The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (19 page)

‘Let’s give Anh a bowl. Where’s Anh?’

I was somewhere in the outfield, probably watching the bees hop from daisy to daisy.

‘Anh, come in for a bowl?’ It was half a command, half a question; the coach half hoping I would say no.

‘C’mon, have a go,’ Phil called out.

‘I don’t want to,’ I replied.

‘This guy’s smashing everyone, so it doesn’t matter. You can’t stuff up,’ Phil said.

It turned out I could. I couldn’t get the ball to stay on the pitch and bowled a whole bunch of wides. The kid batting was getting frustrated because the balls were nowhere near close enough for him to hit. I turned to Phil as if to say, ‘I told you so.’ It was so embarrassing that even the parents watching started chipping in. Some old guy from the sidelines yelled out ‘just try and get it to go straight,’ and I could hear the mothers laughing at me.

I grabbed the ball and bowled another shocking delivery. The kid was so frustrated he ran four feet wide of the wicket and took a wild swing at the ball, which flew straight up into the air to be caught by my wicket keeper. Out!

WHOO-HOO!!!

All my teammates ran over and mobbed me, we all knew it was a complete fluke, but it didn’t matter. I handed the ball back to my coach, thinking it was all over and had ended sweetly.

‘Ah, no, Anh. Because of all the wides, you’ve got four more balls.’

Oh man
, I thought to myself.

The next kid walked up to the crease. His coach had seen what had happened and he told this kid, ‘Don’t try and hit it if it’s nowhere near you. Just leave it.’

I came steaming in from my ‘long run’ and lobbed the ball in the new batsman’s direction… it was so wide it landed on the very edge of the pitch where the concrete joined the longer grass of the field. Hitting that uneven line made it bounce back in and the poor kid watched it roll slowly behind him and dribble into the stumps. He hadn’t even touched the ball and I had got him out.

WHOO-BLOODY-HOO!!!!

I was mobbed again.

‘Mate, you’re on a hat-trick,’ Phil ran over to tell me.

‘What’s that again?’ I asked. I had heard the term before but I didn’t really know what it meant. Phil explained that if I got the next batsman out on his first ball, that would make three wickets in three balls—a hat-trick. Our coach was beaming and he said, ‘In all my years at this school, I have never seen anyone do it.’

Now even I was excited.

Alas, the new batsman was onto me and he whacked my next three balls all over the shop. So much for the hat-trick. But at the end of the year my stats showed me bowling one over, taking two wickets and conceding less than twenty runs, so I had the best bowling average in the whole school. I never played cricket again, but the experience was such a valuable lesson in my life. Since then, whenever I’ve had to go into battle as the underdog, I know in my heart that an extraordinary result is a very possible outcome.

I hated homework. I hated it most when it took time away from helping Mum out with the sewing. It didn’t take me long to find a solution.

The train trip from school to home took around fifty minutes, so I’d hop on the train at the end of each day, find a corner seat and rip through my homework as fast as possible. Many teachers commented over the years how bad my handwriting was, but what they didn’t know was that I was mostly writing on the rattling 3.35 p.m. from Milsons Point to Yagoona. Most days I finished all my homework before Wiley Park station and I’d sit there and stare dreamily out the window, satisfied that I was completely done.

One semester, I had a couple of free periods after lunch on Thursdays, which meant I could go home at 1 p.m. These were great days because I got to go home early and the train was always empty. I could choose any seat I wanted, even flip three over and have six seats to myself, like a private sleeper compartment.

One afternoon I was alone in the carriage. The train stopped at Redfern and a group of three guys, about sixteen or seventeen years old, wearing baseball caps, baggy pants and the rest, got on. They came over and one of them sat next to me, the other two opposite.

‘Can I borrow a dollar?’ the skinniest one of them said. I didn’t think anything of it. I’d never been mugged before and I really thought this guy just wanted to borrow a buck. Maybe he’d return it next time I saw him, maybe not?

‘I don’t have any money,’ I said with a straight face.

‘I don’t believe you, show me your wallet.’

This is when I tweaked I was being rolled. My mind spun as I mentally scoured my wallet to see if I really didn’t have any money. Usually my wallet was completely empty, but every now and then I carried more money than any kid in the whole school. Other kid’s parents wrote cheques for their school fees that were mailed in like clockwork, but we were a bit different. Mum had never owned a chequebook, so every now and then she would look in her little green money sock and see whether she’d scraped together enough money to pay part of the two years’ worth of fees we owed. I panicked when I remembered that very morning Mum had handed me a bulging envelope.

Jesus, Mary and Michael Jackson. Of all the days… have I given the money to the bursar or is it still in my wallet?
I wasn’t sure. I thought to myself,
I need to buy some time here to think.

One of the guys, a huge chubby bloke who looked like his head had been squeezed into too small a face and his cheeks were busting to get out, was wearing an LA Lakers cap.

‘You like the Lakers too?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ he smiled back.

