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  After the meal, a nurse comes by with tablets for each resident. Ah Gong and Ah Mah didn’t take any medication before they moved to the home. Ah Mah refuses.

  ‘What are these for?’ asks their granddaughter.

  ‘They’re for her psychosis.’

  ‘My grandmother doesn’t have psychosis,’ the granddaughter says. She knows her grandparents sequester food in drawers and cupboards until it rots, and are constantly searching for their ‘missing’ money, but most of the elderly former refugees she knows have these habits. Half a century ago, Ah Gong won a small local lottery and with his winnings brought home four durians for his wife and eight children. This was one of his life’s highlights.

  ‘Sorry, they’re to help her sleep,’ corrects the carer. ‘She keeps getting up in the middle of the night and hurting herself.’

  It is easier for the carers to look after this babel of old people if they are medicated, the granddaughter realises. They don’t panic, or fight, or cry out in incomprehensible languages.

  One night, Ah Mah has a stroke and is taken away.

  ‘He doesn’t realise she’s gone,’ says the carer with deep sympathy, a few days later, to the granddaughter. ‘The family hasn’t told him?’

  They had been together for sixty-eight years and had never celebrated a single anniversary. They just got on with the business of surviving, day in, day out. His daughters tell him that they’ve taken Ah Mah to live with one of them.

  ‘At least one of us made it out of here alive,’ Ah Gong mutters.

  When their granddaughter next visits, Ah Gong has packed his clothes in four large black garbage bags. ‘Your aunties said they were coming to take me home,’ he says, staring at the window. ‘They visited this morning, and said they would be back this afternoon.’

  It is a Monday afternoon, 3 pm, and the karaoke has started, but Ah Gong cannot hear a thing.

  Hey, Jude, don’t make it bad / Take a sad song and make it better.

  RETURNING

  About a year ago, my friend Suzanne went on Facebook to find our primary school buddies. Since I wasn’t on Facebook, Suzanne showed me their profiles.

  There was Danielle W., who had two kids, there was Timothy Z., who had two chins. There was Jack, Suzanne’s primary school boyfriend, who had a $30,000 debt from his most recent divorce and now drove trucks for a living. There was Dang, whose mother and my grandmother had shared the same hospital room when I was sixteen, and when only one of them came home he still called me up, genuinely happy for us. There was Meghan, the star of the school play, still pretty; and Nathan, my best boy buddy in Grade Four, who was now openly gay in a suburb where that could mean a broken bottle-top to the face if you weren’t careful.

  ‘Remember her?’ Suzanne asked me, clicking on an image of another very familiar face. Of course I did. She had been one of those happy-go-lucky, freckle-faced kids who smiled easily even when she lived off Vegemite sandwiches every lunchtime. Until our Facebook expedition, I had not thought about Layla Owen since primary school. Over the next week Suzanne told me she had been messaging Layla, and that we should pay her a visit. ‘She has a kid now,’ Suzanne told me, ‘and doesn’t go out much.’

  So on a Friday evening after work, Suzanne drove us to visit Layla. We heard her before we saw her. A shadowy figure emerged from the front door of a concrete house in a suburb where most of the residents’ blinds were drawn shut during the day, and where they took as much care of their homes as they did their teeth. She sounded like she was taking her first and last inhale and exhale with every breath, like someone was doling out limited free supplies of air the same way shopping-centre mall spruikers handed out chips in small plastic bags, and she wanted to grab as many as she could and use them all up before they expired.

  She emerged a different shape and a different size from what we had remembered, as if someone had put her in the oven to rise, but she had still managed to retain her uncooked colour. As she came closer, even though her walk was different, and she was now an adult, we took a look at her face and realised that she still seemed exactly the same. That’s the funny thing that happens with seeing someone you haven’t seen in almost twenty years. They either look like the childhood version of themselves you have embedded in your mind, or they appear as complete strangers. But Layla was no stranger. In her face, we saw the familiar soft-pudding sweetness of an old friend.

  ‘How have youse been?’ She opened the wire-frame door for us.

