The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (7 page)

He got pats on the back from his siblings: ‘What a find!’ In this wonderful, incredible shop where everything is already a bargain, Uncle Dung has found the table that is bargained again. It’s like cheap, minus rock bottom, divided by the square root of next to nothing.

Uncle Dung’s hands were shaking as he quickly sifted through the mountain of clothes and suddenly felt an unfamiliar softness. He pulled out a fur jacket. A beautiful luxurious thick down, made of some kind of animal that must have been rare and exotic.

‘Hien! Come over and try it on!’

Mum darted over and tried to squeeze into it. It didn’t fit.

‘I’ll buy it for my girlfriend,’ Uncle Dung said.

‘What are you talking about? You don’t have a girlfriend,’ Uncle Thanh responded.

‘If I have this I’ll be able to
get one!
’
He looked down at the reflection of light bouncing off the fur. ‘One day, I’m going to meet a girl and give her this.’

‘Put it back you idiot.’

‘No!’

‘What if she’s fat?’ Mum asked. But Uncle Dung had made up his mind.

‘Nah. I’m going to buy it. It’s only fifty cents.’

A couple of glorious hours of shopping later we left, and took with us an enormous loot. We felt so happy, even a little bit guilty, that we’d bought all these beautiful clothes for next to nothing. Uncle Dung was especially thrilled as one day he would meet a beautiful woman and he’d be ready for her, with his generous fifty-cent gift.

Uncle Huy was happy too. He found some men’s jeans that accommodated his generous backside, which was something he was enormously proud of. He felt it made him the best looking of all the brothers.

‘At least I have an arse,’ he’d say. ‘Look at your other uncles… they got no arse. Look at Uncle Dung—he’s got nothing. Just looks like a lower back with a hole in it.’

‘What a great country!’

Almost every day we discovered something else that made Mum and Dad shake their heads at how lucky we’d been. If you got sick, you could go to the doctor for free. If you couldn’t get a job straight away, the government gave you some money to help you get by.

‘You listen to us, kids. As you grow up, you make sure you do as much as you can to give back to this country that gave us a second chance.’

It hadn’t taken my father long to find a job in a factory, and then we were able to move out of the East Hills Migrant Hostel where we had been staying since we arrived in Sydney. Dad rented a two-bedroom flat in Marrickville. (Two bedrooms! Hah! What a great country!)

We lived above an old lady who watered the flowers in the block’s common grounds, and after Dad helped her carry a bag of potting mix one day, she became our friend. Miss Buk is what we called her (I suspect her name might have been Burke, lucky for her it wasn’t Furke), and she was instrumental in helping us find our feet in this exciting new world. Mum would knock on her door with a delicious plate of spring rolls, and offer them to Miss Buk along with a handful of forms which we needed help to fill in—Anh’s primary school application, Dad’s work forms and Mum’s hospital documents when she was pregnant again.

After my little sister was born Miss Buk gave Mum a tiny white dress made of lace for the christening. She had spent several months making it and it was the most beautiful thing my Mum had ever seen. Mum and Dad turned to each other again: ‘What a great country!’

It was 1982 when I started school at St Bridget’s Primary, a local Catholic school with an abundant mix of nationalities: Greeks, Lebanese, Vietnamese and a huge number of Portuguese, which Mum couldn’t pronounce—she’d always be saying things like ‘I like these Pork and Cheese people’.

One day I had homework that required us to write down what we wanted to be when we grew up. The prime minister at the time was Bob Hawke, and Mum and Dad were always talking about him, grateful that he was personally allowing us to stay in
his
country. Every now and then we would say prayers, and after praying to God and Jesus and Mary we would offer thanks to Bob Hawke. I didn’t even know what the word ‘primeminister’ meant, but I liked this guy whose job it was to allow people to live in his country and make them so happy.

One by one my teacher went around the classroom, and there were the usual firefighters, astronauts and all the Asian kids who had been told to say ‘doctor’. I didn’t once hear ‘hot bread shop owner’ or ‘cab driver’. When it came to my turn I banged the desk and shouted ‘primeminister’. It was a huge word for me and got me loads of kudos with the teacher.

I came home from school and over dinner told everyone about how I had declared today I was going to be primeminister. My mum’s brothers didn’t exactly laugh, but they ruffled my hair and said ‘Of course you are’, as if it was kind of cute—you know, like if a young Danny DeVito had said, ‘I’m going to captain the LA Lakers.’

