When my parents first arrived in Australia, they thought the government had put them in a five-star hotel. The Midway Migrant Hostel was just a group of sturdy brick buildings that looked like brown slab cakes – but compared to the cardboard and plastic tents in the camp at the Thai–Cambodian border where they’d been staying only a month before, these buildings were evidence of a life after death: the death of half of our family in the Killing Fields.
In this glorious afterlife, the residents of the Midway Migrant Hostel even had visitors, souls so pure and kind that they could only be sent from God. And indeed they were.