The Son Read online

  ‘She said you were very kind to her, at the end.’

  ‘If you mean that I tried to help her come to Australia, we all did that, for the local staff. But it was no use. Canberra wouldn’t hear of it.’

  That was something I would never forget.

  The Americans, after investing enormous resources into the war, had turned away from it later on, leaving the South to fight on alone against the stronger North. But they had rallied in the end and tried to save as many South Vietnamese as they could before the final collapse. American helicopters laden with civilians lifting off from Saigon rooftops told only part of the story. Over a hundred and sixty thousand Vietnamese civilians were airlifted from Saigon during the final month, more than fifty thousand in the last week alone, to resettle in the US.

  Australia at the time had been less generous.

  As America’s faithful ally Australia had also sent troops to Vietnam, and like the Americans it too had turned against the war later on. But it had gone further still. The war had been very unpopular with the left, and as the victorious North Vietnamese advanced on Saigon the Labor government in Canberra made it clear it would not welcome anyone from the south. Many of the people who came to the embassy seeking help had no prior association with Australia and were simply knocking on any door they could find in their haste to get away before the communists came. Others had been good friends of the embassy over the years, the kind of contacts and supporters that diplomatic missions need and cultivate to do their job properly.

  Canberra was adamant, despite all the embassy’s entreaties. Even the local staff had to be left behind in the end, as we took off in a half-empty plane, taking with us instead eleven cats that belonged to some UN official! Australia, I knew, had more than made up for it since, with the numbers of refugees it had taken in later on, but I still remembered how bitter we had felt at the time. It had been too much like a betrayal.

  ‘She said that you tried to give her some money.’

  ‘It was the only thing I could do. She wouldn’t take it. I thought she was angry with me. I told her to try the Americans.’

  ‘She was proud, Mr Quinn. But she never blamed you.’

  The scene was clearer now, the girl in my office, the dismay and incomprehension on her face when I told her the final decision. She couldn’t understand that the ambassador had no authority, had been expressly forbidden by Canberra to accept anyone without specific approval in each case – only to have it refused at the last minute, when it was too late for most of them to try any other route.

  ‘What happened to her in the end? Did she manage to get out?’

  ‘Not then, no … She’s dead, Mr Quinn. She died when we got out by boat, in 1980.’

  I was silent for a moment. David’s girl, lost in such a stupid, cruel, totally avoidable way.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said at last.

  ‘It’s not your fault. Please don’t think I’m reproaching you for it.’

  ‘If I’d known she was pregnant …’

  ‘No one knew, apart from me. She hadn’t even told David yet. Besides, what could you have done, short of marrying her?’

  I shook my head. ‘Tell me about the boy.’

  He was born in September of that year. By then life had become difficult for the Hoang family, as the communists bore down on anyone connected to the old order. Considering their situation, the birth went well. David had had fair hair but the baby’s was dark, which helped hide his origin.

  He was named Hưu, in Vietnamese, Hòang Minh Hữu, but Hien called him Eric. That was David’s middle name. She decided at once that she would take him to Australia one day. Easier said than done. The exodus of boat people was only just starting, it was dangerous and expensive, Eric was five by the time they got on a boat. There were four of them: Hien, and Eric, and Mrs Tran as I still thought of her, and Khiem, her husband. She had married by then, the young man from the party, now a lecturer in mathematics at the Faculty of Sciences.

  It wasn’t their first attempt, but this time they got away – until a storm hit the overcrowded boat, and the engine broke down. By the time a British freighter hauled them in Hien and some others were dead. The survivors reached Singapore.

  ‘Hawkins Road camp?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. You know it?’

  ‘I’ve been there.’

  She sat quietly for a moment, her eyes withdrawn. Then she sipped her tea and went on.

  From Singapore they were resettled in Britain. They wanted to come to Australia, as Hien had planned, but Singapore only allowed boat-people ashore if they’d been accepted first by a third country. For those picked up at sea by a foreign ship, that usually meant the ship’s country of origin.

