We Are Here (21 page)

One weekend while my father was in Vietnam, the phone rang. I picked up the phone in the back room where the sewing machines were. My aunt’s voice echoed down the line from Vietnam.

‘Cat Thao, is that you? Is your mum home?’

‘Yes, it’s me. But Mum’s not home now.’

‘She’s dead. Grandma’s dead.’

I didn’t know how to react over the phone. It seemed ridiculous and silly to me. So I chuckled. Out loud. The chuckle left me rude, uncensored. I said my mother would call back later and hung up. When my mother got home, I delivered the news to her swiftly and directly. A clean execution. I watched as she began to quietly tremble, the little tremors rippling through the cells in her body. The door remained open behind her. Her face collapsed with yet another blow of sorrow. Tears ran down her face. She called Vietnam straight away.

Not long after the phone calls, the garment contractor came by. He was a ferocious-looking Vietnamese man with bullock eyes that seemed on the verge of falling out of his head. His angular head sat uncomfortably on a tall, thin frame. His coarse sparse hair became wild when he spoke, as did his eyes. My mother asked whether she could return the half-completed load. Her mother had died and she would be unable to finish it with all the preparations in Vietnam and ceremonies to be done here.

‘You have to finish the load by the deadline. People die all the time.’

My mother stared at him. His bullock eyes gazed back at her, unflinching. The sewing machines and I watched in swampy terrorized silence before the next words were uttered. The unfinished garments, half stitched, half happy, tried to retreat into themselves to hide from the towering male figure in the doorway. He hadn’t even paid us yet for the last load. He
would use this unpaid money as ransom, knowing how much we needed it. So my mother agreed to complete the load by the deadline. She rallied all her friends. They came over to help her where they could. She spent the nights alone at the machine, sobbing and sewing. Sobbing for her mother, for her children and the damned wretched destiny that imprisoned her in this way. But the more she sewed, blinded by a scorching heartache, the more we had to unstitch the garments. Lines of thread made their own trails across the fabric, skating to an unknown song, a thousand stitches long.

In Vietnam, my father did all he could to look after the funeral preparations and ceremonies. Even before any of the relatives had known of the death, my grandmother’s sister-in-law had arrived at the house to help. My aunts asked her how she knew. She said, ‘Your mother told me in my dream last night that she had died and that I was to come down and help you kids with all the arrangements.’

Every aspect of my grandmother’s funeral was filmed so that my mother and her brothers in the US could know that the family in Vietnam had done all the proper things required and that the funeral was sufficiently large and well attended. Mental notes were taken of who was there and who wasn’t. On the altar, the burnt ashes from incense sticks curled savagely without breaking off, a sign that ancestors and other spirits are present. My grandmother had hidden her gold somewhere in the house. To ensure that the coffin was not raided and the house kept sacred, the family set out to locate the gold. My grandmother’s
eyes remained open the whole time, even when my aunts tried to forced them shut. B
o, her favourite grandchild, the eldest son of her eldest son, had returned from Colorado for a visit. She had died in his arms. Appropriately and rightfully, B
o was the one who eventually found the hidden gold. Only then did my grandmother close her eyes. All the descendants were dressed in white and wore strips of white cloth tied around their foreheads. B
o, as the eldest son of the eldest son, was identified by a single red dot on his white headband. Not even the eldest son himself has this privilege.

My grandmother’s family practise Cao Đài. In the Holy See in the capital of Tây Ninh sits the first and prime temple of their religion. It is elaborately and brightly decorated. In it there is a statue of Jesus Christ as well as one of Mohammed. The French writer Victor Hugo is considered a saint and is charged with evangelising the west. Members of the Cao Đài faith in Australia raised funds to build a replica temple in Wiley Park in southwest Sydney. Wearing traditional Vietnamese dress, on weekends they would volunteer their time to lay bricks, paint or cook for the builders. The temple was completed over a period of ten years.

A three-day prayer ceremony for my grandmother was held at the incomplete Cao Đài temple in Wiley Park. My mother was dressed in a white cotton traditional dress and also wore a white cotton headband. Inside the lavishly decorated temple, upstairs where coloured dragons twisted upwards around thick columns, we kneeled on round embroidered pillows while the congregation chanted prayers for hours. The ringing sounds
of brass gongs occasionally disturbed the air and reverberated against the omnipresent Asian ‘One Eye’ painted on a perfect giant solid sphere, decorated with the sky.

