Unpolished Gem (11 page)

Instant coffee was my panacea in these years. I put International Roast powder into everything, even our milder forms of Chinese herbal medicine like Lou Han Guo and Chrysanthemum Tea. I would drink cupful after cupful mixed with sweetened condensed milk. It gave me the shakes, but I didn’t care. Sometimes the milk would run out, and I would have to improvise by using coconut milk. Sometimes we would not have any sugar left, and I would use jam. I would also throw in a few spoonfuls of Milo.

“Consider yourself lucky,” my mother scolded me. “When I was young, we couldn’t just walk to the kitchen whenever we felt the fancy to have a drink, and make ourselves a cup of coffee with Sweet and Condensed Milk. We had to work; we never had a mother at home to take care of us. We had one doll, shared among the eight of us, and I went out to earn my own way when I was thirteen.”

For me there was housework, and then there was homework to alleviate the boredom of the housework. And then there were books. When I was thirteen, I devoured
Dolly
fiction the way stuck-at-home housewives devoured Fabio romances. The only Asian girls in those romances were named Momoko or Ginny and came from educated middle-class families. How I hated the clean-cut beauty of these characters, who were having a grand old time without worrying about their poor mothers working their fingers to the bone; without feeling guilty because there wouldn’t be anyone to watch over the screaming sibling, or wipe the floors or clean the house or hang out nappies.

Coming of Age was explained to me in books, and in the books Judy Blume characters waited with delirious anticipation for their period. I didn’t see what the big deal was when it happened to me. So what? It just meant I could make babies if I felt the urge, and of course that was the last thing on my mind. So I wrote the date in my diary, and dreary life continued on as usual. Coming of Age for boys was infinitely more interesting, I thought, when I watched
Stand by Me
and
Dead
Poets Society
. Boys formed friendships by discovering cadavers. They walked on railway tracks, started secret clubs, cried over their own cowardice and occasionally shot themselves in the head when pushed too far. It didn’t matter if girls were cowards, there was no opportunity or reason for us to test our bravery. All that mattered was that we could make a good pot of rice, had a pretty face and were fertile.

A few years later, my Auntie Bek, my mother’s eldest sister, asked me, “Eh, Agheare, did your mother have a big celebration for you when your time came?”

“Huh?”

“You know, with lots of food, and a new set of clothes in red, and lots of rejoicing?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you celebrate Agheare’s coming of age?” my auntie asked my mother.

“Hah?” said my mother, “don’t be ridiculous, no one does that anymore.”

Girls came of age so easily, all they had to do was start bleeding and they were certified women, which meant that they had to be kept mostly at home because of all the rapists out there. “You never know,” my father would say shaking his head, “what kind of people are out there.”

“You never know,” said my mother, “how dirty-minded men are.”

My parents painted a picture of a world in which every man under the age of twenty was a precocious pervert and every man over twenty a potential paedophile.

But the boys in the
Dolly
romances I read were never the phantom types that walked around with permanent bulges looking for nubile Lolitas. They were always sweet lads named Laurie or Jesse or Bradley. They smiled a lot and said things like, “Oh Linn, I never realised what nice almond eyes you have,” and they let their girl rest her head on their shoulder without fear of catching lice.

Yet I knew no Laurie or Jesse or Bradley would tell me, “Hey Alice you are lovely,” because I wasn’t, or “Hey Alice you’re sweet,” because I probably smelt like Johnson’s baby piss, or “Hey Alice, will you be mine?” because I belonged to the house and the babies and they would never discover me inside the concrete walls of Number
3
, Bliss Street, Braybrook. I imagined myself wasting away like a princess in a tower, or rather a caffeine addict in a shack behind the Invicta carpet factory.

None of the boys in my neighbourhood would qualify as Bradley or Laurie, because Bradley or Laurie did not smash empty glass bottles on the road for fun and terrorise the local senior citizens. Bradley and Laurie were usually blue-eyed, blonde-haired, they were never ever blue-haired, blonde-eyed. No, I was sure Brad did not laugh hysterically, screaming F-ing this and that.

