Authors: Cat Thao Nguyen
We Are Here (29 page)
As my three months of freedom drew to an end, I made the most of being with David and his friends. They were a mix of struggling students who drank cases of beer on the university lawn, vocational and community college students, former prisoners and factory workers. They were men who struggled like many other men—with money, with love, with family, with dreams. They would often assemble in the backyards of some Western Sydney suburban house, grilling meat, singing karaoke, dissecting current affairs and hatching plans for a better life. Sometimes there would be huge marijuana plants lined up against the back fence. Although most of them had grown up in Australia, a deep sense of Vietnamese identity burned within them. As they drank VB beer, they would claim that it stood for Vư
t Biên (the Vietnamese phrase commonly understood as the refugee exodus), Vì B
n (for my friends) or V
B
(abandonment by wives). With their depository of survival scars, they each had a profound understanding of loyalty, honour and pride. And I grew to love them all.
Sydney University was a different planet. Every corner of aged sandstone and manicured lawn was unfamiliar to me. I could never have conjured up such a setting even in my dreams. In those early months of university I felt intimidated and out of place. In my first law tutorial, which had about twenty or so students, I quickly discovered that most of my peers came from privileged backgrounds. They had an unabashed interest in money. Only two students in the class declared that they had chosen to study law because of social justice. One of those two students was me. When we discussed ways to diversify court benches, I advocated affirmative action to diversify the student body, ultimately diversifying the composition of lawyers and judges. One student argued that this was problematic because people from Western Sydney didn’t aspire to be lawyers but
instead wanted to become mechanics. Surely we shouldn’t coerce people into doing something they didn’t want to do. The shallowness and utmost lack of insight of comments like this repulsed me. It poisoned my view of a peer group that I was condemned to associate with for the next five years.
I welcomed the diversity of the commerce faculty, by contrast, comprising international students as well as students from all parts of Sydney, some of whom were aspiring entrepreneurs. I blended in with Islamic, Chinese and Iranian students. Still, I could not find a sense of community within the lush cricket grounds, the Old Teachers College or the lunchtime banter in the Wentworth Building canteen. Although I had earned a place at the oldest and most prestigious law school in Australia, I felt it wasn’t my birthright – that I was and always would be a visitor. I hadn’t wanted to go to this university anyway.
I turned in my first law paper, and it was returned to me with a request that I see the tutor. I had barely passed. Apparently my English was incredibly poor and my tutor recommended I seek help from the Intensive English Language Centre. I hadn’t had my English criticised like that since year two when I was eight years old. I was disappointed and confused. That day, paper in hand, I walked towards Redfern train station, the nearest stop to the university. As usual, I handed a muesli bar to a beggar outside the station and rode the Bankstown line home. The same houses, backyards, graffiti that I would see thousands of times whizzed past me as I fell into a reflective trance. My mother and I had seen my name in the
Sydney Morning Herald
under the
English scores only a few months earlier. I had come first in the Higher School Certificate Trial Exams for 2 Unit English at an academically selective school. Lines from
Macbeth
, Sally Morgan’s
My Place
, Peter Goldsworthy’s
Maestro
crowded my brain and flooded me. I recalled memorised analysis of poetic devices used by the poet Bruce Dawe. Signs continued to stream past and words buzzed inside me. Belmore. Lakemba. Rhyming couplets. Wiley Park. Punchbowl. Iambic pentameter. Bankstown.
I’d enrolled at Sydney University with a friend called Peter who was studying for the same degree. Peter had attended the same tutoring college as I did in Yagoona, one suburb next to Bankstown. He was the only son of Vietnamese parents struggling to run a garment-making workshop in Cabramatta and raise Peter and his three sisters. With a deep, stoic sense of determination, he learned to get things done. From the moment we became friends, we both recognised that we shared the same story. Our mothers breathed the same losses and our fathers crafted for us the same quenchable hopes. Peter knew his world was not that of the cocktail parties with the New South Wales Law Society or the cricket club. His world was Cabramatta, hanging out with the boys at the RSL club, hoping to one day pay enough dues to realise for his family their humble dreams. A small home. A new piano for his sister. Nothing grand.
On certain days, whether there was a class or not, Peter would drive into the city in the family’s tired red van to deliver finished
garments. At times, I would hitch a ride in his van or keep him company on runs to the city. The garments hung off a central rack that ran along the roof, swaying in unison like dancers in a crude group performance, while the coat hangers clinked noisily as he braked for a red light. A few times I went with him to the inner-city studios of well-known Australian fashion designers and waited while Peter picked up a dress sample or negotiated a price for a new load. The studios were often painted all white in a chic minimalist style with clean lines. On one occasion, while waiting for Peter, I sat on a wooden chair by the door watching the designer adjust a new piece on a model, pins in hand. In all the years that my mother had sewn, she never made contact with the designer or label owner. There was a number of layers above us in the production chain, including agents. Peter had decided that since he could speak fluent English and negotiate, his parents could do without agents. My mother refused to allow her children to get involved in her work, for fear it would affect our studies, so I wasn’t allowed to take charge like Peter did. The designer/model sighting was a glimpse into another facet of the production chain of which Peter’s family, mine and countless others were a part. I thought of my mother, who was probably sewing as I sat there in the inner-city studio. The thoughts of Karl Marx that I had studied in year twelve Economic History formed a glaring frame around the designer/model composition. We were just one of the factors of production.
Often, Peter would pick me up in the red van and drive us around Western Sydney, looking for a place to study. We told
each other that it was too noisy and distracting at home because of the sewing machines in our houses, but really we were just procrastinating. We spent nights in empty construction lots in Liverpool inside his van, shifting positions to get sufficient light from the highway. We slept inside the van outside the University of Technology Sydney after the security guards chased us out of the study centres because we weren’t students there. Peter tried to coach me in law, in finance, in statistics, but I was constantly distracted by an underlying sense of self-pity. I couldn’t fathom how Peter rose above it all and pushed on. Maybe he just had no choice.
Away from Sydney University, I spent many happy hours with David and his friends, centred around my giant security blanket of Western Sydney. We would go to Mounties, a community club at Mount Pritchard where, as members, we enjoyed a breakfast buffet for $3.50. The club had more than five hundred poker machines and was rated the highest in the state’s poker-machine profit rankings. It was regarded by many as a cultural institution. Every now and then I would cluster around the boys as they played the Cleopatra or Sumo poker machine. The coloured specks of the endless carpet and the electronic tunes of the machines dizzied me.
The boys loved poring over
Hot4s
wheels magazines, ogling the modified sports cars. As I attended car conventions with them, I learned about nitrous oxide, Momo steering wheels,
various spoiler dimensions and whether an engine was a rotary. I soon came to love the language of velocity and the freedom in taking a beautiful vehicle to the red line in first gear.