The Diary of Tam Do

By
Matthew Bond

A Short Reflection Submitted to the Faculty of English

at the Anglican Church Grammar School

September 2019
Dear Diary,

It has now become commonplace for me to just sit and reflect on just how lucky I am to be in the
position I am today. I broke family out from a re-education camp, I escaped a communist regime and
I survived a brain tumour all in one lifetime. Simultaneously, it is in these thoughts that I force myself
to regurgitate my infamous years. To regurgitate my years as an alcoholic, an irresponsible father
but worst of all, when I was a threat to my family. I feel now, after all these years the burden has
become too great. Therefore, I wish to share it with you…

Drunk, wet and wasted, I staggered out of the rain under the rooftop my family was once happy to
share with me. Even with my little self-conscious left undrowned, I knew I wouldn’t receive much. I
had deserted them in the time they needed me to lead them out. Out of a problem that was my
fault. It was my responsibility, and I turned my back on them, and the value I had prized myself on
most. Even after having drowned myself several times on these exact topics, it was to my horror that
when the door opened, the only figure that appeared was Anh – my cherished boy – whose eyes
were scared by fear and had hands shivering, clutching a knife. Shunned from my home, I wept and
ran away. I ran away from my family, that I had made my responsibility to bring to Australia to give
them the best lives possible. In doing so, it was on that night; I fled a coward from something more
than just my relatives, from my former identity.

Never had I experienced these emotions before. It wasn’t loneliness; it wasn’t hopelessness. I was
empty. Before this, I had always known that my wife wouldn’t have allowed me inside, and Tram and
Khoa would have stuck by her side, but I had held onto Anh. And when I was most vulnerable, he
pushed me away. It was obvious that he thought I had turned for the worst, and that I was no-longer
a positive role model for him, but we both knew this wasn’t always true. Long ago, I was his
inspiration. Previously, he would patiently listen to what I had to say. Once, I had been there to tell
him he had succeeded when he thought he had failed. But in the end, although he wanted to keep
the values from my life lessons, he didn’t want to keep me.

Yet, after sobbing day and night to myself about my misfortunes and misery, I eventually faced the
fact. It was my fault. It was I who allowed alcohol to seep into my punctured mental state. A state
that had become reality through my rashness and impulsiveness. It commenced through my duck
farm’s early days, the era that gave my family their first scent of success. Regrettably, it was not
before long that I became drunk on this sweet aroma. In an attempt to maximise profits, I bought
multiple farms, which soon collapsed and were sold for heavy losses, delivering my family back to
where we started. Impoverished. Inadvertently, the amount of pressure placed on our garments
business was now immeasurable and inadequate to support our family. Guilt and failure flooded my
mind from that day forwards. To have ravaged their economic stability with my irrational mistakes
was my tipping point. Subsequently, my mental state declined quickly, and with it the healthiness of
my relationships with my family.

After finally writing this down, I can already feel the weight of my failures from long ago finally leave
my shoulders. In an ideal world, I would undo all my mistakes and their consequences. But above all,
I would remind myself to stay positive and that life is too short to let one singular mistake define
you. Finally, it is always righteous to respect and learn from your mistakes, but always remember to
move on. For there are two times in life, there’s now and there’s too late.