‘Shut up, will ya?’ the skinny guy said to chubby, then turned to me. ‘Give us your wallet,’ he demanded, this time more menacingly.

My mind was in total panic mode now. I
thought
I’d handed the envelope over to Mrs Watkins that morning, but the threat of a beating or worse made me uncertain.
Geez, I wish we weren’t on a train ’cos I reckon I can outrun these guys. Maybe fight the pricks. I might not win, but I’d win some time and someone might come and help me.

I slowly reached my hand in my pocket and pulled out my wallet. As the guy opened it up, I was looking just as closely as he was to see what was in there.

Ahhh.
Relief. No crumpled envelope full of tens and twenties or the occasional fiver that was bent at the edges—like notes get when they have been sitting in a Vietnamese woman’s sock for six months.

‘Shit, aye. You really got nothin’.’ Then the skinny guy pulled out my school train pass, the only thing that was worth anything and chucked me back my wallet.

‘Don’t take his train pass, dickhead,’ the chubby guy piped up. ‘You don’t look like a …’ he peered over the shoulder of his skinny mate and tried to read my name ‘. . . Anne Doo… Arhh Doh… you got a funny name, aye?’

The skinny guy flicked the train pass back at me and the three of them took off.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mum and Dad for giving me one of the hardest names to pronounce
. This was one of the few times in my life where it turned into an advantage.

I was incredibly relieved as it would have taken forever to apply for a new train pass and Mum would’ve had to have forked out a few hundred dollars for three months worth of Yagoona to Milsons Point, five days a week. I sat as still as I could and decided to get off the train at the next stop to catch another one, just in case skinny guy changed his mind and thought he could pass himself off as a kid called Anne Doo.

The next stop was Strathfield and we were only a few minutes away when I heard a huge commotion—swearing, shouting and the familiar crunching of punches landing into a face. I looked up and there were the three guys laying into another guy who was sitting alone. After hearing about all my dad’s heroics, I had always imagined that in a situation like that I would not hesitate to jump in and do the right thing. Instead I just sat there and watched, frozen in fear as the chubby baby-faced giant pounded his ham-like fist into the back of the guy’s head, flinging blood and saliva onto the train window.

Strathfield arrived like an oasis. The doors of the train opened and the three guys got out and ran off, carrying with them the loot, a pair of Reebok Pumps. Lucky for me, a couple of weeks earlier Phil had purchased that can of Diet Coke, otherwise I would’ve been the kid bashed for his shoes.

What does a fourteen-year-old kid do when he wants to make money? A paper run.

‘I’m going to help you out, Mum. I got a job!’

‘Doing what?’

‘Delivering pamphlets.’

‘What about homework?’

‘I’ll fit it in.’

‘Do it if you really want to. But if you’re doing it for money, then don’t.’

I told her I really wanted to. As always, she saw right through me.

‘No, I don’t want you to do it.’

I persisted, telling her it was part of my growing up, blah blah blah, until eventually, she agreed to let me try.

I had asked the woman at the pamphlet company to deliver the largest amount possible. It was to arrive on the Monday and had to be put in the letterboxes by the Wednesday. On Monday morning an enormous stack of boxes rocked up on our doorstep, and all day at school I was looking forward to coming home and starting my new job. The thought of earning cash was such a thrill.

By the time I got back from school a colossal afternoon storm broke open the sky and it bucketed down. I figured,
No problem, I’ll start tomorrow.
Tuesday afternoon and I was raring to go. I emptied my schoolbag of books and chocked it full of pamphlets. It weighed about forty kilograms. It wasn’t even a proper backpack with padding or support, just a sports bag design. I slung the straps over my shoulders and it was lumpy and unbalanced.

Four hours and around ten kilometres of walking later, I had delivered only about a quarter of the pamphlets. On Wednesday night I needed to complete the whole lot so I was off again, this time with Khoa on the other side of the road. We would do a loop around a block, covering both sides. We promised each other we would keep going till we finished.

Ten p.m. that night we slumped into bed absolutely exhausted. We still had about a third to go.

‘Mum, there’s too many.’

‘That’s all right, we’ll finish it tomorrow. It’ll be a day late but once you start a job you’ve got to finish it. I’ll help you.’

The next night Khoa, Mum, Tram and me hit the footpath, working like machines, this time with the car assisting us. (Mum locked the pamphlets in the boot so we didn’t have to walk back home to get more.) What seemed like an eternity later we finally finished. It was way past Tram’s bedtime and I realised that this job was just too much work—I’d never intended for my whole family to have to labour with me; the idea was for Mum to work less, not to have her trek around after dark for hours.

Mum put the others to bed and came over to me, sitting at a table madly trying to squeeze in my homework. She put her hand on my shoulder and I stopped writing and looked up into a mother’s loving face.

‘Thank you, Anh, but this is too much. You keep doing well at school, and I will take care of the money.’

It turned out Mum was better at taking care of the money than me. Despite all our effort, the pamphlets were delivered late and the woman didn’t even pay us.