The Best Australian Stories (9 page)

‘L,' said the boy.

‘I said I'm not playing.'

Here is what I believe: We forgive any sacrifice by our parents, so long as it is not made in our name. To my father there was no other name – only mine, and he had named me after the homeland he had given up. His sacrifice was complete and compelled him to everything that happened. To all that, I was inadequate.

At sixteen I left home. There was a girl, and crystal meth, and the possibility of greater loss than I had imagined possible. She embodied everything prohibited by my father and plainly worthwhile. Of course he was right about her: She taught me hurt – and promise. We were two animals in the dark, hacking at one another, and never since have I felt that way – that sense of consecration. When my father found out my mother was supporting me, he gave her an ultimatum. She moved into a family friend's textile factory and learned to use an overlock machine and continued sending money.

‘Of course I want to live with him,' she told me when I visited her, months later. ‘But I want you to come home too.'

‘Ba doesn't want that.'

‘You're his son,' she said simply. ‘He wants you with him.'

I laundered my school uniform and asked a friend to cut my hair and waited for school hours to finish before catching the train home. My father excused himself upon seeing me. When he returned to the living room he had changed his shirt and there was water in his hair. I felt sick and fully awake – as if all the previous months had been a single sleep and now my face was wet again, burning cold. The room smelled of peppermint. He asked me if I was well, and I told him I was, and then he asked me if my female friend was well, and at that moment I realised he was speaking to me not as a father – not as he would to his only son – but as he would speak to a friend, to anyone, and it undid me. I had learned what it was to attenuate my blood but that was nothing compared to this. I forced myself to look at him and I asked him to bring Ma back home.

‘And Child?'

‘Child will not take any more money from Ma.'

‘Come home,' he said, f inally. His voice was strangled, half swallowed.

Even then, my emotions operated like a system of levers and pulleys; just seeing him had set them irreversibly into motion. ‘No,' I said. The word shot out of me.

‘Come home, and Ma will come home, and Ba promises Child to never speak of any of this again.' He looked away, smiling heavily, and took out a handkerchief. His forehead was moist with sweat. He had been buried alive in the warm, wet clinch of his family, crushed by their lives. I wanted to know how he climbed out of that pit. I wanted to know how there could ever be any correspondence between us. I wanted to know all this but an internal momentum moved me, further and further from him as time went on.

‘The world is hard,' he said. For a moment I was uncertain whether he was speaking in proverbs. He looked at me, his face a gleaming mask. ‘Just say yes, and we can forget everything. That's all. Just say it: Yes.'

But I didn't say it. Not that day, nor the next, nor any day for almost a year. When I did, though, rehabilitated and fixed in new privacies, he was true to his word and never spoke of the matter. In fact, after I came back home he never spoke of anything much at all, and it was under this learned silence that the three of us – my father, my mother and I – living again under a single roof, were conducted irreparably into our separate lives.

The apartment smelled of fried garlic and sesame oil when I returned. My father was sitting on the living room floor, on the special mattress he had brought over with him. It was made of white foam. He told me it was for his back. ‘I made some stir-fry.'

‘Thanks.'

‘I read your story this morning,' he said, ‘while you were still sleeping.' Something in my stomach folded over. I hadn't thought to hide the pages. ‘There are mistakes in it.'

‘You read it?'

‘There were mistakes in your last story too.'

My last story. I remembered my mother's phone call at the time: my father, unemployed and living alone in Sydney, had started sending long emails to friends from his past – friends from thirty, forty years ago. She'd told me I should talk to him more often. Not knowing what to say, I'd sent him my refugee story. He hadn't responded. Now, as I came out of the kitchen with a plate of stir-fry, I tried to recall those sections where I'd been sloppy with research. Maybe the scene in Rach Gia, before they reached the boat. I scooped up a forkful of marinated tofu, cashews and chickpeas. ‘They're
stories
,' I said, casually. ‘Fiction.'

He paused for a moment, then said, ‘OK, Son.'

