Born in Vietnam, made in Australia
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 27: Food Chain
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Pauline Nguyen
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My parents are known as members of the ‘first generation' of Vietnamese refugees, who came to Australia after the Vietnam War. I, however, am known as part of the ‘1.5 generation'. Born in Vietnam, made in Australia. We are the children of defeated warriors who have tried to come to terms with the present life, and the act of negotiating the past with all its rules and traditions, in the hope that the two very different cultures could blend into one well-adjusted whole. This always seemed better in theory than in practice.
When Saigon fell to communist rule, in 1975, my father realised that he had no choice but to escape Vietnam. And the only way that he could do this was to build a boat and smuggle his family out to sea. I was three at the time and my brother Lewis was two. My grandmother begged my father not to leave. She couldn't understand how a parent could risk perishing at sea. But my father is a very determined man.
He stands at just five foot one, a little shorter than me, but what he lacks in height he makes up for in fearlessness and determination – and he had already made up his mind. He would rather die trying than risk imprisonment. Or a fate far worse, the re-education camps. ‘It's not enough that they want to take our freedom,' he would tell me. ‘They want to take our thoughts as well.' My father was determined that if we died, we would all die together.
So in October 1977, armed with only a rudimentary map and a compass, my father steered our tiny vessel out into the South China Sea. We spent days drifting and waiting and praying. We prayed that a foreign ship might come and save us. We prayed that we might find friendly shores. We prayed that the pirates wouldn't attack us. We prayed that our supplies would not run out.
Our prayers were not always answered. Ship after ship ignored our SOS, and at gunpoint a group of Malaysian soldiers pushed us off supposedly friendly shores before we landed in Thailand, where we spent a very difficult year in a refugee camp. Australia finally accepted us and put us up at the Westbridge Migrant Hostel, in the Sydney suburb of Villawood. My father quickly found a job working on the production line at the Sunbeam Factory in Campsie – on the graveyard shift from 2 pm to 2 am, the job nobody wanted.
The train ride home was the worst, he would later tell me. Every night was dangerous. The locals threatened to beat him and the worst bigots threatened to kill him. ‘Go home to your own country, you bastard,' they would yell.
My father cried every day going home on that train. We all cried a lot in those days. We came into a new country with nothing: no job, no house, no money. We didn't know the laws, the language or the systems. My father had nightmares – the same dream, over and over. He's back in Vietnam, preparing for our escape. He's back in the water, drifting day after day with nowhere to go. And then he wakes up.
A full text version of this article will become available during the course of this edition.