We Are Here (12 page)

The first place we moved to was a room below a staircase in Alexandria Street, Newtown—an inner-city suburb four kilometres southwest of Sydney’s central business district. The lodging was a basement of some sort. It was cheap, dark and damp. We had one uncovered mattress to sleep on and, courtesy of St Vinnies, a black and white television. Many years later, I would drive my family back to Newtown, where my parents pointed out the old terrace house in which we’d lived. When my parents told me of the staircase, I remembered a children’s pop-up book where a lion or some other wild creature lived underneath the stairs unbeknownst to the family. In the book the space below the staircase was a magic entranceway to another world of wonderful fantasies and new pleasures. I wondered what the occupants above the stairs must have thought of us: a dishevelled non-English-speaking Vietnamese couple with a four-month-old baby and a two-year-old son. They were wild things from another realm. By-products of a war that many young Australians visibly protested against. Here they were below the stairs.
What to do. What to do.

My mother was still in deep despair from the lingering tragedy of losing H
ng Khanh. It was six months before she could eat properly. Anxiety and sorrow buried themselves in her stomach and she suffered constant cramps and pains. Somehow, the doctors who treated her concluded the problem was with her teeth, so they decided to take them out. At twenty-seven years old she had a full set of dentures. Without a word of English to object and without the energy to protest, my mother let it all
happen. But the dentures did not help to bring her back from the dark pit of despair. Recalling the comfort she had derived from the prayers of the Christians at the Sikhiu camp, she decided that was what we needed.

My parents wrote to the Catholic priest in Adelaide whose address we had been given at Sikhiu. He put us in touch with Father Dominic Nguy
n Văn Đ
i, also a refugee and one of the very first Vietnamese Catholic priests in Australia at the time. We did six months of lessons at a local church. With very little English my parents tried hard to comprehend Jesus and how to be good Catholics in this new land. The priest in Adelaide contacted some lovely Australians to be our godparents. Once Father Dominic was settled, he travelled the country to baptise Vietnamese people and to hold mass in Vietnamese.

The hour of mass was a sacred and treasured timeslot that allowed fragmented and ruptured souls to come together as a community. Once a month clusters of Vietnamese clung to each other over prayers in Catholic churches around Sydney, relishing the sound of the Vietnamese language being spoken and celebrated. We would pray for salvation, for our brethren back home, for extra shifts, for better days. When we were ready, Father Dominic came and baptised us in the sight of our godparents. I was christened Catherine. My mother was Mary, my father Paul and Văn became Peter. Later, after my younger brother was born, he was christened John Bosco. So began my parents’ spiritual journey towards some sliver of healing.

Eventually we left the little space in Newtown because it was ridden with fleas and other microscopic parasites. My small body was covered in bites. Marrickville, three kilometres southwest of Newtown, was our next destination. The suburb was home to the calloused knuckles and weathered foreheads of migrants from Greece, Vietnam and many places in between.

My earliest recollections are of our life in Marrickville. We moved into an old brick split-level terrace house on Illawarra Road. The house had a huge driveway which inclined upward like a concrete sea serpent. It rose gradually until it formed a horizon with the government housing commission flats that always seemed to me to be suspended from somewhere in the sky behind us. One of my first memories is of playing hide and seek with Văn and some neighbourhood children, looking up towards the flats and then skywards, distracted by the fast movement of the bloated clouds. The sky was darkening and a wind had blown up. Leaves were dancing around the yard. I remember being lost in those moments just before the impending storm, in the curious quiet on the verge of mayhem.

Our terrace was opposite the Marrickville branch of the Returned and Services League (RSL club). The RSL is an organisation set up to support men and women who served or are serving in the Australian Defence Force. Licenced clubs were created as a place where war veterans could meet. They serve
subsidised drinks and food and a lot of revenue comes from the poker machines installed inside the clubs.

I remember the giant Australian flag and the large bronze statues of Australian soldiers by the front wall at the club’s entrance. The statues were frozen in time, saluting. They wore the slouch hat, iconic of Australian soldiers. The Southern Cross constellation was in the background. Many people who came home to Marrickville on the train passed by the statues. I wondered what those soldiers would have made of the stream of people alighting at the station, a diverse mix that over the years would come from Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Asia. The soldiers’ watchful, reserved gaze would also see the streets change. Buildings would be torn down and developed into offices and community centres. Ultimately the RSL itself, together with the gallant bronze soldiers, would be demolished, giving way to high-rise modern apartments.

