The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (36 page)

Khoa still loves to dress up. He makes a great skinny Vietnamese Santa.

The wonderful Sister Trish Franklin with her gorgeous children. The Loreto Vietnam Australia Program looks after severely poor and disabled kids in Vietnam. (Courtesy of Sister Trish Franklin)

Suzie and I at the Australian Book Industry Awards night. (Picture: Andrew Henshaw)

Making a speech at the Australian Book Industry Awards night. (Picture: Andrew Henshaw)

Life was good. I was travelling around Australia doing stand-up and TV spots and Suzie wasn’t working so she came with me; it was like we were being paid to go on one big long holiday, except Anh had to go on stage and be funny for an hour or so every night. We had a wonderful time and met the friendliest people from all corners of Australia, from big cities to little country towns. Which is why the couple of times we ran into trouble really surprised us.

At one club a typical bouncer stood at the door, sporting a white shirt and black bowtie. I started filling in the temporary membership form everyone has to complete when they entered a club. The security guy drawled, slow and flat, ‘No, mate, we don’t really like your types in here.’

‘No worries, mate, I’m the comedian. I’m just working,’ I replied.

‘Very funny, mate.’ He didn’t believe me and stepped right up close to my face to make his point. ‘Piss off.’

Even though the guy was a metre wide with a neck the size of a tree trunk, a younger, angrier, teenage Anh might’ve taken a swing at him just for the principle of it. But the past year, having found my dad and got married, had mellowed me. I was still annoyed though.

‘Mate,’ I said, ‘you go in and tell the manager that Anh Do, the comedian, is here. Tell him to come out and get me. And if he doesn’t come out in five minutes, I’m going home. But you’ll still have to pay me, mate, because it’s in the contract. So go get him now, or you won’t have a comedian.’

He turned around slowly and dawdled over to the manager, who came back, looked me up and down and took me in. There was no apology or admission of a mix up.

I did the show and everything was fine. On the way out, though, Suzie wanted to have a word about the issue with someone in charge. I told her not to worry about it—it wasn’t worth it. But Suzie was incensed. Being blonde and blue eyed, she’d never really experienced this sort of overt racism before. I guess I was more used to it, even though it was a very rare occurrence. When my friend Dave advised me as a young comedian to take on all gigs, and not shy away from the hard ones, I took it on board. I was a specialist with the toughest, roughest crowds around—bikies, drunken yobbos and the like—I sometimes got heckled racially even before I got to the microphone. For me it was all part of the training. Suzie, on the other hand, was shocked and outraged.

‘Go on, Anh, deck him.’

‘Honey, he’s enormous.’

‘I’ve seen you belt bigger guys than him in footy games.’

‘Thanks, sweetheart, but look, we’ve got the cash. Let’s just go and have a nice dinner.’

‘Well he’s lucky, because you would’ve smashed him.’ And she pecked me on the cheek.

In truth the guy would’ve left my head looking like Vietnamese Pizza, but I loved my wife for making me feel like I could’ve beaten the guy if I’d chosen to. Suzie understands me better than anyone else in the world. She knew the bouncer’s opinions didn’t matter to me one bit, but what
she
thought about me meant everything. She had just given me the opportunity to ‘let the prick off’.

Not long after that incident I encountered the hardest gig of my life. There are certain comedy shows a Vietnamese comic should just flat out never be booked for. Ever.

I was on the wings waiting to go on stage. There were about two hundred old drunk guys in the crowd.
No problem.
Old drunk guys are a fantastic audience, they laugh at just about anything.
This is going to be easy.
Then the MC got going.

‘Ahem, welcome to tonight’s show everyone. But tonight, before we start, I’d like to ask everyone to bow their heads and observe a minute’s silence for all our fallen brothers in World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam.’

Bloody hell
!
Who organised this gig?

So there were two hundred guys sitting quietly remembering fallen comrades who were shot by Asian men, and I’m waiting to go on to do thirty minutes of funny stuff. The MC concluded the minute’s silence and continued.

‘Okay, everyone, we’re going to cheer up now and have a laugh. Please welcome our comedian …’ He looked down at the piece of paper he was holding and looked at my funny, difficult-to-pronounce name. He squinted at it, then turned to the side of the stage and saw me.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he said out loud.

He was just as shocked as I was. He then looked up and said with a perfectly straight face, ‘Please put your hands together for our comedian… Duncan O’Reilly.’

He hobbled off and had a chuckle to himself. Two hundred old guys started applauding… until they saw me walk out.

Funny looking O’Reilly
! They must have been thinking. The applause quickly died away.

I looked out and the tension in the air was so thick, you could have cut it with a knife. Someone at the back coughed, then we were back to a deafening silence. I broke the silence with my first joke, my opener, a killer… nothing. Second joke… still nothing. I did a full five minutes to complete silence, except for one noise. A gentleman sitting on a table to my right had one of those red bulbous golf ball noses that some old men get, which was made even redder by the dozen or so beers he’d had. He held out his right middle and index fingers in the shape of a gun, and he shot imaginary bullets at me.

Pap!

Pap!

Pap pap pap!

I tried to ignore him, just moved on to my next joke as quickly as possible.

Pap pap pap! . . . Pap!

I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t noticed, and so I said with a nervous smile, ‘Sir, you’ve probably killed a few guys who look like me.’

Everyone looked on, waiting for his response. It was one word.

‘Fourteen.’

He’d killed fourteen Vietnamese in the war.

What do I do now?
To be fair just before I went on stage the club events guy realised how absurd the situation was and said to me, ‘Mate, we’ve got the wrong comedian for the wrong night. Not your fault so just do five minutes. If it’s not going well, just hop off, we’ll still pay you the cash.’

Quitting seemed a very attractive option at this point in time, but do I just walk off and call it a night before things get worse, or should I try one last thing? Dave used to say the hard gigs were an opportunity to test your mettle: ‘Learn from them Anh, treat them like a rare gift.’

I decided to bring forward all the material that would prove to them I was just an Aussie kid. So I did a number of jokes about bull terriers and Datsuns and housing commission estates, and slowly I was getting a few chuckles. Then I moved on to footy jokes, farming jokes and kiwi jokes. Slowly, slowly, I won them over. The old guys finally realised that if they closed their eyes, this Vietnamese kid was actually just an Aussie comedian up there talking about his working-class childhood.

It wasn’t the best gig of my life, but it was one of the greatest experiences of my career. After the show an old guy came up to me, slapped me on the back and said, ‘Geez, you’re funny for a slope.’ I could tell from his demeanour that he meant it as a compliment, so I took it as one.

‘I’ll buy you a beer, son,’ he added. So there I was having a drink with this guy, Paul, and three other guys came over and joined us. They started telling me war stories about their Vietnamese soldier mates, people like my uncles. It was wonderful to hear my dad and uncles’ stories confirmed by Aussie diggers.

I told them that one of my uncles was kind of like a sapper, he’d done some clearing of landmines during the war.

‘Anh!’ Paul piped up excitedly. ‘The first line of Jimmy Barnes’ song ‘Khe Sanh’ is “I left my heart to the sapper’s round Khe Sanh”.’

What an amazing realisation. All these years, Barnesy had been singing about my uncle and I didn’t even know because no one could understand Barnesy!

Then Eric, the funniest of the old guys, said, ‘Isn’t that interesting, Anh, that one of Australia’s favourite songs is about a little Vietnamese town called Khe Sanh. If you ever want to be a rock star, go back to Vietnam and bring out a song called ‘Albury Wodonga’!’