We Are Here (26 page)

Outraged by the political machinations that had sentenced my family to a difficult refugee life, I wrote a letter to the editor of
Time
magazine. In it I said that especially in times of war, often truth is not what is conveyed from within a frame or from what is reported. The truth, I argued, might be found in what was not said. What was not photographed. What was not reported.
Time
published my letter.

It further cemented in me the one-sided history lessons and connection to the stories retold and relived by the Vietnamese war veterans in Australia. On each anniversary of the fall of Saigon, buses would transport people from all across Australia to Canberra, where they would stage protests outside the Vietnamese embassy. The yellow-starred red flag of the Communists would be torched along with dummies of the current Vietnamese president. Men would bring out their medals and stand to attention, clutching the old Republican flag of South Vietnam, yellow with three red lines. The yellow represented our race; the three red lines represented the three main regions of Vietnam—North, Central and South. Under this flag, the three regions would be unified. The old anthem would be sung, led by a community
leader. It was an uplifting war cry to rally soldiers, villagers and young people, and was taught in Saturday Vietnamese school, to young Buddhist groups in Bonnyrigg, to Vietnamese scouts in Bankstown, to Vietnamese Catholic youth clubs in Revesby. This anthem would be forgotten in Vietnam, unlearned and untaught to an entire generation with no recollection of the Vietnam War.

Vietnamese community leaders worked hard to hold onto their truths, their stories and their fight to free Vietnam from the Communists’ continuing oppression. The war was not over for them. It had only taken a different form.

As my senior years rolled on and studies became exhausting, Pauline Hanson began to rise to prominence. A year earlier, on 10 September 1996, while I was still at Bethany, Pauline Hanson had delivered her maiden speech in parliament after winning the seat of Oxley in Queensland. I watched in awe as she spoke of the ‘reverse racism’ suffered by white Australians as a result of Aboriginal assistance, of how the nation’s immigration policy had led to the imminent danger of Australia being swamped by Asians. I wondered, was I part of this looming sinister Asian invasion? As I watched parts of her speech on the news, her words ejected from her mouth, swirling around her in the Australian parliament before they pierced through the television screen, pricking my face and arms like the blast of a thousand icicles. I thought about my place in this Australia.

‘
Between 1984 and 1995, forty per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate. Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country.
’

My country. My country.

These two words chiselled fault lines across the nation. Lines that became boundaries separating those who could use the word ‘my’ from those who couldn’t. Insiders and outsiders. Wanted and unwanted. Australians by birth, by citizenship and by colour. Us and Them. Even those Asians who were born in Australia had to earn their right to live in this land of great opportunity. If you were an Asian sports star, celebrity chef, designer or newsreader who didn’t live in a ghetto, you were okay. I was none of these things. Nor were my parents with their fragmented survivor English.
Yes, sir. Discount. Tomorrow pay you.
It was the language of a silent working-class minority whose children were sometimes born with inexplicable hurt from another time. Another life.

Most of the major political parties criticised Pauline Hanson’s policies, which advocated a return to economic protectionism via the reintroduction of tariffs and the abolition of multiculturalism. Her provocative maiden speech divided the nation, but the prime minister of the day, John Howard, refused to publicly denounce her policies. Disillusioned by this lack of critical and timely
leadership, I wrote a letter to
Time
magazine condemning the prime minister for his silence. It too was published.

As support for Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party flourished, students around the nation rallied to protest. I found out that a student protest in Hyde Park had been organised. Students were to walk out of school at midday. I photocopied hundreds of leaflets and posted them on the walls of the toilet blocks at school.

On the morning of the protest, I stood at the top of the stairs of Punchbowl station, handing out the flyers to students. Some people insulted me, others wished me luck. Ever since primary school I had written my school absence notes and got my parents to sign them. When they were too busy, I forged their signatures, knowing that they trusted me to administer my own learning. I also wrote and signed most leave notes for Vinh. That day, I wrote a note excusing myself from maths class and the rest of the subjects I had that day. At exactly midday, I rose from my seat. My teacher, who knew what was going on, said all she wanted was for me to be careful. I had persuaded a handful of girls to come with me. We had made protest posters. We caught the train to the city and got off at Town Hall, where students were starting to congregate. There was a festive atmosphere. Looking around, it was heartening to see such solidarity from fellow young Australians of all races, colours and creeds. Their eyes all echoed the desperate words of ‘
my country too
’. There were riot police and horses on George Street. As we began to march, whistles, drums and chants accompanied our progress,
the sound spiralling outwards and upwards, along with our hopes for a true sense of belonging.
It is my country too
.

There were more protests as a crescendo of support for One Nation rose from farms, suburban streets and parliament. Before, during and after the rise of Hansonism, friends of mine of Chinese descent, whose family had been in Australia for five generations, were still greeted with exclamations of: ‘You speak English so well!’ The concept of what it meant to be Australian was still so rooted in the legacy of the White Australia Policy. As an Asian teenage girl growing up in Australia, decades after the policy was officially dismantled, a swirling sense of isolation and a lack of belonging began to engulf me. The ripples of One Nation developed in me a deep resentment of the white middle-class Australians who were the decision-makers, stars on popular soap operas, High Court judges, policy-makers and celebrity gardeners. I realised with horror that I had inherited my father’s mouth: a mouth to eat with, not a mouth to speak with. No matter how much I protested or studied, my screams of rage played back in slow motion to an insignificant audience. A testimony blunted and unheard.

