The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (23 page)

Art was the opposite story—I loved being there. It resonated with me that the whole point about art is not to get the diploma, but to
learn the craft.

So that’s how I got through my university years, skipping law classes to be at art classes. Who could blame me? How would you choose to spend six hours: studying the validity of clause 61, or sketching gorgeous nude women? No contest. Not even close.

On the other hand, during this time I dated a number of art girls, but my heart belonged to a law girl. Suzie was no ordinary law girl, anyway. She was a creative spirit, always painting, taking photos and writing beautiful little poems. She’d fallen into law the same way I had—she’d achieved high marks at school so people told her that law was what you did. Suzie was pretty ambivalent about the whole thing too, so while she looked like the perfect student compared to me, she did her fair share of cutting classes, which I always encouraged.

Sometimes I’d sneak into the back of a lecture hall and there she’d be, eyes half closed, head hanging three inches off the desk, almost asleep, and I’d whisper in her ear: ‘You want to go and have a coconut ice-cream?’

Wham!
We were out of there.

One day at uni everyone was lined up in the corridor waiting to go into class. I was standing there, brooding over whether I should just ditch law altogether, when all of a sudden I caught a glimpse of Suzie walking in from the sunshine with a pink freesia in her hair and a fistful of daffodils for me.

‘I picked them for you on the way to the train station.’ And there was that amazing smile again.

How many girls nick flowers out of other people’s front yards to give to their male friends? None that I’ve met. If uni was one big, dismal, grey cloudy day, Suzie was the patch of sunlight that breaks through and takes you completely by surprise.

I liked Suzie; I liked her a lot. It felt like I liked her more than what should rightly be described by the word ‘like’, more like that other L-word. But every time I thought I had a shot, she’d tell me we were ‘just friends’.

My grandma knew how to read palms and had taught me a few things when I was a kid. She used to look at the lines on my little hand and explain to me why I was cheerful but impatient, and had horsey teeth. I tried to read Suzie’s palm at university one day.

‘This looks very interesting. It seems like a man will soon come into your life, he will be stocky, dark and have big teeth …’

‘Oh my god, I must get some pepper spray!’ What a smart aleck.

‘Sorry Anh, I’ve just started seeing someone.’

Damn! Missed the window again. For a future comedian, I had dreadful timing.

Another time I asked her to go to a movie and she replied, ‘I’m leaving for Africa tomorrow.’

‘I think you’re overreacting,’ I replied. ‘I wasn’t asking for marriage, only
Terminator 2
.’ But she really was going to South Africa, to represent our university at an international debating tournament. The day after she arrived home I went over to visit and brought my guitar.

‘What’s the guitar for?’ she asked.

I channelled the soul of a tortured poet and sang the deepest and most meaningful version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ for her. I stared into her gorgeous blue eyes and there was just the briefest flicker of a moment when I was positive that she knew we were meant to be.

‘That’s beautiful, Anh.’ And I got a kiss on the cheek.

Damn.
Still ‘just friends’.
Bloody hell, this girl was tough. It took ages to learn that song.
Stupid Leonard Cohen and his sharp minor seventh chords. Who writes songs with sharp minor sevenths in them? What more did I need to do? Surely she knew I adored her. I mean, I don’t learn songs for any of my other friends. I’ve never sung a soulful ballad to Phil or Lloydy
.

But it didn’t matter. She still had no desire to date this Vietnamese, football-playing palm reader.

One morning I needed to go to the shops and Khoa and Tram were coming with me. Khoa needed to buy some hair gel, and Tram just liked to go shopping. I was getting impatient waiting.

‘Come on, guys.’

Khoa is a paradox. Most of the time he has no problem wearing his pyjamas and a footy jumper down to the supermarket, but every now and then, when he decides he needs to look good, you can put money on having to wait for him. This morning in particular, Khoa was taking ages, and Tram wasn’t ready either, so I left them both at home and went by myself.

