Even losing my father didn’t break her.
It was right near the end of seventy-three. He was doing reconnaissance for the army, and when he was reported missing, everyone in the house knew what it meant.
My mother sat in her room for three days. She didn’t eat and she didn’t speak to anyone. I don’t know if she slept, even. They wouldn’t let me go to her.
Then on the fourth day she came out of the room, lit three sticks of incense in front of the goddess, said prayers for my father, and went on with her life.
In the years that followed, many men were drawn to her beauty, but she always cut them off with the same line.
“My husband will return …”
I don’t know if she really believed it, but no one ever saw her cry.
No one ever saw me cry, either. I made certain they weren’t around when I did …
But I really loved the city. It was so … alive. Even with the war on, and the news getting worse daily.
I was a kid, and it was fun being there with my cousins and the children of our parents’ friends. Even if the stories were dumb.
After 1975 we only went back to Saigon the one time. The communists renamed it Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh — Ho Chi Minh City — in honour of their dead leader, and for us it was like the old city died with the name. But the memories remained, dragging their feet around inside our heads like the ghosts from all those midnight stories.
3
PRIME POSITION
TOAN’S STORY
My father was lucky. If you can call six months in a re-education camp lucky.
In some countries, he said, they wouldn’t have wasted their time “re-educating” him. They’d just have taken him out and shot him. The winners make the rules — on torture, murder … whatever.
But there wasn’t too much of that after the war. At least, not in our part of the country. Maybe everyone had had their fill of killing in the long years before.
Of course, getting shot was still a real possibility.
But that wasn’t why we decided to leave.
It was the uncertainty. Never knowing from one day to the next what was going to be demanded of you. Never being able to speak your thoughts without looking over your shoulder first. You’d think that dying was the worst thing you could imagine happening, but I guess for some people it isn’t. For some people it isn’t even pain they fear.
It’s a future stretching out ahead of you without any hope of freedom.
I know. Freedom is just a word. One that politicians love to use to justify things they can’t justify any other way. The communists were fighting for freedom — so was my father. So were the Americans … and every soldier since the first caveman hit someone over the head with a sharp rock.
But it’s a real thing. And in the end, it’s all about who has control. Of what you own, of what you build. Of who you are.
Take my grandfather. He wasn’t a wealthy man, but everything he had he’d built from nothing. He hadn’t inherited it, he hadn’t stolen it. He’d earned it. It was his. At least, that was how he saw it.
Then, at the age of sixty-nine, reality struck.
For most people it might not have seemed like much, but to my grandfather it was devastating. His shop — our home — was a three-storey structure on the main street of Rach Gia. So when the new government decided to put up a propaganda post — a pair of those huge speakers they use to broadcast the Party line to the masses — where could be more perfect than the roof of my grandfather’s home? There was no discussion; they just arrived one day and began assembling it.
I remember he stood in the street all day, looking up as they worked.
After that, the broadcasts and the music became a part of our existence, but my grandfather never mentioned them, never reacted. As if he could deny they existed.
Even though he died inside a little every time the speakers thundered into life.
I loved my grandfather.
He was full of great stories.
Like the time my mother was going off at me for not doing something she’d already told me to do a dozen times. I was only a kid, but I was learning fast. I knew what was women’s work, and I knew I was on my way to being a man.
My grandfather just looked at my mother, shook his head and took me aside.
“It isn’t man’s work …”I began, but he put his fingers to my lips.
“And you are not yet a man. So you cannot use it as an excuse to be lazy.”
I’d already had the lecture a hundred times from my mother. Being the youngest son makes you spoiled and lazy … I didn’t expect to get it again. Not from my grandfather. He was supposed to be on my side.
He stared at me for a long time. But then he smiled, and I could sense a story coming.
“In China there was once a lazy young man,” he began. “He came from a wealthy family and he was so lazy that he was famous all through the province. But he was not satisfied.
“ ‘I have heard,’ he told his father, ‘that in a cave in the mountains near Shanglin, there lives an old man who is a master of laziness. I want to go there and learn from him, that I might know all the secrets of my calling.’ And because his father refused him nothing, he had his servants carry his son to the cave — for the young man was, of course, far too lazy to walk there.
“Now the master sat at the back of the cave, doing nothing — which was his particular skill — when he saw the young man enter, walking backwards. ‘What do you want with me?’ the master asked.
“ ‘I want to learn all the secrets of laziness,’ the young man replied.
“The master leaned lazily on his elbow and looked up at the young man’s back. ‘Before I agree to teach you,’ he said, ‘you must answer me one question.’
“ ‘Ask it,’ the boy replied.
“ ‘When you entered my cave, you walked in backwards. Unless I am to take it as a sign of disrespect, I must know why.’
“ ‘I did not know if you would agree to teach me,’ said the young man. ‘I walked in backwards so that if you refused I would not have to bother turning around to walk out. Now, will you teach me?’