For so long my diet had consisted of chips and noodles and pizzas I'd forgotten how much I missed home cooking. As I ate, he stretched on his white mat.

‘How's your back?'

‘I had a CAT scan,' he said. ‘There's nerve fluid leaking between my vertebrae.' He smiled his long-suffering smile, right leg twisted across his left hip. ‘I brought the scans to show you.'

‘Does it hurt, Ba?'

‘It hurts.' He chuckled briefly, as though the whole matter were a joke. ‘But what can I do? I can only accept it.'

‘Can't they operate?'

I felt myself losing interest. I was a bad son. He'd separated from my mother when I started law school and ever since then he'd brought up his back pains so often – always couched in Buddhist tenets of suffering and acceptance – that the cold, hard part of me suspected he was exaggerating, to solicit and then gently rebuke my concern. He did this. He'd forced me to take karate lessons until I was sixteen; then, during one of our final arguments, he came at me and I found myself in fighting stance. He had smiled at my horror. ‘That's right,' he'd said. We were locked in all the intricate ways of guilt. It took all the time we had to realise that everything we faced, we faced for the other as well.

‘I want to talk with you,' I said.

‘You grow old, your body breaks down,' he said.

‘No, I mean for the story.'

‘Talk?'

‘Yes.'

‘About what?' He seemed amused.

‘About my mistakes,' I said.

*

If you ask me why I came to Iowa, I would say that I was a lawyer and I was no lawyer. Every twenty-four hours I woke up at the smoggiest time of morning and commuted – bus, tram, elevator, often without saying a single word, wearing clothes that chafed against me and holding a flat white in a white cup – to my windowless office in the tallest, most glass-covered building in Melbourne. Time was broken down into six-minute units, friends allotted eight-unit lunch breaks. I hated what I was doing and I hated that I was good at it. Mostly, I hated knowing it was my job that gave my father pride. When I told him I was quitting and going to Iowa to be a writer, he said,
Trau
buoc ghet trau an
. The captive buffalo hates the free buffalo. But by that time, he had no more control over my life. I was twenty-five years old.

The thing is not to write what no one else could have written, but to write
what only you could have written
. I recently found this fragment in one of my old notebooks. The person who wrote that couldn't have known what would happen: how time can hold itself against you, how a voice hollows, how words you once loved can shrivel on the page.

‘Why do you want to write this story?' my father asked me.

‘It's a good story.'

‘But there are so many things you could write about.'

‘This is important, Ba. It's important that people know.'

‘You want their pity.'

I didn't know whether it was a question. I was offended. ‘I want them to remember,' I said.

He was silent for a long time. Then he said, ‘Only you'll remember. I'll remember. They will read and clap their hands and forget.' For once, he was not smiling. ‘Sometimes it's better to forget, no?'

‘I'll write it anyway,' I said. It came back to me – how I had felt at the typewriter the previous night. A thought leapt into my mind: ‘If I write a true story,' I told my father, ‘I'll have a better chance of selling it.'

He looked at me a while, searchingly, seeing something in my face as though for the first time. Finally he said, in a considered voice, ‘I'll tell you. But believe me,' he continued, ‘it's not something you'll be able to write.'

‘I'll write it anyway,' I repeated.

Then he did something unexpected. His face opened up and he began to laugh, without self-pity or slyness, laughing in full-bodied breaths. I was shocked. I hadn't heard him laugh like this for as long as I could remember. Without fully knowing why, I started laughing too. His throat was humming in Vietnamese, ‘Yes … yes … yes,' his eyes shining, smiling. ‘All right. All right. But tomorrow.'

‘But—'

‘I need to think,' he said. He shook his head, then said under his breath, ‘My son a writer.
Co thuc moi vuc duoc dao
.' Fine words will butter no parsnips.

‘
Mot nguoi lam quan, ca ho duoc nho
,' I retorted. A scholar is a blessing for all his relatives. He looked at me in surprise before laughing again and nodding vigorously. I'd been saving that one up for years.

Afternoon. We sat across from one another at the dining room table: I asked questions and took notes on a yellow legal pad; he talked. He talked about his childhood, his family. He talked about My Lai. At this point, he stopped.

