At that time, Uncle Căng’s wife and three daughters had been sponsored over to Australia. They lived with us temporarily in our house and workshop in the backyard. My mother taught my newly arrived aunt to sew. But it wasn’t enough. The piles of garments accumulated with each missed deadline. So did the debt. It rose like an uncharted mountain range, soaring into the stratosphere.
In 1990 we lost our beloved house. The FOR SALE sign came and went. The happy times faded into the empty cool space underneath our house, in between floor and earth where the mother cat had her litter. There were to be no more Monkey Magic games. No more handfuls of the first fruits of the season. No more sneaking through fence palings into the neighbour’s yard for berries.
Our slice of the Australian dream was shattered and was to be sprinkled all over our modest footprints from Perth to Villawood to Newtown to Marrickville to Punchbowl. My family and I would become nomadic squatters destined to borrow a piece of someone else’s dream in someone else’s play. It was an open wound that hurt us all very deeply.
Uncle Căng and his family had recently rented a house in Punchbowl, a minute away from St Jerome’s Primary School. It was an old white home, which would eventually be painted a new white with a green trim. An inappropriate minty impression that needed a snow-capped mountain and pine trees amid the suburban vista.
When our house was finally sold, we had nowhere to go. Now it was our turn to live with Uncle Căng and his family. Our haphazard belongings were packed into boxes which were strewn across the garage and rumpus room. My father, mother, Văn, Vinh and I all squeezed into a three-by-two-metre room, just large enough to fit my parents’ king-size bed. That night, we all tried to sleep. I lay awake in bed, my father’s snoring sending tremors into the springs of the mattress. With heightened alertness, I explored the sounds that hid inside the bones and green carpets of this unfamiliar house. I was alert to the webs on the windows, the coolness of the walls and my mother’s nervous but regular breathing. This was our new home.
When my grandmother had visited in 1989, all her children owned houses except Uncle Căng. One of her last wishes was for Uncle Căng to be a homeowner. Whether it was a fifty-year-old wooden house built on a riverbank in Tây Ninh, or a fibro duplex in Bankstown, she craved for him the safety of a physical space to which he could always return—an uninterrupted and tangible creation of home, of safety. Title to a house meant you had the chance to create a past and a future. A set of memories nursed through hope, recession, fevers and graduation with walled photos that you could pass down to your children and their children. A place where your spirit could reside and where the custodians of your lineage could rest. Home was house. House was home. We had lost ours, but my relatives in Vietnam still did not know. As my grandmother lay dying of cancer, my dutiful, beautiful mother decided to grant my grandmother her final wish. It would be a gesture of gratitude and love to honour an exemplary woman who had suffered lifetimes of sacrifice.
With the money from the sale of our Beauchamp Street house, we paid off most of our debt. With most of the money we had left over, we could have put down a deposit on a new house or maybe started a small business. But instead, my mother provided Uncle Căng and his wife with a deposit to purchase their own slice of the Australian dream. I remember attending the house inspection with him, unaware that for the rest of their time in Australia, while his family would be settled, my family would be left to shift from one rented house to another.
The place my uncle eventually bought was a lovely fibro house with a decent-sized front yard and large backyard. In the front yard, on either side of the concrete path leading to the front door, were two Australian marsupials—a lifelike stone kangaroo and koala staring out onto the road like gentle protectors. All that was missing was an Australian flag in their paws. Inside the house, my uncle had a mirror he’d found at a garage sale, a souvenir from the 1983 Sydney to Hobart yacht race. A faux-mahogany display cabinet containing glass and porcelain kitsch from St Vinnies sat near the lounge. My uncle and his family’s adoption of Australia as home had officially begun.
Over the years, the fibro house and Australian stone fauna would greet streams of Vietnamese refugees from my uncle’s factory. Machine operators, forklift drivers and leading hands moving in and out of the house’s passageways, carried by drunken tides of Vietnamese song. I would watch with bitter envy as my newly arrived cousins revelled in the familiar happy sounds of song and banter on cheap blue plastic every weekend. That innocent pleasure was lost to me.
