We Are Here (16 page)

Several times we would be called to the hospital in the middle of the night because his heart had stopped beating. The nurses asked my mother whether we would like to invite a spiritual leader to attend because it was possible death was imminent. A priest was called and he and my mother prayed together. My mother came home on one of these nights, kneeled down in front of the altar in our home, which had a picture of my deceased paternal grandfather on one side, the Virgin Mary
in the centre, both beneath a crucifix which hung politely on a nail. She decided to strike a bargain with God, the Asian way. She would be prepared to lose all her money, all her material possessions, if only she was allowed to keep her son, this delicate fragile gift. That night she had a dream. A man dressed as a priest came to her and said that he had chased away all the demons lurking about ready to take Vinh away. The priest said that Vinh would now be safe. After that night, when the bargain was struck and she awoke from the dream, Vinh’s heart never stopped beating again.

As I entered the hospital with my mother to visit Vinh a few weeks after he was born, I held onto the huge drawing I had made which was to be hung from Vinh’s incubator. It was of Vinh as a superhero with a V stamped on a crest emblazoned across his chest. The colourful picture was drawn on a sheet torn from an industrial-sized roll of paper, given to us by a friend of my father’s who worked in a paper factory. On one side, the paper was covered with a slight wax. The other had a rougher texture that made pencil marks bolder. As I scurried down the sanitised linoleum-covered hallway towards the baby unit, I held the long picture up high so it would not drag on the floor. The translucent paper flapped, hugging my body. When we arrived at the ward and I saw Vinh from across the room, he seemed to me like a mythical being that had fallen out of an epic poem, but stripped of his magical powers and needing to be nursed in the human world. His tiny body was sprouting tubes and covered in tape.

When we drew close to his incubator, my mother tapped on the glass ever so softly like a flake of falling sunlight. ‘Vinh, it’s Mummy.’ Timidly, like a little fairy, Vinh opened his eyes. My mother asked whether I would like to hold him. A nurse took him out of the glass case, an uncrying lump of stillness, and placed him in my nine-year-old arms. From that extraordinary moment on, Vinh became the most precious thing in the world to me.

For years after, I would watch over him as he grew into a young man full of unusual wisdom and integrity, with a bewitching sense of wonder about the world. As my parents busied themselves on factory floors, sitting at sewing machines, making care packages and struggling to keep us in Catholic schools, I would attend to Vinh. I would be covered in a choking helplessness as I watched him sleep, struggling to breathe, his body fighting with asthma. At fourteen years old, I took him to St Jerome’s on his first day of school. I cried as I watched him disappear into the line of grey shorts and blue shirts. At fifteen, I sewed him a Robin Hood costume with a cardboard feather taped on his hat for the Easter parade. I made him a bunny hat with chocolate eggs wrapped in gold foil inserted inside the top with cottonwool glued to the bunny’s cheeks and ears. As a teenager, I was crippled with pain when I realised he was bullied in second grade by a red-headed bully by the name of George. I drafted a firm lawyer-like letter to the school which I later discovered was passed around the staffroom. They didn’t believe it came from a fifteen-year-old. The bullying stopped.

Together we practised tying shoelaces, counting and reading. When it was time for his Holy Communion, I joined the parents’ preparation committee, attending meetings in the church after school, still in my high school uniform. I met all his teachers from primary to high school; in all his years of schooling, I missed only one parent–teacher meeting. I discussed his academic progress with his teachers and areas in which he could do better, translating for my parents when they were able to come to the meetings too.

When he got to senior year in high school, the fees became far too expensive for us to manage. I wrote letters to the school asking for assistance, which they kindly gave. I attended his Friday night debating competitions. One week, after seeing his team lose narrowly, I asked the debating teacher, who seemed to have long ago given up on this B team, whether I could coach them for a session. One evening, over pizza at Vinh’s friend’s house, we dissected the mechanics of oral persuasion and argument. Although they didn’t achieve a Hollywood-type turnaround, they improved markedly. When I attended his high school graduation ceremony at Bankstown sports club, I reflected on that day when, as a nine-year-old child, I’d first held him in my arms, his fragile heartbeat full of promise, and sensed that he was full of all that was good and pure in the world.

The community that my parents created became the very dagger that shredded and unravelled their Stitched-Together-Patchwork-
of-Possibilities. My mother had introduced a young woman to the money-lending syndicate who was a lovely sweet thing. In Vietnam, my grandmother had looked after this woman and her brother during their schooling as their parents did not have enough money to feed them. My mother called them her brother and sister. This lovely sweet thing fell in love with Duy, a recent arrival. He had left behind a family in Vietnam with a promise: one day, somehow, they would be reunited. In Australia he began a relationship with the sweet thing. She asked my mother whether Duy could join the syndicate. Although wary of his piercing eyes and syrup-like charm, my mother agreed. And so Duy joined the monthly ritual, drinking beer with the rest of the men and lavishing attention on the children which their own parents often could not.

