Vietnam & Gratitude.

Join my guest, Hue as she takes us along for the ride of her life!

From fleeing Vietnam in a boat, to making the most of every second of life, you'll be inspired by the struggles Hue & her family endured but how they have come out on the other side full of gratitude and peace.

Thank you Hue for sharing your incredible story with me. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to the Uncommon Exposé where I want to change your life by sharing someone else's. If you've got an open mind then please join me and my guests as we share their incredible, inspiring, true stories. Good morning, welcome to my podcast. I am so grateful that you've reached out to share your story with me today. I am super excited for you to come on and tell me about your experience. So welcome. Thank you so much, Shay. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're welcome. No, thank you. So let's just dive straight in and you'll introduce yourself, tell us what you're going to be talking about, and then we'll

SPEAKER_00: 0:42

continue. Fantastic. So my name is Hui. I'm a mum of two. I've got an eight-year-old and an 11-year-old. I'm 46. Yes, 46. And a resident of Greater Springfield. Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 0:56

Yeah. Amazing. All right. So what are you going to be talking to us about today? I

SPEAKER_00: 0:59

thought today I'd share my experience growing up as a refugee because a lot of my friends and colleagues, they don't realize that that is my background because they know me as someone who's pretty much part of the community. And yeah, I don't think anyone's really asked or realized that that's my background. And that background has really shaped who I am today all my values and and one of my biggest values is actually gratitude

SPEAKER_01: 1:25

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 1:26

right massive value I put that into everything I do yeah

SPEAKER_01: 1:29

amazing all right so let's start from the beginning um and just where it all starts for you you think

SPEAKER_00: 1:35

yeah absolutely so um I arrived in Australia as a four-year-old um and I came to Australia by plane but before that my family actually left Vietnam um on a boat

SPEAKER_01: 1:48

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 1:48

and the way my parents told the story is that the they planned the escape because during the Vietnam War which ended in 1975 the communists took over and my dad was actually fighting against them to retain the country and of course the Americans and Australians lost so therefore my dad lost and at the time they were just basically rounding up all the people who were opposed to them and sticking them in concentration camps to re-educate them and so my parents at the time with two young children like yes this no future for us here yeah so it's not only them but i believe about two million people left vietnam for that very same reason yes that's it's insane yeah because they did not see a future for their families if they stayed so um my my dad was one of those people and he said right so they spent a whole year um afterwards planning this escape and they built this boat a fishing boat

SPEAKER_01: 2:46

oh your parents built a

SPEAKER_00: 2:48

boat yeah not just them but like they built it as a uh I guess like a fishing boat. So the authorities saw it like they're trying to rebuild and, you know, it's a fishing boat. But what happened was they planned this escape and they had mostly family. There were 77 people.

SPEAKER_02: 3:04

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 3:04

Right? On this boat that was three meters wide by 11 meters long. Jeez. 77 people. Oh my goodness. Did they

SPEAKER_01: 3:14

just try to fit as

SPEAKER_00: 3:15

many people on as they could? And more people jumped on and just became a stowaways. Wow. until they got off the other side. But it was crazy. I was two and a half when that all happened, and my brother was one. So you can imagine two 20-something-year-olds. They were my parents. My grandparents were on board, my cousins, you know, a whole bunch of people and some random people as well. Yeah, they all left and thought, well, we may as well risk our lives. It's better than what we have here. So you can just imagine the desperation that people must have felt to do that. I can't imagine myself, you know, with my family no everything if

SPEAKER_01: 3:54

it like gives me goosebumps anytime I watch anything on tv or read any books or anything that have had that kind of situation of having to flee with small children it's insane the stories yes do you have any memories of being on the boat

SPEAKER_00: 4:07

I personally don't have memories because I think I was too young but um when my parents told the story it was very much like the waves were like scary you know um and they we were out in the ocean for three days Yeah, wow. you know necklaces or whatever she stuck it in my food pouch so they didn't check there oh really yeah and there was rape and yeah that was going to be

