Unpolished Gem (2 page)

*

Wah, so many things about this new country that are so taken-for-granted! It is a country where no one walks like they have to hide. From the top floor of the Rialto building my parents see that the people below amble in a different manner, and not just because of the heat. No bomb is ever going to fall on top of them. No one pissing in the street, except of course in a few select suburbs. No lepers. No Khmer Rouge-type soldiers dressed like black ants prodding occupants of the Central Business District into making a mass exodus to Wangaratta. Most people here have not even heard about Brother Number One in Socialist Cambodia, and to uninitiated ears his name sounds like an Eastern European stew: “Would you like some Pol Pot? It’s made with
100
% fresh-ground suffering.”

Here there is sweetness, and the refugees staying at the Midway Migrant Hilton horde packets of sugar, jam and honey from the breakfast table. So used to everything being finite, irrevocably gone if one does not grab it fast enough, they are bewildered when new packets appear on the breakfast table the next day. So they fill their pockets with these too, just in case. Weeks later, the packets still appear. The new refugees learn to eat more slowly, that their food will not be taken from them or their bowls kicked away. They learn that here, no one dies of starvation.

So in the beginning there are many wahs of wonder, and when my father returns home swinging his bagful of swine hocks, his ears are assailed with even more. “Wah! Look at this water from the tap!” cries my grandmother, handing him a steaming mug. “So clean and hot you could make coffee with it.” When they walk to the Western General Hospital with my mother to get the blood tests done, bitumen roads are a source of wonder. “Wah! So black and sparkling like the night sky! Rolled flat by machines and not by stones pulled by a hundred people!” When they catch the tram to declare Australian citizenship, the orderliness of the streetscape does not escape my father, who has proudly memorised all the names of the roads, and in the process the chronological order of this colonised country’s monarchs – “King Street, William Street, Queen Street, Elizabeth Street.”

My parents become pioneers navigating a new land. Although they travelled through three Southeast-Asian countries by foot, nothing can prepare them for travelling up and down escalators. “Go down!” the rest of my family urge my mother. But she stands firmly at the top, blocking off entry for all other embarkers. She stares down at her husband, her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law, who have already arrived at the bottom. “Ahhh. I’m scaaared!” My father finally steps on, growing larger and larger as he approaches the top with a smirk pasted on his face, like a slow zoom in a cheesy Chinese film. “Just step between the yellow lines,” he instructs. “Come on, you’ve gone up before, so you can come down too! Weeee, wahhh, see what fun!” Up and down and down and up they ride the escalators at Highpoint Shopping Centre – this
32
-year-old man, his eight-months-pregnant wife, his
27
-year-old sister and the old Asian grandmother in the purple woollen pyjamas. Every journey is one small step for Australians, but one giant leap for the Wah-sers.

The first time my mother walks into a Sims Supermarket, the first moment she sees people loading the trolleys with such habitual nonchalance, she exclaims a long, drawn-out, openmouthed “wahhhh” of wonder. She would not have been surprised if the baby popped out then and there. This enormous warehouse would shock the eyeballs out of the most prosperous families in Phnom Penh! So gleaming spick-and-span clean! Such beautiful food! Such pretty packages! Packed in shelves so high and deep, all the colours so bright and all the lights so white that she does not know where to look. Aunt Que nudges her: “Ay, stop gawking like such a peasant.”

“Wah, you mean
anybody
can come into this big food warehouse?” my ma asks in awe.

“Of course.” Aunt Que has only been here once before. “See that fat man with his bumline showing through his shorts? See those little children with no socks? Anybody!” Even the local thong-wearing loiterer can load up a trolley with these treasures, without needing to pause and calculate because it is all so cheap.

As my mother wanders and wonders up and down the aisles, she thinks about being the first in her family to see such magic. She thinks about the ones back in Vietnam. She sees her father sleeping on the floor of the monastery, her mother selling
bancao
at the market. Her skin-and-bones sisters beneath the tap outside with soap powder dripping from their hair. She thinks about the ones back home who are unprocessed and waiting to be processed, unlike the meat that is stacked in tins of twelve in front of her.

“Fifty cents!” exclaims my Aunt Que. “Look, Kien!”

“I know,” says my mother, “so cheap, eh? Packed so beautifully, too.” Back in Cambodia, every canned comestible seemed to have some kind of Lucky This-or-That animal plastered on its label. “Lucky Lion Chilli Sauce.” “White Rabbit” candy. “Golden Star Happy Dragon” noodles. My mother looks at my Aunt Que, who is holding a can in her hands and turning it round and round slowly, and she knows that my aunt is thinking of the ones back home too.

“What do you think, Young Aunt?” my mother finally asks. “Should we buy some hah?”

“Yes, let’s buy some,” determines my Aunt Que. “It’s so cheap!”

Back in our rented weatherboard house in Footscray, my mother cuts the meat up into little pieces and makes a nice stir-fry stew. “It smells so good,” breathes my auntie as she spoons the meal onto a large plate. My mother cannot help but smile with pride. It is only later when my family sees the television commercial that they realise who – or more accurately, what – the meat is for.

Later that evening, in the bed that fills up the entire small storeroom where they sleep, my mother and father lie thinking about their full tummies. “Wah, who would believe that they feed this good meat to dogs? How lucky to be a dog in this country!” My mother puts her hand on her sticking-out stomach and smiles. Good-oh, she thinks. Her baby is going to be born with lots of Good-O in her. Good stuff.

*

“The hospital nearly gave your father a heart attack when you were born,” my mother tells me later. “Your father was at the Migrant Hostel doing his translating job, trying to explain to those countryside Cambodian migrants that the reason that they were so cold in the mornings was because they were meant to sleep
under
the sheets. Their beds were made so nicely when they first arrived that they thought they were meant to sleep
on
top
of them. They were scared of mucking up the carefully tucked blankets. No one wanted to be shuffled back onto the plane.

“Your father was trying to tell them that the beds were made to be slept in, when suddenly he was told that he was needed at the hospital. Something must have happened to me, your father thought. Why would a hospital
need
him? He thought about bringing along his acupuncture needles just in case, but there was no time. When he arrived at the hospital, he discovered that the doctors just wanted him to be there to see the baby come out!” In Cambodia the husbands would usually find a chair and sit in front of the room where babies were being born until they heard the wahwahwah sounds, and it was only then that they would know that the whole messy business was over and they could find out whether the child had the desired dangly bits or not.

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 ’
60
s. 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!”

F
OR 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.”