VIVIAN PHAM

Vivian Pham’s coming-of-age debut novel, The Coconut Children, received huge acclaim when it was released earlier this year. Here, the 19-year-old Vietnamese-Australian author pens an evocative and lyrical piece on her reflections during recent isolation

strange time to be alive, and an even stranger time to be a child. Toddlers today are only doing it for the first time and should not therefore be regarded as authorities in their field. Only handfuls of humans have managed to remain in the Eden of their own imagining, never having left behind the sunlit scenery of their early years, and it is they who set examples for the rest. But most of us have lost touch with the children we once were, either simply through negligence or due to having been forced by circumstance to grow up prematurely. In spite of how convinced we may at this present moment be of our own adultness, however, there is a possibility that our younger selves never stopped believing in us. Perhaps they wake with us every morning and stay by our side throughout the day, selflessly waiting for us to pay attention.

The search for a childhood post-childhood requires time, a commodity which seems all at once ample. Due to the pandemic, many of us found ourselves at home, imprisoned in the same set of rooms some of our earliest memories took place; and, in a sense, are continuing to take place. If my parents hadn’t decided to move a couple of suburbs away in my last year of primary school, I’d only need step into the backyard to remember exactly where the trampoline used to be or dash to the doorstep to evoke my sister teaching me to tie my shoelaces in the bunny-ears method. There are, of course, certain corners in that house that I’d rather leave unimagined and doors which, when opened, lead only to the holes in my memory. But the simple fact of having once been seven or eight years old can give anyone a strange perspective on time. I may not remember much of who I was at that age, but I do remember there were people who loved me even then. Of those individuals, the sister I mentioned earlier is perhaps the most important.

Kim and I grew up in the same house, went to the same school, and slept, albeit at different altitudes, in the same bunk bed. Being six years my senior, my sister was consigned by fate to be forever wiser than me, and infinitely more generous. She didn’t only teach me my timetables and lovingly stuff spring onions into my mouth at the dinner table, she gave me things to hold and cherish. She didn’t only share with me all her favourite films, she taught me how to be a critic. The games she’d invented out of boredom before I was born taught me all I knew and needed to know about heritage, legacy and tradition. Her mind was my milieu. Have you ever loved anyone for so long that they become the context in which you just happen to occur? In this respect, I could be said to have had a similar relationship with my parents. The great P.G. Wodehouse once described his childhood, equal parts delightful and ordinary, as being unsuited to write about in an autobiography due to his father being as “plain as rice pudding”. Growing up, I had the opposite experience. Both of my parents seemed to have lived lives of epic proportions. Unlike my mum, who is a decade younger, my dad escaped his country by boat and had lived on an island and, later on, a refugee camp for some months before arriving in California.

Now we know, through archives of post-war imagery and his own cinematic storytelling, what he and others in the same boat had endured. But there wasn’t nearly so much clarity when my sister and I were growing up. My dad didn’t say much about the past, and anything he did say carried with it a subtext we couldn’t understand. It seemed that just to have a conversation with him, you’d have to reconstruct the village of Long Thành where his family’s rice paddy lay and be fluent in American tactics of land warfare. I remember feeling resentful years later because I thought he’d held up a withdrawn exterior on purpose, knowing it would make him an idol in our eyes. I thought that he’d simply decided against speaking openly and clumsily with us because any inelegant phrase would prove, once and for all, that he was human. I’m now beginning to gain a sense of the child inside him, too – one that might still be unable to understand, much less articulate, everything that has happened to him, that hasn’t learned to express the minutiae alongside the magnitude, the uneventful and even ordinary aspects of what life used to be like. As children, the grown-ups in our lives can appear deceptively grown up. We should be gentle with them, as we needed them to be with us, and try to understand them even without knowing for certain why they ended up this way. If we can forgive our parents for the mistakes they made when raising us, we can recognise the ways we have been moulded and move more freely towards who we want to become.

Luckily, there are many ways to begin a happy childhood, or to pick up from where you left off. Here are just a few. 1. Play a game. Find a deck of cards. Procure a long skipping rope. Take turns hiding and seeking. 2. Try to do the splits. 3. Give someone a present. Hold your hands behind your back and tell the receiver to close their eyes. 4. Eat a sugary breakfast cereal at your preferred time of day. 5. Consider, however briefly, the possibility that you may have some undiscovered power. 6. Begin a diary. Why were padlocked notebooks and invisible ink such mysterious attractions to us as children? I assure you that you have more secrets now than ever before. 7. Take a nap in the middle of the afternoon. 8. Ask someone if they believe in ghosts. 9. Talk to your dog, or another animal you share a personal connection with. 10. Try the hobby you’ve always wanted to. Take your interests seriously if no-one else will. Of course, this 10-step system is only to get you started. But hopefully it will remind you that you have lived a very different kind of life before, and it can be possible again.

“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood”