We Are Here (19 page)

In Australia, my eczema caused me great trouble. I wanted to wear short denim overalls with a blue gingham cotton shirt inspired by Elly May Clampett of
The Beverly Hillbillies
. (Luckily, my ambitions later in life far more than compensated for this aesthetic childhood dream.) But my skin condition didn’t allow such pleasures. To hide the wretched reptilian scales of eczema,
even in summer I would ludicrously wear a jacket and pull my Sisters of St Joseph long brown socks far above my knees. My teacher and fellow pupils wondered what was wrong as sweat oozed from every pore of my body. ‘I’m fine,’ I would say casually as though
they
were the crazy ones. ‘Let’s keep playing.’ I would concoct some way of distracting them—deliberately messing with the score of whatever game we were playing or walking backwards. Once, when the elastic of my sock was so worn that it slipped below my knee, I spent recess standing on one leg. When my friends asked what I was doing, I replied, ‘I am standing on one leg. Obviously.’ I rolled my eyes as though they were imbeciles. When the bell rang, I ran as fast as I could back to the classroom. Because Catholic school uniform socks were very expensive and not sold at the second-hand shop, I had to improvise by placing rubber bands around the outside of my socks and then folding them down over the top. The trick worked but I would come home with a deep purple ring around my leg as though I had been sliced by a sickle. At the time I was terribly despondent. I envied girls who wore dresses and walked around itch-free.

When my grandmother saw the curse that was clinging to me, she prepared her elimination method. Horse dung. Steamed. I lay over a bamboo bed while the fumes from the dried horse dung wafted through the cracks of the bamboo and into my skin. At least, this is what my mother tells me happened; I absolutely have no recollection of the procedure. Maybe I purged the experience from my memory. It’s not something that one likes to recount
to others. But whether it really was the horse dung, or puberty or utter humiliation, the reptilian disease never returned.

Within a couple of weeks of our arrival, my mother’s two eldest brothers and their families were to move to America under a humanitarian scheme for Southern Vietnamese officers of particular rank. My mother’s eldest brother had suffered greatly in the re-education camp after the war ended. Giant rats had gnawed at his leg and the untreated wound left him with a permanent injury. The subsequent limp followed him to the great land of America and would turn into a haunting reminder of dark, dark times. The organisation sponsoring my uncles was a Lutheran church in Colorado. Pueblo and Boulder in Colorado would become their home. It was 1991 and not many Vietnamese had successfully emigrated to America under the humanitarian scheme. Buses filled with our relatives and my cousin’s friends travelled to the airport to say goodbye. Clad in my new tweed pinafore, a white blouse and white Kmart shoes, I held onto my nine-year-old cousin Anh. I had no reason to sob really. But I did. It was all on camera. My older teen cousins received carefully folded love letters from friends who’d never had the courage to declare their feelings. Hopes of long-distance bonds were harboured. Teenage hearts that were left behind in the small village of Gò D
u would forever live in this moment of goodbye, a moment on the cusp of where their worlds would diverge forever. It was in this last moment that they and my cousins would be
the same. Of the same village, the same childhood games of chopsticks and marbles, the same school, the same struggles. Over a decade later, my cousins would return with university degrees, their American-born husbands and English-speaking children. They would look upon their friends from the airport that day in 1991, now selling fabric in the dim narrow aisles of the Gò D
u market, or with hands callused from fixing Honda motorbikes and hearts worn from nursing flailing love stories. But at the airport that day as my grandparents said goodbye to their sons and grandchildren, uncertainty wrapped itself around everyone. There were last glimpses. From friends, family and secret loves. Full of pensive anguish. Full of possibility.

