The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (32 page)

‘How much you got, Anh?’

‘Three thousand.’

For that, Suzie and I chose quite a few decorations but on the wedding day he surprised us. He emptied his entire showroom into this function centre and decked it out with decorations worth five times what we had paid him. When the guests turned up they saw a rickshaw out the front and palm trees and toucans around the entrance. Peacocks from the zoo joined in and strutted around as well. Dad would have loved the birds. Inside, the centre resembled a tropical jungle. There were crazy circus mirrors and a huge butterfly above the bridal table. It looked fantastic.

We had hired a four-piece band but we also had a musical surprise. One week before the wedding I was walking down the street and saw a pan-pipe group from Chile.

‘What are you guys doing next Saturday?’ I asked. They were available, and we agreed on a price. When the guests turned up at Taronga Zoo, they were greeted by the sounds of the Andes as they entered the jungle within.

The highlight of the speeches was my mother’s, translated from Vietnamese by my brother.

‘I am looking forward to looking after some babies,’ she said, looking at Suzie. ‘If you don’t have any, I will.’

There was lots of laughter from both sides of the family, and I was especially glad she hadn’t told her favourite ‘Anh story’ which dated back to when I was a baby.

In Vietnam, it was easier to breastfeed babies than wean them. In my case, I was breastfed until I was three. Mum tells the story of how when Khoa was only six months old, he had to compete with me for breast milk. Whenever I did something good, Mum would say, ‘That’s because I breastfed him until three.’

Good marks at school? ‘Breastfed until three. It’s good for the brain.’

Did well on
Dancing with the Stars
. ‘Breastfed until three.’

Won a comedy competition. ‘That’s ’cos I breastfed him till he was three!’

Years later, when Suzie and I had our own child, she asked Mum how long she should breastfeed.

‘Oh, only a year, it’s a pain in the arse.’

Suzie and I had our dramatic departure from the wedding prepared—a water taxi was waiting for us down at the zoo’s wharf, but how to get there? When I’d hired the prop rickshaw from my mate I’d asked him if it was operational.

‘Nah, it’s just for show.’ he said. ‘You can sit on it for photos, but don’t try to ride it.’

On the night as we waved goodbye to the large crowd gathered outside the function room Suzie and I looked at our rickshaw.

‘What do you reckon?’ I said.

She gave me one of her light-up-the-room smiles and said, ‘What the hell, let’s go out with a bang!’

I got in the driver’s seat and Suzie jumped into the bucket chair. With a bride in the back, a bottle of red wine in the belly, and a deluded confidence, I took off in the just-for-show rickshaw. As soon as I started pedalling I realised why this was a stupid idea, but it was too late.

The road from the zoo entrance down to the wharf is one of the steepest declines in all of Sydney. Once we took off, there was no stopping us. Suzie screamed loudly as we picked up ridiculous speed.

‘Slow down!’ she yelled.

‘I can’t!’ I had tested the brakes earlier on flat ground and they seemed fine. I didn’t factor in an extra fifty kilograms of wife and a curving, forty-five degree downhill run. All I could hear was:
‘AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!’

And that was just me.

Suzie was screaming a bunch of things I couldn’t hear, but I did make out single words every now and then: ‘Stop! . . .  Fall! . . . Die! . . . Kill You! . . . Divorce! . . . 
AHHHHH!’

Somehow we made it to the bottom alive and Suzie rushed out of the bucket seat, ran up to me, and gave me an enormous hug.

‘You are an absolute nutter, Anh Do. But I love you!’

The next morning we two newlyweds flew off to Thailand for two weeks, on our honeymoon, not realising our lives were about to change in a way we’d never ever expected.

After our honeymoon we moved into an apartment in North Sydney. Suzie continued working as a lawyer and I was doing stand-up. I was offered the chance to do three shows in Melbourne and said ‘Yep’ straight away because I knew it would be a chance to hang out with my father.

When I do comedy, I have a huge props case where I keep all these funny things that I make jokes about in my stand-up routine. It’s the size of a large suitcase. In Melbourne Dad would drive me to gigs. As soon as we stopped the car he would hop out and run round to the boot to grab the case before I could.

‘Dad, it’s heavy, let me carry it.’

‘No, no, you’re the main event tonight. I’m your roadie.’ He’d walk off making himself laugh by going, ‘Check- one-two. Check. Check. One. Two,’ like a guy testing a microphone. No matter how much I argued, he resisted. He was adamant that he was going to be my
dan em
.

