The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (8 page)

We rented a two-bedroom house in nearby Earlwood. The house backed onto a park so Dad knocked off three fence palings and the park became our backyard. Three little kids went from a tiny apartment with no space to having what felt like the continent of Africa to play in. It was paradise. Beaman Park is enormous and has the Cooks River running through it, and Khoa and I spent our days wandering around, making up stories and exploring. Mum stayed home and looked after my baby sister, Tram, while Dad went to work in the factory.

One day, Mum’s friend told her about how, with just a few hundred dollars, she had bought a second-hand sewing machine and could work from home while still looking after her kids. Of course, the following week there was an old, enormous industrial-sized Singer sitting in our living room.

Imagine something about the size of a V8 engine with a sewing needle and thread attached. Every time Mum pressed her foot on the pedal it would make an almighty roar. It sounded like we had a Kombi in our living room. A long
RAAARR
was the sleeve of the shirt, the cuffs were several short
RAR, RAR, RARs
, and a long
RAAARR
again was up the other side of the sleeve. I would be glued to the TV watching
Happy Days
and just as the Fonz would say, ‘Hey Ritchie, listen up, this is important. The secret to meeting girls is …’
RAARRRARRRRRARRRR
. I had little idea that this soundtrack was going to dominate my life for the next decade.

Mum and Dad discovered that working from home meant they didn’t have to knock off at 6 p.m. They could keep going, and the harder they worked, the more money they made. All of a sudden their destiny was in their own hands. Dad left the job at the factory and started making clothes with Mum. It wasn’t long before his entrepreneurial spirit and you-can-do-anything attitude took over. He knew they were being paid peanuts by their employer, so they went to the source and got the work direct from the big wholesaler. Soon we had three uncles, four aunties and several distant cousins helping out, and we were running our own business.

My parents and their siblings worked and worked and worked. I look back now and the hours they did were absolutely ludicrous. But for a group of refugees who came from a communist regime where you had almost no means of making a living, they were in paradise. They were incredibly grateful they had the opportunity to be rewarded for their efforts, and worked accordingly. What a great country!

The business grew and so did the responsibility. There were days when the garments were running late and Mum and Dad would have to work through the night. Watching them work so hard, I decided to try to help and jumped on a machine to have a go. I had seen Mum do it a thousand times—
How hard could it be?

I put a shirt sleeve under the needle and then stomped on the pedal.
RRRAAAAARRRRRRR!
The machine roared into action, sucked up three feet of material and my little seven-year-old left hand with it, neatly cross-stitching that soft bit of skin between the thumb and index finger to the cuff of a sky-blue business shirt. In seconds I had become a huge, kid-sized cufflink accessory, one that made a howling noise and bled everywhere.

I screamed a bloodcurdling howl and ran around the house with the rapidly turning crimson shirt sewn to my hand, twice tripping over it. Mum came sprinting out of the kitchen and had to ‘un-sew’ a delirious, bawling child as my little brother and sister watched in open-mouthed horror.

After that incident my parents decided the best thing was not to ban the kids from the machines, but to actually teach us how they worked. To this day I am still an absolute gun at hemming, overlocking and buttonholing.

As the business grew, we moved again—this time to a factory in Newtown. Even back then, Newtown was the hippy capital of Sydney. It’s actually a very cool place with lots of ‘alternative types’, people with multi-coloured hair, earrings through parts of their anatomy that aren’t called an ear, and just general folk who love being different. But when you’re an eleven-year-old kid walking to the station, a couple of guys with eyebrow studs, electric-blue hair and matching spiderweb tattoos down the left side of their faces are pretty frightening.

I was always on edge when we were at Newtown, but most of the time it turned out to be my own paranoia… those tattooed dudes mostly smiled and were harmless. The only time something creepy happened, we could not have seen it coming.

My brother and I were on the train one day heading to school. I was twelve and Khoa was ten. There was an old lady sitting across from us on the other side of the carriage. She kept looking at Khoa. Maybe she was thinking,
He’s a bit fat for a Vietnamese kid
—because he was. Khoa was a chunky little fella who wore a school jacket that had been badly fixed up (
RRRRAAAAAARRRR
!) and which went down to his knees. So Khoa looked a bit odd and so people often stared at him, and I didn’t think anything of it.

