We Are Here (14 page)

The night was coloured a blackish blue. As I pondered how fast Santa had disappeared, I noticed my father and his friends growing more and more inebriated. My mother and I would soon come to recognise this pattern which became a motif in our lives. First there were the loud voices, followed by roaring belly laughs, and finally some sort of song. The songs all centred on the old days, on their beloved Vietnam. Afterwards, when the Past had flirted with the men and danced her way out with the smells of the night, my mother would pack away the glasses and clear the dishes. Some of the men stumbled home, others sprawled on the floor of the living room of our rented house. If my father was still conscious, my mother would attempt to scold him for drinking too much. But in his state of bliss, there was no more gunfire, no more camps, no more dirty factory earplugs, no more day and night shifts. All that was left was the peaceful hymn of a temperamental river in Gò D
u, far, far away.

It was 1984. We had been in Australia for four years but we still didn’t have enough money for a telephone because the monthly landline fees were very high. Every single surplus dollar was sent back to nourish our relatives in Vietnam. Aching with the need to hear the voices from a distant homeland, my mother went to the post office to send a telex to the family in Vietnam to arrange a date for a phone call. Ten family members in Vietnam travelled for an hour and a half from Gò D
u to the ornate French-built post office in Ho Chi Minh City, the only place within a day’s travel that had telephones permitted for international connection. Hundreds of people came from provinces all over South Vietnam to wait for their One Phone Call. They sprawled on the ground, floating in and out of sleep, eating the small packets of food they had brought, too scared to move in case they were called. Hours went by. In Sydney, we gathered at the home of a friend who owned a telephone. We dialled. In Ho Chi Minh City, the family was called. We were connected. The muffled voices and sobs of relief, nostalgia and joy seeped through the crackling line. Through tears, my mother yelled, ‘Stop crying! We’re wasting the minutes!’ But no one was able to adhere to this instruction. Even if it were merely cries, for a few brief minutes, my mother could hear the cherished voice of her own mother through the telephone’s umbilical-like cord. She could imagine the humidity, the shards of green rice and the malnourished frames of her brothers and sisters. It had been five years since she had heard the voices of her siblings and the slur of her mother’s speech from years of chewing betel nuts.

My father trembled as he spoke to his mother. They were both more softly spoken than the relatives on my mother’s side.

That first telephone call knocked at the deep yearning for home that my parents buried daily. It was as if they had awoken from a restless slumber in this new Australian life. And when the receiver was replaced in its cradle, the silence ravaged them.

My parents continued to work hard and their thrifty lifestyle enabled them to accumulate some money. They found a small business for sale: a shop selling newspapers and magazines. My mother’s entrepreneurial flair had resurfaced, and the loans and papers had all been processed; all they needed to do was sign. But on reflection, my mother told my father that she couldn’t do it. Her children needed her, and if they bought the shop, it would absorb all her time and her attention on us would drift. No. We had to stay close together for as long as possible. This new home was a big world of Australian uncertainty and she wanted to be there for us, for as long as she could.

But to my distress, it wasn’t possible to remain always and forever in my mother’s company. Reluctantly, I started preschool with fears of all-encompassing abandonment. I was to be left in the care of smiling Australian ladies with blue eye shadow and permed hair and I was terrified. I didn’t speak any English and I couldn’t even tell them I wanted to go to the toilet. But my squeaky sandals made me braver. They made a noise with every step I took so my mother would be able to hear me. Văn, who was
always strong and fearless, left preschool for St Brigid’s primary school. We were both to be in Catholic schools for most of our primary and high school education. With our baptisms came my parents’ relentless determination to school their children at expensive Catholic schools. Like their parents before them, our parents were firm believers in the value of education. They were determined that we would go to good schools, no matter what the cost. Jesus would help us.

