We Are Here (28 page)

Around the perimeter of the park, marquees were erected from poles and industrial sheeting, each housing fake
Ochna integerrima
trees with lifelike yellow blossoms, the kind that only flowered during T
t in Vietnam. Lucky red pockets were hung from their branches. Kids paid $1 for a lucky dip, hoping the pocket they chose would give them a greater return. As evening fell, lines of firecrackers were lit, sending up flakes of red paper that came down like a magical curtain. Vietnamese martial arts schools had crews of lion dancers who performed amid the exploding firecrackers, dancing like fearless warriors born again from ancient times.

The festivities at Warwick Farm were the community’s attempts to preserve and celebrate sacred traditions. Despite having travelled for thousands of kilometres across treacherous seas and facing all manner of challenges in a new nation, home had come with them. For those three days in the middle of an Australian summer, on a racecourse near the Hume Highway, opposite a giant car dealership, Vietnam came to us.

Each year at the opening ceremony of the festival, academic awards were given out to students who had excelled in the Higher School Certificate. In the year I graduated from high school, the Vietnamese Catholic Youth Organisation had a food stall. I volunteered at the stall, taking orders and preparing the food. That year, I was to receive an award because I came fourth in New South Wales for English out of tens of thousands of students. I didn’t think it deserved public merit but by the community’s standards, it was good enough. There was a girl who got a perfect score of 100 for the Higher School Certificate. She was also pretty, nice
and
skinny. But I was sure she wasn’t funny. Awards were given to a set of twins who’d scored something like 99.99 and 99.95. They wore their school jerseys on stage, their scores printed on the back. Seriously.

On the day of the ceremony I stuffed a traditional Vietnamese dress into my bag, intending to put it on just before I went on stage to receive my award. The food stall was incredibly busy. I was on my feet all afternoon and didn’t realise that the ceremony had started until one of the other volunteers heard the announcements being made. I quickly got changed out the
back of the stall and looked down at my feet. I was in sports shoes. I had forgotten to pack high heels to go with the dress! Frantic, the volunteers all checked their shoes to see whether I could fit into someone’s decent-looking sandals or high heels. We walked up and down the aisles to see if there was a customer who would lend me appropriate shoes for five minutes. Finally we found something that would work. I quickly bolted across the dusty course, past miniature rollercoaster rides and through plumes of grilled-pork smoke to the back of the stage. I slipped on the shoes and got onto the stage. I was panting, my armpits stained with sweat, while my hair reeked of corn and shallots. The bottom of my white silk pants underneath the traditional
áo dài
had a visible rim of dirt. On the stage, the lights were bright. The MC spoke of the pride of the Vietnamese community residing in these young shiny hopeful stars. Our Future. One by one, the stars would collect their awards. I couldn’t see my parents in the audience but I knew that they were there. I hoped that my father would be happy. I might not have come first, but it was recognition within the community that mattered. A community that spoke his tongue and understood about afternoon and night shifts, steel-capped boots, grease and deadlines. A community that knew my result was a marvellous achievement. I was handed a certificate and a piece of 18-carat gold donated by a Vietnamese jewellery store in Bankstown. The Vietnamese know that recognition is great, but gold is even greater. When the ceremony was over, I ran back down to the stall and got changed. I gave my parents the gold and was
greeted with smiles and pats by the members of the youth group. The older women who cooked at the back laughed as I put on my sports shoes and returned the high heels to their owner. Exhausted, I went home that evening, award in one hand and my traditional dress in the other.

Just before university started, the tutoring college I had attended held an end-of-year function. I was the master of ceremonies. It was the first time many of my peers had seen me in a dress. Even to my own year twelve formal I had worn a red satin suit cheaply tailored by a Vietnamese woman who lived in Punchbowl. The tutoring college function was held at the Unicorn Restaurant above a Lebanese café in Bankstown, opposite the railway tracks. It was there that I met David, a tutor at the college. One of the games we played on the evening was a joke competition. He got on stage and told a disturbingly crude joke that he, at least, found devastatingly hilarious. He laughed profusely at his own joke while awkward groans could be heard in the room amid uncomfortable token smiles. I thought he was either brave or stupid. Since no one else participated in the competition, he won by default. David had a certain self-assurance about him and was quite solidly built for a Vietnamese guy. He was handsome and had an attractive no-nonsense Western Sydney streak. I concluded he was brave.

When David and I spoke at the event, he said he was only a year older than me. I didn’t believe him—he seemed much
older—so he took out his driver’s licence to prove it. Maybe his inherent resilience and outward confidence was groomed from time at his high school, where occasionally police sniffer dogs patrolled the school grounds. Maybe it came of being the only boy in a Vietnamese family. From wherever it had derived, it was exponentially greater than my own, and I found it very attractive.

I waited for him to call me, but when two weeks passed without any communication, I decided to initiate contact. I got his number from the college and dialled.

