We Are Here

by Cat Thao Nguyen

  Within a couple of weeks of our arrival, my mother’s two eldest brothers and their families were to move to America under a humanitarian scheme for Southern Vietnamese officers of particular rank. My mother’s eldest brother had suffered greatly in the re-education camp after the war ended. Giant rats had gnawed at his leg and the untreated wound left him with a permanent injury. The subsequent limp followed him to the great land of America and would turn into a haunting reminder of dark, dark times. The organisation sponsoring my uncles was a Lutheran church in Colorado. Pueblo and Boulder in Colorado would become their home. It was 1991 and not many Vietnamese had successfully emigrated to America under the humanitarian scheme. Buses filled with our relatives and my cousin’s friends travelled to the airport to say goodbye. Clad in my new tweed pinafore, a white blouse and white Kmart shoes, I held onto my nine-year-old cousin Anh. I had no reason to sob really. But I did. It was all on camera. My older teen cousins received carefully folded love letters from friends who’d never had the courage to declare their feelings. Hopes of long-distance bonds were harboured. Teenage hearts that were left behind in the small village of Gò Du would forever live in this moment of goodbye, a moment on the cusp of where their worlds would diverge forever. It was in this last moment that they and my cousins would be the same. Of the same village, the same childhood games of chopsticks and marbles, the same school, the same struggles. Over a decade later, my cousins would return with university degrees, their American-born husbands and English-speaking children. They would look upon their friends from the airport that day in 1991, now selling fabric in the dim narrow aisles of the Gò Du market, or with hands callused from fixing Honda motorbikes and hearts worn from nursing flailing love stories. But at the airport that day as my grandparents said goodbye to their sons and grandchildren, uncertainty wrapped itself around everyone. There were last glimpses. From friends, family and secret loves. Full of pensive anguish. Full of possibility.

  A week or so after the Big Goodbye had found its place and settled in hearts, camera film and phone calls, we visited my mother’s family’s rice fields—the place where, after the fall of Saigon, she spent much time, back bent against the sun, planting, tending and cutting across seasons and sorrows. My aunts told us that my mother, her pants already soaked from being submerged in the wet ground, would squat without shame in the fields, piss in her pants, then keep on planting. Time and hope against her. I stood on the banks of earth separating the fields of dry stalks. The fields had just been hoed. Lovely white ducks skittishly waddled across the field and I chased them with a long bamboo stick, clomping through the wet earth, the shoots of cut rice stabbing my tender urban Australian feet. I watched the workers separating the grain from the stalks, streams of grain shooting out of the machine like a cascading shower of brown and yellow pixels. The men and women sifted the grains through a giant woven basket suspended from a skeletal bamboo frame. I attempted the task myself, the videographer filming my feeble, cumbersome efforts, much of which were staged for the camera.

  On a cyclo, Vinh, my mother and I toured Ho Chi Minh City under the watchfulness of Tom Selleck, who later dubbed in the well-known upbeat song ‘Sài Gòn đp lm, Sài Gòn ơi!’ (Saigon you are so beautiful, oh Saigon!’) The cyclo cruised across District 1 of the city while the swarm of traffic swirled around us. The cyclo driver beamed into the viewfinder of the camera in front, relishing the rare chance at being in front of a camera. My mother recounted her memories of Saigon from when she studied there as a young woman. The narration continued past the main roundabout across Ben Thanh market, in front of the opera house and behind the cathedral, remnants from the French occupation.

  Back in Gò Du, Văn, Vinh and I were exposed to uncensored village life, without luminous supermarkets, refrigerators or Wheel of Fortune. When Vinh wasn’t being carried, he walked only on his tiptoes, the same way he walked in Paddy’s Markets after he saw orange peel and rubbish on the ground. At the market, fish and eels would squirm inside aluminium buckets. Clumps of noisy ducks, roosters and chickens were heaped together on the ground. Balls of glutinous rice wrapped around yellow bean paste floated in buckets of ginger-infused syrup, spooned into small plastic bags with dollops of coconut milk and sesame.

