Growing Up Asian in Australia

by Alice Pung

  ‘Okay, that’s $10.45. Do you have any Fly-Buys?’

  Pause.

  ‘Huh?’

  I would look them in the eyes and say very slowly, my hand imitating a Fly-Buys card, ‘Fly … Buys …’

  Another pause, and a lost look in their eyes.

  ‘Ah, it’s okay,’ I’d say with a shrug.

  Some customers devised a beautiful plan to get out of this game.

  ‘Oh, I left it at home,’ they’d laugh. ‘Okay, see you later.’

  They also loved to get rid of their change. No matter how much they had or how long the queue was.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘That comes to $14.

  85.’

  ‘Okay, I got change.’

  Groan.

  ‘Two dollar, two dollar, five dollar, five dollar fifty-sen, twenty-sen, tin-sen, fi-sen. See you later.’

  One day, I was serving a customer who bought nappies. I put her transaction through and said, ‘Have a nice day!’

  She looked at me and said, ‘Bag, bag, bag,’ pointing at the nappies.

  I showed her that the nappy bag had a handle, so she didn’t need a bag.

  ‘Gif me bag!’ she demanded. ‘You Chinese all the same.’

  I felt like I had been slapped in the face. With my best angry-on-the-inside customer-service voice I said, ‘I am not Chinese, I am Vietnamese.’

  She finished off with, ‘You Asians are all the same.’ She grabbed her nappies and went on her merry way, leaving me angry and frustrated.

  In the entertainment industry, being Asian was daunting at first. I had a Bert Newton face with Bart Simpson skin; I had Chinese eyes and huge black hair. At least I could never be stereotyped as a bimbo.

  Step Three: Become a Viet-school Drop-out

  I am Australian. I am a second-generation Australian Vietnamese. My mum would stress that I am Vietnamese-Australian. All my life I’ve had this mixed idea of who I am and what my role is.

  When I was in Year 7 my mother forced me to go to Vietnamese school for the first time. After coming back from a three-month family trip to Vietnam, she realised she had better send her eldest daughter to Vietnamese school.

  So there I was, a Year 7 student in a Grade One Vietnamese class, my little peers staring up at me. I cried so much before every Sunday-morning class that family friends asked if I was being bullied by my tiny classmates! Being a dutiful Vietnamese girl, I went to Viet school for another three years, until I finally quit, telling my mother I needed to focus on my schoolwork.

  My lack of interest in learning her language created a lasting communication barrier between me and my mother.

  Step Four: The Boyfriend

  I was ugly when I was in high school; I’m not scared to admit it. I was an Asian bookworm, with big owl-eyed glasses and a brown school uniform two sizes too large. I hung out with my Asian crew of girls and did Vietnamese daughter chores: after school, I looked after my two little sisters and attempted to teach them piano to save my mum money. But this all changed the summer after I finished high school. I discovered the internet. There, in a chatroom full of Asian teenagers, I met my boyfriend.

  Big no-no. Number one rule in the Asian Mother’s Handbook: no boyfriend until after university. This rule encompasses all the other rules in the book. If you don’t have a boyfriend, you will still be dependent on your family and stay at home. You will concentrate on your studies. And your virginity will be intact.

  By having a boyfriend, I created a lot of fear for my mother. It didn’t help that my boyfriend was Chinese. Soon after finding out, my mum decided she hated Chinese people.

  ‘They are too tight with money, always family first. Why can’t you go out with an Italian boy, you like pizza?’

  Once I overheard her gossiping to her friends:

  ‘She can date anyone other than a Chinese. I don’t care if he’s Iraqi or Indian, but not Chinese.’

  So, how about a nice Vietnamese boy?

  ‘No Vietnamese. He will cheat on you and gamble all your money.’

  Step Five: Get Kicked Out of the Cuckoo Nest

  When my mother kicked me out of home at the ripe old age of eighteen, I found a freedom that I had never known before. My mother forced wings on me and pushed me out of the nest, and I know she regrets it. At first I was scared. I was the first and only Asian girl in my group of friends to be kicked out of home. I became known as the girl with no home, the girl who had brought shame to her family.