  ‘Yeah, not bad,’ replied Suzanne. ‘Same old.’ When we entered, Layla’s boyfriend was lying on the couch watching the footy. He just looked at us, and then back at the telly, like a walrus looking at some minor and unthreatening gyre in the ocean. Disinterested, uncurious.

  Layla did not offer us food or a drink. This was not to be taken personally. All it meant was that she had never been taught that there was such an experience as ‘having guests over’. I was familiar with this sort of thing. Growing up here, houses were not places where your friends’ parents offered to share their welfare proceeds with others on a regular basis. Lining up at Kmart with my baby sister in a pram, sometimes you’d hear, ‘Git lost, we were here first.’ Minding my sister while she sat on the stationary plastic carousel horses at Highpoint that moved only when you put a dollar in, mothers would come with their kids and say, ‘Git lost, we’re not putting money in for youse too.’ The baffling thing was that we never even asked. Yet those two sentences summed up life behind the carpet factories of Braybrook: Git lost, we were here first, and git lost, we’re not putting money in for youse too.

  Suzanne’s father was a One Nation supporter who, after his divorce, solely dated small Asian women with minimal English skills. But when we were small he used to walk my brother and I home from school, take us to theatres and dole out countless kindnesses on us. Layla’s mother came to my eleventh birthday party at McDonald’s and gave me a doll. Their girls had grown into women, and they were still my friends, even though I knew their small talk would inevitably turn to a litany of complaints about the hardships of life and the crappiness of the government, despite their not being entirely sure whether the government we had was Labor or Liberal. It didn’t matter, because the government was supposed to provide, and if it wasn’t doing its job, then there was every right for the common citizen to bag them.

  ‘Have you ever noticed the homeless in the streets?’ Suzanne asked Layla. Just the other week we had been at Flinders Street Station at night, where Suzanne bought cheeseburgers for a woman who was sitting outside a McDonald’s drawing chalk pictures on the footpath.

  ‘Nah, I don’t get out much,’ replied Layla.

  ‘Well, you’ll notice one thing. They’re all Australians.’ Suzanne meant that they were all white. ‘I think it’s outrageous how our government can’t even look after their own and yet are giving so much money for boat people and shit.’

  Suzanne didn’t realise what she was saying, because in her eyes I was like her. ‘I swear, sometimes I forget that she’s even Asian,’ she once told a boyfriend, possibly the highest compliment you could offer in this area.

  ‘Yeah,’ Suzanne continued, ‘I saw on the news that the government gives these people money to buy new cars and shit, when the rest of us are living rough, just trying to get by.’ Centrelink wouldn’t give you any money unless you had less than $3000 in the bank, something Suzanne had learnt the hard way one year when she lost her job at the glycerine factory.

  ‘They don’t even know how to drive,’ decried Layla.

  And suddenly I could see it from their perspective. What strange and grating feelings must have developed in their solar plexuses, these girls who had known only one way of life, to suddenly see an enormous swarm of crazy migrants in their neighbourhood who just worked day and night, and to see how hard they worked their kids, never taking a break until they had achieved the new car paid for in cash and not through a 24-months interest-free deal; the new house, mortgage-free after six years; and the new
life away from the carpet factories. You weren’t meant to pursue ‘the Great Australian Dream’, they had grown up believing. It was just an ideal, like a television advertisement, and class was as fixed as the fascinators on the heads of B-grade celebrities on Melbourne Cup Day. How did these outsiders cotton on to how the system worked, and how did they do in one generation what usually took two or three? There must have been something dodgy going on with the new arrivals. It was impossible to believe that you could come to a country with nothing and end up with more than everyone else. And yet it was not, when you considered how much they worked, these ethnic relentless pursuers of the Great Australian Dream. In fact, the amount of work they did seemed obscenely unAustralian.