  The neighbours were preparing for a death anniversary celebration and had bought a cow. I stretched upwards above the ring of onlookers and managed to get a snapshot of the epicentre of the crowd. Inside the ring of the fervent audience was the live cow with its legs tied together. A man held a sharp rod linked to a cable which was connected to an electric socket in the wall. I ran into the house but still heard the thumps of the struggle and the sounds of slaughter. My grandmother told me that on one occasion she looked through a hole in the wall directly into the eye of a cow being slaughtered and saw tears streaming from its eye.

  There are lots of photos from that first Vietnam trip. Numerous pictures of the extended family gathered under my patriarchal grandfather’s wings. I am always in the front of the clan, hands by my side, standing to attention, clenching a smile to force out a dimple on my left cheek. A trick I learned in second grade.

  On the day we left, I stood out the back of my grandfather’s house gazing at the brown river, the continuous current carrying families on small boats, selling their vegetables up and down the river. I don’t know why I cried, really. My five weeks could not have warranted a potent attachment to this place. My aunts chuckled at my melodramatic display. That morning, as on every other morning, the man down the street, shirtless and in blue shorts, brought us noodles with pork made from the slaughtered pigs whose monstrous squeals I had heard the night before. When I visited eight and sixteen years later, he would continue to bring me noodles, still wearing blue shorts, his bare torso like dark leather, always bearing a defiant shimmer.

  We all clambered onto the rickety blue vehicle, a type of mini-truck owned by my grandfather’s neighbour. The back tray of the truck had two rows of seats facing each other and was covered by a plastic roof. Passengers at the back could only look to the side of the truck or behind it, never ahead. I always wanted to sit at the edge of the row closest to the opening. We pulled away from my grandfather’s house, the truck and its passengers bobbing as it struggled over the rocks and potholes on the dusty village road. Children from the neighbourhood followed behind. As my mother’s childhood drifted past, we waved to all the characters who had become part of my story too. The noodle man in the blue shorts. The pigs ready for slaughter. The lady whose bad nose job left the bridge of her nose with a transparent glow on sunny days. Goodbye, wet season. Goodbye, jumping frogs. Goodbye, golden jackfruit bursting from their skins.

  When we finally got up onto the tar road, the driver accelerated. The neighbourhood kids stopped chasing after us and began to wave. Just like in the midday movies but this time it was in full colour. They disappeared into figures, then shapeless things, then ragged dots of movement, then the horizon. The conversation around me became a sort of white noise. Muffled. Submerged. Unable to look ahead, I looked behind. Grey sheets of road rolled out behind us. Just enough road to surge ahead. We zoomed past women on bicycles with conical hats, men on Honda motorbikes with roosters hanging off the bike like feather boas, past the stone business with its field of stone giraffes, elephants and tigers. Safaris of frozen haphazard bits of trapped life trailing after me. Goodbye, Vietnam.

  Back in Sydney, there was a cavity where the extended family membrane of Commotion and Big Fuss, Big Sniffs, Big Love sat for five weeks. My misery was compounded as I discovered my class had learned long division while I was away. I found long division hard to master without someone demonstrating it. One day, I ran home from school in tears because I didn’t understand what the class was doing. My mother purchased a series of tuition videos called Maths Made Easy from a Vietnamese acquaintance who was a door-to-door knowledge salesman occasionally dabbling as a translation services broker. He later would sell us both the children’s and adult World Book Encyclopaed
ia for a substantial sum of money. (We paid extra for the gold glazing on the edges of the pages.) He would also later get me a certified English translation of my Thai birth certificate, which before then I could never read.

  The cover of the maths video had a sketch of a happy boy with numbers prancing over his head. The long-division section of the video was taught by a man in cream pants and a blue shirt with a beard so tremendous the lesson came out as a series of mumbles. Needless to say I didn’t focus on the maths but on the primal movement of the beard. I never properly mastered long division. Fortunately, the discovery of calculators would relieve my sense of inadequacy, at least in that regard.

