We Are Here (11 page)

On the day we were to leave, I came down with diarrhoea. My mother didn’t dare take me to the clinic or tell anyone, for fear we wouldn’t be allowed on the plane. She wiped me clean as best she could and wrapped me tightly in the old sarong. Even though I was heavy with excrement I didn’t cry. Together with four other Vietnamese refugee families, we boarded the Qantas plane. There were no other Asians aboard.

This was my family’s first plane ride and it was a one-way trip to an unknown land. We took off, and my parents watched as the land beneath us shrank smaller and smaller like a fading
winter shadow. We flew high above lost stories in the Killing Fields, the barbed wire and landmines, and away from H
ng Khanh. Sitting on the plane heading towards Australia, my parents didn’t yet feel relief. They didn’t allow themselves to become complacent about the risks of returning to the horrors of Cambodia and Vietnam. They had faced and survived peril after peril. Nothing was certain, even now. So they all sat in apprehensive silence as the white people around them chatted politely. They were frightened that at any moment the shred of possibility they were so delicately sitting on would be disturbed. It seemed that even as a baby, Văn understood this. He was quiet and still throughout the journey.

When the flight attendants served us food, my parents panicked, fearing we had to pay for it. They had nothing except the clothes they were wearing and the sarong in which I was wrapped. With the meal was served a can of Coca-Cola. When the Americans had come to Vietnam, as well as bringing military support for the South they had brought this strangely delicious luxury drink. Many South Vietnamese consumed it only during the sacred Lunar New Year festival of T
t. After the war ended in 1975, my mother hadn’t seen a can of Coca-Cola again. Now, five years later, on a Qantas plane, an Australian flight attendant gave her a can. She stared at it. It was in this moment that she finally believed that the terror and the crippling waiting were truly over. The red and white can which she had not seen since the fall of Saigon meant freedom. The new life that beckoned them manifested itself in an aluminium can. It meant they were
away from the contamination of prison camps, brutal rapes, guerrillas and constant, devouring fear.

It was only from this moment that my mother was finally filled with relief. It was as though she had been holding her breath for years. Clutching the Coca-Cola and her three-month-old baby, my mother wept, almost in disbelief. We were alive.

CHAPTER 3

Jesus will help us

Even though it was the end of a typical Australian spring, my parents felt a fierce and chilly wind. It was 13 November 1980. We had arrived in Australia as one of the first few refugee families who had travelled by foot across Cambodia into Thailand. My mother remembers later being interviewed on radio, prodded with questions about the remarkable journey.

Our first port of entry into Australia was Perth airport. The air was crisp; the blanket of humidity common to South-East Asia had been left behind. My parents froze in their inadequate clothes. In the transit lounge, there were a couple of Australian women in overcoats waiting for their connecting flight. They looked at us. Our skin was tanned, our clothes worn. We were mute, frightened aliens. My father would never forget the compassion and pity he saw in their eyes. He had seen other
eyes from jungles and prisons—violent, angry and lustful—and though the women did not speak, he knew in his heart their eyes were welcoming and that his family was safe in Australia. Together with the other four Vietnamese families, we were then transferred to Sydney.

Upon arriving in Sydney, we were met by two representatives from the Department of Immigration and then transported by a small bus to the Villawood Migrant Hostel. Years later this facility would become notorious as the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, surrounded by tall barbed-wire fencing to contain asylum seekers as if they were vicious animals. On the bus ride to the hostel, my mother gazed in absolute awe at the clean, wide streets and the large beautiful houses. The spring blooms had started to open and displayed their stunning petals to her like a thousand glistening ballerinas. She was intoxicated and realised just how far from Vietnam they were.