SPEAKER_01: 5:00

my question were they yeah

SPEAKER_00: 5:02

apparently

SPEAKER_01: 5:02

there were four nice but obviously

SPEAKER_00: 5:04

no they weren't nice so apparently there were four yeah there were four girls teenage girls who got raped oh wow I think tried to jump overboard they fished her out and they yeah oh wow it wasn't very nice but then they yeah they took everything and then popped everyone back on the boat and apparently the next day that's when the boat died and we were just really lucky because we were rescued by an oil tanker

SPEAKER_01: 5:33

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 5:33

a Malaysian oil tanker and brought back to Malaysia where most of the Vietnamese refugees ended up I think a lot of them anyway so we were there for 18 months wow so at the time mum and dad had my brother and I and then in the 18 months I don't know how but then managed to conceive my other brother because that bit I do remember so I don't remember everything but I do remember snippets of what it was like because I was in Malaysia in Malaysia yeah so the the memories that flash up to me was um us kids playing in the church yard and all I remember is orange cosmos flowers yeah so every time I see a cosmos flower it just pops like these memories are really yeah are they positive memories for you or they were just memories I don't know if they were they weren't bad memories they're just memories and yeah Just flashed back to that church yard and these kids running around. I guess they were happy because we were playing. Yeah. And then also the queues lighting up in the camps to get food.

SPEAKER_01: 6:32

In Malaysia.

SPEAKER_00: 6:32

In Malaysia. Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01: 6:34

So was it like a refugee

SPEAKER_00: 6:36

camp in Malaysia? Yeah, it was a proper refugee camp on an island called Pilau Bidong. I think it's now decommissioned. But if you Google it, it's eerie, like it's freaky. Yeah, okay. Because it's ghost town now. Yeah. But it was just like a shanty town with loads of people. loads of people um and so we were like we were given food and i remember um there were times when mom and dad came back with soup and there'll be grubs in it you know like just just stuff like that those memories i remember rubs that are not supposed to be okay okay yeah um yeah so those those kind of flashbacks i remember yeah and my cousin's eye uh digging underneath the the houses to make tunnels just to play because you know we were kids and there was nothing there so those memories i still have yeah not much else you Because the struggles, I was too young to really realize what they were. And then in 1983, we got sponsored over to Australia because my auntie somehow was over here first. So she sponsored us over. And I was poor. So I was quite lucky in that sense that when I arrived in Australia, I was so young that I could really immerse myself in the culture and stuff. And then when we got to Australia, we were in a in a camp it's like is it a refugee camp no it's um you know when they detention center oh okay for a little bit for a little bit until they they worked out what they wanted to do with us and then yeah and then we got our first rental in all of us five of us in this little one bedroom house at Dara oh like it wasn't a house it was someone's bedroom in Dara that we rented for a while until we got our commission house at Mala oh wow so that's why yeah that's why Mala and Durak is so concentrated with Vietnamese people yeah everyone's sort of like that's where everyone ended up yeah um yeah so we were there for a while mom and dad are actually still in jurang yeah um because that's where their community is

SPEAKER_01: 8:31

yeah have you seen or read the book boy swallowed universe

SPEAKER_00: 8:35

uh ages ago well

SPEAKER_01: 8:36

they brief they talk about the vietnamese population in um that's set in

SPEAKER_00: 8:42

is that cabramatta or somewhere down south i can't remember

SPEAKER_01: 8:45

no no just um inala oh okay yeah inala

SPEAKER_00: 8:48

and where was the first place you said that was inala uh Dara. Dara, yeah, it's in

SPEAKER_01: 8:53

Dara too. Oh,

SPEAKER_00: 8:54

there you go. I'll have to check it out again. It's an

SPEAKER_01: 8:55

excellent book, but unrelated to your story, so I was just curious. But it does mention