  We had continued to live in my uncle’s old rented house after he had left for his newly purchased one. My mother and father set up the sewing workshop at the back of the rented house similar to the set up at the home we sold. We laid down light green plastic so the dust and thread wouldn’t embed itself into the carpet. The carpet through most of the house was khaki green. I would stay in my little oasis at the back where my whole family had slept on our first night there. But I would miss my mother’s skin. I would climb into bed with her. Sometimes she would still be wearing a bra. I liked running my fingernails along the tiny ribbing of the straps. She would have a cassette player near her head. It would play Vietnamese opera, always stories of longing, sadness, unrequited or forbidden love. She would cry herself to sleep to these painful but strangely soothing lullabies.

  Our family’s pockets were basically empty and it would continue to be a difficult journey for us. We couldn’t afford a washing machine at the time. I remember being in the outside laundry one winter, washing the sheets by hand, the water bitterly cold and unforgiving. Like clockwork, early every Saturday morning my parents would head to Flemington markets where the produce was cheap and fresh. My mother would come to know all the Vietnamese vendors. Their kids would be sleeping under the tables, or selling cucumbers, competing with big-bellied Italian men with booming voices.

  We had lovely neighbours. To the right was a Vietnamese family. They had a son who was Văn’s age and would become one of Văn’s oldest friends. To our right was a Greek family whose youngest daughter, Karissa, went to school with me. Occasionally I would be invited into their house. It seemed to me like a shrine to all things beautiful. The house smelled of fine precious things. Of rest.

  One Christmas I was allowed to go over and play. I walked across the manicured front garden, up the stairs and into the hallway. The runner was soft beneath my awkward feet. The decorated Christmas tree had musical lights that echoed magical sounds like floating bells. There were wrapped, glistening presents underneath the tree. Framed mirrors and pictures adorned the walls. Lovely burgundy rugs were sprawled on the floor. There was a pool out the back and an open-plan kitchen. As I nervously gazed at it all, wide-eyed, I somehow felt that it was familiar, with its golden clocks, porcelain dolls and silver-trimmed glassware. I realised that this was a house I had pieced together from countless catalogues.

  Our letterbox was routinely stuffed with junk mail, and I would gather the catalogues and retreat to my room. In a quiet space, I would lay them out, forensically examining each coloured page. Savouring worlds of dolls, garden gnomes, curtains, foldout lounges, televisions and washing machines. I would ration the catalogues over a few days until the next batch. Items from Freedom Furniture, Target, the Reject Shop and Harvey Norman would be circled with a pen as I slowly constructed our own shrine of Lovely Things. Very special items were cut out and kept in my top drawer.

  Karissa had all the toys a little girl could wish for. We played with her Barbie dolls and doll’s house in her room. Her father, grey-haired with a gentle smile, had worked hard in a factory all his life. As well as Karissa, he had a successful grown son and daughter, each married with kids. I knew when the grown daughter was visiting from affluent Hunters Hill. Her new E-class black Mercedes always announced her presence, like a black panther cruising past Western Sydney.

  Behind us was a Lebanese family with four kids, one of whom was Vinh’s age. The father was a train driver and the mother stayed at home. From the back fence she would pass over to me tabouli salad made from parsley that she grew in her yard. This mix of ethnicities was typical of Punchbowl, a suburb full of hard-working immigrant families just like ours. A place where diversity was inherent and struggle was second nature. South, east and west of us were families with broken English and working class origins. Each with their own dreams. Each in a different stage of the settlement process. All with kids the same age as my brothers and me at St Jerome’s primary school. Karissa’s family had emerged as the successful immigrant crew. They represented what could be. To our north was Rossmore Avenue, a street with a church on one end and on the other, Punchbowl Public School and Canterbury Road, a couple of hundred metres from the known Canterbury Road prostitutes’ strip.

  In the heart of it all was our little unit. Just another family. For a long time, my father did the night shift at the F. Muller factory. When we woke, he was asleep. When he came home, we were at school. The Hard Yakka industrial uniform with steel-capped factory-issued boots became him. My mother would be at the sewing machine pedalling for school fees, for family assistance in Vietnam, for Telecom bills, for a way out.

