We Are Here (24 page)
Authors: Cat Thao Nguyen
My father couldn’t even look at me while he yelled. He said I had to stop communicating with this boy immediately. If I ever married a white boy, he would disown me.
I demanded to know why they had opened my mail. They were baffled that I could even ask such a question. If they had given birth to me, they had the right to take my life. My right to personal space and privacy was nothing against all of their rights over me as parents. As people whose daily sacrifice for me involved the forgoing of dignity, of sleep and of home.
I stopped responding to James. His letters grew shorter, the intervals between them longer. Then they stopped. But my parents didn’t open my mail again.
As I successfully navigated in-grown hairs and began taking dermatologist-prescribed medication, I became a little more comfortable at Bethany. One day in commerce class we were discussing where our parents worked. My father was still working as a machine operator at F. Muller. On forms my mother was either a housewife or a tailor. Neither seemed to articulate sweatshop worker or garment outworker appropriately, but we didn’t want to embarrass the reader of the forms.
When I named the company my father worked for, a girl in the class said, ‘My dad works there too! He’s the general manager. Maybe they know each other. What does he do?’
I felt the familiar burn on my cheeks. ‘He’s a machine operator.’ I doubted that the general manager knew my father.
He was just a nameless, faceless worker on the noisy factory floor.
‘What’s your dad’s name? I’ll ask Dad whether he knows him.’ It was a naive request, one which could only have come from a teenager who knew nothing of forklifts and second-hand furniture. I dreamed of one day buying brand-new clothes. She lifted the hem of her tunic in the hallway to show her friends the tan she got from the family’s trip to their holiday house. My father called her dad ‘sir’. We were the daughters of employees at the extreme ends of the food chain, sitting together, learning about economics. The difference in our circumstances stung me.
Year ten was coming to an end. I decided to join the yearbook committee. Everyone was asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. They were also asked to provide a quote. Occupations ranged from lawyers to teachers to musicians. Quotes included the usual
Friends forever
and
Dance like no one is watching
. I said I wanted to be either a jockey or Peter Pan. I was small enough to be a jockey, and it was unlikely I would grow much more, given I took after my father’s side of the family. I can’t explain Peter Pan. My quote was my own:
Dare to be yourself. You can love me or hate me. But at least you will know me.
It was more of a self-help aspiration than a statement. Deep down, I knew I didn’t dare to completely be myself.
Everyone was excited about the year ten formal. Who to bring? What to wear? How to do one’s hair? I had no answers for any of these questions. In the playground, girls huddled together to plan the biggest event of their teenage life. Meetings
would be held at various houses, presided over by glowing mothers proffering advice and hot chocolate. Tanning powder and horsehair brushes would be ordered from infomercials. Meanwhile, I begged my mother to allow me to go. It was to be held at Hurlstone Park RSL on Canterbury Road. Văn put in a good word for me. He had paved the way for me already by attending his own formal a couple of years earlier. In the end, it was decided that I could go as long as I had a chaperone. We settled on our neighbour, Văn’s friend, who was eighteen at the time and could drive. Since my mother knew his mother it would be safe for me to go with him. He would take our 1979 Toyota Corona. The bubbles of rust bursting through the white paint. I managed to find a simple long black dress on sale. The girls in my school group had older dates who drove two-door sports cars.
After the event was over, the group decided to head to the city for an impromptu after-party. A combination of testosterone, ego and Punchbowl grit overwhelmed my date; he decided he could keep up with the shiny convertibles. He floored the Corona. I was stunned into silence. We accelerated well beyond the speed the car had ever been driven. Then a convertible sped up beside us. We looked over and saw the driver mouthing something and gesturing. My date ignored them, probably assuming that they were saying that the car wasn’t bad for her age. He pressed harder on the accelerator. The convertible fell behind then sped up to us again and this time the driver was shouting. I looked around. There were sparks shooting from the exhaust. I yelled at my date to pull over.
We found a spot to stop but the car wouldn’t start again. I was hysterical. It was my family’s only vehicle. It was essential to our livelihood. While my date called for roadside assistance, I walked away to a shrub and crouched down, sobbing in my discounted dress, under an urban sky somewhere near Ashfield. Eventually the roadside patrol arrived. After inspecting the car, the mechanic told us that the engine had overheated and we just needed to wait for it to cool down. When at last the car started we drove home mostly in silence. It was way past my curfew. As I walked into the house, I realised I didn’t have the luxury of being like my classmates, of doing what they did. That evening I had risked my family’s only asset: an asset we depended on to take my father to work, to deliver the garments, to buy cheap groceries at Flemington markets. That evening, I was reminded of my place; of where I came from and the pleasures I couldn’t afford.
MacKillop and St John’s were also having their year ten formal. I had met a sweet boy from St John’s during the debating season. When I was up against his team, he withdrew from that debate because he didn’t want to debate me. He sketched a picture of Sydney Harbour for me and wrote out the words to Oasis’ ‘Wonderwall’ on a piece of paper as a gift. When he asked me to be his date for his formal, my mother let me go because he was Vietnamese and Catholic. My date’s dad would be driving us to the venue, and I decided to wait out the front of our house.
While I waited a congregation of beautifully dressed girls gathered on Karissa’s porch. Karissa had stayed on at MacKillop and I rarely saw her after I changed schools. I watched,
dumbstruck, as two stretch limousines with sunroofs pulled up out the front. Several good-looking guys emerged from the vehicles, carrying flowers. Karissa’s mum and older sister were taking photos of them all, everyone beaming proudly and wafting around like a Chanel No. 5 scent.
