The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (43 page)

For my mother, this trip was nothing short of a dream come true. From the moment we arrived, her face lit up. She was just so happy. This trip was a walking, living vindication of all of Mum’s effort. She had sweated and struggled and worked herself to the bone to get her children through those long, difficult years and now, for the first time, we were doing something she had dreamed about, something that her imagination had put on hold for years.

As soon as we landed and drove from the airport to the hotel, I started experiencing this weird déjà vu.

This has happened before. But how can this be?
I asked myself. I had left Vietnam when I was two. But I couldn’t deny that the smells were familiar and they triggered strong feelings and sensations. Vietnam is an assault on the senses. Constant noise, smells, people everywhere, so much traffic that it’s hard to cross the road.

After checking into our hotel, we began walking around as a family. I had automatically assumed we would blend in. Instead, we stuck out a mile. Despite the fact that we spoke the language, the locals could tell we were tourists. It might have been our jeans, Blundstones and NRL footy jumpers.

I wanted to get around like a local, so we went to a second-hand clothing market near our hotel and I bought a range of used clothes. It was ironic, here I was in Vietnam, a Third World country where we were considered wealthy, and still I went looking for my designer label of choice, Le Vincent de Paul.

Everywhere we went we saw deep poverty and there were occasionally beggars. Every one of them who came up to Mum, she would give them around the equivalent of five Australian dollars and they would thank her as if she just won them
Deal or No Deal
. Throughout the trip she gave away loads of money. Being reacquainted with the country of her birth gave her a fresh perspective on what she had created for herself, and us.

‘You know, we’ve got nothing to worry about in Australia. Nothing to worry about at all.’

At one point we met a teenage boy who was selling postcards at a temple. He had an enormous grin and my mum said to us, ‘This is Anh’s skinnier twin.’ In that moment I had a flash of realisation. That could’ve been me. Indeed, if my family hadn’t embarked on that trip years ago, I could’ve easily ended up selling trinkets at a temple for fifty cents a piece.

We visited the Mekong Delta and Mum announced to us with great fondness, ‘This is very close to where we left Vietnam on our boat.’ My brother was fascinated, took out his camera and shot some photos, but then on the way back we encountered some problems.

We were on tour in a mini-bus, which had about twenty people on board—Americans (including Vietnamese Americans), Danes and Brits. At one point we were on a quiet country road that was so severely flooded we couldn’t cross it. The bus driver was adamant.

‘I can’t take the risk of driving you across.’

What the hell do we do?
We couldn’t go back, so our options were either to go forward or stay in the bus overnight and take our chances with the big monsoons looming in the distance. Every single passenger wanted us to go forward, but the poor little driver didn’t want to be responsible for twenty tourists going missing in the Mekong River. For some reason, everyone on board turned to me.

‘Anh, you get up and drive and get us across,’ one old man said.

But I’m only twenty-two. What about all these grown-ups?
We’d been together for a week, chatted and gotten to know each other, and for some reason these people had made up their mind: Anh will drive us across.

‘C’mon, Anh, we don’t want to spend the night here! Drive us across!’ A woman called out. So Mum turned to me.

‘Anh, you want to do this?’

I whispered in Mum’s ear, ‘I’ve never driven a bus before.’

I walked outside with a couple of men to look at the depth of the water. It seemed to be getting deeper and deeper very quickly. Every ten minutes or so a huge truck with big tyres got across easily, but watching how high the water went on these big trucks made me feel that maybe our driver was right, the water was too deep for our mini-bus to cross safely. I came up with another idea. Why not get towed across?

I went back into the bus and asked if everyone would agree to pitch in five US dollars per head, and I would offer the hundred dollars to a passing truck driver to tow us across.

‘Here’s a hundred bucks now, Anh!’ an American guy yelled, waving some bills. ‘Just get us the heck outta here! We don’t want to spend the night in this bus!’

I flagged down the first truck that I thought was big enough, offered the driver the hundred and, after fifteen minutes of rigging and double rigging with chains and bolts and ropes, we were ready to be towed.

Slowly but surely we progressed through the water, all of us watching nervously out the window, realising that there would be no Westpac rescue choppers or anything that fancy if we were to be swept away. With the enormous truck pulling us across, we soon found ourselves on the other side of the flooded road.