  Eventually they settled in Leeds, where Khiem got a teaching post at the university. Naturally they took the child with them, in due course adopted him and gave him their name – Eric Tran. That was her husband’s name, Tran van Khiem.

  ‘You had no other children?’

  ‘No.’ Once more she sipped her tea, before going on.

  Over the next fourteen years life was easier for the Tran family. They were both well-educated – he had studied in the US, she had done a degree in Saigon, a licence in French and English. She requalified, got a job, they put Eric through school: a normal uneventful life. Eric knew they weren’t his parents, and they didn’t pretend to be. With his mixed looks it would have been difficult. And he still had memories of his mother.

  ‘Two Vietnamese with a Eurasian child!’ she said with an ironic smile. ‘I’m sure most people thought he was really mine, that I’d married an American or been a bar-girl, before I met Khiem. But we loved him and looked after him, that’s what mattered. It was after Khiem’s death that the difficulties started.’

  Eric was nearly eighteen by then, in his second-last year of school, and seemed happy. During all these years she and Khiem had been careful not to tell him much about his father – only that he was a white man who had died before he was born. They didn’t know anything about David’s family, and were worried that if Eric went looking for them later on the family might reject him.

  But now Eric began to ask questions. It was as if his adoptive father’s death had unsettled him, caused him to question his identity. He asked mostly about his father. Hao Tran was reluctant to say much, but he persisted, until it became almost an obsession. Finally she told him what she could, including how David had died. That proved a mistake.

  ‘You’ll see why.’

  Eric immediately became very interested in Australia. He began to talk about coming out, getting a visa; he started collecting all the information he could, posters, tourist brochures, immigration details. He read how Australia had accepted many Indochinese refugees. She tried to talk him out of it at first, afraid that he had a rosy picture of life here, but he persisted, saying that when he turned eighteen he would get a visa, and in the end she gave in on that too, and promised to help. First she made him finish his schooling, which had suffered. Earlier he had been near the top of his class. Eric sat through his final exams, with patchy results.

  That was in June the previous year, at the end of the English school year. Eric turned eighteen the following autumn, and with no difficulty obtained a one-year working visa. By then the whole family had British nationality. He came out in October.

  At this point Mrs Tran and I both seemed to notice that the building had gone quiet, apart from the occasional hum of the lift. The sound of evening traffic came up to us muffled through the closed windows. I drank some tea, switched on some lights, came back to my seat. Neither of us mentioned the time.

  At first Eric went to Melbourne. It seemed he had a friend at school from there. He found some part-time work, but didn’t like it much. Soon he moved to Sydney. Some Vietnamese he’d met in Melbourne had given him an address in Cabramatta, where he could find work and somewhere to stay. He came up in early December and went straight there. Cabramatta, more than twenty kilometres south-
west of Sydney, was where most of the Vietnamese refugees had settled.

  ‘Why didn’t he go to Marrickville, to stay with your cousins?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re not my cousins. They’re my husband’s, and there’s no close relationship. They’re not blood relatives of Eric. Besides–’

  She had written to them in advance, asking them to keep an eye on Eric if he came their way, but he hadn’t gone to see them until some time after his arrival in Sydney, and they’d felt slighted.

  ‘Vietnamese can be sensitive about things like that, Mr Quinn. When Eric did go to see them, they didn’t like the look of him. They wrote to me afterwards, to say he’d called, but they were very critical. He had long hair, he was roughly dressed, he even had a ring in his ear. And he’d brought two or three friends along, and they didn’t like the look of those at all. Bụi đời, they called them.

  You know that expression?’

  ‘Yes. Dust of life. I remember. Riff-raff.’

  ‘That’s right. They used words like du côn, thugs, hooligans.’