CHAPTER 5
A maiden journey
School at St Jerome’s went on as usual despite our changed circumstances. But my daydreaming flourished the more it seemed that the world was against us. As I watched Australian television, I dreamed of being someone with blonde hair and blue eyes—definitely not Vietnamese and not living in our cheap rented house in Punchbowl. Văn went to school and rarely shared any problems he faced. But alone he dealt with racist bullies and his own struggle for a place in the world. Somehow I am sure my mother knew of our angst and discontent.
By now it had been over a decade since my parents touched the earth which grew their families’ rice. Over a decade since my mother had looked upon the Vàm C Đông River which passed through Gò Du, that had almost consumed her as a small child and whose banks sustained the house she was born in. When I was eleven years old, my mother decided to use the rest of the little money left after we had sold our house and after the mortgage deposit for my uncle to take her children back to the country where she was born. (My father couldn’t come with us as the factory wouldn’t give him the time off.) The three of us, born in three different countries, needed to know the Vietnamese meaning of family, of heritage, of identity. In Vietnamese, the concept of origin is—a blend of country and home—literally translated as ‘earth water’. In 1991, we would spend five weeks in Vietnam.
We went to the Punchbowl post office to fill out applications for passports. When we finally received them, I examined mine. Under Nationality was typed Australian. I was baffled. I’d always thought I was Vietnamese. I didn’t understand why it said Australian in my passport. My birthplace, ethnicity and nationality are all different, and for a long time I could not distinguish between these concepts. Even now, I hesitate when people ask where I am from.
In July, my mother accompanied her three children on their maiden journey to the mystical land of her childhood. On the day we left I wore a sky-blue collared shirt with a yellow knit jumper over the top. My jumper had diamond-like lattices all over it with ridiculous pompoms evenly positioned on my eleven-year-old torso. What was most significant was that for this special occasion, I had been allowed to purchase a brand-new jumper from a rack in Kmart.
We flew Qantas, the four of us sitting in the middle row. The plane seemed like it was a flying warehouse. Vinh was two years old and a very good passenger. He was dressed in a puzzle of scraps my mother had sewn from excess fabric. His pants had a Christmas cartoon motif while his T-shirt was layered with some black and yellow surf graphic. On the top he had a lamb’s wool vest with light blue trim that had been given as a gift on his first birthday by a friend of my father’s—he was definitely not dressed to be a calendar baby.
Tân Sơn Nht airport in Ho Chi Minh City was substantially the same as it had been before the end of the Vietnam War. Both domestic and international flights and all passengers to Vietnam were processed inside its organs. I took a photo of my mother on the plane as she filled out our customs declaration and immigration cards. She is looking up at the camera abruptly as though interrupted mid-thought; her expression is anxious, oscillating between sure and unsure.
I remember stepping out of the plane onto the mobile staircase and being smacked by the dense humidity. We descended the steps and boarded the bus which would take us to the terminal. Vietnam had only embarked on its market-oriented reforms in 1986 and in 1991, there were still very few Vietnamese refugees returning to Vietnam for any reaso
n. The US trade embargo had not yet been lifted. Fears of books of blacklisted escapees, a thousand watchful eyes and suspicions of persistent Communist persecution prevented many refugees from coming back. For those who did, the stories they told of regular requests to report to police coupled with impromptu inspections kept them nervously vigilant. These stories were delivered to inquisitive Vietnamese back in Australia who wondered whether Vietnam would ever be safe for them.
