The Goat Milk Baby

Jeanette Nguyêt Pham

Description

The autobiography of a Vietnamese-born Australian scientist who navigated through early difficulties to become a better, stronger, and happier person.

When a little girl was born in Saigon a few days after the end of the war, she was named, Minh Nguyêt (Bright Moon). When the baby was two months old and her mother had no breastmilk left, a kind relative gifted the family a goat. Every morning for three months, her mother gathered enough milk to feed Minh Nguyêt. And so began the goat milk baby’s journey through life.

In a captivating memoir, Pham chronicles her family history and coming-of-age experiences as she relied on her instincts, learned from mistakes, focused on her studies, married, became a retail pharmacist, had a baby, and gave her blessing for her husband to travel to Australia for work. But when South Vietnam began losing one town after another to the Viet Cong and she made desperate arrangements to escape to Australia, Pham had no idea that she was securing passage on the last plane to leave Saigon. While disclosing how she rebuilt her life and overcame diverse challenges, Pham also reveals how an encounter with a special bacterium presented her with an unexpected yet exciting scientific discovery.

The Goat Milk Baby is the autobiography of a Vietnamese-born Australian scientist who navigated through early difficulties to become a better, stronger, and happier person.

Sujets

• Refugees
• Personal Memoirs
• Mindfulness
• The Phone House
• Difficulty
• Biography
• Mindfulness (Buddhism)
• Happy
• Mutants
• Lucky
• Autobiography
• Yersinia

Informations

• Publié par: Balboa Press AU
• Date de parution: 27 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781982297732
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Goat Milk Baby
Memoir of a Vietnamese-Born Australian Scientist
Jeanette Nguyêt Pham


 
Copyright © 2023 Jeanette Nguyêt Pham.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
Balboa Press
A Division of Hay House
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.balboapress.com.au
AU TFN: 1 800 844 925 (Toll Free inside Australia)
AU Local: [phone] ([phone] from outside Australia)
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-9822-9772-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-9822-9773-2 (e)
 
 
 
Balboa Press rev. date: 07/25/2023
Contents
Preface
 
1.The Goat Is Gone
2.My Mother
3.My Father
4.It’s Quiet
5.Ghost Stories
6.The Rented Terrace
7.Please Can I Go to School?
8.Cooking Rice
9.The Poorest Girl in the Prestigious School
10.The American Embassy
11.My First Student
12.Shorts for Orphans
13.Unprepared Retail Pharmacist
14.The Christmas Logs
15.The Purple Bougainvillea
16.The Married Life
17.The Passport
18.The Refugees
19.The Oldest Trainee
20.A Good Team
21.A Very Special Friend
22.Mindfulness Practice
23.First Trip to France
24.Our House
25.Rehabilitation
26.The Unexpected Project
27.The Proof of Continents Link
28.The Mutants
29.The Best Beer
30.My Eldest Sister
31.Retirement
32.The Desk
33.Don’t Be Afraid
34.My Sister “Gem Lotus”
35.Princess “Gem Lotus”
36.Covid and the Dahlia
37.My Younger Brother
38.The “Phoenix”
 
