Free The Best Australian Stories by Black Inc.

the damp bills.
    My father was drawn to weakness, even as he tolerated none in me. He was a soldier, he said once, as if that explained everything. With me, he was all proverbs and regulations. No personal phone calls. No female friends. No extracurricular reading. When I was in primary school, he made me draw up a daily ten-hour study timetable for the summer holidays, and punished me when I deviated from it. He knew how to cane me twenty times and leave only one black-red welt, like a brand mark across my buttocks. Afterward, as he rubbed tiger balm on the wound, I would cry in anger at myself for crying. Once, when my mother let slip that durian fruit made me vomit, he forced me to eat it in front of guests. Doi an muoi cung ngon : Hunger finds no fault with food. I learned to hate him with a straight face.
    When I was fourteen, I discovered that he had been involved in a massacre. Later, I would come across photos and transcripts and books; but there, at a family friend’s party in suburban Melbourne, and then – it was just another story in a circle of drunken men. They sat cross-legged on newspapers around a large blue tarpaulin, getting smashed on cheap beer. It was that time of night when things started to break up against other things. Red faces, raised voices, spilled drinks. We arrived late and the men shuffled around, making room for my father.
    â€˜Thanh! Fuck your mother! What took you so long – scared, no? Sit down, sit down—’
    â€˜Give him five bottles.’ The speaker swung around ferociously. ‘We’ll let you off, everyone here’s had eight, nine already.’
    For the first time, my father let me stay. I sat on the perimeter of the circle, watching in fascination. A thicket of Vietnamese voices, cursing, toasting, braying about their children, making fun of one man who kept stuttering, ‘It has the power of f-f-five hundred horses!’ Through it all my father laughed good-naturedly, his face so red with drink he looked sunburned. Bowl and chopsticks in his hands, he appeared somewhat childish sitting between two men trading war stories. I watched him as he picked sparingly at the enormous spread of dishes in the middle of the circle. The food was known as do an nho : alcohol food. Massive fatty oysters dipped in salt-pepper-lemon paste. Boiled sea snails, large grilled crab legs. Southern-style bitter shredded-chicken salad with brown, spotty rice crackers. Someone called out my father’s name; he had set his chopsticks down and was speaking in a low voice:
    â€˜Heavens, the gunships came first, rockets and M60s. You remember that sound, no? Like you were deaf. We were hiding in the bunker underneath the temple, my mother and four sisters and Mrs Tran, the baker, and some other people. You couldn’t hear anything. Then the gunfire stopped and Mrs Tran told my mother we had to go up to the street. If we stayed there, the Americans would think we were Viet Cong. “I’m not going anywhere,” my mother said. “They have grenades,” Mrs Tran said. I was scared and excited. I had never seen an American before.’
    It took me a while to reconcile my father with the story he was telling. He caught my eye and held it a moment, as though he were sharing a secret with me. He was drunk.
    â€˜So we went up. Everywhere there was dust and smoke, and all you could hear was the sound of helicopters and M16s. Houses on fire. Then through the smoke I saw an American. I almost laughed. He wore his uniform so untidily – it was too big for him – and he had a beaded necklace and a baseball cap. He held an M16 over his shoulder like a spade. Heavens, he looked nothing like the Viet Cong, with their shirts buttoned to their chins, and tucked in, even after crawling through mud tunnels all day.’
    He picked up his chopsticks and reached for the tiet canh – a specialty – mincemeat soaked in fresh congealed duck blood. Some of