The growing negative perception of Asian Australians, particularly Vietnamese, was further compounded by the troubles in Western Sydney. I was fourteen when Cabramatta MP John Newman was murdered. Vietnamese-born Phương Ngô, a Fairfield local councillor, was convicted of orchestrating the murder. His appeal attempts were unsuccessful. The Vietnamese community had their own theories. Later, street workers, who
had witnessed the sudden influx of drugs and the changes that would tear through the community, chatted to me about what was not reported, what was not investigated. About the subtext that only a handful of people who walked the cold streets knew. Cabramatta became known as the Vietnamese ghetto and the drug capital of Sydney. As young boys who had been placed on boats of escaping refugees grew up alone in Sydney, they banded together in a street family. In the nineties, it was said that we Vietnamese kids either became overachievers, gangsters or drug pushers. Kids from my part of Sydney lied about their address on job applications in the hope of avoiding the stifling stereotypes. In our own way, in the face of racism, sinister stereotypes and economic disadvantage as well as the usual growing pains of adolescence, we did what we could to just hold on. I was increasingly beset by feelings of confusion, hosting a dormant squalor of anger and pain. But the effort required to keep trying, to hold on, was wearing me down. I could barely fathom the prospect of a bright future. By the beginning of 1998, my Higher School Certificate year, I already felt weary.

We had moved again. We were still in Punchbowl, but this time on the other side of the railway tracks. Our landlords were actually our neighbours at Rossmore Avenue, who had purchased an investment property. The day we moved in, my mother dreamed about the spirits of the house. She saw a vicious murder of Aboriginal people taking place. The pain and the cries, still fresh, clung to the frame of the house. The spirits, torn into sharp shreds of bitterness, mourned in the roof, in the
windows, in the floor. The rent was cheaper there and it was all we could afford. Because we knew the landlords we hoped that they would be kind to us. We had to stay. But my mother knew that the house was cursed. During our short time in that dim house, a series of mishaps occurred. My mother fell down some steps and was on crutches for months. Sewing was excruciating. My father became sick. After almost fifteen years of working as a machine operator, he was forced to stop work. Vinh’s asthma flared up and I grew ever more tired.

The Higher School Certificate was a blur. I didn’t go on the year twelve boat cruise or to any of the major school parties. Occasionally I caught a train to the city on Thursday afternoons when we got off early for sport. I would go to Galaxy at Town Hall on George Street, the arcade games capital. I would play Street Fighter and Tekken. My favourite Tekken character was King, a Mexican luchador who cared for nothing except fighting. In fights he wore a leopard mask that made him look like a mythical lord. Later, having faced death, he was rescued by priests. In repentance he decided to build an orphanage. He enters the King of Iron Fist Tournament to win enough funds to build the orphanage. King had a wicked assembly of hybrid wrestling and martial arts moves. As I bashed on the buttons of the Tekken arcade game, I fell into the world of the screen, wrestling and kicking my way past school bullies to a charmed life.

Other than these few trips to the city, my final year of high school was a haze of late nights, Sally Morgan’s
My Place
, mathematical induction, economic history, carbon compounds and
physics equations. Occasionally I woke up drenched with sweat born of fear and anxiety, believing that I had missed the English exam. I was driven by a fierce need to succeed; success in the Higher School Certificate was a way for me to garner pride and respect for my family among both other Vietnamese families and Australian society at large. The end result was meant to be the redeeming saviour that would rid me of my demons.

I tackled assignments and exams with ferocity. My grades had been stellar since year 11. I came first in economics and maths. For the trial examinations in year twelve, I came first in English. But then it was time for the real exams. As sixty thousand students in New South Wales prepared to sit the exams, I suffered from a deep fatigue that imbued my whole being. After years of relentless effort, bolstered by rigorous study routines and spurred on by self-imposed impossible expectations, I had had enough. I had arrived at a peak and knew that the plateau had come. My energy had slowly been depleting, scattered in bits on the Bankstown line trains, buses and footpaths that had led me to the various schools and tutoring centres I had attended, every day. A strange apathy had taken over, and as I walked out of my last exam, I felt nothing.

Time went by between my last exam and the results. As I spent the days watching
Home and Away
and poring over junk mail, my apathy thawed and gave way to nervous, brittle anticipation for my results. My first university preference was to study a combined Bachelor of Social Work and Bachelor of Laws at the University of New South Wales. It was the only
university in Australia at the time that offered this combined degree. It required a score of at least 99 out of 100.

The day the results were due, I couldn’t breathe. My nerves twisted in my stomach and inside the chambers of my heart. I felt the heaviness of my parents’ thousands of footsteps through Cambodia. At times they probably felt their feet were still wet from the ground of terrorising jungles and accidental blood.

My mother decided it would be good for me to go for a swim. We drove the ten minutes to Roselands swimming pool and my mother pretended to swim while I floated on my back, with children’s playful screams echoing in my ears. I closed my eyes. The rays of the sun kissed my eyelids as I tried to breathe out the long-fermenting bubbles of pressure. My mother was calm as always. As she paddled closer to me, she gave me a look that said there was nothing more I could do; that it was up to fate now. Fate. Together with guilt and mysticism, this was the surrogate mother that raised me.

A couple of years earlier, Văn had completed his Higher School Certificate. My family trembled with happiness and Văn’s cheeks were wet with tears of joy as he peeled open the envelope to learn he had got into the course of his choice. All I wanted was the same.