Sweet n’ Sour

This piece was published in FreeXpression magazine some years ago. I wrote it when I worked at a high school in the area.

Cabramatta.

It’s a place. It’s a plate of food. Sweet and Sour. The white ring of rice is clumped around the edges, the Sweet and Sour poured in the middle. Much like its geography, white Anglo suburbs surrounding the edges, little Asia in the middle. Sweet and Sour, with chilli on top. Most days, I love it, but there are days where I don’t.

Morning finds Cabramatta shaking off her sleep, stretching out her arms like a jaded princess before the hangover and the headache really hit. In Longfield Street the young dealers are up early at eight while in the car park behind the club, the old people stretch out their rusty arms in the graceful art of Tai Chi, moving like birds with clipped wings. Later, they walk across the park, eyes downcast, not sad, just skirting around the syringes from the night before.

By ten the queue for Yum Cha at Vinh Hao is already long. We sit and shout at each other across the table amidst the flutter and squawking of rapid Cantonese. The Yum Cha trolleys appear like little steam trains driven by harried waitresses. They stop at the stations, the lids are lifted off the baskets, the steam rises, the announcer’s voice is urgent. Chicken feet. Phung chao. Dim Sim. You want pork bun?

Up in Freedom Plaza the dealers are doing a roaring trade. Police stroll by, hands go quickly to mouths as little parcels are swallowed. Eyes are lowered. Gestures and furtive glances ricochet around the courtyard. The police stroll on and life goes back to normal.

At the top of John Street, the monks have entered the Buddhist vegetarian restaurant, one of my favourite places to eat. Back in 1994, there were signs on the wall about preserving life and not harming any living thing. On the floor above is the Bar Luck, the restaurant where a student I knew was kicked to death in 1994. We call it the Bad Luck. Wrong place at the wrong time. They threw his body through the plate glass window of the Buddhist restaurant below. So much for preserving life. 

The main street sings with colour. Green vegetables and red, glazed duck on metal skewers, the burnt sugar smell of thit nuong on tiny, open barbeques in the walkways. The vibrant purple maroon of mangosteen, the most beautiful fruit in the world, shouts out at you to buy it. Traditional cheongsam and ao dai dresses hang side by side with skimpy tops and jeans; the old and the new.

Round the corner, my herbalist has one thousand types of dried bark, skins and fungus in little wooden drawers, unlabelled. He knows where to locate all of them. I sit in his dinghy back room while the ‘doctor’ who also works there, puts needles under my skin. Acupuncture. No heroin here. ‘In Vietnam’, says the herbalist, ‘my father was a herbalist. And my grandfather and great, great grandfather.’ I look at his son in his Nike runners, his Walkman plugged into his ears and wonder if perhaps a different future awaits this little boy.

In the clothes shops, the languid assistants eat noodles at their counters in between serving customers. You won’t see that at Myer. In the restaurants, the food comes entirely out of sequence. Dessert sometimes comes first. Makes life interesting.

Outside a crowd of drunks and addicts swear and scream and shake, sleep and slump and vomit. Arabic women carry heavy shopping bags, and the demented Serbian woman with the teapot cossie on her head screams abuse at shoppers. Over on the other side of the station, the Cambodian side, as it’s known, someone has sprayed graffiti on the corner shop. Cabra 2000 it says in awkward white paint, as though this little shopping centre is the ultimate destination for the new millennium.

It certainly is different. Even the names of the shops hold promise; The New Good Luck Butchery, the Peaceful Chemist and the most convenient of all, combining food for both body and soul, the Welcome Fresh Fruit, Vegetables and Buddhist Accessory shop.

There’s a hub of activity down at Triple Eight. Not to be confused with Five T. No relation. One’s a gang. The other’s a restaurant come coffee shop come gift shop. Interesting concept. Triple Eight is Cabramatta’s answer to an Oxford Street cafe. Chrome and black. Jukebox. Cappuccinos. And noodles and fish sauce and chopsticks. East meets West, and the food’s good too.

Over at the library the ‘study boys’ and ‘study girls’ as they are known in local lingo, are doing just that as well as checking out potential boyfriend/girlfriend material in the relative safety of a place that their parents are happy for them to be.

 At four o’clock, the serious students troop next door to the Community Centre to begin two hours of classes. My English class comes in, in varying degrees of lateness. In Vietnamese there is an expression, Thi gio day thung meaning, Elastic time, and sometimes it stretches my patience as well. ‘You guys be on time,’ I warn them, but behind the door, I laugh and throw up my hands in resignation. They’re tired from a day at school, but they come anyway.  I teach, they learn, and we all eat tamarind and coconut lollies together to keep us going till six.

New Year brings the red and gold lion dance, leaping around the streets, lighting the firecrackers strung in front of each shop. The sweet smell of incense and bungers spirals sharply into the air. Moon cakes in gaudy plastic wrappers are lined on the shelves. The fortune tellers have their chairs set up. Bad luck. Good luck. You’ll know when you part with your money.

Under a marquee at the New Year Festival, the strangest bingo game takes place. People are crowded around the caller, some squatting on their haunches on the plastic chairs, their tickets thrust out in front of them, ready for the call. Only he isn’t calling the numbers; he’s singing them. Suddenly a wild cheer goes up into the night. ‘Aussie bingo is a bit boring,’ says my friend Hieu. ‘We Vietnamese weave the numbers into songs. Traditional songs, modern songs. You never know when the number is going to come up. You have to make it rhyme too. A good caller is very talented. Of course, it takes longer, but it’s very exciting.’

At the Serbian coffee shop, under the shade of the umbrellas on a sunny afternoon with strong black coffee and sweet almond cakes, it is easy to forget that this is the place of John Newman’s murder, the place where bodies are often found in toilet blocks, the place where I have attended the saddest funerals of all, the ones belonging to my students, lost to drugs and violence or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Evening in Cabramatta brings a shift change. You can feel it, smell it even. A vague tension is in the air. People clutch their bags more tightly, strapping them across their bodies, aware of an undercurrent. The streets are handed over, not in an obvious way. Eye contact is avoided. In the jewellery shops, you are locked in while you look, just in case. Strange what you get used to.

Last night my mother and I had coffee in a restaurant. At the next table sat X, an ex-student, in big-time trouble with the law. Some people’s fortune cookies just don’t break in half. They crumble. He kissed my mother and paid for our coffee. At eight-thirty we walked through an alleyway to the car park, a stupid idea but sometimes I get blasé. Four youths lurked in the shadows, and my heart skipped a beat. Hi, Miss, they chorused. X and X. Out on bail for theft. They escorted us to the car. Shouldn’t walk through here at night, Miss, said X. People like me hang here. There are many of them like this, gentle boys, and girls whose lives have taken a tragic turn. And later I laughed. The times when I have run into what some people would call a gang, I’ve taught at least half of them. It’s a good insurance policy on a dark night.

An Aboriginal word, Cabramatta means, ‘chain of ponds abounding with the Cabra.’ Cabra are insects the aboriginals used for food, so it’s always been exotic. The locals call it Cabra. Others call it Vietnamatta. Some call it Doesn’t Matter. But it does matter. It’s funny. It’s sad. It’s bizarre. Disturbing. Multicultural. Some of my students can’t pronounce that word. Cultimultural, they say. The best and the worst of human nature are here, side by side. Cabramatta is a Spanish dancer. Under her vibrant skirts, the dark seams rustle. She is a jaded princess. Dark and light. Sweet and sour.

And I wouldn’t work anywhere else.