Only the Heart (15 page)

Something feels wrong. This office, with its treasures, the self-important secretary — what kind of official rates such surroundings?

He feels dirty and out-of-place in this richly carpeted, expensive room, and he studies the grime beneath his finger-nails and the sad condition of his clothes, but he makes no move to improve them. What point is there?

A door opens and the secretary returns, carrying with him a red manila folder and an air of acute effiiency.

And preceding him, a man, who looks at home in this place.

Minh rises to face the newcomer, and behind him he senses the others following his lead. The secretary moves to stand formally between them.

“Vo Van Minh, may I introduce Mr Trevor Stern, Australian ambassador to Malaysia.”

For a moment the world stops turning.

Ambassador …

Suddenly the futility of what they are attempting crashes down on him. He shakes the man's hand and moves back to his seat. But he remains standing. Not from politeness, but because his muscles have refused to obey him.

Trevor Stern is not old, no more than forty-five, Minh estimates, and very tall. He towers above his secretary, and dwarfs the seated family. The older man places the folder in the exact centre of the desktop, as his superior seats himself, leans backwards in the chair, and links his fingers loosely in front of him, rubbing the tips of his thumbs together in a practiced gesture of relaxation.

“Thank you, Stanley. I'll give you a buzz if I need you.”

The secretary hesitates, nods slightly, and leaves the room. Finally Minh manages to bend his knees and sit down.

“Well, Mr … Vo.” The ambassador refers to the folder on the desk in front of him, as he begins speaking. “This is, to say the least, most irregular. Stanley didn't want to let you in.” He looks towards the office door, and a small smile creeps across his lips. “For myself, I like a mystery.”

Minh says nothing. He stares at the man behind the desk, trying to guage his mood. The ambassador looks back and holds his gaze, before continuing: “What made you take the risk? You must know the Malaysian authorities' attitude to … escapees.” The word is carefully chosen 4nd he smiles again as he says it. Minh begins to relax. Beside him he senses Hoa shifting uncomfortably. She does not understand the language and has not read the ambassador's expression.

Finally, he speaks. It has been a long time since he has spoken English, and he chooses his words carefully.

“What make us, Mr Stern?” He sits forward in the chair, pausing to compose the sentences. This man is intelligent and powerful, not some minor official.

This man has the power to make a dream come true, or shatter it.

Minh looks at his wife and at the five children in the seats beside him, then he turns back to the man behind the desk.

“My father was young, he live in Shinan … South China.” The tall man nods. He knows of Shinan. “He was poor. Without … prospects. So he leave … left China, and make a new life in Vietnam. When he die, he own one of the biggest business in Rach Gia.”

He pauses, but the man behind the desk makes no effort to interrupt, looking instead at Phuong. Minh allows his eyes to stray to his niece. The burns on her arm are healing well, but they are still a powerful reminder of how close she was to death, and her hair has not yet grown back.

“My niece was injure in August fire. She was luckier than some.” He does not elaborate. There is no need. The ambassador frowns slightly with sympathy, and turns back to face him.

“I'm sorry … Your father … You were saying …?”

“My father … He never believe in good fortune. Or bad luck. When I was a child, he ask me this question: ‘If you go to lake in winter, and you find single duck, dead and frozen on surface, do you say that it is fate? That it has suffer ill1ortune? Of course not. No more than other ducks who all fly south and find warmer lakes were granted good fortune. We make our own fortune, but …?” Suddenly he stops speaking, embarrassed. “I am sorry. We are not here to talk of my father's wisdom. I —”

“Not at all.” Trevor Stern smiles and leans forward to rest his elbows on the surface of the desk, pushing the red folder slightly away from the centre. The lack of symmetry seems to please him. “If you spend as many hours talking to people as I do in this office, it is a pleasant change to hear someone's wisdom. Please … Go on.”

“When my father was thirteen years old, there were huge floods in Shinan province. Thousands people die, and crops were ruin. He tell me of what happens to him.” He looks to Hoa. She smiles encouragement, though she can understand nothing of what is being said. “Three boys were caught by rising waters. My father and his two friend. They had climb to top of small tree, but the water was getting deeper. In the end, he decide to swim for higher ground, but he could not … convince them to try. He almost give in and stay with them, but in the end he set out on his own, and though he nearly drown, he made it … They never find his friends.