We had brought ten cartons of Eagle Brand medicated oil, highly prized even now for many people in the countryside. This green oil was used to cure every ailment on earth—rubbed on every part of the body that could feel. Under and on noses to clear nasal passages, on the temples for headaches, on stomachs to soothe indigestion and on the back during colds and flu. Each carton contained twenty-four bottles worth about $6 each. As we waited at the baggage carousel, my mother wore a sombre, reserved face. When we got our luggage, with poo-coloured tape on the outside (our names and addresses in Vietnam written in my father’s arched handwriting), we realised our locks had been cut. On inspecting the bags, my mother discovered that two cartons of oil had been taken. At immigration, she slipped $20 into her passport, a clear expectation at the time. The sharp northern Vietnamese accent of the officer whipped at my mother, his eyes clearly inscribing the word traitor across my mother’s forehead in slow precise script. Outside the airport, television screens transmitted images from inside the terminal to eager relatives outside. My relatives had hired a videographer to film the event on a huge VHS video recorder. This videographer would accompany us for the five weeks in Vietnam: to the Saigon zoo, on boats on the Vàm C Đông River and tending to ducks in my family’s rice fields in the rain. He had a Tom Selleck moustache and kindred, lustrous eyes. Outside the airport, he filmed my mother on the television screen, scurrying about inside the belly of Tân Sơn Nht. He then cut to my aunts, who pointed frantically at the screen bellowing, ‘There she is! That’s her! I swear! She’s so fat!’
Finally, we glided out of the automatic doors. I hid behind the handle of the baggage trolley, suddenly shy. There seemed to be hundreds of people bunched up in rows folded into each other, pressed against the shiny railing that separated traveller from provincial relative, all rapidly scanning the exiting passengers for their separated kin. They all looked like me. All these strangers.
When my relatives and grandparents finally identified us, there was an onslaught of grabbing, screaming, crying and sniff-kissing—hugs, love, pity, warmth, grossness and healing all entwined in a potent decisive sniff. Sniffs came from all directions, from all smells, all heights. Sniff, sniff, sniff. Looking up, I saw only shreds of ceiling as I was swarmed by videographer, familiar grandparents and unfamiliar Vietnamese cousins. Still, the thick Saigon air buffeted my body, lifting me up above the noise and excitement.
We climbed aboard the hired bus and headed back to Gò Du village, Tây Ninh province, where She began. When we got to my grandfather’s wooden house on the riverbank, it was dark. Neighbours lined the dirt-covered street. Bashful little boys, sucking on fingers and sugarcane, ran about, revelling in the celebratory atmosphere and senseless jolly. Those whom my mother remembered only as young sweet girls when she’d left on that fateful evening now brought out their children and even grandchildren to catch a glimpse of us: the returned spectacles.
My grandfather’s house was full of yet more relatives who’d been unable to fit on the bus. They had come from the surrounding hamlets, communes and rice fields to welcome us with an immense feast. Knowing how much my mother loves durian fruit, my grandmother had one on hand and split it open as soon as we walked in the door. My mother beamed with happiness as the pungent, creamy, sugary odour filled the air and infiltrated the mellowed wood and stoked my mother’s happiness. She was home.
The first thing we had to do when the sun came up was pay respect to our ancestors. We attended the gravesites of my mother’s grandparents and gravesites on my father’s side, buried on the land of their fathers and forefathers. We brought offerings of fruit, flowers, steamed dense sheets of rice noodle and roasted duck. Special leaves of paper money were burned so that the ancestors had enough to spend in the afterlife. Hell money, it’s called, even though we don’t know whether they are in heaven, hell or reincarnated. These days, loving descendants can also purchase paper houses, shirts, sports cars and iPhones.
At the gravesites, we all lit incense sticks, held them close to our hearts and heads, and then bowed three times. Once for the Creator, once for our ancestors and once for ‘earth water’. At least that was how I understood it. Vinh stayed close to our mother, watching the ceremonies cautiously, clinging tightly to her leg. Seeing how shabbily dressed we all were, clad in dizzying collections of garments cobbled together out of leftover fabric from my mother’s work, my aunts insisted that we all be measured for new clothes. We ended up with lovely tweed-patterned dresses, fine black trousers and respectable, almost regal shirts. Văn got a bronze and gold shimmering collared shirt which I believe he wore only once back in Australia—for a photo. It would have been a hit at Mardi Gras. When we returned to Sydney, my mother’s grand new threads would end up in the bottom drawer, being inappropriate for a simple outworker to wear other than to large public Catholic celebrations.
