Firebomb 01 | The Man Lin

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Just before we start, this episode contains some strong language.

All right.

Okay.

For starters,

what do you remember about the actual attack?

I remember

my mum told us that we were going to stop at our family restaurant first before we went to school.

And I remember seeing the yellow crime scene tape stretched all the way around the restaurant.

So I knew this was serious.

But the most important thing that I remember was the smell of the restaurant.

The burnt restaurant.

The fire started in the storeroom and spread quickly into the wooden beams in the ceiling.

That chemical, strong acrid smell, sharp.

mixed with burning wood.

Everything was damaged either by fire or smoke.

When I walk now past burning rubbish, I am triggered back to that smell of the restaurant when I first stepped out of the car.

Although it's not yet been determined whether the restaurant was deliberately lit, the Arson Squad is carrying out an extensive investigation.

I remember looking through the main

entry doors of the restaurant.

They were open, and inside I could see the lobby,

and there was

this tray of glass tumblers.

I don't know if I asked my mum for it.

I just remember suddenly then having in my hand

the blackened glass tumbler

and it had the same smell as the restaurant smell burning.

And I remember having the intention in my head, I'm going to show this for show and tell.

The next scene I remember next is them being at school and walking into

my classroom

and I remember standing at the front of the class.

I remember all the kids in front and the teacher was on my side and I remember pulling the glass out.

And

that is all I can remember.

That's where my memory ends of that first day.

I was only eight when my family's Chinese restaurant was firebombed in Perth.

And it took a long time before I understood what had happened.

And it turns out that fire...

It was just the start of something much bigger.

My family was targeted as part of a series of terror attacks, one of the few sustained and coordinated terrorism campaigns in Australia's history.

But you've probably never heard about any of this.

It was a sphere that we're just not used to in this state.

They are armed with guns.

I had blood in my eyes, so I couldn't really see.

I didn't know what was going on.

I could barely move, you know.

But it had blown the roof off the wall.

We heard the explosion.

There was a faked assassination attempt and a secret informer.

We wired him up.

No one knew he'd been in our clutches.

They said that they were going to blow my head off if I won the election.

I've been searching for all my life, doing things dangerous just for the pure pleasure.

It's a lie.

They didn't achieve their aims.

They didn't damage us.

This is when the alarm bells start to ring.

The fire and the events that followed after it, it changed my life.

It changed the way that I saw the world and how I saw myself.

I need to know exactly how it happened, how someone could do this to our family, and what they'd say now if I found them.

So I've come back to Perth to find out.

I don't really feel comfortable camping out in the front of that place.

I don't think it's a very good idea.

What the fuck?

I wasn't expecting that.

I wasn't expecting that either.

This is Firebomb, the new season of the ABC's Unravel podcast.

Really, really horrible things can happen to good people, even in a relatively peaceful place like Perth.

Okay, first up, I've got to tell you you a bit about myself.

My name is Crispian Chan, I'm an actor and stage photographer based in Singapore, but I was actually born and raised in Western Australia.

And to properly understand this whole story and why it matters, you kind of have to get your head around those early days, which for me are the mid-80s when I was just a kid living in Rockingham, which is about an hour south of Perth.

It was a coastal town, there's limestone everywhere, fresh ocean breeze, and we played cricket in the backyard.

And there's a home video of me playing cricket.

It was windy.

I'm speaking Cantonese.

Which is really strange to hear because I don't speak fluent Cantonese now, but I was back then.

We've got very short shorts on.

I think I'm wearing a Transformers shirt or something like that.

You know, I remember the Hills Hoist washing line in the background.

We've got the garden shed.

I was just a kid running around doing what I thought was normal, which is to play cricket while yelling out Anzac instead of how Zat, because that's how bad my English was back then.

And

yeah, I was a very

painfully extroverted kid back then.

embarrassingly extroverted kid back then.

I couldn't shut up.

But those innocent childhood memories don't last long.

Because about halfway through year one, my parents decided to make the move back up to Perth.

And for me, it felt like after that, things were different.

For starters, the school I went to was pretty rough.

I remember a particular incident with a boy.

