We Are Here (30 page)

David did Vietnamese martial arts at the Police and Community Youth Club in Cabramatta, as well as tae kwon do in Fairfield. He competed at various venues across the state. I would sit for hours in stadiums, trying to study while waiting for his matches to begin. Sometimes it would be over in the first three minutes. During that brief time while he was on the mat, I held my breath, hands clasped as cheers rose and flared around me. I followed each back kick, front kick, axe kick and punch in a trance-like gaze, brimming with anxiety. As each move sliced the air or thumped the opponent, the ravenous edges of a possible knockout or serious injury clung to my palms. At the end of the rounds, whether he won or lost, relief flooded through me like a cathartic baptism.

Clubs from all over the state competed. Their uniforms were embellished with markings of their clan, their territory whether from Penrith, Kensington or Bankstown. When he wasn’t fighting, David would sit with me, identifying key competitors, their fighting styles and weaknesses in a running narrative. There were clubs with predominantly Asian members, others whose members were mainly of Middle Eastern descent and clubs whose membership was a mixed bag. Each competitor had their own preparatory ritual before a fight. Some would find a quiet space to meditate. Others would listen to the
Rocky
theme song.

At the beginning of the competition, the arena was infused with frenzied excitement. Masters and sometimes grandmasters would be present in watchful Mr Miyagi form. There were versions of the Karate Kid pacing about the stadium. People competed for different reasons. Although they came from all over Sydney, when they walked onto the mat wearing their headgear and chest guards, they were simply red or blue. Not Tran, not McGregor, not Habibi, not Kalinowski. Academic, criminal or driving records did not matter. It was in these circles that David discovered a liberating sense of fairness. The arena was a chance to escape the media’s scathing representation of Vietnamese men, to block out the death of his uncle and the pain of watching his friends fall. The arena often became his only haven of safety. Of truth.

David’s friend Phong had moved out of home to live with his cousin, Bobby, and we would sometimes hang out at their place in Cabramatta. Bobby was a former heroin addict who had been jailed for supply when he was caught dealing drugs to support his habit. As a kid, he, his brother and mother had boarded a small boat with other refugees. Like countless other boats, theirs was attacked by Thai pirates. It is likely that all the women were raped. His mother did not survive. Magically and tragically, the two little boys made it to Australia. For the most part, the two orphans lived on the unforgiving streets, where they found others like themselves. They grouped together. A family by choice. With no one to cradle them, they supported themselves by selling drugs and almost inevitably became addicted to them.
Bobby did his time and got clean in jail. I took to him straight away. His eyes were kind. His crooked teeth and mole on his chin charmed me.

Bobby worked with Phong in a factory in Bonnyrigg, a suburb within the Fairfield local government area. But as things started to disappear from their house, we began to suspect that the white lover had come back to haunt him. Bobby ended up back in jail. His brother, too, spent substantial time in jail, and fell afoul of the stupefyingly inhumane immigration laws. Bobby’s brother Matthew was a permanent resident of Australia with a broad ocker accent and only a scant Vietnamese vocabulary. At the time, the government had a policy of deporting permanent residents who were convicted of crimes. This applied no matter how long the resident had been in Australia and no matter how old they were when they arrived. Thus, despite Matthew having spent most of his life in Australia, when the immigration department realised he didn’t have Australian citizenship they transferred him from jail into an immigration detention facility to be deported back to Vietnam—a country he had left when he was ten years old. Matthew waited in detention to be sent to a foreign land where he knew no one, where he had no life map and where he had no way back. Ironically, the detention centre was Villawood, the place where my family was clothed and fed and treated with humanity and compassion when we first arrived in this new land. Where we were nourished back to life.

Meanwhile, David’s friends were sick of giving second chances to Bobby. He found himself alone and desperate. All of his
life, he had held onto one possession that had belonged to his mother: a bracelet. It was his only physical connection to her; a way for him to imagine an embrace from far across the Pacific underneath the stars over the South China Sea. But soon the bracelet found its way to a pawnshop to be placed among other discarded, used jewels. Just for one more hit to seek comfort from this unquestioning mistress, injecting himself somewhere under a cone of light. As the fluid circulated through his body, the wallowing ache of a missing mother and the impending goodbye to his brother would fade.

For a while we didn’t know where Bobby was. I knew that he would occasionally drop by an outreach service in Cabramatta, so I went there and gave the street workers a bit of money to buy him some food when he next came by. The last I heard he was doing well. He was clean and had met someone, although his girlfriend’s mother disapproved and was doing everything she could to sabotage the relationship.

It’s been a long time now. I’ve lost contact with him and don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. But I still remember his kind eyes and his crooked, lovely teeth.

Vinh had a friend, Sơn, who lived near us. Sơn and his sister had come to Australia also alone as minors. When I found out about the deportation of permanent residents, I asked Vinh’s friend whether he had citizenship. He had no idea. After a few enquiries, we found out that Sơn did not have citizenship. He hadn’t known he needed it. He’d been able to get a driver’s
licence and go to vocational college without it. I urged him to begin the process to get formal citizenship as soon as possible.

On the next Australia Day, Vinh and I accompanied Sơn to the citizenship ceremony at Bankstown Council Chambers. There was no one else to celebrate this day with him. As he stood there, making the Australian Citizenship Pledge among African, Lebanese, Vietnamese and British migrants, I questioned how a nation could sanction the deportation of permanent residents. I looked over at Sơn, a quiet floppy-haired young man with a tender heart who later on would become a bus driver, get married, pay taxes and have a daughter. He would struggle to ensure that his daughter’s cleft palate would be repaired. He, like Bobby’s brother, had spent his formative years in this country. It seemed to me that as a society we were responsible for him, whether he became a doctor or drug dealer. His failure was our failure. To legislate to deport our disappointments but laud migrant successes as legitimate Australian stories was nothing less than cowardice. The words of Pauline Hanson drifted back to me.
My country. My country.

