We Are Here (33 page)

This man stood quietly among other old soldiers, now with greying beards and calluses on their palms from driving forklifts, containing the memories and conviction reserved for this annual release. It was an emotional display of a community’s grief that was far from subsiding. Just like revolutionary causes all around the world throughout the ages, indifferent to the currency of the political ideology, the young were central to the potency and continuity of the cause. We were needed to ensure that even as time passed, the cause remained. The war was not over until it was won, however long it took. It was our duty not to forget, to honour our parents and those who had not survived. The Communist Party of Vietnam was composed of a bunch of corrupt selfish officials who exploited their own people. It was a despotic regime. The sea of yellow flags raised sombrely before me now was a direct antithesis to the celebratory exuberant streams of red-starred flags I had ridden among only a year earlier. I didn’t know how to reconcile my feelings of membership
with knowing that the Vietnam I had visited and loved, where I had felt a powerful sense of belonging, was a country my family had fled. But that year I learned the power and meaning of a flag. That it can transform into a weapon, become a robe of glory, an epitaph or a constant reminder of defeat.

When Sydney hosted the Olympics, David and I watched Vietnam win its first-ever Olympic medal. A woman from Nha Trang, on the South Central Coast of Vietnam, won silver in tae kwon do. There was no one from the Vietnamese Australian community visible in the audience. International students from Vietnam had come to support the fighter, bringing with them the national flag. Their faces were painted red with a yellow star. They cheered loudly from the stands as they witnessed a unique moment in Vietnamese history. The international students erupted into proud but disbelieving screams, even though the fighter missed out on the gold medal. At the end we had our photos taken with the silver medallist.

A couple of weeks later, when my uncle was at our house, I described the wonderful event. My uncle had been a naval officer of the South Vietnamese government. Usually jovial, his manner was curt as he said, ‘It’s been reported in our community newspapers that the girl was bought off and deliberately lost the match.’

‘How can you trust the intelligence behind this news?’ I retorted. ‘Propaganda can be propagated by both sides.’

I took out the photos to show him, hoping that he would be proud of Vietnam’s achievement. The pictures showed
David and I posing with the medallist, who was holding up the Communist flag.

‘You should be ashamed!’ my uncle thundered. ‘How could you have stood there with her? It isn’t just a flag. Flags are not just symbols. We bled for our flag! We died for our flag! That red flag represents a victory stolen from us, mocking our humiliation, spitting on our fallen brothers in unmarked graves. Shame! Shame! What would the leaders of the community say if they saw these photos! You will destroy us!’

My face burned with confusion and naivety. I buried the photos at the bottom of my desk drawer and never looked at them again.

Throughout the years I was involved with the Vietnamese community, I learned freedom songs and the old South Vietnam Republican anthem—all banned in Vietnam now. I learned the supposed duty of young Vietnamese in our diaspora communities to rescue our brethren back in Vietnam from human rights abuses and Communism. I went to camps and surrounded myself with people who looked like me, spoke like me and told me of a greater purpose. They told me of honour, of cultural pride, of legacy, of reason. I drank in this newfound sense of belonging like a thirsty traveller in the desert. I went with the chapter president to political party dinners and press conferences and to meetings with all those who needed to woo the Vietnamese community, whether they were chasing votes or a tabloid story. I chatted with Gough Whitlam, former Australian prime minister, spoke at Parliament House on the
thirty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, shook hands with future Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, and went to Canberra with a delegation to present to the bipartisan Amnesty International Parliamentary Committee. I facilitated community workshops on the challenges facing Vietnamese children and parents, from drugs and the language barrier to generational and cultural conflict. I sat on the National Community Advisory Committee to the SBS. I was on the management board of the New South Wales Ethnic Communities’ Council—the peak non-government organisation for ethnic communities in the state. I attended countless consultations, listened to the woes of detainees in immigration detention and presented proposals for drug education reform in Canberra.

I kept overly busy with community development work, distracting myself from the loneliness I felt at university. But no matter what, at least I had David. We were still dating. While I was immersed in my community development work, David and his buddies had all bought motorbikes. The crew adored their bikes. They rode up and down the coast, and spent hours cleaning them and posing with them for photos. David would pick me up on his bike and take me to university.

We were in love. It wasn’t the expressive type of love I saw in the movies, with excessive handholding and physical affection—we were Asian, after all—but we had a deep sense of shared history and silent understanding. It was love first-generation-migrant style.

As I progressed into second year at university, I became president of the Sydney University Vietnamese Students Association. It was the year of the biannual international Vietnamese youth conference, and it was being held in Paris. All the other university Vietnamese student associations in Australia raised funds to subsidise the trip. There were concerts at Bankstown Town Hall, fashion parades in Cabramatta and raffle tickets sold to almost every Vietnamese parent and relative in Australia. Despite the fundraising efforts, I knew it was impossible for me to go. My Centrelink allowance was just enough to cover my books, train tickets and food; I had nothing to spare.

One afternoon, as David and I sat on the steps in my backyard watching the landlords’ kid play, he asked, ‘Do you really want to go?’

‘I feel like I should because I’m the president. I really want to go.’

‘Okay.’

The next day David put an ad in the paper to sell his beloved Honda Fireblade. Then he gave me the money to go to Paris.

