The Happiest Refugee Anh Do, a Vietnamese Australian and one of our best-loved comedians, shares with us an excerpt from his acclaimed autobiography, “The Happiest Refugee”. In 2011, Anh’s book received the Indie Book of the Year, the Non-fiction Indie Book of the Year, the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year and the Australian Book Industry Awards Newcomer of the Year. He was also the joint winner for the Australian Book Industry Awards Biography of the Year and shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. The German ship took us to a refugee camp in Pulau Bidong, an island in the Malaysian archipelago. As soon as we landed we were surrounded by other refugees. We made friends, traded stories and shared experiences, and realised that our boat had been incredibly lucky. Many others had been through far greater suffering. The second day on the island, American helicopters flew overhead and dropped bags of food. The drop contained a number of items, including lots of tins of corner beef – a practical and long-lasting food. For the first few weeks, our family indulged on this canned meat and, to this day, it is my mum’s favourite food. Every second Christmas she still rolls it out and I curse those choppers for not dropping something tastier. I mean, after bombing the hell out of Vietnam, the least they could’ve done was thrown us some lobster. One day a local Malaysian man came to the camp and offered to buy gold off the refugees. Mum sold her small gold cross for 30 US dollars. She got a good price after telling him that it had ‘been through a very difficult passage’. Our family feasted on that sale – Khoa and I got to eat apples and drink Coca-Cola for a week.
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We spent nearly three months at the Pulau Bidong refugee camp and decided we’d go to whichever country would take us. Australia eventually offered us sanctuary. Mum and Dad were overjoyed. Dad walked around the island asking people if they had any spare warm clothes. He collected a big bundle of jumpers and blankets because he’d heard about Australia – ‘Beautiful country, friendly people, but really cold. It’s right near Switzerland.’ That’s my dad, great at rescues, crap vector magazine vector magazine
at geography. We touched down in Sydney, Australia in thirty-degree Celsius heat and my family were thinking, Geez, Austria’s really hot, man!
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August 1980. ‘What a great country!’ my parents said to each other. One of the first things that happened was two smiley nuns from St Vincent de Paul came and gave our family a huge garbage bag stuffed full of clothes. No charge. For free! There were several pairs of pants for Mum, including two really nice pairs of jeans. She was in heaven. Mum had only ever seen jeans in posters for cowboy movies, and all her life had only owned two pairs of pants at any one time. Now these wrinkly old white angels came and gave her the wardrobe of a western movie star. ‘Tam! Imagine a country could be so well off they could throw this stuff away,’ she said. This big, black magic bag had other things too: belts and skirts and scarves. And also kids’ clothes. ‘Oh, how beautiful. Little tiny jeans. Tam! These people are geniuses…look at these for Anh!’ Then Mum and Dad turned me into a little Clint Eastwood. Somewhere in the translation, someone had mistakenly written down that we were a family with a boy and a girl. My mother, ever polite and practical, took these kind gifts with a grateful smile and, for the next few months, accepted compliments from strangers about what a ‘pretty little daughter’ she had. If you ever meet my brother Khoa, make sure you mention the lovely photo you saw of him in Anh’s book wearing a lacy dress with gorgeous red ribbons. The Happiest Refugee is available at all good bookstores.
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