We Are Here (38 page)
Authors: Cat Thao Nguyen
‘What if I married a white person?’ I asked my mother one day when I was driving her to go grocery shopping. I hadn’t yet told her about Brendan.
There was a contemplative silence as we pulled up at the red light.
‘Your father and I have been in this country almost as long as we lived in Vietnam. As long as you are really happy it would be fine.’
‘What about Dad?’
‘Dad will be okay.’
I felt her disarming sense of grace and was overcome with admiration for my mother’s ability to adapt and to change. In that moment, thoughts of Brendan faded as I became overwhelmed with an indescribable love for my mother. I saw the core essence of her being and how we had come to be. As survivors.
It was a cool February day. As usual, buses, trucks and modified sports cars thundered past our house on Chapel Road, Bankstown. The volunteers at the Salvation Army store down the street had put out the furniture for sale. Students were waiting at the bus stop several houses down. Inside our house, my family was getting ready. My father put on his only suit, a white collared shirt and the same navy blue tie he wore to weddings, funerals, graduations and major church events. He put on the cufflinks bearing the United Nations logo which I had bought for him at the UN souvenir shop in New York. My mother was dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt with a frenzied disco pattern straight out of the 1980s, charcoal-grey trousers and black sandals. Some part of her ensemble always included items from St Vinnies. I looked at my tired, ageing parents. My
father with his hair-sprayed comb-over and greying eyebrows, and my mother, make-up free (as she never learned how to apply it), and in her effort not to look like a peasant, presenting herself to the world as the queen of Western Sydney. This was their Best Dress. This was the day their daughter would become a lawyer.
We parked the car at Bankstown Sports Club then walked to the train station. I noticed my father was still wearing steel-capped heavy shoes from his factory days. He had shrunk visibly in the last few years. His $3 glasses, still with the +2.0 sticker on them, hung defiantly on the wrinkled bridge of his nose.
I had decided that, for the occasion, I was going to buy leather shoes for the first time in my life. I deserved it. My new high heels clicked noisily on the tiles of Bankstown station. A few workers, students and shoppers were clustered around the bottom of the stairs. My parents and I rarely travelled to the city together. The only occasions I could recall were when we had relatives visiting from overseas. We’d take them to town to show them the opera house and harbour bridge from Circular Quay. None of our visitors ever saw
inside
the opera house. We always stood outside on the steps and took photos of the white sails until the visitor complained they were cold—even in summer.
We sat down on the blue benches at the station platform. I wondered about the first time my parents caught a train in this new land, all those decades ago. With a young family and no car, in an effort to save money on groceries, each weekend my parents had pulled a shopping cart across several train lines to reach the wholesale fruit and vegetable market at Flemington.
They became familiar faces to the Vietnamese farmers who brought their produce there with barefoot children clambering under the tables and fighting with each other as their parents struggled to make a living.
The train arrived on time. It was a newer train with air conditioning and fabric seat covers. The sun shined slightly as we began our ride to St James station. It was going to be a good day.
The familiar stations on the Bankstown line rolled past me as they had thousands of times before. So did the landscapes of our life in Australia. We passed Punchbowl station, dotted with the multicultural faces of mothers pushing prams unbalanced by groceries. It was the station where I used to watch the rats weave in and out behind the takeaway store while waiting for a train to my first high school. Punchbowl was where my parents had saved enough money to buy their own piece of Australia. It was where they established a stake of pride which hosted my grandparents’ single visit to Australia, only to see our optimism smashed as we lost our home, desperately clinging onto our dignity. I recalled the day we moved into a room in my uncle’s rented home and my father’s unbearable snoring as all five of us were packed into a bed. It was in that house as a young teenager that I began to comprehend my parents’ desperate struggles. I saw the unequivocal urgency and pain in my mother’s face as she sewed night and day, even after the death of her mother. I witnessed the anguish of abuse that my father suffered on the factory floor. As a child in that Punchbowl house, I felt abandoned to look after my baby brother whose incessant crying
pierced at me as my parents worked hard to deliver the garments. It was in that house that I felt I was truly alone and the world did not let me dream.
