Jessica asked her sister, ‘What’s the difference between ET and Asians?’
‘I don’t know,’ Peta replied. ‘Tell me.’
‘ET got the message and went home.’
They laughed out loud then crossed over to the other side of the street. I was both humiliated and confused by this exchange. I was home. At least that’s what I’d thought. Where else would I go?
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.
But what name had I been called exactly? And why did I feel so ashamed? I looked over at the tree. Its branches tried to reach out to caress me, having witnessed the exchange.
It was time for me to move schools. I was sick of ethnic wars. Sick of shame. I needed to soar.
A teacher at my school was switching to a new school down south called Bethany College. It had a junior campus in Kogarah and another campus at Hurstville for years nine to twelve. The uniform was maroon and grey. I decided to call the school to set up an interview with the principal. She was a lovely round lady with smiling eyes. When I showed her my school reports and grades she was baffled as to why I wanted to leave all my friends and go to Bethany, which wasn’t close to where we lived. In hindsight, I don’t understand how I was able to be brave enough to leave my school and friends. But I was too young to have developed a real sense of community—and far too focused. My sole objective was to succeed academically. My resolve came from a source far deeper than a uniform. A source I could only articulate when I slept next to my mother.
So I said goodbye to my MacKillop friends. It was bittersweet. A lot of the teachers and students thought that by my departure I was insinuating the school wasn’t good enough for me. I know that they quietly resented my decision, given I was a star student.
At the time, my family had been vegetarian for about five years. A combination of Cao Đài scriptures, Buddhist teachings, Bible chapters and documentaries on Nostradamus about the end of the world had convinced my parents that we had a better chance of surviving Armageddon if we didn’t eat meat. Animal meat would weigh down our spirits. Only a few years earlier, in primary school, my mother had made Văn and I eat steamed pigs’ brains for intelligence. The brains weren’t even mashed in with vegetables or stir-fried. They were just squiggly clumps of nutty creaminess, straight from a school science room and flavoured with chicken stock. On one of my last few days at MacKillop, I decided I deserved a meat pie. At lunchtime I lined up at the canteen and furtively bought a pie with sauce. I sat alone and scoffed it down, making sure no one saw me. All my friends knew I didn’t eat meat. One of my friends, a Vietnamese girl, was also vegetarian for the same reasons. I chewed the pie so fast my mouth was almost burned. I quickly went to the bathroom to wash out any lingering smell of meat. Then I returned to my friends who, thankfully, didn’t suspect a thing. I was already a sinner. With the taste of a meat pie and teary goodbyes behind me, I left Mackillop Girls High School.
CHAPTER 7
A mouth to eat with
When I joined Bethany College, I was the only student of Vietnamese origin in my grade. It was another all-girls Catholic school but most of the families were far more affluent than those back at MacKillop. I would walk to the bus station near Punchbowl train station and catch the bus to Hurstville station. Forty minutes later I would arrive and hop onto another bus which would drop me off at Bethany. A friend of mine from MacKillop had already left to go to Bethany not long before I arrived. I joined her group of friends, which consisted of Australian-born girls of Malaysian, Greek and Yugoslavian descent.
I was still a repressed, sensitive and timid girl. But by now I had hairy legs and acne as well as my Best & Less shoes, and my mother still sewed most of my clothes. I quickly realised that I was practically the only one in the whole school who did not have brand-name shoes. Sports day was a torment. I don’t know what it was but some of the students would occasionally make snide comments to me. I felt like an outcast. I decided I needed a pair of Nikes. I read in my local paper that a new McDonald’s was opening in Punchbowl and they were hiring. My father drove me to the interview. It went well. But at the end of it, the interviewer realised that I was three months under the minimum legal working age. I couldn’t believe it. ‘Come back in three months,’ she told me. But I didn’t have three months! My acne wasn’t going to fade, electrolysis was too expensive and in three months’ time I would be even more isolated and bullied. I had to find a place that didn’t mind child labour and would pay cash. There was only one option: Uncle Thanh and his wife’s bakery in Matraville.
