Anh Do - The Happiest Refugee

The Happiest Refugee is one of those unique unputdownable stories which forces its way to the top of your already long list of priorities and engulfs your time and imagination until you have reached its conclusion. In the midst of one very busy week, I found myself relegating many of my other more important, yet far less interesting, tasks to the side and losing myself in the beautiful tale of Australian comedian Anh Do’s life.

Do’s story is that of thousands of migrant Australian families, including my own. Trapped in a life of poverty and hopelessness, under a merciless Communist regime, young Mama and Papa Do had no choice but to risk their lives and that of their extended family’s, to escape to a better country. So 40 men, women and children snuck out onto the open sea before dawn, into a dingy nine-metre long boat, to make the harrowing journey away from Vietnam. They eventually make it to Australia where they are confronted (yes, confronted, as it’s all too much to take in) by a world of hope, opportunity, generosity and small pleasures that they never imagined. Most amusing is the lucky discovery of St. Vinnies, where you can get a bag full of clothes for almost nothing, even jeans for your toddler. “What a great country!” is a phrase often repeated throughout the narrative, as the family revel in their new life.

Of course, life for a migrant family in Australia is anything but easy, particularly when education and English are key requirements of many good jobs. So, like many of our own migrant parents, Anh’s were forced to take whatever money-making opportunities they could find in order to create a better future for their children. But while such tales of hardship, displacement and loneliness could be told with self-pity and exasperation, Anh recounts his family’s day-to-day struggles with humorous anecdotes that reveal lessons learned the tough way, and how most things invariably work out. Interwoven with these stories are heart-warming and humbling tales about the tiny pleasures we take for granted, what Anh calls “little windfalls of luck”. Like when, as a teenager, Anh discovers a voucher in the mail for 50-cent Big Macs at Yagoona McDonald’s, with a limit of four per voucher. Having not had Maccas for years, due to his family’s financial situation, the Dos had hit the jackpot and went around to the neighbours to gather more vouchers. Armed with six, the family drove to McDonald’s, purchased the 24 Big Macs and Anh and his two younger siblings shared a banquet which they still reminisce about today. Or even more touching is the time when Anh found a green chip in his packet of crisps, sent it back for a refund on the off chance that he might redeem his couple of bucks, and got sent a humungous box of chips as compensation. For the next week, he had the same chips as everybody else at school, and as he recounts, “For a week I was normal.”

However, there are some stories that are too painful, too humiliating in their desperation for even a comedian to sugar coat. Like the time his mother was sick in bed, but insisted on getting up to finish sewing the garments for delivery the next day. As he helped his mother to her sewing table, Anh describes the horrible shame of “secretly hoping she would go on, keep sewing, even at the risk of her becoming seriously ill. The fear of having no money was so merciless and so overwhelming.”

Overall, and as we know, this tale has a happy ending. Anh goes on to achieve the dream of many migrant parents – for their child to be offered a high-paying job, in this case it is as a lawyer for a top firm – only to turn his back on it to pursue a career as a comedian. The idea of a Vietnamese migrant comedian is so funny that it can only be true. And Anh does achieve the fame and fortune he needs to give his mother family a better life.

Do’s storytelling is simple but captivating – like talking to a mate over beers. His story isn’t remarkable in any kind of splendid way; it is the story of so many young Australians from a migrant family who witness the cultural, social and financial struggles of their parents and commit to forging a different future for themselves. But it is in this ordinariness that Do captures the collective experience of an entire generation of people. The ordinariness is only made incredible (to Do and his siblings at the time, and to us now) through the stark juxtaposition between Anh and his North Sydney private school peers. His is a relatable tale that, as the daughter of migrants who came to this country when I was five, took me back to the ‘poor stories’ (as one of my Eastern suburbs friends calls them) of my own childhood, but cast them in the humour, warmth and simplicity in which they occurred. We didn’t have much, but at least we had fun and were creative with what we had. I think that’s the experience of most migrant children, and Do captures that naivety and innocence, while being honest about the hardships his family endured. It truly is a great read, and a part of Australian social history that is rarely acknowledged in literature or art, but completely indelible in the character of our country. [Image from http://www.thereadingroom.com/]

Barack Obama - Dreams From My Father

Published in 1995, when only a small handful of people knew him as the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father is a beautifully-composed memoir about the events, discoveries – things in general – that had shaped the future president’s understanding of the world and his place in it. In a (large) nutshell, the book traces Obama’s unorthodox origins, as the son of a white Kansas girl and a Kenyan man who left the young boy and his mother when he was just two; through to his carefree childhood roaming the backstreets of Jakarta with boys the same skin colour as himself; back to living with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii during his adolescence, where he discovers the politics of race and its inequalities; then to his troubled, drug-taking, conflict-ridden years in college; to his work as a community organiser in the worse-hit areas of Chicago; and finally to his home-coming in Kenya where Obama unearths the secrets and untold stories of his identity.