We whizzed past Lakemba station. For years I had alighted at that station to attend MacKillop Girls High School every day. We went past King Georges Road and the Cao Đài Holy Temple where my grandmother’s death ceremony was held. We passed the street where Văn attended tae kwon do practice. From my seat on the train I could see Lakemba Library. It was there where, at thirteen, I literally ran away towards the station from my first crush after he said a simple ‘Hi’. Lakemba station was where I witnessed constant bouts of tension bordering on violence. I recalled the aftermath of the bloody battle between students and their red-stained school uniforms. It seemed like a long-ago, faded memory.
A few stops later we reached Marrickville station. An old man with heavy grocery bags sat waiting on a bench. Marrickville was the first place we settled in properly after our time at the immigration hostel in Villawood. I remembered the flats we’d played around opposite the station. This was where neighbours had taught my mother to sew and from where my father walked every day to work in a factory instead of catching the train, in an effort to save money. The place where we’d had the first Christmas I could recall, with a disappearing Santa and the smell of beer puncturing the air. There was a makeshift manger for Baby Jesus made of discarded brown paper and industrial netting from my uncle’s factory. The men would drink and sing
and wallow in nostalgia. Marrickville was a time of relief from war but being there brought with it the pressure to navigate our way through a strange new land. It was the place of my first memories: the frightening world of preschool, meeting my moustached uncle and my mother escaping my frantic grasp to go to work.
We pulled into Sydenham station, a major interchange which serves the inner west, Bankstown and eastern suburbs lines. The foot traffic is a mix of working class, students and young professionals. As we pulled into Sydenham station, I saw an Asian girl in a high school uniform sitting alone, waiting for her train. She was small with an oversized bag. She was gazing into the distance, and I was reminded of myself so many years ago, sitting on the same bench. Waiting for the future. A wilderness beyond the imagination of my teenage burdened self. This was also the station where, in my final two years of high school, I had changed trains from Punchbowl for Kogarah to attend St George Girls. Each morning, a few Vietnamese girls and I had met in the third carriage from the end and bantered about school, boys, parents and the formal. Each morning, we got off the train at Sydenham and pulsed up the stairs along with the torrent of alighting passengers. We descended to Platform 6, huddled together in our short skirts, stealing conspicuous glances at the Catholic boys in blazers. Despite our frivolous gossip, the unremitting mantra to pursue academic excellence was silently sung and always hung around us refugee children, like the end notes from a choir.
Those last two years of high school blitzed past me. I was still an awkward girl, unsure and unsteady. I tried with all my might to be the best but before year twelve ended, my shoulders began to droop with the burden of responsibility and familial duty. Knowing my parents had bigger issues to deal with and knowing the world they understood had clear boundaries, I didn’t have the solace of sharing with them trivial matters like friendship feuds or how I should tackle school assignments.
As I remembered my teenage self, I was baffled at how I came to be here today, sitting on this train with my beloved parents beside me, on our way to the New South Wales Supreme Court.
As the train slowly pulled away from Sydenham, we could just make out the skyline of the city.
‘Mum, can you see Centrepoint Tower?’
‘Where?’
‘Over there!’
I looked at my mother, straining to see the iconic building. A worn but proud woman who’d spent the most youthful and vibrant years of her life religiously at the sewing machine, hoping that this day would come. A day once so unreachable.
As we passed through St Peters and Erskineville, the houses got smaller and the streets got tighter. New inner-city apartments were being erected for young professionals who all dressed in the same hipster uniform—even on weekends.
We are now arriving at St James station.
