The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (24 page)

It was one of those tasks that seemed just about impossible when you start out, but the brain is an amazing machine. Pretty soon I was confident enough to attempt the test. I had to sit down at a table with a wall of small pigeonholes in front of me. A woman timed me with a stopwatch and when she said ‘Go,’ I picked up a stack of test envelopes with addresses on them and started slinging them into the correct slots.

It was a hellish ride, especially if I got stuck on one—there are some bloody obscure suburbs out there.
Llandilo? Oh my god, is it 2474 or 2747?
Once I’d finished off that stack, I picked up more. Ten minutes later ‘Time’s up’ was called. The woman came over and spent a few minutes checking to see if I’d sorted them correctly. It was a very nervous wait; if I failed I’d just spent a week learning postcodes for nothing.

‘Anh Do? Pass.’

Whoo-hoo!

For a few months every year, especially around Christmas when it got busy, the post office would call me up and off I’d go to do my eight hours of sorting mail. I was a casual worker so the only shifts available were night ones. I’d clock in at 10 p.m. and then clock out at six the following morning.

I learned a valuable lesson about night shifts in that job: your body never really gets used to it. I’d try to sleep during the day, but the sun always managed to bully its way through the tiniest crack in my metal blinds. I did manage to catch a few naps here and there, but it was hard to string a solid six hours together. I was always exhausted by about 1 a.m. From then on I’d stare up at the clock every thirty minutes or so, until an old Vietnamese guy called Minh, who had been an engineer in Vietnam before the war but was now a permanent mail sorter, took me under his wing.

‘Anh, you got to stop looking at the clock so often, it makes the time go slower.’

Minh had also escaped Vietnam as a refugee, leaving his family behind with a view to sponsoring them to come over later, but he got stuck in a refugee camp in the Philippines for seven years. By the time he got to Australia his wife had found a new husband to help care for the two young kids she had to feed. It broke Minh’s heart. Minh decided he’d help me get into the groove of sorting mail.

‘Anh, watch me.’

Some people just seem to do ‘their thing’ effortlessly. He started showing me, sorting mail at an incredible pace, a rhythm that seemed so easy. He finished the stack, slowly but mindfully picked up another, and then the rhythmic motion would kick in all over again. It was like he was in a meditative state as his hand automatically flicked envelopes into their correct slots.

‘You get into it, forget about time, and you will know it’s nearly morning when you hear the birds.’ And Minh was right. Around about 5 a.m. I did start hearing the chirping of birds. I then looked up at the industrial windows way up under the factory roof and saw a gentle glow of blue. That was when I got a second wind because I knew I was nearly there.

As boring as the work was, I was happy to have the job, which often called me in on weekends and that meant time-and-a-half or even double-time pay. The job had one other fringe benefit too. For years afterwards my knowledge of postcodes was a very cool party trick. I’d be at the university bar having a conversation with some girls: ‘So what suburb do you live in?’

‘Mosman.’

‘That’s 2088.’

‘How’d you know that?’

‘I just know. What about you?’

‘Croydon.’

‘2132.’

‘Oh my god, are you like a genius savant or something?’

‘No, but I can do a few cool things… you haven’t locked your keys in your car have you?’

I was old enough now to earn legitimate money and it was a wonderful new-found freedom for my bank balance to no longer rely on the fickle libido of my Siamese fighting fish. Mum was sewing seven days a week, I had my several jobs and even Khoa, at sixteen, had got a job in a printing factory. We worked and worked and eventually scrimped and saved up a decent amount of money. Then Mum borrowed another chunk of cash from family and friends and it was time to go shopping.

Mum had heard about three brand-spanking-new industrial-strength sewing machines that were being sold at cost price. They were fifteen thousand in total. We bought them and set them up in the back garage of the house in Yagoona. Mum was thrilled, she finally had proper machines and was going to be able to get us ahead with a bit more hard work. Things were looking up!

One day about three months later, I was eating my breakfast when Mum came running in the back door.

‘What’s happened to the sewing machines?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The machines, they’re gone!’

I ran out the back and sure enough, our sewing machines had been stolen during the night.

I was angry, but Mum was absolutely shattered. She had saved up for years, and still owed money on those machines. The next month was desperately hard. My mum is an incredibly positive person but when those bastards took away the machines, they took away the opportunity for her to finally give her kids a better life. She tried to hide her pain but we could see it. That night I couldn’t sleep. I woke up to get a glass of water and I heard Mum crying gently in her bedroom.

