Hundreds of young people of Vietnamese descent from sixteen countries congregated in Paris. Each delegation contributed a piece to the opening ceremony of the conference, whether it was a comedic parody of a famed Vietnamese variety show or a moving protest song. For the week of the conference, we met with people who spoke Vietnamese with Norwegian, French and British accents. We exchanged stories of growing up as refugees in our host countries. We laughed, we sang, we understood. There were lectures and presentations on ways to bring democracy to Vietnam, on the role of art in the movement. A Vietnamese international student with inside information on how the Communist Party monitored its people apparently risked much to talk to us. I don’t remember what he said but I remember the security controls: once we were all seated in the theatre, the screens on the windows were electronically rolled down until there was no more natural light and no one from outside could see in.
In a plenary workshop, a question was asked of us: what did it mean to be Vietnamese? Resilience. Excellence. Achievement. I raised my hand but posed questions instead of giving a response. I said that it was easy to think of the apparent successes of our community as a manifestation of what it means to be Vietnamese. But what of our brothers and sisters who suffered from drug addiction, or were involved in crime? Did we still think of them as Vietnamese? Did they possess the core of Vietnamese identity? I was aware of how privileged we were to be there, that we were mostly university students with the means to travel to Europe. But we shouldn’t forget the nameless others back home who were not so lucky. I thought our community development initiatives needed to look beyond the present pro-democracy speak.
The room next to the plenary theatre had been transformed into an exhibition space. During the lunch break I went inside to view the works. I was transported back home to a worn mother and long nights. On display was the work of a Vietnamese Australian photographer from Melbourne who’d photographed the sewing rooms in a number of Vietnamese homes. There were no people in the photos; instead of the usual sense of urgent activity, the rooms were eerily still as though they had violently sucked out leaving a vacuum. They were solemn chambers emanating a grave life of their own. The piles of garments frozen under a stark halogen light were too familiar. The image of Jesus Christ with His illuminating sacred heart and compassionate eyes on the wall could have been ours. So could the chopsticks that rested on a bowl of instant noodles, beckoning an increasing call to work. Thousands of miles away, on a different continent, these photographs both comforted and confronted me. This was my story on the walls and the photographer challenged me to embrace it. He delivered to me the type of validation that comes with a published artwork carrying the core themes of one’s life. He saw me. It was an acknowledgement I had long needed. As I fell into these pictures, I wept grateful tears of recollection and relief. In that little room in Paris, it was the beginning of my understanding of the transformative and healing powers of creative art. It was a lesson I would never forget.
At the closing ceremony of the conference, a symbolic flag was handed over to the Canadian delegation, who would host the conference in two years’ time. As the music played and the delegates clapped, our spirits soared. It was summer in Paris and we were an international body of bright young students bound by a common heritage, by one race.
On Bastille Day, we roamed the streets of the city and took a boat ride on the Seine, waving huge yellow and red-striped flags. In hindsight, it was bizarre that we chose another nation’s day of pride to display ours. Nevertheless, riding on a high of unity and belonging, we celebrated.
My time in Paris solidified in me a forceful commitment to Vietnamese people—a commitment which, at the time, felt like a natural responsibility. Beyond the uplifting celestial songs, the rhetoric and flag-waving, I wanted to examine political structures within the framework of development economics and capitalism. I wanted to explore the holistic merits of democracy for nations like Vietnam. I wanted to understand human rights in the context of globalisation. So upon my return to Sydney, I decided to discard my finance major in my Bachelor of Commerce and switch to government and international relations.