I worked hard on weekends, sweeping the floors, slicing the bread, making pork rolls and packing sweet buns. When I’d finally made enough money for a pair of Nike Airwalks, my mother and Văn accompanied me to the Rebel Sports warehouse on the Hume Highway in Bankstown. The smell of fresh tennis gear, cotton and polyester gym pants, dry-fit shirts and new treadmills was intoxicating. New smelled oh so good! The aisles of shoes opened to me like a shrine of glorious Nike divinity. I glided down the aisles until I found them: white, green and a swoosh of pink. As I held them in my hands, I was overcome with pure joy. It was a religious experience. With my Nikes I would be reborn. I would be saved.
The next day was sports day. At school assembly, several girls in my class who had never spoken to me before commented on how cool my shoes were. The new untainted white glowed brightly beneath me. I hovered.
When I went back to McDonald’s three months later, the store had already opened. I was interviewed by the store manager. Because I didn’t have reports from Bethany yet I showed him my grades from MacKillop along with evidence of my extracurricular activities.
The manager looked at me and said earnestly, ‘Mate, don’t get a job here. Look at the potential you have. Go make something of yourself.’
I didn’t get it. ‘But I need a job.’
He got up and left. I sat there on the hard plastic chair bolted to the tiles. A fast-food flurry of customers, orders and uniforms golden-arches whirled around me. I was crushed.
Not long afterwards, I was walking through Bankstown Square after school one afternoon. Down the escalators from Target, the smell of baking cookies seduced me. Macaroons, Anzac biscuits, brandy snaps, white choc chips and harlequins beckoned from buckets, boxes and cellophane bags. The guy at the Cookie Man was Asian, maybe even Vietnamese. I decided to get a bag of mixed cookies and a job.
The owner had the same name as my younger brother. He was indeed Vietnamese. After a quick conversation, he told me I could start on Thursday. He offered me three shifts a week. The mixed bag of cookies tasted great. I ran home to my mother to tell her the good news.
Once a week I worked with a lovely girl whose parents were from Macedonia. We took turns serving at the counter while the other packed the cookies. One day I short-changed an elderly man. He wore comically large sunglasses that clipped onto his reading glasses. ‘I thought you Asians were supposed to be good at maths,’ he snapped. ‘This totally changes my whole belief.’ I fumbled around in the register for the correct change, my back turned to him, my cheeks burning with humiliation. I wasn’t a person. I was a race. You Asians. When he left, the girl I worked with tried to cheer me up by telling me a silly story. I don’t remember the story. But I remember how hot my cheeks felt and how the smell of cookies suddenly didn’t seem so nice anymore.
But not long after that incident, I remembered why I quite liked working at the cookie store. I got to have fleeting conversations with different people and every now and then something amusing would happen. On one occasion I served a woman with senior citizen pink hair and grand pearl earrings. I wasn’t sure whether I short-changed her or not. I looked at her for some impending reprimand. I wasn’t sure whether all her eyebrow hairs had moulted or whether she had deliberately shaved them like Whoopee Goldberg. She had pencil-drawn eyebrows but had forgotten to draw in the eyebrow on the left. It made her powder
ed face carry a constant look of surprised confusion, as though some surprise a few stores back made one of her eyebrows just pop out like a three-dimensional storybook. She put her change in her purse and left. I exhaled. Then I checked both my eyebrows. Just in case.
My poor mother didn’t know what to do about my hairy legs or acne. She’d never encountered such first-world problems in Vietnam. She spent what she could spare of the government’s child-assistance payments for low-income earners on waxes, creams, cleansers and facials. In the Priceline at Roselands shopping centre, I would read aloud from the packaging of different products, translating for my mother, who was a typical hairless Asian. When ballroom dance lessons began with the local Marist Brothers school, I hid behind a fringe that covered half my face and kept my gaze permanently fixed on the floor. I couldn’t understand it when a Korean Australian boy, who was the cuter of twin brothers, said he liked me. At the bus stop outside Hurstville’s Hungry Jack’s, we sat as far apart as possible on a bench across from the blazing neon lights of the store. I was paralysed with awkwardness. I think I said my parents were really strict and I couldn’t see a movie with him until I had finished university. (I honestly believed this. My mother did tell me once that I could only have a boyfriend once I graduated. From university.)