At one unremarkable meeting of the syndicate, Duy wrote his number on the blue-lined scrap of paper, folded it and placed it in line with the others. It mocked my mother, daring her to expose its owner. My mother tells me that at that time, she knew. Her bones whispered loudly to her that sooner or later Duy would run. As he collected $15,000 and walked out the door that day, he glanced at her. His stare and her look were momentarily suspended in a magnetic field of knowing. He knew that she knew. Ever graceful, she returned to the merriment and continued to eat and laugh with the others, her cheeks flushing underneath the dermis, full of the heaviness of the Knowing, unsure how to tell my father he robbed us.

Incidents like this happened twice more. Though smaller amounts, they all added up to tens of thousands of dollars. One man who stole from us had gorgeous twin babies. He took the money and fled interstate. Later we would read in the community newspaper that he had been hailed as a hero for rescuing a child from certain death. It helped me to understand how grey the world really was, that situations and people didn’t fit neatly into discrete categories of good and bad. That the matrix of decision making is driven by the power of circumstances. That behaviour does not necessarily reflect the essence of a person, and bad decisions can be born out of desperate circumstances. But at the time of the syndicate, as a child, I was far less sophisticated and forgiving.

In the 1980s, for a factory worker and his sweatshop wife, with three children and an extended web of family in Vietnam, all of whom depended on the money and goods that were sent home, the debt seemed insurmountable. People who knew of our crippling financial debacle showed my parents how they could both work and receive social security benefits. They could fake a divorce because single-mother allowances were much better than unemployment benefits, they suggested. Or my father could seek a psychiatrist and lodge a claim with veteran’s affairs for an early Vietnam War veteran pension. But my parents’ response to all such schemes was the same. My father told us that this was tantamount to stealing. It was cheating. It didn’t matter whether the source of the money was a government, a corporation, your employer or your sister: if you did not earn it honestly, it did not belong to you. The government might not know, but you
would and your children would. Karma can be dangerous. My mother agreed. She would have been unable to set our moral compasses if her own was defective. There were many times I would find my parents’ stringent moral code frustrating and unaccommodating for the various grey circumstances in the world’s societal abyss. I would see my mother’s worldview as elementary and naive. Later, when I studied law and political philosophy, I would examine the intricate concepts of justice and rights set out by philosophers such as Kant, Weber and Rawls. But as I matured, travelled and lived through my own challenges, it was my parents’ code, ebbing and swelling in my veins, smeared on my eyelids and pasted onto my voice from the chamber of my chest, that gave me my map for life.

The coordinators of a money-lending syndicate can choose to not pay back the members on behalf of the defaulter. In fact, that is what most syndicate coordinators choose to do. But not my parents. Members invested their money. Risk, borne by my parents, was theoretically thinly spread because of the associations of members—to my parents and to each other. It was an interdependent order of mutual opportunity and benefit, governed by Vietnamese, familial and human rules of trust. When my parents had decided to accept Duy into the syndicate, my parents reasoned they were accountable to the members.

Later, when I was old enough, I asked my parents why they didn’t just tell the other syndicate members to each go after Duy for their cash. This was not unheard of; there were even organised gangs who hunted syndicate defaulters. But I learned
that the members placed their trust in my parents because they were worthy of respect. They were worthy of respect because they had integrity. It was another illustration of the code. My mother had made a pact with God, she reminded me; she had been willing to trade all that she had for Vinh’s life. What we were to lose was only money, only impermanent possessions. There are far more important things in life. Things that could make your heart ache and things that could make your soul weep with joy. The most important legacy you could leave your children was how you chose to live your life: the legacy of a good name and a moral code that lived in every unspoken gift-wrapped word given to strangers, from a dried mandarin from a gentle old tailor to a sarong from a Cambodian man. In time it was all supposed to come to me.

‘Good things happen to good people,’ my mother counselled.

‘But the happening of the good things takes so long.’

‘Everything will come if it is meant to. Trust me.’

No matter how my mother rationalised her actions at the time, with the debt that Duy and the others left, the community melody that had once bounced had become split. It fractured, blending into a flat black tone until it was a big Nothing. The big Nothing left a wound that for years and years frayed at the edge of my father’s consciousness. Another wound to slip into his album which clung to his knees and fingertips like pollen.

To pay back everyone in the syndicate, my parents sought personal bank loans. A recession hit the economy, and interest rates began to escalate and compound like persistent layers
of soot. My mother, grim-faced and pale, sat in numerous bank offices in petrified silence, uncertain as to whether the loans would be granted. She sewed day and night in the newly constructed house and workshop in the backyard while tending to her newborn baby. Suns, stars, moons and skies blended together into a whirl of machine pedals and fine fabric residue.

My parents had planned for a long time to bring my maternal grandparents and my paternal grandmother over to Australia for a visit. In the middle of all their troubles, the visit could not have happened at a more distressing time. Vietnam was still struggling with the legacy of Communist reforms, on the cusp of opening up to the rest of the world. It was unusual for ordinary Vietnamese people to travel overseas at the time, much less those who were old. A bus had been hired to carry forty or so of my relatives out to the airport some sixty kilometres away from Gò D
u to see off my grandparents. My parents did not want to alarm their families about the financial situation. Rather than cancel the planned visit, they donned masks of contentment and welcomed my grandparents to Australia. They were to stay for a few months.