The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir by Anh Do Read Free Book Online

trying to stop tears rolling down her face. Mum started sniffling as well.
    ‘Such ungrateful children!’ Mum was doing a great job of masking her sadness with anger, cursing Miss Buk’s offspring for coming to see her so infrequently. In the years we lived in Marrickville, we only saw Miss Buk’s children visit her maybe two or three times. Mum was desperately missing her own mother, who was a long way away in Vietnam, and couldn’t comprehend why this lovely old lady’s family, who only lived on the other side of Sydney, could let their mother be so sad and lonely.

    We rented a two-bedroom house in nearby Earlwood. The house backed onto a park so Dad knocked off three fence palings and the park became our backyard. Three little kids went from a tiny apartment with no space to having what felt like the continent of Africa to play in. It was paradise. Beaman Park is enormous and has the Cooks River running through it, and Khoa and I spent our days wandering around, making up stories and exploring. Mum stayed home and looked after my baby sister, Tram, while Dad went to work in the factory.
    One day, Mum’s friend told her about how, with just a few hundred dollars, she had bought a second-hand sewing machine and could work from home while still looking after her kids. Of course, the following week there was an old, enormous industrial-sized Singer sitting in our living room.
    Imagine something about the size of a V8 engine with a sewing needle and thread attached. Every time Mum pressed her foot on the pedal it would make an almighty roar. It sounded like we had a Kombi in our living room. A long RAAARR was the sleeve of the shirt, the cuffs were several short RAR, RAR, RARs , and a long RAAARR again was up the other side of the sleeve. I would be glued to the TV watching Happy Days and just as the Fonz would say, ‘Hey Ritchie, listen up, this is important. The secret to meeting girls is …’ RAARRRARRRRRARRRR . I had little idea that this soundtrack was going to dominate my life for the next decade.
    Mum and Dad discovered that working from home meant they didn’t have to knock off at 6 p.m. They could keep going, and the harder they worked, the more money they made. All of a sudden their destiny was in their own hands. Dad left the job at the factory and started making clothes with Mum. It wasn’t long before his entrepreneurial spirit and you-can-do-anything attitude took over. He knew they were being paid peanuts by their employer, so they went to the source and got the work direct from the big wholesaler. Soon we had three uncles, four aunties and several distant cousins helping out, and we were running our own business.
    My parents and their siblings worked and worked and worked. I look back now and the hours they did were absolutely ludicrous. But for a group of refugees who came from a communist regime where you had almost no means of making a living, they were in paradise. They were incredibly grateful they had the opportunity to be rewarded for their efforts, and worked accordingly. What a great country!
    The business grew and so did the responsibility. There were days when the garments were running late and Mum and Dad would have to work through the night. Watching them work so hard, I decided to try to help and jumped on a machine to have a go. I had seen Mum do it a thousand times— How hard could it be?
    I put a shirt sleeve under the needle and then stomped on the pedal. RRRAAAAARRRRRRR! The machine roared into action, sucked up three feet of material and my little seven-year-old left hand with it, neatly cross-stitching that soft bit of skin between the thumb and index finger to the cuff of a sky-blue business shirt. In seconds I had become a huge, kid-sized cufflink accessory, one that made a howling noise and bled everywhere.
    I screamed a bloodcurdling howl and ran around the house with the rapidly turning crimson shirt sewn to my hand, twice tripping over it. Mum came sprinting out of the