The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (2 page)

Downtown Saigon is a tangle of bikes, pedestrians and rickshaws. The year is 1976 and the Vietnam War has just ended. A crowd of people wait at the end of Phu Street, where the train tracks curve sharply around a bend.

A young girl of twenty-one, dressed traditionally in long cotton pants and a commoner’s shirt, grips her bag with both hands, takes a deep breath and steels herself for the run.

The locomotive screeches into view and abruptly slows down to turn the corner. The girl and the gathered crowd start sprinting, jostling for the best positions to jump onto the slowed down train.

The girl chucks her bag into the train compartment then runs as fast as she can, trying to grab hold of the doorway. Back on the straight the train begins to speed up; she is not going to make it. The bag of snacks and fruit that she needs to sell to support her mother and five younger siblings, as well as her father and two older brothers who are locked away in communist ‘re-education’ camps, is on that train. Her family is depending on her. She keeps sprinting and makes one last desperate attempt to grab the doorway, loses her grip and her heart plummets.

Suddenly a hairy brown arm reaches out the door and grabs her elbow. She holds her breath, leaps and the brown arm yanks her into the speeding train. She stands up and straightens her clothes, picks up her bag and thanks the owner of the arm—a smiling squat middle-aged man with a cigarette where his two front teeth should be. She then starts her day’s work.

Up until 1975 when the communists took over, it was legal for traders to sell goods on the trains in Saigon. But since the end of the war the communists have made all trade that isn’t documented with government papers illegal.

The girl has just finished a sale when the passengers around her start making the coughing noises that signal the guards are coming. She sits down quickly and tries to look as inconspicuous as possible.

‘Tickets!’

She hears an unfamiliar voice; there must be new guards. She watches as one of them hassles an old man. The first thing you must remember when you start this kind of work is to give the guards some money or goods to soften their eyesight, so they don’t see the bulge on your ankle where you’ve strapped packets of cigarettes or peanuts or whatever it is you’re selling. And you have to do this ever so carefully, otherwise a real stickler-for-the-rules kind of guard might dob you in for bribery. Then you’re really in trouble, much more than if you got caught selling stuff in the first place. It is all truly frightening. A bloody and merciless war has just finished and the murky, ugly rules of a stain-covered jungle now apply. The girl knows that people sometimes disappear for no reason.

The two new guards don’t take to the old man’s offerings. The girl knows she can’t just get up and walk away, as that would bring attention to her. So she sits as still as she can, drawing back a little even, behind an old woman and her chicken cages.

Suddenly one of the guards, whose face is pockmarked, glances across and notices this young girl with her jet-black long hair and fair skin. He struts over to her.

‘Lift up your trousers!’ the guard demands.

The girl lifts up her black cotton pants to her ankles.

‘Lift them up higher,’ he leers. ‘In fact, take them off.’

Good one
, she thinks to herself.
Now I’m in trouble
.

Any young twenty-one year old girl would be scared at that moment, but this particular girl had been enrolled in a convent until earlier that year. She was supposed to be a nun by now, but the communists had closed down all the catholic churches and convents.

What am I going to do?
she wonders.

‘Oi!’ comes a voice from the back carriage. Not ‘Excuse me,’ or ‘Stand back,’ or anything noble like that. Just a very common and working-class ‘Oi,’ and it emanates from the fifty-five-kilogram frame of a skinny, twenty-one year old Vietnamese boy, with a flat nose, wonky teeth and a mop of hair that looks like he’s been sleeping on one side since he was five. He’s not particularly handsome, not tall or striking, and his voice isn’t deep or resonant. In fact he sounds a little squeaky. But what he is, is loud. And confident. And full of ‘every-one can get stuffed.’ Most importantly, he is acting in defiance of the guards and in defence of her.

She is in love.

This youngster oozes bravado and pure unadulterated certainty. He seems to lack fear. And he says to these two guards in his squeaky voice, ‘That’s not the way to treat a young lady.’

The guard turns and looks at the skinny boy and the gang of lads behind him.

‘Umm, ahhh, she was… I thought she might’ve been selling stuff, but I can’t see anything, so I must be mistaken.’ The guard lifts up the girl’s bag of goods and places it on the seat next to her.

‘I’m sorry, ma’m,’ and he hurries away.

The skinny young man tips his hat to this young lady and heads off through to the next carriage on his business.

