by Shirley Marr
That night, lying in the secondhand pink-framed bed that First Uncle bought for you, your parents feel a whole universe away downstairs. Your rag doll, with her one-dimensional drawn-on face, provides no comfort. The pink wall, softly glowing in the dark, is keeping you awake. You still haven’t found the way to the Room on the Roof. It has been a really long day. You have traveled thousands of miles over the ocean, and your stomach still feels as though it’s up in the air.
The wardrobe door creaks open. You pull your covers closer to your face. Maybe it’s your imagination, but a slice of neon pink glows out of that crack.
Out of bed and you are fleeing down the stairs with your hair standing on end, so fast that it feels as if you’re flying. You dive under the blanket between the two sleeping bodies of your parents, and when they wake and ask you what’s wrong, you don’t want to tell them. Ma Ma groans and tosses in bed. She tries tucking another pillow between her knees, but now that she is awake, she cannot get comfortable again. She gets up and pads to the kitchen.
The light that reaches the bedroom is normal and yellow. You relax back into your parents’ bed, although you refuse to take the blanket off your face. The more you think about it, the less sense it makes—what would be haunting your room? A pink monster?
There are real things you ought to be scared of, you remind yourself. Like starting a new school, having to make new friends, a language you can hardly speak or read…
Your stomach knots up and you realize that you haven’t managed to console yourself. You are still scared. In a different way.
As you worry about a billion things, you are unaware of the exact moment when the light inside your mind goes off and you are asleep. Somewhere in your dreams, a pink door opens and a black-and-white cat comes out and winks at you.
CHAPTER THREE Plasters
When you wake up the next morning in your own bed, there are tears streaming down your face, even though you’re unaware that you’ve been crying. The window next to you, streaked with rain, has been crying too. You sit up abruptly, wipe your eyes, and hold your rag doll tight. You have to get used to sleeping by yourself, that’s all.
It’s the school holidays, so you should go out and explore that garden you can see from your bedroom window—your garden now. Not like the workers’ tenements on the island with that sad piece of grass you had to share with all the other kids. In the back corner you can see a rotary clothesline slowly spinning in a circle. When your clothes are washed, they will be hung out in private, not tethered on a long piece of bamboo from the balcony of your fifth-floor apartment so that everyone can see your old, holey underwear.
It is all yours. Even so, you look warily at the wardrobe door, now firmly shut, and you feel a strange sense of dread and confusion; a tug-of-war inside you trying to decide if you belong here or if you are a guest. Or if you’re not welcome at all.
There is a sharp beep coming from outside the house, and you leap out of bed and down the stairs. You throw the front door open, and Ba Ba, down below on the driveway, is grinning out the open window of the driver’s seat. Your family has its very first car. It is a tiny secondhand thing with rust patches, bald tires, and a broken taillight that has been fixed with orange cellophane. But the important thing is that it runs.
Mr. Huynh gives you a thumbs-up, and you hide behind the front door because you are in your pajamas—not the type that people buy specifically for sleeping in, with teddy bears and cartoon characters, but the clothes that you used to wear during the day, that have become so old that Ma Ma makes you wear them at night.
Ba Ba is dressed in his old work overalls that Ma Ma has cleaned up as much as possible. The overalls tell a story—with paint stains, engine grease, dried cement, and fabric burns—of all the jobs Ba Ba has ever had a go at.
They are all hard jobs, Ma Ma says, but she says you don’t want to grow up and do a hard job. You want a good job where you work in a clean office as someone important, like a doctor. Everyone will look up to you and Ma Ma will be so proud. You must do well at school here so that everything, all the sacrifices and hardships your parents have made, will be worth it. Instead of lifting you up and making you feel lucky, it makes you feel leaden, as though the world is on your shoulders.
The car pulls away with another loud beep, and you lift your arm to wave but drop it down beside you with a sigh. You hide from Mrs. Huynh, who comes through the front door with a large cardboard box. You wait till she leaves before you come out from the living room.
“Come and look at this,” Ma Ma says as she approaches and puts a hand on your shoulder. Ma Ma sits on a chair in the kitchen and opens the cardboard box while you sit down on the tiles. The brown-and-orange circles stare up at you curiously.
