Tan Le: My immigration story

Summary

In this moving talk, the speaker recounts the story of her family's escape from Vietnam, highlighting the unbreakable bonds among three generations of women. From her grandfather's despair to her mother's relentless determination for a better life in Australia, the narrative unfolds through a refugee's journey and the challenges faced in a new land. The speaker's own experiences as a young social activist and her reflections on the importance of being an outsider provide a poignant insight into resilience and the power of community.

Takeaways

• 🌊 The strength of familial bonds was forged in the traumatic experience of escaping Vietnam on a boat, which deeply influenced the speaker's life.
• 📚 The speaker's grandfather's unfulfilled dreams of freedom and unity in his country were passed down and became a driving force for the family.
• 🚢 The perilous journey to Australia by boat was a pivotal moment that defined the family's resilience and unity.
• 🏭 The family's initial life in Melbourne was marked by poverty, hard work, and the determination to integrate and succeed despite discrimination.
• 👩‍💻 The mother's relentless pursuit of education and multiple jobs exemplified the family's commitment to a better life.
• 🏡 The family's community in Footscray was a tapestry of immigrants, each with their own stories of starting anew.
• 🌱 The speaker's early experiences of hardship and community service sowed the seeds for her future social activism.
• 🏆 Being named Young Australian of the Year was a turning point that thrust the speaker into the public eye and expanded her advocacy work.
• 🌟 The speaker's realization that being an outsider can be a strength, opening doors to new possibilities and perspectives.
• 🌐 The decision to move to the US was a bold step that continued the speaker's journey of exploration and success.
• 👵 The grandmother's legacy of defiance against societal norms and her strength as a woman were a significant influence on the speaker's life and values.

Q & A

What is the main theme of the speech?

The main theme of the speech is the enduring strength of the bonds among women across three generations, particularly focusing on the resilience and determination of the speaker's family as they faced adversity and built a new life.

What significant event from the speaker's childhood is described in the speech?

The significant event described is the speaker's escape from Vietnam with her family on a small boat in the China Sea more than 30 years ago, which involved a harrowing five-day journey.

Who is the man mentioned in the first piece of the jigsaw puzzle?

The man mentioned is the speaker's grandfather, a poet and playwright whose life's work was destroyed when the communists entered Saigon, leading him to die broken by history.

What was the speaker's mother's name and what was her primary goal after her father's death?

The speaker's mother's name is Mai. Her primary goal after her father's death was to escape with her family to Australia and secure a new life.

What did the speaker's mother carry with her on the boat, and why?

The speaker's mother carried a small bottle of poison on the boat, intending to use it if they were captured by pirates, to prevent rape and ensure a quick death.

What was the first thing the speaker remembers from the boat journey?

The speaker's first memories from the boat journey include the steady beat of the engine, the bow dipping into each wave, and the vast and empty horizon.

Where did the speaker and her family settle after arriving in Australia?

The speaker and her family settled in Footscray, a working-class suburb of Melbourne known for its immigrant community.

What challenges did the speaker's mother face in her new life in Australia?

The speaker's mother faced challenges such as working long hours on farms and a car assembly line, studying English, and providing for her family despite financial constraints.

How did the speaker's mother contribute to the community after opening her computer store?

After opening her computer store, the speaker's mother contributed to the community by establishing centers to help other immigrants and people struggling with the transition to a new life.

What honor did the speaker receive as a final-year law student?

The speaker was chosen as the Young Australian of the Year during her final year of law school for her work in helping marginalized and disenfranchised communities.

What significant decision did the speaker make after completing her law degree?

After completing her law degree, the speaker decided not to pursue a career in law but to continue speaking out on issues such as youth unemployment, education, and the neglect of marginalized communities.

What does the speaker consider a potential gift from the boat journey?

The speaker considers being an outsider, a recent arrival, and new on the scene as a potential gift from the boat journey, as it allows her to maintain an outsider's perspective and not be limited by the presumptions of her province.

Outlines

00:00

🚢 Journey of Survival

The first paragraph narrates the story of a family's perilous escape from Vietnam to Australia, highlighting the strength and resilience of the bonds between three generations of women. The narrator, a girl at the time, recalls the harrowing journey across the China Sea in a small boat, enduring five days and nights with her sister, mother, and grandmother. She reflects on the impact of her grandfather's tragic life as a poet and playwright, whose hopes for his country's freedom were dashed by the communist takeover. The story also touches on the sacrifices made by her mother, who, at 18, was determined to secure a better future for her family, facing the risks of piracy, rape, and death. The family's escape and subsequent life in a refugee camp before settling in Melbourne are also described.

