We Are Here (20 page)
Authors: Cat Thao Nguyen
When we finally got up onto the tar road, the driver accelerated. The neighbourhood kids stopped chasing after us and began to wave. Just like in the midday movies but this time it was in full colour. They disappeared into figures, then shapeless things, then ragged dots of movement, then the horizon. The conversation around me became a sort of white noise. Muffled. Submerged. Unable to look ahead, I looked behind. Grey sheets of road rolled out behind us. Just enough road to surge ahead. We zoomed past women on bicycles with conical hats, men on
Honda motorbikes with roosters hanging off the bike like feather boas, past the stone business with its field of stone giraffes, elephants and tigers. Safaris of frozen haphazard bits of trapped life trailing after me. Goodbye, Vietnam.
Back in Sydney, there was a cavity where the extended family membrane of Commotion and Big Fuss, Big Sniffs, Big Love sat for five weeks. My misery was compounded as I discovered my class had learned long division while I was away. I found long division hard to master without someone demonstrating it. One day, I ran home from school in tears because I didn’t understand what the class was doing. My mother purchased a series of tuition videos called
Maths Made Easy
from a Vietnamese acquaintance who was a door-to-door knowledge salesman occasionally dabbling as a translation services broker. He later would sell us both the children’s and adult
World Book Encyclopaedia
for a substantial sum of money. (We paid extra for the gold glazing on the edges of the pages.) He would also later get me a certified English translation of my Thai birth certificate, which before then I could never read.
The cover of the maths video had a sketch of a happy boy with numbers prancing over his head. The long-division section of the video was taught by a man in cream pants and a blue shirt with a beard so tremendous the lesson came out as a series of mumbles. Needless to say I didn’t focus on the maths but on the primal movement of the beard. I never properly mastered long
division. Fortunately, the discovery of calculators would relieve my sense of inadequacy, at least in that regard.
We had continued to live in my uncle’s old rented house after he had left for his newly purchased one. My mother and father set up the sewing workshop at the back of the rented house similar to the set up at the home we sold. We laid down light green plastic so the dust and thread wouldn’t embed itself into the carpet. The carpet through most of the house was khaki green. I would stay in my little oasis at the back where my whole family had slept on our first night there. But I would miss my mother’s skin. I would climb into bed with her. Sometimes she would still be wearing a bra. I liked running my fingernails along the tiny ribbing of the straps. She would have a cassette player near her head. It would play Vietnamese opera, always stories of longing, sadness, unrequited or forbidden love. She would cry herself to sleep to these painful but strangely soothing lullabies.
Our family’s pockets were basically empty and it would continue to be a difficult journey for us. We couldn’t afford a washing machine at the time. I remember being in the outside laundry one winter, washing the sheets by hand, the water bitterly cold and unforgiving. Like clockwork, early every Saturday morning my parents would head to Flemington markets where the produce was cheap and fresh. My mother would come to know all the Vietnamese vendors. Their kids would be sleeping
under the tables, or selling cucumbers, competing with big-bellied Italian men with booming voices.
We had lovely neighbours. To the right was a Vietnamese family. They had a son who was Văn’s age and would become one of Văn’s oldest friends. To our right was a Greek family whose youngest daughter, Karissa, went to school with me. Occasionally I would be invited into their house. It seemed to me like a shrine to all things beautiful. The house smelled of fine precious things. Of rest.
One Christmas I was allowed to go over and play. I walked across the manicured front garden, up the stairs and into the hallway. The runner was soft beneath my awkward feet. The decorated Christmas tree had musical lights that echoed magical sounds like floating bells. There were wrapped, glistening presents underneath the tree. Framed mirrors and pictures adorned the walls. Lovely burgundy rugs were sprawled on the floor. There was a pool out the back and an open-plan kitchen. As I nervously gazed at it all, wide-eyed, I somehow felt that it was familiar, with its golden clocks, porcelain dolls and silver-trimmed glassware. I realised that this was a house I had pieced together from countless catalogues.
Our letterbox was routinely stuffed with junk mail, and I would gather the catalogues and retreat to my room. In a quiet space, I would lay them out, forensically examining each coloured page. Savouring worlds of dolls, garden gnomes, curtains, foldout lounges, televisions and washing machines. I would ration the catalogues over a few days until the next batch. Items from
Freedom Furniture, Target, the Reject Shop and Harvey Norman would be circled with a pen as I slowly constructed our own shrine of Lovely Things. Very special items were cut out and kept in my top drawer.
Karissa had all the toys a little girl could wish for. We played with her Barbie dolls and doll’s house in her room. Her father, grey-haired with a gentle smile, had worked hard in a factory all his life. As well as Karissa, he had a successful grown son and daughter, each married with kids. I knew when the grown daughter was visiting from affluent Hunters Hill. Her new E-class black Mercedes always announced her presence, like a black panther cruising past Western Sydney.