“The old man shook his head. ‘I can teach you nothing,’ he said. ‘But if you will sit down, perhaps you can teach me.’
My grandfather looked at me for a few seconds, then smiled again.
“You have a lot to learn about being lazy, Toan,” he said. “So for now, do what your mother says.”
I wonder if he would have come with us if he had lived. I like to think he would.
*
10 June 1977
Rach Gia
GRANDPA
The old man stands in the street and looks up at what he has built. In sixty-nine years he has come such a long way. Yet it feels like no distance at all.
Behind him, the main street runs down to the sea, out of sight behind the rows of buildings, but he has his back to the onshore breeze. Slowly, he tears his gaze from everything he has achieved, and stares northward in the direction of his past.
Shinan, southern China. A small farm, a string of poor harvests. And then the devastation of the last year’s flood. No prospects beyond poverty.
Being the youngest son in a family blessed with five boys and cursed with as many girls — left the young Chau with few choices. So, at the age of fourteen, armed with his father’s gruff blessing and a few days’ food, he made his way to the sea-port of Beihei, and found work on the Albatross, a trader plying the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea.
It was the 1920s and trade was good, but the sea is not the life for a Shinan farmer’s son, and when the ship berthed one evening at Rach Gia, the boy saw his chance.
Three days later the Albatross weighed anchor and sailed — minus its youngest crew-member — and the town had a new citizen.
Working for a French store-owner, the boy learned quickly the art of buying and selling, and the value of smiling when you really wanted to frown. He even learned the language of the city, and the stran
ge, musical language of his employer’s family.
So a few years later, when the Great Depression scoured Europe, and his employer fled to Paris, never to return, Grandpa was ready. He rented a small store in the prime position on the town’s main street, and within five years he had made enough to buy the building. Another five and he had made enough to knock it down, to build a larger shop and a home for his young wife. Two storeys of living space above a thriving business. One of the tallest buildings on the north side of the street. The foundation for his future. His family’s future.
And now, almost half a century later, he stands in the street and watches that future slipping inexorably away.
On the roof, sweating in the hot sun and murmuring curses to each other, a small group of men is manoeuvring into place a huge, red loudspeaker.
He has not asked for it to be placed there. He does not want it there. But in these times refusal is not an option.
The shop is in the prime position, and its three-storey-high roof towers over the street. An ideal spot to place a speaker if it is to broadcast its wisdom to a waiting populace.
Be thankful that they have taken no more than a portion of your roof, when they have the power to take the whole building…
Tuyet, his wife.
Things are never as bad as we allow them to appear.
Sometimes he wonders what he would have done all these years without her gentle optimism.
Accept what must be borne; solve what is not understood. Face each day as a new beginning …
But at some point a man grows too old for new beginnings. That is why a wife must give him sons …
The leader of the working party, a young peasant with rotten teeth and foul-smelling breath, moves up beside him and stands staring up at the building.
Without looking at the old man, he begins to speak, parroting the lines he has been fed, testing the weight of his power.
“ ‘Property is theft.’ Do you know who said that, old man?”
He knows. He has heard it all before. All the lines, all the theories. All the propaganda. He knows, but he says nothing. This man is not interested in having a conversation. His words are weapons, not bridges.
“It was Karl Marx.” Now he turns and faces the old man, his breath a gust of contagion. “Why they let you hang on to the building at all is beyond me. But make the most of it. Things can change. If I was in charge …”
He shakes his head and trails off, as if the dream of some future advancement makes conversation with this remnant of the old order superfluous.
And the old man masks a frown with a smile, as he learned to do so many years ago.
Later that evening the technicians test the speaker, playing a burst of martial music that shakes the walls and fills the upstairs rooms with thunder. A disembodied voice utters some proclamation that the old man tries not to hear, though it vibrates in his bones like the voice of doom.
*
TOAN’S STORY
My grandfather died not long after my father was released from the camp. I think perhaps he just wanted to hang on that long, to make sure the family would be in good hands.
He was pretty old. And in a few short months his whole world had be turned upside down. It must have been hard for him to adjust. He lived with the constant fear that someday soon the authorities might decide that enough was enough, and nationalise his home, just as they had done with so many other properties.
They had the power to do it. Just as they had the power to strip the wealth from people overnight.
One day you were rich, the next day … everyone was equal. And the way they did it was so deadly efficient. If it wasn’t that they were trying to destroy your life, you could almost admire the simplicity of it.
My mother explained it to me once.
There was no warning, she said. Overnight they changed the currency — all the notes and the coins. Next morning, all the old money was worthless and only the new kind was acceptable. On the day of the change, each family was allowed to exchange just two hundred dòng for the new money, and that was it. It didn’t matter how much cash you had hidden away, you could only change two hundred, and the rest was just so much paper and metal. Rich or poor, landowner, shopkeeper or worker, overnight every family had exactly the same wealth.
