I remember sitting down to breakfast when I was maybe 8 or 9.
My mum put a bowl of noodle soup in front of me. It takes her two days to make this dish from scratch.
I glowered at the phở and looked up at her. And in my perfect Australian accent, I said to her, “Mum, where’s the vegemite toast?”
You see, as a young child, I was bullied and ostracised for looking different to the other kids. Girls would call me ugly. Boys on bikes would would ride past after school and call me a “nip”. To this day, their taunts are as clear as day. I would be mercilessly teased because my parents had names the kids in my class couldn’t pronounce.
It continued all the way through high school.
And yet, I wanted so desperately to be like one of them. To swap my almond-shaped eyes and straight, jet-black hair with their blonde hair, green eyes; and to have parents whose names were were Mary and John.
I resented looking different. Feeling different. I hated being Asian. All I wanted was to belong.
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I am a second-generation refugee. My parents are boat people.
After the communists took hold of Saigon in 1976, my parents escaped on a boat along with my then-18 month old brother.
They only two choices at that point: stay and die at the hands of the Viet Cong or leave and die at sea. They decided to take a chance on the latter, in a vessel not too dissimilar from the one in the photo below.
Fast forward to 1980 and after a few harrowing years in refugee camps, they were finally granted asylum in Perth, Western Australia.
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When I was 24, I had my heart broken. We were together for eight years, since we were sixteen. So when it all came crashing down, I embarked on my own journey to reconcile with my identity in all of its various, shapeless forms.
Who am I, really? Where did I come from?
So, I did a thing.
12 years ago I travelled across Australia and spent a year in other people’s shoes with memories more confronting and incomprehensible than I could have ever imagined. With their permission, I shared their stories of survival, despair, tragedy and hope.
The heartbreaking stories that surfaced mirrored that of my family’s; stories that my mum and dad had buried deep in the past. Being confronted with all these truths - my family’s truths - was the hardest bit to comprehend.
Immortalising their stories in a book was an experience that changed my life.
In telling these stories, I reconnected with my heritage. In seeking other people’s truths, I uncovered my own.
30 years later, my mother is putting a bowl of phở down in front of me.
But, I’m no longer asking her for the vegemite toast.
I’m asking her for the recipe instead. In my perfect Vietnamese accent.
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The book – Boat People Boat People: Personal Stories from the Vietnamese Exodus 1975–1996, received a silver medal in the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards (USA). It is no longer in print.
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