We Are Here (32 page)

A few of my cousins were living in Ho Chi Minh City, studying and working. One evening, when Vietnam won a soccer match in a notable Asian competition, my cousin asked whether I wanted to ride around the city with her. I had no idea of the scene I was about to witness. The streets of the city exploded with euphoric energy, its veins rupturing into a sea of red flags. The mayhem of thousands of roaring motorbikes, each with young teenagers, grandparents and couples with babies banging together saucepan lids and plastic bottles, transformed the city into a throbbing chamber of mass patriotism. Those who weren’t riding motorbikes stood on balconies above the streets waving flags, bashing wooden chopsticks against pots, chanting, ‘Vietnam undefeated! Vietnam undefeated!’ On the back of my cousin’s Honda Dream motorbike, stuck in traffic, gridlocked on Le Loi Boulevard, both my knees almost touching the knees of other Vietnamese people on either side of me sitting on the
backs of motorbikes. Smiles beamed from every face, wrinkled and new. As the crescendos of chants swept through the crowds like a swift monsoon rain, I saw the people’s aspirations buoy them. Awaken them. Nourish them. I felt a sense of shared identity. At last I was one of Us. I looked at the people beside me and in front of me, at all the people on a tide of motorbikes that never ended. Everyone looked like me. I felt liberated by my insignificance. And I felt membership. A membership that would never be questioned. I promised myself that one day I would come back here to live, to belong and to be free.

At the end of the trip, I went back to my aunt’s house, where my father’s mother lived. My aunt asked me to go with her into one of the bedrooms. As I sat on the bed, she took out a few bits of paper from a drawer inside the wardrobe. She began to tell me about the time when my father decided to leave Vietnam. My uncle, his younger brother, had gone first, by boat. After some time, they had arrived in Australia.

‘When your father left, I asked him to take my son, your cousin. If he had stayed, he could have been forced to join the military or he would be sent far away. No one had any idea about the fate of young able men after the war ended. Your father definitely would have been punished further, if not killed. When he left, we heard nothing for a long time. If it was safe, we were all going to go. We had no idea whether they were dead or alive. We waited and waited, trying to soothe our anxieties with daily empty rituals. Then we received a letter, smuggled to us.’

My aunt showed me the note, now over twenty years old. Only a few lines were written on it. It was my father’s unmistakable handwriting, elegant and bold.

We are safe now. Extremely perilous. Do not leave.

I sank to the cold tiled floor, leaning against the wooden bed.

The urgency and fear in those words brought to me the image of a man who had barely survived. A man who had no idea about his own future and that of his nephew, wife and baby, one of their kin already lost deep in the jungles of Cambodia. I felt a sharp ache in my chest as I contemplated the fear my parents had faced, the brutality and muzzled pain they had endured. As I cried softly I thought,
I am a witness
.

The noise from my aunt’s rice mill churned incessantly like swirls of ocean foam. My aunt left to attend to some rice buyers. Alone in that room, with the old pre-war ceiling fan spinning, I stroked the paper. I was holding a physical connection to a young man who had bravely set off into an unimaginable future. A young man I longed to know.
We are safe now.

After I arrived back in Australia, I found myself driving through Chester Hill past a large empty park. After the noise and colour of Vietnam, the silence of the wide streets and blankness of the sparse parks made me melancholy. I longed for the earthy gestures of farmers and the frenzied mania of a bustling nation. I missed my aunts’ excessive fretting and the daily intrusion into everyone else’s business like it was their right. Compared to the
dense stew of Vietnam, the suburban and urban landscapes of Sydney seemed like a desolate graveyard.

With a few more months before the university year started again, I applied for some jobs. I eventually landed an entry-level claims-processing job at a large superannuation fund administrator. Excited to work in my first white-collar job in a tall city building, I purchased a cheap pale grey suit and cream shoes from Bankstown shopping centre. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was very much a New Girl Look. But soon after I started I grew insanely bored of entering data and reading through endless claim sheets. I gravitated towards the IT helpdesk guys and found myself thinking of ways to pass time. Once, I forgot to switch my mobile phone to silent and it rang loudly. The manager spoke to my supervisor, who in turn was asked to advise me on appropriate office etiquette. Such was the world of polite water-cooler conversation and stifled whispers between workstations.

