We Are Here

by Cat Thao Nguyen

  My parents knew and approved of David’s circle of friends—all Vietnamese guys from Cabramatta, Chester Hill and neighbouring Sefton. Even if they weren’t all at university, they were temple-going boys who followed Vietnamese traditions disciplined by concepts of karma and honour.

  David’s house was another version of Karissa’s. The interior decoration had catalogue-worthy items like fashionable furry rugs, gold-framed mirrors, bundles of cinnamon sticks and a jacuzzi. David and his dad had extended their house, undertaking most of the renovations themselves. David was a handyman and a natural protector. For the time we were together, I was grateful to be able to defer many practical challenges and decisions to him while maintaining a facade of invincibility to my parents. For the first time in my young adult life, I felt I had someone to lean on. Someone to cradle and rescue me. The lingering feelings of being out of my depth, inadequate and alone had subsided somewhat under his watch. To me, David was a working-class Vietnamese-born knight heading a Western Sydney cavalry.

  But in the first few months David and I dated, I felt pangs of envy and self-pity each time I entered his home. The leather couch, the wall of family memories, children’s drawings pressed onto plates, crystal glasses and bath salts and the softness of a stable crib pranced in front of me like a character in a musical. The raging pangs became less delirious over time, but provoked in me an aching desire to reward and heal my family with material pleasures. A house. A home. Comfort. Certainty. Security. But I was a soon-to-be university student with a government Centrelink Youth Allowance and irregular income from a series of odd jobs. Later, I set up a small floristry operation from home. Despite this, there was no way I could immediately provide for my family. I was haunted by the hardships suffered by my parents, who wouldn’t hustle and cheat like others yet were constantly pounded by misfortune. All I could do was offer moments of gladness and specks of hope.

  In 1999, a film called Three Seasons was showing at a cinema in Fairfield, about a fifteen-minute drive from Chester Hill. An American film made in Vietnam, it was about the poetry as well as underbelly of Ho Chi Minh City. It was Father’s Day and I did not have a cent to my name. In the nineteen years since my family had arrived in Australia, my parents had never once set foot inside a movie theatre. In Vietnam, my mother had seen only one film on the big screen. I was determined to take advantage of this rare opportunity to take my family to see a Vietnamese-language film at a cinema in Sydney. I researched a few pawnbrokers in Bankstown until I found one that offered a decent interest rate, then I pawned my Nokia mobile phone. With the money, I took everyone out to the movies. It was my gift to them.

  As I sat there in the dark, I looked over at my father and my mother and saw expressions of rare pleasure on their faces. Scenes of old and new Saigon swept across the screen in gigantic form. There was the familiar roundabout at Ben Thanh market, surrounded by cyclos and conical hats. The cinema was filled with the sound of Saigon banter and Vietnamese song. We saw the places we had passed when we toured the city by cyclo, me a child of eleven on my mother’s lap. I knew that with the financial hardship we were enduring, my parents might never be able to visit Vietnam again. For nearly two hours, overdue electricity bills, stomach ulcers, misunderstandings and fiendish sewing contractors receded through the cinema doors and waited outside like a loyal pet. As the changing scenes flickered on our faces, in the safety of the dark, I quietly cried.

  As my three months of freedom drew to an end, I made the most of being with David and his friends. They were a mix of struggling students who drank cases of beer on the university lawn, vocational and community college students, former prisoners and factory workers. They were men who struggled like many other men—with money, with love, with family, with dreams. They would often assemble in the backyards of some Western Sydney suburban house, grilling meat, singing karaoke, dissecting current affairs and hatching plans for a better life. Sometimes there would be huge marijuana plants lined up against the back fence. Although most of them had grown up in Australia, a deep sense of Vietnamese identity burned within them. As they drank VB beer, they would claim that it stood for Vưt Biên (the Vietnamese phrase commonly understood as the refugee exodus), Vì Bn (for my friends) or V B (abandonment by wives). With their depository of survival scars, they each had a profound understanding of loyalty, honour and pride. And I grew to love them all.