Suddenly, the old iron railings and vintage advertisements of Arnott’s biscuits and NRMA insurance appeared as our train pulled in. The green
trim of tile followed the tunnel to the surface like a steady snake. The echoes with the footsteps of business shoes, high heels and aspirations fluttered through the narrowness. St James station: home to Sydney University’s law school campus and the historic New South Wales Supreme Court. We walked up the platform and slid our tickets into the machines. My parents hesitated, revealing how unaccustomed they were to train travel. Their Vietnamese voices reverberated in the dull tunnels winding upwards and outwards. We walked through the tunnels, past the sleeping homeless man, and I wondered where Gus, the saxophone player, was today. His sounds had kept me company so often. I recalled his encouraging words when I shared with him how despondent I felt each time I went to law school. He always gently reminded me of simpler things to hold onto and appreciate—how lucky I really was.
We went up the flight of stairs ascending to street level. With each step, the expanse of light became more encompassing. And then there it was. The New South Wales Court emerged before us like a lord from feudal times. Monumental. Regal. The highest court in the state of New South Wales established in the nineteenth century. A symbol of justice, of the people, of democracy. Ideals pursued and held onto by my parents as they left the only country they had ever known.
Across from the court was the law school. I walked my parents through to the law school foyer and showed them where my portrait had hung a couple of years earlier. My father quaintly smiled in appreciation as he crossed his hands behind his back.
He now had an old man’s walk. I saw in his stooped posture the years of heavy factory work and the strain of forever being a foreigner in this land where he carried his own muted cries. Vietnam was so far away but somehow I could still see an invisible rope to his ageing mother and his homeland, connected by a collection of pre-war and war-time memories.
‘Let’s have a coffee at the café next door,’ I suggested. It was only on special occasions that my parents ever sat down anywhere and ordered coffee. My father’s daily dose of caffeine came from instant granules of Nescafé. As they looked around at the lawyers and legal assistants, my mother was clearly the only one in a speckled disco shirt. I brought the coffee over, I explained the meaning of the funny wigs and gowns to my parents.
My father began his only way of intimate engagement: conversations about pre-unified Vietnam. ‘Before 1975 . . .’ I listened as my father rambled on about university in the days of President Diem and how Communism had destroyed quality education. I saw the animation in the lines around his mouth and eyes, and the way he leaned in with his good ear when my mother spoke. Dried bits of the cheap hairspray delicately fell onto the shoulders of his suit like flakes of dandruff. I brushed them away and quietly sipped my latte.
Brendan, who was also going to my legal admission, walked into the café, tall and handsome in his suit, his hair shorter now as befitting a lawyer. I had told my parents about Brendan. This was their first meeting. My mother had prepped my father to make sure he would be pleasant. As Brendan shook my father’s
hand, my mother snapped too many photos. My father smiled excessively. After too much awkward smiling from everyone, I suggested we get ready to go inside the court.
Inside the Supreme Court building, we emptied our pockets onto trays and walked through the security scanners on our way to the Banco Court on level thirteen. Large oil-painted portraits of former judges hung along the walls like watchful ancestors. Inside the Banco Court, my heart began to race as my parents went to nestle in their seats among the audience of family, sponsors and employers while I joined the other soon-to-be lawyers preparing for admission. The Chief Justice entered in full robe. A solemn, ceremonial silence pervaded the room.
Those seeking admission stood up one by one, each accompanied by a practising lawyer. According to the rules of legal admission, only a current member of the profession can endorse your membership. Families beamed and brimmed with pride. A thousand thoughts shot through me. Then it was my turn. My parents watched with revered and proud curiosity as my sponsor and I rose to our feet.
‘I, Brendan Michael Alastair Cahill, move Cat Thao Nguyen to be a member of this honourable court.’ As we sat down, Brendan slipped me a smile. A heartening smile, so warm and comforting, I struggled to hold back the tears.
You swear or declare and affirm that you will truly and honestly conduct yourself in the practice of a Lawyer of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and that you will faithfully
serve as such in the administration of the laws and usages of this State according to the best of your knowledge, skill and ability?