It was an intellectually rewarding choice. Finance’s random walk theory mattered much less to me than duty. But as I sat in lectures and researched for assignments, I began to see that the sentiments of the Vietnamese community were based more on hurt than rational or considered argument; that the political agenda to restore Vietnam had a lot to do with communal and individual journeys for redemption and healing as well as corrosive bitterness, robed in noble and righteous aspiration. How does one erase the memory of burying a fellow soldier alive at the order of a North Communist cadre? How does someone who is forced to flee his homeland after spending years in a re-education camp overcome the sight of his wife being raped by pirates? I would never have the answers for these men and women. I would never be able to heal all my father’s wounds. But maybe I could learn to see through the present to the forgotten pre-war days, to look past the unfathomable journeys of hurt to the man he once had been. Maybe, ever so slightly, like a feather scraping the air, I could help to heal these deep, deep wounds.
CHAPTER 11
So much world
In my third year of university, when a new president was elected to the Vietnamese Students Association my participation in Vietnamese community activities waned in favour of broader community development and arts projects. As I initiated and managed statewide projects, I began to see how similar minority groups are to each other. The stories had the same themes of dispossession, of trauma, of persecution, of survival. I witnessed the magical ability of the arts to empower and to change nightmares into dreams. With the notions of advocacy and storytelling, I busied myself. I exhibited as a multimedia artist in various exhibitions, won a film scholarship and performed as a spoken-word artist at the Museum of Sydney. I initiated a multicultural short film festival and worked with the Ethnic Communities’ Council to establish its first youth awards. Study for my double degree continued but not without difficulty as my attentions were diverted. Law interested me less than reading Plato’s Republic and the real changes that I saw effected in my extracurricular work. Peter continued to feed me notes and pass me down tutorial guides. The busier I grew, the more I was distracted from underlying feelings of shame and disassociation.
During this time, our family moved from Chester Hill to a cheap and decaying house in Bankstown. The lawn at the front was unkempt and there was an old tyre and other bits of junk underneath a frangipani tree that grew carelessly against the fence. The dated white fibro house boasted a threatening BEWARE OF DOG sign on the side gate, but there was no dog. Underneath my bedroom window a couple of forgotten rose bushes grew. As I lay on my bed on windy nights they would scratch at the window like a forgotten puppy. On the day we moved in, we found a couple of discarded syringes at the foot of the rose bushes. Inside, the green paisley carpet was dotted with cigarette burns. The kitchen was painted a crude, dated blue. The bathroom walls featured a couple of sad raised goldfish and shells. We froze in the winter and sweltered in the summer.
The Vietnamese landlord lived at the back with his young family in a tiny burrow covered by corrugated iron. We weren’t far from the stretch of Canterbury Road where the prostitutes would position themselves in the evenings. The side streets were known for drop-offs and exchanges of drugs. It wasn’t uncommon to see police cars meandering through these streets at night. Before we bought a shed to store the meagre hoard of belongings we had accumulated over two decades, Vinh slept in the living room on the couch. But despite all its shortcomings, with rents on the rise we were just happy to have found a place near public transport and a church.
Before we moved to Bankstown, my parents had decided to sell our sewing machines. Business was drying up as the low-end work was being shifted to countries with cheap labour—such as Vietnam, ironically. My mother no longer had the visual precision to work on the higher end, more meticulously designed sm
aller loads. In any case, there wasn’t going to be enough room for the machines in the new place. Their departure marked the end of a chapter in our settlement journey. From the time I began preschool to when I entered university, the two machines were reliable friends to us: the training wheels of a young refugee family. The pair should have been used by both my mother and Hng Khanh, her youngest brother who was lost in Cambodia. I was sure her heartache gnawed her softly as she sewed and thought of her lost baby brother.
On the day the machines left us, I looked at them for a long time before they were moved into the truck. The yellow measuring tape stuck along the edge of the Singer machine was peeling. Its numbers had partially faded. The pedal of the overlocker had worn away, exposing a patch of raw shiny metal where, for two decades, my mother’s foot moved in sure pulses. The sound of the machines that welcomed me each time I opened the front door was the sound of rent money, school fees and grocery shopping. They had sustained us.