  CHAPTER 9

  Lush green lawns

  Sydney University was a different planet. Every corner of aged sandstone and manicured lawn was unfamiliar to me. I could never have conjured up such a setting even in my dreams. In those early months of university I felt intimidated and out of place. In my first law tutorial, which had about twenty or so students, I quickly discovered that most of my peers came from privileged backgrounds. They had an unabashed interest in money. Only two students in the class declared that they had chosen to study law because of social justice. One of those two students was me. When we discussed ways to diversify court benches, I advocated affirmative action to diversify the student body, ultimately diversifying the composition of lawyers and judges. One student argued that this was problematic because people from Western Sydney didn’t aspire to be lawyers but instead wanted to become mechanics. Surely we shouldn’t coerce people into doing something they didn’t want to do. The shallowness and utmost lack of insight of comments like this repulsed me. It poisoned my view of a peer group that I was condemned to associate with for the next five years.

  I welcomed the diversity of the commerce faculty, by contrast, comprising international students as well as students from all parts of Sydney, some of whom were aspiring entrepreneurs. I blended in with Islamic, Chinese and Iranian students. Still, I could not find a sense of community within the lush cricket grounds, the Old Teachers College or the lunchtime banter in the Wentworth Building canteen. Although I had earned a place at the oldest and most prestigious law school in Australia, I felt it wasn’t my birthright – that I was and always would be a visitor. I hadn’t wanted to go to this university anyway.

  I turned in my first law paper, and it was returned to me with a request that I see the tutor. I had barely passed. Apparently my English was incredibly poor and my tutor recommended I seek help from the Intensive English Language Centre. I hadn’t had my English criticised like that since year two when I was eight years old. I was disappointed and confused. That day, paper in hand, I walked towards Redfern train station, the nearest stop to the university. As usual, I handed a muesli bar to a beggar outside the station and rode the Bankstown line home. The same houses, backyards, graffiti that I would see thousands of times whizzed past me as I fell into a reflective trance. My mother and I had seen my name in the Sydney Morning Herald under the English scores only a few months earlier. I had come first in the Higher School Certificate Trial Exams for 2 Unit English at an academically selective school. Lines from Macbeth, Sally Morgan’s My Place, Peter Goldsworthy’s Maestro crowded my brain and flooded me. I recalled memorised analysis of poetic devices used by the poet Bruce Dawe. Signs continued to stream past and words buzzed inside me. Belmore. Lakemba. Rhyming couplets. Wiley Park. Punchbowl. Iambic pentameter. Bankstown.

  I’d enrolled at Sydney University with a friend called Peter who was studying for the same degree. Peter had attended the same tutoring college as I did in Yagoona, one suburb next to Bankstown. He was the only son of Vietnamese parents struggling to run a garment-making workshop in Cabramatta and raise Peter and his three sisters. With a deep, stoic sense of determination, he learned to get things done. From the moment we became friends, we both recognised that we shared the same story. Our mothers breathed the same losses and our fathers crafted for us the same quenchable hopes. Peter knew his world was not that of the cocktail parties with the New South Wales Law Society or the cricket club. His world was Cabramatta, hanging out with the boys at the RSL club, hoping to one day pay enough dues to realise for his family their humble dreams. A small home. A new piano for his sis
ter. Nothing grand.

  On certain days, whether there was a class or not, Peter would drive into the city in the family’s tired red van to deliver finished garments. At times, I would hitch a ride in his van or keep him company on runs to the city. The garments hung off a central rack that ran along the roof, swaying in unison like dancers in a crude group performance, while the coat hangers clinked noisily as he braked for a red light. A few times I went with him to the inner-city studios of well-known Australian fashion designers and waited while Peter picked up a dress sample or negotiated a price for a new load. The studios were often painted all white in a chic minimalist style with clean lines. On one occasion, while waiting for Peter, I sat on a wooden chair by the door watching the designer adjust a new piece on a model, pins in hand. In all the years that my mother had sewn, she never made contact with the designer or label owner. There was a number of layers above us in the production chain, including agents. Peter had decided that since he could speak fluent English and negotiate, his parents could do without agents. My mother refused to allow her children to get involved in her work, for fear it would affect our studies, so I wasn’t allowed to take charge like Peter did. The designer/model sighting was a glimpse into another facet of the production chain of which Peter’s family, mine and countless others were a part. I thought of my mother, who was probably sewing as I sat there in the inner-city studio. The thoughts of Karl Marx that I had studied in year twelve Economic History formed a glaring frame around the designer/model composition. We were just one of the factors of production.

