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  PRAISE FOR UNPOLISHED GEM

  ‘Delightful – a funny, touching debut.’ Courier Mail

  ‘There’s something striking on every page.’ Helen Garner

  ‘Virtuoso storytelling’ The Australian

  —

  PRAISE FOR HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER

  ‘Pung has an extraordinary story to tell and the finesse to bring it, most movingly, to the page.’ The Monthly

  ‘A beautiful exploration of father–daughter relationships.’ Vogue

  ‘Remarkably tender and thoughtful’ The Sunday Age

  —

  PRAISE FOR LAURINDA

  ‘Biting yet compassionate’ Australian Book Review

  ‘Funny, horrifying and sharp as a serpent’s fangs.’ John Marsden

  ‘A candid and powerful exploration of family, culture and class.’ Readings Monthly

  ‘Exquisitely sharp’ The Age

  —

  PRAISE FOR ON JOHN MARSDEN

  ‘A timely reminder of the value of authentic representation in literature and the power of being seen.’ ArtsHub

  ‘There is deep love and respect in her words.’ AU Review

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Alice Pung 2018

  Alice Pung asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  9781760640910 (paperback)

  9781743820582 (ebook)

  Cover design by Jen Clark

  Text design and typesetting by Marilyn de Castro

  Cover photograph of author at the Little Saigon Market in 2008 by Simon Schluter / Fairfax Syndication

  Back cover photograph of author © Courtney Brown 2018

  For Nick

  CONTENTS

  STEALING FROM LITTLE SAIGON

  STEALING FROM LITTLE SAIGON

  STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER

  HOLIDAY AT SLACKS CREEK

  CHINESE NEW YEAR DRAGON

  VISITS

  CAVEAT EMPTOR

  OPPORTUNITY

  SILENCE OF THE PHONES

  SCREEN DUMPS

  24/7

  SPIRIT CHIMES

  HAIR APPARENT

  ALLY OF THE DOLLS

  LOOKING SHEEPISH

  HOME TRUTHS

  THE SHED

  THROWING THE BOOK

  HOME TRUTHS

  RETURNING

  STOP RACE MIXING!

  LIVING WITH RACISM

  WHO IS THE ORDINARY REASONABLE PERSON?

  MUM IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY

  THE WINTER AFTER THE OLYMPICS

  MUM IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY

  SEARCHING FOR AI HUA IN AMERICA

  THE FIELD MARKER

  EXECUTING HISTORY

  THE FIELD MARKER

  THE BUS

  WRITING ABOUT MY FATHER

  AT SCHOOL AND ON THE PAGE

  KATHARINE’S PLACE

  SCHOOL DAYS

  SHUNNED IN A STRANGE LAND

  IT’S TIME TO EMBRACE THE ‘F’ WORD

  THE SECRET LIFE OF THEM

  LETTER TO A

  AGAINST CALAMITOUS ODDS

  DARK FICTION

  CLOSE TO HOME

  THE FLASHING GREEN MAN

  UNPOLISHED GEM

  LITTLE DUMPLINGS

  THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

  TWO CULTURES AND A BABY

  AFTERWORD & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PUBLICATION DETAILS

  STEALING FROM

  LITTLE SAIGON

  STEALING FROM

  LITTLE SAIGON

  My mother knows a certain marketplace in Melbourne the same way some people know their spouses. She comes from two generations of traders. She knows all the different ways to get around any market, how to coax, control, cajole and conquer: all the tricks of the trade. My great-grandmother hawked boiled eggs on the streets of Phnom Penh, her own mother sold fried rice-and-chive cakes before Pol Pot came, and when they were exiled in Vietnam, my mother sold fabric in a Saigon stall.

