We Are Here (37 page)

At Easter lunch in Brendan’s lovely house, the good china and silver were used and opera played while we ate. Jokes were told and gentle enquiries about me were made. As I drove back
to my parents’ home, I cried at the contrast between lunch with Brendan’s family and Easter lunch with my parents in our small rented house and the humble food offerings to our ancestral/ Virgin Mary hybrid altar. How could my family ever interact comfortably with Brendan’s? Each meeting would be a gracious ‘Thank you for accepting us into your country,’ which Brendan’s parents would probably not know how to respond to unless they could squat on plastic mats and eat roasted pig heads. A flood of impossible images bobbed and drifted in my used car like a dirty oil spill, engulfing my mind. With my indelible angst and non-English-speaking parents, how could my relationship with Brendan ever work?

Brendan’s friends were mostly white and had attended private schools. One was a professional cricketer whose girlfriend who was a fashion model. Others were investment bankers, engineers and consultants. One evening we were invited to a dinner party in an exclusive apartment building in Potts Point. It was the first time I was to meet some of his friends. I had never been in such a setting before. The banker cooked tuna steaks. They asked about me and where I was from. When I mentioned Bankstown, one of the girls said people out there had an accent and used phrases like ‘Fully sick, bro.’ She tried to say the phrase in a Western Sydney accent, but it was a really pathetic attempt. I then volunteered how to say it properly. They all erupted in laughter. ‘Yes, that’s it!’

That evening I felt I was at a masquerade. I felt I was betraying my heritage and my community by pretending to be part of a
society I did not belong in, nor want to. Our worlds were so far apart.

Brendan had moved to a share house in Redfern, a two-minute walk to university, after living for some time in Darlinghurst, a trendy area near the city. Shortly after, in December 2005, Sydney experienced its worst-ever manifestation of divisive racism in what became known as the Cronulla Riots. The riots erupted after some tussle on the beach between Anglo-Australians and Australians of Middle Eastern descent. It quickly turned violent, with hordes of youths from all over Sydney congregating to protect mosques after threats of arson were made. Anglo-Australians assumed the symbols of nationalism, draping themselves in the flag and wielding cricket bats. Random cars and people were bashed. It was ugly and terrifying. But as I watched these images beam from the television, I saw in many of the non-Anglo faces and heard in the roaring shaky voices the need for validation. The need for acceptance. How many generations must be born here before we were considered to be part of this country? All around Australia, people like me saw the rage and understood its underlying causes.

I was at Brendan’s new place in Redfern, dissecting the incident with him. I spoke of how it felt for these Australians to be told to GO HOME from the country of their birth, and how when Australia was symbolised by cricket bats it only confirmed for many of us that this was not our country. It never would be.
Brendan analysed the event more dispassionately. His point of view was intellectual. It was rational. It was insulting. I stormed out of the house and onto the street where my car was parked. He followed, begging me to get out of the car, arguing that I shouldn’t drive in my state.

‘You will never know what it is like for people like us!’ I screamed at him in the disinterested open air. ‘You will never understand what racism is and yet you will decide what will become of us, you will decide everything for us!’ I saw him as another expression of oppression.

That night Brendan became the Them to my Us. No matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to forgive him for his privilege. I recalled my father’s threat when I was sixteen; he would disown me, he’d said, if I ever dated a white boy. This memory was still attached to me like a lead ankle cuff. Despite my growing independence, I still couldn’t bring myself to defy my father; I had not yet told my parents about Brendan.

In my last year of law school, I wanted to earn extra money, so I got a part-time job working for the TAB, the leading horse and sports betting company. I worked at the racecourse each Saturday, taking bets. I learned all about Boxed Quinellas and Superfectas. I was placed in a different part of the venue each week. The public area was the most colourful, with pensioners in shorts mingling with brides-to-be on a hen’s weekend. Many betters would wait until the last few seconds when they were
enlightened with some equine intuition before they placed their bets. Often it would be a mixed string of bets and varying dollar values. But the days would all end the same—girls holding their heels in their hands, some vomiting in the bathroom, some faces drooping with disappointment, others gleeful.

Several times I saw people from law school in the VIP pavilion. The girls were glowing with spray tans, fascinators and glossy game-show smiles. I would always shrink into my coloured uniform vest, the mandatory TAB scarf around my neck soaking up my sweat and humiliation. In those moments, I didn’t see it as just a job, but as yet another reminder: Me on the service side and Them drinking from champagne flutes. In the seconds just after the races were over, when the roar of the ravenous crowd had throbbed to a climax and then fizzled, sometimes I daydreamed about attending the races as a spectator—a free agent wearing a lacy dress, poised with a glass of sparkling wine and a perfectly positioned hat. Maybe one day. After law school was over.

