The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (17 page)

I rationalised that I wasn’t really the performing type. I’d
rather
sit in a room and stare at the clock, waiting for the talented boys to come back and tell me all about their heroic adventures. And that’s just what I did. For many, many long periods.

Then one day Mrs Borny, our English teacher, who I’ve always thought was my very own real-life version of Robin Williams’ character in
Dead Poets Society
, walked in and decided that us bunch of rejects weren’t hopeless and started to run her own drama classes. She had never agreed with splitting up the class in the first place, and even though she’d never taught drama before, she improvised and pretty soon we were doing our own version of plays and acting games. Suddenly this bunch of rejects felt like the lucky ones, the ones taught by ‘The Secret Drama Teacher’.

Mrs Borny not only taught us drama but also how to write it, creating stories from scratch. One day she said to me, ‘Anh, you’re a very talented storyteller.’ She had no idea how far that one line of encouragement would take me… until twenty years later, when this little boy became a famous comedian and surprised her on a TV show called
Thank You
.

It’s funny how boys and girls are treated differently. My sister always got a haircut at the hairdressers but Khoa and me, that was a job for Mum. And she was appalling at it. No training, no method, no tools; just a pair of kitchen scissors—the type that you use to cut chickens apart—and a two-buck comb. She always took it slowly, figuring she wouldn’t start too short and give herself room for error, and then she would slowly chip away at it until it kind of looked right. But it never looked right.

One side too short, a patch missing, a crooked fringe. It looked so bad that when I went to school the next day all my friends thought I had picked up some sort of disease. A couple of mates waited until we were alone and asked, ‘What happened there?’ It looked so bad that no one even laughed; they really thought something bad had happened.

‘I got into a fight a few years back,’ I’d lie. ‘There’s a scar, and a bit less hair there.’ They believed it.

Once, as soon as I had a spare fifteen bucks, I took myself to the barber. When I walked in, the Indian guy dropped his Brylcreem and shrieked, ‘Oh my god! What in the name of Vishnu happened to you?’

Even a professional was fooled into thinking there was something physically wrong because of the accidental brutality of my mother’s efforts.

Later a friend of Mum’s came over and saw my wobbly head.

‘Get yourself a pair of clippers,’ she advised Mum. ‘Use a number three setting all over, all the time, and you’ll be fine.’

Mum bought a pair of twenty-dollar Kmart specials. They lasted a few years. They used to jam up because they were cheap, and I had thick hair. Mum would yank them out— and I’d get clumps of bald spots. As it grew back it evolved into another look altogether. You know when you sleep on the one side for too long and the next day your hair decides to tell the world which side you prefer? Well my head looked like that permanently.

I was also starting to look a lot like my dad.

When times were good Mum and Dad used to take us to McDonald’s once every few months. Usually for a special occasion like Christmas, or Khoa winning a scholarship, or Dad’s horses coming in at the races. It signalled good times and, even today, when I bite into a Big Mac and get a hit of that ‘special sauce’, I get a dose of memories flooding back.

In 1993 Mum was working multiple jobs to feed three teenage kids. Rice is cheap, but combined with chicken thigh or drumsticks at $5 a kilogram, well, you’ve got a few days’ worth of meals. We hadn’t been to McDonald’s in years. I came home from school one day, lifted open the letterbox and discovered a flyer announcing ‘McDonald’s Yagoona is closing down.’ Because it was the first-ever Maccas to open in Australia, to commemorate its last day there was going to be a never-seen-before special. It read: ‘bring this flyer in and get a Big Mac for fifty cents.’

Fifty cents! Whoo-hoooo!!!!!

‘Limit four per voucher. One voucher per customer.’

No problem.
I knocked on the door of my closest neighbours and asked them if I could have their Maccas flyer if they weren’t going to use it. I managed to get six vouchers altogether. That would be a whopping twenty-four Big Macs.

Mum, Grandma, Khoa, Tram and I packed into our car— we must have looked like a Vietnamese version of
The Beverley Hillbillies
. Five vouchers used up. We drove around the block, dropped off my grandma and picked up my auntie to take advantage of the sixth voucher. With twenty-four Big Macs in tow we headed home with guilty grins on our faces. Still today my brother and sister talk fondly of the Big Mac banquet we enjoyed; our enthusiasm rivalling those of our uncles when they talk of their great plum banquet during the war.

