The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (13 page)

My family were, and still are, extremely paranoid when it comes to documentation. That night at dinner one of my uncles summed up the fear: ‘If you don’t have your identity papers they’ll kick you out of the country.’ In hindsight I can see where their fear came from. Those pieces of paper meant we were safe and without them my family felt as vulnerable as someone selling snacks on a Saigon train with no permit.

My parents always believed in giving us kids as good an education as they could afford. So when it was time for me to go to high school they searched high and low for the best school.

Uncle Huy, who was in training to become a Jesuit priest, was somewhat of an expert on schools. He had travelled around, written references for families trying to get their kids into the best Catholic colleges, and even done a bit of teaching here and there.

‘You’ve got to send the boys to St Aloysius,’ he said to my parents. ‘It’s the one. It’s got great academic grades but it also teaches them how to live a great life.’

When Mum and Dad looked into it they were sold. The school had two mottos. First: ‘Men for Others’—done deal as far as Mum was concerned. Here was a school that was going to teach her boys to look after others and, if she hadn’t drummed it into us enough at home, we’d get another dose at school. The other motto was: ‘Born for Greater Things’.
Boom
! Dad’s happy.

‘Now
that’s
a school motto,’ he said. ‘None of this, “We’ll try our hardest blah blah blah” crap. Born for Greater Things! That’s the school for my boys! How much is it?’

When the lady told him the fees, he turned to Mum and said in Vietnamese, ‘Holy Schmoly… born for expensive things!’

Khoa and I giggled.

‘No problem!’ he said. He’d decided then and there that he was going to do whatever it took to pay those big fees.

As we drove home I listened to my parents discuss how they were going to afford it, the plans they would put in place, the different strategies and sacrifices. In that moment, my naive little brain realised something big about Mum and Dad. All the effort, all the late nights sewing till 3 a.m., all the risks to get us onto a boat and take on the ocean was for one reason: so that they could give their children a better life.

When we got home we flicked through all the pamphlets the school had given us and we found a page that had a magic word on it: Scholarship.

‘Woo-hoo!!!’ said Mum. It was like she had opened the pamphlet and out fell a scratchie with three matching horseshoes on it.

‘Anh! Khoa! All you got to do is sit a test and ace it, and you get to go to the school for FREEEEE!’ Her voice lifted to a grand crescendo at the end and Khoa and I tried to calm her down.

‘You gotta win it first, Mum. Like, probably thousands of kids go for it, and they’ve only got a few.’

‘You’ll win it,’ she said.

‘What if we don’t?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ I love how Mum always said ‘doesn’t matter’. Not even a loaded ‘doesn’t matter’, like a ‘it
really does matter
and your mum will be devastated if you don’t do this for her’, but a real honest-to-god ‘doesn’t matter’. It was like when I had to do that speech to become primary school captain: ‘Doesn’t matter.’

I guess when you’d been shot at by pirates and faced starvation on a leaky boat, these little things really do seem trivial. That’s one of the most astonishing things about both my mum and dad. They always had mammoth dreams for us, but at the same time they never put us under any pressure.

They also seemed to have a different reaction to failure. Dad especially was always positive, even a little bit over the top when we failed. ‘Great, son! At least you know you’re sailing near the edge of your capacity!’ It was a strange concept for a kid to wrap his head around.

Armed with the knowledge that your parents had full belief in you, but yet wouldn’t be at all fazed if things didn’t work out, Khoa and I attended those exams and we both ended up winning partial scholarships. It wasn’t the big one where you get to go totally for free, but Mum and Dad only had to pay half the fees.

‘Wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful!’ Mum shrieked. And we were off for a McDonald’s Happy Meal to celebrate. It was the last McDonald’s outing we had as a family because things were about to take a turn for the worst.

My father is an eternal, incurable optimist. He has this incredible combination of self-belief, mixed with an addiction to risk taking: ‘You can do anything,’; ‘There’s now and there’s too late.’ But for a period back then it seemed like the universe was conspiring to break him because it hit him with wave after wave after wave of misfortune.

