The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (40 page)

‘Nothing. Let’s go.’

Up until that point I was just mucking around. It’s in my nature to take it easy and have a laugh. I’d survived the first round of eliminations, so I was now in bonus territory. Every week I found myself in the bottom two so the end was probably close. It seemed like the judges were going to score me low anyway. But now I had a reason to stick around as long as I could.

I started to train as hard as possible, and it began to pay dividends. I started climbing up the rankings and a few weeks later I topped the scores, which sent me into the grand final. I was shocked, my family were shocked, the judges were traumatised.

Everywhere I went total strangers were wishing me luck, and it was a strange feeling. For most of the series the judges had slaughtered me in the scoring. Fair enough, I guess, I’m really not that great a dancer. So when I reached the grand final, I realised it was because the Australian public had voted for me. The judges’ vote was worth fifty per cent and the home viewers’ vote was worth the other fifty. It was a revelation. This funny looking Vietnamese kid was getting voted through each week by the Australian public. That said a lot about what a wonderful country this is. It melted away all those moments in my life, and there have been very few to be honest, when I’d copped racism and had been made to feel like an outsider.

In the grand final episode I had to learn three dances in one week.
Sheesh!
It was a lot to ask a guy who was not that talented a dancer and had a short attention span. I was up against Bridie Carter, an actress from
McLeod’s Daughters
, who had won a Gold Logie for Most Popular TV Personality in Australia. Added to this, she was an amazing dancer who scored tens just about every single week. It was a tall ask.

Alas, I tried as hard as I could, but I was beaten by a better dancer, a much better dancer and a friend. Throughout the series Bridie and I had got to know each other and it was like competing with a best mate.

‘Doesn’t matter!’ squealed my mum, who had the house full of uncles and aunties and friends all cheering for their little Vietnamese boy who very nearly lost his life on a boat, but had just made them proud on the grand final of
Dancing with the Stars
.

One of the greatest delights of being on the show was the joy it brought to my family. My mum used to get everyone over and throw ‘Anh’s on
Dancing
’ parties. They just loved seeing me being a funny bugger on TV and being acknowledged by the whole country. Mum would be walking through Bankstown shops and Vietnamese women would say, ‘Your boy, oh my god, he’s so good! We voted for him.’ Every week Mum put twenty or thirty votes in for me herself.

‘Stop wasting your money, it’s not going to make a difference,’ I told her.

‘I know it doesn’t, I just want to do it,’ she replied. I realised that it wasn’t about making a difference to me staying in or not, it was about her being able to support her son, so every week she registered multiple votes. Mum also reasoned that the votes were contributing to a charity and that made it a win-win for her.

At the same time Dad was throwing
Dancing
parties in Melbourne. He’d buy a couple of slabs of beer and invite twenty friends over. They told me later that, every time I danced, my father would get up and do the funky chicken. It’s like someone showed him this one dance move and it’s all he had in his repertoire. Everyone would whoop and cheer at both of us, and then swear and throw empty cans at the judges when they gave me a bad score.

Then there was Grandma. In week four of the competition I danced the waltz and dedicated it to her. She had seen me on TV plenty of times, but she’d never understood my jokes with her limited English. However, costumes and music and beautiful movement was something she truly loved—remember this was the grandma who would come home after a day in the garden, crack open a beer and sing a few hours of karaoke.
Dancing with the Stars
quickly became her favourite show, and she would look forward to it every week, counting the days till she would see ‘My beautiful Anh’ dancing on TV again.

One thing that concerned her, however, was all the weight I was losing. My grandma is one of these eat-up-good-have-some-more type of women. After struggling to feed ten children in bitter poverty, she came to Australia and discovered a land of plentiful food. When I was young all my mates loved coming over to our place because my mum and grandma would send them home a few kilograms heavier, filled up with wonderful exotic foods from spring rolls to egg custard tarts.

I started
Dancing
weighing eighty-five kilograms. Over the three months of the show, doing between four and eight hours of dance training a day, I lost a total of thirteen kilos. When I’d reached seventy-two kilograms none of my clothes fit anymore, so towards the end of the series I was turning up to Channel 7 studios in the only thing that wouldn’t fall off my waist, my Year 10 school pants.