He was wearing a grey,

generic grey school uniform shirt, and he had brown hair.

I remember it was during lunchtime, and he had me, he was on top of me, and he was doing

the slitty eye thing with his fingers, you know, stretching his eyelids.

And

he was saying Ching Chong.

And then I remember at one point, he actually

spat on

me.

And that was kind of when I had a first taste of something that was not quite right.

So while I was trying to fit into school and into Perth life, my mum and dad, they were on their own journey.

They went into business with my auntie and uncle and they started up this Chinese restaurant called the Man Lin.

And it had this distinctive Chinese pagoda style roof line and it pretty quickly made a name for itself.

So I guess you could say it seemed like the hard work was beginning to pay off.

The Man Lin, Chinese restaurant.

You know, it was a bit of an institution in our neighborhood.

It had this lovely,

classically Chinese roof that was very distinctive, so you could see it from all around.

There was two chefs, my dad, and his identical twin brother.

So imagine you're seeing double at the stoves.

Heating up the farrows and then the

two other walks cooking or different dishes.

Fried rice with the little baby prawns in it.

Fantastic.

The special.

The special.

They had four woks going between them, two for each person.

So he's a hectic in the kitchen.

The sounds, the clattering of the walks, the fire, the heat.

You always wanted the table for the lazy season.

Juggling these still walks, arms going everywhere.

Exactly.

And you could tell when it was getting crazy and mad because the phone would not stop.

All the doctors is just lining up on the table.

But all that progress just came to a grinding halt when someone set the place on fire.

One of the owners of the Man Lin restaurant in Karawara was rung at about 2 o'clock this morning and told that his business was in flames.

Damage is estimated at $155,000.

That fire on the 1st of September 1988, it delivered a blow out of nowhere to the dream that my parents had worked so hard to build.

But the most shocking thing was, we weren't the only ones targeted that night.

Less than an hour earlier and only a few kilometers away in Como, the China City restaurant was set alight.

It's believed a petrol bomb was thrown from the adjacent park onto the restaurant's roof.

The police say they can't be sure the two fires are linked, but admit the coincidence is highly suspicious.

This was the first sign that my family had become entangled in a much bigger story.

And it's a story that wouldn't truly end until after the turn of the millennium.

And in some ways, it still hasn't ended.

That's why I can't let it go.

For me, it's like an itch.

I have to keep scratching.

And it's not that I need to find out who did it,

I actually know who lit these fires.

But it's important to start this story from the beginning.

Because what I want to know is, how did they get away with it for so long?

If we don't understand a story this far-reaching, this shocking, if most Australians have never heard of it, what hope have we got of stopping something like this happening again today?

At some point I realised that I wasn't going to be able to answer any of these questions sitting in Singapore.

Welcome to Perth everyone where the local time has just gone 20 minutes past midnight.

As we arrive into Perth we pay our respects to the First Nations custodians of this land, past and present.

Somewhere along this, well yeah looking at this cabinet, I believe this is actually where

my my parents kind of keep all the family photos and kind of

stuff.

So

I'm just gonna

it's okay mum, it's all gonna be good.

So ever since the fire my parents have always recorded any news reports from the TV or they've cut out newspaper clippings about it and they've kept them all in the cupboard.

If I remember correctly, it's a blue scrapbook with a koala on front and these don't look like that.

So much of what I know

about what happened is in this cupboard.

And there's more topics here.

And the one thing that I keep coming back to is

this video that has my mum's interview on it.

How did you feel when you saw your restaurant destroyed like that?

She's sitting in the dining room with the reporter and she had makeup on which I don't normally normally see her wearing.

I really feel very scared and frightened.

I have never really heard my mum express her feelings like that about anything.

Because my parents don't usually talk to me about their feelings, even now.

Mother.

You want to wash dishes?

You'd rather wash dishes than to talk to me?

Wash dishes.

Here's a question.

So, like, how does it it feel, you know, to be asked to kind of revisit some of these memories and all that?

Strange.

Strange.

Why is it strange?

You don't like talking about these things?

When it comes to something that's happening in their own lives, they don't really talk about their feelings in that way.

Our Chinese cultures not

to share all this.