As I traced the lines of the machines that day, I remembered a time in class at law school. The girl I sat next to had thin lips, long hair and wore expensive black-framed glasses. She had perfect teeth and skin. No visible pores. After several classes and a few polite conversations during break times, I asked her what she wanted to do after university. At the time, my mother had been sewing regularly for an urban fashion label that had stores in almost every large shopping centre in Sydney. We had been going through a steady head contractor based out of Chester Hill, whose kids I tutored in English and economics. My fellow student told me that she was going to work for her family’s business after she graduated.
‘What sort of business is it?’ I asked.
‘We have a fashion label.’ She told me the name. It was the same label my mother was sewing for. The two words by themselves were just harmless nouns. But as they left her mouth, I felt a wrenching stab. It was a bitter reinforcement of my rank in the world order.
Not long after this conversation, I received a grant to write a play. Living Room was based on my mother’s experience inside our various sewing rooms and how, from a seat at the sewing machine, she watched her daughter grow. Maybe it was an attempt to validate her experiences and my own. But at the time, I had no such lucid intentions. On opening night at Parramatta Riverside Theatre, there was a light buzz. The audience was a mixture of friends, family, artists, producers and media. This time, I didn’t need to translate for her. Quiet tears gently flowed down her cheeks as she saw her life played out on stage by a Filipino actress. The play ran for all of ten minutes, which I would later feel was an insult. I sat beside her in the audience, squeezing her hand. ‘Understand?’ ‘Understand.’ She smiled graciously. Forgiving me.
Later that week, I sat in class with the fashion-label poreless-skin student. As the lecturer droned on, again I found my mind sauntering in and out of the classroom. Were our destinies already forged? I wondered. Did any of this matter? With increased vigour, I began pursuing grant applications and scholarships to produce artworks. This was the arena where I found clear meaning and salvation. A world where I could control storylines and outcomes.
I received a grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts to produce a writing and photography anthology, Memory Frame. A friend and I gathered together a small group of young Vietnamese Australians to reflect on their families’ journeys to Australia and their ultimate conception of place and identity. For my contribution, I sifted through the scant collection of photos from the refugee camp and interviewed my father. Holding my list of prepared questions, I sat with him at the dining table donated to us by our former landlord. The yellow plastic tablecloth with blue tulips reflected the sun shining through the kitchen window, draped in a jungle themed curtain. I asked my father about the decision to leave Vietnam, about what he remembered of the journey through Cambodia, about the disappearance of my uncle. A few minutes after we’d begun, he asked me to stop and then he left the room. ‘Later.’ But later did not come.
The next morning my father said he’d found it hard to sleep, and when he did the nightmares came. The steam from the instant coffee rose from the Bankstown City Council mug as he spoke. Underneath the Vietnamese Students Association cap I had given him, my father looked old. I had no words of comfort to offer him. But I felt a sordid shame and remorse at the realisation that I had been so insensitive in pursuit of my ‘project’. His memories were vivid. I recalled one year we had attended an Australia Day event organised by the local council at a park. There was a Blackstone engine. It took my father back to the very night he, his wife and young baby had spent on a roadside underneath the black Cambodian sky across from an abandoned Blackstone factory. Without considering, I had turned the interview into an intellectual fact-finding exercise that assaulted him like an icy ten-page hospital questionnaire in English. I marvelled at my own immaturity.
My mother told me that she would answer any questions I had. ‘Dad is fragile. He is a lot weaker than you think.’
But even as I asked my mother a watered-down version of my original set of questions, I could not shake my disgust at myself for causing my beloved father so much pain. I pictured tormenting images of jungles, guns, uniforms and savage eyes hovering above my parents’ bed like a torrent of ghouls. I wanted to know where these images had come from. What scenes of horror had he witnessed? What patches of happiness had been robbed from him? What decay had he seen? No matter how many questions I had, I knew now that the answers I sought could not come from my father himself. It was only through fragments of stories that my mother and relatives told over time that I was able to piece together a jigsaw collection of my family history. Incomplete, but just enough.
