The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (16 page)

My family have always joked that I have a horsey face. They used to pull out this photo and say ‘Check out Anh and his twin!’

It’s not easy to fit in when your mum buys you whatever clothes are on sale. Here’s Khoa, aged seven, wearing a T-shirt for the R-rated film A
Nightmare on
Elm Street.

Me and Dad. Those pictures of Jesus and Mary made it to the living room shelves.

Khoa, Dad and me enjoying good times. In the six months after this photo was taken, Dad went into a spiral of decline and eventually left.

Khoa and me as teenagers. Khoa lost a lot of weight after Dad left.

One of the few photos of Tram smiling as a child. She was very self- conscious of her teeth.

Tram and me on her wedding day. Big beautiful smile!

Mum, Tram and me. Good times.

I remember one time I won a prize at Year 10 graduation, which was a big deal held at the Sydney Town Hall. I felt dread when I heard my name called out because it meant getting up and standing on stage in front of the whole school. In my mind I could hear them all saying:
Jesus, look at that jacket, it’s two different colours.
For god’s sake, how poor are that family?

While up on stage I crossed my arms and made a mental note to self: Next year, you idiot, do well, but not so well you have to get up in this stupid jacket.

Then there were the other uniforms we needed, all of it top-of-the-range high-quality stuff, all of it very, very expensive. The St Aloysius winter catalogue makes the latest Gucci release seem limited. The sports uniform is different to the PE gear, which changes each semester, and is different again to the rugby gear, and the soccer, cricket and basketball outfits. Add to this the fact that sport is compulsory in both summer and winter, and you have a very large uniform bill for two relentlessly growing teenage boys.

Mum had another brilliant solution. She would scour St Vinnies and other op shops for items that looked similar and then just cut off the St Aloysius badges from our old stuff and stick them on the ‘new’.
Voila!
If you panned a video camera along the Under 15A rugby side warming up you’d see a consistent royal blue all the way across until you got to me. My jersey was more a faded cobalt, like someone had hung me on the washing line for three months and forgotten I was there.

Many people ask me after a comedy show: ‘Were you the class clown?’ I was nowhere near so. In fact, I was at the other end of the spectrum: a quiet kid who was studious and focussed on my work.

In Year 7 every kid in the form did a subject called drama, which was just about everyone’s favourite because it was basically mucking around, play-acting and putting on little shows. It was a glorious break from the boredom of maths and chemistry, and I loved it. It was also a break from real life when your life was full of worries and concerns. My mind was always chattering and churning out the same thoughts:
Will they see my two-toned jacket? Mum’s sick again. I don’t have the money for next week’s excursion.
In drama, all of a sudden, you could stride into a battle scene wearing a helmet and vest, reciting heroic lines that save the kingdom. Instantly your worries would fade away.

For that brief double period of make-believe you got to float away on an intoxicating bubble of imagination. You got to escape into a fantastical world where you could experience the highest highs and the lowest lows, death, love, betrayal, winning the princess, killing the villain, even being the villain. And yet no one could be harmed, the dead brother returned to being your best mate, Phil, and you all have a laugh at how Phil took so long to die.

Then in Year 8 the school did a weird thing. It decided that half of the class would get to do drama and the other half would never have any potential.

So at the beginning of Year 8, Mr Stevens, the drama teacher, walked in and ran a ten-minute exercise—which was some sort of theatre game—and then proceeded to pick the fifteen deserving boys and cull the fifteen no-hopers.

When Mr Stevens started to assemble his star class we all sat there in anticipation. I reckoned I had a pretty good chance because the year before I had done well at the subject. It was like those horrible times in the playground when two captains get to pick their teams and your self-esteem endures a knife wound with every kid picked before you. You look around and hope that you’re not stuck at the end with the nerd and the fat kid. Then the end arrives and you’re the very last one standing, and you realise with abject misery that you are the nerd
and
the fat kid all rolled into one.

As I watched Mr Stevens select his fifteen stars, I started to get worried about a trend that was emerging. He was basically picking the loudest boys in the class—all the class clowns, the ADHDs, the look-at-me-I-need-to-be-noticed types. I was thinking,
Oh man, there’s a real chance I might miss out here
. There was so much tension in the room; A
Dancing with the Stars
elimination is nothing next to this.

I counted the grinning faces on the other side of the room, noting there were twelve already. I looked left and right at the bunch of remaining rejects and, sure enough, we were the quieter ones.

What an idiot
, I thought.
There’s still a bunch of great talent sitting here. C’mon, don’t you realise some of the world’s best actors were introverts: James Dean, Robert De Niro, Charlie Chaplin… C’mon!

Three more places left and he called out the names.

Not me… damn!

Not me… damn!

Not me, again. Bloody hell.
My heart sank.