Folded at the top of the box are old baby clothes and baby bibs. Ma Ma gives them a sniff and places them lovingly on her knee. You wonder how old the Huynhs’ baby is now. Ma Ma pulls out a jacket and a pair of long pants with school logos on them that look suspiciously like they might fit you.
“Go on, try them on. This is the school you’ll be going to.”
You find yourself jumping off the floor as though a mouth had somehow opened in between all those brown-and-orange eyes and bitten you. Then you run away from your fears by racing out the back and loudly slamming the screen door shut. There on the back steps, you kick at the concrete all the way down.
You wonder why the house is built so high. It takes twenty-six steps to get down from the back door. From the front, you have discovered that it takes thirty steps, as the staircase bends a little. If you walk all the way down either, there is a red wooden gate on the side that should open to let you pass to the other side. But it is locked. It is arched like a hunched man with two heart-shaped holes for eyes that watch you, no matter which side you’re on.
Big Scary looks down at you, surrounded by more of the tall, dark green cactus and a thin palm tree that rustles loudly like stormy weather. You search for the Room on the Roof that you could not find yesterday. It is there; it is real. From the back, though, there is no window and the eye cannot see you.
A twig cracks behind you and you turn your head. At the top of the fence, exactly where you saw that black-and-white cat, is not a pair of yellow eyes, but brown ones instead. They belong to a boy who sees that he has been caught spying, gasps, and quickly lowers himself out of sight.
Still standing on the bottom step, you look at the waist-high weeds and wonder if you are brave enough to dive straight in. There could be snakes slithering around the roots. There could be spiders and creepy-crawlies. There could be dead things. There could be anything. But then you remember that you are running from your problems and there is only one way to go and that is forward.
You jump into the grass.
You run right up to the fence and look through a hole in the wood.
Your brown eye meets another brown eye that didn’t expect it, and you watch as the boy turns and flees into the Huynhs’ house. Frowning, you stand up straight again, scratching your head.
The grass bends wildly in the wind, but it is only grass.
In fact, now that you stand in the middle of the wilderness of the backyard, it is actually quite boring. The little domed glasshouse looks even more rusty and broken up close. The overnight rain has streaked the panes. There are no orange trees that First Uncle died under. Maybe that was a dream. Maybe all this is one bad dream.
Curling yourself up on the bottom step, you resolve to stay out here, hoping that when the day finally goes black, you will disappear with it. But you are so hungry, your belly is aching. And you are so cold, you are shaking.
There is a little meow behind you, and you turn your head to see the black-and-white cat sitting on a step above you. Then the cat does something unusual. She lifts up one of her paws and signals you to come toward her.
You turn your head and look all the way up to the top of Big Scary and decide you’ve forgotten what made you upset or angry and that you need you
r mother’s love.
So you follow the cat back up the stairs. As you decide to lift her into your arms, you find the cat is gone. All that is there is a vaguely cat-shaped rock next to the screen door, which looks as though it has been there always. Maybe First Uncle used it to prop the door open; maybe you didn’t notice it before.
Or maybe the rock just winked at you.
Back inside Ma Ma takes you silently in her arms even though you are conscious of pressing too close against her belly. There is a guest sitting at the kitchen table in the form of Mrs. Huynh with a mug of instant coffee in front of her. Like a magician, she smiles, stands up, and makes everything better.
First, she gets both Ma Ma and you to sit down. Then, from the big foam cooler she has brought over, she takes out a plastic tub of peanut cookies and places it on the table. As you stuff your mouth full of the sweet, crumbly goodness, Mrs. Huynh pulls out a bamboo steamer, and before long there is a plate of warm dumplings and red bean baos.
Both you and Ma Ma eat as though you haven’t eaten in your whole lives (or were ready for a hearty breakfast at least). All that remains afterward is one corner of hard skin from a dumpling and the soggy paper off the bottom of the baos. You both stare at Mrs. Huynh as she finishes stir-frying vegetables and meat, putting them in a plastic container to cool down. There is rice cooking away in the rice cooker.