I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling for hours, I just couldn’t fall asleep. Eventually I got up and went out to the park at the front of our house and lay in the middle of the field, in complete darkness, until 3 a.m. in the morning. I was cursing everyone and everything for my mother’s suffering. Most of all I cursed my father. He should’ve been there to protect us. I decided then and there that I was going to find the prick and make him pay.

The next day I walked to the public phone up the road. I didn’t want to call from home because I didn’t want anyone in my family to know I was trying to get in touch with my Dad. I phoned Uncle Eight and asked him where Dad was.

‘He’s living in Melbourne these days. You didn’t know that?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Do you have his number?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘All right, I’ll go get it.’

I waited for what seemed like a very long time, although in reality it was probably only a couple of minutes, for Uncle Eight to come back with the phone number for me. I scribbled it down on a Franklins shop-a-docket, in between the half-price dry cleaning and the twenty-per-cent-off Fruitworld offer.

‘Thanks, Uncle Eight. You been well?’

‘Yeah. You? How’s your mum?’

‘Good, good,’ I muttered. It was a strange conversation with a man who used to live with us and had looked after me like I was his own son. After Dad left we had very little contact with his side of the family, and I’d lost touch with all these uncles I’d known so well. I felt like asking him if he’d swallowed any more jewellery lately. Instead I mumbled, ‘All right then, see you later.’

I hung up and stuck the docket in my wallet. It sat there for a month. What was I waiting for? Nothing really, just procrastinating.

One Sunday morning I walked up the road again and dialled the number.
Bringggg-bringggg, bringggg-bringggg
. I heard someone pick up on the other end and a male voice said ‘’Ello’ but it sounded Mediteranean.
What the hell? Who turned my dad into Stavros the Greek?

I looked down at the number.
Bugger, I forgot to put the ‘03’ area code in first.
I hung up and stuck the docket back in my wallet. Where it stayed for another two years.

I loved studying art so much I signed up for extra drawing classes at the local community college. After the first session the teacher asked if anyone lived in the Bankstown region because a few people in the class needed a lift home. I put up my hand and was introduced to a girl named Rachel. Over the next eight weeks I gave her a lift home and soon we started going out.

Rachel was a redhead and she rode a motorbike, it was awesome—like dating the girl off the matchbox. Rachel and I used to like going to outdoor markets and one day we were at the ones in Bondi and I was looking around for a stall to buy her a crystal necklace. Amethyst is the crystal of tranquillity and Rachel was a fiery redhead who could have done with a bit of calming down. We searched everywhere, and I was surprised to find that there weren’t any.
Geez. What sort of self-respecting full-of-dodgy-hippies market doesn’t sell crystals?

My fish breeding had taught me about supply and demand. I told Rachel that this kind of stuff would do well here. It was the perfect little gifty thing that was cheap and could be taken home by people who were just spending a day at the beach.

‘If I had the cash to start a stall, I could make a killing here.’

‘Why don’t we?’ she said.

‘I don’t have the capital.’

‘I do.’

And with those two little words, Rachel and I became partners in a market stall business.

The agreement was that I would run the stall and Rachel would be the financier. It went ballistic, the crystals flying off the trestle table faster than kebabs outside the footy. The only problem with having a monopoly and raking it in was that soon other entrepreneurial hippies noticed. Within a few months there were five other stalls selling crystals and crystal jewellery. My market dominance was crumbling and I needed an edge.

One day Rachel and I watched
Dances with Wolves
and I had an idea.
This is it!
I expanded to authentic American Indian souvenirs, which were imported from the United States. Tomahawks, headdresses, jewellery and axes—a natural, logical fit for English backpackers at Australia’s Bondi Beach. The stuff was so ‘in’ at the time and it went berserk. Pretty soon I had two girls running stalls for me. I was managing a franchise, and making good money out of it.

One day I had a tomahawk worth $200 for sale. A lady came up and asked me, straight up: ‘Are you American Indian?’

‘Actually, I’m from Vietnam,’ I told her. She smiled.

‘Well, you look very much like an American Indian.’

‘Well, thanks… I guess,’ I replied. She bought the tomahawk, so I got the money as well as the comment.

As soon as she left, I found a mirror to see if I could see what she saw.
The eyes? No. The nose? I don’t think so. It must be the hair.
By this time I had grown my mullet out and it had turned into a shiny, black, off-the-shoulder mane.