VI

My parents arrived on a rag-tag armada two hundred years too late. People barked at them in the street when they first got to Australia. Once, while I was arguing about becoming a republic a red-haired woman said to me, foreigners shouldn’t get involved in our politics. Walking down Chapel Street on a late night out I always have to hazard the occasional wide-shouldered blonde haired footy player, ni hao, and a bow. What could I have said? Afterwards I would replay the moment over and over ceaselessly, searching for that one perfect comeback but of course I only managed to go to bed with his image in my mind while he probably stumbled on, forgetful and harmless, never to be troubled by the thought of me again.

But if I’m being honest with you, it’s all small change really. I was never beaten, and rarely overtly teased. My parents have made a life for themselves here, and then some. I am a child of privilege, even if that privilege has taken a more convoluted route than that of some others. Or perhaps that’s the problem. Others, with the same chances and the same privilege and the same education never stopped to ask why. It was a birthright. They could jump online and with a little bit of research, print out their history. Their Year 8 projects were easily completed, and then tacked on the wall without further thought. My history doesn’t exist anywhere except in your mind, and through you passed onto a handful of relatives. And it’s a history of hardship, hardship that I’ve never experienced so my history settles uneasily on my privileged shoulders.

You believe in God because you have suffered so much, while I believe in nothing because that’s the sum total of what I’ve experienced. Your century, just finished, was filled with big ideas and big failures. People talked about the great human project and wrecked entire countries trying to complete it. My century, just beginning, is more modest, and therefore more mundane. We make no great claims to change the world but instead plod along with it, hoping not to rock the boat. You underscore my insignificance with your smile, when you say that all in all, you consider yourself lucky to have witnessed such momentous changes in history first hand. I think back to all the televised images of horror and war I’ve seen, but I can’t tell the difference between the news and the movies.

VII

After sitting by the riverside for a while we wound our way up to Sacré Coeur from behind, so that the white cathedral only ever appeared every now and again, its glistening dome sitting like a cap above the apartment buildings. There were less tourists going this way – almost none in fact. Everyone else moved through Montmatre, passed the Moulin Rouge and the artists sitting by their easels, and onwards up that fabled hill, a journey that takes some time because with almost every second step an even more brilliant angle for a picture is revealed. But round the back, people went about their lives – a small Algerian restaurant was buzzing with familial laughter and a handful of boys were kicking a soccer ball around a dusty courtyard that substituted for a park.

Rounding a corner we were suddenly faced with a grey wall – some two hundred or so steep steps crowned by that dome that seemed to catch the sunlight like a prism. When we finally made it to the top of the stairs you waited a moment, and we could hear the gentle babble of the tourists all around us, and it seemed to me as if I could hear snatches of English. Some of it was, but a lot of it was incomprehensible when I listened more closely. You followed me as I walked around towards the front, but I left you behind as I took a couple of quick steps and then Paris stretched out before me, hazy beneath the evening sun. People were arrayed all along the hill, pointing fingers and staring up past me. The sun began to set and the babble was replaced by an awesome hush and the whir of cameras. It was then that I turned to follow the golden sun beams which lit up your face, a little out of breath but still smiling at me. Behind you the church blazed like a funeral pyre.

VIII

When eating pho you have to savour the first taste because it is always the richest, and the most complex. It is only in that first spoonful of soup, meat and noodles that you can really taste the subtleties of the herbs and the plum sauce and the chilli and the lemon, each individually and all at the same time. It’s getting late but the European summer still shimmers outside, and my body clock is so out of sync anyway that I’d probably eat breakfast if it was offered to me. But instead Ba Noi comes out with a great big bowl of pho, and places it with undue emphasis squarely in front of me. For a moment I sit there awkwardly, waiting for Ba Noi to go get the other bowls but she just hovers there, waiting. I ask you both if you’re eating but to my surprise you both shake your heads, still smiling and gesturing at me to begin. It’s not the first time that you mutter something about your health and some diet, pills and fish oil. Unbidden and unwelcome, a thought passes through my mind which I try to suppress but the damage is done – what if this is the last time that I see either of you? The steaming hot pho suddenly goes cold along with everything else in the room and I want to say something like, I hope a part of you survived the journey across the seas and is still within me. Your strong, wiry hands, or your quick, undulled eyes or even your steady smile which you level at me now, as if you know what I’m thinking. And of course, sticking to family tradition, I say nothing, instead slurping away at the pho while you both look on.