We arrived at our station and I saw this old lady get off also. I had never been so keen to get to school in my life. She followed us all the way—keeping about fifty feet behind us, but always watching—and stopped outside the school gates. At the end of the day, she was standing in exactly the same spot. She had waited outside our school all day!
We rushed to the station and onto the train and she was nowhere to be seen.

‘Thank God, she’s gone now,’ I said to Khoa with relief.

We got off the train at Newtown and there she was,
again
. Now I was starting to freak out a bit. She kept her distance and followed us out of the station area, quietly shuffling along behind us, down all the streets we turned into. Khoa reckoned we should take a detour and go via the police station. I considered that option for a second and decided against it, reasoning that it would make the trip longer. I just wanted to be home as fast as possible.

As we turned into our street, we found ourselves walking faster and faster. We couldn’t contain our fear any longer and we bolted home. We banged on the door and screamed, ‘Open up. Open up!’ My uncle let us in and we rushed upstairs and told our parents all about it.

My dad looked out the window and, sure enough, the old lady was hovering around on the street. She stayed for hours and hours. I begged my dad to call the police.

‘What are you worried about?’ he said.

‘She’s followed us since this morning,’ I pleaded with him.

‘Just a homeless lady, she’s harmless.’

‘But she’s probably crazy.’

Khoa joined my pleas: ‘Yeah crazy. She’s got this crazy look. I saw her look at me like she wants to eat me.’

I think,
Well, he is the fat one. That’s how it worked with Hansel and Gretel
.

Then what Dad said next was odd, but really not surprising for him.

‘You two go down and ask her what she wants.’

‘What?!’

‘She’s harmless. Go down and see what she wants. I’ll watch you from here.’

‘What if she does something bad to us?’ I asked.

‘Like eats us,’ Khoa added.

‘She can’t do anything bad to you. Look at her. If she got into a fight with you two, who would win?’

‘We would,’ Khoa said.

‘Then you’ve got nothing to be worried about.’

And that was that. Khoa and I waited and waited at that window for another couple of hours and then the lady just tottered away. We never saw her again. That night at dinner my family talked about the whole encounter. Dad said:

‘Always question your fear, Anh. There’s almost never a good reason to be scared.’

My father hates fear.

The factory had a huge industrial space that Dad filled with V8 sewing machines, and offices which he turned into our make- shift home. I’m sure what he did was illegal—it didn’t matter. No one knew, asked or cared. We lived there with Uncle Two’s family.When we left Vietnam to come to Australia, Uncle Two left his family behind and came out on the boat with us (his family arrived later). Uncle Two was sickly as a child and out of all nine brothers he was the quietest, so Dad took it upon himself to look after his second eldest brother and had kept a close eye on him all his life.

What was fascinating about Uncle Two was his involvement in the war. This reserved and gentle man had a missing index finger on his left hand and if you asked him what happened he shrugged it off, and not tell you that he had spent a part of the war defusing landmines. One day he lost a finger, which he counted as an incredible blessing because most people in the same situation lost their lives.

These days mine defusing is a much more scientific process, with engineers called ‘sappers’ being highly trained for the task. A while ago, I was watching TV and I saw footage of a mine defuser strolling through a minefield in Afghanistan and I thought to myself,
This guy doesn’t look all that nervous for a guy who’s looking for landmines
. And then I realised he wasn’t nervous because in front of him was a cameraman walking backwards.

My uncle was from the old school of sappers and he was somewhat of a hero in my father’s eyes. With a thriving business, a huge factory and plenty of space, Dad invited Uncle Two and his family to move in with us. It was one of the best times of my childhood because Uncle Two had four sons around our age, and the whole bunch of us ran riot in this huge industrial space.

Khoa and I shared a bunk bed in an office, while my sister Tram slept in a bed in my parents’ room, a converted dilapidated boardroom. The old storeroom was shared by my uncle’s four sons, Dung, Manh, Tri and Martin—yes, the youngest was called Martin; he was born in Australia. Eventually Dung, the eldest, who shared the same name as my Mum’s brother, decided to change his name to Joe. A quick word of advice for any immigrants moving to a new country: before sending your children to school, please ask the immigration authorities if any of your names are a local word for ‘poo’.

While they stayed with us, the boys went to our school and the six Dos made a funny looking group. At a sports event, the teacher lined us up and went through our names: Dung Do, Anh Do, Manh Do, Tri Do. He laughed and said, ‘You guys are like a xylophone; Ding, dong, do …’

Even we had a giggle at that one.

Living with our cousins had massive advantages, but it also had one very embarrassing disadvantage.