Unpolished Gem Read online

  When my mother wakes up, she notices the white walls, the clean room and the pastel curtains. Just like a bedroom, she thinks sleepily, not a trace of blood or sour meat smell. There are green and red cups of hospital jelly in the tray in front of her, and little dixie cups of vanilla ice-cream. She thinks that the hospital is throwing her a post-birth party. I am the most crumple-faced walnut she has ever seen, and I have a clump of black hair plastered to my head like a Beatle circa the early ’60s. This is the one thing the nurses will always remember about me: “She came out with all this hair like a little hat!” they exclaim. “The first Chinese baby we have ever seen, and with a full head of hair!” I keep crying: having unique headgear obviously does not bring any special consolation. My mother does not know what to do with this little creature with the howling hole in her face; she has been accustomed to me quietly curled up and causing no fuss in her belly, content with whatever liquid morsels passed through her umbilical cord. Now I won’t even take my ma’s milk. In the end, she feeds me a spoonful of coffee sweetened with condensed milk to shut me up. Only then can she close her eyes and go blissfully back to sleep.

  *

  “Have you thought of a proper name for the baby yet?” my grandmother asks her son. She has nothing but disdain for those parents who do not give their children Chinese names. Did they really think that new whitewashed names would make the world outside see that yellow Rose was just as radiant a flower as white Daisy?

  “I have indeed,” says my father. “And not just some common Pretty Pearl or bloody Blooming Orchid name like every second girl!” He holds up a little book with a cover that shows some exceptionally pretty people of all skin tones standing around smiling and patting the heads of catatonic-looking creatures: cattle, lambs and even a lion or two. Written on the cover are the Chinese characters for Be Ready for the Good News. Some kind-hearted white folks had given him this free literature guaranteed to put an end to all suffering.

  “Good News.”

  “Good News?” retorts my grandmother.

  “Yes, Good News!” claps my father, because this is Paradise, and his baby is born into it.

  Next my father has to search for an English name, because his daughter has to have a name that her future legions of white-faced friends will remember, but not a name that she can never grow into. Cousin François is about as French as French fries, French toast and French kiss, while Cousin Candy is more like a piece of congealed toffee stuck at the back of the throat, too gooey to swallow, but too unsightly regurgitated.

  Most parents play it safe and stick to the list in the “Naming your Baby” book in the hospital. Yet certain names stand out above the Lin-dahs and the Day-vids of the world. Across the road is a boy named Ao whose father named him after the first half of the Cantonese word for Australia. At the New Star Grocery is a Chinese boy named Freedom, and a Vietnamese girl named Visa. And of course, Richard, for riches. It doesn’t matter that Sky will eventually end up working at the bank, that Mercedes will stay in her parents’ factory producing picture frames, or that Liberty will get married at eighteen and raise a family of four by age thirty. It doesn’t matter that these children will grow up among other playmates whose parents push them so high that their heads spin from vertigo: Day-vid the heart-surgeon by day and hobby concert violinist by night; and young Lin-dah with the lovely brick-veneer double-storey dwelling and a dental clinic above her parents’ jewellery store. It doesn’t matter, because at this age we do not know that our playmates Lin-dah who used to be Linh and Day-vid who used to be Duong will be jet-setting to their latest holiday destinations in the future with the money earned from their double-happiness salaries, that they will pay with real Visa cards and drive real Mercedes. All this doesn’t matter because at the moment they are the ones with the banal unpronounceable names, and we are the children with the special names. We are the ones smiled upon by grown-ups, white people and Fortune.

  My father remembers a story translated from English that he read in his youth, about an enchanted land in which a little girl finds herself. This new daughter of his will grow up in this Wonder Land and take for granted things like security, abundance, democracy and the little green man on the traffic lights. She will grow up not ever knowing what it is like to starve. She will go to the Great School, and study to be anything she desires. Then after University, of course she will become a lawyer and marry Day-vid the heart surgeon. “This girl is going to have a good life,” says my grandmother. “Look at her now, refusing to eat her congee! Now what child under Pol Pot could have the luxury of refusing food, especially when her mother has carefully sucked the heat out of it in her own mouth first. Ay, this girl is going to have a good life indeed!”