05:01

🌱 Roots of Resilience

The second paragraph delves into the challenges and achievements of the family as they build a new life in Melbourne. Settling in Footscray, a suburb rich with immigrant communities, the family faces poverty and discrimination but finds strength in their shared experiences and determination to succeed. The mother's relentless work ethic, from farm labor to factory work and eventually running her own businesses, is underscored. Despite the hardships, including the mother's nightmares about their escape and the daughters' experiences with racism, the family perseveres. The narrator's own journey from a dedicated student to a social activist and recognition as Young Australian of the Year is detailed, along with her mother's advice to embrace challenges and the importance of authenticity.

10:04

🌟 Legacy of Strength

The final paragraph focuses on the narrator's reflections on her family's legacy, particularly the strength and influence of her grandmother. It recounts the grandmother's extraordinary life, from her early struggles in a Confucian society to her bold legal battles against her abusive husband. The paragraph also explores the narrator's own aspirations and fears as she contemplates motherhood, considering the value of the hardships she experienced. She expresses a desire to instill in her future children the same courage and resilience that were forged during her family's escape. The narrative concludes with a poignant moment of connection with her grandmother after her death, symbolizing the enduring bond between the women in her family.

Keywords

💡Bonds of women

The 'bonds of women' refers to the strong emotional connections and mutual support that exist among women across generations. In the video, these bonds are exemplified by the shared experiences of the speaker's family, particularly during their escape from Vietnam and subsequent life in Australia. The bonds provided strength and resilience, allowing them to endure hardship and build a new life together.

💡Strength

Strength, in this context, signifies the physical and emotional power to withstand adversity. The speaker describes how the strength of the women in her family was tested and revealed during their escape, especially in the harrowing five days at sea. This strength is portrayed as a vital element that allowed them to survive and thrive.

💡Refugee

A refugee is someone who has been forced to leave their country to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster. The video script recounts the story of the speaker's family as refugees fleeing Vietnam, seeking safety and a better life in Australia. Their refugee status is central to understanding their struggles and the challenges they faced in adapting to a new culture.

💡Jigsaw puzzle

The 'jigsaw puzzle' metaphor is used to describe the process of piecing together a life story or understanding one's identity. The speaker refers to her life narrative as an ongoing puzzle, indicating that understanding oneself and one's past is a complex and evolving process. Each 'piece' of the puzzle represents a significant event or aspect of her life.

💡Poverty

Poverty is the state of being extremely poor. In the script, poverty is a reality that the speaker's family faced after arriving in Australia. It is depicted through the scarcity of resources, the need to budget carefully, and the use of secondhand clothes, which underscores the family's determination to overcome their circumstances.

💡Discrimination

Discrimination is the unfair treatment of people based on their identity or perceived differences. The video mentions instances of discrimination that the speaker faced, such as being called 'slit-eye' and seeing graffiti telling Asians to go home. These experiences highlight the challenges of integration and the resilience required to confront such prejudice.

💡Resilience

Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from difficulties. The speaker's narrative is filled with examples of resilience, from her mother's determination to escape Vietnam to the family's collective efforts to build a new life in Australia despite the hardships they faced.

💡Social activism

Social activism involves efforts to bring about social, political, or environmental change. The speaker's involvement in social activism is highlighted through her work with marginalized communities and her recognition as Young Australian of the Year. This keyword illustrates her commitment to using her experiences to advocate for others.

💡Outsider

An 'outsider' is someone who does not belong to or is not part of a particular group. The speaker reflects on being an outsider and how this perspective has been both a challenge and an advantage. It has allowed her to bring fresh insights and to challenge established norms, which is a recurring theme in her narrative.

💡Optimism

Optimism is a hopeful and positive outlook. The script mentions 'implacable optimism' as a driving force behind the speaker's actions and decisions. Despite facing significant obstacles, she and her team maintained a positive attitude, which was crucial in overcoming the challenges they encountered.

💡Privilege

Privilege refers to special rights, advantages, or immunities granted or available only to a person or group. The speaker expresses concern about the potential negative effects of privilege on her future children, fearing it could lead to complacency. She values the challenges she faced, which she believes contributed to her strength and character.

Highlights

The strength of bonds among women over three generations shaped the life of a young girl.

The girl's experience of escaping on a boat with her family in the China Sea more than 30 years ago.

