The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (22 page)

I got along with the interviewer really well. We were talking about all the sports I played—rugby and basketball and a whole bunch of other things—and I was on a roll. Finally the interviewer asked me if I had any health issues.

‘No, well, not unless you count asthma.’

‘You have asthma?’

‘Yeah, why?’ I said, slightly concerned by his tone of voice.

‘I’m sorry, Anh, we can’t take you if you have asthma.’

Shit, quick… think of a way out:
‘Did I say I have asthma? I meant I’m from Alaska.’ No, that won’t work
. I racked my brain for a back-pedal but found nothing.

‘Why don’t you take people who have asthma?’

‘Because in a situation involving gas masks, you would be unable to use your puffer and you’d put yourself and your unit at risk of harm.’

You’re kidding? My Uncle Thanh crawled through the Vietnam jungle with one lung, and you’re going to disqualify me for the occasional use of Ventolin?

‘Thank you, sir. Thanks for your time,’ I muttered.

I caught the train back home to Yagoona, conceding defeat. Mum was there when I walked in.

‘You didn’t get in, did you?’

‘Get into what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I really didn’t know how the hell she found out.

‘Khoa told me all about it. He asked me if he can have your fish.’

‘Nah, I didn’t get in.’

She comes over and pats me on the back of the head.

‘War’s taken too many men away from me.’

As the Year 12 exams loomed it was time to pick a course to study after school, and I really had no idea what I wanted to be. I was certain of one thing, though, it had to pay lots of money. One of my teachers somehow worked out my personal circumstances and made a suggestion.

‘Anh, you should apply for special consideration. What you’re going through at the moment is pretty intense.’ In the previous couple of years he’d noticed that my home address had changed six times, our school fees were behind by four or five semesters, and I was falling asleep in class after staying up late helping Mum sew garments.

‘Why don’t you apply? If you do, you’ll get extra marks to get into university and do a degree.’

‘No thanks, sir. I’m okay.’

And that was the end of that. I wasn’t interested.

I was actually furious at him. I realised that maybe some of the teachers knew of my situation, and I was paranoid that it would get out. ‘Anh is poor.’ ‘Poor Anh, his mum doesn’t have any money.’ ‘Don’t you feel so sorry for the poor refugee?’ I cringed as I imagined them talking about me. I hated being on the receiving end of sympathy. I remember all through school being determined to prove that I could survive without any outside help.

As a kid there was a period when one particular landlord loved turning up to collect the late rent himself. Many times Mum was at work and I just got sick of telling this guy we’d pay him soon, knowing full well that we weren’t going to be able to. So Khoa, Tram and I would hide whenever he showed up and pretended there was no one home. After a while he figured out that there were people inside so he’d walk around the house and look into the windows to try and catch us. It was all strangely terrifying—we knew this guy was just after rent, but the act of hiding from someone in and of itself has the power to put you in a state of fear.

I remember on more than one occasion saying to myself,
I’m so sick of this. As soon as I’m old enough I’m going to earn loads of money and buy Mum the biggest freakin’ house in the suburb and we’ll all live there together and it will be our house and the whole world can go and get stuffed.

There seems to be a lie perpetuated at schools, where you are told you have two options if you want to make loads of money: become a doctor, or become a lawyer. No one talks about the rich real estate investor, the wealthy builder or even the well-to-do plumber. Many a time a plumber has turned up to my house, spent thirty minutes unclogging a drain, and handed over a bill for $300 without batting an eyelid. Not a bad hourly rate. But at the end of school, the money choice was doctor or lawyer.

I’ve always hated going to the doctor, especially the ones who have a lot of Asian clients. The waiting room always smells like menthol. Every time an Asian person gets sick, they first try the cure-all Tiger Balm. Got a headache? Tiger Balm on the forehead. Got a sore wisdom tooth? Tiger balm on the jaw. Got haemorrhoids? . . . It’s a bit like the dad in the film
My Big Fat Greek Weddin
g, who sprays Windex on every ailment. Most people watched that film and laughed at the dad, but my mum watched it and then went out and bought a bottle of Windex for her sore elbow.

I really had one option: become a lawyer. I enrolled in law at the University of Technology in Sydney, and on the very first day I walked in and thought to myself,
This sucks
. There was only one good thing about uni as far as I was concerned.

It was the very first class, on the very first morning of university. We were a bunch of kids just out of high school, all of us nervous and excited and dressed really badly because for many of us it was the first time we had chosen what to wear rather than just slapping on a uniform. I looked around the classroom and caught sight of a tallish blonde girl.

Wow, she’s pretty
, I thought to myself.