  One hot summer weekend, while my father was at work and my mother was sewing, I went out to the backyard and stood under the hose to cool down. Afterwards, I lay on the grass looking up at the clouds, trying to trace outlines of kings, elephants, trees, superheroes and crickets. I looked at the worn underwear hanging on the line, flapping like flattened jungle leaves from nature documentaries. It got late and my father had just come home from the factory. My parents had to deliver a load of garments. I was supposed to watch Vinh; they couldn’t take him with them because the garments had filled the boot and the backseat. Văn was at tae kwon do practice at a community club in Lakemba, one suburb away.

  Vinh was as attached to my mother as I was at his age. She had to sneak out of the house as she did over a decade earlier with another desperate child. This paused scene of stealth disappearance was replayed to her like a lost button that resurfaces again and again. When Vinh realised that my mother had left he began to cry. There was nothing I could do to stop him. It was an excruciating feeling. Helplessness engulfed me like a toxic gas. I tried to entertain him, making up stories about where our mother was. I took photographs of him so that he could pose and momentarily stop crying. I made him wear the Easter hat I had created for the school parade. Nothing worked. I felt like an exhausted circus performer.

  As Vinh sat on the floor in the back room screaming, the grand sewing machines also wept. His ceaseless cries clung onto the dusty blinds and broken swing in the yard. I went back outside to lie on the ground, trying to block the piercing desperate screams, but it was impossible to recapture the carefree spirit of the afternoon. I felt completely and utterly helpless. For the first time in my life, I had the sensation that I was truly alone. There was no one to rescue me. No one to say everything would be alright. No one to take over the responsibility. That was supposed to be the job of my mother’s youngest brother, lost somewhere in the jungles of Cambodia.

  The emptiness of the house gnawed at my fingertips and toes. Feelings of infinite desperation unravelled and wrapped themselves around my eleven-year-old body while Vinh’s screeching cries continued to deafen my small ears. When my parents eventually returned, the solemnity of adulthood had already seized me. It took away my freedom to play, to wonder. It would be years before the solemnity would let go.

  CHAPTER 6

  Why didn’t you get 100?

  Like most girls from St Jerome’s, I went on to MacKillop Girls High School in Lakemba, right next door to St John’s Boys High School. In the mornings, I would walk to Punchbowl train station and make the short trip through Wiley Park to Lakemba. Sometimes I would get a lift with Karissa in her mother’s Mercedes. Often, when I needed to wait in their house, it ga
ve me a chance to glimpse their precious things. We weren’t friends at school. It wasn’t even openly acknowledged that we were neighbours. The contrast of our families’ socioeconomic status embarrassed me.

  The transition to high school wasn’t too troublesome, given that most of my primary school friends also enrolled at MacKillop Girls. The year I started high school, it was now my father’s turn to visit Vietnam. At the time, my father did not indicate any reservations. But looking back, I can only imagine the deep trepidation he must have felt, returning to the country he had fled. At the airport, we said goodbye and I asked my father to bring me back a white teddy bear. Looking back, it was a silly request, no doubt fabricated from cheesy Hollywood movies. On his way back, the white bear would cause him problems at customs in Vietnam. They wanted to slice it open, suspecting that my father was trafficking drugs. Knowing his indelible fear of Vietnamese authorities, I cannot fathom what torture that experience must have been. Trying to contain the flood of memories of uniforms ruling his re-education camp life, grinding his dignity with abuse.

  I had also asked my father to bring me back a pair of Reeboks to replace my cheap shoes from Best & Less, which were branded Apple Pie and Grizzly. He brought me back a pair of white high-tops with pink trim and embroidered logo. Perfect. At school everyone noticed my shoes straight away. It was obviously a model that was not available in Australia. A true import. But very quickly someone pointed out that my shoes had Reobek imprinted on them instead of Reebok. I was mortified. I was further punished the next day after I returned to wearing Apple Pies.

  One weekend while my father was in Vietnam, the phone rang. I picked up the phone in the back room where the sewing machines were. My aunt’s voice echoed down the line from Vietnam.