The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (6 page)

The most dangerous animal is the one cornered and fearful. My uncles, ex-army paratroopers, suddenly felt a surge of adrenaline and stood up in unison. They were tired and hungry and weak, but they had one last fight left in them. Then the teenage boys started calling out to each other, psyching each other up, their fear now turned into desperate rage. Everyone was ready to fight till the end. If the child was thrown into the ocean, there would be no survivors.

The head pirate sized up the situation and barked frantically at the man dangling the baby. The child was thrown to the feet of his mother. His life was spared.

That baby was my brother Khoa. My crying mother gathered him up and held him tight, like a son who had returned from the dead.

One by one the pirates went back to their vessel, taking with them every little thing they could find, even our broken second engine. The pirate with black teeth angrily yanked my aunty out of the pilothouse and shoved her back onto our boat. She fell on the deck and was protectively covered by the arms and bodies of our family, grateful that nothing further had happened to her. The pirate’s noisy diesel motor started up and fumes filled the air.

As their boat veered away, one of the pirates did something strange. He was a young kid according to my uncles, no more than eighteen years old, and had been less aggressive throughout the whole encounter. Suddenly and for no apparent reason he threw us a gallon of water.

That water saved our lives.

You can’t drink jewellery or eat gold teeth caps, but that water meant everything because it bought us an extra day. That second pirate attack saved our lives.

Now we drifted according to the breeze, our boat a small blimp in a vast blue universe of ocean. We had been at sea for four days and that gallon of water did not last long. We lay quietly, waiting for death or a miracle.

On the fifth day Mum squinted at a distant shape. Another boat, but it looked different to the others. The boat grew bigger and bigger and bigger still. We saw a flag waving on its mast. It was a huge boat. A ship, actually. Our boatload of beaten refugees stirred and stared—waiting, hoping, but terrified to hope too much. The ship came closer and suddenly a voice blared through a loudspeaker. It was incomprehensible, shocking in its loudness. These were no Thai pirates. We looked up at a dozen fair, foreign faces. They were Germans.

The fair faces smiled down at us, giving us benevolent looks that said, ‘You will be okay now.’ My mother sank to her knees, clutching Khoa and me to her chest, and said, ‘Thank you God.’ Parched mouths murmured with excitement, tears rolled down dirty cheeks, bodies hugged and breathed great sighs of relief. It had finally come to an end.

Dad looked up at the Germans and spotted an older man with a long aquiline nose, peaked hat and many stripes on his jacket sleeve. He was obviously the captain. A torrent of foreign words poured from his mouth. We continued to gaze up at our saviours with blank, but smiling faces.

The captain dropped down behind the ship’s railing for a moment and then reappeared with something in his hands. Dad couldn’t quite make it out. The captain threw the object onto our boat.

Whack!
A heavy axe landed on the deck. Everyone jumped, startled by the appearance of a weapon. A flicker of concern crossed Dad’s face as he looked up at the captain again. The captain pointed at the axe and gesticulated with his arms. More strange words came tumbling out.

What’s he saying?

Now the other sailors joined their captain in this crazy, cross-cultural game of charades. Some were pointing at our boat and some were making whacking actions with their arms, as though chopping something with an axe.

‘What are they doing? Do you think they’re going to attack us?’ Uncle Eight asked, confused.

He was making his way across to Mum, psyching himself up to swallow that gold cross he’d only just managed to return to her that morning.

And then a flash of enlightenment.

‘Maybe they can only rescue us if our boat is sinking!’ shouted Dad. So he picked up the axe, swung it above his head, and struck our little wooden boat.

Thwack!

It was as though we’d finally got the secret password. Open sesame! A rope ladder appeared over the side of the ship and the sailors began pulling us on board, one by one, carefully nursing the women and children with a tenderness that will always stick in my mother’s mind.

Dad, with barely enough energy left to lift the axe let alone use it properly, finally broke through the wooden hull and water began gushing in. He was the last to be taken on board and by the time he stepped off the rope ladder his dry sunburnt face had cracked open into a whopping great big smile as he tasted his own salty tears of relief. He’d delivered thirty-nine lives to safety.