I turned up the radio to drown out the boys outside, who were obsessed with fornicating perdition because they were yelling it at the top of their lungs. Then Mariah Carey came on the radio and sang “Dream Lover, come rescue me,” so I turned off the radio. If by some miracle Dream Lover wanted to bother with that scrawny girl in the concrete house behind the Invicta carpet factory, Dream Lover would have to overcome several obstacles, including surviving the carpet fumes, getting past the broken glass on the road and avoiding getting a bottle pushed in his face. He would then have to find the house number, because my grandmother had written PUSH on the letterbox instead of Number
3
, because my father had written PUSH on the garage door and she thought that was the name of our house.

And if Dream Lover wasn’t a complete idiot standing there PUSHing the letterbox off its hinges, he would walk to the front door and ring the doorbell and pose himself in all manner of chivalry, and the door would open to reveal the darling exploited Proletarian Princess carrying the third-world gene.

“Who is that? Is that Brianna?” the ma of the Proletarian Princess is heard yelling from inside the house. “Tell her she can’t come over, why is she always coming over?”

“No Ma, it’s not Brianna,” the Proletarian Princess mutters, staring through the iron-lace grating of the security door.

“Then who is it?”

“It’s a … another friend.”

“Tell them to go away, tell them you have work to do! Shut the door! You’re letting the factory fumes in. Get back inside! You haven’t even wiped the floors properly! If I slip carrying this baby in my stomach, by God you are doomed. Always half-finishing things off, like a cat with a head and no tail.” And so the door closes, and the Proletarian Princess walks sadly back into the house, realising that there are no Proletarian Princesses anyway and how could she possibly have been so thick as to imagine that Dream Lover would come rescue her from here in the first place?

A
LL you want at fifteen is to have a boyfriend, not to choose the future father of your children. All a fifteen-year-old boy wants is to receive affirmation from a girl, and perhaps something more if he is lucky – not to choose the future daughter-in-law for his mother. All we wanted was someone to go to the movies with, to talk to when tormented by adolescent angst, and to show off to our friends.

“At this age, you must not get into relationships, you must study hard, your future is so important,” my father told me. My father had grand images of me freshly processed from the tertiary production line and packed into a sterile office somewhere in Springvale, doing Very Important Work. It was all well and good to scream and cry for pretty dresses and plastic bonbons in the hair as a child, but when you reached adolescence, yearning for those very same things could spell doom. No longer is the little flaunter smiled upon, for to be a flaunter is the worst thing a girl can be. Button up your coat and don’t think about such things. Boxed into your blue blazer, you sit at your desk and study, and that will settle you down. Back in the old country, the good girls stayed at home and the bad girls went out with baskets of oranges and apples late at night and made their money selling all sorts of fruit in the park.

Here it was different. The difference between our sweet apple-smelling schoolgirl in Melbourne Central Station and our sweet apple-selling streetgirl in Central Market Phnom Penh was that one believed in free love, and the other did not. Australian democracy seemed to be available to all by the mere shedding of your clothes. Perhaps clothes did not even have to be discarded, because in broad daylight we would see the schoolgirls and boys in their school uniforms, full blazers and ties and kilts and long socks, lying atop each other in the park. There was no other place to go to lose themselves because their parents must not know, because their parents knew nothing about being free to love. Parents just didn’t get it. Life was not to be spent at the mercy of sunken-faced migrants, bringing from the old country a million scruples that made no sense. Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free, not held tight in the clutches of the village gossip or the narrow-eyed matchmaker.

I was the cover-up girl for my friends, the one who watched and lived vicariously and answered the phone to let the parents know that Melissa was at my house even though I knew she was probably clambering in the window of Tung’s room, dressed like a soft brown sausage poured into a tube of black vinyl, eyes lined with kohl. I was the one friends begged for evidentiary aid when the age-old excuses were all used up: “We have to go to the library.” “We have to use the school’s computer labs.” “We have to meet up with friends for a group project.”

Names were changed, new identities forged. “Oh, hello, Brianna,” I would say into the phone when it was actually Bryan, and if the boy was too dumb to catch on, I hung up and called the real Brianna to lament.

“Who was that boy who rang before?” my mother demanded. She knew it was a boy because she had picked up and answered. “’Allo? ’Allo? You want Asunder?” She handed the phone to my twelve-year-old brother.

