We Are Here

by Cat Thao Nguyen

  ‘Cat Thao, is that you? Is your mum home?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. But Mum’s not home now.’

  ‘She’s dead. Grandma’s dead.’

  I didn’t know how to react over the phone. It seemed ridiculous and silly to me. So I chuckled. Out loud. The chuckle left me rude, uncensored. I said my mother would call back later and hung up. When my mother got home, I delivered the news to her swiftly and directly. A clean execution. I watched as she began to quietly tremble, the little tremors rippling through the cells in her body. The door remained open behind her. Her face collapsed with yet another blow of sorrow. Tears ran down her face. She called Vietnam straight away.

  Not long after the phone calls, the garment contractor came by. He was a ferocious-looking Vietnamese man with bullock eyes that seemed on the verge of falling out of his head. His angular head sat uncomfortably on a tall, thin frame. His coarse sparse hair became wild when he spoke, as did his eyes. My mother asked whether she could return the half-completed load. Her mother had died and she would be unable to finish it with all the preparations in Vietnam and ceremonies to be done here.

  ‘You have to finish the load by the deadline. People die all the time.’

  My mother stared at him. His bullock eyes gazed back at her, unflinching. The sewing machines and I watched in swampy terrorized silence before the next words were uttered. The unfinished garments, half stitched, half happy, tried to retreat into themselves to hide from the towering male figure in the doorway. He hadn’t even paid us yet for the last load. He would use this unpaid money as ransom, knowing how much we needed it. So my mother agreed to complete the load by the deadline. She rallied all her friends. They came over to help her where they could. She spent the nights alone at the machine, sobbing and sewing. Sobbing for her mother, for her children and the damned wretched destiny that imprisoned her in this way. But the more she sewed, blinded by a scorching heartache, the more we had to unstitch the garments. Lines of thread made their own trails across the fabric, skating to an unknown song, a thousand stitches long.

  In Vietnam, my father did all he could to look after the funeral preparations and ceremonies. Even before any of the relatives had known of the death, my grandmother’s sister-in-law had arrived at the house to help. My aunts asked her how she knew. She said, ‘Your mother told me in my dream last night that she had died and that I was to come down and help you kids with all the arrangements.’

  Every aspect of my grandmother’s funeral was filmed so that my mother and her brothers in the US could know that the family in Vietnam had done all the proper things required and that the funeral was sufficiently large and well attended. Mental notes were taken of who was there and who wasn’t. On the altar, the burnt ashes from incense sticks curled savagely without breaking off, a sign that ancestors and other spirits are present. My grandmother had hidden her gold somewhere in the house. To ensure that the coffin was not raided and the house kept sacred, the family set out to locate the gold. My grandmother’s eyes remained open the whole time, even when my aunts tried to forced them shut. Bo, her favourite grandchild, the eldest son of her eldest son, had returned from Colorado for a visit. She had died in his arms. Appropriately and rightfully, Bo was the one who eventually found the hidden gold. Only then did my grandmother close her eyes. All the descendants were dressed in white and wore strips of white cloth tied around their foreheads. Bo, as the eldest son of the eldest son, was identified by a single red dot on his white headband. Not even the eldest son himself has this privilege.

  My grandmother’s family practise Cao Đài. In the Holy See in the capital of Tây Ninh sits the first and prime temple of their religion. It is elaborately and brightly decorated. In it there is a statue of Jesus Christ as well as one of Mohammed. The French writer Victor Hugo is considered a saint and is charged with evangelising the west. Members of the Cao Đài faith in Australia raised funds to build a replica temple in Wiley Park in southwest Sydney. Wearing traditional Vietnamese dress, on weekends they would volunteer their time to lay bricks, paint or cook for the builders. The temple was completed over a period of ten years.

