One evening when David was at my house while I was working on an accounting assignment, he had a call from one of his friends who was in some sort of fight; guys were throwing bricks at him, he said. Immediately, even though he was dressed in his best fake Nautica shirt that I had bought him in Cabramatta, David got into his car to drive the five minutes, past scatterings of fast food joints and petrol stations, down the Hume Highway to Chullora.
I lay on my bed, overcome with helplessness and fear, listening to the hands of the clock ticking and the sound of clinking dishes from the kitchen. My gaze roamed my room restlessly, looking at book titles, at the handles of my drawers, at the red and blue curtains I had sewn myself. I tried to picture the fight scene in my head. Finally David returned. The back of his shirt had been sliced from collar to hem and there was blood on his sleeve from a deep gash on his forearm. He had it stitched up at a clinic that night and the next day we went to university as though nothing unusual had happened.
There were a lot of loose groups around at the time. Some called themselves gangs, some didn’t. Some named themselves, some didn’t. As far as I knew, only very few were involved in organised crime. Most so-called gangs were just bunches of guys who had something to prove and a confused mix of pride, testosterone and a lack of direction. They would cluster around Bankstown train station with dyed fringes and bad attitudes. Insignificant misunderstandings between the groups where it would be too humiliating to apologise would escalate into feuds. The feuds festered, fed upon themselves and grew into wild centaurs. Sometimes they would be passed onto younger brothers. While in high school, David and his mates used to also sit around at Bankstown train station. They weren’t part of a gang, they were just hanging out, sometimes calling out pick-up lines to passing schoolgirls. Some sort of misunderstanding occurred between them and some other guys. Chest-thumping swelled and threats were made. Although time had passed, the tension still simmered and lay like dormant landmines.
I had just got home from class and David and I were about to go out when he got a call. As he held the phone against his ear, I saw his eyes grow wide. The air froze as I recognised the nervous grind of his molars. After he finished the call, he looked at me and said, ‘Phong just got shot. I don’t have the details. I just have to go.’
I stood in the doorway and watched as David ran to his car. With unflinching precision, he rapidly reversed down the driveway and sped away.
Phong had been shot outside a club in the city. He spent the next three months in hospital. Although he survived, the bullet remained in one of his arteries as the surgeons deemed it too dangerous to operate. The movement of the bullet was unpredictable. Each day that he was alive was a gift. After he got out of hospital, we would sit in his backyard as he told us how he had a tube up his penis most of the time. One of the boys asked whether he got extra sympathy from the nurses and whether they were hot. We laughed and drank VB well into the night. I would witness drunken moments when the boys, almost tearful, would say how thankful they all were to be alive. To be together and to have each other. For all of us, we shared the grit of our working-class Western Sydney lives, the journeys of our parents to this land and the knowledge that more often than not the odds were against us. It forged a solidarity that ran silent and free.
As the media revelled in the drug issues of Vietnamese-dominated Cabramatta, current affairs show 60 Minutes decided to hold a forum in the heart of darkness. At Cabramatta RSL, lights were set up, boom operators positioned themselves and the host, Ray Martin, checked his hair. People from the local community were invited and strategically placed in certain positions. There were small business owners, and sports and community club representatives. State MP Reba Meagher sat on one side of the room and a representative from the opposition Liberal Party sat on the other. Reba Meagher had been drafted into the seat of Cabramatta by the Labor Party after the shooting of John Newman. She was supposed to represent Cabramatta but she did not live in the area. Instead she lived forty-five kilometres in the expensive beachside suburb of Coogee. The Vietnamese community called her a stepmother.
