We Are Here (17 page)

It was bizarre to have grandparents suddenly. Văn and I found it amusing to introduce them to western ways. When a burger from McDonald’s was brought home for my grandfather, he unpacked all the bits on a plate. With a knife and fork he slowly tackled the beef patty, the lettuce, tomato, pickles, onion and buns. The bits had been separated onto the plate like a surrealist painting. My grandfather, still with dark blotches in his greying
hair, was in his seventies. He dressed in a safari suit and fedora hat and used French words to describe beer and drivers. As I sat watching him eat, I did not appreciate that he had been imprisoned as a French resistance fighter, lived through two wars and outlived his eldest and youngest sons.

One evening, when my mother and father were out delivering a load of finished garments, Vinh—recently brought home from hospital—began to cry incessantly. I told my grandmother that he usually fell asleep whenever he was lying in his capsule in the car. So we took out the baby capsule and Grandma and I took it in turns to push Vinh up and down the short hallway, trying to simulate automobile motion. I made car noises. Grandma sang a Vietnamese lullaby. My mother walked in on this absurd scene, unsure of how to react. She finally chuckled when we all realised that it had worked. Vinh had stopped crying.

We took my grandparents to get their portraits taken. Both my grandmothers wore traditional velvet dresses with floral patterns. My maternal grandmother sat on a Victorian daybed inside the photographer’s studio with one leg crossed over the other, the white satin pants showing beneath the front flap of the traditional
áo dài
dress. In the portrait, she is looking tentatively into the camera, the hard, sacrificial life of a Vietnamese woman, borne with grace and humility, in her gaze. Years later, at her funeral, this portrait would be carried by the eldest son of her eldest son. It would sit on the altar of her descendants wherever they were in the world, spread across America, Australia and
Vietnam, so that this humble, tenacious matriarch could receive our wishes and soften our fears.

One day, my maternal grandmother overheard a telephone conversation my mother was having. My mother was desperate and trying to borrow money. My grandmother’s heart was shattering as she heard the frazzled brokenness in her daughter’s voice. The next day she told my mother she wanted to go back to Vietnam because it was too cold in Australia. But she secretly did not want to be an additional financial burden on her eldest and most loyal daughter, and she could not bear to witness her child’s agony.

But not long after my grandparents went back to Vietnam, my grandmother got mouth cancer. With limited medicinal supplies in the countryside, one morphine injection cost $100 at the time—a considerable amount of money, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Loans were taken out to pay back loans. We spiralled deeper and deeper into debt. Duy was still around. His wife and children had now been sponsored over. Despite it all, my parents would help his innocent family settle into this strange land, offering everything from simple kitchen utensils to furniture. I guess the memory of tough beginnings was still vivid. No matter what Duy had done, his wife and children did not deserve to suffer. My mother asked Duy to pay us back, no matter how slowly. He complained that he didn’t have a job. Later, after he’d bought a two-storey house and a brand-new four-wheel drive, he still refused my mother’s request to pay us back $50 a month. At the time, my mother, who others often
labelled as unreasonably compassionate, offered him a job at our workshop. She would teach him to sew. She had borrowed money to purchase a set of new sewing machines in anticipation of setting up a large workshop together with Duy’s agreement to participate. But finally when it was all set up, he declared that the arrangement was unsatisfactory to him. He didn’t want to drive to our workshop every day. In one last act of insanity, my mother offered to loan him one of our sewing machines so he could work at home.

One day, Duy arrived at our house, sidling down the path into the workshop. My mother greeted him briefly then carried on with her work, quickly returning to one of the machines to sew. She had two thousand more shirts to finish before 7 pm. The clock on the wall towered over her, its numbers and hands ready to fall out and surrender to Fractured Stress in the air. Duy began to dismantle one of the machines. As always, he was cloaked in a sickening sense of entitlement. I stood watching him resentfully. These were
our
machines. I knew that my father wasn’t supposed to know about this ludicrous arrangement. My mother’s rationale was that if we provided him with the means, there would be a chance we could recover a tiny fraction of what was due. Anything mattered to my mother at that point. But as a child, I saw only Duy’s disgusting slyness paraded on his shoulders. It pranced ostentatiously down to the hollow of his cheeks and in and out of his chest and mouth. When I saw him at our precious machine, I ran as fast as I could along the red-brick path outside the workshop, up the concrete stairs leading to the
front house, past the toilet and into the mustard-brown-tiled living room.

‘Dad, he’s taking our machine!’

My father, though confused, leaped up from the lounge and ran down the stairs and across the yard into the workshop. The next few moments are blurry. When my father saw what was happening, an insidious pain pierced his stomach as though a butterfly knife had been wedged into him. Clutching his side, he collapsed onto the floor like a soiled rag. Unsurprisingly, Duy cowardly fled the scene. My father was taken to hospital. The Fractured Stress had infused itself into his body, planting ulcers in his stomach. Now they had ruptured in a violent, vicious implosion. He had to be nursed through the next few months with bland rice porridge and extra gentleness.

My mother still sewed relentlessly each night. Each day. With eyes open. And sometimes with eyes closed. On one weekday lunchtime, she went into the bank. It was filled with collars, ties and overalls, all trying to squeeze in their banking during the break. My mother waited patiently in line for forty-five minutes. When she got to the teller, she handed in the withdrawal slip. It unmistakably and undeniably read $5. She never forgot the look on the young teller’s face. Probably a girl in a summer job saving up for a holiday or new pairs of shoes. My mother walked out of the bank with her last $5. She made decisive, purposeful steps towards the bakery. The money was enough to purchase bread and a spread for her children’s lunch that week. When she got home, my mother spent the next hour on her hands and knees,
looking into every crevice of the house, behind every object, in the hope of a lost coin. The coolness of the mustard-brown-tiled floor kissed her cheeks softly, sadly, and the house cried silent tears of pity.

