The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (44 page)

Mum was fantastic in the show. Her job was to ad-lib a few cooking spots in the middle of my performance. She showed the eighty guests how to do a lazy person’s version of Peking Duck and they loved it! She was an absolute natural and a big hit.

‘Next time I come, I show you how to do Vietnamese Pizza! . . . Just kidding.’

Back at the hotel afterwards, I was exhausted and getting ready for bed, when I heard a knock on my door. It was Mum looking anxious.

‘Anh, I can’t fit all the pasties in the fridge.’

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

We took all the alcohol out of both our mini-bars and stacked the pasties inside. Their doors still wouldn’t close properly, so we moved the sofa in each room against the fridges to keep them sealed as tightly as possible. Next day, we flew out with the pasties, still cold and fresh, in the luggage racks above us. They tasted delicious the next day.

In front of a large, captive audience at the christening, Mum told the story of how she made all that money.

‘All I had to do was cook for five minutes, and they put us in a beautiful hotel,’ she giggled. All my uncles and aunts listened excitedly. She is their champion, and they love hearing about all her success and adventures.

‘Two K for five minutes?’ They started calculating her hourly rate.

‘You’re on twenty-four thousand an hour,’ Uncle Dung told her. ‘Can we come and cook with you? I’ll do it for half the money.’

Mum walked into her new English class at the start of one semester and the teacher announced that the day’s lesson was about multiculturalism. He popped a DVD into the machine and pressed ‘play’. As the film started, my mother shouted out to the class, ‘That’s my sons’ film.’

‘What do you mean?’ the teacher asked, surprised.

‘My sons made that film,’ she explained.

‘Oh, very good. Let’s watch shall we?’ the teacher replied dismissively, probably thinking to himself,
Who’s this crazy Vietnamese woman?
The other students around her didn’t seem to believe her either and they all continued to watch the screen. Mum sat back quietly in her seat and bided her time.

The film reached its ending and then all of a sudden my mother appeared up on the screen—doing what she does best, cooking—in the climactic final scene. The whole class turned to her and gasped.

Mum has now appeared in all of Khoa’s films—one short film and three feature films—and her friends have given her a new nickname: ‘Action!’ She has gone from a quiet little Vietnamese woman to a movie star among her migrant student buddies.

I recently saw another member of my family on TV—unexpectedly. I was watching a show on the ABC late one night that was being filmed in a mental institution, and in the background I saw a patient putting a cup of coffee into a microwave—it was Uncle Two. It was a complete shock and I rang Dad straight away.

‘Yeah, that’s him. He’s been living there for about a year,’ he confirmed. I had thought he was living with my aunt, but apparently it got too hard for her to look after him and they put him in a mental institution.

Uncle Two is the father of our cousins Joe, Manh, Tri and Martin who all lived with us on the farm and in the factory in Newtown. My quietest uncle had gone through some trauma during the war and had always been withdrawn. After he was estranged from his wife, he lived with different brothers and sisters, and for a while lived with my dad in Melbourne.

One time Dad took a three-week trip to Vietnam and when he got back to Australia I went to visit him. I noticed that Uncle Two wasn’t there anymore. I also noticed that the house stank, and one bedroom in particular had its door closed.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked Dad.

‘Your uncle’s gone to live with your auntie and grandma now, he just can’t take care of himself anymore.’

Dad opened the door to the bedroom and it was absolutely putrid. Uncle Two had been left alone for the three weeks and during this time he had gotten so lonely that he found a nest of baby birds and raised them in his own bedroom. The birds defecated all over the room and there were feathers everywhere—in the carpet, on the curtains and stuck in the window ledges.

Even though Dad had attempted to clean out the room, it still had an overpowering stench, the indescribable smell of loneliness.

Joe is Uncle Two’s eldest son. He and I had always been close since we ‘escaped’ that giant turtle those many years ago. When I got married, Joe was one of my groomsmen.

A few years ago Joe got married. It’s customary in Vietnamese weddings for the father of the groom to give a speech, as well as the father of the bride. Joe’s father was in a mental hospital and so Joe asked my dad to give a speech on his behalf.

This night was one of my dad’s proudest moments. He gave a fantastic speech and afterwards, as we sat drinking, I said to him, ‘Good speech, Dad. You do good wedding speeches.’ He could see what I was trying to say.

‘I’m very happy doing the speech, Anh. I’ll probably never do one for your brother and sister.’ He took a drink. ‘I don’t deserve to—so I’m very happy today.’ We clinked glasses in a way that was a celebration of his big win today, and an acknowledgement of his regret about the yesterdays.

Later in the night Dad and I were both drunk.

‘How’s your mother?’

‘Good,’ I replied.

‘She’s the most beautiful woman in the world. You know I still love her.’

Many years ago I had said to Khoa, ‘You have to go and see Dad.’

‘I don’t want to,’ was his response, and he walked into his room and slammed the door.

I asked again several months later and got the same result.

One time, my father’s health problems were so severe that I thought the end was close. I felt I had no time left, and I still had a son’s promise to keep.

‘You have to go. If you don’t I’m gonna smash you and drag you to see him,’ I said to Khoa.

Still no result.

Then I realised I had to be a little smarter about it.

One day Khoa and I were having a beer.

‘Hey Khoa, you know how you’re the Young Australian of the Year now, you should go see the old man, take your trophy and tell him he can stick it up his arse—’cos you’ve done so well without him. Show him how irrelevant he was.’

A few weeks later Khoa went to see Dad. Shortly after that Tram did as well.

Like me, it took them both a while to get used to the idea. Since that day I have seen a healing in my brother and sister. It hasn’t been easy and it’s taken a long time, but there is a forgiveness that allows them to leave behind the anger and memories of a violent drunken father, and remember a wonderful loving father.

I was there for both reunions and watched Dad change. I saw a physical, obvious transformation of a man before my very eyes. The happiness that it brought to him was so palpable that you could see a vitality literally returning to his face, his skin, his eyes.

Six months later I went to visit Dad again. As I descended the escalator at Melbourne airport, he spotted me and literally sprinted up to me. He grabbed my son Xavier, threw him into the air and sat the little fella on his right shoulder. With his other arm Dad grabbed my head and pulled me close, giving me a kiss on the cheek.

‘I’m clean, Anh,’ he said, burying his head into my neck. ‘Doctor says I’m clean.’

An old lady nearby doesn’t know what’s going on but it makes her smile to see two grown men hugging and sobbing.

My father’s tumour proved to be benign and eventually it responded well to treatment. His health improved slowly and it’s been years since I have heard his speech suffer. He credits his recovery to seeing his children again, and has since had yet another son with his partner. So now I have two half-brothers.

That very first time I went to visit Dad many years ago, I met my half-brother who Dad named Anh, after me. My third son was born in 2009. Dad asked, ‘What did you call him?’ I said, ‘Leon, but the Vietnamese shall call him Lee.’

‘That’s what everyone called me,’ Dad said.

‘I know, Dad. I named him after you.’

Only a few months ago, I realised that Mum was going to find out eventually that I’d been seeing Dad, so I thought I’d tell her. Mum surprised me with her response.

‘I know you see him. Just don’t tell me about it.’

‘All right, well, if you’re going to read the book, there’s going to be a few things about him in there you might not know.’

‘I know everything, Anh. He’s got a new wife now and a couple more kids.’