The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (11 page)

We had a wonderful time on our visit to Melbourne. My father and uncle took us around to visit all the usual sights. As it was the first time Khoa and I had gone interstate, we returned with lots of gifts for Mum.

Then six months later, a strange thing happened. Uncle Six suddenly moved out and I never saw him again. He just disappeared. I asked Mum and Dad where he went, and they genuinely didn’t know. One day he was my favourite uncle, the next day he was gone—no phone calls, no visits, no contact ever again. We didn’t learn the truth until many, many years later; in fact, nearly two decades later.

In my last few years at primary school, Dad was talking about buying a farm. The sewing business had prospered, but he still had a hankering to reconnect with his family’s farming roots, to go back to what he knew—the land and animals. So he found a duck farm, on seven acres of waterfront property at Swan Bay, two hours north of Sydney.

The farm was gorgeous, with a couple of houses on it as well as a swimming pool, but that was all window dressing to Dad. He saw the waterfront potential. Rather than just buying a cheaper block inland, he saw a chance to make some money out of breeding ducks, with a view to subdividing the land later.

The farm was beyond what Dad could afford but he wasn’t one to let that stop him. Dad had a favourite Vietnamese saying that he always used to pull out, and it loosely translates as this: ‘There’s only two times in life, there’s now and there’s too late.’ It goes a long way towards describing his outlook on life.

Dad roped in three of his brothers, Uncle Two, Uncle Three and Uncle Nine, who’d also come out from America. Together they bought the property and Two, Three, Four and Nine would rotate time spent there.

Dad had seen a niche market opportunity.

‘Asians love duck eggs. If this goes well, I’ll expand it,’ he told me.

He always had big plans for making big money. When I saw the farm, I had big plans for having a great time.

For two or so years, we visited the farm every school holidays and it was like the old days again because our four cousins who had lived with us in Newtown would come up as well. We’d all spend the holidays desperately searching for new and interesting ways to get into trouble. By this stage Joe was twelve, I was eleven, Manh was ten, Khoa was nine, Tri was eight, my sister Tram was seven, and their youngest brother Martin was kicking around our ankles.
Bang, bang, bang
. We were an assembly line, an indomitable force. Armed with spring rolls and duck eggs we would roam the surrounding marshlands for hours on end.

Dad bought a dinghy at an auction as well as a bunch of old oars, and we discovered the joys of fishing. One day Joe and I took the boat out by ourselves, just the two of us. Suddenly, I felt a huge tug on my line.

‘Joe, I’ve got a big one!’ The rod was bent like a banana, and I could actually feel it moving the boat along through the water. I thought it was going to pull me out of the boat so we panicked and cut the line. This left our boat rocking so hard we almost fell out.

‘Ahhh!’ Joe screamed and instantly turned white. I spun around and saw an enormous flipper not three feet away from our little dinghy. It slapped the water and rocked the boat again, forcing two terrified little boys to wail and cling on for dear life. Then this bald, leathery head slowly emerged from out of the water and an enormous eyeball stared straight at me for a second, then submerged.

It was a giant turtle, about five-foot long, with the most glorious and beautiful shell which gleamed in the sunlight. The turtle gave us a momentary display of its magnificence, then disappeared into the deep of the water again.

Joe and I rowed back to shore as fast as we could, in silence at first and then laughing hysterically, releasing the tension of the most terrifying thing we had ever encountered in our little lives—apart from scary homeless women. As soon as we got back we told everyone about our ordeal, neglecting to mention the screaming, cowering or wailing like babies. Our fathers seemed proud that we’d survived a scare and got back safely. Later that week however, I got another scare that I wasn’t meant to see, and it would change me forever.

Every morning at sunrise, our fathers knocked on our bedroom doors, and all six kids woke up, jumped into our gumboots lined up against the wall and went out to collect eggs. Free range, of course. Dad didn’t like the idea of battery cages so nothing was too good for our ducks. They had an acre to walk around and Dad built sheds for them to lay their eggs in. If they didn’t like it indoors, the ducks could waddle around under the trees surrounding them.

After a year, the ducks were producing great quantities of eggs and the farm was paying its way. The only problem with free range, Dad discovered, is that foxes could get to the ducks, so we went to the local pound and bought seven dogs.