There's only so much I could ever understand about the fire from my parents.

and there's only a limit to what they're prepared to say or what they even know because

they didn't really have the luxury of time to process this.

I mean, you know,

as a migrant family, they're just trying to make ends meet.

I actually tracked down the other family whose restaurant was burned on the same night as ours.

But they didn't want to talk about it.

It's Crispian Chang calling here from the ABC.

So, yeah, he

was trying to find ways to end the call and trying to get out of the conversation.

So, if I'm gonna find out more about what happened, I'm gonna need to go somewhere else.

Got your coffee.

I've actually already finished a coffee in the short time that it's taken me to come here.

I had to already myself.

Alright, here we go.

I I know there's still a lot of information bird out there about what happened, so I decided to team up with an investigative reporter.

Do you need me to bring up the bag?

Uh yeah, that would be good.

I guess.

Alex Mann.

He works at the ABC in Australia.

Grab that, that would be awesome.

And we figured that we should just retrace the steps of the investigation, you know,

start the morning after the fire, just like the police did.

Hello, Maury.

How you going?

Doors open?

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Maury Tong was the head of the WA Police Arson Squad, and he led the investigation into the fire.

There you go, Alex.

Crispian, pleased to meet you.

We've met you with mum and dad, obviously.

Yeah, yeah.

Maury is this tall, big man.

He has these glasses, a shaved head.

He talks about his work with this authority, but there's also this warmth about him.

So he sat us down in his immaculate lounge room.

Now,

this might help jog your memory a bit here.

We've got some photos from the man Lynn.

Yes.

The day after.

It would have probably been, you may well have been out of shot somewhere nearby.

This was taken by the

staff.

Yeah.

So Maury told us that when he first arrived on the scene, one of the first things they did

was to create a perimeter.

Work out where we were going to cut off and fence off with tape.

And they would then start looking for clues starting from the outside and working their way back to the center where the fire was.

Looking at what are called fire indicators, which is like a roadmap of fire, taking you back to where the fire started.

But then when he started working his way closer towards the restaurant, he started seeing things that didn't seem

quite normal.

We found evidence of what's called mechanical impact damage on external windows, which shows that there was a forced entry.

He started to notice that were these

interesting marks.

So we saw very very heavy charring and damage in not uniform but in runs and rivulets over the window sills and down the brickwork on the outside.

Like a liquid burn in some ways going down.

Which immediately was an indicator that something had been introduced.

That's really not normal fire behaviour.

So this wasn't some drunk who just decided to light a match and toss it.

I mean, whoever did this had a plan and they had come prepared.

They used petrol and they threw something through the window with it.

It looked like the restaurant had been firebombed.

This was a targeted attack.

The offender had gone there or offenders had gone there specifically to torch that particular business.

Fortunately, the damage at the other restaurant burnt that night wasn't as bad as at ours, but it it looked targeted too.

Two Asian restaurants,

not all that far apart from each other, were targeted on the same night, both using identical methods of ignition.

In the immediate aftermath of those two fires, the cops seemed to have no idea who or what was behind them.

No one had seen anybody set fire to the restaurants.

George Putlin was one of the other Arson Squad detectives assigned to the case.

There was no

initial forensic evidence.

Yeah, they hadn't left fingerprints on a can or anything like that.

And it was always very hard with the owners of these restaurants.

They were very guarded and a lot of them hadn't been in Australia that long.

So the detectives, they started coming up with possible theories.

There might have been irate people that didn't like the meal or something like that.

But mum and dad couldn't think of any particularly angry customers.

So police then thought maybe mum and dad were the victims of an extortion racket by organized criminals.

Extortion by fire is one of the most common motives for criminal fire setting.

And

we knew that the triad system like the mafia was alive and well in Perth.

Didn't know who they were, but we knew it was there.

The Chinese criminal elements in Australia have formed criminal associations.

In the 80s, media reports were filled with stories of Asian organised crime and the threat of these triads.

The triads that have emerged here are basically gangs of organised Chinese criminals.

Their strict vows of secrecy at bizarre initiation ceremonies make them hard to penetrate.

The groups no doubt invoke the notorious triad name to engender fear.