  *

  So I learnt to make concessions, which were small concessions. I told myself, you are skilled, you are university educated. I chose to forget the blind panic that engulfed me in my mid teens, the fear of what would happen if I wasn’t these things, if I was stuck, spending my whole life with the git lost, we were here first crowd. I reminded myself constantly but for the Grace of God go I, even though I wasn’t Christian. How tenuous fate is, how largely due to luck. Anyone could be nice to symmetrical-faced, liberal-minded, healthy, vegetable-raised middle-class young women who said all the right things, but my friends were my friends because they were true and transparent: Layla, with her house decorated with Target Home Depot tables and Big W cushions. Suzanne, with her quiet grace, her carefully applied make-up and her clean shoes. They did not censor their views, they did not pretend to love when they felt fear, they did not pretend tolerance when they felt contempt. And as much as I disliked their ideas, we made a strange form of exceptionalism for each other. They were kind people at heart, they loved and tolerated others on an individual basis, even if they had ‘Fuck off we’re full’ stickers on the backs of their cars. They had their strong views, but they were never going to be the policymakers, the teachers, the lawyers or the people in positions of power in this country, younger versions of which I encountered at university – people who would never let me get a word in, and who spoke with expertise about the Third World because they had visited Cambodia on a school trip when they were fifteen.

  There was a little boy, about six years old, jumping on Layla’s other couch. This was, I soon found out, Layla’s son, Jayden. I told Layla how beautiful her son was, because it was true. I also knew that these people did not make conversation. They just muttered out loud, mental reminders directed at no one in particular: ‘I gotta go to the dentist soon.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  Pregnancy had made Layla’s teeth wobble, she told us, until she could almost move one of her front teeth at a forty-five degree angle. Eating felt like she had those fake pink-and-white lolly teeth in her mouth. And then, one day the teeth just started to fall out. So now she was waiting to get dentures made.

  Jayden leapt onto the couch.

  ‘Fucking git off me!’ Those were the first words we heard the prostrate boyfriend say all evening.

  Suzanne told Layla how we had, over the weekend, gone to a pub called the Sphinx in Geelong (the local residents referred to it as the Sphincter) to hear an ’80s cover band called Shock Rock.

  ‘Can youse come and pick me up when you have another one of those again?’ Layla asked. She was almost pleading. She didn’t have a car. ‘I don’t go out much, with Jayden and everything. And lazy shit here won’t take me anywhere.’

  ‘Fuck you.’ Lazy Shit did not move from the couch.

  ‘So can youse?’

  ‘What are you going to do about your kid?’

  ‘Lazy Shit’ll look after him.’

  I was inclined to be polite and say, ‘Sure, when we next go we’ll make sure to ask you along,’ even though I had no intention of ever going back to see Shock Rock. But Suzanne didn’t say anything, so neither did I. After all, I might have had the disingenuous good manners, but Suzanne was the one with the car.

  ‘What does she do all day?’ Suzanne wondered, after she pulled out of Layla’s driveway. ‘Imagine if we had never got out of the neighbourhood.’

  We tried to.

  But we couldn’t. We didn’t want to even think of the possibility. The evening was still young, too young to be tainted with such fears. We were driving away, and on the way back the lights were green in our favour.

  STOP RACE MIXING!

  When you are about seven months pregnant, you and your husband go to a local hardware store. When you return twenty minutes later to the car park, someone has put a folded piece of paper on your windscreen, held down by the wiper. You think it’s just an advertisement, but when Nick unfolds it to take a look, he grows very agitated. ‘I’m going to see if anyone else got this on their cars,’ he tells you, and returns a few moments later. No one else has anything on their windscreen except youse.

  You take the paper from him. At first it seems like a badly photocopied advertisement: a picture of a black boy and a white girl, both around ten years old, well-dressed, perhaps a promotional shot for an American ’80s sitcom. The children are inside a circle, which you think is the frame of the picture, until you realise that the image inside is cut into quarters by a large thin cross. In capital letters on top of the picture are the words: STOP RACE MIXING. Then you realise – the kids are targets inside the barrel of a gun.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ you say to your husband, ‘I bet that STOP RACE MIXING person has a whole collection of posters he carries around, so when he sees men holding hands he probably pulls out his STOP GAY MARRIAGE and when he sees redheads eating bagels he takes out the STOP GINGER JEWS one.’