For the next five weeks, everywhere we went, we were shadowed by a posse of our relatives. The group included my father’s grown nieces and nephews from my aunt’s fifteen children, and their children as well as various other relatives. I had no idea where they all fitted in the family tree. We spent most of the time in the countryside, visiting family, old great-aunts, second cousins and poor neighbours. Most received a green bottle of Eagle Brand oil, my mother’s well wishes and her children’s apprehensive smiles. We walked through bamboo groves to mud houses where grey-haired men in blue shorts slept on wooden beds. I would watch my mother’s cousin climb a coconut tree with a machete to bring us fresh coconuts to drink. These were the special kind, naturally carbonated. The sizeable green ball rested on my lap as I sipped its sweet gassy goodness. With no flush toilets around, when I had to go my mother asked one of her cousins to take me to where I could do my business. I was led to a small plantation of tall bamboo and directed to just go anywhere. As I squatted on the ground, I noticed the sea of mutated fire ants. These were the largest ants I had ever seen in real life. I came back with souvenirs of itchy red marks on my bottom.
The humidity made my scaly eczema even more uncomfortable than usual. I tried mightily to not scratch but the dust, the heat and the excitement aggravated it. I dug at select bumps on the insides of my elbows and knees with my fingernails. This was in lieu of scratching the whole terrain. The indents from my fingernails into the few bumps provided only temporary relief. Unable to resist the sinister itch, I scratched until I bled. In addition to the eczema I occasionally suffered from asthma. Back in Australia, my mother boiled up a black bitter herbal medicine in a clay pot. To gather the ingredients, I went to Cabramatta, a suburb with many Vietnamese families, to the housing commission flat of an old man with a long white beard. He gave me various leaves and roots along with dried cicadas specifically to treat my asthma, but for some reason my dermis issues were never treated.
In Australia, my eczema caused me great trouble. I wanted to wear short denim overalls with a blue gingham cotton shirt inspired by Elly May Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies. (Luckily, my ambitions later in life far more than compensated for this aesthetic childhood dream.) But my skin condition didn’t allow such pleasures. To hide the wretched reptilian scales of eczema, even in summer I would ludicrously wear a jacket and pull my Sisters of St Joseph long brown socks far above my knees. My teacher and fellow pupils wondered what was wrong as sweat oozed from every pore of my body. ‘I’m fine,’ I would say casually as though they were the crazy ones. ‘Let’s keep playing.’ I would concoct some way of distracting them—deliberately messing with the score of whatever game we were playing or walking backwards. Once
, when the elastic of my sock was so worn that it slipped below my knee, I spent recess standing on one leg. When my friends asked what I was doing, I replied, ‘I am standing on one leg. Obviously.’ I rolled my eyes as though they were imbeciles. When the bell rang, I ran as fast as I could back to the classroom. Because Catholic school uniform socks were very expensive and not sold at the second-hand shop, I had to improvise by placing rubber bands around the outside of my socks and then folding them down over the top. The trick worked but I would come home with a deep purple ring around my leg as though I had been sliced by a sickle. At the time I was terribly despondent. I envied girls who wore dresses and walked around itch-free.
When my grandmother saw the curse that was clinging to me, she prepared her elimination method. Horse dung. Steamed. I lay over a bamboo bed while the fumes from the dried horse dung wafted through the cracks of the bamboo and into my skin. At least, this is what my mother tells me happened; I absolutely have no recollection of the procedure. Maybe I purged the experience from my memory. It’s not something that one likes to recount to others. But whether it really was the horse dung, or puberty or utter humiliation, the reptilian disease never returned.
We Are Here Page 8