Our fathers part 1: peanut toffee

As we’ve always said growing up, family is not about blood relations; it’s about who you grew up with. I have four older siblings; two sisters and two brothers. One of us is from a different mother, and all of us have different fathers. After his relationship with mum, my dad had two other kids whom I’ve never called my siblings, even if I am their namesake.

My childhood home had three bedrooms. My brothers, Han and Teo, shared the main bedroom at the front of the house. Mum thought the boys naturally needed the most space and wanted them by the front door to watch for intruders. She didn’t consider that as teenage boys, they would instead use their proximity to the front as an easy means to sneak out of home late at night. Thi and sis had the second-largest bedroom across the hall. Their room was the prettiest in the house, hand-made decorations hanging in perfect symmetry across the walls. Sis always had an incredible skill of making mundane things beautiful. She’d made pink and green floral arrangements from plastic straws and hung them on the most prominent wall. At the bottom of the arrangements dangled long spirals she’d cut from the remaining straws. Mum and I shared the last room. It was only large enough for one bed, so she and I shared until I was too big and had to sleep on a mattress in the living room instead.

Mum turned the dining room into her workroom with four industrial sewing and locking machines. They were the first significant investment mum made when she came to Australia. Her investment kept her employable until the regular sewing led to irreversible joint damage in her wrists. Whenever she worked, at least two of us kids had to help her to make sure she met the work deadlines. There was no such thing as being too young to work; we all had our responsibilities. Mum rarely went to bed before 12am and would have her Chinese drama series playing while she worked, so there was rarely a chance to talk to her. Being a child full of questions, I craved for days when she didn’t have clothes to sew. On these rare occasions, she would come to bed early, and I would ask all the questions I had to ask. My siblings were so much older than me; sis was already twenty-three when I was born. I’d missed out on so much of our lives and needed mum to tell me about the world before I was born. Who were we as a family? What brought us to Australia? Why do we act the way we do? I was especially interested in our fathers since no one else in my family seemed to ever talk about them.

“Tell me about Thi’s dad,” I asked.

“I was still in school when we met”, replied mum, and I recalled a picture mum once showed me of her youth. She was standing by her bicycle in a long white ao dai. Half of her thick, black hair was hair pushed back behind her ears and the other half folded across her chest. She styled her bangs into soft curves across her forehead, as was the fashion during her youth. Her banana-leaf hat hung from her forearm, letting the world know that she was a child of Vietnam. Though she was still just a teenager, a soft wrinkle had already formed between her brows. For as long as she’d remembered, she’d always held intense frustration in her country and life. That furrow of her brow continued to deepen as she aged.

“He was very handsome and dressed like all young men of our village, in a white collared shirt tucked in black slacks. He kept a pair of aviators folded in the collar of his shirt,” said mum, recalling her first love.

“His hair was long like your dad’s”. Vietnamese men with long hair and aviators seemed to be mum’s type because it was the only similar feature across all her loves.

“He was a candy-maker, oh thinking about the peanut toffee he made, them qua!” mum said. She shook her head and snapped her tongue at the memory.

“He would pick me up in his motorbike and drive me to where he made the toffee. I’ve never tasted toffee quite as delicious. He would melt a large sugar pot and mix in the thickeners before pouring the mixture onto a table. He rolled the sugar into a ball; you would think he was making bread dough! He had a long, thick nail on his wall, this big!” mum said, lifting her hands to show a nail the length of a baguette.

“He threw the dough at the nail and stretched out the candy into a long strip. Folding the long candy itself back onto the head of the nail, he repeated the folding and pulling process faster and faster. He was so strong. After the toffee was stretched and folded, he put it back on the table and sprinkled peanuts. Once the toffee cooled, it would be a big thick slab of candy. Picking it up, he would smash it into smaller pieces and give me the first taste”. I couldn’t see mum’s face in the bedroom’s darkness, but I knew she was smiling.

“I had already graduated and was working as a nurse when we had your sister. I adopted sis to take care of Thi”. During her adoption, Sis was seven years old, old enough to be put to work. Mum was considered progressive for taking sis as her child than a servant. While progressive compared to others in the village, this did not stop mum from treating sis with the extreme strictness reserved for stepchildren and adoptees. It was usual for poor villagers to give up their daughters rather than let them starve. Others simply put their kids to work, whatever it took to survive.

Vietnam had been in constant turmoil for most of mum’s life. The fall of Saigon had bittered her and Thi’s dad’s hopes for a future in their motherland. Even during times of war, sharing peanut toffee sparked joy and love. They knew there was still hope for their future, filled with democracy and freedom, as long as the south stood firm against the incoming communists. When the communists came, peanut toffee felt like an insensitive delight amidst the deep sorrow.

People fled the country in mass groups, squatting shoulder to shoulder in small fishing boats. Some people took on a form of heroism their family had never known in them, showing courage and loyalty to those around them with little regard for their own safety. Families were bonded, and love grew in their struggle. In contrast, others were hardened by heartbreak from losing their country and loved ones. The deaths and sacrifices during the war lost their meaning.

“Love is precious but impractical and dangerous. To survive, you had to put love for yourself before anyone else”, mum said.

“Grandfather may have survived had it not been for his love for grandmother. He could have come to Australia and received proper health care and support”. Grandmother had refused grandfather’s pleas to leave Vietnam. Grandfather only had enough for one ticket, his own, meaning she would be left behind. She was already old, and several of her ten children had died. She didn’t want to lose her husband and risk living alone in poverty. Grandfather was a good man, and he promised to send money back home and find a way to reunite them in another country. However, grandmother knew that once he left Vietnam, there was no reason for grandfather to remain committed to her. As mum said, love was impractical, and it was not enough. Fleeing in Vietnam, many people changed their names and left their identities behind. For some, it was to escape their war crimes. However, I know the pain and trauma of war pushed some to disassociate. For others, they changed their identities in the hopes of a better life. Whatever the reason, families in Vietnam had no guarantee that loved ones who fled would care for them.

Mum adored grandfather; she was his favourite child. She wished he’d left Vietnam and grandmother if it meant he would live. I suppose that’s why mum quickly forgave Thi’s father for leaving without her. Though he never divorced mum, he later remarried a woman he met on the boat from Vietnam to Australia. I don’t know his real name; I don’t know if even mum knows anymore.

Later in life, I asked Thi about her relationship with her father. How did she feel about his decision to leave them behind? In a matter of fact manner, she echoed mum’s logic.

“I know I should probably defend mum, but it was a different time. People didn’t know if they would ever see one another again, so he sought happiness.”

I’d wished for mum’s sake that she had begged Thi’s dad to stay in Vietnam the way grandmother had begged grandfather. They could have come to Australia together, and mum would have avoided all the painful heartbreak that followed her throughout her life. Mum, Thi, and her dad could have had the fairy tale ending Thi’s dad now has with his new family. What a cold and loveless thing to be pragmatic in times of turmoil.