My brother Tuc died recently from kidney cancer. Tuc was not my biological brother, but adopted me as his brother 12 years ago. He was a refugee from Vietnam; a strong Catholic, proud father and great worker for the Vietnamese community through the St Vincent de Paul Society, which is where I met him. Although our lives had different starts, I found much to learn from his life.
Tuc was an officer in the South Vietnamese army. After the war ended in 1975 he was interned by the North Vietnamese for many years, locked up in a hole in the ground. I asked him how he survived. He smiled and pointed to his picture of the Madonna. 'She helped me.'
Tuc had a strong faith which helped him through the trauma of his incarceration and his separation from his family. I wonder if I could have survived such persecution and torture.
Tuc escaped to Thailand in the early 1980s. He spoke good English, so became an interpreter in the camp. He told international officials about US soldiers he'd seen living in villages in Vietnam, long after the war ended. The US listed them as 'MIAs', but Tuc said they had decided to live in Vietnam and had new families. He was puzzled when US officials denied that US soldiers would do this.
He could not understand why these intelligent foreigners could not accept facts that contradicted their preconceptions. I'm reminded of how, in the same way, many Australians do not believe the stories of refugees, because they do not fit with our ideas about how people act.
Tuc was offered resettlement in the US or Australia. He chose Australia because he was disheartened by the US leaving Vietnam to the communists he believed would destroy his country. He arrived as a refugee in 1983, and worked full time in order to save to buy a home for his family, still in Vietnam.
I met him in 1988, about the same time that his wife, son and daughter finally were resettled in Australia. Tuc had been separated from them since 1975.
It was not long before Tuc was calling me 'my brother'. At first I thought this was a cultural thing. But when he called my parents 'my father and my mother', I realised he had adopted us into his family.
A Vietnamese custom is to have a special gathering for the new year,