Foolish dares aside, I still channelled every ounce of energy into study. This was the world that I could control. Six times a week I attended extra tutoring for maths, physics, chemistry and English. On weekends, I read the Financial Review, Time magazine and The Economist. One day, scanning Time magazine, I saw an article about Eddie Adams and the Vietnam War photo that won him the Pulitzer Prize. It was the image of South Vietnamese police chief General Nguyn Ngc Loan executing a Vit Cng prisoner somewhere in Saigon on 1 February 1968. The general has his back turned to the camera. His arm is almost fully outstretched, holding a handgun to the head of the prisoner. The general wears a sobering look of unflinching resolve. His target is squinting obscurely in anticipation of the bullet. A soldier dressed in camouflage looks on, the shadow from his helmet concealing his eyes. From the black and white photo, it is unclear whether the ground is covered with shadows from nearby trees or whether the road is stained with blood. In an article he wrote for Time, Eddie Adams said that while the general had executed the suspect, he, Adams, had killed the general with his camera. For as long as the general survived, long after that fateful photograph was taken, hate, cynicism and resentment latched onto the general’s reputation like an incurable virus. His family would also suffer.
After I read the Time article, I asked my father about the photo. My father explained that it was war. People died. That just before the execution, the captured Vit Cng had himself slaughtered some Americans. My father believed that all the images that came from the war, the images that helped to consolidate anti-war activism in the US and around the world, were part of a Communist propaganda effort to ensure the withdrawal of US troops. As horrific colour images from the jungles of South-East Asia appeared on televisions in homes of American and Australian families, people took to the streets. Crescendos of anti-war sentiment transformed into thousands of signed petitions rolling into the corridors of political decision making, which would end up in parliament. All the while, lieutenants like my father and former army doctors like my doctor in Cabramatta watched in dismay as military assistance was phased out. South Vietnamese soldiers battled on without bullets in their guns. My father, my uncles and members of the Vietnamese community drip-fed me their side of the story. I absorbed these one-dimensional stories about the war that destroyed their villages, their livelihoods and robbed them of their rightful places within the nation of their elders.
Outraged by the political machinations that had sentenced my family to a difficult refugee life, I wrote a letter to the editor of Time magazine. In it I said that especially in times of war, often truth is not what is conveyed from within a frame or from what is reported. The truth, I argued, might be found in what was not said. What was not photographed. What was not reported. Time published my letter.
It further cemented in me the one-sided history lessons and connection to the stories retold and relived by the Vietnamese war veterans in Australia. On each anniversary of the fall of Saigon, buses would transport people from all across Australia to Canberra, where they would stage protests outside the Vietnamese embassy. The yellow-starred red flag of the Communists would be torched along with dummies of the current Vietnamese president. Men would bring out their medals and stand to attention, clutching the old Republican flag of South Vietnam, yellow with three red lines. The yellow represented our race; the three red lines represented the three main regions of Vietnam—North, Central and South. Under this flag, the three regions would be unified. The old anthem would be sung, led by a community leader. It was an uplifting war cry to rally soldiers, villagers and young people, and was taught in Saturday Vietnamese school, to young Buddhist groups in Bonnyrigg, to Vietnamese scouts in Bankstown, to Vietnamese Catholic youth clubs in Revesby. This anthem would be forgotten in Vietnam, unlearned and untaught to an entire generation with no recollection of the Vietnam War.
Vietnamese community leaders worked hard to hold onto their truths, their stories and their fight to free Vietnam from the Communists’ continuing oppression. The war was not over for them. It had only taken a different form.
As my senior years rolled on and studies became exhausting, Pauline Hanson began to rise to prominence. A year earlier, on 10 September 1996, while I was still at Bethany, Pauline Hanson had delivered her maiden speech in parliament after winning the seat of Oxley in Queensland. I watched in awe as she spoke of the ‘reverse racism’ suffered by white Australians as a result of Aboriginal assistance, of how the nation’s immigration policy had led to the imminent danger of Australia being swamped by Asians. I wondered, was I part of this looming sinister Asian invasion? As I watched parts of her speech on the news, her words ejected from her mouth, swirling around her in the Australian parliament before they pierced through the television screen, pricking my face and arms like the blast of a thousand icicles. I thought about my place in this Australia.
‘Between 1984 and 1995, forty per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate. Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country.’
My country. My country.
These two words chiselled fault lines across the nation. Lines that became boundaries separating those who could use the word ‘my’ from those who couldn’t. Insiders and outsiders. Wanted and unwanted. Australians by birth, by citizenship and by colour. Us and Them. Even those Asians who were born in Australia had to earn their right to live in this land of great opportunity. If you were an Asian sports star, celebrity chef, designer or newsreader who didn’t live in a ghetto, you were okay. I was none of these things. Nor were my parents with their fragmented survivor English. Yes, sir. Discount. Tomorrow pay you. It was the language of a silent working-class minority whose children were sometimes born with inexplicable hurt from another time. Another life.