The next day they both go back to the second-last carriage of the 4.30 p.m. to see if the other one is there. On their third meeting he buys her a lemonade and makes a young guy in the carriage stand up so that she can sit down. He does the same for old ladies and old men as well, people he doesn’t even know.

Six months later this former nun-to-be finds herself married to this outlaw, and nine months after that they become my mum and dad.

My mother has seven brothers and sisters. She was third of the eight. When the war ended her two older brothers, high-ranking paratroopers who had fought alongside American and Australian soldiers, were put into communist ‘re-education’ camps. The propaganda was that they would learn about the new way of life they would experience under the communist government. In truth these were more like concentration camps. Uncle Thanh jokes that it was like staying at a ‘minus-five star hotel’. That brown thing on your pillow wasn’t a chocolate. My uncles went in thinking they would be out in two weeks; but they were there for three years. Better than some of their mates, who never came out at all.

Uncle Thanh is Mum’s eldest brother, a softly spoken man whose gentleness masks an incredible inner strength. During his re-education the communists sent Uncle Thanh into the jungle as part of a labour gang. After several months of trudging through mosquito-infested swampland and daily back-breaking work, hacking through dense vegetation, he contracted malaria. He became delirious and passed out. The guards dragged him back to the camp jail and dumped him at the infirmary tent. They had no medicine to treat malaria.

The camp’s overworked doctor and his fifteen-year-old assistant placed Uncle Thanh on a stretcher and carried him, along with a couple of vats of saltwater, to a sunlit patch of jungle where the light was better. They yanked off his shirt and tied him spread out on the stretcher. The kid shoved a thick chunk of bark between my uncle’s teeth so he wouldn’t bite off his tongue. The doctor pulled out his rusty scalpel, dunked it in the saltwater and sliced open the prisoner’s stomach. With no anaesthetic. A sickening scream whipped through the trees.

Then Uncle Thanh passed out. He didn’t see the doctor carefully pull out his intestines and other organs from his stomach cavity and place them in the vat of saltwater. This treatment was supposed to sterilise the organs and purge the body of malaria. After a few minutes the doctor put them back into his stomach cavity and quickly sewed the gaping wound shut with a needle and thread, as if he were patching up a hole in his army coat.

For the next twenty-four hours Uncle Thanh hovered between life and death. He was taking up valuable space in the infirmary and the guards had to make a decision. As he looked dead enough they put him in a coffin in the makeshift morgue.

The following day a guard walked past and heard banging and shouting coming from the room full of dead bodies.

Jesus, one of them’s alive
, he thought.

He opened the door and there was Uncle Thanh lying on the dirt floor. To everyone’s amazement he survived, but at a price. The operation left him infertile.

Uncle Huy is Mum’s second eldest brother and he has a bigger build than Uncle Thanh. He is also the better looking of the two, if you ask my grandmother.

‘Look how white he is,’ she says, ‘. . . and tall.’ He stands at five foot six and a half.

While he was in the army, Uncle Huy’s unit was told to catch a boat upstream to a different position. The night before they were due to leave, he and some army mates snuck out and went drinking. They got completely plastered and were late waking up the next day. As they raced down to the port they saw their boat leaving.

‘We’re going to get into so much trouble for this. Why didn’t you wake us up you idiot!’ Uncle Huy yelled, smacking his mate next to him across the back of the head.

The four soldiers watched the boat grow smaller as it moved slowly out of the harbour. As Uncle Huy reached down to pull out a cigarette he heard an enormous
bang
! There was a gigantic explosion on the far side of the waterway that looked like a fireball hovering above the water. It was their boat. The friends stared, stunned and silent at the fate they had just escaped. Everyone on board was dead.

That moment affected my uncle for many years, planting the seed for his life’s calling: shortly after arriving in Australia, he entered a seminary in Sydney, took his vows and became a Jesuit priest.

My father grew up in extreme poverty. His mother gave birth to twelve children but four had died in childbirth or early infancy. Even with eight mouths to feed Grandma found it in her heart to adopt two more boys. So Dad grew up as one of ten—nine boys and one girl, who was the last child, a whimsical gift to Grandma from nature.

Many large Vietnamese families have so many kids that they give them a nickname which is simply the order they were born. My dad was the fourth born. His name is Tam, but his brothers simply call him ‘Four’. It was a system that evolved in poor villages where large families were common, and it just made things easier. When Grandma needed to get everyone in for dinner she would just stick her head out of the hut and shout: ‘Two, Three, Four, Six, Eight… time to eat!’