The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (18 page)

It was round about halfway through Year 10 when I decided enough was enough. I told Mum I hated St Aloysius, it was too far away, taking almost two hours of travel to and from Milsons Point each day. I told her I wanted to attend the local public school. It was a total lie. At the time I was the student council representative (like a class captain), my marks were good and I loved my sport. Most of all I loved my mates. But none of this mattered when weighed up against the hardship my mum was going through and I would’ve happily given it all up to see her work a little bit less; to have her fall sick less frequently. She saw right through it and flatly refused.

‘You’re doing well, son. Just a couple more years and you’ll have the marks to choose a profession that you’ll love and you’ll not have to do a crappy job like me.’

My mum is an asthmatic and her breathing is the first sign she’s sick. She wheezes loudly and it is a haunting, scary sound that makes my skin crawl. One time Mum was bedridden and Khoa, Tram and I had to bring her food. The next morning she called me into her bedroom and asked me to help her walk to the sewing machine.

‘What are you doing, Mum?’

‘They’re coming to collect this today. If I don’t finish we won’t get paid, and they won’t give me any more work,’ she wheezed.

‘But the doctor said if you don’t rest you could seriously harm yourself.’

‘I’m all right…’

I helped her over to the machine and offered to give her a hand, but it was a buttoner that I was just no good at.

What surprised and even shocked me on this occasion was not Mum’s willingness to work but that I, instead of willing her to rest, was secretly hoping she would go on, keep sewing, even at the risk of her becoming seriously ill. The fear of having no money was so merciless and so overwhelming.

It’s a horrible feeling—shame mixed with desperation. I once had an acquaintance who was a junkie and he explained to me about his shame of breaking into his own mum and dad’s house to steal from them, just so he could get his next fix. I felt the same watching my sick mother sew those garments.

My mum has a genius streak that is not always present at the exact time she is performing the act of genius.

When I was fifteen, we were pretty close to being flat out broke. It was round about this time when a distant cousin, three times removed, arrived from Vietnam with her daughter and went to stay with relatives. It turned out that a number of family issues, secrets and lies that had happened years and years ago came to the surface, and this poor young woman faced being without a place to live in a new, foreign, intimidating country.

‘Come live with us,’ my mother insisted.

I couldn’t believe what Mum was offering. Financially we were struggling, desperately struggling, and she’d just offered a young woman and her five-year-old daughter a place to stay.

‘They’ve got no one,’ she said.

‘Are they going to pay rent and stuff?’ Khoa piped up.

‘If they can, they will. If they can’t, what does it matter?’ And that was that. We knew not to argue with Mum when it came to giving. The next day the young mother and her daughter moved in with us.

Somehow, though, it didn’t seem like we had to do with less at all. It felt like exactly the opposite. Having this woman stay with us made us feel very well off. This is why my mum is a genius. She could’ve told us a million times that we were lucky to have what we had—three meals a day, clothes to wear, a roof over our heads—and we would never have believed her because we heard these clichés all the time and they didn’t make us feel lucky. But allowing someone who had even less than we did to live with us made us feel incredibly fortunate, wealthy even. This woman was so appreciative and grateful, and always made us feel like we were benefactors sent from God to help her through.

Six months after they moved in Mum assisted the woman to find a job and before long she was off, just like that, ready to start her life again. Every Christmas she sent us a card to let us know how she was doing and that was enough for Mum. It was a pattern in our life that I had grown to expect and even to enjoy. Over the years there had probably been a few dozen people, ranging from uncles to single mums to old ladies, come and stay with us, and it is a part of my childhood I wouldn’t change. I learned life experiences from a whole range of people, and it was an incredibly rich and varied form of wisdom that these passers-by gifted us with.

I played basketball for a while at school. The best way to describe my teammates was by their shoes: three Reebok Pumps, four Air Jordans, and a Nike Max Lite. My shoes were called ‘Kind Lion’—someone at the Chinese factory must have stuffed up the translation. My mother bought them from an Asian grocery store in Bankstown for $15. They featured a lion running across the sides and were made of plastic and vinyl.

The vinyl didn’t breathe and the shoes made my feet smell like three-day-old road kill that had been hit while eating parmesan cheese. However, I soon learned that if you played well enough, the other kids would lay off your badly named shoes, and so I decided to practise every day.

We bought a second-hand basketball ring and I bolted it onto the side of the house and shot hoops with Khoa. I’d never put so much practice into a sport, but I had a very good incentive. The school had an endorsement deal with the local sports shop: if any kid reached thirty points in a game, they won a new pair of shoes.

