The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (42 page)

‘I’m the warm-up guy.’ He smiled, so I kept going.

‘I’m Jackie Chan’s body double.’ The guard laughed and I decided to show him a magic trick, and pulled a red hanky out of nowhere. He wasn’t impressed.

‘No, sorry, can’t go in.’ A shame. Maybe if the trick had been better… 

I patted him on the back and walked away. It had ended okay. But there was a moment there when I thought to myself,
I really could end up in a Gobi Desert jail
. Then another part of me thought… 
No problem, I know a bloke who’ll steal some fake IDs and bust me out
.

Just like me, my dad loves sports. He loves seeing people going all in and throwing the dice for that one shot at glory. So when SBS asked me to host a sports quiz show called
The Squiz
, I was rapt. Hosting
The Squiz
, for me, was like being a kid in a candy shop. Every week I met sports stars and listened to them share amazing experiences, which many people—myself included—had never heard about.

Aussie Joe Bugner, the former heavyweight boxer, came on and told us about the first time he fought Muhammad Ali. It was in Las Vegas in 1973. Three days before the fight, Bugner got into the hotel lift. It went up to the mezzanine, the doors opened and there, standing right in front of him, was Ali. Ali walked in, and the two of them were alone in the lift. Ali began trash-talking Bugner and started throwing a flurry of punches at him, stopping half a centimetre in front of his nose. The lift carried them up to the twenty-sixth floor and Ali got out.

‘The fight was as good as over,’ said Bugner. ‘I was completely intimidated from that moment on. For the next three days I lived in fear of the man.’ That’s how Bugner told it; a fantastic story. When the episode aired I watched it with Dad, and afterwards pulled out a little piece of paper and gave it to him. It read ‘Get well soon Anh’s dad.’ Signed: ‘Aussie Joe Bugner’.

I also appeared on
Top Gear Australia
, which is an Aussie version of the popular BBC driving show. Part of being the guest for that week was doing the ‘hot lap’ in the hero vehicle. My cousins said to me, ‘Anh, we’re sick of the stereotype that Asians can’t drive, you gotta go on the show and blow that out of the water.’

Sweet
, I thought.
I’m going to floor it, the pedal’s going to be rammed so hard against the metal the two of ’em are going to be like conjoined twins.

I turned up to an airport where they filmed the hot lap and I’m raring to go.

‘Here’s the car, Anh.’ I jumped inside all pumped up and then I looked down.

‘Oh my god, it’s a manual.’

I’d never driven a manual before and I couldn’t even get it to start. The producer of the show came over and decided to give me a couple of quick lessons. We filmed what must surely be one of the slowest hot laps in
Top Gear
history, more of a tepid-to-cold lap really, as I bunny-hopped my way around and finished the entire course in mostly second gear.

One of my favourite TV experiences was appearing on a show called
Thank You
. It was a Channel 7 special where people surprised someone they wanted to say a big thank you to. For example, someone was thanking a person who’d pulled them out of a burning car, and another person was thanking someone who donated an organ to them. There was a celebrity part of the show and the producers called me up and asked me if there was anyone I wanted to thank. I immediately thought of my Year 8 English teacher, Mrs Borny.

There I was, back at my old school, St Aloysius, hiding outside a classroom where Mrs Borny was inside talking to a class of boys.

‘You ready, Anh?’ The producer asked me.

‘Give us a minute,’ I said as I tried to compose myself. Then in I walked with the camera crew, and I saw her again for the first time in fifteen years. She looked amazing, same beautiful smile, same glint in her eye that emanated a wonderful generosity and promised you that this little, grey-haired lady was going to believe in you and give you every chance of learning and growing.

I walked up to her, gave her an enormous hug and told her about everything she’d done for me. She held me tight around my waist and said to me, ‘Anh, Anh, I’m so proud of you! So proud of you!’

She was surprised and shocked and couldn’t believe that I’d even remembered her. I gave her a leather-bound copy of my
Footy Legends
movie script and told her that it was her who convinced me I could write. I also told her that I was but one of probably thousands of kids who’d she’d had an impact on through her kindness, and that she was my Robin Williams character from
Dead Poets Society
. Tears welled up in her eyes.

All through my life I have been lucky to have had supportive people to help me along the way and my wife Suzie has been my soulmate and a best friend rolled into one gorgeous package. Suzie and my three boys are the best thing about my life.

Recently my eldest boy Xavier, a five-year-old, asked me, ‘Dad, have you been to the moon?’

‘No.’

He followed up with, ‘Have you been to any other planets?’

‘No.’

He said, ‘Dad, I might go one day.’

I channelled my own dad and said, ‘You do that Xavier. You do that ’cos you can do anything.’

My second boy, Luc, overheard this conversation and piped up:

‘Dad, can we go for a ride in a rocket?’

‘Well, sure we can. That sounds great.’

‘Can we go today?’

‘Maybe not today, Luc.’

‘OK. Can we go on a bus?’

Luc was three at the time and he’d never been on a bus before so off we went.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years writing jokes and comedy material, but it is impossible to top some of the things that come out of my children’s mouths. Another time Suzie and I asked Luc, ‘What’s your favourite animal?’

‘Octopus, ’cos it’s got eight testicles.’

At the time of writing this book, my third boy, Leon, is six months old and is like a clone of my father, only a lot better looking. He doesn’t have much hair yet, but when it does grow, hopefully it won’t look like he’s been sleeping on the one side all his life.

I said to Suzie, ‘How about we keep having kids till we get a girl?’

‘Nice try, Anh. I don’t want to be like your grandmother and have ten kids.’ I absolutely adore Suzie and the boys and every single day I just laugh and think to myself,
I truly am the luckiest guy in the world.

My family and friends haven’t changed and their company reminds me of how fortunate I am. However, one friend called up recently with a surprise.

‘Hi, Anh. I’ve just done this personal development course and we’re supposed to call up people in our lives who mean a lot to us. And if we have any issues with them, to tell them and be honest with them.’

This is a bit weird
, I thought. ‘Okay. What’s on your mind?’

‘I just wanted to call you up and say to you, Anh, that in the past ten years you’ve done very well and, to be totally honest, sometimes I feel a bit jealous. I wanted to let you know that I’m really happy for everything that you’ve been achieving.’

‘Thanks, mate, but I’ve never felt any jealousy from you. You’ve been a hundred per cent mate, so no need to apologise.’

‘Well, I’m glad I never showed it on the outside, but I felt it inside and I just wanted to let you know.’

What a top bloke. That was a huge thing to do. And it was a gift for me. It made me aware of making sure my friends and family always feel they are number one. That I remember to let them know how much I cherish them.

I have been back to Vietnam three times now. The first time was back in 1998, before I was dating Suzie. Mum had always wanted to show us where we all came from, and so we set a date and started saving. It was unlike saving for anything else we’d ever saved for in the past; this time it wasn’t just to pay for school fees, or to pay back some debt, this time we were putting money away for an overseas holiday! We’d never done that before and it was incredible.

So I worked double overtime at the cake shop, sorted mail till my fingers were numb, and Mum, Khoa and Tram were also working hard to help us achieve this exciting goal. It didn’t take long at all, and soon we had ourselves four tickets to travel back to where this crazy, wonderful journey all began.