  This market is called Little Saigon, and my mother shops here twice a week. If you walked inside and paid no heed to the outside world, you could very well be in Vietnam. It has white tiles on the floor, and a number of different stalls selling everything from durian cakes and roast ducks to jewellery and rice-bowl-shaped bras. There are also two large supermarkets of the non-chain variety selling fresh produce, including over five different types of mushroom – enoki, shiitake, oyster, Korean and standard brown. One of the supermarkets carries swimming, crawling seafood in tanks. In any other suburb, a market with this sort of fare would be considered an exotic place for gourmands, with the prices handwritten on squares of cardboard with neat black frames, beneath the one-sentence description of the obscure comestible. But not here. Here, you can get mangoes for three dollars a kilo.

  The name says everything you need to know about the migrants who run the place – what era they come from, what government they were living under before they left, and their nostalgic yearnings towards some point in the past. In many ways, our lives revolve around the marketplace, and from an outsider’s view, our parents seem to be trying to replicate the patterns of their youth in Phnom Penh. These are people who bury gold in their backyards and buy three-day-old buns from the bakery. All their lives have been about sequestering things away so that no one can see how much they have, in case forces more powerful – governments, soldiers, the snaking coils of family nepotism gone poisonous – take what they have. Humility, hard work and an overvigilant sense of privacy: that’s what they now believe in.

  However, the same values seem not to apply when it comes to scrutinising other people. One evening, my mother came home and told us about a woman in town whose husband was much older than her. My mother said she tried to keep out of things, but she couldn’t help having ears. ‘She’s so young and she is looking after a decrepit old man,’ the gossipmongers whispered to one another in the vegetable stall when they saw the wife leading her husband by the elbow and choosing tomatoes. In the jewellery stores, when the wife came to sell off some gold to pay for her husband’s most recent hospital bill, they talked. In the bank, when she was lining up with him to collect his pension, they whispered.

  One day, the odd couple came to the electrical appliance store where my mother worked, to buy an iron. ‘My son is moving to work in Bendigo this year,’ the wife told my mother, and all who were within earshot. ‘He’s become a doctor.’

  ‘What a smart son you have!’ my mother exclaimed. All the while wondering, as they all did, exactly how large a gap is there between you and your husband?

  ‘He’s smart, like his mother!’ the old man chuckled. ‘She was such a smart little girl. Did you know that when we were in the camp, she used to collect cola cans, and somehow she ended up making little chairs and tables from them.’

  ‘We stayed for twelve years at the Thai refugee camp,’ added his wife.

  ‘Yes, and when the Red Cross white people and the Jesus white people came to set up their tents, they would be so charmed by her little tin furniture that they actually gave her some money for them! Hehehe.’

  ‘Shut up, you.’ She gave him a little push to his shoulder.

  ‘Oi! Be careful you don’t topple your old man over!’

  ‘So, did you know each other at the camp?’ my mother
asked.

  ‘We met at the camp,’ the wife said.

  ‘She was wandering around, like a little lost creature.’

  ‘I was only twelve.’

  ‘But as smart as a fox.’

  ‘The Black Thieves smashed my parents,’ said the wife – and of course my mother knew who the Black Thieves were; it was what they all called the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia – ‘and then a cousin took me to the camp. He –’ she pointed to her husband ‘– he was thirty years old. He had once worked for my parents back in Phnom Penh. He became my older brother. He looked after me when I was a small child in the camp for all those years, and so now it’s my turn to look after him.’

  It was then that my mother realised the woman wasn’t so young, and her husband wasn’t so old. Suffering had etched calligraphy lines of experience on his face, and he had alleviated as many of his wife’s hardships as he could, which is probably why she looked the way she did.

  *

  Recently, my mother told us that she had seen a small bout of shoplifting at one of the two supermarkets in Little Saigon. While my mother was trying to buy some spinach, there was a loud yell. My mother looked towards the nectarine trestle table and saw that a cleaver-wielding man, eyes popping like a dybbuk, had grabbed hold of the wrist of a petrified young Indian woman with a long braid down her back. ‘Thief! Thief!’ he hollered. He held up a clear plastic bag containing a single mango. ‘You haven’t paid for this.’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘Where did you pay for this?’