What drove me to the other side of the world? To see you or to see the monuments? What is here that I can’t get in Australia? I get a vague sense that this moment, sitting here, slowly eating Ba Noi’s pho, is as close as it’s going to get. And yet it’s not enough – I can feel a million things swirling around in our undercurrents, passing between the three of us in little rapids and eddys, but I don’t know how to tap into it. Like standing before the Eifel Tower I know that this is it, the furthest point you can get before you have to commit yourself wholly to get any further. Either way, here I am, looking for some history.

IX

If they tore something out of you, then they tore something out of me too. Like a gene passed on, a hollowness. After Dad dropped you off at the airport, he became a ghost. I would wander into the living room with my teddy tucked beneath my arm and find him in front of the TV, his head resting against the back of the sofa, eyes closed. Or else we had to play quietly, even though it was a warm Saturday afternoon, because Dad was napping. Why do we accept these silences in my family? Was it just callousness that I never asked?

I took the cowardly way out, by piecing things together, inferring facts and reading into the gaps. Sometimes the past is nothing more than a family tree, which you sent me a few years ago. None of the names meant anything to me, so instead of telling me who my family was, it just looked like a blank page, waiting to be filled in. A lot of it has been like that, an exercise in joining the dots. That Dad left for Australia while you were still in prison – I gathered that from adding up the dates. Does that explain why he drifts in and out, as if the camera can’t quite keep him in focus? Is it that simple?

Eventually my guesses lead me to where there are not dots at all, just the blank page and a heavy pen to trace imaginary histories with. The things that I don’t know at all. Like what your handwriting looks like. What your favourite meal is. Whether or not you resented us for being free. And how do you see me now, Australian-accented, , toying with socialism and no prospect of a Vietnamese bride – have I betrayed you? It’s these questions that I want to ask, but I can’t find the words, in any language. They would sound too strange spoken aloud. They’re the kind of things that are supposed to be learnt, not told.

X

Thanks to failure I know how to avoid where the bicycles have fallen. I like that phrase too. I’ll don my rucksack now and try to learn the same lessons, onto Barcelona, Milan, Prague and beyond. But when I come home what will I say? You can’t carry this kind of thing through Europe and back on the long-haul flight home. It’s unseemly to talk about the past and your father and your grandfather when all people want to hear is that I went up the Eifel Tower, that I went to that five storey club in Prague. Ba Noi forces a container of pastries into my hands, already full of passport and ticket and map but what choice do I have? As you watch me fumble with them you smile, once again. What happened to sorrow and despair and solitary confinement? Do you erase it all so easily with those dentures? I was once a committed Communist, you say, out of the blue. Is this your parting benediction? Go forth, be young? I came here to get something to live by, so I wouldn’t become a ghost. A little bit of family history to tie me down, stop me from floating away but now maybe the opposite is true – I’m at the bottom of a deep, dark and uncharted ocean and my feet are too heavy, my hands are tied and I’m struggling for breath. 

So I think it’s apt that as I shoulder my pack it’s weighed down with your gifts, which I carry like a burden. People rush about us but we remain still, just for a few moments, refusing to be swept along with the endless coming and going. Again, I can only offer you my silence, as Ba Noi clucks one last time about my height, about the weight of my bag, and have I got all my documents? And then just like that, without further ado, I surrender to the pull of the crowd and I leave you, ever smiling, with a sole arm raised in what I must convince myself is a blessing. 

Walking down the concourse towards the train, I want to be five or six again, too young to understand what separation is. With Ba Noi’s warm hand ruffling my hair and the certainty that whatever happened, it was Dad doing the driving, and all I had to do was sit and watch. Instead now I propel myself forwards, which is  another way of saying that I’m walking away from you, one foot in front of the other, into the bustle and chaos of a thousand other travellers amongst whom I become harder and harder to distinguish; surely by now your ageing eyes have lost me?