Behind us was a Lebanese family with four kids, one of whom was Vinh’s age. The father was a train driver and the mother stayed at home. From the back fence she would pass over to me tabouli salad made from parsley that she grew in her yard. This mix of ethnicities was typical of Punchbowl, a suburb full of hard-working immigrant families just like ours. A place where diversity was inherent and struggle was second nature. South, east and west of us were families with broken English and working class origins. Each with their own dreams. Each in a different stage of the settlement process. All with kids the same age as my brothers and me at St Jerome’s primary school. Karissa’s family had emerged as the successful immigrant crew. They represented what could be. To our north was Rossmore Avenue, a street with a church on one end and on the other, Punchbowl Public
School and Canterbury Road, a couple of hundred metres from the known Canterbury Road prostitutes’ strip.
In the heart of it all was our little unit. Just another family. For a long time, my father did the night shift at the F. Muller factory. When we woke, he was asleep. When he came home, we were at school. The Hard Yakka industrial uniform with steel-capped factory-issued boots became him. My mother would be at the sewing machine pedalling for school fees, for family assistance in Vietnam, for Telecom bills, for a way out.
One hot summer weekend, while my father was at work and my mother was sewing, I went out to the backyard and stood under the hose to cool down. Afterwards, I lay on the grass looking up at the clouds, trying to trace outlines of kings, elephants, trees, superheroes and crickets. I looked at the worn underwear hanging on the line, flapping like flattened jungle leaves from nature documentaries. It got late and my father had just come home from the factory. My parents had to deliver a load of garments. I was supposed to watch Vinh; they couldn’t take him with them because the garments had filled the boot and the backseat. Văn was at tae kwon do practice at a community club in Lakemba, one suburb away.
Vinh was as attached to my mother as I was at his age. She had to sneak out of the house as she did over a decade earlier with another desperate child. This paused scene of stealth disappearance was replayed to her like a lost button that resurfaces
again and again. When Vinh realised that my mother had left he began to cry. There was nothing I could do to stop him. It was an excruciating feeling. Helplessness engulfed me like a toxic gas. I tried to entertain him, making up stories about where our mother was. I took photographs of him so that he could pose and momentarily stop crying. I made him wear the Easter hat I had created for the school parade. Nothing worked. I felt like an exhausted circus performer.
As Vinh sat on the floor in the back room screaming, the grand sewing machines also wept. His ceaseless cries clung onto the dusty blinds and broken swing in the yard. I went back outside to lie on the ground, trying to block the piercing desperate screams, but it was impossible to recapture the carefree spirit of the afternoon. I felt completely and utterly helpless. For the first time in my life, I had the sensation that I was truly alone. There was no one to rescue me. No one to say everything would be alright. No one to take over the responsibility. That was supposed to be the job of my mother’s youngest brother, lost somewhere in the jungles of Cambodia.
The emptiness of the house gnawed at my fingertips and toes. Feelings of infinite desperation unravelled and wrapped themselves around my eleven-year-old body while Vinh’s screeching cries continued to deafen my small ears. When my parents eventually returned, the solemnity of adulthood had already seized me. It took away my freedom to play, to wonder. It would be years before the solemnity would let go.
Like most girls from St Jerome’s, I went on to MacKillop Girls High School in Lakemba, right next door to St John’s Boys High School. In the mornings, I would walk to Punchbowl train station and make the short trip through Wiley Park to Lakemba. Sometimes I would get a lift with Karissa in her mother’s Mercedes. Often, when I needed to wait in their house, it gave me a chance to glimpse their precious things. We weren’t friends at school. It wasn’t even openly acknowledged that we were neighbours. The contrast of our families’ socioeconomic status embarrassed me.
The transition to high school wasn’t too troublesome, given that most of my primary school friends also enrolled at MacKillop Girls. The year I started high school, it was now my father’s turn to visit Vietnam. At the time, my father did not indicate any
reservations. But looking back, I can only imagine the deep trepidation he must have felt, returning to the country he had fled. At the airport, we said goodbye and I asked my father to bring me back a white teddy bear. Looking back, it was a silly request, no doubt fabricated from cheesy Hollywood movies. On his way back, the white bear would cause him problems at customs in Vietnam. They wanted to slice it open, suspecting that my father was trafficking drugs. Knowing his indelible fear of Vietnamese authorities, I cannot fathom what torture that experience must have been. Trying to contain the flood of memories of uniforms ruling his re-education camp life, grinding his dignity with abuse.
I had also asked my father to bring me back a pair of Reeboks to replace my cheap shoes from Best & Less, which were branded Apple Pie and Grizzly. He brought me back a pair of white high-tops with pink trim and embroidered logo. Perfect. At school everyone noticed my shoes straight away. It was obviously a model that was not available in Australia. A true import. But very quickly someone pointed out that my shoes had
Reobek
imprinted on them instead of
Reebok
. I was mortified. I was further punished the next day after I returned to wearing Apple Pies.