In between my relationship with Brendan, various jobs, policy work and class, the clerkship season had come around. Each year the elite law students would vie for placements at the giant and illustrious corporate law firms of Sydney. Usually the placement would guarantee a graduate position. A clerkship at one of the top firms meant admission to yet another exclusive club. Even if they didn’t want to be a corporate lawyer, the frenzied formula of competitive selection coerced many students to apply anyway for the chance to don a badge of prestige. I too put in an application
and was shocked to find out that I had two interviews. Both were top-five law firms housed in buildings with harbour views and their own catering service. One had awarded me a scholarship and so I reasoned had probably granted me an interview out of a sense of obligation.

I was busy running from a community meeting to one of the interviews and I didn’t have a jacket. I had on black pants and a white collared shirt – aka my TAB uniform. On the way to the interview, I decided to drop by Pitt Street Mall in the centre of town to see if I could find anything appropriate. To my relief, I found a decent jacket on sale. With eyes honed from our sweatshop years, I knew immediately it was a cheap polyester blend, but I hoped the interviewers wouldn’t be able to tell. Before I went to the interview, I needed to drop by the law school library to return a book before I got fined.

After my hasty purchase I ran into the law school foyer and jabbed at the lift button—my portrait on the noticeboard still staring out at me. As I stepped into the lift, a girl joined me. She looked at me and then said politely, pointing at my armpit, ‘Um, excuse me, your tag is still on your jacket.’

I looked down. A bright red
SALE
tag glared back at me. It was luminescent. Horrified, I tried to conceal my embarrassment by saying casually, ‘Oh yeah, thanks, I was wondering if anyone would tell me.’

By the time I got to the interview, I was a dishevelled mess. The interviewer’s name was Warwick. I had never come across this as the name of a person before. My friends all had either
easy-to-pronounce Christian names or their own ethnic ones. Throughout the interview, I pronounced the silent W in the middle—War-wick—which was how the Vietnamese pronounced Warwick Farm. Only later, when I spoke to Brendan, did I understand why Warwick had winced slightly whenever I said his name.

I hoped I would do better at the interview with the second firm. I met with two of the partners, a man and a woman. The woman seemed nice enough. When it came time for me to ask questions, instead of asking about the firm’s strategies to expand into Asia or the number of oil and gas joint ventures it had advised on, I asked, ‘If you had chosen a career other than law, what would you have chosen?’ I was interested to see what sort of people they were. The man said he might have been a yachtsman because he loved sailing. The woman said, ‘Maybe a writer.’

That got me excited. ‘What’s your favourite book?’ I asked.

‘There are so many, but I really like
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
.’

‘Yes, that’s a good one,’ I agreed.

Silence.

I thought it had gone well, but I wasn’t offered a place at either firm. I was pretty sure that my future lay in social justice anyway. As the final classes drew to a close, I finished my placement at the Refugee Advice and Casework Service as well as the Aboriginal Legal Centre in Redfern. I got a job at the New South Wales Legal Aid Commission, primarily working on
criminal appeal cases as well as the Balibo Five inquest. (When Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, five Australian journalists who had been based in Balibo were murdered.)

I had some extraordinary experiences. Each day was an adventure. I sought out blood experts, analysed police briefs, dissected six months of surveillance in a conspiracy matter, reviewed case law to mount a defence, wrote memos for clients on their civil law matters, prepared cross-examination questions regarding autopsy reports, and ached at the desperation of those who were born into rape, alcoholism and poverty and now were accused of crimes. More often than not it was almost impossible for them not to become a statistic. As I flicked through criminal records in preparation for sentencing submissions, I realised how so many people became dehumanised in case files and numbers. On one occasion I accompanied a barrister to the psychiatric ward of a maximum-security prison to meet with our client regarding his plea in a grave sexual assault case. Inside the prison, a gallery space contained recycled trauma, pain and mental illness, transformed into artworks. For many other prisoners, despite the art program, their hurt lived on in nightmares and a continuing life of crime. In the taxi ride back to the office, I spoke with the barrister about a variety of things. He was interested in the art. Our conversation meandered between references to the case, to the overall ‘Aboriginal Situation’ and to fashion. A few years later, I read that he committed suicide. I realised that everyone’s pain was relative, only to them.

Brendan became a lawyer before me. He got a job in rural New South Wales as a criminal lawyer. One weekend, we drove the four hours from Sydney to his rented flat in Wagga Wagga. I stayed for a week to help him set up. I bought second-hand furniture at St Vinnies and cooked him Thai, Italian and Vietnamese meals. I walked up and down the main strip trying to find another Asian person. I finally found one working at the ice-cream parlour. Sometimes we ate counter meals at the pub. During the day, I watched
Oprah
and
Dr Phil
. I dressed up, listened to rock music and drank dirty martinis alone like a bored housewife. At night Brendan would bring piles of case files home and we would analyse the evidence like we were in law school again. Classes seemed so far away. But this was real life now. They weren’t just the Accused. These were real people. Brendan wrote Spanish poetry for me while we listened to Leonard Cohen. Despite the little world we had created for ourselves, I felt the film of our bubble thinning as the cricket community club beckoned and he was drawn more and more into the life of the country town. Something that I could never fathom being a part of.