Reinvention reflections: Meet mum

Meet my Mum – a woman shaped by countless reinventions: leaving a war‑torn country, surviving a refugee camp, navigating divorce, and rediscovering who she is.

The story of my mum begins in the Kieng Giang province of Southern Vietnam; she is the fourth born child of the family and is the only female amongst her siblings that made it to Australia. On a recent trip back to the village where my mum was born, my aunty brought out some very old photos that she had found. Amongst those photos, were some images of my lovely grandmother (who I will have to write about), and some childhood portraits of my mum. As I held those precious and tattered portraits, I wondered what my mum was like as a child. When I ask her about her childhood, she has scattered recollections of what life was like back then.

She was married off at nineteen, and she was a typical village girl who lived along the riverbank of the Mekong. She remembers swimming in the Mekong, climbing coconut trees and playing in the family rice fields. By the time I met my mum, she would have already gone through some tough times. I did not know about any of it until stories started unravelling through the years and I have pieced together the details but still find myself finding out new bits of information all the time.

One of the photos that I have seen many times in the family photo album, but never made the connection, was this one below. This is my mum in 1983, at a refugee camp in Thailand, she would have been in her early twenties. One of the reasons why I did not make the inference is perhaps because she looks so stoic and well dressed. In my mind, I thought she would have been in a less trendy outfit (cue my ignorance - the barb wire fencing was not something I mentally processed).

Mum recalls the three attempts to flee Vietnam after the war, and this would have been her third attempt. She speaks about the nine-day boat trip and of holding one of my brothers, who was a baby at the time, and feeling scared as she had to give him sleeping pills to stop him from crying and alerting any officials above deck. She also recalls the fear of holding him, his body lifeless and being scared that he would not wake up. Her mother’s guilt runs strongly to this day. My oldest brother was also on the boat with her and would have been three. On this particular boat trip, she recalls having gold strapped to different parts of her body. My grandmother had sewn little pockets into her clothing that were hidden, the night before.

The boat got intercepted on the gulf of Thailand, and my mum along with my two brothers, two uncles and my cousin Lee ended up at a refugee camp. For nine months, she was there and recalled stories of how kind some of the Thai officers were to her and would often give them boiled sweet potatoes. After submitting an application for a humanitarian refugee visa through the Orderly Departure Program (which facilitated family reunion) and clearing all of the relevant paperwork, they boarded Qantas flight 747 to Melbourne Australia. Her first home was the commission houses in Richmond, before moving to the south eastern suburbs a few years later after divesting from a restaurant business on Victoria Street.

Growing up, my mum was a home maker, looking after four kids and occasionally sewing on the side, this was when clothing manufacturing was still largely local. My dad’s business did well, and she did not need to worry about security or any of that. That is, until the rug was pulled from under her feet, and my dad’s cheating and lies ultimately led to the marriage falling apart after twenty-five years.

I remember the morning clearly, and painfully.

Mum had been awake all night driving around looking for my dad, thinking that something horrible happened to him. Unbeknownst to her, he had a new mistress that he was leaving her and the family for. He was too much of a coward to admit so, and as such, when he suddenly came through the door the next morning, she pressed him about why he was leaving, he blamed the kids.

The years that followed, were quite tumultuous.

I was lost and numb, and my younger sister was quite young too. We all dealt with the situation in different ways, and I would say I was not the best daughter back then. My sister was there for my mum, on the hardest of nights, where she would sob herself to sleep.

At the time the stresses were so high for her, she was running a café and ran into some health problems. She had a benign tumour removed and got back to work only two weeks after the surgery.

Slowly but surely, she picked up the pieces and held our family unit together. She held on and worked hard during my younger sister & I's final years of high school and waited four years altogether before she would prioritise herself. She decided to offload the café, simplify her life and start over. I was in my second year at university, around mid-semester, she came to me and asked me to look out for the family as she had to prioritise herself and go on a vacation. I would do the grocery shopping and cooked food that my brother’s complained about and tried to wrangle some of the siblings to no success, and I look back and laugh about those times as I have fond memories of it.

My mum’s Eat Pray Love vacation, really helped her; I think it was a healing journey where she could finally breathe and focus on herself. She was away for around three months travelling to India, China, Myanmar, Tibet and Vietnam and came back different. She was always strong willed, but I started witnessing and observing my mum’s reinvention more acutely. I don’t know whether that was driven by me becoming less self-absorbed or maybe a bit more emotionally mature. Probably both of those things, helped me put myself in her shoes.

I remember thinking about how she would have defined herself as a daughter, mother, wife and homemaker for so long, and I started to see my mum blossom like a beautiful flower. She rebuilt herself and her community, she found ways to anchor herself that gave her purpose. She fought through the judgement from my dad’s side of the family, they were always obsessed with material things, and mum was on a different journey where she was volunteering and exploring her spirituality through Buddhism. Gossip from the local Vietnamese community was something that she also endured and rose above.

Her journey was not an easy one, and it took quite a few decades to come into her own. Nowadays, she is enjoying early retirement and lives an eventful life. Travelling, daily meditation, volunteering at the local temple, going on slow walks with friends and enjoys cooking and spending quality time with family and growing her own veggies.

If I think about my mum’s story and her strength, she has role modelled resilience and reinvention many times over. Something that I have learned from her story is in the form of being able to overcome the things that life throws at you, and to be content in the little moments. Success in life can mean so many different things - it does not necessarily have to entail what society tells us, and I think she has illustrated how she has worked through the ups and downs of her life events, to become someone of her own.

In anchoring herself in community, giving back, being present and enjoying life, she spreads positive energy to the people around her.

Mum, if you are reading this, thank you for being so brave even when times were hard and for teaching me so much.

For those reading, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below - has there been any one in your life that you have admired for their reinvention journey?

Thanks for reading.