The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (10 page)

There were four class captains in the running to become the big head honcho school captain. It was a very big deal, and the four of us were to make a speech in front of the whole school at the next assembly, to tell everyone why we were the best candidate for the job. The teacher pulled us aside and told us that it was okay to get help from our parents to write this speech, as it was such a big deal. I went home and said to Mum and Dad, ‘You have to help me write a speech to become school captain.’

‘Six! Anh needs your help to write his speech.’

Uncle Six had done a couple of years of school in Australia, and at the time he was the best at English in our whole household, but this didn’t mean he was any good. Together we wrote my speech and on the day of the assembly I was ready to wow the school armed with a migrant’s second-year English speech.

That morning I was first to speak.

‘Hello School Peoples.’

‘I am Anh.’

I could hear a few snickers from the other classes, but I was determined to go on.

‘I will try for my hardest to be very friendly boy, and I will always saysing hello to all you school peoples…’

Everyone started laughing. The worst thing was when I looked down, I even saw teachers laughing. I looked across at my own teacher and she wasn’t laughing, but I could see her trying not to laugh!

I was so mad at her. I froze. I didn’t know what to do. It was almost like time stood still. In that moment I just totally blanked out and forgot what to say next.

The only people who weren’t laughing were my little classmates. They were on my side. Just then I heard a tiny girl’s voice:

‘C’mon, Anh.’

I looked down and there was Karen, an eleven-year-old face full of support. A few of her friends joined in.

‘Keep going, Anh.’

‘I… I… should be school captains because I want to helping the students…’

I stood as still as I could, just blanking out everyone, every noise, every snicker and laugh, and saying everything that I had to say like a monotone robot. Soon it was over. Thank God. My first ever public speaking experience.

I look back on it now and I can’t even blame people for laughing. Bloody Uncle Six must’ve skipped the classes where they taught plurals and adjectives.

The boy and girl after me were much more polished and confident and then it was a boy named Edward’s turn. The guy marched up with a clipboard like he’s the governor-general or something and started reeling off words that made people go, ‘Huh?’ And that was just the teachers. All us kids were sitting there with eyes glazed over, listening to a ten-minute routine that sounded like the prime minister’s speechwriter was applying to get into Mensa. Little Tanya, one of my fellow candidates, turned to me and said, ‘I don’t care if I don’t win, as long as this guy doesn’t.’

It turned out Edward didn’t win and I didn’t either. It went to a tall kid named George who was a great choice. In all honesty I really didn’t care, but a part of me wanted to do well because I knew my father was so excited about it. Throughout primary school I had won the odd academic award but it seemed like this pat on the back for leadership qualities meant much more.

Dad picked me up from school and, after I told him I didn’t win, there was no change in his demeanour, he was just as exuberant. Maybe he knew it was always going to be a long shot. I’ll never know, but he called up everyone to celebrate anyway. We all went out and had yum cha and it was one of the biggest celebrations I can remember in my childhood.

My brother was the biggest smartarse:

‘As if they’d choose someone to be school captain who has nits.’

But my father treated that loss as if it were a win, and it was a lesson that stayed with me for a long time. If the worst happens, if you lose and fail, but you still celebrate coming second because you’ve given it a red hot go, there is no need to fear failure.

The following year, when I graduated Year 6, I was in the running to win the prize for maths. It was a big occasion in the school hall; we were all dressed up and everyone’s parents were there. They announced third, then second, then finally …

‘First: Anh Do!’

Sensational!
I thought to myself. I got up to collect my award and as I made my way to the stage I looked back and saw my father get to his feet and give me a standing ovation. All by himself. Everyone saw him stand up and they probably thought he was going to look around, see that he was by himself and sit back down. But I knew better. Not my dad. I knew he didn’t give two hoots what others thought, he was going to let his son know how overwhelmingly, beamingly, incredibly proud he was.

As I stood up on stage to have my photo taken, I looked down and thought to myself,
My dad’s a legend.

I don’t know if everyone has such fond memories of their first girlfriend, but every now and then when I hear a song by Milli Vanilli, like ‘Blame it on the Rain’, I’m reminded of my first love and waves of happy times come flooding back.

Her name was Karen. She was Vietnamese, ten months older than me, and half a foot taller. I didn’t even know she liked me until the end of Year 5. On the last day of school kids used to bring presents for their best friends, and Karen walked up and gave me a little box with some small cakes of soap in the shape of a peach and a mango inside. I showed them to Uncle Six.

‘I think she likes me,’ I said. He smiled.

‘Maybe she thinks you need a bath.’

I was very slow when it came to the boy–girl thing. Then halfway through the holidays Karen invited me and a mate over to her house in the middle of the day. She had a friend there, too, a Portuguese girl named Elizabeth. Before you could say ‘Pork and Cheese’, we were playing spin the bottle. We weren’t playing the naughty version, the one where you take your clothes off. It was the kissing variety: if the bottle spins to you, you had to kiss whoever it spins to next, unless they were the same sex, in which case you keep spinning.