  ‘Over there.’ She pointed to the furthermost counter.

  ‘That’s not our counter!’

  The stalls were set up in such haphazard fashion that you could not tell where one market began and the other ended. If this was your first time, you would think that it was one enormous market, until you started to notice the counters.

  Yet my mother had seen the young woman walking around the market with the mango in her bag for a while. The man led her to the correct counter, still clinging to the cleaver, which he used to cut open nectarines for customers to taste. ‘Did she pay for this?’

  ‘No,’ yelled the cashier woman, ‘she did not come here to pay.’

  ‘We call the police!’ declared the cleaver-wielding man.

  The young Indian woman’s eyebrows knotted and she looked like she was about to cry.

  ‘Please don’t call the police,’ she begged, opening up her purse. ‘I pay for it.’

  ‘We call the police. You pay for it now.’

  She took out some coins and handed them to the cashier.

  ‘Twenty dollars, or we call police.’

  ‘Twenty dollars?’

  ‘Twenty dollars.’

  ‘For one mango?’

  ‘For you steal.’

  ‘But I don’t have twenty dollars.’

  ‘Then wait here, we call police.’ Grabbing her wrist, he took out his mobile phone with one hand.

  ‘Okay, okay, I pay.’

  *

  The marketplace is a law unto itself, where moral cause-and-effect accumulates interest. The mores are simple, the sort of universal laws that one would find within the first ten or so precepts of every major faith and culture: don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t cheat. A rigid and unassailable sense of morality comes with a certain level of comfort, perhaps: a conviction that life will not change, or that God will not blink or turn his face away. But these were not my mother’s convictions. She had never believed in a compassionate God. She came from a country where women’s throats were cut with palm leaves, and coconut juice had been used in intravenous drips as a blood substitute. Where people were still scrambling for food scraps on the floor. The kind of stealing my mother witnessed was not the happy frisson of high-school hijinks.

  She knew it for what it was – it was a secret, this shame. Even though the trestle tables were so laden with fruit that every evening at six o’clock the market workers would stuff plastic bags and sell them for two dollars each, the Indian girl wasn’t supposed to be trying to smuggle out that lump of fruit without having paid for it, just as my mother knew she wasn’t supposed to have lied at the refugee camp to smuggle a seed of a different sort out. She was eight months pregnant with me when she arrived in Australia, and the only way she could get on that plane was to lie and say that she was four months along.

  Perhaps it was similar to the sort of shame that made my parents afraid to ask for things, even from fifteen-year-olds behind the counter at McDonald’s; they always got us to ask for the sweet-and-sour sauce for our nuggets, always berated us for our sullen reluctance. It was the petty avarice of the poor, and punished even more harshly by the migrants who had been here longer and who had achieved the enviable ‘permanent resident’ status, because this thievery reminded them of who they used to be, how they used to think and, occasionally, what they used to do.

  I had seen it once myself, when I was leading an interviewer and filmmaker through Footscray Market, two blocks away from Little Saigon. Filmmakers who feel like they need an authentic visa into Footscray and the world of these migrants and their markets sometimes ask me to be their passports. Their genuine sense of decency cringes at filming poverty, but when led through the streets by a loquacious local guide, this suddenly becomes an adventure akin to those they had when they backpacked through Vietnam or Laos. I am the link between what is foreign – the market – and what is familiar – my made-in-Australia roots and lack of an Oriental accent.

  That day, there was yelling in the middle of the fruit section. ‘She come-a do this every week!’ hollered the Mediterranean fruit-stall owner, who had his hand firmly on the vinyl-covered trolley of an old, stooped-over Asian grandma. He flung open the flap of her trolley to reveal a bunch of bananas and some potatoes. ‘Come see! Come see!’ he beckoned to the film crew. He wanted to catch the culprit on film, even though the documentary was about something else.