One evening when David was at my house while I was working on an accounting assignment, he had a call from one of his friends who was in some sort of fight; guys were throwing bricks at him, he said. Immediately, even though he was dressed in his best fake Nautica shirt that I had bought him in Cabramatta, David got into his car to drive the five minutes, past scatterings
of fast food joints and petrol stations, down the Hume Highway to Chullora.

I lay on my bed, overcome with helplessness and fear, listening to the hands of the clock ticking and the sound of clinking dishes from the kitchen. My gaze roamed my room restlessly, looking at book titles, at the handles of my drawers, at the red and blue curtains I had sewn myself. I tried to picture the fight scene in my head. Finally David returned. The back of his shirt had been sliced from collar to hem and there was blood on his sleeve from a deep gash on his forearm. He had it stitched up at a clinic that night and the next day we went to university as though nothing unusual had happened.

There were a lot of loose groups around at the time. Some called themselves gangs, some didn’t. Some named themselves, some didn’t. As far as I knew, only very few were involved in organised crime. Most so-called gangs were just bunches of guys who had something to prove and a confused mix of pride, testosterone and a lack of direction. They would cluster around Bankstown train station with dyed fringes and bad attitudes. Insignificant misunderstandings between the groups where it would be too humiliating to apologise would escalate into feuds. The feuds festered, fed upon themselves and grew into wild centaurs. Sometimes they would be passed onto younger brothers. While in high school, David and his mates used to also sit around at Bankstown train station. They weren’t part of a gang, they were just hanging out, sometimes calling out pick-up lines to passing schoolgirls. Some sort of misunderstanding
occurred between them and some other guys. Chest-thumping swelled and threats were made. Although time had passed, the tension still simmered and lay like dormant landmines.

I had just got home from class and David and I were about to go out when he got a call. As he held the phone against his ear, I saw his eyes grow wide. The air froze as I recognised the nervous grind of his molars. After he finished the call, he looked at me and said, ‘Phong just got shot. I don’t have the details. I just have to go.’

I stood in the doorway and watched as David ran to his car. With unflinching precision, he rapidly reversed down the driveway and sped away.

Phong had been shot outside a club in the city. He spent the next three months in hospital. Although he survived, the bullet remained in one of his arteries as the surgeons deemed it too dangerous to operate. The movement of the bullet was unpredictable. Each day that he was alive was a gift. After he got out of hospital, we would sit in his backyard as he told us how he had a tube up his penis most of the time. One of the boys asked whether he got extra sympathy from the nurses and whether they were hot. We laughed and drank VB well into the night. I would witness drunken moments when the boys, almost tearful, would say how thankful they all were to be alive. To be together and to have each other. For all of us, we shared the grit of our working-class Western Sydney lives, the journeys of our parents to this land and the knowledge that more often
than not the odds were against us. It forged a solidarity that ran silent and free.

As the media revelled in the drug issues of Vietnamese-dominated Cabramatta, current affairs show
60 Minutes
decided to hold a forum in the heart of darkness. At Cabramatta RSL, lights were set up, boom operators positioned themselves and the host, Ray Martin, checked his hair. People from the local community were invited and strategically placed in certain positions. There were small business owners, and sports and community club representatives. State MP Reba Meagher sat on one side of the room and a representative from the opposition Liberal Party sat on the other. Reba Meagher had been drafted into the seat of Cabramatta by the Labor Party after the shooting of John Newman. She was supposed to represent Cabramatta but she did not live in the area. Instead she lived forty-five kilometres in the expensive beachside suburb of Coogee. The Vietnamese community called her a stepmother.

At the time, I had started to engage in community development with the Vietnamese community, mainly through drug education. Community leaders asked me to attend the televised forum. It would be good to air the perspectives of young people of Vietnamese background. So David and I went along to the event, which was sensationally titled ‘Law and Order’. It soon became clear that the forum was carefully scripted, with predetermined questions asked of certain people. The footage was then edited so as to present Cabramatta as a divided community. The theme of law and order—or, it was implied, the lack thereof—meant
that the policy response was geared towards a one-dimensional problem, and centred around more police, more cameras and tougher sentencing laws. What a boring, tired and predictable analysis! I was sickened by the transparently political approach. I stood up and volunteered an alternative perspective.

‘This is not only a simplified law and order issue. It involves health, education, unemployment, settlement and youth issues. It’s more complicated.’

But before I could continue, the host, Ray Martin, interrupted to show the forum video footage of a violent assault captured by closed-circuit television cameras. At the time, nobody realised that the footage had been shot many years earlier. After a small business owner voiced his views about Vietnamese young people, David stood up. His understandable defensiveness hampered his ability to articulate the deeply layered and complex issues facing us. What ensued seemed to be an argument between him and the small business owner. Not surprisingly, this heated confrontation made it into the edited broadcast.

Leaving the forum, David and I felt the same sense of anger and frustration that our voices had been muted. That our community, the Vietnamese community, as well as the Cabramatta community, had become fodder for ratings. We had been manipulated by journalists who wanted to prove themselves brave enough to venture into a politically charged and dangerous part of Sydney. Television producers dramatised community issues and exploited our stories. Our local member of parliament didn’t even respect us enough to live in the area she
purported to represent. The truth was complex and unsavoury. Nobody wanted to know the truth.