  Often, Peter would pick me up in the red van and drive us around Western Sydney, looking for a place to study. We told each other that it was too noisy and distracting at home because of the sewing machines in our houses, but really we were just procrastinating. We spent nights in empty construction lots in Liverpool inside his van, shifting positions to get sufficient light from the highway. We slept inside the van outside the University of Technology Sydney after the security guards chased us out of the study centres because we weren’t students there. Peter tried to coach me in law, in finance, in statistics, but I was constantly distracted by an underlying sense of self-pity. I couldn’t fathom how Peter rose above it all and pushed on. Maybe he just had no choice.

  Away from Sydney University, I spent many happy hours with David and his friends, centred around my giant security blanket of Western Sydney. We would go to Mounties, a community club at Mount Pritchard where, as members, we enjoyed a breakfast buffet for $3.50. The club had more than five hundred poker machines and was rated the highest in the state’s poker-machine profit rankings. It was regarded by many as a cultural institution. Every now and then I would cluster around the boys as they played the Cleopatra or Sumo poker machine. The coloured specks of the endless carpet and the electronic tunes of the machines dizzied me.

  The boys loved poring over Hot4s wheels magazines, ogling the modified sports cars. As I attended car conventions with them, I learned about nitrous oxide, Momo steering wheels, various spoiler dimensions and whether an engine was a rotary. I soon came to love the language of velocity and the freedom in taking a beautiful vehicle to the red line in first gear.

  David did Vietnamese martial arts at the Police and Community Youth Club in Cabramatta, as well as tae kwon do in Fairfield. He competed at various venues across the state. I would sit for hours in stadiums, trying to study while waiting for his matches to begin. Sometimes it would be over in the first three minutes. During that brief time while he was on the mat, I held my breath, hands clasped as cheers rose and flared around me. I followed each back kick, front kick, axe kick and punch in a trance-like gaze, brimming with anxiety. As each move sliced the air or thumped the opponent, the ravenous edges of a possible knockout or serious injury clung to my palms. At the end of the rounds, whether he won or lost, relief flooded through me like a cathartic baptism.

  Clubs from all over the state competed. Their uniforms were embellished with markings of their clan, their territory whether from Penrith, Kensington or Bankstown. When he wasn’t fighting, David would sit with me, identifying key competitors, their fighting styles and weaknesses in a running narrative. There were clubs with predominantly Asian members, others whose members were mainly of Middle Eastern descent and clubs whose membership was a mixed bag. Each competitor had their own preparatory ritual before a fight. Some would find a quiet space to meditate. Others would listen to the Rocky theme song.

  At the beginning of the competition, the arena was infused with frenzied excitement. Masters and sometimes grandmasters would be present in watchful Mr Miyagi form. There were versions of the Karate Kid pacing about the stadium. People competed for different reasons. Although they came from all over Sydney, when they walked onto the mat wearing their headgear and chest guards, they were simply red or blue. Not Tran, not McGregor, not Habibi, not Kalinowski. Academic, criminal or driving records did not matter. It was in these circles that David discovered a liberating sense of fairness. The arena was a chance to escape the media’s scathing representation of Vietnamese men, to block out the death of his uncle and the pain of watching his friends fall. The arena often became his only haven of safety. Of truth.