“Hello?” Alexander paused. He looked at me. Uh-oh. I glared at him and willed him to hang up.

“Errr, yes. She’s here.” Then, without thinking, he handed the phone over to me. “Here, it’s for you.”

“Hello?” I asked into the receiver, my voice squeaking. “Who is this?” “Just Alexander’s friend,” I lied after I hung up, wondering why I had to lie.

“How do you know him? He sounds too old to be your brother’s friend.” The questions were hurled at me like the pits of sour plums. “Why does he have our number?” “What did he want?” “Oh, so you spoke for
that
long about homework hah?”

How could I explain to my mother that we were just chatting, let alone what we were chatting about, when I did not have that many Teochew words in my head, and when the meaning of “chat” did not register in her mind? Boys did not talk to girls for no reason. “Boys should not talk too much,” she said to me slowly. “Boys who have too many words are no good.” She took a long look at me and I knew that the news was going straight to my father. Why did the words matter so much, anyway? “People talk,” said my mother. “Boys talk to you, you talk to boys, and people talk.”

Who were these people, and what did they talk about? How was it that they could see me but I could not see them? “They are walking together,” people said. “I saw your daughter walking with a boy. I wonder who the boy is hah?” Even if the boy was walking two metres behind, even if he were a platonic friend, even if he were the loser from the Ha Thinh grocery store who followed me back to Retravision every afternoon after school, I would feel as though I was doing something wrong, and feel the inevitable guilt. Then he would feel the guilt, and we would both wonder what was going on, and whether it was true that he did like me in
that
way or whether I did like him in that way even though I was completely sure that I didn’t, but perhaps my actions meant otherwise? Once I started acting awkward around somebody, they probably thought that I liked them, and once both people started acting awkward, it meant that the parents could come and stand over us and call us “Ah Di” and “Ah Mui”, Little Brother and Little Sister, and make sure we’d never want to be within a seven-kilometre radius of each other again.

*

“Your parents think you went out with Vincent on Sunday.” Cousin Andrew had called me on the phone to tell me what I already knew. I thought, this is all his mother’s doing, this is all my mother’s doing. “You know I didn’t, and that’s none of your business anyway,” I sighed.

“It is when your parents come over to my house and start asking me questions!”

My parents had come over to his house to interrogate him!

“So what happened?” Andrew asked.

“Nothing. He called me and my mother answered and made a few crazy connections in her mind. And now I am stuck here all holidays. Can’t go anywhere in case they think I’m going out with boys and getting corrupted.”

“This is stupid. Why don’t you tell them that nothing has happened?”

“I did. I can’t.”

After two weeks of house arrest I was going crazy, with a barricade of books around my bed and the bedroom door closed from prying parents. But I had no need to fear for my inalienable right to privacy, because they knew I was not going anywhere, not going out with the Lee and Lah loiterers in any case. This was my mother’s term for the boys who squatted on the benches in the park, wasting time.

What was most damning were not the things that were said, but the things left unsaid. And since there were so many things that I could not say, I exercised my right to remain silent until my silence was construed as guilt, and the guilt ensured my house arrest.

Nothing I said could protect me because it was automatically assumed that I could not protect myself. “But I didn’t go out with anyone!” I would cry, and that cry would be taken as a sign of the frailty of youth, hypersensitive, hysterical – how could the elders ever think of trusting such a baby to her own devices if she got emotional over such little things so easily? Teary denials were the first sign of wrongdoing. “The worst thing that can happen to a girl is if she is tricked,” my mother warned me. “There is no redemption for one who is tricked.”

The most reasonable thing to do was to do the unreasonable, give people real cause to talk. The easiest solution would be to just call up the boy, ask him out even if I didn’t like him in that way, and board a bus out of Braybrook. After all, it was only a five-minute walk to the bus stop. But I was paralysed. At the rate things were going, I thought, dating would be conducted under house arrest too, if the elders had anything to do with it. Watching from afar and making up complicated stories about uncomplicated young people was bad enough. Worse still would be to bring a potential partner home to be watched. I could just imagine it. We would be sitting opposite each other at the table doing homework while my mother cut up spring onions on the kitchen bench. The best we could do would be to pass notes to each other like schoolchildren watched over by the headmistress.