  A three-day prayer ceremony for my grandmother was held at the incomplete Cao Đài temple in Wiley Park. My mother was dressed in a white cotton traditional dress and also wore a white cotton headband. Inside the lavishly decorated temple, upstairs where coloured dragons twisted upwards around thick columns, we kneeled on round embroidered pillows while the congregation chanted prayers for hours. The ringing sounds of brass gongs occasionally disturbed the air and reverberated against the omnipresent Asian ‘One Eye’ painted on a perfect giant solid sphere, decorated with the sky.

  After my grandmother died, a portrait of her assumed a position on our altar, along with the Virgin Mary and my paternal grandfather. Every time we moved, the altar was the first thing to be packed and unpacked. On top of the tallest chest in a central space, usually the living room, my mother would lay out a blue piece of fabric. She would carefully place the statue of the Virgin Mary in the centre and position the pictures of my grandparents on either side of the statue. A vase of fresh flowers and fruit would also be placed at the altar. Whenever there was a death anniversary of an ancestor or an important date in the lunar calendar, we would place food that we had cooked at the altar for our ancestors. Only once we had finished offering our prayers with lit incense would we be permitted to eat. On these occasions, there would always be a cup of rice, salt and water—the staples of life. The altar grounded us. It was a connection to our forefathers, a constant reminder of who we were and where we had come from. Although the centrifugal forces of life pushed things outwards, no matter how far we were flung from the centre, this core remained unchanged. Our ancestors watched over us. Ate with us. Forgave us. Received our tears. Celebrated our joys. And dreamed with us.

  My grandmother became my guardian. As the idea of organised religion and the political contradictions of the church disillusioned me, I talked to my grandmother. When I next visited Vietnam, I brought home her traditional Southern Vietnamese pyjamas. They fitted me perfectly. I would often wear the black shirt with jeans. There were slits on either side for ventilation as the farmers worked in the sun. There were large pockets on either side of the snap buttons down the front. Together with jeans, it was my sartorial attempt to fuse east and west.

  In Vietnam, people would go to the temple to search for answers. After a quiet prayer a question would be posed. Two small blocks of wood would be tossed. If the two blocks landed in a certain way the answer would be yes. In Australia, my mother improvised with two twenty-cent coins and a saucer. After praying to my grandmother at the altar and lighting incense, I would toss the coins. If heads and tails came up, the answer was yes. If it was a double heads or double tails then the answer was negative. Simple. I consulted my grandmother on many things, from whether I should defer university or take a particular job to whether or not the guy I was dating was my future husband. At night, before I went to sleep, I would make the sign of the cross (after years of Catholic education I couldn’t quite give up the habit) then pray to my grandmother. She replaced the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It was a somewhat confused hybrid of faith and worship.

  As I was beginning high school, throughout Western Sydney there were fights between groups of Vietnamese and Lebanese kids. In hindsight it wasn’t anything to do with gang activity or organised crime; more likely it was just about minority kids being territorial and defensive, trying to claim turf in an assertion of clan and community. The majority of Vietnamese refugees and Lebanese immigrants to Australia arrived at about the same time. We were different to the Greeks and Italians who were already largely settled. They had worked hard over generations to establish an economic and political presence in Australian society. They had money and they had a voice. All that we newer migrants had were fresh wounds and fear. We were living in rented houses whose front doors opened out onto a sweeping landscape of uncertainty. But we had each other. Our
kind. My kind. People whose spices meant the same things. Whose food tasted the same, whose rituals were mirrored, whose silence was understood.

  At various public and private schools in Western Sydney, fights were breaking out. Maybe it started independently at one or two schools but because of cousins and connections elsewhere, everyone was eventually dragged from one place to another for backup. For pride. For our people. At my all-girls school, a quiet Vietnamese student with broken English and a Demi-Moore-circa-Ghost haircut suddenly had enough of the fighting. The version I heard was that she was teased by a Lebanese student. This usually placid Vietnamese girl reacted. What started as bullying became reframed as a tribal battle: a battle to defend the honour of our people. Phone calls were made. Times arranged. Supporters rallied. At 3.30 pm one day, when Lakemba train station was packed with uniforms from MacKillop and St John’s high schools, it was on. Apparently school compasses were used to stab people. I arrived late, after it was all over, but saw blood on a fellow student’s uniform. The spots of blood on the baby blue shirt looked like the beginnings of a Jackson Pollock. Fortunately, it was someone else’s blood that had splattered on her. She recounted the events to me. I later heard that Sefton and Chester Hill high schools had the same issues. Knives were brought to school. Then came police and sniffer dogs.

