We Are Here (13 page)

‘Mum, go to sleep.’

‘What are you doing up? Go to sleep. I have to finish this. There’s a deadline.’

I remember the times when one of the machines would break. My mother, ever graceful, calm and never in a moment of panic, would get her kit of tiny Phillips-head screwdrivers and screws and try to fix it. As a six-year-old, I learned how to change broken needles and worn out bits of the machine. I could thread the Singer skilfully and change its oil. Opening up the machine to reveal the small sunken pool of machine oil was a fascinating expedition. It was like an unmasking of a mysterious story character. My wild imagination would lead me to stand beside the machine in a hypnotic trance. I would daydream, watching the droplets of oil build up in weight, then descend with a plop into the pool below. I imagined an allied machine wounded in the battle to rescue my family from local government inspectors or vicious landlords. Or picture microscopic ballerina fairies, which everyone else would only see as specks of dust through the Venetian blinds, slicing and swimming through the humid air above the pool of oil.

I would always fall asleep to the regular sound of my mother sewing—the coded sounds of the rapid fire of the needle as she stepped on the pedal, then the quick click of the end of a consecutive series of stitches as she snapped her heel. Sometimes her eyes were so tired and the scent of sleep so seductive, she would place her fingers too far in and the needle would stab into the nail of her forefinger. Through gritted teeth, she would tend quickly to the wound with Eagle Brand green medicated
oil and keep going. The tune of the sewing machines, like the regularity of rust and rain, became the lullaby of my childhood. Delivery-day deadlines became the milestones upon which each week was measured.

Shortly after we moved to Marrickville, my father went to the Commonwealth Employment Service office to look for work. Manual labour didn’t require much English so he was able to get a job swiftly. He worked as a sander at a carpentry factory in Sydenham, only one train station away. But to save money my father walked to work and back each day. At the factory he met another Vietnamese man who was leaving for a better-paying job at Lidcombe, several kilometres west, with a company called Sigma Industries. It manufactured air-conditioning systems for trains. The man got my father a job at this factory, and he began to take the train to work. My father was overjoyed as the pay was great. At the time my mother was making $162 a week at the sewing factory. They were able to buy a second-hand Mazda for $300. It was the first asset they could call their own, earned through toiling with their hands and feet, an acquisition which gave them a whisper of pride. They didn’t dare aspire to own any other luxuries; in those days, an apple, a uniform, an automatic car and a living family were enough.

But after six months, work at the air-conditioning factory dried up and my father was unemployed. Soon after, he got a job at Crown Corning’s glassware factory in Waterloo, a few
kilometres south of Sydney’s CBD. It was shift work. Every three days the shifts would change, moving between afternoon, day and night shifts. My mother was still working at the factory and there was no one to look after my brother and me. My father looked for another job and found work as a kitchen-hand and dishwasher at Eastern Suburbs Leagues Club near Bondi Junction, not far from the famed and stunning Bondi Beach. It gave him a glimpse into a different class, a world where men wore collared shirts and sliced their knives through juicy steaks. My father was off Tuesdays and Thursdays and could work out a schedule with my mother to look after us. The hours were good but there wasn’t any parking for non-members of the club so my father had to park about a twenty-five-minute walk away. He left to work as a machine operator for F. Muller, a company which manufactured refrigeration units. He stayed there for over fifteen years.

During the time my mother worked at the sewing factory, the ritual of hide and seek continued while I cried and pleaded each morning. One day, seeing how much her Princess of Thailand needed her, my mother stayed home. For good. My father rotated through day, afternoon and night shifts at the factory while my mother sewed at home. They mastered the routine and rhythm of a new life, hoping it would be as predictable and steady as possible.

One of my mother’s older brothers, Uncle Căng, was finally released from the re-education camp and he too left Vietnam.
Uncle Căng migrated to Australia via the Sikhiu refugee camp and came to live with us. He was dark and unshaven, with an unruly moustache. My first memory of him was when he and my mother were walking towards the intersection of Marrickville and Illawarra roads, my mother carrying me. He stretched out his arms to hold me, but I turned away violently and gripped my mother, fearful of this scary-looking person.