From the time we moved to Bankstown, I developed a passionate attachment to the community. It is one of the most culturally diverse areas in Australia, home to a sizeable community of Vietnamese and Lebanese migrants. Bankstown was the subject of a series of damaging media reports focusing on gang violence, attempts to shoot police and race-related gang rape. I sat on the inaugural youth advisory committee of the city council. In our meetings at the council chambers beside Paul Keating Park, the committee members would often share stories that had outraged each of us. There were instances where reporters handed out baseball caps to willing youths at the station in order to photograph them, instructing them to pose with infamous American manufactured gang gestures in exchange for a small amount of money. When the story ran with the image, the headline featured the fear-inducing word ‘gang’.
As young people of a misunderstood community, we tried hard to advocate for truth, for social justice. But as reports were churned out by journalists sentenced to community newspaperdom before moving up the Fairfax/News Corp ladder, many of us became more watchful and more distrustful of outsiders as well as a mainstream Australia that saw our diversity as a threat to their ‘way of life’. Within the streets of Bankstown, I learned to feel comfortable and proud in a place where in the main shopping centre women in hijab walked among Asian families and African youths without people turning their heads or clutching their purses.
As I commuted from our fibro house in Bankstown to the glossy central business district of Sydney, I felt I was crossing a border between two different countries. A pensive frustration continued to mushroom inside me. Postcodes still mattered.
Some of the law subjects I was taking required me to attend the St James campus in the city. It was a tall, narrow, claustrophobic building in the heart of the Sydney law precinct, opposite the Supreme Court of New South Wales. Like the other law offices and courts built in the late 1960s, the law school’s grey concrete walls were cold and forbidding. In the small brown-tiled foyer, a long noticeboard sat inside a glass case mounted on the wall facing the lifts. This was where faculty news, paralegal jobs and information on research grants and scholarships were displayed. On level five of the building a small shop sold pies, sandwiches and drinks in a communal area with a few couches, tables and a pool table. I hardly
ever went up there. If I did, it was to buy a cup of barely tolerable coffee or use the bathroom. While I would wait for the lady to make the coffee, I watched the other students assemble in cosy clusters on the couches, sharing notes and chatting. I knew I would never be one of them.
I spent as little time as I could in the suffocating building of law school. The long neon lights were invasive and the gargoyles that towered above the city on the building’s corners grimaced at me with sadistic pity. I floated in and out of the shadows of the back rows in class. But a few redeeming moments occurred each time I alighted the train at St James station. I would walk through a tunnel and emerge into the beautiful expanse of Hyde Park. Often the buskers and homeless would be stationed just before the stairs ascended onto the street level. One busker, who I befriended, played the clarinet and as I walked into the tunnel each time, the gradual pitch of his tunes would fill and soothe me like a cup of peppermint and honey tea. At lunchtimes, I would escape the drab spell of law school and lie sprawled across the grass of Hyde Park, watching a game of giant chess or children feeding pigeons near the naked statues at the central fountain. When I had a late class, I loved walking through the archway of giant towering trees that latticed its branches together at the top in a mystical apex of enchanted green.
One evening, as I walked through Hyde Park, the fairy lights flickered and blinked among the trees as the sun swiftly descended. I dumped my bag at the foot of a tree and climbed up. I sat like a hidden insect, recording the suits going home and parents with strollers against shimmering wishing pools of water. It was the cusp of spring and Louis Armstrong streamed through my iPod against the five o’clock Elizabeth Street traffic. I wanted to dissolve right there. After a year of classes at the St James campus, I was miserable and found the prospect of a further two years full-time there unbearable. (My self-imposed isolation probably didn’t help.) I couldn’t bear the ritualistic, tortuous attendance at the St James campus. I saw drones without imagination posing as students. I toyed with the idea of taking another deferment.
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