SPEAKER_00: 9:00

how... So, yeah, one of my heroes is actually like Arne Doe because he wrote a book about the happiest refugees. Yes. That's what it's all about. And, yeah, our experiences are very similar because he came here quite young as well. Yeah. And so I was lucky in the sense that I didn't have to worry about the identity crisis because I know a lot of teenagers who were... you know, came from one culture and then plonked into another. They don't know where they belong. Yeah. Because I kind of went to school here, started primary school here. Assimilated. Yeah. So I was just part of the community from day dot. But it's, you know, just gratitude in the sense that we made it here and alive. Yeah. And also gratitude that my parents sacrificed so much for us to be here. Yeah. And then how they struggled to actually feed us and, you know, make a living.

SPEAKER_01: 9:49

Do you feel like your parents, and you might not be able to answer this question but um that they've come out of that whole journey with gratitude and positivity or do you feel like it was quite a traumatic experience for them and like i said you might not be able to answer

SPEAKER_00: 10:02

this yeah no i can actually because my i told you yeah my sister sat them down for three hours and actually interviewed them yeah all these questions yeah um and they at the time obviously it was a lot of trauma yeah absolutely um and but now they're so grateful yeah so the gratitude there and um and yeah they're retired now they're happy and yeah and they love the fact that we all live close by now yeah yeah so um growing up i guess the last uh the earlier memories of me being in australia was um one of the things that was not having all the things we wanted like

SPEAKER_01: 10:45

everyone else

SPEAKER_00: 10:45

we had everything we needed um but just going to school actually i'm a photographer by trade so tomorrow I'm heading up to Banya to photograph a charity called Stationary Aid and what they do is they collect all the leftover books from you know the end of school year that's how they use they repurpose it and then they give it back to the kids who need it yeah that's excellent yeah that really resonated with me because when I started school we had nothing and the Smith family came in and they donated school bags they you know they gave us everything we needed to that school and I just you know even now I get teary because I remember the pride that mum and dad had that they I was going to make me cry yeah like it still does it really makes me that they had that they could send us to school like anyone else yeah so that was that was pretty amazing so so much gratitude for the help that's out there it's getting me too I know yeah I'm not quite a teary person but then I have so much gratitude for my parents for that that's right the appreciation you know what I mean yeah we take so much for granted um yeah growing up here that we don't think about all the small things no um yeah so that that was one of the memories that still really triggered me yeah um another one i guess was just wanting just growing up and wanting to be like everyone else because my girlfriends all went to you know they go to school and they go home school holidays they went out they went they went camping they went somewhere with their parents you know um we never had that kid because mom and dad were busy trying to put food on the table yeah so there was a lot of wanting stuff that we didn't need really so now as an adult i totally i totally appreciate that but yeah when you're in primary school you're like oh you know what did your parents do professionally um back in vietnam they dad was a mechanic like because of the war it really displaced them so they did what they could to survive after the war yeah but um dad was a mechanic before he left. So when he came here, he basically was a stay-at-home dad while my mum went out because it was easy for her to find work. Oh, okay. That would have been hard. Yeah, it was really hard. And so she worked in the Golden Circle Cannery for a while, just like doing factory work, line work. And then that wasn't bringing much money at all. So then they started sewing. They taught themselves how to sew and they were doing uniforms from home. And it was really hard because... they got paid peanuts

SPEAKER_01: 13:22

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 13:23

and I remember another memory um and you know my story is not unique so many other Vietnamese families refugee families all my friends they their parents went through the same thing and the memory I have of them doing the sewing is that um it brought in the money but they they had ridiculous deadlines they were paid I don't know like 50 cents to to do some one piece of uniform or something or three dollars to do a whole polo shirt right but whoever gave them the thing would have given them the wrong instructions so they they sewed something the wrong way and then deadlines like tomorrow so I remember there were days when all of us were sitting me you know five how old was it maybe eight nine year old sitting there and picking clothes so that they have time to then restitch it so they can deliver so memories like that it's wow yeah yeah you don't think how hard it is but it's like you just do everything you can what they did everything they can to survive and as kids we just we just took everything for granted