I would later discover that this strange dark man was a broken-hearted poet and an imprisoned former police officer of the South Vietnamese government. For the next eight or so years before his wife and three daughters were sponsored to come over to Australia, with each payday from his factory job he would buy fish and chips for Văn and me. Thursday afternoon would come around and I would sit on his knee as we tore open the deep-fried packets of salty goodness wrapped in a single sheet of paper. It was always an eagerly awaited divine ritual of delight.

As a man with charisma and clear leadership capacity, my uncle would ascend from being a simple factory worker to production manager of an entire factory plant which produced a variety of industrial netting. In his lunch breaks, he would compose traditional Vietnamese poetry. Sometimes, within the confines of his backyard, among the polystyrene boxes in which he grew mint and shallots, he would sorrowfully recite these compositions. His tone was always mournful, his songs always yearning for yesterday. They were always performed on drunken occasions accompanied by nostalgic cigarette smoke
rings which appeared and faded abruptly like a look of knowing in a lover’s eyes.

Later, when I was old enough to appreciate the irony and tragedy of his life, he would give to me what he described as his life’s treasures—the collection of handwritten poems of an unremarkable Australian life, composed over decades on the loud factory floor. That day, tears welling in my eyes as I cradled in my hands his memories, his songs, a man’s lifetime of love and loss, I felt unworthy of the privilege—to be the keeper of this compilation of bitter hopes, solitary moments and hushed, brave dreams.

Before Uncle Căng’s wife and daughters arrived, he and father would meet regularly with the few other men from Tây Ninh province now living in Sydney. Each week, the blue plastic sheet taken from the excess stock at my uncle’s factory was laid down on the concrete in our backyard, the housing commission flats still supervising the curious activity below. My mother would make food that went well with lingering laughter and iced beer. Back in Vietnam most people didn’t have fridges, so beer was drunk with ice to keep it cool. Here in Australia, even with fridges, somehow the subconscious ritual of plonking cubes of ice into beer beamed them back to the familiar land of their ancestors. I would always watch on with a sense of hesitation and splendour.

One Christmas, my uncle built a manger out of crumpled paper, sprayed with silver paint to look like stone. He took coloured netting from the factory and decorated the manger
with Christmas baubles and other found objects. Then he added porcelain statues of Baby Jesus, Joseph, Mary and smiling sheep, purchased from—of course—St Vinnies. Looking back, the haphazard attempt to recreate the nativity scene must have been hideous bordering on blasphemous.

Uncle Căng and my father unfolded the blue plastic sheet and the rhythm of the evening began to set in. The men sat and started to gulp the Fosters with a Vietnamese count of ‘One, two, three—down!’ Glasses clinked as the past crept in to join them.

My cousin H
i had come to stay with us during his summer holiday from school. My mother had prepared and hid presents for Văn and me inside the house. Close to midnight H
i and my mother ran outside and said to me, ‘Santa is here! He’s inside!’ I stood with Văn at the door, petrified. I did not want to see a fat white man in a red outfit that didn’t have matching red shoes, even though I was fairly sure he wouldn’t eat me. Finally, after what seemed like a very long period of hovering on the threshold, paralysed by fear, Văn ran into the house and then out. But Santa was too fast for Văn. H
i pointed to the sky and said, ‘There he goes! Look!’ I strained with all my strength to see him fly off but I must have been too slow. Was it because my parents couldn’t speak English and he wasn’t sure whether we could speak English either? Later I would wonder why Jesus, Santa and the fairy godmother, as well as the cast of
Home and Away
, were all white.

When my first tooth began to wobble I became excited at the prospect of being visited by the tooth fairy. I wondered whether
her fluttering would sound like a mosquito near my ear. The evening after I had pulled out the tooth, I placed it under my pillow hoping for at least one dollar. With that, I could buy three bags of liquorice at the school tuckshop. I examined the tooth carefully, making sure all the blood was cleaned off the crown and the root. In the morning, I looked underneath the pillow. The tooth was still there. Maybe the tooth fairy had forgotten. Or maybe she hadn’t come because I wasn’t white. On television, the kids that were visited by the tooth fairy were white with white parents. I kept my tooth in a little box in the top drawer of my desk. Just in case.