Belonging_Essay

Text One: Review On home and haven THE FORUM: Minh Bui Jones | October 18, 2008 FROM the sludge of the harbour to the sparkling water of the sea, there was an endless stretch of blue and red boats. The painted eyes on the prows, to ward off misfortune, bobbed in the gentle current. After an absence of more than 30 years, Vung Tau, a fishing town on the tip of a peninsula 125km south of Ho Chi Minh City, appeared as I remembered it. It was idyllic, if you could ignore the baking heat and the pong of rotting fish. At low tide, when the stench was unbearable, the wooden trawlers would lean on their sides. Getting to your boat meant frog-leaping from one vessel to another. From this spot 30 years ago, my family made a giant leap to a new life. In the early hours of one morning in April 1978, my sisters and I were woken from our sleep. I was nine years old and I remember only the darkness, the whispers and the fear. Sealed up in a secret compartment my father had built in our fishing boat, we were told not to make a sound while the Customs officers made their inspection. My sister was only three and the fate of the entire family seemingly rested on her. If she had made the tiniest of squeaks we would have ended up in a re-education camp or something worse. Fortunately we passed the checkpoint undetected and made it out to sea. Not for long, though. Our relief was shattered by the crack of gunfire from behind. Somewhere on the dark horizon a patrol boat was giving chase. But as it gained on us, a thick sea mist descended. Mum maintains to this day that Buddha came down on a cloud to save us. And that was just the first morning of our long journey to a foreign haven. Sick, hungry, thirsty and lost, we were easy pickings for the elements and the pirates. The latter came twice, took anything of value, but spared our lives. Eventually we made it to Malaysia and beached on a tropical island cum refugee camp where we were fed, clothed and processed. We arrived in Adelaide in August 1978 without the faintest clue where we were. One generation later, we have mostly overcome the culture shock. The children have grown up, married and have children of their own. It's a familiar story in Australia; just another family tree taking root. In August, the most popular ceremony in the Buddhist calendar took place. Le Vu Lan is the Vietnamese equivalent of Mother's and Father's Day combined, an occasion when children visit their local temple to pay respect to their ancestors and parents. We Vietnamese children are taught from a tender age that we owe our existence to our parents. This practice of filial piety is the glue that holds together a society such as Vietnam, which doesn't have a welfare state or nursing homes. The day before the festival, two dozen or so Vietnamese elders, mainly women, toiled away in the kitchen at the Phap Bao Pagoda in Sydney's southwest. Everywhere I looked there were vats of bubbling soup, platters of golden spring rolls, fresh bunches of flowers and pyramids of fruit. A group of teenagers rehearsed the lion dance in the garden. I took off my shoes and entered the prayer hall with my mother at my side. We went through a door and down into a small, elongated room containing a plain altar. The walls on either side of the altar were covered with passport-sized photographs. These were the faces of the dead, their ashes held elsewhere in the temple. I found my father's, a photograph taken not long before he succumbed to cancer nearly five years ago. Looking at the photo, you wouldn't know he was a sick man. With that easy smile, the natural brown skin and shining dark hair, it's hard even to believe he was in his late 70s. The photo was taken on one of his regular visits to Vietnam, a forsaken homeland where he found happiness. In contrast, in photos taken in his adopted country, he looked old, bitter and lost. Even when surrounded by a brood of smiling grandchildren he appeared out of sorts, slightly mad even. The difference in these photos bears testimony to a dual life. In Australia my dad was the stay-at-home, non-English-speaking pensioner who could be seen ambling aimlessly around Cabramatta. In Vietnam, he was a man with a purpose and proud past: a university student, a soldier, a businessman, father of a big family and a whole lot more. Even when he came back as a tourist he had plans and dreams. In the last years of his life he married a much younger woman. The shame it brought on the family was acute. But now that he's dead, it's easy to forgive and try to understand the loneliness that stirred his heart. Several years ago I was asked to write about the so-called 1.5 generation. Although I was unfamiliar with the term, a description of people like me who had come to Australia as children and grew up with a split cultural identity, I quickly found comfort in its language of loss and yearning. Fellow gen 1.5ers I met spoke of their experience as though it was the only one that mattered. Standing in front of the photo of my father that day, my generation's self-obsession came back to haunt me. How could we have been so blinkered, waffling on about cultural dislocation, when the real suffering was taking place next door, in our parents' bedroom' Theirs was a silent chamber of grief in a house full of noise. Cut off from the language, music and poetry of their existence, these first-generation migrants, like my father, drift slowly into oblivion while their children's much-heralded success as doctors and dentists hogs all the attention. Minh Bui Jones is executive director of the inaugural Ideas from Asia festival. Text Two: Cartoon [pic] Text Three: Poem Belonging by Eileen Carney Hulme We never really slept, just buried clocks in the sanctuary of night every time I moved you moved with me, winged eyelashes on your cheek returns a kiss small spaces of silence in between borrowed breaths arms tighten at the whisper of a name all the words of the heart the unanswered questions are at this moment blue rolling waves tonight our souls rest fragrant in spiritual essence candle-flamed, undamaged utterly belonging. Text One – Review a) How has the author used language to develop a sense of belonging' (3 marks) Text Two – Cartoon b) What is ONE idea expressed about belonging in this cartoon' (1 mark) c) How is this idea expressed' (2 marks) Text Three – Poem d) Describe THREE ways the composer has conveyed a sense of belonging. (3 marks) Texts One, Two and Three e) You have been asked to select one of the previous texts to use in the area of study Belonging. In your response, you must state which text is most effective in conveying the concept of belonging. (6 marks)