I was so happy with my new trim figure that I went and gave all my bigger clothes to St Vincent de Paul and bought a whole new wardrobe. Of course, as soon as
Dancing
finished I packed on those thirteen kilos again in the following three months. I went back to Hornsby St Vincent de Paul to try and buy my chunky clothes back and couldn’t find a single item. I really should’ve taken Uncle Dung because there were heaps of cheap fur coats.

Being on reality TV is an interesting experience. The audience watch you be yourself because you let your guard down, and people get to know you pretty well. Sometimes they kind of expect you to be familiar with them too.

A week after the series had finished, I was in the bank paying off my credit card, holding about eight hundred cash in my hands. Suddenly an arm grabbed me from behind. I went into I’m-being-mugged mode and my mind frantically went,
Kick him in the shins, poke him in the eyes, stomp on his
 . . . The arm spun me round, and it was an old lady.

‘Tango with me, Anh!’ I was so surprised, and relieved. I shuffled around with her as the bank staff chuckled.

‘I voted for you, Anh,’ she said. I realised how absurd and wonderful it was that total strangers had spent money to keep me in a dancing show, and I will never know who you all are, but I will forever be grateful. Thank you.

One day I was walking down the street and a man approached me. It took me a brief moment to recognise him, after all I hadn’t seen him in almost twenty years.

‘Anh! Do you remember Uncle?’

‘Uncle Six.’ I put out my hand and shook his awkwardly.

‘I’ve been watching you on TV. Very good. Very good.’ That familiar smile, his white teeth piercing through his dark skinned face.

‘Thanks, thanks… umm, good to see you again,’ I muttered and with that I walked off, resisting the urge to turn back and give him a huge hug, buy him a beer and catch up on twenty years with my once-favourite uncle, the one who was like a second dad to me. But instead I brushed him off. At the time I thought I had good reason. I had once sat up late talking to Dad and somehow we got talking about Uncle Six.

‘He’s a dickhead, Anh.’ Dad started telling me how a few years earlier Grandma had seen Uncle Six in the street, and how he had looked down at his feet and pretended not to see her at all. He just walked right on by.

‘Grandma took him in when his mum was too poor to look after him, and after raising him up, what does he do? He pisses off and never even rings to see how she’s doing. Even ignores her on the street.’ My father is very protective of Grandma, and so am I. So when I’d seen him that day, the first thing that came up in my mind was,
You bastard
. I’d loved my uncle, but I love my grandma more.

Then when I began researching this book, I interviewed my grandma and found out something that broke my heart. Indeed, Uncle Six had been an adopted boy, but there was something else that no one in the family had ever been told. Something that my grandma had kept secret until she told me, and gave me permission to put into this book. Grandma told me that Uncle Six was the lovechild of her husband.

What?

‘Your grandfather…’ she stumbled, wiping away tears as the memories came back to her. ‘Your grandfather had an affair with a woman during his time as a soldier. One day he comes back with this boy and he tells me everything that happened, and he asks me to adopt this boy as if he were our own.’

‘Oh my god. Weren’t you angry?’

‘Of course I was. But this boy’s mother was so poor. He would’ve starved to death.’

‘Does my dad know?’

‘No. Nobody knows. Everyone just thinks he’s some poor boy we adopted.’

I fumbled with my little dictaphone that I had been using to record our conversation. ‘Just give me a minute—I’ll erase it from the tape.’

‘No don’t erase it, Anh.’ She grabbed my hand and said, ‘I want you to tell everyone. I need for him to be forgiven. I need for him to forgive me. I need for this to be told.’

‘I can’t tell them. You tell them Grandma.’

‘You tell them for me.’

‘I… I’m not equipped with all the facts. They’ll slay me.’

‘Then let them all find out when they read your book.’

And so, to all my uncles and aunties and my extended family… ahhh… surprise!

A Channel 7 producer called up and asked me if I wanted to go on
Celebrity Deal or No Deal
.