Obama’s introduction sets the tone for the entire book – it is honest, modest and realises the vanities of recounting one’s ‘life’ mid-way through. He genuinely acknowledges his untrustworthy, almost falsified, memories (backed up predominantly only by verbal histories), and concedes that they are tainted by the 20/20 vision of hindsight and the wisdom and retrospective understanding that time allows. And yet, Obama pushes on with tales of his childhood with a loving, yet ambitious mother and her Indonesian husband, and the day he began to realise that his skin was different and somehow undesirable. He recounts the one time that he met his father, at age ten, the awkwardness and tension that washed over them both, and the fact that he would carry the man’s impossibly high-standards as a benchmark for all successes and failures in his life. Even when the mythologised image of his father would be shattered, in a single chapter which compounds the man’s life story as told to Obama by his half-sister, the man’s image, his absence and contradictory life, would continue to shape Obama’s own troubled grapplings with the world around him. Such troubles are exacerbated in a large portion of the book simply titled ‘Chicago’. Here Obama discovers for himself, and subsequently reveals to his reader, the now debunked international image of the USA as land of freedom and prosperity. Interwoven with Obama’s own story are those of the people whom he meets during his years as an organiser, and of course the lessons – political, social and personal – that he learned from these years. What he witnessed in the most racially, and hence economically, divisive areas of Chicago was not unlike the poverty, deficiencies and overall sense of hopelessness that he would come to see during his first trip to Kenya. And one of the gems in Obama’s book is the way in which he reflects on such encounters with humbling, insightful and deeply honest empathy for society’s Others, neither excusing or blaming them, but rather seeing a possible version of what could so easily have become himself.

The story’s third and final section is ‘Kenya’ when, in the summer before beginning Harvard Law School, Obama journeys to his father’s land to meet the family he never knew and to discover the truths about his father. Obama first recalls the beautiful, sobering feelings of ‘returning’ to an unfamiliar home, where his name is first recognised as a relation to Dr. Obama, his late father. ‘No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tone,’ he writes. ‘My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances and grudges that I did not yet understand.’ What transpires from this web is something I can only describe as both mind-blowingly complex in their inter-familial conflicts, yet strangely familiar and universal for the same reason. Due to the ongoing practice of polygamy in Kenyan society, Obama has a myriad of half-siblings, countless aunts and uncles, and even a paternal grandmother who is not biologically his. But while Obama may come from a stranger-than-usual mixed family, the dynamics, conflicts, fleeting moments of familial love and loyalty, have an uncanny familiarity, even for those of us from the most ‘normal’ of family situations. His encounters with family and the obligations, expectations and allegiances expected from people you’ve never even met, but with whom you share an unbroken bond, resonates with a universal familiarity, particularly for those of us who have families in economically unstable countries like Kenya. Obama writes with brutal honesty about the mess and confusion that is his inheritance, which he initially begrudgingly accepts, but comes to fully embrace as an indelible part of who he is. And towards the end, Obama is told the story from the beginning, starting with his father’s father, in the remote deserts of Kenya, when white people did not exist, to when they eventually came with their irreversible changes, to Barrack Obama senior meeting a young girl at Hawaii University, through to his final demise. I devoured these pages of family history, paralleled by that now-ubiquitous tale of colonialism that has made its way to the far corners of the Earth, seeing again its effects in yet another part of the world. When the story ended I felt with Obama an overwhelming catharsis; a sense that his long and harrowing journey to manhood had finally come to a sufficient conclusion.