Within the hostel compound were refugees from all over the world—Vietnam, Cambodia and Iran. Like us, they had journeyed thousands of kilometres from the ancient lands of their ancestors to finally converge in this suburban facility. Some of their children had sad and worn eyes, others played naively. The adults were supportive of each other through broken bits of English. My father recalls a pleasant and hopeful atmosphere. Most of us had already been processed as refugees offshore. There was no barbed wire, and people moved about freely inside and outside the facility. Christian volunteers visited regularly, providing the residents with clothes and other
essentials. My parents were overwhelmed by the warmth and generosity of the nuns and volunteers from the Catholic charity St Vincent de Paul. My mother and I would later become devoted fans of their second-hand stores. No matter where we were in Sydney, we could always count on a nearby St Vinnies, as they became affectionately known, for daywear, furniture, kitchenware and party costumes.

On our first night at Villawood, we were allocated sleeping quarters. My mother, Văn and I were in one room and my father and H
i in another. We didn’t know if we would be given meals or when dinner time was, so we sat quietly in our rooms, creatures that had been buffeted and weathered into submission—afraid that any questions or movements would upset the fragile tranquillity we had found. Dinner time came and went. Familiar hunger pangs bellowed. Finally, other Vietnamese refugees who had arrived earlier realised we weren’t at dinner and came to our rooms to see what was wrong. They saw us waiting placidly. On realising what had happened, they went back to their own rooms and brought us instant noodles. As we ate, my mother, full of uncertainty in this new land and already anxious about how to support her family, asked them whether they knew how Vietnamese people could make money.

‘What will we do here? How do we make a living?’

‘Don’t worry, there’s plenty of work. You can sew, work in a factory, clean. That’s what I hear from the settled ones. It will be alright.’

Summer arrived with an unfamiliar blistering dry heat. We were going through the process of creating a new life. The first step was to be disease free and so we were taken to a hospital to get vaccinations. The next thing was banking, even though we had no money. Representatives of the major banks came to Villawood to encourage the refugees to open bank accounts. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia was the first to market to us so that’s who earned our loyalty. (Years later when Văn and I needed to open bank accounts, naturally the Commonwealth Bank of Australia was our first choice.) We were free to stay at the migrant hostel until we found housing and were ready to go. During the day the refugees left when they needed to and came back in the evenings. There was no pressure to leave.

My uncle, Thanh, who is my father’s brother, and his wife had arrived in Australia earlier, having left by boat. They were all reunited when Uncle Thanh and his wife came to visit us at the hostel. It was a surreal moment when the brothers saw each other for the first time in years, knowing that they had both cheated death and were now meeting on foreign soil in a land without gunfire or random incarceration. The last time they had seen each other was at home—a whole dimension away in time and place. They spoke of their sisters in Vietnam, their countless nieces and nephews working in the rice fields. They thought of their mother, dressed in her southern Vietnamese peasant pyjamas, so far from her only sons.

Ever since my father had seen the image of the tattooed Australian man in a pub in the magazine in Thailand, it had haunted him. One of the first things he asked Uncle Thanh was: ‘Are Australian men scary? Are they violent and mean?’

My uncle laughed heartily. ‘No, that’s just on the outside. They’re very kind.’

It was true that my parents’ first impressions of Australians were that they were immensely hospitable and compassionate. Australia had truly welcomed them. Their only complaint was the food. Dinner at the hostel was the typical Anglo meat-and-three-veg combo. Although they were extremely grateful to be fed, they missed the taste of home—of lemongrass, garlic, chilli, fish sauce and mint. After the immediate nightmares and trauma started to melt away, the culinary desire for home came back.

One night, asleep in our room at the hostel, my mother sensed a strange presence. When she awoke, she saw a dark-haired white man standing at the foot of the bed. He was completely naked. She grabbed Văn and me tightly and screamed. The man ran outside. After this incident and riddled with familiar fear, she insisted to my father that it was time to leave the hostel and venture out to find a home of our own, away from the full-time support of helpful Australian hostel staff. H
i went to live with my aunt and uncle who had settled earlier. Like the other four families who came from Thailand with us on 13 November 1980, we each dispersed from the migrant hostel and settled across Sydney to dream another narrative—leaving behind Sikhiu, giant rats and regular Anglo meals.