  FOR Wah-sers like us, there is no such thing as tacky cheap knick-knacks. What an insult to call kitsch all the familiar stuff from the old country, the stuff even wealthy people had in their homes. Baskets for two dollars, colourful pink and red ones, in which to wash the lettuce. Plastic neon-yellow chopstick-holding baskets, plastic racks, plastic bedside tables for thirty dollars each to be assembled at home. Bright prints of Vietnam scenery on shaped plastic to hang on the walls of your house. Colourful floor mats with little animals printed on them. And squeaking sandals for the children, sandals at every corner of the house, so guests do not need to walk around in bare feet. My father brings home twelve pairs of oversized brown plastic sandals that are on sale at a little gift shop in Footscray, where they also sell embroidered slippers for $3.50. Other incense-ridden places in the city or Carlton would sell them for $25.95, under the name of exotic oriental ware.

  We are wealthy beyond measure, my father keeps reminding us; not even the wealthy families in Phnom Penh live like this. Some of the furniture given to us by the Brotherhood is better than the furniture for sale in Cambodia. “Ah, look at this house,” he laughs as he stands in the front yard of our first home in Braybrook. “It’s beautiful! Ah, look at these shoes! I bought them in the largest size possible so they can fit anybody!”

  “Not the Aussies,” corrects my mother. “Their feet are one and a half times that size!”

  “Doesn’t matter about the Aussies, they never take off their shoes anyhow.”

  “Heh heh,” laughs my mother, as she stacks my father’s brown plastic shoes on a white plastic shoe rack, “a good thing too. Big feet smell.”

  It is her first house, too, a whole house of her own. Except for the mother-in-law as an unfortunate permanent fixture, it is exactly as my father had promised. My mother buys little glass figurines from the Teochew gift shops that are sprouting up in every street, their racks over-brimming with toilet paper next to plastic flowers next to dog-food dishes next to garish plastic pictures of Jesus Christ with a raised red heart emanating from his chest and rays of fluorescent light reaching to every corner of the frame. “Look at this, Agheare.” My mother shows me a small white plastic wheelbarrow with fake flowers spilling out. She places it behind our glass cabinet in the front room of the house for guests to notice. “Beautiful hah?” I agree wholeheartedly. It fits right in with our blue and maroon vase from Uncle Fang’s Guangzhou glass factory, and a little white porcelain angel with her features painted too high for the grooves on her face. Beautiful things do not need to be expensive, and precious things are to be kept hidden in case of burglars, or guests with kleptomaniac fingers. My parents could never understand those houses where the Royal Doulton plates and family antiques were displayed for every eye to see. After war, people learn to keep good things hidden. They learn that nothing is permanent, and that the most beautiful things are not necessarily the most expensive.

  Grandmother is a collector of string, of Danish biscuit tins, of scraps of paper, and artwork from me. When I come home from kindergarten with bits of macaroni stuck onto a paper plate and spray-painted gold, my grandmother, my auntie and my mother wah over it. How magnificent, they breathe, how precious. No muted tones for us, we like our things two-thousand-decibel colourful. The b
righter, the better. At Christmas, when my brother Alexander and I are colouring white paper with crayons to make paper chains because we don’t have any pre-printed coloured paper, my grandmother cries, “You silly kids. You don’t have to do that, look what I have!” She holds up a handful of junk-mail advertisements. “Look at all the colour here!” She sits on the floor with us, helping us cut up Target advertisements into strips. We make paper chains and string them from every corner of the ceiling, hang them from every doorframe. “Isn’t this much better than white paper?”

  White is the colour of mourning, red is the colour of blood and life and sunrise, and black is the colour of the evening. But summer evenings here seem pastel, the weather more tame than in Southeast Asia. In fact, everything about this new country seems more contained, hazy like a sort of heaven, no streaks of red or orange or yellow to assail the eye or unsettle the senses.