SPEAKER_01: 14:23

yeah I think that's children isn't it though

SPEAKER_00: 14:26

yeah yeah so those kind of values um of their sacrifice really yeah yeah really still I still feel today and even talking to them sometimes you don't they don't ever remind us of it like they just talk but then but then when you really think about it oh my god how hard have they worked to get us to where we are today yeah um um let me just think just going through school as well birthdays were a big thing we never celebrated birthdays it wasn't a cultural thing like yeah it was never a cultural thing in the Vietnamese culture anyway it is in Australia so we never got birthday presents when growing up so we're like you know I'll come why don't we get birthday presents and

SPEAKER_01: 15:13

you mentioned that and I can I'm an Australian born person but I do typically see that children of the same culture all seem to gravitate towards each other because there's obviously shared beliefs and shared customs and things like that but you just mentioned that all of your friends were australian so or with were they vietnamese did you find that you would gravitate towards vietnamese people or um

SPEAKER_00: 15:38

so at school all my friends yeah my school friends were all aussies yeah my best friend at the time was um tall blonde blue eye i just wanted to be like her um but at Where we were, my parents are quite religious. So we went to church all the time. That was the one non-negotiable. We all went to church so many times a week. I've lost count. But they used to send us to Sunday school. And so I hated it at the time because I'm like, oh my God, more study. But what that did was taught me how to read and write Vietnamese. So I can read and write Vietnamese. I wouldn't trust myself in business, but I can make it very conversational. I can. um and I made a lot of really good Vietnamese friends yeah who share the same values and they're the same age so they have the same um belief system as me so even though at core they're Vietnamese they're very westernized the way they think yeah okay and um for me growing up through school that was my struggle it's like for so long I actually didn't want to be Vietnamese yeah because I was kind of like embarrassed and ashamed yeah um and yeah because I just wanted to be like everyone else yeah so I was lucky because I would I never experienced racism firsthand because I was so westernized I guess in the way I thought I never really had an accent um a typical Vietnamese accent anyway and and so I just sort of fit in but I've seen the racism like I saw how um others were treated and stuff and it's kids are just cruel you know they don't understand they're just even if there's nothing wrong with you they can find something and tease you about it yeah so um yeah growing up that i didn't have the racist um towards me but there was definitely a lot of it around yeah um so primary school and then high school was the same i think i yeah i just wanted to be like my friends and at one stage when i was 14 to 16 i changed i decided to call myself stephanie don't don't even ask because my name's way so it's spelled h-u-e yeah it looks like you yeah so no one can actually say it yeah it just bugged me and I was like oh my gosh um and my surname was Nguyen which is like Smith

SPEAKER_01: 17:56

yes yeah

SPEAKER_00: 17:58

I really don't like who I am yeah you know I didn't like a lot of the stuff so I called myself Stephanie for two years and not legally I just yeah everyone were your

SPEAKER_01: 18:08

parents on board or did

SPEAKER_00: 18:09

you know they didn't even know so so all of my when I socialized yeah and so for two years like we went we did a lot of youth camps like interstate so yeah with the Vietnamese church stuff and so all these um my friends that i met in sydney and in adeline that they if they saw me now they go hi steph oh really i could see

SPEAKER_01: 18:32

you as a steph though

SPEAKER_00: 18:34

i don't like okay not

SPEAKER_01: 18:35

stephanie

SPEAKER_00: 18:36

but definitely but we can double f right oh no you know that was so cool um but i my first job was when i was 14 and a half got a job as soon as i could and i worked at a takeaway um convenience store at Forest Lake yeah and I think my boss there she was Filipino yeah and she the movie Short Circuit with the robot oh yeah that was an old movie but that there was Stephanie there and I think the way it worked reminded me of her so she started calling me don't be a Stephanie or whatever it was I can't remember and then yeah all of a sudden it just stuck I just thought it was a cool name and I thought oh you know double F sounds good I think maybe because I didn't know how to spell it I don't know

SPEAKER_01: 19:18

maybe not I love it I love it it's I think it's excellent. And I love that you picked double F. I think that that is so like perfect of the age group and the mindset. And it was cool.