  What was my shameful act? I had a boyfriend before I finished university … and she found him in my wardrobe. My mum is Vietnamese, and no way was her daughter not a virgin. That afternoon, I got home from uni and saw all my belongings in the back-yard. Everything. I was stunned. She had threatened to kick me out before but never acted on it. I collected my essential belongings and moved in with my first ever boyfriend. We slept on a foam mattress on the floor. My friends were supportive, but they couldn’t understand: we were all conditioned to depend on our Asian parents, and now I couldn’t.

  To my mother, I was the slut daughter. I am still with my boyfriend after five years and I’m still a slut in her eyes. I guess I will be for the rest of my life.

  So, there you have it: five simple ways to disappoint your Vietnamese mother.

  The Courage of Soldiers

  Pauline Nguyen

  Like his peers, my father wanted desperately to raise four high achievers, believing that the sacrifices he and my mother had made were far too great for us not to be. We aimed high because we had no choice. We were made acutely aware that he and my mother had fled Vietnam not for their own future but for ours – to ensure that we could lead a prosperous life and have a better education. ‘You are like cars with no direction,’ my father would say, ‘and I am your steering wheel, leading you in the right direction.’

  My father feared that his children would lose the old culture. At home, we spoke Vietnamese to our parents and English to each other. We practised all the formal traditions and lived the pious Vietnamese way. We upheld filial obedience and dutifully worshipped our long-lost ancestors.

  My father had hoped that the two very different cultures could blend into one well-adjusted whole. In theory, this sounded better than when it was put into practice. We worked at the restaurant seven days a week before and after school, stopping only to finish our homework and complete household chores. Outside activities included maths school, Vietnamese school, cooking school, debating and martial arts. We did all this and had to get top grades as well.

  My father placed tremendous pressure on us from an early age – any average result was a failure in his eyes. The knowledge of this lingered over our heads like a cheerless cloud that never lifted. He sent us to strict same-sex private Catholic schools, which was a challenge in itself. But report time was the worst. Twice a year, from the age of seven until thirteen, we would bring home our school reports with total fear and loathing. Assisted by his favourite billiard stick, the stiffest, shiniest one, my father would cane us once for every ‘B’ grade. For every ‘C,’ he caned us twice. This ritual required us to lie flat on our stomachs and not budge a millimetre as we waited for our father to deliver his wrath. Our polished floorboards, as hard and shiny as they were, offered no support as my father’s stick sliced the skin of our buttocks and hacked at the flesh of our thighs. When my father was done, and as we lay there in a bloody heap, he threw us a dollar for every ‘A.’

  With teeth clenched and fists squeezed until the knuckles turned white, I sometimes stared out the window and wondered what the neighbours would think if they ever heard us scream. What did it matter? To shed a tear or release a whimper at any time throughout this ritual meant a further beating to nullify our weakness. I cried only in private. Mostly I cried for Lewis, who, no matter how hard he tried, could never get anything higher than a ‘C’ for handwriting and physical education.

  Fear dominated every day of my childhood. Fear and the dog shit covering the yard were the sme
lls of my youth. I cannot remember any time when fear did not lurk over my shoulder. Fear seeped through every window, rose up from each shiny floorboard and spilled through the dead cracks in our walls. It hovered over our beds while we were sleeping.

  My dearest Aunty Ten tried her best to ease our pain. It was all she could do when report time came to stay at our house for as long as possible to delay the beatings. It comforted me to know that there was another Vietnamese adult in this world who thought that my father’s actions were cruel and unacceptable: ‘They are only children, for Christ’s sake.’ Her kindness only made matters worse – elongating our agonising wait, our nerves singed to the flashpoint. Eventually the time would come for her to leave. ‘I’m so sorry, honey, I must go … I’m so sorry.’