After my grandmother died, a portrait of her assumed a position on our altar, along with the Virgin Mary and my paternal grandfather. Every time we moved, the altar was the first thing to be packed and unpacked. On top of the tallest chest in a central space, usually the living room, my mother would lay out a blue piece of fabric. She would carefully place the statue of the Virgin Mary in the centre and position the pictures of my grandparents on either side of the statue. A vase of fresh flowers and fruit would also be placed at the altar. Whenever there was a death anniversary of an ancestor or an important date in the lunar calendar, we would place food that we had cooked at the altar for our ancestors. Only once we had finished offering our prayers with lit incense would we be permitted to eat. On these occasions, there would always be a cup of rice, salt and water—the staples of life. The altar grounded us. It was a connection to our forefathers, a constant reminder of who we were and where we had come from. Although the centrifugal forces of life pushed things outwards, no matter how far we were flung from the centre, this core remained unchanged. Our ancestors watched over us. Ate with us. Forgave us. Received our tears. Celebrated our joys. And dreamed with us.

My grandmother became my guardian. As the idea of organised religion and the political contradictions of the church disillusioned me, I talked to my grandmother. When I next visited
Vietnam, I brought home her traditional Southern Vietnamese pyjamas. They fitted me perfectly. I would often wear the black shirt with jeans. There were slits on either side for ventilation as the farmers worked in the sun. There were large pockets on either side of the snap buttons down the front. Together with jeans, it was my sartorial attempt to fuse east and west.

In Vietnam, people would go to the temple to search for answers. After a quiet prayer a question would be posed. Two small blocks of wood would be tossed. If the two blocks landed in a certain way the answer would be yes. In Australia, my mother improvised with two twenty-cent coins and a saucer. After praying to my grandmother at the altar and lighting incense, I would toss the coins. If heads and tails came up, the answer was yes. If it was a double heads or double tails then the answer was negative. Simple. I consulted my grandmother on many things, from whether I should defer university or take a particular job to whether or not the guy I was dating was my future husband. At night, before I went to sleep, I would make the sign of the cross (after years of Catholic education I couldn’t quite give up the habit) then pray to my grandmother. She replaced the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It was a somewhat confused hybrid of faith and worship.

As I was beginning high school, throughout Western Sydney there were fights between groups of Vietnamese and Lebanese kids. In hindsight it wasn’t anything to do with gang activity
or organised crime; more likely it was just about minority kids being territorial and defensive, trying to claim turf in an assertion of clan and community. The majority of Vietnamese refugees and Lebanese immigrants to Australia arrived at about the same time. We were different to the Greeks and Italians who were already largely settled. They had worked hard over generations to establish an economic and political presence in Australian society. They had money and they had a voice. All that we newer migrants had were fresh wounds and fear. We were living in rented houses whose front doors opened out onto a sweeping landscape of uncertainty. But we had each other. Our kind. My kind. People whose spices meant the same things. Whose food tasted the same, whose rituals were mirrored, whose silence was understood.

At various public and private schools in Western Sydney, fights were breaking out. Maybe it started independently at one or two schools but because of cousins and connections elsewhere, everyone was eventually dragged from one place to another for backup. For pride. For our people. At my all-girls school, a quiet Vietnamese student with broken English and a Demi-Moore-circa-
Ghost
haircut suddenly had enough of the fighting. The version I heard was that she was teased by a Lebanese student. This usually placid Vietnamese girl reacted. What started as bullying became reframed as a tribal battle: a battle to defend the honour of our people. Phone calls were made. Times arranged. Supporters rallied. At 3.30 pm one day, when Lakemba train station was packed with uniforms from MacKillop and St John’s
high schools, it was on. Apparently school compasses were used to stab people. I arrived late, after it was all over, but saw blood on a fellow student’s uniform. The spots of blood on the baby blue shirt looked like the beginnings of a Jackson Pollock. Fortunately, it was someone else’s blood that had splattered on her. She recounted the events to me. I later heard that Sefton and Chester Hill high schools had the same issues. Knives were brought to school. Then came police and sniffer dogs.

I don’t know when it all died out. Maybe I stopped listening and seeing. Maybe we just grew up. Maybe our respective tribes became more settled and there was less to prove. Less to look back at what we had to defend and more to look ahead, to go forward.