SPEAKER_00: 19:29

It was so cool. Yeah. Until I realized it wasn't cool. And I thought, no, I better change it back. And I don't think it was until I finished high school that I realized how cool it was to be me.

SPEAKER_01: 19:42

Okay. Yeah. I was going to ask what point

SPEAKER_00: 19:45

did you feel that? Because growing up, I had a really... You know, I didn't have a traumatic life, really. I was really lucky in that sense. And growing up in high school, I was a straight B student. Yeah, didn't really excel in anything, but that was okay. I tried my best and that was, you know, my parents were amazing because they wanted us to do well. Yeah. But they were never ones to push. Yeah, okay. Whereas I know some of the other parents or friends that really push their kids to do hard because they're like, we sacrifice all this and, you know. you need to and you know the truth is not everyone is academically gifted or sporty or whatever and I certainly wasn't I really like really tried hard to just get straight B's because I knew I'm a people pleaser so I really wanted to like make my parents happy so inside I was creative I was really creative but I never and that doesn't really fit

SPEAKER_01: 20:44

into the academic scheme of things

SPEAKER_00: 20:46

and so I remember in high school that had careers day and there was a guy that came he works in advertising and he came and said oh yeah i'm you know i'm in advertising ad sales it's really cool long hours you know you don't really get a social life because you work so hard blah blah blah and he told us all the negative stuff about it but all i heard was the free stuff he's getting a lot of free stuff though when you oh yeah because you get all the samples and you get tickets in my head 12 year old stephanie year 12 Stephanie how old was I 17 year old all I had was free stuff and I thought that sounds good yeah so when I was looking for things to do at university I thought free stuff okay how can I get into advertising and I ended up doing a Bachelor of Business Communications specialising in advertising yeah that's how that's how my career started but when I jumped from high school to university I think that was when I realised that being me was cool because when you're out side of that um high school mindset and going to that bigger broader university stage you meet so many cool people who aren't australian that come from different nationalities and then i think also you mature and you grow up and you change your mind about a lot of stuff and so you see the world differently so you're able to be

SPEAKER_01: 22:10

yourself yeah rather than sitting down and trying to be academic you could be creative and that was an asset to you

SPEAKER_00: 22:17

yeah and also um it was an opportunity you need to reinvent yourself because no one knew you really

SPEAKER_01: 22:24

do you know what I mean

SPEAKER_00: 22:25

because a lot of my Vietnamese friends a lot of them went into medicine or accounting or stuff like that which was all cool so they went to different universities and a lot of my high school friends actually didn't do end up doing what I did so I met a whole new group of friends who were all into what I was into and it was really cool so that was really when I started to embrace who I was and my heritage as Vietnamese but I consider myself Aussie and so I don't feel like I need to pretend otherwise I'm very proud of my Vietnamese heritage and that has helped me I guess anchor my values what's important to me and straight after uni I went to Sydney and funny story there was once again I met a whole bunch of new people and one of my neighbours came we had a little bit of a party one night Australia Day party or something and that was the year that Australia I can't remember which Prime Minister said no more boat people do you remember that I can't

SPEAKER_01: 23:38

remember

SPEAKER_00: 23:38

yeah and they had this big thing on no boat people and oh the comments were coming out of these people who I really liked they were so negative about you know but they didn't know my story