My father grew up with many
dan ems
—young men who followed him around and did things for him because he was a natural leader. His nickname among his mates was ‘Lee’ which means judgement, and these young men trusted his judgement in a time of war. I dare say he’d probably never been a
dan em
himself before, and here he was volunteering, no, insisting, he was going to be one
for his own son. It reminded me of occasions in my childhood when some Vietnamese men refused to call me Anh, and Dad wouldn’t let it go until they did.

‘It’s his name. Call him by his proper name.’

Anh
in Vietnamese means ‘elder brother’, and it’s a title reserved for someone senior to yourself. So by giving his son the name, Dad made the world call me ‘elder brother’, and he made his little boy the chief.

I introduced Dad to my friend Dave Grant and Dave, ever the charmer, asked, ‘So who is this Anh, your handsome brother?’ Dad laughed loudly.

‘No! I am his father!’

Dave became Dad’s favourite comedian, after me of course.

I did a fantastic gig, and Dad was thrilled. We chattered away on the trip home, both of us on an adrenaline high. When we got back to his place we sat back to talk over a few beers. That was the night when he finally admitted to me that he had a tumour in his head. It was pressing against nerves in his brain, which caused him to slur his speech occasionally. He explained that he had good days and bad days, and that it was unpredictable and sporadic.

‘What treatment are you on?’ I asked him.

‘I’ll be okay,’ he said.

‘What do you mean you’ll be okay? You getting treatment?’

It turned out the idiot hadn’t even started seeing a doctor until a few weeks beforehand. My dad likes taking care of things himself, and hates asking for help. Geez! I just don’t understand… 

People… 

Like… 

That… 

God, we turn into our parents don’t we? I finally saw the absurdity of my stubborn unwillingness to ask for assistance at school, getting into so much trouble for ‘forgetting’ my textbooks, for ‘losing’ my sports uniform, when I could have just told them the truth—‘My mum can’t afford the textbooks’—and the school would’ve sorted something out.

Dad took a huge gulp of beer.

‘When the Lord wants me, he can take me. He can take this outlaw back,’ he said, staring off into the middle distance. ‘And he may well punish me.’

It wasn’t the earnest, heartfelt apology I was looking for, but it was an admission of sorts, and it was good enough for me. I remember when I was young, I never once heard my dad apologise to my mum directly, but he’d do this thing where he’d refer to himself in a less-than-glamorous, third-person kind of way.

‘Well, this forgetful bastard made a mistake, didn’t he?’

‘Mum told me about the kid on the boat,’ I said. Dad took a deep breath and screwed up his eyes.

‘That was an impossible situation,’ I assured him.

‘I will never know, Anh. I will just… never… know.’ He paused contemplatively. ‘But what I know is this: I promised his mother I would deliver him safely.’

My mum, uncles and aunties all swear there was no way my father could’ve saved Loc when the seventeen-year-old kid jumped into the ocean. Dad had tied a rope around himself and ordered two of the men to hold onto it while he jumped in to search. Everyone on the boat pleaded with him not to jump—if Dad died, the trip was as good as over for everyone. That split-second decision not to go in haunted him forever.

‘You always have to make decisions in your life, Anh. And don’t kid yourself; when you don’t decide, that’s a decision.’

We sat in stillness for a while, staring at empty cans of beer and two empty bottles of wine. Then Dad began tapping his finger on the table repeatedly and looked down. I knew this was a sign he was about to say something out of character. Something he found hard to express.

‘Anh, I didn’t want to bring this up yet, but if I ever have to go anywhere, like… go… you know… for a long, long time—not that I’m intending to, but if it happens—there’s just one thing I want to do first. I’d like to see your brother and your sister again. So I can tell them I love them. So they have no doubt that I love them.’

When I got back to Sydney I told Khoa I’d seen Dad and explained everything that’d happened.

‘You should go and see him too, Khoa.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘No, man, you don’t understand. There might not be much time left. You gotta go and see him.’

‘No. Piss off!’

He walked into his room and slammed the door. I hadn’t expected this reaction from him at all. How naive I was to forget the absolute fury I’d felt towards Dad the first time I went down to see him. I didn’t say anything to Tram as I thought I’d have to figure out what to do with Khoa first—one at a time.

When I next saw Dad I told him it was going to take a little longer than I thought for them to come around.

‘So how about this, Dad. You can’t go anywhere until I get them to come round and see you?’

‘Ahhh. Sure.’ He looked up to the sky and announced: ‘Sorry up there, you’ll just have to wait, because this bastard’s not going anywhere.’ Then he smiled his wonky overconfident smile.