  ‘Have pity on me,’ the old woman cried in Cantonese, lifting up her trouser leg, ‘my leg hurts.’ Sure enough, her leg was bandaged from the sockless foot to the mid-calf. By then, a small circle of onlookers had formed around the Greek fruitier, the old-lady pilferer and her trolley.

  ‘Here, here,’ said one woman, handing the stall owner five dollars, ‘take this! Take this! I pay for her.’

  ‘No want your money!’ He pushed the note aside. ‘You no understand, she come-a do this every week!’ He beckoned to the cameraman. ‘Quick, put camera here!’ he directed, as if he were running the show.

  We quietly made our exit, leaving the little circle to disperse. As we walked away, I realised this: there I was, with a camera crew and books and words, and I knew that the people whose worlds I wrote about would never read my books, and the people who read my books would never fully inhabit these worlds, even though they have already begun to populate them. And when they do, increasing the property prices for those already living in Footscray, they will make the existing residents very happy because now they will be able to purchase a house-and-land package in the newly opened manicured feats of urban planning that lie just a Toyota Camry drive away from the countryside. And Mr and Ms Stall Owner will at last be able to move away from the hollering hot masses of fruit-pilfering new arrivals.

  So I show my film crew strange fruit, and hope they quickly forget about the incident with the old lady. I show them how to dip slices of sour mango in dishes of salt and chilli. They look in astonishment at the cleaver-wielding hecklers. And then I take them to a pho restaurant for lunch. I don’t mention how housewives will heave and clutch their hearts over being short-changed ten cents. I never mention the young Indian woman who once put a single mango in a plastic bag without paying for it. At the end of the day, they can leave and marvel over the interesting cultural tour. They do not see the missing fingers from meat slicers, the feet ruined by vats of hot oil accidentally spilled, the hacking coughs from inhaling the floating mites of polyester fibres.

  The marketplace is
a front, the final face of our lives – the most charismatic, enterprising and proud. And the most extraordinary thing the filmmakers will take away from the day, the only true thing I will disclose about my mother’s market, and the one thing they will write about in the newspapers with wonder, is that it is possible to buy mangoes for three dollars a kilo.

  STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER

  Every day is labour day for South-East Asian migrants, so the idea of Labour Day being a public holiday is ludicrous to my family. On holidays we generally clean the house, mop the floor, mow the lawn and do the myriad other things we don’t get a chance to do during the normal working weekend. We make the most of our family time together: my siblings and I skate on the tiles with drying cloths tied to our feet and Mr Mop in our arms. My mother, hair tied back with a rubber band and her hands in a bucket of suds, hums old Chinese pop songs while my father, who can neither sing nor dance, lunges into the car with the Dustbuster.

  But this particular Labour Day was different. ‘Let’s go pick stwawbellies,’ my mother had suggested a few days earlier. ‘The Teochew Chinese Friendship Association are organising a trip.’

  ‘We’ve done that before,’ protested my father.

  ‘No, that was the chelly farm,’ said my mother, rhyming cherries with jellies. ‘These stwawbellies are meant to be big – bigger than supermarket ones.’

  ‘Larger than the ones in the Little Saigon Market?’

  ‘Old Mrs Teng said much bigger!’

  We were already imagining fruit the size of small apples as we did a quick ring-around of the extended family. My father appealed to their sense of parental self-sacrifice to convince them to take the day off work.

  ‘A good trip for the kids,’ he told his sister, ‘and picking strawberries is safer than other fruit. They don’t grow on trees that you can fall out of and die.’

  On Labour Day morning my mother woke, as usual, at 6.30. By the time the rest of us rose, the picnic was packed: a loaf of Safeway bread, boxes of Barbecue Shapes (biscuits from the Arnott’s factory where my uncle worked) and a purple ‘picnic rug’ (actually a plastic tablecloth my mother found on sale at Forges of Footscray). A Vietnamese pork loaf went into the icebox.