At that time, Uncle Căng’s wife and three daughters had been sponsored over to Australia. They lived with us temporarily in our house and workshop in the backyard. My mother taught my newly arrived aunt to sew. But it wasn’t enough. The piles of garments accumulated with each missed deadline. So did the debt. It rose like an uncharted mountain range, soaring into the stratosphere.

In 1990 we lost our beloved house. The
FOR SALE
sign came and went. The happy times faded into the empty cool space underneath our house, in between floor and earth where the mother cat had her litter. There were to be no more Monkey Magic games. No more handfuls of the first fruits of the season. No more sneaking through fence palings into the neighbour’s yard for berries.

Our slice of the Australian dream was shattered and was to be sprinkled all over our modest footprints from Perth to Villawood to Newtown to Marrickville to Punchbowl. My family and I would become nomadic squatters destined to borrow a piece of someone else’s dream in someone else’s play. It was an open wound that hurt us all very deeply.

Uncle Căng and his family had recently rented a house in Punchbowl, a minute away from St Jerome’s Primary School. It was an old white home, which would eventually be painted a
new white with a green trim. An inappropriate minty impression that needed a snow-capped mountain and pine trees amid the suburban vista.

When our house was finally sold, we had nowhere to go. Now it was our turn to live with Uncle Căng and his family. Our haphazard belongings were packed into boxes which were strewn across the garage and rumpus room. My father, mother, Văn, Vinh and I all squeezed into a three-by-two-metre room, just large enough to fit my parents’ king-size bed. That night, we all tried to sleep. I lay awake in bed, my father’s snoring sending tremors into the springs of the mattress. With heightened alertness, I explored the sounds that hid inside the bones and green carpets of this unfamiliar house. I was alert to the webs on the windows, the coolness of the walls and my mother’s nervous but regular breathing. This was our new home.

When my grandmother had visited in 1989, all her children owned houses except Uncle Căng. One of her last wishes was for Uncle Căng to be a homeowner. Whether it was a fifty-year-old wooden house built on a riverbank in Tây Ninh, or a fibro duplex in Bankstown, she craved for him the safety of a physical space to which he could always return—an uninterrupted and tangible creation of home, of safety. Title to a house meant you had the chance to create a past and a future. A set of memories nursed through hope, recession, fevers and graduation with walled photos that you could pass down to your children and their children. A place where your spirit could reside and where the custodians of your lineage could rest. Home was house. House
was home. We had lost ours, but my relatives in Vietnam still did not know. As my grandmother lay dying of cancer, my dutiful, beautiful mother decided to grant my grandmother her final wish. It would be a gesture of gratitude and love to honour an exemplary woman who had suffered lifetimes of sacrifice.

With the money from the sale of our Beauchamp Street house, we paid off most of our debt. With most of the money we had left over, we could have put down a deposit on a new house or maybe started a small business. But instead, my mother provided Uncle Căng and his wife with a deposit to purchase their own slice of the Australian dream. I remember attending the house inspection with him, unaware that for the rest of their time in Australia, while his family would be settled, my family would be left to shift from one rented house to another.

The place my uncle eventually bought was a lovely fibro house with a decent-sized front yard and large backyard. In the front yard, on either side of the concrete path leading to the front door, were two Australian marsupials—a lifelike stone kangaroo and koala staring out onto the road like gentle protectors. All that was missing was an Australian flag in their paws. Inside the house, my uncle had a mirror he’d found at a garage sale, a souvenir from the 1983 Sydney to Hobart yacht race. A faux-mahogany display cabinet containing glass and porcelain kitsch from St Vinnies sat near the lounge. My uncle and his family’s adoption of Australia as home had officially begun.

Over the years, the fibro house and Australian stone fauna would greet streams of Vietnamese refugees from my uncle’s
factory. Machine operators, forklift drivers and leading hands moving in and out of the house’s passageways, carried by drunken tides of Vietnamese song. I would watch with bitter envy as my newly arrived cousins revelled in the familiar happy sounds of song and banter on cheap blue plastic every weekend. That innocent pleasure was lost to me.

CHAPTER 5

A maiden journey

School at St Jerome’s went on as usual despite our changed circumstances. But my daydreaming flourished the more it seemed that the world was against us. As I watched Australian television, I dreamed of being someone with blonde hair and blue eyes—definitely not Vietnamese and not living in our cheap rented house in Punchbowl. Văn went to school and rarely shared any problems he faced. But alone he dealt with racist bullies and his own struggle for a place in the world. Somehow I am sure my mother knew of our angst and discontent.

By now it had been over a decade since my parents touched the earth which grew their families’ rice. Over a decade since my mother had looked upon the Vàm C
Đông River which passed through Gò D
u, that had almost consumed her as a small child and whose banks sustained the house she was born
in. When I was eleven years old, my mother decided to use the rest of the little money left after we had sold our house and after the mortgage deposit for my uncle to take her children back to the country where she was born. (My father couldn’t come with us as the factory wouldn’t give him the time off.) The three of us, born in three different countries, needed to know the Vietnamese meaning of family, of heritage, of identity. In Vietnamese, the concept of origin is—a blend of country and home—literally translated as ‘earth water’. In 1991, we would spend five weeks in Vietnam.