‘Hello? Is that David? Do you know who this is?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘Do you want to meet up some time?’

‘Okay. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’

‘Don’t you need to know where I live?’

Apparently he was also a bundle of paradoxes. He did martial arts and protected his friends in street fights, but was too shy to call a girl. We began dating. At eighteen years old I held hands with a boy, kissed and drank alcohol for the first time. As the world rapidly opened up to me under David’s loving and protective watch, I felt like a child in an expanding and infinite universe, full of delicious new experiences which whizzed around and through me like dancing dandelions.

My parents had no idea I was dating David. Around this time, we had moved from Punchbowl to Chester Hill, eleven kilometres northwest. The curse of the house we had been living in had begun to poison our minds and infect our sleep. Before
the move to Chester Hill, I scanned the Vietnamese community newspapers for rentals and conducted my own inspections before providing a final list of recommendations to my parents. I found a place one street away from David’s house. It was a clean, decent place with a granny flat where the landlords lived. My parents accepted my recommendation and we moved in.

Shortly after the move, I introduced them to David. We were both very nervous. He had a shaven head so when he prepared for the meeting he wore a beret as well as a collared shirt and sleeveless vest over the top. It took him seven minutes to walk over from his house. When he came to the door, my father took one look at him, said hello, turned around, grinned broadly and then vanished into the backyard. I was gleeful. Silent withdrawal was usually my father’s tacit approval. (But sometimes, confusingly, this move also signalled tacit disapproval.) My mother chatted to David politely, asking about his family, when they’d arrived in Australia and what he was studying at the University of New South Wales. His parents both had white-collar jobs. His mother worked for a state government department and his father was an engineer. I found it baffling that they did not sew and work in a factory like most of the Vietnamese parents I knew.

My parents knew and approved of David’s circle of friends—all Vietnamese guys from Cabramatta, Chester Hill and neighbouring Sefton. Even if they weren’t all at university, they were temple-going boys who followed Vietnamese traditions disciplined by concepts of karma and honour.

David’s house was another version of Karissa’s. The interior decoration had catalogue-worthy items like fashionable furry rugs, gold-framed mirrors, bundles of cinnamon sticks and a jacuzzi. David and his dad had extended their house, undertaking most of the renovations themselves. David was a handyman and a natural protector. For the time we were together, I was grateful to be able to defer many practical challenges and decisions to him while maintaining a facade of invincibility to my parents. For the first time in my young adult life, I felt I had someone to lean on. Someone to cradle and rescue me. The lingering feelings of being out of my depth, inadequate and alone had subsided somewhat under his watch. To me, David was a working-class Vietnamese-born knight heading a Western Sydney cavalry.

But in the first few months David and I dated, I felt pangs of envy and self-pity each time I entered his home. The leather couch, the wall of family memories, children’s drawings pressed onto plates, crystal glasses and bath salts and the softness of a stable crib pranced in front of me like a character in a musical. The raging pangs became less delirious over time, but provoked in me an aching desire to reward and heal my family with material pleasures. A house. A home. Comfort. Certainty. Security. But I was a soon-to-be university student with a government Centrelink Youth Allowance and irregular income from a series of odd jobs. Later, I set up a small floristry operation from home. Despite this, there was no way I could immediately provide for my family. I was haunted by the hardships suffered by my parents, who wouldn’t hustle and cheat like others yet were constantly
pounded by misfortune. All I could do was offer moments of gladness and specks of hope.

In 1999, a film called
Three Seasons
was showing at a cinema in Fairfield, about a fifteen-minute drive from Chester Hill. An American film made in Vietnam, it was about the poetry as well as underbelly of Ho Chi Minh City. It was Father’s Day and I did not have a cent to my name. In the nineteen years since my family had arrived in Australia, my parents had never once set foot inside a movie theatre. In Vietnam, my mother had seen only one film on the big screen. I was determined to take advantage of this rare opportunity to take my family to see a Vietnamese-language film at a cinema in Sydney. I researched a few pawnbrokers in Bankstown until I found one that offered a decent interest rate, then I pawned my Nokia mobile phone. With the money, I took everyone out to the movies. It was my gift to them.

As I sat there in the dark, I looked over at my father and my mother and saw expressions of rare pleasure on their faces. Scenes of old and new Saigon swept across the screen in gigantic form. There was the familiar roundabout at Ben Thanh market, surrounded by cyclos and conical hats. The cinema was filled with the sound of Saigon banter and Vietnamese song. We saw the places we had passed when we toured the city by cyclo, me a child of eleven on my mother’s lap. I knew that with the financial hardship we were enduring, my parents might never be able to visit Vietnam again. For nearly two hours, overdue electricity bills, stomach ulcers, misunderstandings and fiendish
sewing contractors receded through the cinema doors and waited outside like a loyal pet. As the changing scenes flickered on our faces, in the safety of the dark, I quietly cried.