We Are Here (31 page)

Shortly after the forum, Cabramatta police contacted David and me to see whether we could help them. We met with one of the department heads. She was nice enough and seemed to care about the community and the human face of crime. Maybe they wanted a deeper understanding of some of the issues facing the community. Maybe they wanted intelligence. Either way, I found it hard to overcome my distrust of institutions and authorities governed by the white middle-class majority. Beyond superficial meaningless interactions, I could neither volunteer information nor maintain a relationship with these sweetly sinister organisations. With my artillery of anger, I retreated to my kind and walled myself in.

I’m ashamed to admit that, after the
60 Minutes
broadcast, I was immaturely envious that David got airtime and I didn’t. He didn’t deserve it. Damn it, I was the one who had always been the social activist. He drank beer on the university lawn while I studied political commentary. With my pride (or ego) wounded, I was unable to see that his voice was as legitimate as mine. It didn’t matter that he did not study social science, couldn’t quote left-wing theorists or articulate his understanding of rights in a political framework. Leadership required an ability to truly engage, galvanise and involve people like David and his friends. Although I would conduct many workshops with young disillusioned and disadvantaged people in my community development work, in my early twenties I hadn’t acquired the
heart and humility to truly listen. The irony was that I wanted others to listen to me.

Looking back, I can now understand how I came to connect public achievement and adulation with a sense of self-worth. But at the time, my insatiable hunt for glory was ever present, underlying a genuine commitment to social justice.

As I tried to fight social injustice, meanwhile, I also trudged along painfully at university, a stranger in a strange land. I sat in lecture theatres and tutorials, trying to fade into the walls as my peers asked interesting and thought-provoking questions. On days I had law classes, I felt weighed down by reluctance. I woke up late and ran for the train in the tracksuit pants and oversized T-shirt I’d slept in. Against the backdrop of real-life struggle that I witnessed daily, university seemed like an artificial bubble of fantasy that I couldn’t bring myself to care about.

When the results of the first econometrics test were posted, Peter and I joined the crowds around the noticeboards in the Merewether Building to see our scores. Each student scanned the lists for their identification number and accompanying result. Each wore their score on their face as they turned away—some flushed with pleasure, others quietly satisfied, some bewildered. My heart thumped as I looked for my score. Then it was as if my heart stopped. Shock and confusion engulfed me as I turned to look at Peter. I had failed—terribly. I’d been awarded 11 out of 50.

It was clear to me that something was seriously wrong. These results weren’t mere ad hoc foibles. As my marks continued to slip I began to question whether I really did have the ability to
study at university or for some reason my ability was simply crippled. I began to realise that all my old drive, the focus and determination I had maintained for most of my life, was gone. My former resolve, based on determinable academic objectives, remained in high school while my unworldly self drowned in a massive tertiary world of nameless bodies and unaffordable textbooks. This wasn’t an excursion. The mockery of my self-diagnosed sense of displacement in this new world seemed permanent. The trailing adolescent angst had again, finally, caught up with me. Where did I belong? What did I want to do? Where was I going?

My time at Sydney University, especially within the ebb of the conservative law school, had filled me with self-doubt, confirming the existence of a racial and class hierarchy that found me always at the bottom, raising in me questions of place, of identity, of purpose. While others around me had relished their arrival at this bastion of prestige, for me it was an endurance test. I spent each class sitting silently in the last row, shrouded by constant disillusionment. As each lecture, workshop and tutorial passed, I retreated into a shadow that moved unnoticed through the grounds of the university. I pocketed droplets of my peers’ conversations, which were peppered with references to their Sydney University lineage. Of grandparents graduating from the same degrees. Of expectations of corporate jobs and yacht club memberships. I didn’t matter. I didn’t exist. I had never mattered. Not here, not in the media, not on
60 Minutes
, not in the broader political landscape, not in any key locus of
decision-making. I never would. Everything was Theirs. The reality cemented itself and burned into me each day like a corrosive acid. In those first few months at university, I waited for permission to exist. But it never came.

CHAPTER 10

A tangible heritage

‘I can help you, Cat Thao. We can do this. We can finish this together.’ I heard the pleading in his voice but I couldn’t bring myself to look at him.

‘I can’t, Peter. I can’t do it anymore.’

‘Fuck them, Cat Thao—we can do this.’

After a few months of study, my spirit felt heavy. I was drowning in expectations, in disappointment, in trying to fit in; snapshots from my past and present collided—the parent–teacher meetings, the public-speaking competition, the sewing machines, Vinh’s first day at kindergarten, law school tutorials, my father’s factory uniform, eating jackfruit in Vietnamese orchards. I made the decision to quit university for that year. I needed space. I needed to recalibrate. I needed to breathe.

I decided to go to Vietnam. This time I would be going alone, as an adult. My family, Peter, and David and his friends came to the airport to say goodbye. David’s friends performed a song for me and gave me gifts to remind me to come back. At the time, I didn’t know how long I would be away. I cried when David hugged me. Deep down I knew I was afraid—and more so without him. But we both understood that this was something I inexplicably needed to do.