SPEAKER_01: 23:49

yeah yeah

SPEAKER_00: 23:50

it was insane they were like oh yeah they're just coming to bleed the system you know all all the typical things that people say when they don't know anyone who has the same experience firsthand yeah they only hear what they hear in the media that's right or they only know what they hear in the media and um i actually was sitting there going hello yeah you know i i was actually a boat person and if australia didn't welcome my family here yeah i wouldn't be here yeah but i would not be able to contribute back to the community yeah do you know what I mean so it's it's um it's ignorance that I think people um feel a certain way about things because they don't know but as soon as I said that actually he was so remorseful of his comments because he he did not personally know anyone who made anything of themselves and I wasn't saying that I made something of myself I was just functioning you know um you know working and paying my taxes and like well that's all my parents wanted us to do was to live in a society where we have the freedom to do what we want to do and contribute and be part of it we're not here to steal your money they just wanted a better life for us and that's why and so I have so much empathy for all the new refugees because they have it so much harder now so much harder because it's tough now to get in and not only that but all the I guess, like, all the negatives that come with people, you know, like, coming into your country illegally. Yeah. Because, like, they don't see the desperation behind it. And I'm sure if you speak to anyone who has entered the country legally, a big part of it is because they don't think, they didn't think they had a choice. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Obviously, there might be some who aren't, but the majority is... out of desperation yeah so

SPEAKER_01: 25:55

yeah do you feel that um because you have assimilated so easily from a young age that that might have been why this person was so open to hearing your side he knew you personally and he i'm going to say identified you as australian yeah but if you had been really true to to vietnamese and had clung to your cultural beliefs and those things that he might have had a different perspective

SPEAKER_00: 26:19

yeah i think so no you're right I think so because he knew me as a person yeah he didn't stick me in a box like oh you were a refugee

SPEAKER_01: 26:26

yeah yeah

SPEAKER_00: 26:27

and I think just in life in general people judge very easily they look at you and they say don't judge a book by its cover but you do right you do and I now share you know I've been on a few podcasts and I love sharing this part of me because a lot of people don't realize yeah they see someone in their 40s with a family and my husband's English yep and And so my kids are half-half, but they identify as Australian. Yeah. Do you know? Yeah. They know how to count in Vietnamese. Yeah. So I feel like I'm a failed mother in the sense that not being able to teach my kids the language. Okay. But it's hard. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's so hard because I don't speak it at home. I only speak it when I go to mum and dad's. And then when I go there, mum and dad want to speak English with them. Yeah. So I have to teach them. Yeah, so I can't even remember. the question but oh yeah it's about it's progressed naturally into a conversation yeah so it is people see you they they just make stories up in their heads about who you are without anything and we all do it like you know like you look around you go oh yeah they must be wealthy oh yeah you know yeah they must have had an easy life or they must have struggled but you just don't know people's story and until you talk to them yeah exactly and um and this part of my story i'm i just feel grateful that i did have a very um boring upbringing yeah boring's good like I don't like drama yeah and what that's allowed me to do is after after university I went and traveled so I was in Sydney for about five years I went to Hong Kong worked and lived there for two years and then London for four years yeah and then came back here have you been back to Vietnam I have been as a tourist yeah people look at me and they're like yeah she's a tourist yeah it's so simple like I just I look Vietnamese but I don't like Vietnamese because I um I've been here too I'm Aussie you know what I mean the way my values are very westernized and yeah yeah

SPEAKER_01: 28:29

did you like go to the when you went back to Vietnam go to the place where your parents lived and or did you just do the tourist

SPEAKER_00: 28:36

yeah I I did my uh mainly the tourist thing so um one of the things that I would love to do with my family um is to take them back and go to all those places again um my kids are just too young to appreciate that so I'm just going to wait and actually make it a real experience for them but I still have some family back there some mums got some sisters still back there so we will definitely go back yeah but once again I'll go back as a tourist because I didn't grow up there but all my friends who've travelled back to Vietnam absolutely love it now they think it's amazing you know yeah that's amazing

SPEAKER_01: 29:16

so how do you feel now so you said you're a photographer um is that you're only professional do you like dabble in a few different