Whoo-hooo!

There was a huge cheer from everyone as we made it safely across. This put the whole bus in the most delightful mood. Everyone just started chatting away excitedly, buoyed by a glorious sense of relief. That’s when I overheard Mum talking to another Vietnamese woman.

‘He’s clever for a young man isn’t he?’ said the woman.

‘Yes, he is very good at these things, just like his father,’ Mum replied.

It was the first time in a long time that I’d heard Mum talk about Dad in a positive light. Maybe Vietnam was affecting her.

A few years ago my mum stopped working and these days she spends her time helping to look after my three kids and my sister’s daughter, and she is also studying English. She tells me almost daily, ‘I am in heaven, Anh.’

Mum had always wanted to study English but never had the time, having to work multiple jobs to feed three kids. For years she watched me on TV and could hear the audience laughing, but she never understood any of my jokes. Until recently she had never been to see me do stand-up comedy.

A couple of years ago, about six months after
Dancing with the Stars
finished, Mum came and saw me at the Opera House. She had never been inside the Opera House before and as she walked through the doors she saw big posters of her little boy. I did my show, which includes a segment about my mum and how amazing she is, and then at the end of it told the crowd that she was in the audience. The sell-out crowd got to their feet in unison to give my mum a standing ovation.

I looked down at her and she was crying. I couldn’t hold it either, and cried all over the Opera House microphone.

Mum has gone from never seeing her son on stage, to becoming a performer herself in a very short amount of time. As she tells people, ‘Last year, I crack the big time,’ on the corporate speaking circuit.

I had received a call from a big company that had traditionally held an annual food and wine night for their staff and decided they wanted to add comedy into the mix. The events organiser knew I spoke about my mum’s cooking in my stand-up routine.

‘Is your mother really a good cook?’ she asked.

‘The best. She never stops. When I was a kid I thought my name was “Taste this!’’’

‘Excellent,’ the lady said. ‘Can she come down with you and do some cooking during the show?’

‘I’ll just double-check her schedule to see if she’s free.’ I paused, then did that
Hmm… hmm… hmm
 . . . noise you do when you’re pretending to look at someone’s diary.

‘She is available that night.’

Next they wanted to know if Mum did any public speaking.

‘She does truckloads,’ I lied.

I went home and told Mum, ‘I can book you for some speaking. Are you up for it?’

‘Yes. Will I get paid?’

‘How much do you want?’

‘Can you get me $50?’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

I went back to the company and told them she was happy to do it.

‘How much does she charge?’ they asked. I kept a totally straight face.

‘Two thousand a show.’ The events organiser didn’t even blink.

‘Fine, no problem. We want two shows.’ I raced home.

‘Mum, they’ve booked you for two shows!’ Mum was thrilled. ‘But I didn’t get you the $50.’

‘Oh, well, that’s okay. It’ll still be fun to do it with you.’

‘Mum, I got you two thousand. Per night. That’s four grand.’ She squealed with excitement.

‘I love this speaking!’

The company was generous. They flew us down to Adelaide, then Melbourne, put us up in five-star hotels—a room each. We were chauffeur-driven and taken to fancy restaurants.

‘Anh, do we have to pay for this meal?’

‘Mum, you don’t have to pay for anything.’

She smiled at a waitress, ‘Actually, I will have dessert, please.’ She then turned to me. ‘I love this speaking!’ She was having the time of her life.

When we were in Adelaide, Mum visited her two brothers, Uncle Huy, the preist, and Uncle Dai, who owns a bakery. The show was on a Thursday night, and we were due to fly back to Sydney on the Friday. On the Saturday, my third son, Leon, was due to have his christening.

As soon as we stepped into my uncle’s bakery Mum stopped still in the middle of a sentence.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said. I could see the cogs start turning in her mind. ‘I’m going to get three hundred meat pasties from your uncle’s bakery and we’ll take them back for the christening. He’ll do it for me at the family rate,’ she beamed.

‘Mum, how are we going to lug three hundred pasties back to Sydney?’ But she waved away my doubts.

‘They’ll be fresh, they’ll be perfect.’ There was no stopping her.

‘Alrighty then, Mum, whatever you want to do.’

She went out the back to see my uncle and returned with two huge boxes of pasties.