The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (25 page)

A week later, a guy came along and asked, ‘What native tribe are you from?’ This time I thought,
He wants a native, I’ll give him a native.

I had heard about an Indian tribe called the Chippewa, so I told him proudly, ‘Actually, my grandfather’s Chippewa.’ He had already bought a tomahawk, and he was happy. But it made his day that he had bought it from a genuine Chippewa, via Vietnam.

After a while it became obvious that Rachel and I didn’t actually have that much in common. We would talk about a few superficial things and then run out of things to say. It didn’t matter how good she looked on that bike, we were at the beginning of the end of our relationship. In the way that it does when things start to break down, it actually started to annoy me that she was so nice and complimentary all the time.

‘You’re a really smart guy,’ she would keep saying. Well, everyone was good with their brain at university, that’s how we got there. But Rachel was from a different world. I would say something simple, like, ‘The sun was a beautiful colour when it set today.’

‘Wow, you’re so smart’, she’d say.

One day I bought her a nice bracelet.

‘Wow, this is so nice Anh… it must’ve been expensive.’

‘Yeah it was. I had to sell a kidney.’

‘Oh my god, did it hurt?’

I never forgot, however, that Rachel was always kind to me, that she’d put her faith in me when we started up the business, virtually handing me all her savings.

‘You take care of it, Anh. You’re the one with the business brain.’

When we finally broke up I felt indebted and paid her back all the profits we had amassed to date. She made triple her money back.

I called up Suzie one day and after some small talk I asked, ‘You still with your boyfriend?’

‘Yep. You still with your girlfriend?’ I wasn’t, but Suzie had just said ‘yes’ so I wasn’t going to be outdone.

‘Yeah, still with Rachel. Going strong, actually. She’s great… really clever girl.’

The timing was off yet again; it was time to move on.

During my studying art phase I got into the whole alternative lifestyle… I began not only creating art on canvas but wearing things to decorate myself. I had hair that went all the way down to my lower back, the flannelette shirts gave way to seventies purple paisley ones I picked up from St Vinnies, and the thongs were thrown out to be replaced by pointy Bob Dylan–style boots. Before you knew it I had become a fully-fledged Vietnamese hippy.

I moved to Leura in the Blue Mountains, lived with two hippie girls and went with them to alternative music and folk festivals. I was trying to find out who I was, and tried all sorts of creative outlets. I played guitar, wrote a few songs, as well as studying law, and painting.

One hot December I headed off to a festival called Confest in a little town called Tocumwal, on the border of New South Wales and Victoria. It was an annual event that was described as Australia’s largest outdoor alternative lifestyle festival. It was hilarious; eight hundred hairy, smelly, tie-dyed hippies turning a riverside camping ground into a commune.

I was running fire-twirling classes. I’d learned how to fire twirl at the Bondi markets when I was selling the American Indian artefacts. There was a guy at a store next to us flogging funny hats, juggling batons, and five-foot-long sticks which had a Kevlar wick on each end… ‘fire sticks’. In the downtime he taught me how to twirl these and I picked it up quickly.

A girl walked past while I was running my class and the first thing that caught my eye was a brilliant flash of colour. She had bright strawberry blonde hair that went all the way down past her waist. There must’ve been something about this fire spinning, Dylan-boot wearing, Asian Tonto that was attractive, because we exchanged phone numbers and soon we started dating.

Amanda was an art student who drew and painted and wrote lots of love letters. We would sit on the beach for hours, just hanging out, chatting and daydreaming away. She was also a vegan and she wanted me to turn vegan too. At first I didn’t even know what it meant.

‘Is that like vegetarian?’

‘Yeah, but a bit different. Vegetarians eat cheese and eggs and drink milk, but I don’t eat any animal products at all.’

‘Okay then, if you feel that strongly about it, from today onwards I too shall be vegan!’

We stopped at the service station and I came back with an Aeroplane Jelly.

‘You can’t eat that Anh.’

‘Why not?’

‘’Cos jelly’s made from animal hooves.’

‘Really? No way. I had no idea.’ The Aeroplane Jelly went straight in the bin.

‘How about chocolates then?’

‘Nup. Got milk.’

‘How about custard?’

‘Got eggs.’

‘How ’bout oysters?’

‘Of course not, Anh!’