The cheapest ticket involved flying from Sydney to Melbourne to Hong Kong to Japan to Russia to Paris. I travelled as part of a group of about thirty people who constituted the Australian Vietnamese delegation. The leg to Russia was on an Aeroflot flight. An Aeroflot plane had crashed only a week earlier. I didn’t need to know this but one of the other students kept mentioning it. The tray table was broken and kept smacking my knees throughout the flight. None of the flight attendants smiled. To
help with my anxiety, another delegate in the group gave me a sleeping pill. It completely knocked me out. When I awoke, I had a thick pool of drool on my shirt and the plane had landed. The Russian passengers clapped and cheered loudly as we shuffled off the plane—to discover that our connecting flight had been cancelled. So the Australian delegation sprawled across the floor of the Moscow airport for a few hours while we waited for someone to give us directions. We avoided eye contact with the rather gruff airport staff who strode briskly around the airport. Eventually they put us up in a nearby hotel to wait for a flight the next day. It was summer in Russia, and I was enthralled by the idea that the sun never went completely down. I stood at the window for hours, marvelling at the white and still night.

Hundreds of young people of Vietnamese descent from sixteen countries congregated in Paris. Each delegation contributed a piece to the opening ceremony of the conference, whether it was a comedic parody of a famed Vietnamese variety show or a moving protest song. For the week of the conference, we met with people who spoke Vietnamese with Norwegian, French and British accents. We exchanged stories of growing up as refugees in our host countries. We laughed, we sang, we understood. There were lectures and presentations on ways to bring democracy to Vietnam, on the role of art in the movement. A Vietnamese international student with inside information on how the Communist Party monitored its people apparently risked much to talk to us. I don’t remember what he said but I remember the security controls: once we were all seated in the theatre, the screens on
the windows were electronically rolled down until there was no more natural light and no one from outside could see in.

In a plenary workshop, a question was asked of us: what did it mean to be Vietnamese? Resilience. Excellence. Achievement. I raised my hand but posed questions instead of giving a response. I said that it was easy to think of the apparent successes of our community as a manifestation of what it means to be Vietnamese. But what of our brothers and sisters who suffered from drug addiction, or were involved in crime? Did we still think of them as Vietnamese? Did they possess the core of Vietnamese identity? I was aware of how privileged we were to be there, that we were mostly university students with the means to travel to Europe. But we shouldn’t forget the nameless others back home who were not so lucky. I thought our community development initiatives needed to look beyond the present pro-democracy speak.

The room next to the plenary theatre had been transformed into an exhibition space. During the lunch break I went inside to view the works. I was transported back home to a worn mother and long nights. On display was the work of a Vietnamese Australian photographer from Melbourne who’d photographed the sewing rooms in a number of Vietnamese homes. There were no people in the photos; instead of the usual sense of urgent activity, the rooms were eerily still as though they had violently sucked out leaving a vacuum. They were solemn chambers emanating a grave life of their own. The piles of garments frozen under a stark halogen light were too familiar. The image of Jesus Christ with His illuminating sacred heart and compassionate
eyes on the wall could have been ours. So could the chopsticks that rested on a bowl of instant noodles, beckoning an increasing call to work. Thousands of miles away, on a different continent, these photographs both comforted and confronted me. This was my story on the walls and the photographer challenged me to embrace it. He delivered to me the type of validation that comes with a published artwork carrying the core themes of one’s life. He saw me. It was an acknowledgement I had long needed. As I fell into these pictures, I wept grateful tears of recollection and relief. In that little room in Paris, it was the beginning of my understanding of the transformative and healing powers of creative art. It was a lesson I would never forget.

At the closing ceremony of the conference, a symbolic flag was handed over to the Canadian delegation, who would host the conference in two years’ time. As the music played and the delegates clapped, our spirits soared. It was summer in Paris and we were an international body of bright young students bound by a common heritage, by one race.

On Bastille Day, we roamed the streets of the city and took a boat ride on the Seine, waving huge yellow and red-striped flags. In hindsight, it was bizarre that we chose another nation’s day of pride to display ours. Nevertheless, riding on a high of unity and belonging, we celebrated.

My time in Paris solidified in me a forceful commitment to Vietnamese people—a commitment which, at the time, felt like
a natural responsibility. Beyond the uplifting celestial songs, the rhetoric and flag-waving, I wanted to examine political structures within the framework of development economics and capitalism. I wanted to explore the holistic merits of democracy for nations like Vietnam. I wanted to understand human rights in the context of globalisation. So upon my return to Sydney, I decided to discard my finance major in my Bachelor of Commerce and switch to government and international relations.

It was an intellectually rewarding choice. Finance’s random walk theory mattered much less to me than duty. But as I sat in lectures and researched for assignments, I began to see that the sentiments of the Vietnamese community were based more on hurt than rational or considered argument; that the political agenda to restore Vietnam had a lot to do with communal and individual journeys for redemption and healing as well as corrosive bitterness, robed in noble and righteous aspiration. How does one erase the memory of burying a fellow soldier alive at the order of a North Communist cadre? How does someone who is forced to flee his homeland after spending years in a re-education camp overcome the sight of his wife being raped by pirates? I would never have the answers for these men and women. I would never be able to heal all my father’s wounds. But maybe I could learn to see through the present to the forgotten pre-war days, to look past the unfathomable journeys of hurt to the man he once had been. Maybe, ever so slightly, like a feather scraping the air, I could help to heal these deep, deep wounds.