A week or so after the Big Goodbye had found its place and settled in hearts, camera film and phone calls, we visited my mother’s family’s rice fields—the place where, after the fall of Saigon, she spent much time, back bent against the sun, planting, tending and cutting across seasons and sorrows. My aunts told us that my mother, her pants already soaked from being submerged in the wet ground, would squat without shame in the fields, piss in her pants, then keep on planting. Time and hope against her. I stood on the banks of earth separating the fields of dry stalks. The fields had just been hoed. Lovely white ducks skittishly waddled across the field and I chased them with a long bamboo stick, clomping through the wet earth, the shoots of cut rice stabbing my tender urban Australian feet. I watched the workers separating the grain from the stalks, streams of grain shooting out of the machine like a cascading shower of brown
and yellow pixels. The men and women sifted the grains through a giant woven basket suspended from a skeletal bamboo frame. I attempted the task myself, the videographer filming my feeble, cumbersome efforts, much of which were staged for the camera.

On a cyclo, Vinh, my mother and I toured Ho Chi Minh City under the watchfulness of Tom Selleck, who later dubbed in the well-known upbeat song ‘Sài Gòn đ
p l
m, Sài Gòn ơi!’ (Saigon you are so beautiful, oh Saigon!’) The cyclo cruised across District 1 of the city while the swarm of traffic swirled around us. The cyclo driver beamed into the viewfinder of the camera in front, relishing the rare chance at being in front of a camera. My mother recounted her memories of Saigon from when she studied there as a young woman. The narration continued past the main roundabout across Ben Thanh market, in front of the opera house and behind the cathedral, remnants from the French occupation.

Back in Gò D
u, Văn, Vinh and I were exposed to uncensored village life, without luminous supermarkets, refrigerators or
Wheel of Fortune
. When Vinh wasn’t being carried, he walked only on his tiptoes, the same way he walked in Paddy’s Markets after he saw orange peel and rubbish on the ground. At the market, fish and eels would squirm inside aluminium buckets. Clumps of noisy ducks, roosters and chickens were heaped together on the ground. Balls of glutinous rice wrapped around yellow bean paste floated in buckets of ginger-infused syrup, spooned into small plastic bags with dollops of coconut milk and sesame.

The neighbours were preparing for a death anniversary celebration and had bought a cow. I stretched upwards above the ring of onlookers and managed to get a snapshot of the epicentre of the crowd. Inside the ring of the fervent audience was the live cow with its legs tied together. A man held a sharp rod linked to a cable which was connected to an electric socket in the wall. I ran into the house but still heard the thumps of the struggle and the sounds of slaughter. My grandmother told me that on one occasion she looked through a hole in the wall directly into the eye of a cow being slaughtered and saw tears streaming from its eye.

There are lots of photos from that first Vietnam trip. Numerous pictures of the extended family gathered under my patriarchal grandfather’s wings. I am always in the front of the clan, hands by my side, standing to attention, clenching a smile to force out a dimple on my left cheek. A trick I learned in second grade.

On the day we left, I stood out the back of my grandfather’s house gazing at the brown river, the continuous current carrying families on small boats, selling their vegetables up and down the river. I don’t know why I cried, really. My five weeks could not have warranted a potent attachment to this place. My aunts chuckled at my melodramatic display. That morning, as on every other morning, the man down the street, shirtless and in blue shorts, brought us noodles with pork made from the slaughtered pigs whose monstrous squeals I had heard the night before. When I visited eight and sixteen years later, he would continue
to bring me noodles, still wearing blue shorts, his bare torso like dark leather, always bearing a defiant shimmer.

We all clambered onto the rickety blue vehicle, a type of mini-truck owned by my grandfather’s neighbour. The back tray of the truck had two rows of seats facing each other and was covered by a plastic roof. Passengers at the back could only look to the side of the truck or behind it, never ahead. I always wanted to sit at the edge of the row closest to the opening. We pulled away from my grandfather’s house, the truck and its passengers bobbing as it struggled over the rocks and potholes on the dusty village road. Children from the neighbourhood followed behind. As my mother’s childhood drifted past, we waved to all the characters who had become part of my story too. The noodle man in the blue shorts. The pigs ready for slaughter. The lady whose bad nose job left the bridge of her nose with a transparent glow on sunny days. Goodbye, wet season. Goodbye, jumping frogs. Goodbye, golden jackfruit bursting from their skins.