After driving less than a block up the road I stopped to turn right. A couple of cars were coming in the opposite direction, and I was waiting for them to pass. I had been stopped for maybe four or five seconds when something caught my eye in the rear-view mirror. I didn’t even have time to see what it was when there was a colossal
BANG
! I suddenly found myself twenty metres up the road in a mangled mess of steel. A bus had run into me. The driver turned out to be an old man who didn’t even see my stopped car. A policeman told me later, after they’d examined the tyre marks, that he was charging along full pelt like Sandra Bullock in
Speed
.

As I was sitting in the driver’s seat covered in glass, a strange calmness came over me and a weird footy instinct kicked in. Every now and then in rugby league you get smacked so hard by a big guy that you find yourself lying flat on the ground staring at the sky. You always get back up slowly, going through a routine, one by one moving each limb to see if you’re okay. Arms working? Check. Legs moving? Check. Neck and head still joined? Check. And I did this after the accident. Amazingly, after being hit by a speeding bus, I was a hundred per cent unscathed. Not a scratch.

The car, on the other hand, didn’t do so well. My Nissan Pulsar was half its size, squashed up like an accordion, with the back seats crushed right up against the front. All I could think was,
Thank god Tram and Khoa didn’t come, one of them would’ve been killed
. I went to open the door to get out. It was jammed. By this stage there were strangers running towards me from the outside. A man helped pull me through the broken window. Just then I saw my mum running towards the car screaming her lungs out. What a sight it must have been for her. To hear this enormous bang, come out the front of the house, and see that a bus had swallowed up the hatchback her son was driving.

‘Mum, Mum, I’m okay!’ I called out.

She came up and hugged me. She started running through her own version of my footy routine and grabbed my arms and shook them around, inspected the back of my head, my neck, my legs, handling me roughly like I was some sort of gladiator slave she was about to purchase, all the while catching her breath and uttering, ‘thankyougod… thankyougod… thankyougod …’

As sirens approached, everything settled down, and after Mum was a hundred per cent sure her boy was indeed unscathed, she noticed the old bus driver sitting on the footpath. He looked a mess. Sitting there, his face was as white as a sheet, his head was looking down at his trembling hands. He was still holding the bus keys but his hands were shaking so much that they jingled loudly.

Mum walked over, sat down beside him, put her arm around him and said, ‘My son okay. No worry.’ I realised she was trying to comfort a scared old man, and my heart filled with love for her.

The bus company took a few months to process all the paperwork, but soon its insurance people confirmed it was going to pay us $4000 for the Pulsar. We jumped for joy because we only paid three and a half for it, and that had been years earlier.

‘Four grand! Anh, let a bus run you over once a week. We’ll be rich!’ Khoa hollered. Tram whacked him on the back of the head.

It might seem a strange way to react to an accident, but Khoa, Tram and I really were absolutely overjoyed that I had been hit by a bus. Suddenly there was money, lots of money, more money than we’d seen for a long, long time. We all knew exactly how to spend it. Up to this point in our lives we had never owned a computer. But around this time, in western society at least, computers were quickly moving from being a luxury to a necessity and all three of us were desperate to get one.

Many of my university assignments had to be typed, and handwritten ones were actually given an automatic 10 per cent deduction in marks. So everyone handed in typed assignments except for me. It was fine for a while, as I usually scored high enough that even with 10 per cent off I was still way clear of the 50 per cent pass mark. But as I got more and more disenchanted with law and attended fewer and fewer classes, I was starting to sail much closer to the line.

We went shopping and the cheapest computer we could find, with the necessary printer, monitor, hard drives, software, etc., etc., was $3750. That’s how much a basic PC cost back then. I spent the remaining $250 on a Toyota Corona and we were all happy.

The computer turned out to be very significant, with Khoa and I both writing our first screenplays on its Honeywell keyboard. Still to this day Khoa likes to mention the very lucky day when a bus driver almost killed Anh and kickstarted his movie career.

In my second year of university, I was juggling lots of balls: law and art, helping Mum out with the garments, working at a cake shop and a bunch of other odd jobs, doing anything to earn extra cash. One of the more interesting positions I got was working at Australia Post as a mail sorter. I thought you’d just apply and that’d be it. Easy. But to get the job I had to pass a postcode test, which meant I had to learn off-by-heart all the postcodes of every single suburb in New South Wales in one week.