SPEAKER_00: 29:24

so i um work-wise i would consider myself um a creative entrepreneur because what that does is it's an umbrella so that allows me to turn anything i love doing into a business yeah so i can spend time doing it um i've realized a long time ago that life's too short to be stuck doing something you hate because i lost a girlfriend who um just through cancer yeah and she never got to do anything she wanted because she she thought she was stuck and that's all she could do yeah like in relationships and in life she just thought she was stuck yeah and then I think that really opened my eyes to say you know what you can do you can change it up you are the you are the person who's writing the story of your life

SPEAKER_01: 30:05

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 30:06

if you don't like where it's going change it change change your characters get rid of people who you know don't aren't your cheerleaders and bringing new people and and so for me um my day job is photography so I I started photography when I came back to Australia that was in 2010 2011 I started my business and then along the way I've done lots of little stuff I had a succulent business at one stage because I got addicted to succulents I'll start a business called Crafty Little Suckers that's a cool name though I like that it was succulents, planters and stuff you've developed from Stephanie with your name selection the growth so I have I did family photography for a while and now I've stepped away a lot and now I do business and personal branding but a couple of years ago I got so busy doing that that I just felt I lost myself in it and I wasn't doing anything for me and that creativity was being stifled because all my I was getting paid to create for other people and so then I started art so that's why I reached out to you so I started doing my art and I was like alright this is fun I love doing this and then I realised I didn't have time for art so I was like you know what I'm going to turn this into a business because I will make time for it and I won't feel guilty about it so then that became a business and then through that last year I met two other beautiful souls Sean and Marie and we decided to start something a little bit more for the community so we started a business called Creative Hearts Co so I don't know if you saw that we did a pop up gallery so we did that and we've got big plans for it this year but that All that is basically me realizing that I can do whatever I want now because my parents have sacrificed for us to give us the freedom to do this. To be yourself. Yeah. And I guess the biggest tip I can tell everyone is like, you just got, if you love something and you want to do something, just back yourself because to be honest, the only person stopping you is you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 32:14

Right. And we're in a land of opportunity, right? I know. Safe space. and

SPEAKER_00: 32:21

don't be afraid to reach out as well because there's a lot of times I sort of like doing especially in business doing business I just sat there by myself going okay I'll just stay in my little box and just do whatever and it wasn't until I stepped out of my comfort zone and intentionally went and reached out to people and said hi go to networking events and actually meet people and talk to them as people not as businesses that I realized that everyone's there and everyone wants to help you you just need to ask and yeah so that might business journey has been amazing so I'm loving that space but also my family as well being able to work for myself which means I can dictate my hours it's bloody hard because boundaries is something that you really need to set when you work from home but that allows me to just you know if they're doing something at school I can just say okay I just won't schedule anything in there I can be there for my kids because the one biggest regret that my parents said of raising us because in the end they ended up with five kids so they had two more girls when they came to Brisbane so five kids and my sister asked them she said what was your biggest regret raising us and they said it was that we couldn't give you the time we weren't there for all the school stuff we didn't spend time to get to know you guys as people you were just a daughter

SPEAKER_01: 33:45

because we were so busy that's right I was going to say they were providing

SPEAKER_00: 33:48

yeah and they felt so much guilt around that yeah okay and um we just said you know oh my god look at us now we you know like yeah we're all doing fine yeah we didn't we didn't miss out on anything that we needed you guys gave us everything we needed and now that they have um they can relax now they have the mental and emotional capacity that they're giving all that love and all that to our kids

SPEAKER_01: 34:12

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 34:13

you know we see that and it's so beautiful you know just my my dad he mucking around with um with my kids he would never have done that with us we would have had a slap in the bottom you know because don't be silly you know but now it's fun my mum who's almost 70 has a YouTube channel with my nephew he's 22 so my beautiful nephew is autistic he's legally blind and he's got cerebral palsy so he's got a lot of challenges they started a YouTube channel together a couple years ago and they're doing she's posting daily oh wow it's insane she's found her voice now and she's like out there sharing cooking and gardening do you think you've got