  In the evenings, the windows are open and we go outside and sit in the trailer Dad brought home from the Alcan factory. It is good in the trailer, we make it bang here and there in the wilderness of our front yard, beneath the tall red-purple plum tree. This tree overshadows all the other trees, stretching its branches like extended arms covering the whole front yard and half the verandah, and in between are the smaller trees, the bushes, the ferns clamouring for the light. Red leaves cover the ground of the front yard, and the whole place is like a rainforest without rain. You cannot tell that this is a Chinese house. No hexagonal I Ching mirror on the front door, no words of warning, no clipped hedge and double happiness signs anywhere, unless you count the name of our street. No neat little cumquat trees at the front for luck.

  We are trying to assimilate, to not stand out from the neighbours, to not bring shame to our whole race by carrying over certain habits from the old country, such as growing chickens in the backyard or keeping goats as pets. The plants we plant in the backyard are functional plants, herbs like hot Thai mint, basil, shallots and lemongrass, and we have geraniums and oleander in the front yard.

  In fact, if you watch from the outside, you will see the crinkle-faced Asian grandmother watering the bird-of-paradise flowers with the hose. Through the back window of the house you will see the mother washing the dishes in the kitchen, and in the front yard you can watch the two children with half-coconut-shell haircuts poking holes in the dirt and trying to plant black custard-apple seeds, and everything seems so true-blue suburban that you would never suspect that the inside of the house is crowded with such a collection of curiosities that make us smile, make my father clap his hands in delight as he peers up at the smiling faces of Ordinary Australians cut up from the Target brochures and strung up in sticky-taped chains in every room.

  *

  Paper chains and plastic sandals aside, when my mother’s two little sisters first arrive and settle into their housing commission flat, I come face to face with what I consider to be true cutting-edge Chinese chic. When they step off the plane, Aunt Ly and her little sister Sim are like those heroines in the movies set in pre-war Shanghai, that big booming city full of newly arrived dowdy women who come with boxy brown suitcases and countryside smiles smeared on their faces, ready to make it. They walk with dreams on their heels and the heels of their dreams: spangles, gold lamé and rhinestones, the height of glamour. They wear floating dresses they have made themselves – polyester is silk that requires less ironing, and the colours are infinite.

  And when they move into their own flat, they show us that domestic glamour is not confined to the suburbs. The housing commission flats, with their distinctive checkered floors, are better than the apartments in those Hong Kong serials my grandmother watches with my mother, complete with commercials copied direct from HK Television that you have to fast-forward. Those videocassettes are illegally shipped to Australia to stock the shelves of illegitimate video shops or even the lounge-room collections of extended families who pass them back and forth like shared secret pleasures. These serials have twenty-eight, twenty-nine videos and my mother and my grandmother discuss what has happened in them over the kitchen table while peeling carrots and chopping beans because my grandmother is a brilliant storyteller and conversationalist when she is not attacking people with bones in her words.

  From the top of the Housing Commission flats you can see down below to the park and the playground equipment – they don’t even have such private parks in Hong Kong! These flats have two or even three rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen with black and white tiles – oh, such class, just like the black and white tiles in the rich people’s mansions, except in plastic laminex. Easier to clean, you see.

  In the cupboards of those flats are endless cups of coffee and sweetened condensed milk and multitudes of Marmee instant noodle packets. And when it is cold outside it is always warm inside. From the eleventh floor you can see down, and people are always walking in and out of their doorways, so many people so close. Laundry is always hanging outside, and plastic buckets, usually red ones for some bright reason, perhaps to counteract the distinct mossy-seepy smell of stairwells.

  My aunts buy nail polish for twenty cents a bottle and sit on the floor of their bedrooms painting their toes. They curl their hair at the flats of their friends who are training to be hairdressers. Many old folk who became family friends take good care of them, tell them who are the good boys, and the old women watch with a cunning eye to see which young woman would be best suited for the son or cousin of so and so. “Ah Ly, I know a good young man for you.” And they sing the praises of someone’s son or someone’s brother – never mentioned by name, they are always someone’s son or someone’s male relative, because they do not exist in isolation of their family. No one exists in isolation of their family, and if they do, there are plenty of old people to look after them and plenty of old people to look after, who live in the housing commission flats and whose sons and daughters leave them to mind the house and the babies while they both work to earn enough to raise their children born in the old country or the new.

