We Are Here

by Cat Thao Nguyen

  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 Du 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.

  It was bizarre to have grandparents suddenly. Văn and I found it amusing to introduce them to western ways. When a burger from McDonald’s was brought home for my grandfather, he unpacked all the bits on a plate. With a knife and fork he slowly tackled the beef patty, the lettuce, tomato, pickles, onion and buns. The bits had been separated onto the plate like a surrealist painting. My grandfather, still with dark blotches in his greying hair, was in his seventies. He dressed in a safari suit and fedora hat and used French words to describe beer and drivers. As I sat watching him eat, I did not appreciate that he had been imprisoned as a French resistance fighter, lived through two wars and outlived his eldest and youngest sons.

  One evening, when my mother and father were out delivering a load of finished garments, Vinh—recently brought home from hospital—began to cry incessantly. I told my grandmother that he usually fell asleep whenever he was lying in his capsule in the car. So we took out the baby capsule and Grandma and I took it in turns to push Vinh up and down the short hallway, trying to simulate automobile motion. I made car noises. Grandma sang a Vietnamese lullaby. My mother walked in on this absurd scene, unsure of how to react. She finally chuckled when we all realised that it had worked. Vinh had stopped crying.

  We took my grandparents to get their portraits taken. Both my grandmothers wore traditional velvet dresses with floral patterns. My maternal grandmother sat on a Victorian daybed inside the photographer’s studio with one leg crossed over the other, the white satin pants showing beneath the front flap of the traditional áo dài dress. In the portrait, she is looking tentatively into the camera, the hard, sacrificial life of a Vietnamese woman, borne with grace and humility, in her gaze. Years later, at her funeral, this portrait would be carried by the eldest son of her eldest son. It would sit on the altar of her descendants wherever they were in the world, spread across America, Australia and Vietnam, so that this humble, tenacious matriarch could receive our wishes and soften our fears.

  One day, my maternal grandmother overheard a telephone conversation my mother was having. My mother was desperate and trying to borrow money. My grandmother’s heart was shattering as she heard the frazzled brokenness in her daughter’s voice. The next day she told my mother she wanted to go back to Vietnam because it was too cold in Australia. But she secretly did not want to be an additional financial burden on her eldest and most loyal daughter, and she could not bear to witness her child’s agony.

  But not long after my grandparents went back to Vietnam, my grandmother got mouth cancer. With limited medicinal supplies in the countryside, one morphine injection cost $100 at the time—a considerable amount of money, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Loans were taken out to pay back loans. We spiralled deeper and deeper into debt. Duy was still around. His wife and children had now been sponsored over. Despite it all, my parents would help his innocent family settle into this strange land, offering everything from simple kitchen utensils to furniture. I guess the memory of tough beginnings was still vivid. No matter what Duy had done, his wife and children did not deserve to suffer. My mother asked Duy to pay us back, no matter how slowly. He complained that he didn’t have a job. Later, after he’d bought a two-storey house and a brand-new four-wheel drive, he still refused my mother’s request to pay us back $50 a month. At the time, my mother, who others often labelled as unreasonably compassionate, offered him a job at our workshop. She would teach him to sew. She had borrowed money to purchase a set of new sewing machines in anticipation of setting up a large workshop together with Duy’s agreement to participate. But finally when it was all set up, he declared that the arrangement was unsatisfactory to him. He didn’t want to drive to our workshop every day. In one last act of insanity, my mother offered to loan him one of our sewing machines so he could work at home.

  One day, Duy arrived at our house, sidling down the path into the workshop. My mother greeted him briefly then carried on with her work, quickly returning to one of the machines to sew. She had two thousand more shirts to finish before 7 pm. The clock on the wall towered over her, its numbers and hands ready to fall out and surrender to Fractured Stress in the air. Duy began to dismantle one of the machines. A
s always, he was cloaked in a sickening sense of entitlement. I stood watching him resentfully. These were our machines. I knew that my father wasn’t supposed to know about this ludicrous arrangement. My mother’s rationale was that if we provided him with the means, there would be a chance we could recover a tiny fraction of what was due. Anything mattered to my mother at that point. But as a child, I saw only Duy’s disgusting slyness paraded on his shoulders. It pranced ostentatiously down to the hollow of his cheeks and in and out of his chest and mouth. When I saw him at our precious machine, I ran as fast as I could along the red-brick path outside the workshop, up the concrete stairs leading to the front house, past the toilet and into the mustard-brown-tiled living room.

  ‘Dad, he’s taking our machine!’

  My father, though confused, leaped up from the lounge and ran down the stairs and across the yard into the workshop. The next few moments are blurry. When my father saw what was happening, an insidious pain pierced his stomach as though a butterfly knife had been wedged into him. Clutching his side, he collapsed onto the floor like a soiled rag. Unsurprisingly, Duy cowardly fled the scene. My father was taken to hospital. The Fractured Stress had infused itself into his body, planting ulcers in his stomach. Now they had ruptured in a violent, vicious implosion. He had to be nursed through the next few months with bland rice porridge and extra gentleness.

  My mother still sewed relentlessly each night. Each day. With eyes open. And sometimes with eyes closed. On one weekday lunchtime, she went into the bank. It was filled with collars, ties and overalls, all trying to squeeze in their banking during the break. My mother waited patiently in line for forty-five minutes. When she got to the teller, she handed in the withdrawal slip. It unmistakably and undeniably read $5. She never forgot the look on the young teller’s face. Probably a girl in a summer job saving up for a holiday or new pairs of shoes. My mother walked out of the bank with her last $5. She made decisive, purposeful steps towards the bakery. The money was enough to purchase bread and a spread for her children’s lunch that week. When she got home, my mother spent the next hour on her hands and knees, looking into every crevice of the house, behind every object, in the hope of a lost coin. The coolness of the mustard-brown-tiled floor kissed her cheeks softly, sadly, and the house cried silent tears of pity.