SPEAKER_01: 34:52

your creativity from her

SPEAKER_00: 34:54

then? actually it's more my dad so creativity from my dad I think in another life he would have been an amazing artist and from my mum I've got my business sense because mum will just go for it dad hesitates he thinks I get my analytical skills from dad whereas mum is just try it just go for it and she'll just go for anything and if it doesn't work she won't do it again but if it works she'll just keep pushing so yeah so I have so much love and respect for my parents because you know their story is just insane what they went through and like I said their story is not unique to them because a lot of other refugee families would have had the same but now being in my 40s and knowing what they went through just a sacrifice I appreciate it so much and so yeah gratitude is one of my biggest values and if you go to my personal Facebook page it says there's a quote on gratitude the more you have are thankful for the more you will have to be thankful for so something like that

SPEAKER_01: 35:55

it seems that there's just from listening to your story now their struggles have given you like a thirst and a passion for life absolutely to make you've been given this opportunity to make whatever you can and you're going to grab that with both hands and ride the wave

SPEAKER_00: 36:09

yeah

SPEAKER_01: 36:09

so that's amazing

SPEAKER_00: 36:10

and it has been and every time like you know I have a hard day I'm like what am I moaning about oh my god I've got nothing to moan about you know um oh obviously everything's changed a lot but you know we've got a roof over our heads we can afford to pay you know like send our kids to school with food so yeah and just even lunchbox talking about food I remember one of the staples in our lunchbox in primary school was leftover rice right with sprinkled with peanuts that's been fried and crushed with sugar and salt oh yum that sounds good though it was yummy can you imagine sending it to school now peanut free zone oh of course but growing up that was literally our staple because it was cheap because that was all they can afford yeah and we'd be oh my god how embarrassing we have all our friends with all their muesli bars and stuff or leftover noodles from the night before so there was a lot of shame of who you know like us growing up but then now I think about it it's like oh my god they just did the best they can and we all do the best we can I guess and I hear that

SPEAKER_01: 37:19

and I think yum yeah but yeah years ago it wouldn't have been like

SPEAKER_00: 37:23

that you just want a

SPEAKER_01: 37:24

sandwich Vegemite sandwich

SPEAKER_00: 37:26

yeah just want to be like everyone else yeah yeah so there was a lot so my identity crisis while I was Stephanie had red hair at one stage oh that's amazing oh yeah I had like a really dark tan yeah it

SPEAKER_01: 37:40

was like I assume not a spray tan because it was different in the 80s and 90s

SPEAKER_00: 37:44

yeah it was a spray tan it was partly self tan partly sun baking partly I just wanted to be cool yeah

SPEAKER_01: 37:51

I know I love that but you've like you've embraced that and you've just like

SPEAKER_00: 37:56

oh it's funny you know

SPEAKER_01: 37:57

you've you don't try to repress that there was that it's just part of who you were and

SPEAKER_00: 38:02

I was quite embarrassed for a long time and then and then when I started doing my art I was like you know what this is all part of who I was yeah no I love that and along the way there are other stories that really helped me I guess still build on who I am because we're still all writing our stories and yeah but the biggest lesson for me is like it's never too early or too late to do anything you want yeah and every mistake there's a reason for or any anytime you feel crap or you think you're in a hole there's a reason why it's basically that's that's an end of a chapter and this is your opportunity to write a better one yeah oh yeah so that's me

SPEAKER_01: 38:45

i love that amazing um or just saying like normally i ask my guests to share what they would tell their younger self or what they would tell someone in a similar position but you basically answered that without me having to ask you so thank you so much it was a full circle and i loved that journey with you so thank you for sharing with me

SPEAKER_00: 39:05

thank you for giving me the opportunity to share i hope i helped someone

SPEAKER_01: 39:09

yeah me too i'm sure I'm sure that it will there'll be some part of whatever you've just shared that someone will be able to take away from so thank you

SPEAKER_00: 39:16

pleasure