The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (33 page)

Every morning Suzie walked across the Harbour Bridge to work—a lovely way to start the day—then got bogged down in contracts, mergers and hostile takeovers—not so lovely. I knew she wasn’t enjoying being a lawyer, from time to time she even talked about quitting and pursuing her creative interests, but she was reluctant to take the leap.

When I had been in Melbourne, Dad had asked me, ‘Is Suzie happy, Anh?’

‘Yeah, I think so. Why?’

‘Make sure she’s happy. Don’t make the mistake I made. I took your mother for granted.’

One night I started to talk to Suzie about her work again.

‘Are you happy being a lawyer, sweetheart?’

‘Not really.’

‘So why don’t you quit?’

‘I don’t know, it’s not that easy. It’s a lot of money to walk away from.’

‘Don’t worry about the money, we’ll manage. What matters is that you’re happy.’

Unlike me, my wife is not one to make snap decisions, whether it’s about her career or which placemats to buy at Ikea. She had to think about it for a while. In the end she quit, and there we were, a bunch of degrees and not a lawyer in sight. Suzie decided to go back and study writing and photography, which she enjoyed immensely.

We decided to move back to the house I’d bought for Mum in Yagoona for a short time while we looked for somewhere else to rent. It was a fantastic house, and I enjoyed working on the place, improving little bits and pieces that needed to be done. After all, I had been building birdcages, duck enclosures and golden pheasant pens since the age of twelve. However, there was a busted side gate that I had hastily repaired, and never got around to fixing properly. One afternoon a huge storm came along and blew the bottom of the gate out.

Mum had owned two pug dogs called Nugget and Peanut for several years and now the little tackers decided to go exploring in the rain. We drove around for hours and hours trying to find them.

‘Where are they going to sleep?’ my mother whimpered. She usually cried only when she was happy, not when she was sad. But Mum wept openly about those two dogs. They were like extra children to her.

‘Mum, go to sleep, it’s all right,’ I said, trying to pacify her. ‘I’m sure we’ll find them tomorrow.’ I was comforting myself as much as her.

The next day we made posters on the bus-crash computer, and went to the corner shop.

‘Can I put these up on the wall?’ The shop owner nodded.

‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘There was an old lady who came in yesterday and she told me she’d found a couple of dogs and needed to buy dog food. She lives just four doors down.’ My eyes brightened.

‘Did she say what type?’

‘No, but she definitely said she was feeding two dogs.’

I bounded up to her front door and knocked vigorously. A small Asian woman appeared.

‘Hello. The shop owner told me you found two dogs?’

‘Yes, two dogs,’ she said, then turned around and started talking to Mum’s dogs in Vietnamese.

‘You’re Vietnamese?’ I said, in Vietnamese.

‘And so are you,’ she replied, in Vietnamese. ‘I knew these dogs belonged to Vietnamese people,’ she said. ‘They speak Vietnamese.’

Ra day, ngoi soung
, she said to the dogs, and they sat down as asked.

‘I tried to feed them dog food but they preferred the pork soup I cooked for my grandson. They eat Vietnamese as well.’

‘Thank you,’ I told her, and pressed some money into her hand. She didn’t want it.

‘Take it, please,’ I urged her. ‘We were going to give it away as a reward anyway.’

With dogs in tow, I raced home. Mum was over the moon.

‘This is best day of my life,’ she beamed. I kept thinking back to the day I bought her the house, but said nothing. As I left she was hugging her little Vietnamese speaking pugs like they were long-lost babies.

I just love animals. I’m sure it’s a trait I got from my dad. Like him, I also have a habit of getting all excited about an idea, and going way over the top. When I started breeding fish, the house filled up quickly with twenty fish tanks. Then one day I was struck with bird fever.

It started at a Christmas party where someone gave Suzie’s cousin a pair of lovebirds. I thought they were beautiful so, just like my dad would have done, the next day I went out and bought myself a crimson rosella, two lorikeets, five finches, and a corella. The corella was hand-reared and completely tame, in fact he thought he was a human being. I called him Pacino and taught him to say
Phoo Wah
like in
Scent of a Woman
. I even made a stand for him so he could have meals with us. He had his own little plate, and his own assigned seat at our dinner table.

Later on I bought a budgie as well. He was a cute little white thing and Suzie was quite attached to him. She named him Rocky. He and Pacino were good friends, but Pacino was my favourite. I trained him to poo on command. I would hold him over a litter tray and say, ‘Poo!’ And plop, out it would come. I taught him to do it on command in English and Vietnamese. I think he was Australia’s only bilingual toilet-trained corella.

Unfortunately, I was starting to travel for comedy gigs and was away a week at a time. Pacino missed me. He had attached himself to me and, when I wasn’t there, he would just squawk and squawk and
Phoo Wah
and squawk all day long. It would start at five in the morning and go till night.

It turned out he just didn’t like women. Whenever Suzie went anywhere near him he would try to nip her. She thought it was just her, but then he began nipping at my mum as well. Up until now Suzie had been pretty relaxed about the aviary in our lounge room, but this behaviour tipped her over the edge.

‘Pacino’s a misogynist. A male chauvinist pig… bird. He has to go,’ she said.

What an ultimatum. The parrot or your wife.

I called up an old Vietnamese family friend who had been keen on the bird since I’d bought it.

‘You know my bird, the one you’re always talking about? I gotta find a new home for him. Do you want him?’

‘Be over in ten minutes.’

He got to our place in five and took Pacino away. Suzie did a celebratory dance around the lounge room.

‘Oh yeah… he’s gone!
Phoo Wah
 . . . he’s gone!’

Two hours later, Suzie was printing photos in her darkroom with the door shut, so I knocked and called out, ‘Guess what, sweetheart? Pacino’s back.’

‘Ha ha, very funny.’ And then she heard him.

‘
Phoo Wah
. SQUUAAAAWWWK!
Phoo Waaaah
.’

‘You have got to be kidding! What bird did I torture in a past life to deserve this?’

The old man had a little Pomeranian dog, which hated the corella even more than Suzie. The two went at each other for two hours straight, so Pacino was sent packing. This time, though, Suzie was firm.

‘He’s not staying in this house!’

‘Please! He loves me.’

‘So does Phil, but you don’t see him living in our lounge room, soiling himself every time he hears the word “Poo”.’

On cue, Pacino dropped a greeny-grey splash onto the carpet.

I knew I’d lost, and so I said, ‘Okay. He’s gone.’

This time I called up the local pet shop, who asked me to bring him in.

‘Please just find him a good home,’ I said.

‘Does he talk? Any words at all?’ the owner asked.

‘Of course!’

Pacino belted out a bunch of hellos and ‘want a scratch?’ And, of course,
Phoo Wah
. For good measure he threw in
An com di
and
May im lung
—Vietnamese for ‘Eat your dinner’ and ‘Shut the hell up!’

‘He speaks a bit of Vietnamese as well,’ I explained. But I had something even better to show him. ‘Check this out … Poo!’ And Pacino did.

The shop owner was beside himself.

‘I’ve never seen that before! I’m going to keep this one for the shop—as a tourist attraction!’

Khoa and me in our school uniforms.

The boys are growing up. This was my long-haired period.

Khoa and me on the set of
Footy Legends
. I trained pretty hard for six months to try to look like a football player.