At the time, I had started to engage in community development with the Vietnamese community, mainly through drug education. Community leaders asked me to attend the televised forum. It would be good to air the perspectives of young people of Vietnamese background. So David and I went along to the event, which was sensationally titled ‘Law and Order’. It soon became clear that the forum was carefully scripted, with predetermined questions asked of certain people. The footage was then edited so as to present Cabramatta as a divided community. The theme of law and order—or, it was implied, the lack thereof—meant that the policy response was geared towards a one-dimensional problem, and centred around more police, more cameras and tougher sentencing laws. What a boring, tired and predictable analysis! I was sickened by the transparently political approach. I stood up and volunteered an alternative perspective.
‘This is not only a simplified law and order issue. It involves health, education, unemployment, settlement and youth issues. It’s more complicated.’
But before I could continue, the host, Ray Martin, interrupted to show the forum video footage of a violent assault captured by closed-circuit television cameras. At the time, nobody realised that the footage had been shot many years earlier. After a small business owner voiced his views about Vietnamese young people, David stood up. His understandable defensiveness hampered his ability to articulate the deeply layered and complex issues facing us. What ensued seemed to be an argument between him and the small business owner. Not surprisingly, this heated confrontation made it into the edited broadcast.
Leaving the forum, David and I felt the same sense of anger and frustration that our voices had been muted. That our community, the Vietnamese community, as well as the Cabramatta community, had become fodder for ratings. We had been manipulated by journalists who wanted to prove themselves brave enough to venture into a politically charged and dangerous part of Sydney. Television producers dramatised community issues and exploited our stories. Our local member of parliament didn’t even respect us enough to live in the area she purported to represent. The truth was complex and unsavoury. Nobody wanted to know the truth.
Shortly after the forum, Cabramatta police contacted David and me to see whether we could help them. We met with one of the department heads. She was nice enough and seemed to care about the community and the human face of crime. Maybe they wanted a deeper understanding of some of the issues facing the community. Maybe they wanted intelligence. Either way, I found it hard to overcome my distrust of institutions and authorities governed by the white middle-class majority. Beyond superficial meaningless interactions, I could neither volunteer information nor maintain a relationship with these sweetly sinister organisations. With my artillery of anger, I retreated to my kind and walled myself in.
I’m ashamed to admit that, after the 60 Minutes broadcast, I was immaturely envious that David got airtime and I didn’t. He didn’t deserve it. Damn it, I was the one who had always been the social activist. He drank beer on the university lawn while I studied political commentary. With my pride (or ego) wounded, I was unable to see that his voice was as legitimate as mine. It didn’t matter that he did not study social science, couldn’t quote left-wing theorists or articulate his understanding of rights in a political framework. Leadership required an ability to truly engage, galvanise and involve people like David and his friends. Although I would conduct many workshops with young disillusioned and disadvantaged people in my community development work, in my early twenties I hadn’t acquired the heart and humility to truly listen. The irony was that I wanted others to listen to me.
Looking back, I can now understand how I came to connect public achievement and adulation with a sense of self-worth. But at the time, my insatiable hunt for glory was ever present, underlying a genuine commitment to social justice.
As I tried to fight social injustice, meanwhile, I also trudged along p
ainfully at university, a stranger in a strange land. I sat in lecture theatres and tutorials, trying to fade into the walls as my peers asked interesting and thought-provoking questions. On days I had law classes, I felt weighed down by reluctance. I woke up late and ran for the train in the tracksuit pants and oversized T-shirt I’d slept in. Against the backdrop of real-life struggle that I witnessed daily, university seemed like an artificial bubble of fantasy that I couldn’t bring myself to care about.
When the results of the first econometrics test were posted, Peter and I joined the crowds around the noticeboards in the Merewether Building to see our scores. Each student scanned the lists for their identification number and accompanying result. Each wore their score on their face as they turned away—some flushed with pleasure, others quietly satisfied, some bewildered. My heart thumped as I looked for my score. Then it was as if my heart stopped. Shock and confusion engulfed me as I turned to look at Peter. I had failed—terribly. I’d been awarded 11 out of 50.