  What worried her was that his visit to them coincided with a change in Eric’s letters to her. At first he’d only written about places he’d seen, things he was doing. But now he started telling her about some of the young Vietnamese he was meeting. He talked of a group, some kind of anti-communist organization, and she didn’t like the sound of it.

  ‘I didn’t know much about Vietnamese in Australia. I still don’t. But it sounded too much like – well, bụi đời, the kind of foot-loose young refugees you hear about, who can’t settle down and turn into gangs. And all that militant talk, of demonstrations, fighting the communists, of reconquering the south. He was very scathing about his cousins, too. Now that I’ve met them, I can see why they didn’t get on – they’re northerners, originally, and very prim and proper, and the people Eric is with are mostly southerners, and they’re young and brash, and not respectful of their elders. That in itself was a concern.’

  She wrote back warning Eric against getting mixed up in expatriate Vietnamese politics. He replied that he knew what he was doing, she shouldn’t judge his friends by what the cousins said about them. If the war had been lost it was because of people like them, small-time profiteers who thought only of themselves and didn’t care about their country.

  That too was disturbing.

  Then, in late January – just before Tết, Vietnamese New Year – something nastier happened. The cousins’ shop in Marrickville was broken into, with considerable damage. The cousins wrote immediately to Mrs Tran, and while they didn’t accuse Eric directly, they blamed his friends, who were questioned by the police. While there was no evidence that any of them were involved, some of them had been in trouble before. The whole episode had become very unpleasant, with the cousins asking for compensation and doing their best to make her feel responsible. That was when she decided to come out.

  ‘And you went to stay with them. That can’t have been pleasant either.’

  ‘I didn’t have much choice. I don’t know anyone else in Australia, my relatives are in the United States, and – well, I felt I owed it to them, as well as to Eric, at least to come out and find out what had happened.’

  Her arrival hadn’t helped much. The cousins by then were so set against Eric that they wouldn’t let him into the house at first, when he called round to see her. She had to go for a walk in the street to talk to him. Eric indignantly denied anything to do with the break-in. He said they were maligning his friends, just because they didn’t like the look of them.

  She believed him. About his friends she wasn’t so sure, when she went to see him in Cabramatta. Some of them did fit the cousins’ description – brash, untidy, boastful, with long hair, tattoos, the lot! And the language to go with it.

  ‘I know Vietnamese can be a pretty earthy language, but it was all a bit much! And the house was full of silly posters and anti-communist slogans. Down with the Viet Cong, Reconquer the south, Fight for a free Vietnam, that sort of thing. But they didn’t look like criminals, just brash and boastful and uncertain of themselves. They were friendly enough when Eric told them who I was.’

  Eric also took her to the restaurant where he worked, in the centre of Cabramatta. It was large and looked well-run. The owner wasn’t there but Eric appeared to fit well into the place. That wasn’t what worried her.

  What did worry her was all that rabid anti-communist talk.

  ‘We’ve always been anti-communist, Mr Quinn. Anything else would be unthinkable for people like us. After what they did, after what we’ve been through. And we never tried to hide it from Eric – on the contrary, we wanted him to know what we left behind, why we felt the need to leave Vietnam. So he could understand why his mother had died. So he wouldn’t blame her, or us, for taking that risk.’

  ‘But we didn’t hate the communists. I don’t hate them, not for the war; they suffered enormous sacrifices for it, just as we did. I can even understand why they wanted to conquer the south. It’s for what they did afterwards that I can’t forgive them. The repression, the vindictiveness, the mindless arrogant orthodoxy – of course I blame them for what happened to Hien, but I can equally blame your country for refusing to take her, when she could have left in safety. David’s death was just an accident of war. But try explaining that to a boy who lost both parents because of them. All I did was reinforce his hatred.’

  She shook her head. ‘We’ve never taken part in anti-communist activity among the refugee communities. There aren’t many Vietnamese refugees in Britain – there’s not as much scope for it there as here or in America, and in any case it’s such a waste of time. There’s nothing more pathetic than those emigré groups wallowing in nostalgia and plotting to get back what they couldn’t hold on to in the first place.’