Then the girl turned my way and I quickly looked down at my watch, pretending to be fascinated with the time, taking way too long to see that it was 10.05 a.m. and fifteen seconds… sixteen seconds… seventeen seconds. I had just finished six years at an all-boys school and my how-to-be-super-smooth-around-girls skills were a little bit rusty. In fact they were non-existent.

Once I had cleverly distracted her by exploring every nook and cranny of my Casio (and totally convinced myself that she must be facing away by now) I turned to sneak another look. She was chatting to a girl, and then she turned in my direction again and smiled. I don’t really believe in love at first sight, but if it does exist then I had just been made a victim. I was smitten.

This girl’s smile lit up the room. She seemed to emanate a warmth which captivated me. That day, at 10.06 a.m. and eleven seconds precisely, was when time stood still for Anh Do.

Over the next few months I started forming friendships with my classmates and one of my friends was the light-up-the-room-with-a-smile Suzie. After about six months, Suzie and I had become best friends, and she would ring me up after classes and we would talk for three or four hours. I used to heavily favour my left ear for phone conversations, but thanks to Suzie my ears became ambidextrous. After a couple of hours on the left side, my ear was so sore, I learned to switch over to my right ear and listened just as well.

I thought,
Four hours on the phone! Come on, she must like me a little bit.
So I plucked up the courage and one day told her how I felt.

‘Suzie… you know how, umm… you and me and… we evidently
[Evidently? Who says ‘evidently’? Since when is evidently a word in the ‘Smooth Dude Dictionary? I don’t even really know what the word means!
] . . . umm… will you want to go date with me?’

In my nervousness, I’d turned into a Vietnamee English student struggling to talk all proper. Suzie gave me a long hug, I smelled her perfume and my heart sang. I was thinking to myself,
This Vietnamese guy going to on a date!

‘I really like you, Anh,’ she said. ‘But kind of more like a friend.’

My heart sank. I somehow managed to mumble, ‘No worries, of course, I kind of see you like a friend too, I just thought, you know… ahh, is that my train I hear?’

My train?
We were at Broadway, about a kilometre from Central Station. I hobbled off in a rush, trying to go as fast as I could without running, like an Olympic walker about to get disqualified.

I look back on it now, and if I’m honest there were quite a few reasons why she wouldn’t have been interested in me. But I’ll list the three that stand out: Most days I wore a flannelette shirt, Target trackie dacks, and sported a gloriously bad mullet. Who was I kidding? I looked like a Vietnamese Billy Ray Cyrus.

My instincts kept telling me that law wasn’t for me. The ultra-competitive nature of the course was especially disheartening, and seemed to be missing the point of championing right over wrong. For example, there were times when we got assignments that required us to read, say, twenty pages of volume six of the
Law Journal
. The library would have one copy in the reference section, so everyone would have to photocopy the twenty pages and put the book back. I’d go down to the library and find nothing but a big gap between volumes five and seven. Volume six would be missing. This happened again and again and again, and I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. Then a librarian mate told me there were one or two selfish students who would photocopy the required pages for themselves and then hide the volume somewhere obscure, like between the books on the mating habits of grasshoppers and those on the buttock tattoos of male Eastern Samoans. Good luck to the rest of us finding it.

I’d often sit in lectures and fantasise what I would do if I ever caught one of these lowlifes; with one punch I’d make their number six tooth go missing, leaving a big gap between teeth five and seven. I’d then wrap tooth six in some grass, hop over and wedge it between the buttock tattoos of a large male Eastern Samoan. Good luck to them finding it.

Law was perfect for some but not for me, I guess, so I enrolled in a visual arts course at Meadowbank TAFE. And I loved it.

People often asked me why I studied law and art at the same time. ‘Why not?’ was my answer. If there was a rule saying you couldn’t study full time at TAFE and uni simultaneously, I didn’t know about it. I’ve always found that if you apply yourself at the right time with the right intensity, you can accomplish just about anything. So many times in my life I think my naivety about what you supposedly
could
and
couldn’t
do helped me make big leaps that others might think were over the top.

Deep down inside I knew I didn’t want to be a lawyer, but I was keen to finish the degree because of its value in getting me a job, any sort of job. I soon figured out that you could do the degree without actually being there for most of it. In lectures I’d look around and see that everyone was just tuned out, daydreaming.
They may as well not be here at all
, I thought.
Well, I may as well not be here as well
. So I just attended the key lectures—namely, those where they tell you what’s going to be in the exam—and then nailed those topics at home in half the time it took a rambling professor to get through his often irrelevant presentation on chapter 47, subsection 12, on the importance of understanding the use of semi-colons in contract law.