  I don’t know when it all died out. Maybe I stopped listening and seeing. Maybe we just grew up. Maybe our respective tribes became more settled and there was less to prove. Less to look back at what we had to defend and more to look ahead, to go forward.

  At MacKillop I was a diligent student. I stayed up all night to memorise textbooks. I did not go to any parties and knew nothing of boys. Life was study leavened with rations of Astro Boy, Transformers and Monkey Magic. I always kept the top button of my shirt done up. The library was shared between the boys and girls high schools but it was located at St John’s. I tried to avoid going to the library at lunchtime because it meant crossing the boys’ playground – an utterly mortifying experience. If it was an urgent and pressing assignment, I would quickly power walk my way across the bitumen, head down, focusing on my footsteps. Boys, handballs, court lines flurried past my peripheral vision.

  When the students had left for the day, I stayed after school in the library three days a week to get extra work done. I entered statewide mathematics and science competitions. One year I created a board game around Pythagoras’ Theorem. I went to the hardware store to buy chipboard, brass hinges and screws, and made a coloured numbered spinner instead of dice. It was a simple concept: random questions around Pythagoras’ Theorem had to be answered before the player could move. They had to reach the end of the squiggly series of coloured squares. There was a limit of four players. I won an award. Of course. I had to receive an award, even if it was for supreme nerdiness.

  I was part of the debating team and always second speaker. I was not confident enough to open but was a little too egotistical to settle for summing up as third speaker. Second was where I felt comfortable. It was the position in the debate where you could really solidify the win or turn things around. Unless our school hosted, most of the time we had to travel to other schools each Friday night during debate season. My father would drop me off at the school and my English teacher, a feisty Greek Australian woman with dyed orange hair and worry lines between her eyebrows, drove me to the hosting school every week. My father would wait outside my school at about 9 or 10 pm to pick me up. Only once did a police officer question him for parking in the dark outside a school on a Friday night.

  I think my parents only ever watched one debate. Even then they didn’t understand what was being said, so there was really no point in them attending. They were busy working and trying to surmount all the obstacles I wasn’t fully aware of at the time. We had an understanding. My job was to study hard, translate for them, deal with government authorities, banks and insurance providers, and look after Vinh.

  In year eight, I came first in every subject except one, in which I came second. I don’t know whether my parents understood what a feat this was. I had even come first in English and physical education. Although I was small, I was sufficiently agile to pass all the physical tasks. I was far more challenged than the broad-shouldered swimmer types but managed to overcompensate in the theory component. It really didn’t matter how well I went at shot-put or javelin. I named all the sports in a decathlon as well as all the moves in floor gymnastics and the array of gymnastics equipment.

  Ironically, the subject I came second in was Vietnamese. Apparently I couldn’t be the best all of the time. Because of the number of Vietnamese- and Arabic-speaking students at the school, the school offered these languages in addition to the standard Italian and French. Vietnamese was taught by Ms Ngoc. She had a short bob and large plastic-rimmed glasses. She looked best when she wore a navy skirt with a white shirt that had large navy polka dots. She didn’t have matching navy high heels but her black pointy closed-toe shoes were sufficient. Everyone in the class was of Vietnamese origin. In the Italian class there was a Vietnamese girl whose family had been resettled in Italy before moving to Australia. She spoke better Italian than the second-generation Italian kids.

  I wrote lots of stories in Vietnamese class during those first couple of years of high school. My mother kept many of them. There is a story about a girl who grows up, falls in love and gets married to a Vietnamese guy. She finds out that her husband and her father are the same type. In the story, I had written in Vietnamese ‘men are all useless’. Some concepts transcend language and culture!