Dad had an amazing knack of knowing which dogs were smart and could be trusted just by looking at them and playing with them for a few minutes. He really had a way with animals. He trained the dogs and they became an army of bodyguards for the ducks, and fantastic playmates for us. Not one fox got to the ducks after that, and we got to take the dogs fishing and exploring.

One rainy night we were watching TV when I looked out the back door and saw Blackie, a young kelpie cross, throwing up froth.

‘Dad!’ I yelled.

We all went out to inspect him and within minutes he was lying on his side whimpering, unable to even move. Some people had gone fishing at a local bay, caught a couple of poisonous toadfish and irresponsibly left them lying around on the shore. All the dogs knew to avoid the toadfish but Blackie was young and naive, and he’d swallowed a deadly carcass.

Dad got me to call up the local vet, which was a good forty-minute drive away, but it was closed. Dad told Joe and me to keep the kids occupied, away from the back door. Once Joe had the others entertained, I snuck back out and saw my father tenderly carry Blackie in his arms like a small child to the side of the shed. Then he picked up a huge shovel, lifted it high above his head and… 
wham!

It was over. A single blow.

Dad silently used the same shovel to bury the dog in the rain, like a scene in a Stephen King movie. Mum came over and put her arm around me when she saw that I was watching through tears of sadness and frustration. I was only eleven years old and I didn’t understand the idea of ‘putting it out of its misery’.

‘Why did he do that? What if Blackie got better in the morning?’ I argued with Mum. She gently explained that it would have been cruel to let him suffer in agony all night, that Blackie was well past gone, and what Dad did was actually the kind thing to do.

‘Your father loved Blackie, too, Anh. But he knows when an animal is near its end.’

The next morning all of us kids went out and made a cross out of sticks and Tram picked some flowers that we quietly laid under the tree next to the shed where little Blackie was buried. It didn’t matter that it was only a dog, or that we had six others. We were kids who had just experienced our first death of a pet.

I adored the farm. My favourite childhood memories are of being there and playing around, and also of how Mum and Dad were so in love with each other when we were there. Mum was so proud when Dad and his trained dogs caught the fox that was eating our ducks.

‘Your father’s the best when it comes to animals,’ she would say to no one in particular.

It seemed like my parents were in their element. This rural-raised couple from a Third World country were at peace on the land.

In the evenings we would all sit down in front of our little TV and watch
MacGyver.
He was awesome; he could turn a can of tuna and a pocket torch into an alternator and save a planeload of Colombians. Dad would always sit back and treat the show like a challenge, commentating on what might realistically work and what would not. Sometimes he would predict what Mac was going to do next. ‘Wow!’ All us kids would be mesmerised as we watched Dad’s prediction unfold, but Mum was never surprised. She knew what her man was capable of and, in her mind, no
MacGyver
stunt was ever going to top how her young husband had single-handedly gotten her brothers out of a concentration camp.

I also loved it when Dad taught me things. I felt so privileged to be learning the secrets only a chosen few would ever know. One time my uncle locked his car keys in his old Toyota and Dad went and fetched a coathanger. He bent it out of shape and then, within a few minutes,
click
, the car was unlocked. Everyone was impressed, smiling and relieved… for a few short seconds. Dad immediately locked it again and slammed the door shut.

‘Anh! Your turn.’

He threw me the crooked coathanger and went back inside to finish his beer with my uncle.

My brother and I worked hungrily on the lock. We had just seen Dad do it and here was our chance to perform a feat that felt like a magic trick, or at the very least part of a spy’s arsenal of skills. A couple of times I could see the lock ever… so… slowly… rising… then, before I could lift it all the way up, it’d slip and fall again.

After an hour, just as I was about to give up… 
click!

Whoo-hoo!

It’s hard to describe how satisfying it was. I once spent two hours with a mate throwing basketballs at the ring from the halfway line. After a few hundred attempts,
thwip—
straight through! That’s what it felt like.

I ran inside, yelling, ‘I done it! I done it!’

Picking a car lock is a bit like riding a bike, once you’ve done it, it kind of stays with you forever. As I got older it became very handy. At university I was the go-to man for girls who’d locked their keys in their car: ‘Yes, ma’am, I’m happy to help.’ I used to go to parties hoping someone would forget their keys in the car just so I could be the hero. On the school bus I’d daydream about everything from a hijacking to a thermonuclear war, all I’d have to do is reach into my schoolbag and pull out my trusty coathanger.