Our neighbours in Marrickville were also refugees from Vietnam, although they had left by boat like many others. They were three little boys and their mother and father, along with a teenage aunt. They kindly inducted us into life in Australia. My mother did not have any technical skills. Our neighbour taught her how to sew and piece bits of pre-cut fabric together. Once my adaptable mother had learned to recognise the staple pieces that formed pants, shirts and dresses, our neighbours helped her to find work sewing in a factory.

I remember her leaving to go to work for the first time. I was left in the care of our neighbour, the young aunt. My mother
snuck out of the house via the side entrance. It was a long and narrow path that was unevenly paved with tosses of stone. The world away from my mother’s proximity, the safety of her smell, was terrifying—the cars, the beetles, the wet tissues and plastic bags that gathered in the gutter after the rain, the roar of the trains erupting over the railway bridge. I don’t know how I knew she was leaving, but I sensed that raw moment of initial separation from my mother. The disappearance of the film of her proximity was palpable, like the sudden departure of a spring sun shower, or that brief second when you know you’ve lost the battle with the wind and the kite string slips from your grip.

I evaded the babysitter’s feeble attempts at distraction and escaped her grasp, running down the long side entrance to glimpse my mother’s silhouette exiting the left side of the house. Screaming with a lungful of desperation, I ran down the sidewalk. Everything seemed too big. Beyond the door was a blinding white confusing mash of world. All I saw was my mother at the cusp of it all, about to melt into the vortex. Behind me a voice yelled, ‘Cat Thao! Come back! Let Mum go to work! She has to go to work!’ I didn’t know what this Work was. Nor did I care.

My mother snuck off successfully that time, but she wasn’t always able to leave without tiny arms and fingers having to be prised from around her neck through storms of weeping.

As it turned out, though, my mother wouldn’t work outside the home for very long. Common with most Vietnamese refugee mothers, she would spend the next twenty years as an outworker operating a sweatshop in one of our rooms. The Singer sewing
machine and Juki industrial overlocker would become as familiar to us as family members. Wherever we moved, they came with us, like precious heirlooms. They watched over us like the ghosts of ever-present ancestors. There is a photo taken on my fourth birthday. Văn and I are wearing animal party hats. His was a smiling crocodile; mine was a yellow giraffe with a brown tuft of hair. Văn isn’t smiling. My mother is also in the photo, dressed in her St Vinnies clothes. Arranged in front of us on the coffee table are a bottle of Fanta, a packet of chocolate éclairs and a birthday cake. I have a bandage on the inside of my right elbow covering an outbreak of the terrible eczema I suffered from growing up. Standing impassively in the background of the photo is the Juki overlocker: sombre, firm, disciplined, reliable. Like a grandfather clock.

Two years later when I turned six, Văn and I resumed our positions, this time in front of the Singer sewing machine. Văn has a faint smile this time. I stand erect and attentive, albeit with a cheeky grimace. We are again wearing animal party hats. Remarkably, I still have the giraffe, while Văn has changed to a frog. He’s much taller than in the previous photo whereas I seem not to have changed much. Knowing my mother, she probably kept all the hats and candles from the previous birthday, along with the fake white and yellow daisies and chrysanthemums in a vase on the coffee table. There is another birthday cake, probably from the same bakery in Marrickville. An owl-shaped children’s blackboard is leaning against the Fanta bottle. A stack of plastic cups sits beside it. Large rolls of black thread have been inserted
in the rods of the Singer. There are piles of pre-cut fabric on the table beside the machine. Even now, I can tell from the photo that it is a combination of satin and chiffon—delicate and hard to sew.

Often I would come home from school, whether it was second grade or seventh, and help my mother unstitch hundreds of incorrectly sewn garments. When some designer from an upmarket Surry Hills studio decided to be adventurous with their line, producing highly complex designs, my mother would spend hours unstitching the sample and slowly piecing it back together. It would result in something that would be draped over a half-starved model paid several hundred times what my mother would earn for an hour’s work and, accordingly to the life insurers, the model’s life was worth so much more than ours.

Sitting atop a large pile of fabric, I would listen with my mother to the Vietnamese program on the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) radio station, specifically established to serve the needs of ethnic communities. She would work late into the night. On many occasions when I couldn’t sleep or I awoke suddenly, I would find her underneath the orange spotlight, asleep at the machine, its constant hum buzzing in her ear like a lovely monsoon mosquito. I would always try to press the off button quietly so as not to wake her. I held my breath and put gentle pressure on the button. But the action, no matter how careful I was, would always jerk her awake.