  These young women, proud and beautiful by virtue of being young, smile deliriously so that their cheeks glow and they can take their beautiful faces plein-air into the parks, except they choose to dab on fuchsia pink powder and mascara their lashes. They want to be the Taiwanese singer Teresa Tang, these young women in their Salvation Army stilettos and their fifty-cent lipsticks.

  They find many friends, women like themselves at the height of glamour and prime of fertility, and in this country filled with hard-working young migrant men with determination in their eyes and the fire of the same dream burning in their bellies filled with factory working-class diet of two-minute noodles, there is no fear of not finding a family. So trusting, these young women from Southeast Asia, believing that because they are granted these new apartments and these new lives and the government takes such good care of them, that all Australians are alike.

  So when my Auntie Ly’s friend Ah Ngo needs to make a phone call because she has forgotten the number of Ly’s flat, she thinks she can go to any flat door and knock; that all Australians are as kind as the Brotherhood of St Laurence ladies who have given her the dress she is now wearing, white with little brown and blue flowers scattered all over it, a flowing Monroe skirt below the knees and a little matching belt at the waist. So there she is, hair freshly layered and feathered around her face, lipstick on, high-heeled pumps, knocking on the door.

  The door opens and she gesticulates hand to ear and smiles and says “Fon, fon?” because she knows that in these flats, the phone is close to the kitchen which is close to the door, and the burly white man in the singlet lets her in. Being Asian, she takes off her shoes at the door, and she goes to the phone and just as she fumbles in her purse for the little slip of paper which has Ly’s phone number on it, just as she is about to make her call, head cocked to one side wedging the phone between her ear and her shoulder while she unfolds the little piece of paper, she feels a sharp jab on her behind and it is the Aussie bloke’s hands and his front up a
gainst her back. The phone drops and she screams and bolts out of there so fast that he is left with a pair of white high-heeled pumps inside his flat, shoes which are too small for any Western woman’s feet, and he does not know what to do with them. He picks them up, examines them, looks at the little heels and the plastic bows on the front. Then he peers out the window at the park below and flings them down one at a time, watching them fall to the concrete below. He closes the window and sits down to watch a bit of television.

  Meanwhile, Aunt Ly’s friend Ah Ngo runs up the flight of stairs because she does not know where to go and to go down would be to go down six more floors and she can’t think clearly except to escape and up she goes and up seems like the only direction and in any case, the staircase in front of her goes up and so that is where she goes. She pants and sobs and heaves up the stairs and in the middle, just when she thinks her legs are going to give way, she hears a familiar voice: “Ay, ay, where are you going? I was just going down to look for you,” and looks up to see my Auntie Ly and my Auntie Ly can see that something has happened. And so she takes her friend into her flat and she is shoeless but safe. And they both realise that it is not so safe here, and even though you are young and lovely you are not invincible.

  MY mother teaches me to obey my elders, and I grow up with filial piety permeating through every pore, so that when we have dinner with my grandmother, no one ever starts eating until she picks up her chopsticks. My grandmother sits at the head of the table, and I am always seated on her right-hand side. Whenever an unsuspecting soul picks up their chopsticks prematurely, she turns to me. “You know, Agheare, when your uncles and father were small, whenever they picked up their chopsticks before the adults did, or whenever they did not hold their bowls in their hands properly, I would say, ‘No manners hah?’ and they would plead for me to teach them. ‘Ma,’ your uncle would say, ‘Give me a whack over the knuckles if you catch me doing that again!’” My grandmother loves using this story of my father and his sadomasochistic siblings to prove how well she brought up her children, but after hearing it so many times and seeing my father smile over the table every time, I have my doubts about it.