In the end I spent three months in Vietnam, my ascendant curiosity about the country blossoming. The more I discovered, the more I loved it and hungered for more. I spent a lot of time in Gò D
u with my uncles, aunts and cousins, in the house where my mother had spent her childhood. I played soccer with kids in a dusty ground fenced off by a crumbling wall. I went to the market with my aunt to buy live chickens and freshly skinned jumping frogs. I rode a motorbike at dusk past acres of rubber-tree forests, until darkness descended along with a mammoth swarm of moths that smacked into my face. The air was scented with simplicity and carried aromas of star anise, garlic and fried fish. People sold petrol on the side of the street in old two-litre Coke bottles. Buffaloes and cows trundled along worn paths, pulling carts of freshly harvested rice. In the evenings, villagers ate on the floor in mud huts, drinking homemade rice wine.

One night we celebrated my birthday. My cousins and kids from the village gathered in my grandfather’s house, in front of the ancestral altar. Techno music pumped and I taught the kids how to dance while the smaller ones ate cake. My grandfather,
who was gradually becoming deaf, observed us with an indulgent smile.

My cousins and I went to orchards and sat on woven grass mats surrounded by fruit trees, eating lychees and longans until our bellies ached.

I rode on the back of my cousin’s motorbike, moving along the narrow path separating my grandfather’s rice fields until my cousin, bike and I slipped into the field, emerging wet and muddy. The farmers laughed heartily at our silliness while the ducks looked on.

One evening my aunt took me on her motorbike and we trundled along unsealed roads, swerving around pot holes and overgrown grass. The sun was hanging low in the sky and the fresh smell of earth and farm surrounded us. Finally we arrived at an old house that was surrounded by wild foliage and tall coconut trees that were bent and swaying slightly. It was clear that no one lived there.

‘Your dad was born here,’ she told me. ‘He lived in this house. Your grandfather planted those coconut trees.’

I stared at the old house. Its wood panelling was dark and patchy with moisture. I walked over to the coconut trees and ran my fingers over the shrapnel wounds it had sustained. Here I was on the land of my father’s father, the land that had nurtured my father as a child like an external womb. I breathed in the air. I pulled at the grass. I basked in the red sun. I clung to the tree, hoping my heritage would stream into me—this physical connection to something real. A connection to this majestic and
tangible heritage. I kept my hand on one of the coconut trees for a while. I felt its roughness and imagined my father as a young boy and his father watching him many years ago—before war, before separation.

In Vietnam, I was far from Redfern station, from essays on crime and punishment, far from classes punctuated with conversations of boat clubs I would never go to. And far from a country where I had no continuity of place. And I didn’t want to let go.

Towards the middle of my trip, I went with a group of college students on a four-day bus journey to central Vietnam. I stayed at a beautiful, serene pebble beach. The locals told me stories of how, in the late 1970s, people would come to the beach each day to remove refugees’ bodies that had washed ashore and give them proper ceremonial death rites. They told me of people who scanned the beach every day for belongings of loved ones who had departed without a trace, searching for answers, for finality among the same pebbles that I was walking upon. A shirt, a watch, a button.

At night, the college students built a camp fire and sang. I didn’t know any Vietnamese songs so I sang the first part of ‘Stand By Me’. They clapped along joyfully. The jubilant flames cast flickering shadows on our faces, moving and jumping like a mad puppet show. These were the types of memories I had hoped I would create during my university years back in Sydney.
We all slept on hammocks on the beach. I listened to the waves and felt the ocean breeze as I fell asleep under a sky dense with stars, dreaming of lost things.

I also visited the romantic mountain city of Dalat in the Central Highlands. With its cool European climate, it was a favoured holiday destination of the French during their colonial occupation of Vietnam. Dotted around this beautiful city were old French villas nestled in pine trees, waterfalls and cobblestone laneways. Giant lakes and silhouettes of mountain ranges were the backdrop for little mobile cafés with low plastic chairs.

I was told by a bus driver that there was a table near a Chinese temple in Dalat that could spin upon command. Apparently it was made of an ancient wood that was now extinct. There were three tables in the world made from these trees that now only existed on the tongues and in the minds of bus drivers and villagers. As I walked uphill towards the Chinese temple, there was a humble house on the right. I took off my shoes and went inside. The living room was small and there was a guest book on the table. Not much was exchanged between myself and the woman who served me tea, except warm smiles. She then led me to the round table. It was not grand by any means, being only seventy centimetres or so in diameter and standing only a metre high. There was no gloss or decorative elements of any kind. The woman told me to place both hands on the table and then either say aloud or think to myself the word ‘spin’. I put my hands on the table and thought,
Spin right, spin right.
Then, ever so gently, the table began to move anticlockwise. I then
thought,
Stop
. The table complied.
Spin to the left, faster, faster
, I commanded silently. Again, the table did as I’d instructed. The woman then removed the table-top from its base and placed it on the ground to demonstrate that there was no trick, no hidden wires. It was utterly and unassumingly spectacular. My father had always told me that our ancestors reside in the trees, in the rivers and the mountains. Here, in this simple house, a demonstration of Vietnamese mysticism revealed itself to me. Ancient. Inexplicable. Present.