Nghiem was the first person I went to. He was a gentle, frog-faced man I’d first met in Saigon in the last weeks of the ancien régime, and recontacted later in Sydney in the early eighties, when he’d resettled there and I was trying to set up some access to the Vietnamese target. An engineer by training, and a former Colombo Plan student in Australia, he had been one the first to be allowed in after the fall. Nghiem had looked askance at my attempts to draw him into the net – not everyone welcomes an approach from a spy – but we had remained friends, though I hadn’t seen him for years. I guessed he’d retired.
I still had his number and rang him the next morning in Lindfield, where he lived with his Australian wife Ann and the youngest of their four children. He sounded glad enough and didn’t object when I invited myself round after work.
‘I’m doing some consultancy work and I need your advice.’
A cover works best mixed with the truth. I thought it best not to reveal my true purpose at this stage.
‘It’s about the Vietnamese community,’ I explained that evening in his sitting room. Ann had offered me a peck on the cheek and a cup of tea and discreetly withdrawn. I wondered how much Nghiem had told her of my past approach.
‘I have a client who wants to do business in Vietnam, and needs to recruit some talent locally. People he can trust, whose heart is in Australia even if they were born in Vietnam. But I’ve lost touch, and I don’t know where to start. Can you give me a few clues? Who to talk to, who to avoid, that sort of thing?’
‘I don’t have much to do with them any more,’ Nghiem said.
‘Maybe some basic information, for a start. What’s the community these days? A hundred thousand?’
‘In Sydney? Oh less than that. Eighty at most, if you include the Chinese from Vietnam as well. Maybe he should look at those, if he’s interested in business.’
‘Maybe. But not counting them? Just ethnic Vietnamese?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe fifty thousand.’
‘Where are they mainly? In Cabramatta?’
‘There, and Fairfield. They’re mostly southerners there, and Buddhist, and a lot of the Sino-Vietnamese have settled there too. The northerners and the Catholics congregate more around Marrickville, and you’ve got Bankstown as well, which is a bit of a mixture.’ Nghiem paused to think. ‘I’d say Cabramatta’s your best bet. That’s where there’s the most business activity. Have you been there lately? It’s amazing how the place has grown.’
‘You read some alarming statistics in the press, all that unemployment.’
‘I know. That’s worrying.’ Nghiem’s kind face wrinkled in concern. ‘But that’s mainly the uneducated, the ones who came here without their families, the farmers and the fishermen. Some of them have a hard time assimilating, so they stick too much together.’
Nghiem came from what used to be called the mandarin class: his father had been a senior official in the north, under the French, there were lawyers and doctors in the family. People like Hao. I remembered the refugees I’d met in the camps, queuing up to be interviewed by immigration and UN officials (and by more devious types like me, masquerading as humanitarian do-gooders). Many of them had been simple folk, straight from their villages, with little education and no concept of the outside world. And the youngsters, the draft-dodgers, ducking the new war which the communist Vietnamese were now waging in Cambodia, after driving the Khmer Rouge out in 1979, or who were simply sent out by themselves, as young as twelve or thirteen sometimes, to serve as spearhead, an anchor for a family to follow. You could see there the seeds of some long-term problems. Yet many of those had done well, some becoming millionaires, and not all the former mandarins had been so successful.
‘What about these gangs you read about? How serious are they, really.’
‘You know what the press is like,’ Nghiem said. ‘A lot of it’s exaggerated. There’s a problem there alright, but I don’t know much about them.’
Like most of his kind Nghiem had little time for the rougher elements in the Vietnamese community.
‘One thing I am worried about is those extremists,’ I went on. ‘You know, all those ex-military types, who want to turn Ho Chi Minh City back into Saigon. They’re the last thing my client needs. Any sign of them to look out for?’Nghiem gave me a patient look. I remembered the way he’d shrunk back when I’d asked him years ago to introduce me to other Vietnamese.
‘Those you’ll know soon enough! But I wouldn’t worry too much about them. They’re not as strong as they used to be. A lot of Vietnamese go back to Vietnam on visits nowadays and that’s taken the wind out of their sails … sorry Paul, I wish I could be more helpful.’
‘No, thanks Nghiem, you’ve been a great help.’
I took my leave of Ann, who looked secretly relieved.
‘If you really want to know more about those people,’ Nghiem said on the doorstep, ‘why don’t you ask Jack Lipton?’
He was next on my list. But Jack and I were both busy the next day, and I had to wait until Wednesday to see him. Once again I was conscious of time flying past.