Obama’s story, while extraordinary and extremely peculiar, resonates with a sense of commonness that we can all empathise with. That search for your identity, the wrestling between your inherited culture and the (white) one you grew up in, the fact that you never quite fit into either world whole-heartedly or without reservation. His is the universal story of difference, of living in and through disparate cultural identities that are all supposed to be your own, but that you can’t completely claim. Obama’s captivating and eloquent prose captures the heart, honesty and humility of this story. It speaks to our own insecurities about self and place with neither dogmatism nor false optimism. The story’s simple, yet powerful, conclusion leaves us with a sense of peace, contentment, and the knowledge that, at short intervals in time, everything is alright with the world. [Image from http://www.mylib.in/]

Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin

Li Cunxin is Mao’s Last Dancer – the last of the performing ballet dancers who trained under Madam Mao’s unorthodox curriculum, which combined the staunch militarism of Communist China with the grace and elegance of European ballet. As a peasant boy, and the sixth of seven brothers, Li’s life seemed predetermined by his birth – and indeed all his brothers remain in the village they were born, Li being the only one who escaped from certain impoverishment. Li’s account of his childhood is far from picturesque; marred by starvation, a lack of everything, and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, the collective experience of Li’s peasant commune is indicative of the desperation and malevolence which enveloped all of China at the time. As with ‘Wild Swans’, I could not help but flinch and wince at the harrowing recollections of human evil which formed a young boy’s memories.

Following years of brutal training, Li has the rare opportunity to study in America with the Houston Ballet. And here is where Li’s masterful storytelling has the ability to take one from the dark well (an analogy from the story) into the expansive sky of the west. This is by far my favourite part of the story; as Li enters the foreign land of the west, he is not only amazed by what he discovers, but such discoveries also begin to undermine his strict and life-long Communist indoctrination. Li discovers America and its little luxuries with such naive innocence that one cannot help but delight in rediscovering the mundane, everyday comforts along with the earnest young man. The warmth of a shower, the satisfaction of a full stomach, the inhibitions of free speech, and of course the marvellous workings of ATMs, where “money comes out of walls!”

While the blurb of the book tells how Li was randomly chosen to train as a ballet dancer at Madam Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy, his dedication and commitment, driven by devotion to his family and the real belief that he could help them through his dancing, were anything but whimsically attained. Indeed, more than an account of the atrocities which characterised China, or the difficulties Li endured to succeed in his profession, or even the stark differences between east and west, this is a story about family. The brightest moments, the ones which dulled even the most painful of circumstances, were those which saw Li’s family, particularly its matriarch, band together to support each other. Li’s unflagging determination to be reunited with his family, despite his deflection, is inspiring and speaks volumes of the capacity for a child to return his parents’ unconditional love. And when Li’s mother, upon hearing his voice after years of estrangement, proclaims, “Ohh, my son! I never thought this day would come before I leave this world. How happy I am...I can die peacefully now,” I could not control the tears.

There is much more I could write about this story. However, this will have to suffice. This is an honest and humble account of one of the few lucky individuals who escaped Mao’s China, but never forgot his roots.

Barrack Obama - The Audacity of Hope

Barrack Obama’s ‘The Audacity of Hope’ really is a manifestation of the book’s title. Simple, yet definitely audacious, Obama’s ‘Thoughts on reclaiming the American dream’ are grounded in realism and common sense, yet – since such qualities of thinking seem to be lost on many policy makers – offer many straightforward solutions to the myriad of problems facing the USA. Obama is not so naive as to think that America’s issues can be solved swiftly and harmoniously, and he acknowledges that his suggested solutions will not make everyone happy, but is unapologetic in the fact that they will make things fairer and close the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Systematically deconstructing the many aspects of the American way of life – Family, Employment, Money, Politics, Race – with a pragmatic eye, Obama is simultaneously hopeful about the capacity for his fellow citizens to slightly alter their habits and mindsets in order to improve American living standards for everyone, and to improve the flailing global image of the world’s superpower. It is a monumental undertaking, but with Obama at the helm, one is confident that he will be able to achieve such audacious goals.

However, more than just a book about discussing the current faults and issues of the conflicting nation, and preaching about what should be done; Obama’s book is, at the core, a great piece of writing. As I read it, I kept asking myself “How can someone maintain this quality of writing for an entire book, that isn’t even fiction?” Obama’s prose is eloquent, sophisticated, yet not esoteric. He puts forth his points and thoughts in a simple and refined style which allows even the most basic of novices to understand and relate to his words. To be able to tell engaging, colourful stories when one is discussing politics and the woes of the world is a major feat, and Obama has achieved this with ease, humility and unpretentious charm. Obama’s words have the ability to sweep you off your feet and take you to the furthest reaches of humanity’s potential for kindness and compassion, despite the existing evidence to the contrary. This is what great writing reads like. Even if one is not particularly politically-minded, which I am not, or does not particularly care for America and whatever issues it is facing, Obama’s book is still a great read – if only for its position as an exemplar of remarkable writing.