in his factory overalls and steel-capped boots. These glimpses gave me a brief view of the real man behind the father figure, and I longed to know and understand him. They were clues in my later search for his spirit, a search not for my father, but for a simple brave man before the heaviness of his world burdened him.
As the cans piled up, we would store them out the back near the garden. One by one I would place the empty cans on the concrete then jump on them to flatten each one into a compressed and uncompromising unit. Every few weeks, my father, Văn and I would go to the recycling spot near Punchbowl train station to trade in our formidable bags of beer cans for five cents a kilo. The huge recycling bins would tower above me like an austere school principal. I loved watching my father and Văn wrestle with the bags as the shiny compressed cans cascaded into a waterfall of aluminium. Given the number of bags, I’m surprised the Department of Family and Community Services wasn’t called!
Each month, before the drinking properly began, the adults would gather in the living room to determine who would take out the loan kitty that month. At the point before my mother opened up each piece of folded paper, there would be a museum silence. The person with the lowest number would be announced and they would take out the cash loan that month.
Those were the happy times, monthly episodes of merriment. It was a time of optimism, too. My parents decided to build another house in the backyard in order to set up a larger garment-making operation with more machines employing more Vietnamese mothers.
At the time, I didn’t fully understand the situation in Vietnam, but every so often my parents would bundle goods into boxes to be sent back home. Each box would contain everything imaginable for a long voyage: underwear, chopsticks, shirts, pens, soap. I would help put the goods in each box, inspecting everything to see whether there was something I could keep for myself. One time I saw a new T-shirt go into a box my uncle was preparing. It was turquoise with a cartoon drawing of a beach scene: a palm tree, orange sun and yellow sand. It even still had a tag. The shirt glowed with newness, infused with air-conditioning and fluorescent light from its time on a rack in a department store. Until the end of high school, most of my clothes were either second-hand or sewn by my mother. I almost salivated at the sight of this new T-shirt. Gently, my uncle explained that it was for Tiên, his youngest daughter in Vietnam. He promised he would buy me something else. It was the first time I realised my uncle’s affection was divided, and the shock was numbing.
My parents would cover the boxes with unrelenting layers of poo-coloured tape. With my father’s bold arched handwriting, he would write various addresses on the boxes, along with the names of my grandparents and my aunts. These names would float around in my head, but I didn’t know where Gò Du, Tây Ninh province, Vietnam, was. Whether it had karate uniforms or kittens or secret berries or ducks with white feathers. I knew it was far away, though. With eight brothers and sisters on my mother’s side and a few more on my father’s side, as well as their spouses and children, all associated with the former disgraced regime, a lot of caring needed to be packaged.
When we moved to Punchbowl, I started school at St Jerome’s Primary. I was immediately placed in the ESL class: English as a Second Language. I spoke Vietnamese at home and English outside. My parents knew the English jargon specific to their work and street-market vernacular—enough to get jobs done and discounted vegetables at the wholesale market in Flemington. Most likely the school had decided I needed assistance even without hearing me speak. I went to the classes for a few months, despite the fact that my English was fluent.
There was a Vietnamese man at the end of the street with a son the same age as me who also attended St Jerome’s. I don’t remember the son being in the ESL class though. Maybe because his dad had worn a tie at enrolment day. The man at the end of the street kindly drove me to school and picked me up every day. He had a considerable beard, the first beard I had ever seen. (The second beard was on Father Stephen, who came to replace the elderly Father Bill at Punchbowl parish. Father Stephen said Father Bill went to retire in the hills. I wonder now whether this was his way of sugar-coating Father Bill’s death. It would have been fine to me. Father Bill was slightly deaf and would yell. His head had scales and hosted random hairs. The moderate hump on his back seemed to grow bigger each time he leaned down to speak to someone. Anyway, Father Steph
en’s arrival was a few years later.) At the time, I didn’t understand how our neighbour’s beard stayed on his face. Was it glued on? It was a constant source of fascination.
One afternoon we had an early mark. Instead of waiting for the man and his son, I decided to walk home to surprise my mother. When I got home I thought I would increase the surprise by sneaking in the side entrance. There was a tall wooden fence blocking the side passageway. Not wanting to spoil the surprise and go in the front entrance, I decided to deftly and mischievously climb the fence with my blue St Jerome’s bag still on my back. When I got to the top, I lifted one leg over to straddle the fence, but the weight of the bag shifted and I lost my balance. I plunged head first onto the cold, unforgiving concrete below. My right temple made contact and I heard clearly the sound of the collision—a combination of a high bing and solid thump.
Still intent on surprising my mother, I got up and silently entered the back door. When my mother saw me, she was indeed surprised. She forced me to lie down while she inspected my temple, which immediately bruised and became swollen like a plum. For the next week, she rolled a boiled egg over my head so that the egg could absorb the bruise. The bruise went away but the bump didn’t. It’s a permanent reminder of my reckless fearlessness and a trace of my mother’s ability just to keep going, even when it hurts.
My mother was pregnant. The pregnancy was fine but, as usual, my mother worked very hard. Australia’s bicentennial year—celebrating two hundred years since the arrival of the First Fleet—drew to a close and 1989 dawned. The baby wasn’t due for three months, but my mother went into labour. The baby was lying horizontally in my mother’s womb and had to be delivered by caesarean. My baby brother, Vinh, was lifted out of my mother’s belly, wrapped in a translucent film, uncrying, eyes closed. He weighed 1.3 kilograms and was immediately placed in an incubator at Bankstown hospital, about a fifteen-minute drive from our house. He would live there for the next three months. My mother believed he was a precious creature sent to her from the heavens.
We Are Here Page 6