Most of the major political parties criticised Pauline Hanson’s policies, which advocated a return to economic protectionism via the reintroduction of tariffs and the abolition of multiculturalism. Her provocative maiden speech divided the nation, but the prime minister of the day, John Howard, refused to publicly denounce her policies. Disillusioned by this lack of critical and timely leadership, I wrote a letter to Time magazine condemning the prime minister for his silence. It too was published.
As support for Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party flourished, students around the nation rallied to protest. I found out that a student protest in Hyde Park had been organised. Students were to walk out of school at midday. I photocopied hundreds of leaflets and posted them on the walls of the toilet blocks at school.
On the morning of the protest, I stood at the top of the stairs of Punchbowl station, handing out the flyers to students. Some people insulted me, others wished me luck. Ever since primary school I had written my school absence notes and got my parents to sign them. When they were too busy, I forged their signatures, knowing that they trusted me to administer my own learning. I also wrote and signed most leave notes for Vinh. That day, I wrote a note excusing myself from maths class and the rest of the subjects I had that day. At exactly midday, I rose from my seat. My teacher, who knew what was going on, said all she wanted was for me to be careful. I had persuaded a handful of girls to come with me. We had made protest posters. We caught the train to the city and got off at Town Hall, where students were starting to congregate. There was a festive atmosphere. Looking around, it was heartening to see such solidarity from fellow young Australians of all races, colours and creeds. Their eyes all echoed the desperate words of ‘my country too’. There were riot police and horses on George Street. As we began to march, whistles, drums and chants accompanied our progress, the sound spiralling outwards and upwards, along with our hopes for a true sense of belonging. It is my country too.
There were more protests as a crescendo of support for One Nation rose from farms, suburban streets and parliame
nt. Before, during and after the rise of Hansonism, friends of mine of Chinese descent, whose family had been in Australia for five generations, were still greeted with exclamations of: ‘You speak English so well!’ The concept of what it meant to be Australian was still so rooted in the legacy of the White Australia Policy. As an Asian teenage girl growing up in Australia, decades after the policy was officially dismantled, a swirling sense of isolation and a lack of belonging began to engulf me. The ripples of One Nation developed in me a deep resentment of the white middle-class Australians who were the decision-makers, stars on popular soap operas, High Court judges, policy-makers and celebrity gardeners. I realised with horror that I had inherited my father’s mouth: a mouth to eat with, not a mouth to speak with. No matter how much I protested or studied, my screams of rage played back in slow motion to an insignificant audience. A testimony blunted and unheard.
The growing negative perception of Asian Australians, particularly Vietnamese, was further compounded by the troubles in Western Sydney. I was fourteen when Cabramatta MP John Newman was murdered. Vietnamese-born Phương Ngô, a Fairfield local councillor, was convicted of orchestrating the murder. His appeal attempts were unsuccessful. The Vietnamese community had their own theories. Later, street workers, who had witnessed the sudden influx of drugs and the changes that would tear through the community, chatted to me about what was not reported, what was not investigated. About the subtext that only a handful of people who walked the cold streets knew. Cabramatta became known as the Vietnamese ghetto and the drug capital of Sydney. As young boys who had been placed on boats of escaping refugees grew up alone in Sydney, they banded together in a street family. In the nineties, it was said that we Vietnamese kids either became overachievers, gangsters or drug pushers. Kids from my part of Sydney lied about their address on job applications in the hope of avoiding the stifling stereotypes. In our own way, in the face of racism, sinister stereotypes and economic disadvantage as well as the usual growing pains of adolescence, we did what we could to just hold on. I was increasingly beset by feelings of confusion, hosting a dormant squalor of anger and pain. But the effort required to keep trying, to hold on, was wearing me down. I could barely fathom the prospect of a bright future. By the beginning of 1998, my Higher School Certificate year, I already felt weary.
We had moved again. We were still in Punchbowl, but this time on the other side of the railway tracks. Our landlords were actually our neighbours at Rossmore Avenue, who had purchased an investment property. The day we moved in, my mother dreamed about the spirits of the house. She saw a vicious murder of Aboriginal people taking place. The pain and the cries, still fresh, clung to the frame of the house. The spirits, torn into sharp shreds of bitterness, mourned in the roof, in the windows, in the floor. The rent was cheaper there and it was all we could afford. Because we knew the landlords we hoped that they would be kind to us. We had to stay. But my mother knew that the house was cursed. During our short time in that dim house, a series of mishaps occurred. My mother fell down some steps and was on crutches for months. Sewing was excruciating. My father became sick. After almost fifteen years of working as a machine operator, he was forced to stop work. Vinh’s asthma flared up and I grew ever more tired.
