The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (12 page)

Dad was always building a shed, mending a fence or making an enclosure.

‘Can we keep some budgies?’ we asked him one day.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got to build the cage yourselves.’

This was Dad’s way of training us to learn practical skills; he was very hands-on. He took all of us to town to buy the wire. The only car we had up at the farm was the work van which had a bench in the front and no seats in the back. The two youngest kids, my sister and Martin, sat next to Dad in the front; us five other boys sat on the floor of the van in the back. Every time it turned a corner, we’d all
whoop
with delight.

‘Turn again, Dad,’ I pleaded. ‘Come on, swoosh us around.’ It was totally illegal and totally fantastic. We would sit on the wheel hub on the floor and start hanging on to it as we wound our way around the country roads. For twenty minutes it was great fun, but after that the floor started getting hot because it was right above the engine. Soon our arses could stand the heat no longer and we would have to jockey around for a cooler position.

After we bought the wire, Dad sat us down in front of his duck enclosure.

‘Right, have a look at this.’ We inspected it.

‘Based on that, work out how you might build a smaller cage for budgies.’

So the six of us boys went to work with saws and pliers, and Tram had her busiest day ever with the bandaids. Eventually we finished a cage that was wonky, not quite square, but to us it looked like a bird Taj Mahal. It passed Dad’s inspection and we headed off to buy some budgies.

I love auctions. I love the discovery part of them. Often you turn up not knowing what you might find and it’s like unearthing treasure. Then you try and anticipate what things might sell for, hoping no one else wants that American Indian with the flashing neon eyes, and get worried when a rich-looking old lady starts inspecting it closely.

My dad used to take us to livestock auctions. We’d roll up in the van, get out and discover a zoo of fascinating beasts. Except with this zoo you get to buy the animals and take them home.
Brilliant!

Ferrets, puppies, budgies, goats, parrots, ponies—for an eleven-year-old kid it was magic. What made it even more exciting was going with a nutty impulsive dad, who would actually buy stuff you asked for. You didn’t always get what you wanted, but my dad was the type of guy you could try it on.

‘Dad, how about a little guinea pig?’

‘Nah, looks like an overweight rat with its tail bitten off.’

We once rolled up to an auction and there were these funny creatures that looked like miniature camels. Dad had never seen anything like them before in his life. Not even in photographs.

‘What the hell’s that?’ he asked.

‘They’re called alpacas, Dad. We learned about them at school last year. They’re good for wool.’

‘They’re funny looking, aye. What do they eat?’

‘I think they eat grass. Like sheep but different.’

‘Eight!’ He squeaked. ‘Check out these things. They keep the grass low, Anh reckons.’

‘Chuck ’em in the back paddock if they go cheap,’ Uncle Eight suggested. I waited the rest of the afternoon in painful anticipation.

‘Lot number 157—chooks… number 162—rabbits…  164—goldfish.’

C’mon, c’mon, just get to the alpacas already.

‘Lot number 241—a pair of Peruvian alpacas.’

It was intense and exciting and I don’t remember much except that I watched as the price got to my dad’s set maximum and he stopped bidding.

There’s still a chance
, I thought. Every now and then Dad would stop at his maximum but then, just as the auctioneer was about to bang the gavel for the third time, Dad would stick up his hand and try to give the guy a wrist sprain from stopping too suddenly. I was hoping that would be the case this time.

‘Sold! To green shirt at the back.’

Damn. We missed out.

‘Next up, lot number 242—a male golden pheasant.’

The thing about Dad, the next auction immediately after he loses an auction is a very good time to get him to buy something.

‘Dad! Can we have a pheasant? Pheasants are good for long grass too!’

Dad loved birds—ducks, chickens, sparrows and even those annoying myna birds. He reckoned that in Vietnam he knew a kid who taught one to say, ‘
Da Dao thang Viet Cong Hoi.
’ (‘Piss off, you smelly Vietcong.’) I never believed him until I got older and an Indian mate told me that in his country mynas are like cockatoos. So Dad was interested in the pheasant.

‘Beautiful feathers… like a yellow peacock,’ he said.

That afternoon, when Mum heard the van come up the driveway, she wondered,
What useless animal did he buy this time?

In we walked with our pheasant.