  You find the incident harmless enough. Some cowardly moron is probably sitting in their car waiting to see your reaction. You imagine them grinning a nicotine-stained smile, smoking their taxpayer-funded cigarette and thinking, Ha! That’ll teach those miscegenating fornicators a lesson.

  When you tell your friends at the university college where you live and work, they are incredulously horrified and outraged. ‘Clearly mentally ill,’ they say. Or, a little self-righteously, ‘Who are these people? They don’t represent me or my country.’

  But you know who these people are. Oh yes. STOP RACE MIXING and you go back a long way. When you were a sixteen-year-old sales assistant at your dad’s electrical appliance store, old ladies would come in and say, ‘Can I have an Australian salesman, thanks.’ And you would dutifully go and find Joe the Italian or Jim the Macedonian.

  When you are ten, Mum walks you home from school and sees a man mowing the lawn across the road. ‘Go ask him how much he charges to cut grass,’ she tells you. Mum speaks no English and the only literature she reads is the Kmart and BI-LO ads that come in your letterbox every Tuesday. You do as she asks. The man, older, with a face like beef jerky left out of the packet for too long, hollers at you: ‘I DON’T DO YOUSE!’ You report to Mum, ‘He doesn’t cut grass.’

  ‘Of course he does, I’ve seen him doing the other lawns around here. Go back. He can’t hear you through the lawnmower noise.’

  You go back. He yells at you again. ‘GIT LOST I DON’T DO YOUSE.’

  You are mortified and ashamed, and at that moment you hate Beefjerk but also your mum for not getting it.

  Your mum does not care if you are literate or not at school – her greatest fear is that soon you will not be able to speak to her in the same language. You, your brother and sisters already talk to one another in English. Your medieval dialect of Teochew cannot convey certain wonders, such as the pros and cons of each Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s powers and personality. So your parents sent youse off every week to learn a third language, one that can be an intermediary.

  Mandarin school goes for only three hours every Saturday morning, with a half-hour break in between for recess. Because you are all grouped according to your oral and written abilities, there’d often be other fifteen-year-olds among the small mainland children, so you don’t feel too out of place. And compared to real Chinese school for c
hildren in China, you are on a perpetual holiday. During the summer, you all bring along water balloons and in that hour drench one another so profusely that the last hour of class is hell for your poor, refined mainland teachers, who have to deal with a class full of wet, dripping, feral Western hoons.

  During the school holidays, so many of youse fail to do your homework that the principal, Easter Wu, begins offering cash prizes to students who have. Two dollars for the best writing in class, and one dollar for the three runners up. ‘Cheapskate Chinese,’ mutters thirteen-year-old Corrina, the mongrel half-Australian in your class, and then she turns to the small seven-year-old next to her: ‘Hey, kid, I’ll give you a dollar if you say, “I don’t wanna be a chinga!”’

  James’s eyes shine: he can spend hours copying the plotless stories in the textbooks written and sold by the principal, all about offering various fruit to your elders – Grandma, eat this strawberry! Thank you, small child. Grandpa, have a banana! Here, let me peel it for you! Wah! What a good child. – and making lovely accompanying illustrations of filial piety, or he can just take Corrina up on her offer.

  ‘I don’t wanna be a chinga!’ grins James. ‘Heh, heh.’

  ‘Here you go, have a dollar.’

  To those poor hardworking mainland Chinese teachers, Corrina probably represented a very good reason to STOP RACE MIXING.

  *

  You grow up with grandparents who survived the Chinese famine, uncles who survived the Cultural Revolution, a father who survived the killing fields of Cambodia and a mother who lived through the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, and you learn that to survive means to blend in, to try and render yourself invisible to any targets. You never know when the targets will change depending on the whim of political leaders, and you bide your time and wait for the aim of the gun to hopefully bypass you. When you were eight, someone chucked a rock through your window but your parents never got it repaired. Your mother just permanently lowered the blinds and quietly went about her work in the garage.