  ‘We lost the war, Mr Quinn. For a number of reasons, some beyond our control, and I don’t much admire the Americans for the way they let us down in the end. But we lost it. What hope is there to reconquer anything now? It can’t lead to anything. Eric is too good for that, there’s too much talent and promise in him to waste himself that way.’

  She took a long breath, and sat back in her chair.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know if they’re thugs or militant anti-communists or just insecure kids playing at grown-ups in a world they don’t understand. But now they’re talking about a large demonstration, some sort of action against a visiting Vietnamese official. I’m frightened. It sounds violent. That’s why I’ve come to you. I don’t want Eric to be mixed up in that kind of world, Mr Quinn. And I don’t know what to do about it.’

  She stopped, and in the silence that followed a rush of memories tumbled into my mind: of David, the last time I’d seen him, his poor mangled features barely recognisable as I held a handkerchief to my nose to keep from gagging, before they closed the lid on his coffin. The local area commander I’d questioned, down to a skinny patrol sergeant and the last outpost he’d checked at before his death. A radiator hose, they’d mentioned, confirmed by a quick inspection of the wreck, a nervous embassy driver at my side. For greater anonymity David had rented a car in Saigon, to avoid using his own – with its diplomatic plates – and he had paid the price. It was clear enough how he’d died. I was beginning to understand why.

  There was Hien too, that pale dim memory, fragile as a ghost. David had failed her, by getting himself stupidly killed, and I had failed her too, through not understanding the depth of her need and her despair. No wonder she had been so desperate to leave, carrying his child, and felt so rejected. Perhaps this was a way to make amends.

  Mrs Tran sat quietly watching me. She looked exhausted, almost gaunt, as if her story had taken too much out of her, yet beautiful still, even desirable in her anguish. Careful, I thought. This was neither the time nor the place. But I couldn’t help feeling a surge of excitement at the way this beautiful, tragic woman had reappeared in my life. It was a long time since I’d had anything to do with Vietnam and its diaspor
a of struggling, suffering exiles, but one way or another I knew I would have to help her.

  She spoke up, as if reading my thoughts.

  ‘I know this isn’t your problem, Mr Quinn. You’ve been very patient with me. But I’ll have to go back to England soon, and if I can’t get Eric out of this situation I don’t know what I’ll do. Anything, any advice you can give me, if you can recommend anyone – I don’t have much money, but I’m quite prepared to pay for any help–’

  I held up my hand.

  ‘That won’t be necessary Mrs Tran. I was just thinking. I still have a couple of contacts in the Vietnamese community, maybe I can find out something about that group of his. But first I’d like to meet Eric. Will he be in the restaurant tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, he’s usually there from twelve to three. It’s the Dai Nam, just off John Street.’

  She handed me a photo, of a youth, in jeans and a check shirt too big for him, clowning with a friend in a backyard. Two wings of thick dark hair framing a high forehead, a boyish grin, a strong jaw, the eyes staring at the camera as if issuing a challenge. A handsome face, not yet a man’s, but with toughness in it. Intelligence too.

  ‘He doesn’t look very Asian,’ I said. ‘In fact he doesn’t even look Eurasian, except for the eyes.’

  ‘People sometimes think he’s Italian. Apart from his hair he takes more after David.’

  I pushed my last memory of David away.

  ‘How did your husband die, Mrs Tran?’

  ‘He had leukemia.’

  ‘And your sister? I know this is painful, but I need to know that, before I see Eric.’

  ‘I understand. I told you, we – we ran into a storm. She was swept overboard. Eric was down with me in the hold. She was seasick, she’d gone up on deck …’ She looked at me, her eyes pleading. ‘Please, Mr Quinn, don’t mention that when you see him. He had nightmares for a long time afterwards.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  We finished our tea and stood up. I switched off the lights, locked up and walked with her to the lifts.