‘You won't offer your father some of that?'

‘What?'

‘Heavens, you think you can hide liquor of that quality?'

The afternoon light came through the window and held his body in a silver square, slowly sinking toward his feet, dimming, as he talked. I refilled our glasses. He talked above the peak-hour traffic on the streets, its rinse of noise; he talked deep into evening. When the phone rang the second time I unplugged the jack. He told me how he had been conscripted into the South Vietnamese army.

‘After what the Americans did? How could you fight on their side?'

‘I had nothing but hate in me,' he said, ‘but I had enough for everyone.' He paused on the word
hate
like a father saying it before his infant child for the first time, trying the child's knowledge, testing what was inherent in the word and what learned.

He told me about the war. He told me about meeting my mother. The wedding. Then the fall of Saigon. 1975. He told me about his imprisonment in re-education camp, the forced confessions, the indoctrinations, the starvations. The daily labour that ruined his back. The casual killings. He told me about the tiger-cage cells and connex boxes, the different names for different forms of torture: the honda, the airplane, the auto. ‘They tie you by your thumbs, one arm over the shoulder, the other pulled around the front of the body. Or they stretch out your legs and tie your middle fingers to your big toes—'

He showed me. A skinny old man in Tantra-like poses, he looked faintly preposterous. During the auto he flinched, then, immediately grinning, asked me to help him to his foam mattress. I waited impatiently for him to stretch it out. He asked me again to help.
Here, push
here
.
A little softer
. Then he went on talking, sometimes in a low voice, sometimes smiling. Other times he would blink – furiously, perplexedly. In spite of his Buddhist protestations, I imagined him locked in rage, turned around and forced every day to rewitness these atrocities of his past, helpless to act. But that was only my imagination. I had nothing to prove that he was not empty of all that now.

He told me how, upon his release after three years' incarceration, he organised our family's escape from Vietnam. This was 1979. He was twenty-five years old then, and my father.

When he finally fell asleep, his face warm from the Scotch, I watched him from the bedroom doorway. I was drunk. For a moment, watching him, I felt like I had drifted into dream too. For a moment I became my father, watching his sleeping son, reminded of what – for his son's sake – he had tried, unceasingly, to forget. A past larger than complaint, more perilous than memory. I shook myself conscious and went to my desk. I read my notes through once, carefully, all forty-five pages. I reread the draft of my story from two nights before. Then I put them both aside and started typing, never looking at them again.

Dawn came so gradually, I didn't notice – until the beeping of a garbage truck – that outside the air was metallic blue and the ground was white. The top of the tin shed was white. The first snow had fallen. He wasn't in the apartment when I woke up. There was a note on the coffee table:
I am going for a walk. I have taken your story to read
. I sat outside, on the fire escape, with a tumbler of Scotch, waiting for him. Against the cold, I drank my whisky, letting it flow like a filament of warmth through my body. I had slept for only three hours and was too tired to feel anything but peace. The red geraniums on the landing of the opposite building were frosted over. I spied through my neighbours' windows and saw exactly nothing.

He would read it, with his book-learned English, and he would recognise himself in a new way. He would recognise me. He would see how powerful was his experience, how valuable his suffering – how I had made it speak for more than itself. He would be pleased with me.

I finished the Scotch. It was eleven-thirty and the sky was dark and grey-smeared. My story was due at midday. I put my gloves on, treaded carefully down the fire escape, and untangled my bike from the rack. He would be pleased with me. I rode around the block, up and down Summit Street, looking for a sign of my puffy jacket. The streets were empty. Most of the snow had melted, but an icy film covered the roads and I rode slowly. Eyes stinging and breath fogging in front of my mouth, I coasted toward downtown, across the college green, the grass frozen so stiff it snapped beneath my bicycle wheels. Lights glowed dimly from behind the curtained windows of houses. On Washington Street, a sudden gust of wind ravaged the elm branches and unfastened their leaves, floating them down thick and slow and soundless.