“He light incense for their souls until the day he died.”

Again he pauses, holding the man's gaze.

“You ask me why. Why we take the risk? We have three son, Mr Stem. My sister was taken by Thai pirates. I promise her I take care her daughters. You tell me. Your family is holding on to tree and water is rising. Do you wait for good fortune to save you, and hold on, when you know no boat coming for six months? Or do you take the risk?”

*

TOAN'S STORY

My grandfather never believed in fate. My grandmother does. But fate or will-power, what happened in Kuala Lumpur was a turning point in all our lives.

The ambassador sat there for a few seconds after my father finished speaking. We didn't know what was going on between them, and my father couldn't explain until later that night, but you could taste the tension in the room.

Then the man behind the desk smiled, and we saw my father's shoulders relax. I think the ambassador was really impressed with the kind of determination that would lead us to make such a trip.

But to be honest, I doubt if he'd ever expected to be confronted with a five-kid family of desperate refugees in his fancy office, and I don't think there was any way he could say no.

He listened to the story and took down all the information personally, including the names of the Australian officers that my father had worked with in wartime intelligence.

We were ready to go back to Pulau Bisa, but he arranged for us to stay in KL until the clearances were checked. I think he'd already made his decision before we left the office, because in no time we were given our medicals and were moved to the holding camp to wait for a flight out.

And suddenly Pulau Bisa was no more than a receding nightmare.

I remember looking down from the plane as we took off from Kuala Lumpur, craning my neck with the wonder of it all, and looking down on the clouds and the sea, with the land getting further and further away. It was strange and exciting. The beginning of the dream. The leap into the unknown.

But I wasn't scared. Not a bit.

I was sitting next to my father and he was holding my hand, and at that moment I knew that he could do just about anything. Vo Van Minh was a hero. Besides, he was almost as lucky as I was.

In the seat behind us Linh was throwing up in a paper bag, so things were about as normal as they could be. Except that we were in the sky, heading for a new world that we didn't know a single thing about …

PART THREE

YIN
AND YANG

15

STUPID

TOAN'S STORY

I learned something on my first day at school that I never forgot.

It wasn't maths or science, or even how to do up my shoe-laces. It was much more important.

I was sitting there in the intensive Language Unit, feeling frightened and small, in a desk that was too big for me, in a strange room where everything was new and threatening, with Miss Matheson the teacher leaning over me, asking me something I couldn't understand. I knew it was a question by the tone of the voice she used, and it wasn't like she wasn't being kind and gentle with me. It was just that I didn't understand a word, and that scared me.

Until Nguyet, the girl sitting next to me, turning around and whispered in Vietnamese, “She wants to know your name,
stupid
.”

I looked at her and the expression on her face stung me. Here was someone who not so long ago had been in the same situation as I was facing now, and
she
was calling
me
stupid. Whatever faults I have, being stupid was never one of them, and even then I knew it.

I looked at her and she rolled her eyes and looked back at the book in front of her. I felt the anger begin, like a small fire in my gut. At that moment the fear disappeared, and I knew for certain that
no
one was ever going to call me that again.

I turned to Miss Matheson, who was still leaning over me, and I looked her straight in the eyes.

“Toan,” I said. “Vo An Toan …”

With Matheson at school and my father at home — not to mention the radio and the tv — I picked up enough English in the first three months for them to take me out of Intensive and let me loose in the real world of Grade Two. For Linh, the process took a bit longer, but I don't think her heart was in it the way mine was. She wasn't worried about being called names, because they never affected her. She'd always been too tough to worry about what someone else said.

I remember the day I left the Unit. Miss Matheson smiled and wished me good luck. She was an old softie, and most of the time there wasn't a whole lot for her to feel all warm and gooey about, trying to help kids who were struggling with their whole lives, as well as the language she was trying to teach them. So when one of her charges achieved anything, it was like a ray of winter sunshine for her.

She held out a package to me. It wasn't very big, and it was wrapped in gold paper and tied with a red bow. I ripped the paper off and found myself holding a small book. A tiny pocket dictionary.