I stood there on my porch in the same discounted black dress recycled from the last formal, clutching my Salvation Army purse. I turned to go back inside the house when I heard a beep. My date’s dad waved from the driver’s seat. I sighed with dread. My cheeks burned and throbbed. I wish I could have taken the blup-blup-blup inside my cheeks and thrown it at the bottom of the poinsettia tree in the corner of the front yard. With my head down and right hand holding up the length of my dress, I quickly moved towards the vehicle, hoping that my envy and I could slip by Karissa unnoticed into the car. In the backseat, my self-pity sat imposingly beside me.
With the Higher School Certificate two years away, I needed to maximise my chance of success. For this reason, and the fact that Catholic school fees and uniforms were forcing my mother to sew longer and longer hours under dim lights, I decided to compete for a spot at an academically selective high school. The fees would be much cheaper. The biggest intake after year seven was for year eleven. One weekend I went to St George Girls High School to sit an exam in maths and English. I did well enough to earn a spot. My teachers at Bethany were sad to see me leave. I knew that my
spiritual needs were not going to be nurtured at this public school but the way that the Higher School Certificate worked meant that the marks I would get at an academically selective school would be moderated against students in the state, resulting in adjustments in my favour for my final grade to enter university.
One afternoon, just before dusk, I was at home studying when I heard the car pull into the driveway. I knew this meant my father was home. Usually he would take off his steel-capped boots in the garage and air out his thick socks before entering the house. But after some time had passed and he didn’t come in, I went out to the garage. He was sitting on a milk crate. He used my old primary school bag as his work bag. My mother would pack a lunch of yesterday’s dinner stacked inside round aluminium trays held together by a long handle that clicked in place. The bag, boots and lunch container were piled neatly around him. I looked at my father. He seemed different somehow. He was like some sort of withering creature born with a naturally sad face. He looked broken and defeated with the type of melancholy I previously heard from my uncles, which is so powerful it changes the lines on your palms.
I asked him what was wrong. He began to describe the abuse, the torment, the racism that he was subjected to at work and the placid face that he is forced to wear every day. On this particular day, a fellow worker decided to sabotage the multi-million-dollar machine my father was operating during his shift. This worker took a handful of tiny screws and threw them into the machine.
Production was stopped. Time costs money. Money costs jobs. Jobs were how you supported your family.
My father never told me what happened in the re-education camp, but I learned from my uncles that inmates were forced to denounce themselves repeatedly, chanting that they were traitors to their country. I imagined the hundreds of times my father would have been made to repeat these words. And now in Australia he was just another mute migrant. Anger, fear, resentment, pity, terror and sadness had rolled over him like waves. Finally, pushed beyond endurance, that day my father imploded. Like a crazed rabid animal he had grabbed a metal rod and headed towards the culprit to attack him. But before he could strike his target, reason took hold. What would happen to us if he went to jail? He dropped the rod along with the last remnants of his pride. My teenage heart was breaking into tiny bits of pulp as he recounted the story. Then he looked at me and said, ‘In this country I have a mouth to eat with but I don’t have a mouth to speak with. You are my voice.’
That day marked a turning point for me; I saw my future. There would be many others just like my father who needed a voice to speak for them. They needed access to justice and representation. And I realised that my father was the bravest man I knew. It took courage to walk away. It took resilience and discipline to wear a placid face no matter the hurt he was suffering inside.
Inside the house my mother had stopped sewing and was getting dinner ready. I had seen her cry silent tears. I had seen
her lose everything she owned and start again without breathing a word of self-pity or complaint. As I looked at my mother, with bits of thread in her hair, holding the fish sauce bottle over the pot on the stove, I knew I was seeing the most graceful and compassionate woman I would ever know.
That day I vowed I would do whatever I could to be worthy of being my parents’ daughter, a daughter of this family—a family that was surviving.
I was a little more comfortable at St George Girls High School than I had been at my previous schools. It was an academically selective school and enrolment at the school had not been an easy task. I discovered it was acceptable to be ambitious and to be smart. And the uniform code was less rigid than the Catholic schools I had attended; I could wear it shorter. The day before school started, my mother hemmed my dress and asked me why it had to be so short. I told her that it was the standard at this new school. The truth was that I was still as slight as a child and my boobs didn’t seem like they wanted to grow; a short dress was all I could do to look good.
One late afternoon not long after I started at St George Girls, I had stayed late at the library to do some research, so most of the students had gone. As I left and walked towards Kogarah
train station alongside the fence of another school, I saw two girls from a local public high school come towards me. Many of the students from other high schools had a strong dislike for St George girls, who they believed acted as if they were smarter and better than everyone else. As the girls came nearer, they moved towards my right. I sensed something was going to happen but didn’t react quickly enough. When they reached me, they rammed me against the steel fence, their bags heavy against my body. Then they just kept on walking. I turned around and yelled ‘Bitch!’, to which one of the girls yelled, ‘What did you say to me?’ and started coming towards me. Luckily the other girl pulled her back and they kept on walking. I was angry and confused. What had I done? Why did this have to happen to me? I walked as briskly as I could to the train station with my head down. My body burned with rage. I had to find a group that I could cling to.