When the farm was prospering Dad and his brothers had invested in a number of properties: a huge three-storey factory in Leichhardt, a house in south-western Sydney, as well as another block of rural land. Soon after the heartbreaking events at the farm and the onset of high interest rates, there was simply no way he and his brothers could afford the inflated repayments. They hung on for as long as they could and then eventually sold everything at a massive loss. So Dad not only lost his own money but all the savings of his brothers as well.

Now Dad’s the type of guy who can bounce back after a financial setback, but losing the trust and friendship of his brothers was crippling for him. One night I awoke to the most awful sounds of swearing, breaking furniture and bodies thumping against the wall. I ran out to see my father and Uncle Three tangled in a bloody wrestle on the floor of our living room. They were trying to kill each other. My mum was screaming for them to stop, threatening to call the police and at the same time trying to shoo away the kids from the appalling scene.

I ran back into my room and tried my best to block out the dreadful noise. For the first time in my life I was genuinely afraid.

My father eventually got in the car and left. Where he went I don’t know but he returned the next day. Shortly after that Uncle Three moved out and returned to America.

Dad then went into a downward spiral. He’d always been a pretty heavy drinker but now he began drinking copiously, and it wasn’t until many years later that my mother explained to me the depth of my father’s guilt.

Uncle Three left Vietnam on a boat about six months before we made our journey. He had with him three brothers: uncles Five, Seven and Nine. Just like our boat, they were attacked by pirates. Unlike on our boat, there were very few survivors. After the pirates took everything they sank the boat in the middle of the ocean, and the 32 people on board were forced to cling onto bits of debris at the mercy of the raging Indian Ocean.

Uncle Three passed out and woke up on a beach in Malaysia. After searching desperately for other survivors he found Uncle Nine alive. Eventually they found the dead bodies of uncles Five and Seven. When news got back to Vietnam that two brothers had died on the trip my father blamed himself for not being on the boat.

For a while there had been talk of Dad and our family joining that earlier boat but we eventually stayed to await another journey. My father felt that he might have been able to do something to save his brothers had he been with them. Although he was technically brother number Four, he was always a leader among his siblings.

When uncles Three and Nine joined Dad in Australia it was clearly obvious how much they meant to him and how much he wanted to make their lives better after them having endured the tragedy of finding two brothers’ tattered bodies sprawled out on the rocks. Now he had somehow managed to lose all their money, and the guilt ate away at him.

He felt guilty not only about uncles Three and Nine, but Uncle Three’s wife as well. While searching for other survivors from their boat, Uncle Three saw a person struggling out at sea. He swam out and saved the life of a young lady. The two became friends and eventually married. This couple had endured enough. Now, after a stint in Australia where they had worked hard and eventually made some progress, they were returning to the United States with absolutely nothing.

‘Is that why he feels guilty, Mum?’ I asked.

‘That’s a part of it, but not the biggest part of it. Your father blames himself for the death of his eldest brother.’

Dad’s drinking was getting out of hand and he was no longer holding down a job, or helping out with making the garments. He was turning into a regular drunk and the tipping point for Mum was when he turned violent.

About half a dozen times when I was a young teenager my father hit me in a drunken stupor, without measure, without controlled words of admonishment to soothe the wounds, but wildly and with intent to cause pain, like Sammy’s dad. Well, when you teach your son that he can do anything, you shouldn’t be surprised if he hits you back. On what was to be the last occasion I flung myself in Dad’s direction and pushed him into the wall, smacking my fist into the side of his head. I cried and screamed at the same time, I was delirious. My defiance struck him harder than my fist ever could. It shocked him and he stumbled away in confusion.

Dad often seemed to disappear for weeks on end and then one day Mum told us that he had gone back to Vietnam for a while.

‘What’s a while, Mum?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure, maybe a year.’

Ahhh, relief
, I remember thinking to myself.
No drunk in the house for a year.