CHAPTER 4

An Australian dream, a Vietnamese garden

After several years of sewing garments, day and night factory shifts, and Vietnamese prayer, my parents had saved enough for a deposit on a house. My mother had a cousin who was living in Punchbowl, a suburb ten kilometres southwest of Marrickville. The cousin had left Vietnam by boat and arrived in Australia a few years earlier. Eager to be close to family, my parents bought a house in Punchbowl on Beauchamp Street. We pronounced it Bee-chum and none of us ever figured out where the punch bowl of Punchbowl really was. I loved our five years there. The house represented our piece of the Australian dream. There is a photo of us all standing out the front: my mother and father, H
i and my uncle, the poet, Văn and I. We are all proudly
perched against the café latte–coloured Datsun 120Y my parents had bought when we moved to Punchbowl. The car is parked behind my uncle’s 1979 mustard-coloured Corona. My mother is wearing a second-hand jumper with a picture of Halley’s Comet on it and my father has a Clark Gable moustache. I am in pink patent leather shoes far too large for me. I remember begging my uncle to buy me those pre-loved shoes at the Flemington flea market one Saturday morning. In the photo, the sun is shining. My father has his hands on his hips and is standing tall, holding in his pockets Stitched-Together-Patches-of-Possibility. Dreaming just enough.

The house was on a quiet leafy street. It had whitewashed walls and our number was painted white inside a black oval on the right-hand side of the entrance. My father planted hydrangeas, bougainvillea, poinsettias and daisies in the front garden, which had a concrete path that curved into the patio. On the left was a side entrance leading to the backyard, which was enclosed by a tall white picket fence. The yard at the back was an enormous wonderland. My father decided to grow his little patch of Vietnam all the way at the end of the yard in the right-hand corner. There were clumps of lemongrass, mint, shallots, purple perilla leaves and coriander, as well as orange, lemon, peach and banana trees, and vegetables on vines that climbed, sprawled and twisted into themselves. It was an enchanting plot that he was proud of. The vines and tendrils created a substantial canopy over the few square metres. I would pass through an imaginary wall and find myself on the other side, emerging underneath a
cool shelter of lush leaves with webbed rays of sunlight filtering through. I would stand on the naked earth, perfectly raked, ready for me to ruin. There is a photo of Văn standing in the garden. He must have been about eight. He is wearing brown corduroys, a white striped shirt and a broad smile. His right arm is outstretched and poised, his hand cradling a cluster of fruit—the first of the season.

We had seven cats. They kept breeding. We had no idea about desexing. Occasionally as the darkness descended on a thick summer evening, my mother, father, Văn and I would pack the Datsun. I would be clutching a few of the scrawny kittens, pacifying them in the backseat with tender strokes. Every now and then my father would hear a yelp from me as the kittens clawed into my hand. We would cruise through the unlit streets of Punchbowl like stealth hunters. Sometimes we would lurk in the surrounding suburbs. When my father spotted a backyard he deemed dark enough he would slow down the car. But I always argued against the first choice, declaring it was not a good enough home. When we finally settled on a place, I would hold my breath, my heart smacking against my chest, as we dropped the meowing kittens over the fence. But no matter how long it took, sometimes many months, they would always find their way back home.

The childless couple next door adored me. The wife would watch me play. She told me she had had seven miscarriages, though at the time I didn’t understand what a miscarriage was. She tried to explain it to me over the fence one day. I couldn’t
understand how a baby got inside a tummy in the first place, and then how it could disappear. Did it explode into a thousand bits of glitter? I shrugged and went back to playing Monkey Magic with Văn.
Monkey Magic
was a TV series on the ABC based on the sixteenth-century Chinese novel
Journey to the West
and featured a monk, a pig monster obsessed with lust and gluttony, a water monster who was a reforming cannibal and a magic monkey. Together they went on a pilgrimage to fetch the Holy Scriptures, battling demons and monsters along the way. The Japanese-produced show had been dubbed into English by the BBC. Văn and I were fascinated with the stream of crazy characters and jumped around the backyard with broomsticks, doing karate chops and spins. Văn and I were always going on adventures. We would sneak down the back laneway and slip through a gap in a neighbour’s fence to steal berries from a tree.

As we settled into our own glimpse of Australian dream, my parents still carried their old home with them in their mouths—from conversation to cuisine. Inside the house, we spoke, ate and lived Vietnamese. Sometimes when I got home from school I would be greeted by two little black and orange moths on the doorstep, both comfortably perched on the incline facing one another. I would step over them and head to the kitchen, which would be filled with the aroma of fried salted lemongrass fish. I would hover around my mother like a kitchen god’s silent prayer. I would tell my mother over the sizzle of fish that the ancestors had come to pay us a visit and she would
remind me never to step on them. To this day, I’ve never crushed a moth—just in case.