I knew how much that present meant to her. I'm not sure if she ever realised how much it mean to me.

“Good luck, Toan,” she said, and kissed me on the top of the head. But I wasn't embarrassed. No one was every going to embarrass me again. Certainly not by giving me a present and kissing me on the head.

“Yeah. Good luck …
stupid!”
Nguyet winked and smiled as she said it — in English this time — and I smiled back.

I walked out with my bag on my back and my precious dictionary in my hand.

I still have it.

Caroline Chisholm Public School … Six hundred kids in a bunch of old buildings designed for two-thirds that number. But it really wasn't a bad place to start your “real school” career. The teachers were friendly — mostly – and so were the kids. And the school bus stopped outside our door. It could definitely have been worse.

Because she was older, they put Linh in Third Grade when she came out of the ILU a couple of months later. I think she would have preferred to join me — you know, a familiar face and all. But she couldn't; she was already a year older than most of the kids in her grade, and even if her English wasn't all that swish, being two years older would have caused other problems for her as the years went on. At least, that's what the school decided.

I think it affected her far more than me. After all, I'd been in the class on my own for weeks already, and I'd found my niche. Besides, I was always a bit more outgoing. Linh kept things to herself and sat quietly in the background — not something anyone ever accused me of!

So there we were, our first year in our new country, in school, learning the complex rules of “fitting in” — rules that for a couple of hundred years had been turning immigrants into Australians, no matter what they looked like, or where they might have come from.

If you don't want to spend your time on the outside looking in, you have to know the rules.

*

LINH'S STORY

The fact is, Toan was the kind of kid that teachers like to take the credit for.

What began as a stubborn determination not to fail quickly grew into something else. It wasn't obsession; that's too strong. Let's just say he found most things pretty easy to do, and those he didn't, he wasn't about to give in to.

I don't think it ever really worried him that he was so good at most things that he stood out in the crowd. Not the way it would have worried most of us.

When they finally made it to “real school”, the kids from the ILU usually spent the first few months — or years — finding their feet and treading carefully. We were very much in the minority in the early days, and you couldn't help feeling the eyes on you.

Most of the time it was pretty harmless; just curiosity, I guess. There weren't enough of us for anyone to feel too threatened by, so it was mostly just the staring, and maybe the occasional comment from one of the sixth graders about someone's dog disappearing.

But still, you didn't go out of your way to make waves. To get yourself noticed.

Unless your name was Vo An Toan, of course.

His English might have been a bit scratchy still, but his maths … You don't exactly need great language skills to play with numbers, do you? And his father had played number games with us since we were old enough to count our fingers. Most nights in the camp we'd spent at least half an hour throwing mental arithmetic around the hut like a baseball. Answer the question, ask the next one, ten-second limit; and if you missed out — you performed a forfeit — bark like a dog or do a chimpanzee imitation. I seem to remember performing a lot more forfeits than Toan ever did, even though he was so much younger.

So you can imagine Mrs Ghirardi's surprise when the new kid from the ILU finished the first weekly arithmetic test ten minutes before anyone else, without a single mistake. I think his fate was sealed from that moment on.

Mrs Ghirardi was Toan's second grade teacher, and his third grade one as well. I can imagine her going back to the staffroom at lunchtimes with stories about him. Toan was never your average kid. He wasn't even your average teacher's pet. Because although he did everything as well as he possibly could, and wouldn't give anything away until he was satisfied he could master it, he would never shut up, especially if he got bored. Which he did whenever they were doing something he already knew how to do.

I guess that's why he never had any problems fitting in. He was always scoring his share of trouble as well as merit awards, and in a desperate attempt to save her own sanity, Mrs Ghirardi finally hit on the plan of getting him to help his friends when he'd finished his own work — before he started showing his boredom in more … colourful ways.

So by the time English wasn't a problem any more, neither was fitting in. Toan had friends coming out of his ears, and by association so did I.

He was confident, popular, and still only in grade four when we moved schools.

Cabramatta to Auburn. Not much of a move when you compared it to the journey we'd already made. Ten, maybe fifteen kilometres. But it was a significant move. At least it was in my uncle's eyes.