At school I continued to excel but was bullied by a girl who was a bit of a troublemaker. She could sing really well, though. The combination of hairy legs, acne, homemade clothes, discount-store shoes and a reputation as a studious geek made me an obvious target. The girl hung out with a group whose members also felt it was funny to stop me from leaving the classroom after I’d gathered my books. At the doorway, a freckled brunette girl with oily hair towered over me, her arm extended to block my exit. After a minute or so of asking her to let me through while she laughed scornfully, I just looked up at her and said, ‘Fuck you. Let me through.’ The girl was as shocked as I was. I clutched at my cheap contact-covered exercise books, unsure of where that expletive had come from. I had never sworn before that moment. Bewildered and silent, the girl let me pass. I walked out of the room, riddled with shock and guilt. I went to my religion teacher, who was also my year coordinator, and told him what had happened. I was looking for absolution because I had said the F-word. Struggling to conceal a grin, he said it was okay. I think he was secretly proud of me.
I participated in an after-school science project. We were to make a telescope and enter it into a competition at the University of New South Wales. Our small group worked on it for months. We experimented with various materials in order to grind the lens slowly enough to get a precise concave. The end result didn’t look very nice, but it worked. One afternoon, we waited after school until nightfall, then took it in turns to look through our telescope made from a discarded industrial pipe during laborious hours in the lab. I saw the moon up close for the first time in my life. I saw Venus. I saw stars. I saw a world where ancestral spirits waltzed from one planet to the next, where my wishes to them were kept safe, where my daydreams would become night dreams and then particles of sunlight. Simply magic.
I started up a St Vincent de Paul district youth group at my school. I contacted hospitals and day centres for mentally disabled kids. I coordinated volunteers (mainly my group of friends) to visit in the school holidays. I participated in debating again. At sixteen, I decided to enter a public-speaking competition. I had grown more confident. The Rostrum Voice of Youth competition was a statewide affair with district and regional rounds. My teachers travelled with me to each competition. As a new school that was relatively unknown, they were proud to see me representing Bethany and beating students from selective high schools and prestigious private grammar schools. I made it all the way to the state finals, which were to be held at the National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour. Students from around the state were to be put up at a hotel near Hyde Park for a couple of days. I had never stayed in a hotel before. My family and teachers were going to be at the finals. The pressure to win was immense. I wanted my parents to be proud of me.
A couple of days before the event, I was in the library after school. Everyone had gone home and the library was closing. My year coordinator, an amazing and compassionate man, sensed that I wasn’t okay. He sat opposite me. At the time, I couldn’t articulate that part of my mission was redemption. For my mother, for my father, for Hng Khanh believed to be killed in the Cambodian jungle—for all those who hadn’t made it. I mumbled something about the refugee life, about wanting to make my parents happy, about being helpless, about the absolute imperative to win. To win would be a visible victory; it would in some part make the endless sewing and factory shifts worth it. I sobbed into my hands.
My year coordinator sat there and listened to me, a sixteen-year-old child with droopy, heavy shoulders. Then he told me that my parents were already proud of me, something I did not believe. He took out his wallet, withdrew a card and handed it to me. It had been given to him several years ago by a special person, he said. ‘I’ve been carrying this card with me for a long time. I was told to part with it when I met someone special. Someone who needed it. I want you to have it. When you meet someone special who needs it, you too will pass it on.’
I took the card. It was a simple piece of cardboard, a little curved from being pressed in the wallet. There was a small calendar on one side. On the other was printed: I am and I can. With God’s strength. I would keep that card with me for about eight years until I passed it on in turn.
I sat there at the library desk, holding the card in my hand. I knew it wasn’t enough. I knew that it would not give me the power to win the competition, to redeem all the pain and suffering of my family, to heal us. But I placed it in my wallet and thanked him.