People are just too scared to talk to the authorities.

This triads theory had occurred to my parents too.

That's what I heard in Hong Kong.

The triads,

they would ask restaurants for money.

If you don't give them the money, then they would do something to damage your restaurant.

But mum and dad hadn't heard from any gangs.

Nobody approached us for that and we didn't offend anybody.

So why this happened?

But the police weren't quite ready to rule out the triads theory.

They were struggling to make progress on the investigation.

And meanwhile, mum and dad were busy just trying to survive.

One of the first things they did after the fire was to save anything they could from the wreckage of the restaurant.

So we tried to get into the kitchen, get all the plates or pots and pets.

In a way, my family was lucky because the building was insured, but they still had a big problem.

We have no business, we have no income.

We found out that we didn't insure for the loss of profits, and we really had no income coming in.

Then,

there was this growing fear about who might be attacked next, but mum and dad they weren't gonna let this get to them.

They weren't going to be intimidated by whoever was doing this,

they had a family to feed.

What can you do?

You run away from Perth, You run away from Australia?

We can't do that.

We're just wondering why how can the police

haven't do anything not to restore these people?

It's all up to the police to do something.

But before the police even had a chance to really push their investigation forward,

Around midnight on the 22nd of November 1988, less than three months after my parents' restaurant was attacked,

someone broke a window at the back of the Golden House restaurant way over in Perth's East.

They poured petrol in through the window,

then they lit it all up with a Molotov cocktail.

For the police, this fire immediately changed the game.

By the third fire, the target and the modus operandi had become become sufficiently cohesive to be able to identify it as a serial set.

The red flag started to go up then that

it was becoming more than just a coincidence.

So you had three restaurants burned within three months across Perth.

Now they were starting to mount up then.

We wanted to solve it before it got out of hand.

It was going to get out of hand though.

Someone was systematically firebombing Perth's Chinese restaurants and they weren't just doing it one part of the city.

This latest fire was across the other side of town.

Now, that didn't fit with the theory that Chinese triads were running some kind of extortion racket.

Slowly but surely, our focus shifted.

Triads usually stay in one part of town and they don't just hit up restaurants.

Extortion gangs move into a geographical location and they don't just pick one kind of business, they go through the whole thing.

So the police began concentrating on their other main theory.

And it was a theory that they'd actually been looking into for a while.

We were focusing on a known group.

And this group was hiding in plain sight.

Even before the fire, as a young kid, I remember being aware of them.

Do you have any memories of the first time that you saw the posters?

There was a bus stop that was behind my parents' restaurant.

And my brother and I sometimes we'd go out and play around outside the back of the restaurant.

There were little side alleys or bushes that we'd run around in.

But there was this bus stop across the road and it was one of those concrete, old concrete bus stops with the holes on the side that you can see through.

And I remember seeing inside

of the walls, there were like mini posters.

They were about the size of my hand.

I remember seeing a poster that said Asians out.

So, you know, that caricature of the bucktooth Chinese man.

I was distinctly aware that it was addressing my family.

I knew it was about us and it wasn't nice.

Over the past few weeks, a number of anti-Asian posters have been plastered around the restaurant.

An anti-Asian poster campaign, racist posters, posters like Asians Out, are plastered around the town.

We were bloody disgusted about it and we went all out to find out who these these people were.

The group behind these posters had a plan and they were just getting started.

He was frothing at the mouth.

He was so ideologically driven.

All of a sudden there's a face to where all this hatred's coming from.

We couldn't believe what had happened.

It was a warning that they were sending to us.

The firearms, the gunfire is unbelievable.

This series is hosted and reported by me, Crispian Chan and Alex Mann.

We've been making this podcast on Garaguland and Wutjagnungaland.

Our producer and researcher is Dunya Karagic.

Research and fact checking by Johnny Liu.

Our theme and music composition is by Martin Perolta.

Sound design and additional music by Simon Branthwaite.

The commissioning editor was Alice Brennan.

And our executive producer is Tim Roxburgh.

To make sure you're the first to get the next episodes, follow the Unravel podcast.

You can find it on the ABC Listen app.