It was clear to me that something was seriously wrong. These results weren’t mere ad hoc foibles. As my marks continued to slip I began to question whether I really did have the ability to study at university or for some reason my ability was simply crippled. I began to realise that all my old drive, the focus and determination I had maintained for most of my life, was gone. My former resolve, based on determinable academic objectives, remained in high school while my unworldly self drowned in a massive tertiary world of nameless bodies and unaffordable textbooks. This wasn’t an excursion. The mockery of my self-diagnosed sense of displacement in this new world seemed permanent. The trailing adolescent angst had again, finally, caught up with me. Where did I belong? What did I want to do? Where was I going?
My time at Sydney University, especially within the ebb of the conservative law school, had filled me with self-doubt, confirming the existence of a racial and class hierarchy that found me always at the bottom, raising in me questions of place, of identity, of purpose. While others around me had relished their arrival at this bastion of prestige, for me it was an endurance test. I spent each class sitting silently in the last row, shrouded by constant disillusionment. As each lecture, workshop and tutorial passed, I retreated into a shadow that moved unnoticed through the grounds of the university. I pocketed droplets of my peers’ conversations, which were peppered with references to their Sydney University lineage. Of grandparents graduating from the same degrees. Of expectations of corporate jobs and yacht club memberships. I didn’t matter. I didn’t exist. I had never mattered. Not here, not in the media, not on 60 Minutes, not in the broader political landscape, not in any key locus of decision-making. I never would. Everything was Theirs. The reality cemented itself and burned into me each day like a corrosive acid. In those first few months at university, I waited for permission to exist. But it never came.
CHAPTER 10
A tangible heritage
‘I can help you, Cat Thao. We can do this. We can finish this together.’ I heard the pleading in his voice but I couldn’t bring myself to look at him.
‘I can’t, Peter. I can’t do it anymore.’
‘Fuck them, Cat Thao—we can do this.’
After a few months of study, my spirit felt heavy. I was drowning in expectations, in disappointment, in trying to fit in; snapshots from my past and present collided—the parent–teacher meetings, the public-speaking competition, the sewing machines, Vinh’s first day at kindergarten, law school tutorials, my father’s factory uniform, eating jackfruit in Vietnamese orchards. I made the decision to quit university for that year. I needed space. I needed to recalibrate. I needed to breathe.
I decided to go to Vietnam. This time I would be going alone, as an adult. My family, Peter, and David and his friends came to the airport to say goodbye. David’s friends performed a song for me and gave me gifts to remind me to come back. At the time, I didn’t know how long I would be away. I cried when David hugged me. Deep down I knew I was afraid—and more so without him. But we both understood that this was something I inexplicably needed to do.
In the end I spent three months in Vietnam, my ascendant curiosity about the country blossoming. The more I discovered, the more I loved it and hungered for more. I spent a lot of time in Gò Du with my uncles, aunts and cousins, in the house where my mother had spent her childhood. I played soccer with kids in a dusty ground fenced off by a crumbling wall. I went to the market with my aunt to buy live chickens and freshly skinned jumping frogs. I rode a motorbike at dusk past acres of rubber-tree forests, until darkness descended along with a mammoth swarm of moths that smacked into my face. The air was scented with simplicity and carried aromas of star anise, garlic and fried fish. People sold petrol on the side of the street in old two-litre Coke bottles. Buffaloes and cows trundled along worn paths, pulling carts of freshly harvested rice. In the evenings, villagers ate on the floor in mud huts, drinking homemade rice wine.
One night we celebrated my birthday. My cousins and kids from the village gathered in my grandfather’s house, in front of the ancestral altar. Techno music pumped and I taught the kids how to dance while the smaller ones ate cake. My grandfather, who was gradually becoming deaf, observed us with an indulgent smile.
My cousins and I went to orchards and sat on woven grass mats surrounded by fruit trees, eating lychees and longans until our bellies ached.