You see, even in the late seventies he'd decided it was important to move out into the “real world” — away from the safety of our own people and the Vietnamese community that was growing up around Cabramatta.

It was too easy, he said, to stick to the old ways; to hide from the harsh words and the difficult choices. To act like you'd never left Vietnam.

The choice had already been made, he said, and we had to learn to live with it.

A lot of his friends didn't agree with him.

“They don't try,” they would say. “We are like the enemy. If they don't
want
us living next door, why should we put ourselves into such a situation? At least here, together, we are safe.”

“Safe!”
he would shout.” A
coffin
is safe. A
prison
is safe. This is
their
country,
they
don't need to try.
We
do. At least, if we want it to be
our
country too, we do. Or else we all might just as well have stayed back home. Where it was
safe
.”

It was easy for him to talk like that, of course. He spoke the language. Maybe he even understood Australians a little better because of his wartime experience of working with them. But for most, fitting in was much harder. More threatening, I guess.

By that stage, maybe two and a half years after we arrived, the “boat-people” had become much bigger news, and the mythology that grows up around any group of immigrants was gathering momentum. Name-calling, conflicts in the workplace, a bit of Saturday night “slant-bashing”, it doesn't take to many incidents to draw any group together, to build the wall between “us” and “them”.

But my uncle simply didn't believe in walls.

So when the chance came up — a Commission townhouse in Auburn — we moved out.

*

TOAN'S STORY

Lex Savvides. Lex, short for Alexi. Apart from Linh, he's basically my best friend, even though he still lives in Auburn, and between the demands of studying, his sports and my filming schedule, we only get to see each other once in a while.

We sat next to each other for two and a half years after I arrived at Stanton Street Public School in the middle of grade four. I guess you can get quite close in that length of time, but it wasn't exactly the ideal start to a friendship.

You see, on the second day I was there he beat the crap out of me.

Lex was twelve centimetres taller than I was. He was the biggest kid in the whole grade, and he wasn't all that good at most subjects. He wasn't dumb or anything, it was just that both his parents spoke Greek at home, and his English was … well, nothing great. He couldn't read all that well and it affected his work. But he
was
good at maths. And that was what led to the fight.

You see, I arrived on the Thursday, and on the Friday they had a maths quiz. Nothing important, just a bit of fun, really — if you can call anything to do with maths fun. It wasn't anything I hadn't done a hundred times before. I finished and waited for the others, but I didn't see Lex watching me.

When you have trouble with most of what they ask you to do, you tend to get pretty defensive about the things you
are
good at. And suddenly Lex had competition.

I made one mistake, he made two. And after school he caught me behind the bike-racks and beat me up.

He didn't tell me why. Rhiannon Holbrook did that. Lex just spent the next week sitting across from me, watching me and not saying a word.

But by the next week I had a decision to make. Do well and risk another beating, or give in and miss a few of the answers.

I did well.

Lex must have decided there was no point in beating me up
every
Friday. The next Monday lunchtime he challenged me to a game of basketball on the old ring at the back of the playground and thrashed me twenty to two. After that, he started talking to me in class and cheating off me in anything that didn't have to do with maths, and we became friends.

Lex played rep basketball and his club soccer team was undefeated for the whole time he played, until he quit to concentrate on making the dunk. He taught me most of the moves I know and I even played on a couple of teams with him. But he was out of my league in sports. It wasn't just his size; he's currently six five and still growing. Lex has what the experts call “body intelligence” — muscles that do exactly what the brain tells them, exactly when it wants them to. Next year he warms the bench for the Slammers. He shrugged when I congratulated him on the news.

“It's only the CBA,” he said, smiling like a cat.

“CBA at seventeen. NBL at nineteen,” I replied. “By twenty-one, you'll be fighting off scouts from the NBA.” And I smiled too. “
They
don't care how bad your maths is.”

That was when he hit me.

When we left Auburn I was in year nine. I was fourteen, so of course I knew everything there was to know. But I couldn't know what was about to happen to me. After all, there was no warning. It was just something that had been growing secretly inside me, biding its time, waiting to burst out. And when it did, I'm not sure I was exactly prepared …