‘Oh my god. What are we going to do with that?’ she asked.

‘Forty-five bucks! Beautiful isn’t it? We’ll keep it in the backyard,’ Dad replied. He paused for a second, then added, ‘And if it doesn’t work out, we’ll cook it.’

One day my dad was driving around and saw some feed for sale by the side of the road. It wasn’t just a bargain, it was the bargain of the year. ‘So cheap, have to buy it.’

Dad bought a small amount, just to see if it was okay, because sometimes cheap feed can be off. The ducks loved it. Dad was excited. The next day he sent Uncle Nine back to buy a dozen bags, enough to feed the whole farm that afternoon.

The next morning we woke up to find several thousand dead ducks. The feed was dodgy—the trial sample had been random luck.

That was the end of the farm, and that was the end of my dad the farmer. It all went downhill after that. He and his brothers held on to the property for a while, and thought about buying more ducks. ‘Otherwise, what the hell do we do with it?’ he asked.

Before anyone could give him a considered answer, the property bubble burst. It was 1989, interest rates hit eighteen per cent, and the farm was sold for a loss. Mum and Dad went back to scrounging out a living sewing clothes in our living room.

For a large part of my childhood my dad’s mum lived with us. We called her
Ba Noi
, which is Vietnamese for paternal grandmother. She was an important part of my upbringing as most of the time it was her who looked after us while Mum and Dad were busy sewing.

Grandma loved gardening. Every house we lived in that had a backyard would be turned into a Saigon paddy with eggplants, snakebeans, basil, Vietnamese mint, melons and limes. Grandma knew exactly which plants needed chicken wire put around them to fend off Dad’s dozen or so ducks and the golden pheasant, which he’d named ‘Dinner’. Our front yard would be filled with flowers and bright orange cumquat trees laden with fruit. Old Aussie ladies would see Grandma in the front yard tending this exceptional flora display and ask her questions. She would happily turn to them and flash her black-toothed smile, which probably freaked them out.

Grandma always had a wonderful youthfulness about her. She used to come in after a hard day’s work in the garden, crack open a can of VB, put her feet up and sing karaoke. At the time I owned a Nintendo game console and one of the earliest versions of a shooting game. You sat back three or four metres from the TV, pointed the laser gun at the screen and shot the animals that flew past. I spent a full year perfecting my aim and I had just managed to crack the game and make it to the end.

The very day after I finally did this, I woke up at midnight and heard the
doo-doo-loo-whoop
of someone breezing through the game, scoring hit after hit after hit. I came out to the living room to see Grandma, who had been having bouts of insomnia, plonked on two Yellow Pages phone books in front of the TV, shooting away. She literally had the laser gun touching the screen.
How could she miss?

I glanced at the score and realised she was only two levels away from the end that had taken me a year to reach! I had to sit next to her and cheer her on as she finished the game like I had the night before. The next morning I told everyone about it and my brother and sister wanted to see. Grandma was so proud of herself that she stacked the two phone books in front of the TV, and did it all over again while we had breakfast.

Having a cool grandma living with you was wonderful thing, but like with all the elderly, there were a few rules you had to follow. The first was: ‘Never leave important paperwork lying around just in case it ends up in the bin.’

One day I came home from school and Mum asked me to retrieve my Australian citizenship certificate as we were applying for something important. After I found it, Mum told me to put it away in a safe place because I had to take it to school the next day. One of my favourite television shows was about to start, so I left it on the kitchen bench.

‘Where’s the form?’ Mum asked me the next morning when it was time to leave for school. I couldn’t find it. Two hours later we’d turned the house upside down and we still hadn’t found it.

‘Go outside and check in the bin,’ my mother said. ‘Might as well have a look in there.’

I went and pulled out last night’s rubbish. A surge of excitement and relief flooded through me as I glimpsed the certificate’s creamy colour. I pulled out my citizenship certificate and un-scrunched it, finding three snapper heads wrapped up inside.

Grandma couldn’t read English so she had no idea what she’d done, and I’d left the certificate lying among some Kmart pamphlets, which she thought were perfect for wrapping up fish heads. I headed off to school extremely late and carrying a schoolbag that smelt like the back alley of the fish markets. I avoided a clout on the head for that one, but only just.