The Philippine Online Chronicles

In Australia, most English-speaking migrants gravitate towards the public service. It’s a mini-United Nations. In my time as Customs Officer and later, Tax Officer, I worked with so many first- and second-generation migrants that we sometimes played a game of spot-the-native-born-Aussie in the Office. I made friends with Maltese, Anglo-Indians, Serbs, Cypriots, Mauritanians, Italians, South Africans and Sri-Lankans. Most came to Aussieland like me under the qualification points system with sponsorship from close kin.

But there were two guys in my first office who were different from the others.  They were Vietnamese "reffos" (refugees), and they were young men with old eyes.  The routes they took in coming to Australia were different from the rest of us.

This is the story of one of them.

I first met Ba at the Customs Office when I was the Detained Goods Clerk at Melbourne docks. He was then the Uniforms Officer and we shared an office and storeroom. Ba was a shy, bespectacled, dapper little man with really polite manners and very gentle demeanor. I used to watch him service uniform requisitions, leading officers to the dressing rooms to try the uniforms on and patiently going back and forth to the storeroom to find just the right size for the finicky ones. He was unfailingly courteous, not complaining when officers would walk in even during lunch break or tea time asking to be served.

We used to talk in the afternoons, when work dragged. The accent took a little getting used to and Ba was not very fluent in English but I understood him well enough. He came, he said, from the “camps” – the Indonesian refugee camps. He was born to a well-to-do Saigon family; his mother, he said, owned three groceries and so they were able to afford the boatmen’s asking fees when time came to quit the place.

They were in the second wave, around 1980. They were heading for Malaysia or Singapore and through to the west coast of Australia but didn’t make it and wound up in Indonesia. Processing by the UN took more than five years but Ba and his father and two uncles finally made it.

Foolishly, I asked about his mother. Dead, he said in a flat voice -- and his aunts and an older sister, all dead. Suddenly, I recalled all I had read about the fishermen/pirates in the Gulf of Thailand and the orgy of plunder and rapine that the flotilla of boat refugees from Vietnam had sailed through in trying to get to Australia. I never asked again. Ba must have been a boy at the time. He was only in his mid-twenties when I got to know him.

Speaking to him in private, I understood that Ba hated the communist regime in his old country with a passion. Their house and their stores had been expropriated. Communist policy, I commented but Ba shook his head. No, some ranking military officers got their hands on their properties is all, nothing to do with socialism. But Ba was upbeat about things, in that oddly polite way that he had.

There were a couple of younger sisters back in Saigon he was sponsoring, through the family reunion policy at the UN International Refugees Commission. At first, I felt a little envy; if only we Pinoys could work our way through an appropriate UN office as the Vietnamese could, maybe we could get over more of our family members. But thinking like that made me feel guilty; we Pinoys would never have knowingly endured the terrors that the Vietnamese boat people had. Ba and his family had paid for their visas in blood and tears.

A couple of months before he moved on to the Airport (ethnics were badly needed there), something happened that showed me another side of Ba. There was this burly Building Maintenance officer up on the second floor who occasionally came down to greet officers coming in for their uniforms. His name was Digby and he was your caricature redneck, a loudmouth with very vocal views about too many Asians swamping Australia and all that.

One time, I saw Digby at the end of the room, whispering to another officer and turning around to say something to Ba, guffawing and braying all the time. I couldn’t hear from that distance but Ba suddenly stooped down and in one fluid motion scooped up a massive telephone directory and flung it at Digby’s face. The next moment, Ba had jumped up on the table, hands in the standard karate stance and other officers in the room were rushing in to break it up. Break what up…? Digby was stumbling out the door, clutching a broken nose. He never came down to our office again. They hushed it all up and Ba got his requested transfer, anyway.

I haven’t seen Ba for several years now but I liked that little guy. I hope his sponsorship of his kid sisters was successful.

Photo: “IMG_8368” by Brian Jeffery Beggerly, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved

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