We Are Here by Cat Thao Nguyen

this was his way of sugar-coating Father Bill’s death. It would have been fine to me. Father Bill was slightly deaf and would yell. His head had scales and hosted random hairs. The moderate hump on his back seemed to grow bigger each time he leaned down to speak to someone. Anyway, Father Stephen’s arrival was a few years later.) At the time, I didn’t understand how our neighbour’s beard stayed on his face. Was it glued on? It was a constant source of fascination.
    One afternoon we had an early mark. Instead of waiting for the man and his son, I decided to walk home to surprise my mother. When I got home I thought I would increase the surprise by sneaking in the side entrance. There was a tall wooden fence blocking the side passageway. Not wanting to spoil the surprise and go in the front entrance, I decided to deftly and mischievously climb the fence with my blue St Jerome’s bag still on my back. When I got to the top, I lifted one leg over to straddle the fence, but the weight of the bag shifted and I lost my balance. I plunged head first onto the cold, unforgiving concrete below. My right temple made contact and I heard clearly the sound of the collision—a combination of a high bing and solid thump.
    Still intent on surprising my mother, I got up and silently entered the back door. When my mother saw me, she was indeed surprised. She forced me to lie down while she inspected my temple, which immediately bruised and became swollen like a plum. For the next week, she rolled a boiled egg over my head so that the egg could absorb the bruise. The bruise went away but the bump didn’t. It’s a permanent reminder of my reckless fearlessness and a trace of my mother’s ability just to keep going, even when it hurts.

    My mother was pregnant. The pregnancy was fine but, as usual, my mother worked very hard. Australia’s bicentennial year—celebrating two hundred years since the arrival of the First Fleet—drew to a close and 1989 dawned. The baby wasn’t due for three months, but my mother went into labour. The baby was lying horizontally in my mother’s womb and had to be delivered by caesarean. My baby brother, Vinh, was lifted out of my mother’s belly, wrapped in a translucent film, uncrying, eyes closed. He weighed 1.3 kilograms and was immediately placed in an incubator at Bankstown hospital, about a fifteen-minute drive from our house. He would live there for the next three months. My mother believed he was a precious creature sent to her from the heavens.
    Several times we would be called to the hospital in the middle of the night because his heart had stopped beating. The nurses asked my mother whether we would like to invite a spiritual leader to attend because it was possible death was imminent. A priest was called and he and my mother prayed together. My mother came home on one of these nights, kneeled down in front of the altar in our home, which had a picture of my deceased paternal grandfather on one side, the Virgin Mary in the centre, both beneath a crucifix which hung politely on a nail. She decided to strike a bargain with God, the Asian way. She would be prepared to lose all her money, all her material possessions, if only she was allowed to keep her son, this delicate fragile gift. That night she had a dream. A man dressed as a priest came to her and said that he had chased away all the demons lurking about ready to take Vinh away. The priest said that Vinh would now be safe. After that night, when the bargain was struck and she awoke from the dream, Vinh’s heart never stopped beating again.
    As I entered the hospital with my mother to visit Vinh a few weeks after he was born, I held onto the huge drawing I had made which was to be hung from Vinh’s incubator. It was of Vinh as a superhero with a V stamped on a crest emblazoned across his chest. The colourful picture was drawn on a sheet torn from an industrial-sized roll of paper, given to us by a friend of my father’s who worked in a