Throughout a whole season there might be only two or three kids who got there. At our level, the whole team together would usually reach only thirty or forty points in total. I was an As player in the Under 13s, playing with hotshots who were really good. While I was scoring the occasional basket, I was never going to get anywhere near thirty. So at the start of the Under 14s I deliberately played as bad as possible, skipped training sessions, ate pizza just before games, shot poorly and played lazy in defence. Within a couple of weeks, I had successfully been promoted (at least in my mind) into the Ds.

Whoo-hoo! Let my season begin!

I soon learned that it was even harder to score thirty in the Ds than the As because the guys around you were freakin’ hopeless. It took me all season to get even close, but my big chance came in the last game of the season against Barker College. With seven minutes to go, I was on twenty-four points.

‘This guy is everywhere,’ my Irish coach shouted out to his bench. ‘He deserves a rest. Anh, take a break!’ he called to me. I was shattered. He had no idea about the score I was going for. I sat down for about thirty seconds then jumped up again.

‘Sir, sir, can I go back on for the last five minutes?’

‘Nah, we’ve got the game won. Relax son—you’ve earned it.’ Luckily, Phil piped up.

‘No, sir, you don’t understand. Anh’s on twenty-four and he only needs six more to win a pair of High Top Reebok Pumps.’

‘Jaysus! Why didn’t you tell me earlier you daft eediot! Anh, next time-out you’re on.’

New shoes here I come baby!
I leapt on to the court. My teammates knew exactly what was going on.

‘Give Anh the shot!’

I had three minutes to score six points, the entire team conspiring to get me there, and a killer hook-shot that no opposition D’s player could stop. All I needed was for my shoes to hold up.

The entire season I had punished my kings of the jungle, and they were turning into tired, pissed-off lions that had had a gutful of my stinky feet running them ragged. I’d played the last three games with virtually zero grip left on them, so at every break I ran to the side of the court, poured some lemonade on the ground and then walked around in the puddle to sticky up my soles. On this fateful day, I’d run out of lemonade.

Nooooooo!

‘No worries,’ said Phil. ‘I’ll go buy some from the vending machine.’ Phil came back quick smart… with a can of Diet Coke.

‘What? Where’s the lemonade?’ I asked.

‘You’re only going to use a bit of it, I thought I could drink the rest; and my mum wants me to stick to Diet Coke.’

Whatever
, I thought.
A soft drink is a soft drink.
I poured the Diet Coke onto the ground and gave lion one and lion two a much-needed sip. I handed the can back to Phil, who started guzzling like a thirsty refugee.

‘Whoa. Save some for me, Phil. Don’t drink it all.’

I rushed back onto the court and in about five seconds I realised something wasn’t right. The Diet Coke had absolutely zero effect on my grip. In fact, it seemed to make my shoes glide across the court’s surface. I slipped, slid, fell over and played the worst three minutes of my basketball career. My twenty-four points remained just that and I never got those High Top Reebok Pumps with the little orange inflator device. The whistle went at the end of the game and I walked off the court. Everyone was stunned.

‘What happened?’ says Phil.

‘I had no grip whatsoever.’

He looked down at the Diet Coke.

‘The stickyness must come from the sugar.’

The next summer Phil decided to swap games and play cricket and asked me to switch as well so we could still hang out. I knew absolutely nothing about cricket, not even the backyard variety. Other kids had a backyard to play in, mine was filled with Grandma’s vegies, two ducks and a golden pheasant.

‘Nah, I’ve never played before, I don’t even have a bat.’

‘Doesn’t matter. I’ve got heaps of spare gear I can lend you.’

‘Sweet.’

That was all the encouragement I needed. My biggest concern at the beginning of each sports season was whether I had the right equipment or not. I once considered playing tennis but only for as long as it took me to walk into Rebel Sport and see the prices of racquets.

At the time my Kind Lions were in tatters and my basketball singlet was so small it used to ride up my back every time I took a shot, so Phil’s offer came like a rescue chopper in the night. Before long we found ourselves in the Es together.

I soon realised that switching to cricket was the biggest mistake I’d ever made. I was totally hopeless at it. I was near the bottom of the batting order and I never got to bowl either, except on one very memorable occasion.

Around the middle of the season we were playing Cranbrook. They had this kid who was just impossible to get out. He was on about sixty runs or so, which was huge for a schoolboy Es team. Our whole squad had tried to bowl him out with no success. The coach thought he might as well chuck me in there.