My uncles’ reaction made my dad absolutely furious. I remember thinking,
He’s overreacting a little bit isn’t he?
But he was completely livid, laying into my uncles about their stupidity and how they were not to assume that his boy was as dumb as they were. As far as Dad was concerned, his kids ruled the world. At many a dinner party, my uncles would recall how on the boat trip Dad wouldn’t let anyone touch the steering wheel, other than the designated drivers, and even threatened to throw people overboard if they did. But for long stretches of the voyage, he would hold me up to the wheel and let his two-year-old kid have a go.

Dad’s enthusiastic, ‘You can do anything’ attitude, coupled with Mum’s caring, ‘Look after those less fortunate’ approach, sounded like incredible advice to a kid, but I had to figure out the subtleties and deeper meaning of their advice. On more than one occasion I took them way too literally and found myself in trouble.

Sammy was a huge kid; the biggest kid in the year by a long way. He was mostly a grinning and laughing boy who liked to muck around and I never had a problem with him at all. We knew each other and at times even played in the same group. The only problem with Sammy was that he had an awful temper and every now and then something inside him would just snap and he’d explode.

One day we were playing handball and Sammy hit the ball over the line on the full. ‘Out!’ we all shouted. He refused to budge and so little Joey Santos pushed him off the court. We watched as the big fella turned around, grabbed Joey by the collar, and shaped up to belt him. Before I knew what I was doing, my hand shot out and grabbed Sammy’s arm and suddenly I found myself in a fight with the biggest kid in Year 5. I can distinctly remember my mind saying to me,
Pull away. He’s enormous
.
But there was a louder voice in my head saying,
I can do anything. I can beat this guy
.

We traded punches for half a minute or so—
whack, whack, whack
—back and forth, and then it dawned on me that there was a searing pain in my cheek. I instinctively covered my head and stepped back, and the other boys rushed in to stop the fight. I got absolutely smashed. If it had gone on much longer he probably would’ve punched me all the way back to Vietnam. Sammy, of course, was completely unscathed.

I couldn’t believe I’d lost. My dad’s ‘You can do anything’ had settled in my little brain to such a degree that I was totally convinced I was going to win. Instead, my first fight left me with a split lip, a bruised jaw and a battered self-belief. I went home that afternoon and lied: ‘I ran into a guy when we were playing bullrush.’ That night, as Mum was tucking me into bed, she inspected my cuts.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘No,’ I said. She kissed me on the forehead.

‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘go up to the boy and make peace with him.’

The next day I went up to Sammy and was surprised when he threw a friendly smile at me. I smiled back and my lip split again. Over the coming months the strangest thing happened—Big Sammy and I became best friends.

One day we were the two last kids to get picked up from the front of school and I saw Sammy’s father for the first time. Even just in the way his dad grabbed Sammy’s bag, there was this pent-up aggression ready to go off. As they got to their old Kingswood in the car park, I heard a few loud words and then his dad started laying into him. Not like a measured smack on the bottom to reprimand a child, Sammy’s dad was hitting him like an angry bar fighter trying to hurt a smaller opponent. Sammy wailed as he was almost thrown into the backseat of the car, and I quickly looked away as the car sped past, terrified his dad might’ve seen me witnessing something I should not have.

The next day I quietly went up to Sammy and asked him about footy cards, expecting him to talk to me about what had happened, but he never offered an explanation. It was never mentioned and I suspect it might not have been that rare an occurrence.

Soon after my family moved away from Marrickville and we had to say goodbye to Miss Buk. She gave us all hugs that lasted a little bit too long and were a little bit too tight, and then we all piled into our station wagon. As we pulled away she waved to us with one hand, the other trying to stop tears rolling down her face. Mum started sniffling as well.

‘Such ungrateful children!’ Mum was doing a great job of masking her sadness with anger, cursing Miss Buk’s offspring for coming to see her so infrequently. In the years we lived in Marrickville, we only saw Miss Buk’s children visit her maybe two or three times. Mum was desperately missing her own mother, who was a long way away in Vietnam, and couldn’t comprehend why this lovely old lady’s family, who only lived on the other side of Sydney, could let their mother be so sad and lonely.