bonds that took hold in the life of that small girl and never let go
that small girl now living in san francisco and speaking to you today
this is not a finished story it is a jigsaw puzzle still being put together let me tell you about some of the pieces
imagine the first piece a man burning his life 's work he is a poet
a playwright a man whose whole life had been balanced on the single hope of his country 's unity and freedom imagine him as the communists enter saigon confronting the fact that his life had been a complete waste
words for so long his friends now mocked him he retreated into silence he died broken by history he is my grandfather i never knew him
but our lives are much more than our memories my grandmother never let me forget his life my duty was not to allow it to have been in vain and my lesson was to learn that yes history tried to crush us but we endured
the next piece of the jigsaw is of a boat in the early dawn slipping silently out to sea
it was inconceivable to her that she would not succeed
so after a four year saga that defies fiction a boat slipped out to sea disguised as a fishing vessel
all the adults knew the risks the greatest fear was of pirates rape and death like most adults on the boat
my mother carried a small bottle of poison if we were captured first my sister and i then she and my grandmother would drink
my first memories are from the boat the steady beat of the engine the bow dipping into each wave the vast and empty horizon i don 't remember the pirates who came many times but were bluffed by the bravado of the men on our boat
or the engine dying and failing to start for six hours
but i do remember the lights on the oil rig off the malaysian coast and the young man who collapsed and died the journey 's end too much for him
and the first apple i tasted given to me by the men on the rig no apple has ever tasted the same
after three months in a refugee camp we landed in melbourne
and the next piece of the jigsaw is about four women across three generations shaping a new life together
we settled in footscray a working class suburb whose demographic is layers of immigrants unlike the settled middle class suburbs whose existence i was oblivious of there was no sense of entitlement in footscray the smells from shop doors were from the rest of the world
and the snippets of halting english were exchanged between people who had one thing in common
they were starting again
we were poor
which was usually new clothes they were always secondhand two pairs of stockings for school each to hide the holes in the other a school uniform down to the ankles because it had to last for six years
and there were rare but searing chants of slit eye and the occasional graffiti asian go home go home to where something stiffened inside me there was a gathering of resolve and a quiet voice saying i will bypass you
my mother my sister and i slept in the same bed my mother was exhausted each night but we told one another about our day and listened to the movements of my grandmother around the house my mother suffered from nightmares all about the boat
and my job was to stay awake until her nightmares came so i could wake
she opened a computer store then studied to be a beautician and opened another business and the women came with their stories about men who could not make the transition angry and inflexible and troubled children caught between two worlds grants and sponsors were sought centers were established
i lived in parallel worlds in one i was the classic asian student relentless in the demands that i made on myself in the other i was enmeshed in lives that were precarious tragically scarred by violence drug abuse and isolation
i didn 't know the protocols i didn 't know how to use the cutlery i didn 't know how to talk about wine i didn 't know how to talk about anything
i wanted to retreat to the routines and comfort of life in an unsung suburb a grandmother a mother and two daughters ending each day as they had for almost twenty years telling one another the story of their day and falling asleep the three of us still in the same bed
i told my mother i couldn 't do it
she reminded me that i was now the same age she had been when we boarded the boat no had never been an option just do it she said and don 't be what you 're not so i spoke out
on youth unemployment and education
and the neglect of the marginalized and the disenfranchised and the more candidly i spoke the more i was asked to speak
i met people from all walks of life so many of them doing the thing they loved living on the frontiers of possibility and even though i finished my degree i realized i could not settle into a career in law there had to be another piece of the jigsaw
and i realized at the same time that it is okay to be an outsider a recent arrival new on the scene and not just okay but something to be thankful for perhaps a gift from the boat
because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province
i have stepped outside my comfort zone enough now to know that yes the world does fall apart but not in the way that you fear possibilities that would not have been allowed were outrageously encouraged there was an energy there an implacable optimism
a strange mixture of humility and daring so i followed my hunches i gathered around me a small team of people for whom the label it can 't be done was an irresistiblechallenge for a year we were penniless at the end of each day i made a huge pot of soup which we all shared
we worked well into each night most of our ideas were crazy but a few
before i close though let me tell you about my grandmother
she grew up at a time when confucianism was the social norm and the local mandarin was the person who mattered life hadn 't changed for centuries her father died soon after she was born her mother raised her alone
at seventeen she became the second wife of a mandarin whose mother beat her
with no support from her husband she caused a sensation by taking him to court and prosecuting her own case and a far greater sensation when she won
i was taking a shower in a hotel room in sydney the moment she died six hundred miles away in melbourne i looked through the showerscreen and saw her standing on the other side i knew she had come to say goodbye my mother phoned minutes later
a few days later we went to a buddhist temple in footscray and sat around her casket we told her stories and assured her that we were still with
because you have been holding it since this morning he said you have not let it go
if there is a sinew in our family
it runs through the women given who we were and how life had shaped us we can now see that the men who might have come into our lives would have thwarted us defeat would have come too easily
now i would like to have my own children and i wonder about the boat
who could ever wish it on their own
i don 't know
but if i could give it and still see them safely through
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