What shines through is Ahn Do’s love for his family, and his gratitude for his mother in particular who worked so hard when the family broke up. In many ways the family acted in the ways that most evoke fear and disdain for the Australian population- the extended family living in crowded conditions in a factory, the domestic sweating of female family members, the buying up of property- but all these activities made complete sense within the cultural world-view and history of this Vietnamese family. At a time when our government has twisted the language to conflate ‘asylum’ and ‘illegal’, it was instructive to read of the fear and precariousness of their trip by sea to Australia, and their deep gratitude to the then-government for offering a new life to the family. The story was far better than the telling of it.

The book was organized chronologically as Ahn Do told his story of travelling to Australia from Vietnam as a ‘boat-person’, his family’s striving for financial security, the break-up of his parents’ marriage, the progress of his own career and marriage, and his reconciliation with his estranged father. I must say that it’s not a structure that particularly satisfied me because it left you skating across the topic without tunnelling very deep. The book reads like a series of stand-up routines, with very few of them extending beyond two pages (and sometimes much shorter) often with a rather inflated hook sentence to draw you in, and a soft punchline at the end. I must confess that while I know who he is, I can’t remember actually seeing him perform, as he tends to work on commercial channels and aimed at a younger demographic than I.

Comedians’ autobiographies are not a must-read for me: I’ve read Judith Lucy and um…… surely Clive James is more than a comedian? So let’s just say that I’m drawing from a very small puddle of familiarity with the genre.Īhn Do is a young Australian comedian of Vietnamese heritage. This was a bookgroup selection, which I would never have chosen for myself.

The luckiest refugee