3 hours ago
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Like my parents before me, I arrived in another country with only as much as I could carry. It was colder than I was used to, and a thick coat was one of the first items I bought. I knew no one, everyone I loved was thousands of kilometres away, somewhere sunnier and warmer.
Without the promise of work, home or livelihood, I had packed up my life in coastal Sydney and moved to Birmingham – dubbed the “Venice of the north” for the canals snaking through the city and its suburbs.
I soon found myself out of my depth, working a job I was not entirely qualified for, without friends to lean on and paying bills and rent for the first time in my life. When the sun started setting at half past four and the chill sapped the joy from everyone’s lives, I wondered why on earth I made this choice.
In moments like those, I remembered that more than 40 years ago my dad had left on a one-way journey from his motherland, Vietnam, to come to Australia. He trekked through the Cambodian jungle, evading soldiers, to reach a refugee camp in Thailand. Meanwhile, my mum stepped on to a plane at 17 to leave her home forever. Her brother had set sail years earlier on a boat some would say was unfit for the open ocean, but he had made it thankfully intact to a safer place; he said life in Australia was good and so she followed.
They were all strangers in a strange land. My dad told me how they once went into a supermarket just to gawk at all the things they could not afford to buy. They wore big thick jackets because these young Vietnamese men from the tropics had never experienced temperate weather. The store thought they wanted to steal.
The language was by far their biggest challenge. Just as I have been stumbling on Bicester (which I swear is pronounced: Bye-chester), Beauchamp (which has to be: Boh-champ) and Ruislip (I have been told but I still don’t remember: Roos-lip? Roo-y-slip? Rus-lip?), my parents contended with mouthfuls like Sydenham (they pronounce it: See-nem-HAM), Parramatta (PAA-laa-maa-TA) and Cabramatta (Cah-lah-ma-ta).
Of course, our struggles have been different in many ways – I have had an education, which my parents never got the opportunity to pursue. Because of them, I had a life with enough time and comfort to discover who I am, and to read about everything from Veronese and Van Gogh to the Romans and the Renaissance.
They learned English – their fourth language – on the fly, with its tenses and conjugations, not present in Cantonese or Vietnamese. While I may still say soccer instead of football, I didn’t need my 12-year-old to read my letters and I never confused “you” and “your”.
So whenever my job gave me anxiety or life was grey like a Brummie winter, I remembered my parents did a lot more with a lot less.
They raised children, started a business, sold that business and bought a home. They did all of that while being told their arrival meant Australia was now being “swamped by Asians” and they should go back to where they came from.
A missed deadline seems far more surmountable next to the mountain my parents conquered. Contending with office politics or the pressure to hit your KPIs is a far cry from washing dishes in a French restaurant or cleaning industrial equipment like my dad once had to. All while the people around didn’t understand you.
Resilience is perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learnt from my parents.
It’s impossible to know whether their lives would have been better had they stayed in Vietnam. When I took my dad back to Vietnam on a holiday, I could see him imagine what it would have been like, as he saw the sprawling modern city Saigon has become. But what is undeniable is that their migration changed them and created a beautiful albeit tough life.
As refugees, my parents lost their place in the world but, in taking a chance in a new home, they found themselves – as parents, as factory workers, as bank tellers, as Aussies.
For me, moving overseas has showed me that I know what I want out of life. I’ve met colleagues I can count as friends for life and had the privilege to travel and see things that my parents only ever read about. I’ve discovered the delights of a Punjabi mixed grill at a Desi pub and gained a taste for haggis and orange chips. I’ve wandered the Palace of Versailles and imagined extravagant balls, I’ve peered up at the architectural wonders of Antoni Gaudí, I drank mead on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, and sailed along the fabled canals of Venice.
Becoming a migrant was the best thing I’ve ever done, and I was lucky to have the choice.
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Bertin Huynh is a multimedia journalist and producer
