Free We Are Here by Cat Thao Nguyen

When my father spotted a backyard he deemed dark enough he would slow down the car. But I always argued against the first choice, declaring it was not a good enough home. When we finally settled on a place, I would hold my breath, my heart smacking against my chest, as we dropped the meowing kittens over the fence. But no matter how long it took, sometimes many months, they would always find their way back home.
    The childless couple next door adored me. The wife would watch me play. She told me she had had seven miscarriages, though at the time I didn’t understand what a miscarriage was. She tried to explain it to me over the fence one day. I couldn’t understand how a baby got inside a tummy in the first place, and then how it could disappear. Did it explode into a thousand bits of glitter? I shrugged and went back to playing Monkey Magic with Văn. Monkey Magic was a TV series on the ABC based on the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West and featured a monk, a pig monster obsessed with lust and gluttony, a water monster who was a reforming cannibal and a magic monkey. Together they went on a pilgrimage to fetch the Holy Scriptures, battling demons and monsters along the way. The Japanese-produced show had been dubbed into English by the BBC. Văn and I were fascinated with the stream of crazy characters and jumped around the backyard with broomsticks, doing karate chops and spins. Văn and I were always going on adventures. We would sneak down the back laneway and slip through a gap in a neighbour’s fence to steal berries from a tree.
    As we settled into our own glimpse of Australian dream, my parents still carried their old home with them in their mouths—from conversation to cuisine. Inside the house, we spoke, ate and lived Vietnamese. Sometimes when I got home from school I would be greeted by two little black and orange moths on the doorstep, both comfortably perched on the incline facing one another. I would step over them and head to the kitchen, which would be filled with the aroma of fried salted lemongrass fish. I would hover around my mother like a kitchen god’s silent prayer. I would tell my mother over the sizzle of fish that the ancestors had come to pay us a visit and she would remind me never to step on them. To this day, I’ve never crushed a moth—just in case.

    Vietnamese people started arriving in greater numbers, some from Tây Ninh province. My parents started a money-lending syndicate. In developing countries, where collateral for bank loans is usually scarce, families or groups of close friends rely on informal money-lending syndicates. Funds are pooled together and loans are given out each month. A $500 syndicate of twenty people would yield a potential monthly loan pool of $10,000 with differing interest rates each month. The interest rates were a way to fairly determine who each month’s borrower would be. It was simple: everybody would secretly write down the interest they were willing to pay on the loan if they were granted it at that month’s meeting. Everyone’s piece of paper would be folded up and then placed on the dining table in a clear vertical line. My mother would then unfold each one in front of the participants. The person willing to pay the highest interest, and therefore the most desperate person for the loan, would be granted it that month. As the organisers of the syndicate, my parents could access the pool of loan funds interest-free. There were no contracts, no way to enforce repayments of the loans; there was only one sacred rule: trust.
    Each month, my parents would host the syndicate meeting which consisted only of close family and friends. We Vietnamese had to stick together and leverage our network. Each month the women would cook a variety of food. Some couples went to farms far out in Western Sydney to buy fresh ducks to make congealed duck blood salad. It was always a special occasion when a live duck was bought. Everyone participated in a