The Higher School Certificate was a blur. I didn’t go on the year twelve boat cruise or to any of the major school parties. Occasionally I caught a train to the city on Thursday afternoons when we got off early for sport. I would go to Galaxy at Town Hall on George Street, the arcade games capital. I would play Street Fighter and Tekken. My favourite Tekken character was King, a Mexican luchador who cared for nothing except fighting. In fights he wore a leopard mask that made him look like a mythical lord. Later, having faced death, he was rescued by priests. In repentance he decided to build an orphanage. He enters the King of Iron Fist Tournament to win enough funds to build the orphanage. King had a wicked assembly of hybrid wrestling and martial arts moves. As I bashed on the buttons of the Tekken arcade game, I fell into the world of the screen, wrestling and kicking my way past school bullies to a charmed life.
Other than these few trips to the city, my final year of high school was a haze of late nights, Sally Morgan’s My Place, mathematical induction, economic history, carbon compounds and physics equations. Occasionally I woke up drenched with sweat born of fear and anxiety, believing that I had missed the English exam. I was driven by a fierce need to succeed; success in the Higher School Certificate was a way for me to garner pride and respect for my family among both other Vietnamese families and Australian society at large. The end result was meant to be the redeeming saviour that would rid me of my demons.
I tackled assignments and exams with ferocity. My grades had been stellar since year 11. I came first in economics and maths. For the trial examinations in year twelve, I came first in English. But then it was time for the real exams. As sixty thousand students in New South Wales prepared to sit the exams, I suffered from a deep fatigue that imbued my whole being. After years of relentless effort, bolstered by rigorous study routines and spurred on by self-imposed impossible expectations, I had had enough. I had arrived at a peak and knew that the plateau had come. My energy had slowly been depleting, scattered in bits on the Bankstown line trains, buses and footpaths that had led me to the various schools and tutoring centres I had attended, every day. A strange apathy had taken over, and as I walked out of my last exam, I felt nothing.
Time went by between my last exam and the results. As I spent the days watching Home and Away and poring over junk mail, my apathy thawed and gave way to nervous, brittle anticipation for my results. My first university preference was to study a combined Bachelor of Social Work and Bachelor of Laws at the University of New South Wales. It was the only university in Australia at the time that offered this combined degree. It required a score of at least 99 out of 100.
The day the results were due, I couldn’t breathe. My nerves twisted in my stomach and inside the chambers of my heart. I felt the heaviness of my parents’ thousands of footsteps through Cambodia. At times they probably felt their feet were still wet from the ground of terrorising jungles and accidental blood.
My mother decided it would be good for me to go for a swim. We drove the ten minutes to Roselands swimming pool and my mother pretended to swim while I floated on my back, with children’s playful screams echoing in my ears. I closed my eyes. The rays of the sun kissed my eyelids as I tried to breathe out the long-fermenting bubbles of pressure. My mother was calm as always. As she paddled closer to me, she gave me a look that said there was nothing more I could do; that it was up to fate now. Fate. Together with guilt and mysticism, this was the surrogate mother that raised me.
A couple of years earlier, Văn had completed his Higher School Certificate. My family trembled with happiness and Văn’s cheeks were wet with tears of joy as he peeled open the envelope to learn he had got into the course of his choice. All I wanted was the same.
Unable to wait for the postman, I drove alone to the sorting centre at Lakemba to see if my letter was en route. It was still there. I picked up the envelope marked with the New South Wales Board of Studies logo on the outside. As I drove home, I looked at the envelope sitting beside me on the passenger seat. I silently chanted, ‘Ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine,’ until the numbers rolled like the streaming rhythmic sound of a Disney cartoon train. When I got home, I retreated to my room, too tense to open the envelope in front of my parents. The cork-like linoleum floor and grey walls held their breath. The blinds shuddered. The Aboriginal spirits stopped wailing.
I fumbled through the various information sheets and raw score marks until I found the Universities Admissions Index. I read it three times: 98.95. There must have been a mistake. I quickly called the Universities Admissions Centre to see whether there was an error. No error. I called the Board of Studies. I later called the University of New South Wales after the selection for places had occurred to see whether I could somehow get in. There was no hope unless
I repeated year twelve or chose another course and transferred into my preferred program a year later.
I lay on my bed that day and sobbed. I don’t know how long I stayed there. The sun went down. The traffic on Punchbowl Road subsided then grew loud again. I heard countless series of pedestrian light beeps go from quarter note beeps to rapid fire beeps as some random person crossed the road just outside our house at the intersection. The neighbouring boys from down the road had come back with a stolen stash of bike parts and I heard them speaking. The air grew thick. I could smell a stir-fry from the kitchen. My parents’ attempts to comfort me were futile. I was a failure. I had come so close. I didn’t want second best. Second never mattered. Second meant my father asking blandly, ‘Why didn’t you come first?’ There was no rage, no yelling, just a simple and dull question which somehow stung so much more than if it had been meant to hurt.
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