Acknowledgement
Preface
Dear Readers,
A few days after my seventy-seventh birthday, during one of my three times a week forty-minute walks in the neighbourhood, on the lovely path around the university campus, a thought jumped into my head: I am the luckiest person!
Where does that come from? I realized the smooth paved path in the natural strip peppered with gum leaves and nuts was indeed a comfortable environment for happy thoughts. I was lucky to be still in good health seven years after my retirement from forty years of service.
A few walks later, it dawned on me I might be the happiest person too! I had everything I had ever wished and much more. After more walking and more digging into my past, I worked out what made me the person I am today.
I was really excited when I realized I can share my experiences and perhaps my luck and my happiness, as they are one. A life without struggles would soon become boring, while early difficulties often help us appreciate what we have even more. They also make us a better, stronger and happier person if we managed to overcome our weaknesses.
The last but not least of that line of thoughts was that my ultimate dream of helping underprivileged children will be fulfilled, as the totality of the sale of my memoir will go to the charity funds I have been supporting.
1
The Goat Is Gone
“Mummy, the goat is gone!” my seven-year-old brother cried out when he opened the door of our rented terrace one morning in February 1946. The cord my father used to tie the goat to the lone jackfruit tree in the tiny front yard was there, but the precious animal was nowhere to be seen.
Traditionally, our given names take inspiration from flowers, things in nature, or desirable qualities. As I was born in autumn 1945, a few days after the end of the war, around the time of moon festival, my parents gave me the name Minh Nguyệt (Bright Moon).
When I was two months old, my mother had no milk left to breastfeed her baby daughter. Food was scarce. She gave me the liquid of rice porridge sweetened with a little brown sugar my father had bought on the black market.
It was a stroke of luck when a kind relative, realizing the situation, gave us a goat that had borne babies not long before that. Another luck was the mature jackfruit tree in the front yard. The goat apparently loved jackfruit leaves.
At first, my parents wondered where the baby goats were but did not think much about them soon after. Every morning, for three months, my mother would wash her hands, clean the goat’s nipples, and get enough milk to feed me.
When the goat disappeared, my father went for hours looking in vain for her in the neighbourhood.
A few months of goat milk allowed me to move on to rice porridge and other semisolid food. When I was a young adult, everyone said I was a little stronger and taller than my three older sisters at the same age. I often thought of the rich nutrients in the goat milk I had received as a young baby and thanked the baby goats whose bad fortune gave me a good start in life.
Besides the episode linked with the goat, each year the jackfruit tree gave us several enormous fruits weighing around three kilograms each. The yellow flesh was deliciously fragrant, sweet, and crunchy, a special treat for us all. The boiled seeds tasted like chestnuts. Some years when there were too many fruits, my father had to pluck off some while they were still green and small, double the size of a large grapefruit.
Green jackfruits made wonderful dishes, especially appreciated by vegetarians. My mother would gently boil them in a large pot of water for about half an hour, until just tender. After outside layer was shaved off, the inside was sliced thinly and mixed with crushed roasted peanuts or sesame seeds, shredded Vietnamese mint, and a dressing of sweet, sour, and spicy fish sauce or soy sauce for a vegetarian meal—my favourite salad, virtually free. For a more luxurious version, my mother would add a few slices of cooked pork belly and a few cooked school prawns, a truly delicious and healthy dish. She would also make a lovely soup with green jackfruit and prawns topped with shredded coriander leaves and green onions.
Sometimes my mother made an absolutely beautiful vegetarian stew with chunks of green jackfruit and fried tofu seasoned with soy sauce and pepper. What a wonderful tree! When I was in my twenties, the jackfruit tree died of old age. We truly missed it.
Before I was born, my parents had three boys and three girls aged from seven to seventeen, effectively one or two years between them. When my older brother Khánh (the Bell) was six, my mother found out she was going to have another baby. It was quite unexpected. Then three years later came my younger brother Thanh (Delicate). We were referred to as the little ones.
In February 1945, with a relative normality in everyday activities starting again in Saigon, my father, a schoolteacher in the government system, was summoned to a post in Saigon. My pregnant mother followed my father to his new post. They brought along my six-year-old brother Khánh and the two eldest, my seventeen-year-old brother Thạch (Precious Stone), who was quite ill, and his younger sister Nga (Swan), aged sixteen, to help my mother. They left the three middle ones, my older brother Quí (Precious) and his two younger sisters Hương (Fragrance) and Liên (Lotus), in a village in Nha Trang with my maternal grandmother, who was in her late sixties. Nha Trang was a beach town in the centre of Vietnam, where my father was a schoolteacher before the Second World War. My parents were not sure about the accommodation the government had promised for newly arriving public servants. My father eventually went back for my three older siblings a few months later.
My brother Thạch passed away when I was three months old. My poor mother never completely got over the loss of her firstborn, a kind-hearted, bright, gentle, sportive, and handsome young man. My mother used to tell me about him loving to swim along the beach in Nha Trang. One day my brother caught a cold and never recovered from his pneumonia. When my family moved to Saigon, our cousin who was a doctor found out Thạch had tuberculosis. My poor brother loved so much his new baby sister but refrained from embracing her and instead kissed her heel for fear of infecting her. My mother told me years later when I was old enough to understand. Thạch died in his prime due to the lack of antibiotics.
My mother eventually found consolation and peace in the study of Buddhist philosophy, having learned the impermanent nature of all things and acceptance.
2
My Mother
My mother’s given name was Thược Dược (Dahlia) but misspelled in her birth certificate as “Dực.” She was a daughter of a mandarin at the emperor of An Nam’s court, as Vietnam