And it affected everyone. Not just the rich. There was the story of the street-vendor who had spent his whole life working with his wife, selling food on the streets of Saigon. Unknown to him, his wife had been putting aside money for the time when they could no longer work. one note at a time, over many years.
I guess what starts off as a good idea can become an obsession, because the pile was worth a fortune. At least it had been the day before. On the morning of the exchange, she came to him crying, and showed him the pile of useless paper.
Suddenly all the years of work and sacrifice came crashing down on him. He took the money into a small shed and set fire to it — and to himself.
Of course, that was why the gold my father had bought and hidden away was suddenly so valuable. Money is just money, but gold is … gold. I asked him once what had made him buy all that gold.
He just smiled and said my grandfather had told him to do it …
Freedom.
Now I can talk about it like I know what I’m talking about, but in those days, I didn’t think about freedom, or politics. Or anything more than getting up in the morning and acting like a kid. But for the last ten years I’ve listened to my parents and their friends talking. And I’ve tried to figure out just what it was that made them gamble their lives, and the lives of their children, in leaky fishing boats, when there was every chance of capture and imprisonment.
Or worse …
You see, between Vietnam and the promised land of Malaysia sailed the murdering pirates of the South China Sea, and every person who made the decision to try and beat the odds knew the terrible risk they were running.
But they tried anyway.
So what did freedom mean to my father? What did it mean to my mother, or to Aunt Mai? I guess, in the end, it meant the simple right to make choices.
And they chose to go.
4
VỰỎT BIÊN
9 March 1986
Boundary Park, Australia
LINH’S STORY
Uncle Minh took my grandmother out to Cabramatta, and from there he was going to show her where they’re building the new house. The twins went with them, but Toan couldn’t go along; he was working, and he was probably going to be away all day. I couldn’t go either. I had more important things on my mind.
With everyone either out working or showing the old lady around, it left me free to see Miro alone, without “the eyes” watching every move.
I don’t know how he puts up with it. I really don’t. In all the time we’ve known each other, I don’t think we’ve had more than a couple of days together without someone from the family tagging along.
I’m almost eighteen, but they still treat me like a kid. I tell them this isn’t Vietnam. That they do things differently in Australia. But maybe that’s the point; if it was Vietnam — or if he was called Vinh or Tang or something, instead of Miroslav — maybe they’d ease off. But it’s not, and he isn’t, and they always seem to find an excuse to send along a chaperone.
Luckily, a lot of the time it’s Toan, and he’s cool.
He always manages to discover urgent things to occupy him for three or four hours, until we can get back and pick him up: One on one at the stadium, a movie, a new machine at Timezone. Even the occasional trip to the library.
He gets on really well with Miro. Which is more than you could say for the olds.
They don’t actually say anything, but you can tell that they… I don’t know…I guess they act uncomfortable when Miro’s around.
Okay,so he’s pushing one-ninety centimetres and he’s as blond as I am dark, and maybe they don’t think we look so hot together, but he really tries.
He just seems t
o pick the wrong topics to start conversations about. He’ll say something and there’ll be this nervous silence, either because no one has a clue what he’s talking about, or because they do, and it isn’t something that you talk about with kids in the room. You get the picture.
So he clams up, and sips his ginseng tea (which he really doesn’t want, but is too polite to refuse), while my Aunt Hoa makes a point of talking to her husband in Vietnamese, or tidying up the table in front of Miro, like he’s stopping her from doing the housework or something.
I guess I can understand where she’s coming from. She’s my aunt, but I’m more like a daughter to her. She just wants to do the right thing.
And it’s not like Miro and I don’t get comments sometimes when we’re together in the street. She’s probably worried about what might happen if we really get serious.
I wish I could make her see that it’s already too late to worry about that.
Anyway, at least for one day they were all out and we had a breather.
*
TOAN’S STORY
My grandmother was very impressed with the new house. It’s nowhere near finished, of course, but even without the roof on you can see how it’s going to turn out. Two storeys of luxury, on the high side of the street, with curved balconies looking out over Greenvale.
We’ve come a long way from the refugee hostel at Cabramatta, or the Housing Commission townhouse in Auburn. And even further from Rach Gia. And I’m sure when she watched us go all those years ago, she never expected anything like this. She probably didn’t expect to ever see us again.
I remember looking back and waving as we walked away. I didn’t know what my parents knew, so it wasn’t anything special to me, going off down the street, waving back to my grandmother. A little while and we’d be back.
We stopped at the corner and I looked back for the last time. She seemed so small, standing there in front of that building. My grandfather’s building. The symbol of his success in his chosen country.
It’s funny how the circle turns …
*
27 February 1977
Rach Gia
GRANDMA
Toan is nervous. It is the eve of the New Year celebrations, and for the first time in his young life he has been given the honour of speaking the traditional words of respect to the oldest member of the house.
Only the Heart Page 3