Then there was that day I scored on chips. I’m one of those guys who likes to read things. Anything. The paper, road signs, even the back of a packet of chips. So I knew that if you were ever unsatisfied with a chip there was a number you could call. Well one day I was halfway through a packet of potato crisps when I found a green chip, so I called them up.

‘Send the offending chip to us and we’ll pay for the postage,’ the woman on the phone told me, ‘and we’ll refund your money.’

The packet of chips was only a couple of bucks but I reasoned that the refund would at least be enough for me to buy another packet. I sent off the green chip straight away and didn’t really think about it too much. A week later, a humungous box of chips was delivered to my door. There must have been thirty packets inside. It felt like Christmas.

For a week I had the same chips as everybody else at school instead of the no frills variety that I used to eat really fast so I could quickly dispose of the black and white bag. I sauntered out at recess with my big packet of branded chips and ate them proudly in front of the other boys, offering them to friends like I was all cashed up. For a week I was normal.

These little windfalls of luck meant so much to us; to go from having to scrape by to all of a sudden having something in abundance made such an impression. I often asked my mum about Vietnam, what it was like being in the middle of a war, and her answers would sometimes surprise me. She told me it was the little trivial everyday things that you couldn’t do that was the most annoying; like running out of ingredients and not being able to just stroll up to the shops to buy some.

‘You get used to the noise and bombs and bullets and you end up not being really concerned about getting killed so much as being sick of having this bland rice with no fish sauce,’ she said.

Tram’s jackpot came when she was eleven. She entered a photo competition for kids in the Sunday paper. She was vaguely interested in photography and decided to take this artsy shot of a green, plastic rubbish bin. She sent the photo in and forgot about it.

Two weeks later a letter arrived in the mail telling her she’d won the competition and the prize was a Toyworld voucher for $500. We couldn’t believe it. She shared the bounty with us and we split the voucher three ways. We went from having no money to having $500 to spend on anything we wanted in a toyshop. We spent hours deciding what to buy and it was such a happy day. Tram has since grown up to become a successful photographer.

Tram always looked after Khoa and me as though she was our older sister. By this time Grandma had moved out and Tram had to grow up quickly, helping me cook, clean and do other household chores while Mum was working. I remember her standing on a stool to reach up to the sink just so she could wash the dishes.

At the start of every year St Aloysius gave you a list of textbooks you needed for the semester. Between my brother and me the cost came close to a thousand dollars. Mum simply didn’t have the money, and after a while I stopped showing her the list.

‘I’ve got to buy some books, Mum.’

‘How much do you need?’

‘One hundred, two hundred; whatever you can spare.’ I didn’t want her to see the list and be burdened by the knowledge that she didn’t have enough. It would have devastated her to know that I was missing the required books.

Lucky for me I had my good mate Phil Keenan. Phil was the only kid in school who knew I didn’t have all the books.

‘What classes have you got today?’ he would ask. When it was English, for example, he would lend me his books for my period and I would return them to him in time for his class. I always had to be thinking about how to plan the day, when to meet up with him, how to make sure the other boys didn’t catch on. This concern totally overtook my life; it was all-encompassing and supremely annoying.

Borrowing text books was one thing but then there was the problem with the books that you had to write in. I would sit at my desk and pretend to be writing in Phil’s book by hovering my pen above it. The teacher probably thought,
What’s wrong with this freak?
To Phil’s credit he helped me whenever he could and instinctively knew it was a closely guarded secret.

Sometimes I would get caught out. If Phil was away I would go to English without a book. When the teacher asked where it was, I would lie and say, ‘I forgot it.’ I was too proud to admit I couldn’t afford my own book.

It may seem very trivial, but I would say it was one of the things that hurt the most over my whole school life, when I saw the disappointment in my teachers’ eyes when they would give me detention for wearing the wrong thing or for forgetting my textbooks. Of course they had to do it—because those were the rules. And they couldn’t understand why Anh, who they knew was such a good kid, would every now and then seem to break the rules almost deliberately. I could have gotten off by simply telling them the truth—‘My mum doesn’t have the money’—but that was never going to happen.