was all cashed up. For a week I was normal.
These little windfalls of luck meant so much to us; to go from having to scrape by to all of a sudden having something in abundance made such an impression. I often asked my mum about Vietnam, what it was like being in the middle of a war, and her answers would sometimes surprise me. She told me it was the little trivial everyday things that you couldn’t do that was the most annoying; like running out of ingredients and not being able to just stroll up to the shops to buy some.
‘You get used to the noise and bombs and bullets and you end up not being really concerned about getting killed so much as being sick of having this bland rice with no fish sauce,’ she said.
Tram’s jackpot came when she was eleven. She entered a photo competition for kids in the Sunday paper. She was vaguely interested in photography and decided to take this artsy shot of a green, plastic rubbish bin. She sent the photo in and forgot about it.
Two weeks later a letter arrived in the mail telling her she’d won the competition and the prize was a Toyworld voucher for $500. We couldn’t believe it. She shared the bounty with us and we split the voucher three ways. We went from having no money to having $500 to spend on anything we wanted in a toyshop. We spent hours deciding what to buy and it was such a happy day. Tram has since grown up to become a successful photographer.
Tram always looked after Khoa and me as though she was our older sister. By this time Grandma had moved out and Tram had to grow up quickly, helping me cook, clean and do other household chores while Mum was working. I remember her standing on a stool to reach up to the sink just so she could wash the dishes.
At the start of every year St Aloysius gave you a list of textbooks you needed for the semester. Between my brother and me the cost came close to a thousand dollars. Mum simply didn’t have the money, and after a while I stopped showing her the list.
‘I’ve got to buy some books, Mum.’
‘How much do you need?’
‘One hundred, two hundred; whatever you can spare.’ I didn’t want her to see the list and be burdened by the knowledge that she didn’t have enough. It would have devastated her to know that I was missing the required books.
Lucky for me I had my good mate Phil Keenan. Phil was the only kid in school who knew I didn’t have all the books.
‘What classes have you got today?’ he would ask. When it was English, for example, he would lend me his books for my period and I would return them to him in time for his class. I always had to be thinking about how to plan the day, when to meet up with him, how to make sure the other boys didn’t catch on. This concern totally overtook my life; it was all-encompassing and supremely annoying.
Borrowing text books was one thing but then there was the problem with the books that you had to write in. I would sit at my desk and pretend to be writing in Phil’s book by hovering my pen above it. The teacher probably thought, What’s wrong with this freak? To Phil’s credit he helped me whenever he could and instinctively knew it was a closely guarded secret.
Sometimes I would get caught out. If Phil was away I would go to English without a book. When the teacher asked where it was, I would lie and say, ‘I forgot it.’ I was too proud to admit I couldn’t afford my own book.
It may seem very trivial, but I would say it was one of the things that hurt the most over my whole school life, when I saw the disappointment in my teachers’ eyes when they would give me detention for wearing the wrong thing or for forgetting my textbooks. Of course they had to do it—because those were the rules. And they couldn’t understand why Anh, who they knew was such a good kid, would every now and then seem to break the rules almost deliberately. I could have gotten off by simply telling them the truth—‘My mum doesn’t have the money’—but that was never
These little windfalls of luck meant so much to us; to go from having to scrape by to all of a sudden having something in abundance made such an impression. I often asked my mum about Vietnam, what it was like being in the middle of a war, and her answers would sometimes surprise me. She told me it was the little trivial everyday things that you couldn’t do that was the most annoying; like running out of ingredients and not being able to just stroll up to the shops to buy some.
‘You get used to the noise and bombs and bullets and you end up not being really concerned about getting killed so much as being sick of having this bland rice with no fish sauce,’ she said.
Tram’s jackpot came when she was eleven. She entered a photo competition for kids in the Sunday paper. She was vaguely interested in photography and decided to take this artsy shot of a green, plastic rubbish bin. She sent the photo in and forgot about it.
Two weeks later a letter arrived in the mail telling her she’d won the competition and the prize was a Toyworld voucher for $500. We couldn’t believe it. She shared the bounty with us and we split the voucher three ways. We went from having no money to having $500 to spend on anything we wanted in a toyshop. We spent hours deciding what to buy and it was such a happy day. Tram has since grown up to become a successful photographer.
Tram always looked after Khoa and me as though she was our older sister. By this time Grandma had moved out and Tram had to grow up quickly, helping me cook, clean and do other household chores while Mum was working. I remember her standing on a stool to reach up to the sink just so she could wash the dishes.
At the start of every year St Aloysius gave you a list of textbooks you needed for the semester. Between my brother and me the cost came close to a thousand dollars. Mum simply didn’t have the money, and after a while I stopped showing her the list.
‘I’ve got to buy some books, Mum.’
‘How much do you need?’
‘One hundred, two hundred; whatever you can spare.’ I didn’t want her to see the list and be burdened by the knowledge that she didn’t have enough. It would have devastated her to know that I was missing the required books.
Lucky for me I had my good mate Phil Keenan. Phil was the only kid in school who knew I didn’t have all the books.
‘What classes have you got today?’ he would ask. When it was English, for example, he would lend me his books for my period and I would return them to him in time for his class. I always had to be thinking about how to plan the day, when to meet up with him, how to make sure the other boys didn’t catch on. This concern totally overtook my life; it was all-encompassing and supremely annoying.
Borrowing text books was one thing but then there was the problem with the books that you had to write in. I would sit at my desk and pretend to be writing in Phil’s book by hovering my pen above it. The teacher probably thought, What’s wrong with this freak? To Phil’s credit he helped me whenever he could and instinctively knew it was a closely guarded secret.
Sometimes I would get caught out. If Phil was away I would go to English without a book. When the teacher asked where it was, I would lie and say, ‘I forgot it.’ I was too proud to admit I couldn’t afford my own book.
It may seem very trivial, but I would say it was one of the things that hurt the most over my whole school life, when I saw the disappointment in my teachers’ eyes when they would give me detention for wearing the wrong thing or for forgetting my textbooks. Of course they had to do it—because those were the rules. And they couldn’t understand why Anh, who they knew was such a good kid, would every now and then seem to break the rules almost deliberately. I could have gotten off by simply telling them the truth—‘My mum doesn’t have the money’—but that was never
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