When I received my first pay cheque, I decided to treat myself and David to a buffet lunch at the Sheraton on the Park, where I’d had my year twelve school formal. It was the only five-star hotel I had ever set foot in. As I moved cautiously around the food stations, a bowl with a ladle caught my eye. As I spooned the clear broth into a bowl, David came up and looked at it suspiciously. ‘I don’t know if that’s soup.’ I blushed, embarrassed, when we realised it was the container for the dirty ladle. In Vietnamese cuisine soup was normally a clear broth and so I thought the slightly murky water that the ladle was resting in was the soup.
The actual soup was in a tureen next to it. We suppressed our laughter as we shuffled back to our table, surrounded by a battalion of unfamiliar cutlery.

By the time the new university year started, I had had enough of being a cog in a giant mundane wheel of corporate routine. At orientation week, I weaved through the university club stands while the music from the band on the stage blared. Beer was drunk in great quantities from plastic cups while boys kicked footballs around on the lawn. I passed the Anime Club, Drinking Society and Evangelical Union among many others. When I found the Vietnamese Students Association I immediately became a member.

I enrolled in the same compulsory subjects. Accounting, economics, econometrics, Legal Institutions and Law, Lawyers and Justice. Somehow after returning from Vietnam, I possessed greater resolve. The paper that I turned in for Legal Institutions received the top mark and was copied and distributed as a model for all the other law students. All without going to the Intensive English Language Centre. I proffered comments in class on the moral philosophy implications of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. I debated the administration of justice. I wrote great essays in macroeconomics. However, it wasn’t long before the old feelings of isolation returned. I decided once again on a policy of disengagement with the law faculty and the student body. I attended only the minimum requirement of classes. In all my years at law school, I never once attended the weekly level five cocktail gatherings at the St James Campus in the city.

I had a friend of Iranian background who was studying for the same double degree. He was funny, politically astute and had a sharp sense of self. I met a few others who were nice enough, but none who would become good friends.

I started to become heavily involved in the Vietnamese Students Association. There were barbecues and fundraisers out in Bankstown or Cabramatta. I was one of the masters of ceremonies for a large Christmas ball that raised funds for Vietnamese refugees in a camp in the Philippines. Very quickly, I was recruited by the executive board of the official Vietnamese Community Organisation. The main office in John Street, Cabramatta, administered a range of programs funded by various state government departments, including arts and health. Under the guidance of the elected executive, the office employees coordinated community activities such as the annual T
t Festival as well as the occasional protest against political delegations from Communist Vietnam. There was a variety of Vietnamese community organisations, such as the senior citizens group, the Vietnamese Buddhist Society, the Vietnamese Catholic Society, the Vietnamese Women’s Association, the Vietnamese Scouts Group and the Vietnamese Students Association.

All these groups were eligible to vote for the executive of the official umbrella Vietnamese Community Organisation in Australia, New South Wales chapter. Anyone in the community could also register to vote. There were election ads run on Vietnamese radio and in print during the election campaigns. Each chapter executive nominates representatives to form the
federal executive. Whichever group won the chapter elections, there was always a guarantee that all the core activities of the organisations revolved around pro-democracy campaigns for Vietnam.

The anniversary of the fall of Saigon had arrived. Every 30 April, each chapter of the Vietnamese Community Organisation in Australia sent members on a pilgrimage to Canberra to commemorate the day. Countless free buses from Victoria, New South Wales and other states made their way to the front of the Vietnamese embassy in Canberra to mourn the loss of the war and protest against the current regime’s atrocities. People made protest signs and waved them along with the old South Vietnamese flag. A flag which within Vietnam is not only offensive but is buried along with the official version of history. Men who still had their medals and insignia would wear them with pride. The old fed the young with stories of horror and injustice. Musicians sang old pro-Saigon war songs while fists pumped in the air after the leaders yelled, ‘Down with Communism!’

In the first year that I participated in the fall of Saigon pilgrimage, I roamed the crowd taking photos. The image of one particular man struck me. He was small with a long thin face, high cheekbones and round eyes sunk into two oversized sockets. He looked like a man-mouse. But his face wasn’t what drew my attention. It was the way he stood. He was resolute
and proud, unflinching in the audience as speeches and songs continued throughout the afternoon. He clasped the pole of a flag with his right hand, resting it almost vertically against him. His stance remained unchanged for a long time. Nobody came to talk to him or stand with him. His reverent silence exuded a noble sadness that moved me deeply. As I looked through the lens of my camera at him, I tried to imagine his story and the thoughts that were mulling inside him. Where had he come from in Vietnam? Did he have any family? How did he get to Australia? How many others like him were there?