  It made no difference to my father what time my aunty left. He was a patient man, and especially good at playing this game. As soon as Aunty Ten walked out the front door, my father, with the enthusiastic glare of an executioner, would cock his head once in our direction. We knew what we had to do. The regular beatings ensured that I eventually brought home straight ‘A’s and secured a permanent position in the top three students of my grade – a habit I kept for every one of my dreary school years.

  By the time we reached high school, the canings stopped and a new punishment was introduced: public humiliation. While our friends were going out, discovering life and having fun, my father forbade us to go anywhere. He installed deadlocks on every major door of our house: front door, back door, living-room door, dining-room door and bedroom doors. It would have been impossible for a thief to penetrate, let alone for any child to escape. Our lives consisted of school, restaurant, sanctioned activities and home. He tolerated nothing else. My father controlled every hour of our day and when any situation fell out of his control, we suffered the full force of his anger.

  I can still recall the stench of my fear when I stepped onto the wrong train going home from school one day. It was overcast – the claustrophobic clouds had already descended with an air of nervous anxiety. In a flutter of lateness, I had mistakenly caught the express train at Liverpool station. It shot past Cabramatta and didn’t stop until half an hour later at Town Hall. Distressed and severely panicked at the thought of having to explain the lateness to my father, I carelessly jumped onto the first train I saw heading back. Unfortunately, it was the ‘all stops’ peak-hour train, delivering me back to Cabramatta another two hours later. Walking to the restaurant that evening to face my father was like losing control behind a car wheel – I was heading at full speed into a brick wall and there was no way of stopping. All I could do was grit my teeth, clench my fists and brace myself for the impact.

  My parents didn’t want to know about my version of events, accusing me instead of secretly meeting with the phantom boyfriend they had concocted in their heads. My father confirmed my fear with three clean punches to my face, followed by his usual torrent of poisonous words: ‘You’ll grow up and amount to nothing more than a common whore!’

  He made sure his friends were watching.

  *

  My father fled Vietnam to escape the oppression of the communist regime. It is ironic that we in turn have had to escape the tyranny of his rule to find freedom for ourselves. With the help of a close friend and the support of my brothers, I ran away from home as soon as I was old enough and immediately went into hiding. My brothers, who always knew my whereabouts, warned me by phone if my father or any of his henchmen came close to finding me. He had spread the word that there could be only two reasons for my leaving: one, that I had become a drug addict too ashamed to face the world; or two, that I had fallen pregnant to the phantom boyfriend. These conclusions were so typical of his nature. He had never attempted to get to know or understand his children. What assumptions he did come up with were based on anger and venom in his heart. I do not know which fact is sadder.

  That morning, I packed a lone suitcase, said goodbye to my brothers and walked out the tired front door. Leroy, only five years old at the time, pleaded with me to stay. ‘If you leave me, Sis, I will get a knife and stab myself in the stomach!’ Poor Leroy: how confused he must have felt to be abandoned by his sister.

  With the courage of soldiers, my brothers ventured to the restaurant to face the firing line. They presented my father with the farewell letter I had written: a soft, compassionate letter outlining all the reasons I had to leave. My brothers told my father that they had ‘found’ the letter after ‘discovering’ that I had gone.

  He hastily read my words and put them in his pocket. He ordered my brothers to join him at the table. He picked up four square, stainless-steel napkin dispensers and placed them neatly on top of one another. With steel in his voice, he said, ‘These represent each one of you.’ He pointed to each dispenser as he spoke, resting his finger on the bottom. ‘This one is your sister. She is meant to be the foundation for the four of you.’ After a long, deliberate pause, his backhand at the ready, he took a sudden violent swing at the bottom dispenser, sending it flying through the air and smashing it against the tiled wall. As the top three dispensers came crashing to the ground, he shouted, ‘Instead, she has chosen to wreck the family home!’ My brothers tell me that the restaurant was full of customers, and that he digested not one word of my letter. ‘She is wrong,’ he said, ‘to do what she has done.’