I rode on the back of my cousin’s motorbike, moving along the narrow path separating my grandfather’s rice fields until my cousin, bike and I slipped into the field, emerging wet and muddy. The farmers laughed heartily at our silliness while the ducks looked on.
One evening my aunt took me on her motorbike and we trundled along unsealed roads, swerving around pot holes and overgrown grass. The sun was hanging low in the sky and the fresh smell of earth and farm surrounded us. Finally we arrived at an old house that was surrounded by wild foliage and tall coconut trees that were bent and swaying slightly. It was clear that no one lived there.
‘Your dad was born here,’ she told me. ‘He lived in this house. Your grandfather planted those coconut trees.’
I stared at the old house. Its wood panelling was dark and patchy with moisture. I walked over to the coconut trees and ran my fingers over the shrapnel wounds it had sustained. Here I was on the land of my father’s father, the land that had nurtured my father as a child like an external womb. I breathed in the air. I pulled at the grass. I basked in the red sun. I clung to the tree, hoping my heritage would stream into me—this physical connection to something real. A connection to this majestic and tangible heritage. I kept my hand on one of the coconut trees for a while. I felt its roughness and imagined my father as a young boy and his father watching him many years ago—before war, before separation.
In Vietnam, I was far from Redfern station, from essays on crime and punishment, far from classes punctuated with conversations of boat clubs I would never go to. And far from a country where I had no continuity of place. And I didn’t want to let go.
Towards the middle of my trip, I went with a group of college students on a four-day bus journey to central Vietnam. I stayed at a beautiful, serene pebble beach. The locals told me stories of how, in the late 1970s, people would come to the beach each day to remove refugees’ bodies that had washed ashore and give them proper ceremonial death rites. They told me of people who scanned the beach every day for belongings of loved ones who had departed without a trace, searching for answers, for finality among the same pebbles that I was walking upon. A shirt, a watch, a button.
At night, the college students built a camp fire and sang. I didn’t know any Vietnamese songs so I sang the first part of ‘Stand By Me’. They clapped along joyfully. The jubilant flames cast flickering shadows on our faces, moving and jumping like a mad puppet show. These were the types of memories I had hoped I would create during my university years back in Sydney. We all slept on hammocks on the beach. I listened to the waves and felt the ocean breeze as I fell asleep under a sky
dense with stars, dreaming of lost things.
I also visited the romantic mountain city of Dalat in the Central Highlands. With its cool European climate, it was a favoured holiday destination of the French during their colonial occupation of Vietnam. Dotted around this beautiful city were old French villas nestled in pine trees, waterfalls and cobblestone laneways. Giant lakes and silhouettes of mountain ranges were the backdrop for little mobile cafés with low plastic chairs.
I was told by a bus driver that there was a table near a Chinese temple in Dalat that could spin upon command. Apparently it was made of an ancient wood that was now extinct. There were three tables in the world made from these trees that now only existed on the tongues and in the minds of bus drivers and villagers. As I walked uphill towards the Chinese temple, there was a humble house on the right. I took off my shoes and went inside. The living room was small and there was a guest book on the table. Not much was exchanged between myself and the woman who served me tea, except warm smiles. She then led me to the round table. It was not grand by any means, being only seventy centimetres or so in diameter and standing only a metre high. There was no gloss or decorative elements of any kind. The woman told me to place both hands on the table and then either say aloud or think to myself the word ‘spin’. I put my hands on the table and thought, Spin right, spin right. Then, ever so gently, the table began to move anticlockwise. I then thought, Stop. The table complied. Spin to the left, faster, faster, I commanded silently. Again, the table did as I’d instructed. The woman then removed the table-top from its base and placed it on the ground to demonstrate that there was no trick, no hidden wires. It was utterly and unassumingly spectacular. My father had always told me that our ancestors reside in the trees, in the rivers and the mountains. Here, in this simple house, a demonstration of Vietnamese mysticism revealed itself to me. Ancient. Inexplicable. Present.
We Are Here Page 16