The girl's grandfather was a poet and playwright whose life's work was destroyed by the communists.

The girl's mother, Mai, was determined to escape and start a new life in Australia.

The perilous journey on a boat disguised as a fishing vessel with the constant threat of pirates.

The emotional memory of the boat journey, including the encounter with pirates and the death of a fellow passenger.

The family's arrival in Melbourne and the challenges of starting a new life in a multicultural suburb.

The mother's relentless work ethic, studying English, and gaining IT qualifications while working multiple jobs.

The girl's experience of poverty, including wearing secondhand clothes and enduring racial slurs.

The mother's nightmares about the boat journey and the girl's role in comforting her.

The mother's entrepreneurial spirit, opening a computer store and later a beauty salon.

The girl's recognition as Young Australian of the Year for her social activism.

The girl's struggle with her new public identity as a social activist and her mother's encouragement to persevere.

The realization that being an outsider can be a strength, not a weakness.

The decision to move to the US based on a hunch and the continuation of the girl's adventurous spirit.

The grandmother's story of overcoming adversity and her impact on the family's resilience.

The emotional connection to the grandmother's death and the warmth of her hand as a symbol of family bonds.

The contemplation of passing on the family's legacy of resilience to future generations.

Transcripts

How can I speak in 10 minutes

about the bonds of women over three generations,

about how the astonishing strength of those bonds

took hold in the life of a four-year-old girl

huddled with her young sister, her mother and her grandmother

for five days and nights in a small boat in the China Sea

more than 30 years ago.

Bonds that took hold in the life of that small girl

and never let go --

that small girl now living in San Francisco

and speaking to you today.

This is not a finished story.

It is a jigsaw puzzle still being put together.

Let me tell you about some of the pieces.

Imagine the first piece: a man burning his life's work.

He is a poet, a playwright,

a man whose whole life

had been balanced on the single hope of his country's unity and freedom.

Imagine him as the communists enter Saigon --

confronting the fact that his life had been a complete waste.

Words, for so long his friends, now mocked him.

He retreated into silence.

He died broken by history.

He is my grandfather.

I never knew him in real life.

But our lives are much more than our memories.

My grandmother never let me forget his life.

My duty was not to allow it to have been in vain,

and my lesson was to learn that, yes, history tried to crush us,

but we endured.

The next piece of the jigsaw is of a boat in the early dawn

slipping silently out to sea.

My mother, Mai, was 18 when her father died --

already in an arranged marriage,

already with two small girls.

For her, life had distilled itself into one task:

the escape of her family and a new life in Australia.

It was inconceivable to her that she would not succeed.

So after a four-year saga that defies fiction,

a boat slipped out to sea disguised as a fishing vessel.

All the adults knew the risks.

The greatest fear was of pirates, rape and death.

Like most adults on the boat,

my mother carried a small bottle of poison.

If we were captured, first my sister and I,

then she and my grandmother would drink.

My first memories are from the boat --

the steady beat of the engine,

the bow dipping into each wave,

the vast and empty horizon.

I don't remember the pirates who came many times,

but were bluffed by the bravado of the men on our boat,

or the engine dying and failing to start for six hours.

But I do remember the lights on the oil rig off the Malaysian coast

and the young man who collapsed and died,

the journey's end too much for him,

and the first apple I tasted, given to me by the men on the rig.

No apple has ever tasted the same.

After three months in a refugee camp, we landed in Melbourne.

And the next piece of the jigsaw is about four women

across three generations shaping a new life together.

We settled in Footscray,

a working-class suburb whose demographic is layers of immigrants.

Unlike the settled middle-class suburbs, whose existence I was oblivious of,

there was no sense of entitlement in Footscray.

The smells from shop doors were from the rest of the world.

And the snippets of halting English

were exchanged between people who had one thing in common:

They were starting again.

My mother worked on farms,

then on a car assembly line,

working six days, double shifts.

Somehow, she found time to study English

and gain IT qualifications.

We were poor.

All the dollars were allocated

and extra tuition in English and mathematics was budgeted for

regardless of what missed out,

which was usually new clothes;

they were always secondhand.

Two pairs of stockings for school,

each to hide the holes in the other.

A school uniform down to the ankles, because it had to last for six years.

And there were rare but searing chants of "slit-eye"

and the occasional graffiti:

"Asian, go home."

Go home to where?

Something stiffened inside me.

There was a gathering of resolve and a quiet voice saying,

"I will bypass you."

My mother, my sister and I slept in the same bed.