The German ship took us to a refugee camp in Pulau Bidong, an island in the Malaysian archipelago. As soon as we landed we were surrounded by other refugees. We made friends, traded stories and shared experiences, and realised that our boat had indeed been incredibly lucky. Many others had been through far greater suffering.

The second day on the island, American helicopters flew overhead and dropped bags of food. The drop contained a number of items, including lots of tins of corned beef—a practical and long-lasting food. For the first few weeks, our family indulged on this canned meat and, to this day, it is my mum’s favourite food. Every second Christmas she still rolls it out and I curse those choppers for not dropping something tastier. I mean, after bombing the hell out of Vietnam, the least they could’ve done was thrown us some lobster.

One day a local Malaysian man came to the camp and offered to buy gold off the refugees. Mum sold her small gold cross for 30 US dollars. She got a good price after telling him that it had ‘been through a very difficult passage’. Our family feasted on that sale—Khoa and I got to eat apples and drink Coca-Cola for a week.

We spent nearly three months at the Pulau Bidong refugee camp and decided we’d go to whichever country would take us. Australia eventually offered us sanctuary. Mum and Dad were overjoyed. Dad walked around the island asking people if they had any spare warm clothes. He collected a big bundle of jumpers and blankets because he’d heard about Australia—‘Beautiful country, friendly people, but really cold. It’s right near Switzerland.’

That’s my dad, great at rescues, crap at geography. We touched down in Sydney, Australia in thirty-degree Celsius heat and my family were thinking,
Geez, Austria’s really hot, man!

August 1980. ‘What a great country!’ my parents said to each other. One of the first things that happened was two smiley nuns from St Vincent de Paul came and gave our family a huge garbage bag stuffed full of clothes. No charge. For free!

There were several pairs of pants for Mum, including two really nice pairs of jeans. She was in heaven. Mum had only ever seen jeans in posters for cowboy movies, and all her life had only owned two pairs of pants at any one time. Now these wrinkly old white angels came and gave her the wardrobe of a western movie star.

‘Tam! Imagine a country could be so well off they could throw this stuff away,’ she said.

This big, black magic bag had other things too: belts and skirts and scarves. And also kids’ clothes.

‘Oh, how beautiful. Little tiny jeans. Tam! These people are geniuses… look at these for Anh!’ Then Mum and Dad turned me into a little Clint Eastwood.

Somewhere in the translation, someone had mistakenly written down that we were a family with a boy and a girl. My mother, ever polite and practical, took these kind gifts with a grateful smile and, for the next few months, accepted compliments from strangers about what a ‘pretty little daughter’ she had. If you ever meet my brother Khoa, make sure you mention the lovely photo you saw of him in Anh’s book wearing a lacy dress with gorgeous red ribbons.

And it wasn’t just Khoa who experienced little mix ups with the clothes. Uncle Huy—who had a bit of a large bottom—found that a certain pair of jeans was more comfortable than the others. He walked around in them with a check-me-out, how-good-do-I-look grin on his face when my mum spotted something not quite right.

‘Which side is the zip on?’ she asked.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Look at the zip, those are women’s pants.’

‘No they’re not,’ Uncle Huy huffed, turning red. But Mum was on a roll.

‘Look, the zip is on the left side. Hahhahha. Everyone look, Huy is wearing girlie pants.’ She offered him a frilly hot-pink number: ‘You want a nice blouse to go with that?’

‘You don’t even know… in Australia the zip can be like, on either side.’ He scurried off, trying to get the pants off so quickly he caught himself in the backward zip.

A couple of months later, our family discovered that the nuns from St Vincent de Paul actually had a shop where you could go and
pick your own clothes
,
buying them at a fraction of the cost. We all walked into that shop and it was like second-hand heaven. We wandered around open-mouthed saying ‘Oooh’ and ‘Ahh’, like we were five-year-old kids. That distinctive, beautiful smell of mothballs and old clothes that have just been washed wafted into our nostrils and we were drunk with anticipation.

Uncle Dung, one of Mum’s younger brothers, and the most smiley of all the uncles, stumbled onto the clearance table and shouted out to the whole shop that he had struck gold. He was literally shaking with excitement and disbelief that such a thing could even exist.

‘Everyone come quickly!’ he yelled. ‘This table… 
even cheaper
!!!’