  Leaving my three brave brothers was the most painful part of running away – leaving them to face the consequences and pick up the pieces once I had gone. Life only got worse for them as the damp vapour of sadness filled every corner of our family home, lingering persistently over their heads, seeping into their clothes and skin. The pain between my mother and father followed them even to the restaurant, like a translucent shadow, leaving an unnatural mist for all to see. If little dialogue existed between them before, even less existed once I had gone. Communication shut down altogether – not out of hatred for one another, but out of despair. ‘Every day was like walking on thin ice,’ Luke tells me. My brothers’ workload grew heavier as they picked up the duties I had left behind. ‘Every day we were afraid – afraid of not working hard enough, afraid of letting any chores go amiss, afraid of stepping out of line in any way. We made sure that we did nothing wrong. Dad’s wick was constantly on fire.’

  My mother suffered the most, Lewis tells me: ‘She briefly lost her mind when she lost her only daughter.’ She became emaciated, letting grief eat away at her. ‘She sighed constantly, wore a permanent frown and never smiled at all.’ She became a vegan and vowed not to eat meat until she could see me again. For many Buddhists, vegetarianism is a means of cleansing not only the body, but also the spirit and the mind. It is a way of asking the gods for forgiveness, guidance and strength. It is custom to abstain from meat twice in every lunar calendar month. My mother’s tears fell at last, as she prayed every day for my return.

  *

  After two long years of waiting, my parents emptied of all hope; every ounce of inspiration drained out of them. They finally surrendered to their own sorrow and closed down the family business. With their livelihoods packed up, they began living a monastic existence, trying the best they knew how to make amends with the three boys still living at home.

  For me, life was also about survival. I could not allow myself, not even for one moment, to think about the tremendous shame that I had dumped upon them. The months passed slowly as I moved around to avoid detection. Truly fearing for my life, I hid in a quiet beach suburb in Newcastle, a city north of Sydney – one of the last places anyone would think of looking. But my spirit grew weary of living in fear and my body tired of being on the run. I made up my mind to return to Sydney and finish my degree.

  By this time, I had found a new strength. My fear of the future was nothing compared with my fear of the past. Even so, out of habit, I would look over my shoulder everywhere I went. I completed my arts degree in 1995. Looking back, I find it amusing that even years after leaving home, I still felt compelled to inform my father of
my academic achievements. Each year, I would cut away my home address and send him my results, to let him know that there were some things I would never forget: ‘Aim high, hold strong ambitions for your future. Remember where you came from and above all else, never forget the true value of your freedom.’

  This is an edited extract from Secrets of the Red Lantern (Murdoch Books, 2007).

  You Can’t Choose Your Memories

  Paul Nguyen

  When she was growing up, my mother’s parents owned a successful shoe shop in a beautiful, tree-lined part of Saigon. They never refer to it as Ho Chi Minh City, so neither do I. While their lives weren’t the most luxurious, my grandparents earned enough money to send my mother to a French Catholic boarding school to get the best education she could. She, however, saw this as proof that she was unloved, sent away by her parents because she wasn’t wanted around the house, and she was resentful for it. Her parents weren’t physically affectionate: they showed their love through money, by bringing food to the table and giving their four children shelter and education. In return, the children were obliged to do as their parents told them. This is how my mother was raised and this is how she raised me.

  My mother, a doctor, is a workaholic. She became the breadwinner of the family when my dad (also a doctor) became sick, which satisfied her need for control but totally defied her idea of a traditional patriarchal family like the one she was raised in. This caused complications all around. When I was in primary school, I went to my godmother’s house each afternoon until my mother could pick me up. When I got home, I would watch TV until bedtime because I had done all my homework at my godmother’s house. I shared a bed with my mother for the first ten years of my life, but I don’t remember us ever just talking. About my day, about her day, about anything. But my godmother talked. She had two kids of her own and I got along with them well.