My mother was exhausted each night,

but we told one another about our day

and listened to the movements of my grandmother around the house.

My mother suffered from nightmares, all about the boat.

And my job was to stay awake until her nightmares came

so I could wake her.

She opened a computer store,

then studied to be a beautician and opened another business.

And the women came with their stories

about men who could not make the transition,

angry and inflexible,

and troubled children caught between two worlds.

Grants and sponsors were sought.

Centers were established.

I lived in parallel worlds.

In one, I was the classic Asian student,

relentless in the demands that I made on myself.

In the other, I was enmeshed in lives that were precarious,

tragically scarred by violence, drug abuse and isolation.

But so many over the years were helped.

And for that work, when I was a final-year law student,

I was chosen as the Young Australian of the Year.

And I was catapulted from one piece of the jigsaw to another,

and their edges didn't fit.

Tan Le, anonymous Footscray resident,

was now Tan Le, refugee and social activist,

invited to speak in venues she had never heard of

and into homes whose existence she could never have imagined.

I didn't know the protocols.

I didn't know how to use the cutlery.

I didn't know how to talk about wine.

I didn't know how to talk about anything.

I wanted to retreat to the routines and comfort

of life in an unsung suburb --

a grandmother, a mother and two daughters

ending each day as they had for almost 20 years,

telling one another the story of their day

and falling asleep, the three of us still in the same bed.

I told my mother I couldn't do it.

She reminded me that I was now the same age she had been

when we boarded the boat.

"No" had never been an option.

"Just do it," she said,

"and don't be what you're not."

So I spoke out on youth unemployment and education

and the neglect of the marginalized and disenfranchised.

And the more candidly I spoke, the more I was asked to speak.

I met people from all walks of life,

so many of them doing the thing they loved,

living on the frontiers of possibility.

And even though I finished my degree,

I realized I could not settle into a career in law.

There had to be another piece of the jigsaw.

And I realized, at the same time,

that it is OK to be an outsider,

a recent arrival,

new on the scene --

and not just OK,

but something to be thankful for,

perhaps a gift from the boat.

Because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons,

can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province.

I have stepped outside my comfort zone enough now

to know that, yes, the world does fall apart,

but not in the way that you fear.

Possibilities that would not have been allowed

were outrageously encouraged.

There was an energy there,

an implacable optimism,

a strange mixture of humility and daring.

So I followed my hunches.

I gathered around me a small team of people

for whom the label "It can't be done" was an irresistible challenge.

For a year, we were penniless.

At the end of each day, I made a huge pot of soup

which we all shared.

We worked well into each night.

Most of our ideas were crazy,

but a few were brilliant,

and we broke through.

I made the decision to move to the US after only one trip.

My hunches again.

Three months later, I had relocated, and the adventure has continued.

Before I close, though, let me tell you about my grandmother.

She grew up at a time when Confucianism was the social norm

and the local mandarin was the person who mattered.

Life hadn't changed for centuries.

Her father died soon after she was born.

Her mother raised her alone.

At 17, she became the second wife of a mandarin whose mother beat her.

With no support from her husband,

she caused a sensation by taking him to court

and prosecuting her own case,

and a far greater sensation when she won.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

"It can't be done" was shown to be wrong.

I was taking a shower in a hotel room in Sydney

the moment she died,

600 miles away, in Melbourne.

I looked through the shower screen and saw her standing on the other side.

I knew she had come to say goodbye.

My mother phoned minutes later.

A few days later,

we went to a Buddhist temple in Footscray and sat around her casket.

We told her stories and assured her that we were still with her.

At midnight, the monk came and told us he had to close the casket.

My mother asked us to feel her hand.

She asked the monk,

"Why is it that her hand is so warm and the rest of her is so cold?"

"Because you have been holding it since this morning," he said.

"You have not let it go."

If there is a sinew in our family, it runs through the women.

Given who we were and how life had shaped us,

we can now see that the men that might have come into our lives

would have thwarted us.

Defeat would have come too easily.

Now I would like to have my own children, and I wonder about the boat.

Who could ever wish it on their own?

Yet I am afraid of privilege,

of ease,

of entitlement.

Can I give them a bow in their lives, dipping bravely into each wave,

the unperturbed and steady beat of the engine,

the vast horizon that guarantees nothing?

I don't know.

But if I could give it

and still see them safely through,

I would.

(Applause)

Trevor Neilson: And also, Tan's mother is here today,

in the fourth or fifth row.

(Applause)