‘C’mon, Amanda. I can understand that you love animals and you don’t want them killed, but horses’ hooves are just like our fingernails—doesn’t hurt at all when you cut them off!’ I drifted off for a second with this weird theme song in my head:

I like fingernail jelly.

Fingernail jelly for me.

I like it for dinner, I like it for
 . . . 

‘Anh, I’m serious.’

‘Sure, I’ll do it.’

I liked making an effort with girlfriends, it was my father’s streak. But if we ever went to a fancy restaurant, Amanda would sit down, question everything on the menu and eliminate every single dish! So there we’d be, dressed up nice, bottle of wine, views of the Opera House, and for dinner the waiter brings over… 

‘Steamed vegetables for madam and for sir.’

I felt like I should have booked a table for two at the local Fruitworld. After all, in my wallet I did still have that shop- a-docket.

I didn’t realise what an impact the vegan lifestyle would have on me. For a start, I dropped from about eighty kilograms down to sixty-eight. At the time I was playing rugby league, and I was the captain of my team and was supposed to set an example on the field. But being vegan meant my example was to get absolutely hammered every time I went in to make a tackle. I thought my body was still the same, and so I would go in thinking I was still eighty kilos, but I would just bounce off the runners like a weedy ten-year-old kid. I once broke my elbow in a tackle because I didn’t carry the weight to support my enthusiasm.

Amanda also had one other problem that wasn’t technically a relationship breaker, but definitely something that was a little odd. She couldn’t say ‘Vietnamese’. She would say Viet-man-nese, over and over again.

‘It’s not that hard,’ I told her. ‘Sound it out: Viet-na-mese.’

‘VIET—MAN—NESE.’

‘Viet—man—nese? What the hell is that? Like some refugee superhero or something. I am Viet–Man! I will fly over to your house and save your dinner with the softest hot bread rolls.’ I could have let it go if she’d actually had a speech impediment. But she didn’t—she spoke normally—and somehow her subconscious had decided that the one word she would have trouble with, she would meet a guy from that country and have to say that word often. It’s like being one of those people who say their Rs as Ws and work as a Weal Estate Bwoker.

I said goodbye to Amanda after six months and went straight out for a bacon and egg breakfast, had Steak Diane for lunch and spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. Best eating day of my life.

Most guys turn to their male friends for advice about women; my go-to guy was a girl—Suzie. When Amanda was driving me crazy with her mispronunciation, I’d go home and call Suzie.

‘As a friend,’ I said to her, ‘can you just say Vietnamese for me?’

‘Vietnamese? Why?’

‘No reason. See you at uni tomorrow.’

She even helped out with my car on occasion. The old canary yellow Corona I’d bought after the bus hit me lived down to its $250 price tag. It was unreliable. It could lurch around the city at low speed but you couldn’t trust it to go long distances. And it was easy to break into.

The car was useful, however, to get me around the various weekend markets in Sydney. Although Rachel and I had broken up, I was still running the business, selling crystals, Indian artefacts, candles and the like. One Saturday, I had a stall outside Hornsby Westfield in Sydney’s north, and at the end of the day I had $5000 worth of goods that needed to be put away somewhere safe. The problem was that I was going to a party on the Hawkesbury River with my current girlfriend, and the Corona wasn’t reliable enough to drive all the way, nor was it safe enough to leave parked on a street chock-full of jewellery. We decided to catch a train, which meant I needed to find somewhere secure to leave the car.

In those days forward planning wasn’t really part of my life. The only person I knew who lived near Hornsby railway station was Suzie, whose family lived on a large block in the affluent suburb of Wahroonga. A few hours before the train was scheduled to leave, I rang her.

‘It’s Anh. Can I leave my car in your big driveway?’

‘Sure.’

Suzie’s family knew me pretty well. They enjoyed seeing my different phases and fads. I parked in the middle of her family’s very long driveway and was greeted at the door by her brother.

‘Anh’s at the door,’ he said, then whispered inside to the family, ‘Come and see. Quick.’

First they were wondering,
What five-dollar rust bucket is he driving now?
They were used to my bad cars over the years. I picked Suzie up in them. One of the first times we hung out together, I drove up in a car whose bumper bar fell off as it approached the house. Nothing says ‘potential good boyfriend for daughter’ like, ‘Hi, Mrs Fletcher. Nice to meet you. Can I borrow a coathanger?’