The next day in school assembly, my year coordinator led the school in prayer. He made special mention of me and how proud the school was. He asked the school community to pray that I do my best. That was all that was asked of me. I bowed my head in an attempt to slide further down into my second-hand blazer as I felt hundreds of eyes on my back.
That weekend, my parents drove me to the city. We rarely ventured into town. The series of intimidating one-way streets and tall buildings disoriented us. My father got lost and drove around the same block several times until I just got off at a hotel that had the words Hyde Park on the front. I told my parents just to go home and assured them that I would be okay. My mother was in tears with worry. It was the wrong hotel, but I managed to find the right one.
There I met the other contenders. They had come from schools all across the state, including rural New South Wales. We were taken to Australia Square for lunch at the Summit, an expensive revolving restaurant on the forty-seventh floor. I felt out of my depth in such grand surrounds. I had never seen Sydney from this viewpoint. The city stretched out below us like a giant patched carpet. I was far from the safety of my working-class suburb. I wasn’t meant to be there with students from schools that had tennis courts and sweeping acreage, students whose parents spoke fluent English and drove cars that didn’t have cancerous rust around the wheels. I missed my family.
The night before the event, I couldn’t sleep. Our group’s leader was a pudgy man, probably in his late twenties or early thirties. Obviously sensing my discomfort, he tried to boost my confidence. He told me that I was smart and relatively attractive with a reasonable nose. I didn’t understand why he specifically mentioned my nose. Immediately I leaped to the conclusion that there was in fact something wrong with my nose. His pep talk left me feeling worse about myself than ever.
It was my family’s first visit to the National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour. My father wore a suit. I saw my teachers in the audience. I saw in them their aspirations for my victory. The competitors nervously paced outside the auditorium. It was one of those theatres where the sound was completely contained and the lighting was dramatic. James, a student from Broken Hill with a blond mop, was really sweet. He tried to help calm my nerves. His charming crooked smile
revealed two teeth that weren’t f lush with the rest. I loved his protruding teeth. They were perfectly imperfect.
We all had to deliver a prepared speech and an impromptu speech. The topic of the impromptu speech was given to us after the prepared speeches were presented. We had ten minutes to prepare and then it was my turn. They pronounced my name correctly; that was a good start. I walked onto the stage and the spotlight was so bright in my eyes that I couldn’t see the audience. Everyone was swallowed by the darkness but my mother’s face flashed at me from somewhere on the right. I wore my lucky velvet maroon clips on either side of my head, just above my ears. Standing up on the stage, it was clear to me that I wasn’t good enough. The inadequacy I’d felt gazing at the view from the Summit seeped into the theatre. The stitches of my father’s Hard Yakka uniform and the hum of the sewing machine crept into the theatre and perched themselves on seats in the front row. Drained of confidence, I gave a lacklustre performance.
When all the speeches were done, the competitors were invited on stage for the announcement of the results. I didn’t win. I wasn’t even runner-up. I forced a smile, but I was devastated. My teachers and family posed with me for photos. The loss of that day would haunt me for some time to come. There was nothing anyone could do to soothe me. The idea that I could be so close but not good enough embedded itself in me. I never participated in a public-speaking or debating competition again.
The only bright side of the whole debacle was that James and I became penpals. He wrote to me from Broken Hill and I responded. I looked forward to receiving his letters. There was nothing romantic about them; it was just an easy natural communication between two awkward teenagers who somehow knew they didn’t belong.
One day I came home from school to find my parents in a rage. My father had opened my mail. He saw a male Anglo name at the end of the letter and was overcome with a fear whose seeds had been planted years before I was born. Back in Vietnam, secret lovers would write letters to each other with promises to elope. Also, my father had done his military service sometimes alongside white Americans. He knew that some of them had a hunger for women that resulted in the rapes of Southern Vietnamese villagers. In Vietnam, during the war every time an American came into the house, my mother and her sisters would hide underneath the wooden beds, praying that the lustful white man would not find them. They would hold their breath, eyeballs locking onto army boots, hands clasping hands.
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