  When I received ninety-nine per cent in a maths exam, my father asked me why I didn’t get a hundred. When I came second in Vietnamese, he asked why I didn’t come first, despite coming first in all the other subjects. It was a kind of tough love that confuses children growing up in a western society, where television parents regularly give unconditional hugs and tell their children, ‘I love you’. Or where parents say, ‘as long as you do your best’. Ludicrous. How can mediocrity ever be okay? I may not have had a Tiger Mum yelling at me, but the pressure was there. I was raised with the typical academic expectations of Asian children as reported on tabloid current affairs shows and caricatured by my fellow Australians on the ABC. But I didn’t play the violin or piano; we couldn’t afford the lessons. It might not be reasonable but the pressure to excel academically makes sense. As people who are physically smaller, we didn’t have a real chance at being sports stars unless it was in table tennis, badminton or snooker. Maybe golf. But the cost of golf club memberships would exclude most refugees. The only legal way to attain financial security for families with no capital, no language and no political access was education.

  As a kid, I understood this instinctively. Even as I meticulously decorated my year two weather project with glitter pen, I knew. When my mother had a minor car accident with a Bankstown real estate agent when I was seven, I negotiated with him over the phone in English while my mother sat beside me nervously. When the landlady in Punchbowl berated my mother for not paying the rent on time or not keeping the kitchen clean, I translated. I watched as my mother stood silent in her attempt to retain her self-respect. I didn’t know how to translate dignity. Or grace. My mind wasn’t quick or brave enough to rebut the landlady on her behalf. All I could do was stand there, telling my mother off in Vietnamese for the landlady. A borrowed mouth of poison.

  I had been trained in the language of responsibility and sacrifice. I was exposed to the intimate moments of quiet humiliation that accumulate like rust when a parent must rely on their small child to read medicine packaging, to fill out application forms. For grown-up things. And I knew that it was my job to study hard and succeed, to make my parents’ years of sacrifice worthwhile—which meant that nothing could be allowed to disrupt my studies.

  One day, I got off the train at Punchbowl station as usual and started walking home down Rossmore Avenue. Jessica Jones and her older sister Peta also got off at Punchbowl. Jessica was in
the same year as me and we had gone to primary school together but weren’t really friends. Jessica was a stocky girl with glossy blonde hair. Her sister was freckled and slender. She excelled in athletics. Their mother did shifts at the St Jerome’s canteen and was probably head of the parents and teachers committee as well. When I bought twenty cents’ worth of liquorice at the canteen, I would politely say hello to Mrs Jones. I secretly daydreamed that my mother would also be behind the metal grilles, serving fellow pupils with a warm smile and keen eyes. I imagined my mother being an active member of the school community so that I would have some sort of respect in the classroom and playground. But that was never to be the case.

  As I walked down Rossmore Avenue, I noticed that the Jones sisters were walking behind me. The air was crisp. It was sunny. The size and weight of my school bag was not commensurate to my fragile frame. I felt like a sea tortoise stranded in suburban Sydney cursed to bear a heavy sack of knowledge and solitude. At the upper end of St Jerome’s playground, where it met a pedestrian crossing on Rossmore Avenue, there was a giant tree. For six years throughout primary school, I played under and around it. Its roots exploded through the tar beneath and its wisdom emerged from the ground like a lost tune. Its branches and leaves rose, sprawled and towered above like a cloud. Trapped and beautiful. Wild and safe. This tree had watched me grow. It had witnessed my loneliness and soothed my sadness. I went to the tree to cry, to tell it my secrets, to hide. One Lunar New Year as I walked past the tree, I saw a lucky red envelope sitting idly underneath it. There was no one around. I opened the small envelope and inside was twenty dollars! The tree smiled as I ran home to tell my mother.

  So on my way home from the station, I crossed the road just to walk into the tree’s soothing orbit. I was walking past the tree as I sensed the Jones sisters drawing closer.