I never knew the reason—maybe it was the dents in the carpet or the shape of the bottle, or maybe the gods of puppy love were just messing with my young head—but on this particular day Elizabeth and I kissed eleven times and I didn’t get my lips near Karen once. It didn’t help that my mate, a chunky little guy called Peter with an even wobblier head than me, had got to kiss her about ten times. Karen was getting visibly more and more upset, and soon she began to try to manipulate the spin of the bottle. It bumped her outstretched foot and still bounced around to Peter. She coughed and her hand bumped it around for an extra spin, and back to Peter again. She wasn’t happy and the penny
finally
dropped:
Wow, I think she really does like me!
Soon Karen got sick of her rotten luck and decided to fix things; after all, we were in her house.

‘Stop the game!’ she cried, and took me into the kitchen. She closed the door, and we pecked each other on the cheek—not on the lips. They were Karen’s rules. We were very innocent. And that was it, I became her man and it was incredibly cool for a while. For a full six months, in fact… until a silly jump rope charity came to our school and tore us apart.

Jump Rope for Heart it was called, and all the school kids had to practise skipping so our families could sponsor us with a few dollars each, which went to a very worthwhile cause. For the ethnic boys who didn’t have older sisters, it was the first time we’d ever tried skipping. It turned out, I was a natural. I grabbed each end of the rope, instinctively shuffled forward to get maximum swing, and
whoosh, whoosh, whoosh,
away I went.

I was no good at tunnel ball, hopeless at bullrush, and rubbish at all of those useful boy sports, but skipping was my forte. For a while it was great. I got a whole bunch of kudos for it, and it even momentarily made people forget the bad speech I’d given a couple of months before.

‘Wow, look at Anh. He’s a great skipper, who cares if he does speeches like an illegal Mexican.’

Karen loved it. Her man was the best male skipper in the class and she whisked me away from flicking footy cards with the boys to skipping with her friends. It wasn’t too long, however, before she figured out that I had an even greater skill than skipping… holding the rope.

After two lunchtimes of being the ‘rope boy’ for a bunch of girls, while envying my mates belting each other at brandings with a bald tennis ball, I’d had enough. We broke up. Karen was my first girlfriend and I really was quite distraught when the whole thing ended. Again, it was Uncle Six who lent a sympathetic ear and helped me through it.

For a long time Uncle Six was like a surrogate father. I learned patience and temperance from him. It was a useful contrast to the bravado and impulsiveness of my dad.

Perhaps opposites do attract because Uncle Six got along with my dad really well. In fact, he was kind of like Dad’s right-hand man. If Dad had a really important chore to be done, he knew he could rely on Six to accomplish the task.

One day, early on when the garment factory was flourishing, Dad was in Melbourne talking to the suppliers about extra units. He hadn’t seen Khoa, Tram and me for a couple of weeks, and he missed us. Tram decided to stay home with Mum, but the two boys were trusted with Uncle Six and the van, which we stacked nearly to the brim with all sizes and colours of dressing gowns—a delivery for a Melbourne client. There must have been a couple of tonne of terry towelling in there.

Khoa and I crawled into the back cabin of the van and squeezed into the one-foot gap left between the top of the dressing gowns and the ceiling. It was just about the most comfortable, and fun, bed you could imagine. About four hours into the trip, we were zooming along on the highway when Khoa and I were awoken by a gigantic, very scary
BANG!
The van had careened out of control, and the two-tonne weight in the back was making it even harder to get it back on the straight. There was a screeching of tyres and then an abrupt
THUD!

Uncle Six managed to keep his cool and carefully guided the van to the side of the road, stopping it safely by ramming it into a huge boulder. Khoa and I crawled out to see Uncle Six inspecting a blown-out tyre. We were in total darkness on a country road, and alone except for every once in a while when an enormous truck thundered past.

Uncle Six tried using the van’s jack to lift the truck, but the sheer weight of the robes was too much. He tried a variety of different angles and positions for the jack, but it just would not budge. So he got down on his haunches, took a good look at the whole thing and went off into the bushes. He returned with a bunch of sticks and boulders and smaller wedge-shaped rocks and started placing them around the van in a strange manner, like he was going to start a religious ceremony or something.

He got Khoa and me to hold the steering wheel still while he used a huge branch to lever the boulder that had stopped us out of the way. With the help of gravity he pushed the van forward, making it mount a smaller rock and lifting the van just high enough for him to take off the tyre. Even to me, a little kid who knew nothing about physics or mechanics, it seemed like an incredible feat.

‘How’d you learn how to do that?’ I asked.

‘Your father taught me.’

He replaced the tyre and about thirty minutes later we were on the road again.