A Great Place to Raise a Family

Tracey Lien’s A Great Place to Raise a Family begins in Sydney in December 2005, immediately after the Cronulla riots, and follows the Luu family, a working-class Chinese Australian family of Teochew-Vietnamese background living in the fictional suburb of Mirabong. The central event is apparently simple: the Luus return home from Hungry Jack’s and discover that their house has been violently ransacked. A front gate has been torn from its tracks, a window smashed with a brick and kicked through, furniture overturned, drawers emptied and possessions scattered everywhere. Yet almost nothing valuable has been taken. The television remains. The computer remains. Chancey’s gold jewellery, including pieces once sewn into clothing when she fled Vietnam, is left behind. The only missing object is a huge ceramic treasure chest made at school by ten-year-old Fiona Luu. The bizarre theft becomes the mechanism through which every member of the family is forced to confront a secret.

The timing is crucial. Only days earlier, thousands of white Australians had gathered at Cronulla Beach and attacked people perceived as Middle Eastern. The riots dominate television and public conversation, creating an atmosphere of racial fear that reaches far beyond Cronulla. Fiona, who has never been to the beach despite dreaming of it, absorbs the violence as a child does: incompletely but intensely. Her great-aunt Ah Sim, however, understands it through the memory of previous catastrophes. Ah Sim lives in a council flat overlooking Cronulla Beach and witnesses the riot from nearby. She sees young men wrapped in Australian flags, hears the chanting and watches the crowd become violent. Most disturbingly, she sees a white neighbourhood boy she knows, nicknamed Germany, participating. To Ah Sim, this proves that ordinary, apparently decent people can be absorbed into collective cruelty.

Terrified, Ah Sim flees Cronulla in the middle of the night and goes to the Luus’ home. Tommy, Fiona’s father, dismisses her fear because the rioters are targeting “Lebanese” people, not Asians. Ah Sim thinks this distinction is dangerously naïve. Her life has taught her that hatred expands. She survived political upheaval, war, flight from Vietnam and refugee camps, and she remembers Maoist China’s campaign against sparrows as an example of ordinary people participating in destructive collective madness. When Fiona asks why the rioters looked angry, Ah Sim insists they looked frightened. For her, fear is the novel’s most dangerous force because frightened people surrender judgement and then justify cruelty as self-protection.
After the burglary, Tommy claims to call the police. He sends Fiona to stay with Ah Sim while the family cleans the house. But Fiona soon discovers something strange. Her friends Dazza and Eric Seng tell her that their older brother Bunny, a junior police officer, says no burglary was reported in Mirabong. The police never came because, according to official records, nobody called. Fiona cannot reconcile this with her parents’ story. Her father explicitly said he contacted them. She begins investigating with the earnestness of a ten-year-old detective, convinced that adults are hiding something.