  David’s friend Phong had moved out of home to live with his cousin, Bobby, and we would sometimes hang out at their place in Cabramatta. Bobby was a former heroin addict who had been jailed for supply when he was caught dealing drugs to support his habit. As a kid, he, his brother and mother had boarded a small boat with other refugees. Like countless other boats, theirs was attacked by Thai pirates. It is likely that all the women were raped. His mother did not survive. Magically and tragically, the two little boys made it to Australia. For the most part, the two orphans lived on the unforgiving streets, where they found others like themselves. They grouped together. A family by choice. With no one to cradle them, they supported themselves by selling drugs and almost inevitably became addicted to them. Bobby did his time and got clean in jail. I took to him straight away. His eyes were kind. His crooked teeth and mole on his chin charmed me.

  Bobby worked with Phong in a factory in Bonnyrigg, a suburb within the Fairfield local government area. But as things started to disappear from their house, we began to suspect that the white lover had come back to haunt him. Bobby ended up back in jail. His brother, too, spent substantial time in jail, and fell afoul of the stupefyingly inhumane immigration laws. Bobby’s brother Matthew was a permanent resident of Australia with a broad ocker accent and only a scant Vietnamese vocabulary. At the time, the government had a policy of deporting permanent residents who were convicted of crimes. This applied no matter how long the resident had been in Australia and no matter how old they were when they arrived. Thus, despite Matthew having spent most of his life in Australia, when the immigration department realised he didn’t have Australian citizenship they transferred him from jail into an immigration detention facility to be deported back to Vietnam—a country he had left when he was ten years old. Matthew waited in detention to be sent to a foreign land where he knew no one, where he had no life map and where he had no way back. Ironically, the detention centre was Villawood, the place where my family was clothed and fed and treated with humanity and compassion when we first arrived in this new land. Where we were nourished back to life.

  Meanwhile, David’s friends were sick of giving second chances to Bobby. He found himself alone and desperate. All of his life, he had held onto one possession that had belonged to his mother: a bracelet. It was his only physical connection to her; a way for him to imagine an embrace from far across the Pacific underneath the stars over the South China Sea. But soon the bracelet found its way to a pawnshop to be placed among other discarded, used jewels. Just for one more hit to seek comfort from this unquestioning mistress, injecting himself somewhere under a cone of light. As the fluid circulated through his body, the wallowing ache of a missing mother and the impending goodbye to his brother would fade.

  For a while we didn’t know
where Bobby was. I knew that he would occasionally drop by an outreach service in Cabramatta, so I went there and gave the street workers a bit of money to buy him some food when he next came by. The last I heard he was doing well. He was clean and had met someone, although his girlfriend’s mother disapproved and was doing everything she could to sabotage the relationship.

  It’s been a long time now. I’ve lost contact with him and don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. But I still remember his kind eyes and his crooked, lovely teeth.

  Vinh had a friend, Sơn, who lived near us. Sơn and his sister had come to Australia also alone as minors. When I found out about the deportation of permanent residents, I asked Vinh’s friend whether he had citizenship. He had no idea. After a few enquiries, we found out that Sơn did not have citizenship. He hadn’t known he needed it. He’d been able to get a driver’s licence and go to vocational college without it. I urged him to begin the process to get formal citizenship as soon as possible.

  On the next Australia Day, Vinh and I accompanied Sơn to the citizenship ceremony at Bankstown Council Chambers. There was no one else to celebrate this day with him. As he stood there, making the Australian Citizenship Pledge among African, Lebanese, Vietnamese and British migrants, I questioned how a nation could sanction the deportation of permanent residents. I looked over at Sơn, a quiet floppy-haired young man with a tender heart who later on would become a bus driver, get married, pay taxes and have a daughter. He would struggle to ensure that his daughter’s cleft palate would be repaired. He, like Bobby’s brother, had spent his formative years in this country. It seemed to me that as a society we were responsible for him, whether he became a doctor or drug dealer. His failure was our failure. To legislate to deport our disappointments but laud migrant successes as legitimate Australian stories was nothing less than cowardice. The words of Pauline Hanson drifted back to me. My country. My country.