Mrs. Huynh will go, but she will come back with a cardboard box full of basic food items in cans and packets that she puts into the pantry. You watch as Ma Ma fishes out an old red packet from her bedroom and folds money into it. She tries to give it to Mrs. Huynh. Mrs. Huynh smiles in an understanding way and pushes the red packet back into Ma Ma’s hands. Ma Ma’s cheeks go red.
* * *
Later in the day you curl yourself into a corner of the house and daydream. Big Scary takes your body and hides it from the world. You flick through the collection of little books you have made for yourself. You write poorly in the New Language, unable to rearrange the alphabet into many correct words. You write even worse in the Old Language, the characters you attempt always sloppy, Ma Ma telling you off about your incorrect order of brushstroke. So you let pictures be your voice instead. You draw complete stories and staple them together.
You will start a new book today. And you find yourself drawing a picture of a house, with a singular room at the very top in which a giant eye that fills the entire window looks out. You draw brown-and-orange eyes. You draw heart-shaped eyes that stare out of a wooden red gate. In your corner you hide from the thought of the first day of school. You tell yourself that it’s not real; you screw it up into a tiny ball and throw it into the wastepaper basket in the back of your mind.
“Are you going to buy me the toy pony?” you ask Ba Ba when he comes home from his new job at the end of a long day. But he’s in no mood to talk. He doubles over with one hand on his hip, the other forming a fist to hammer on the small of his back.
“Had to carry many bags of concrete mix to the roof of the building site,” he says. “I am sure they were cruel on purpose.”
There is talk about asking Mr. Huynh about “unions” and “workers’ rights,” but you don’t know what that means.
“Ma Ma says we don’t have to make our own toys anymore and that I can have the pony. I want the pink one with wings and blue thunderbolts down the side.”
That is when Ba Ba shouts at you.
Shocked, you take a step back.
Ba Ba puts his face in his hands and goes silent. Ma Ma swallows and puts her hand on her stomach. Silently, she takes off Ba Ba’s dirty work shirt from under his undone overalls and sticks on so many capsicum plasters that his back becomes a strange, fleshy patchwork.
Ma Ma says they will suck out the aches. You will see in the morning, she says, the bottom of them will turn black, and that means they have sucked out the aches. You recoil from these giant Band-Aids; you’ve had one placed on yourself once and it burned. But in the morning, when they are ripped off Ba Ba, you will look—half horrified and half fascinated—at the wrinkled, shriveled skin underneath.
Right now you want to ask what you said wrong, but you don’t want Ba Ba to shout at you again in case it is a question that a stupid girl would ask, and Ma Ma has explicitly told you to be a good girl. So you sit down and say nothing while Ma Ma puts a plate of rice and Mrs. Huynh’s stir-fry in front of you.
You diligently eat it, even though your stomach is all clenched up and the back of your throat has that aching feeling you get when you cry. It is not until you are back up in your bedroom, a million light-years away from everyone, that you tightly hug your homemade rag doll with no name.
That night, when the wardrobe door creaks open and that slice of pink comes out, you decide you will train yourself not to run to your parents. The New Land is your home now and you cannot run from that. Even though it had always been just the three of you on the island, you never felt lonely or sad. You felt safe. You know Big Scary is trying to make you feel the same way, but it is not the same.
You hide your face under the blanket and tell yourself this feeling of fear and confusion will pass. And so too will the loneliness and sadness. You will feel better soon. You will all find your place, and everything will settle into that worn-in and comforting pocket where it was before. But everything has changed. It has changed too much to ever be good and the same again.
CHAPTER FOUR Shoes
The house hides you from a lot of things.
The bitter cold outside.
The icy fear inside your heart.
The cool way your parents have started talking to each other.
You draw and dream and become as small as a message written on a grain of rice.
But she cannot protect you from everything.
You wake up and two weeks have flown past.
It is the first day of school.
Ma Ma is already up. She rises every day at five to make sure that Ba Ba has his morning cup of instant coffee and to pack a pot of instant noodles for his lunch.
The car also needs to be started up and the engine left to idle for fifteen minutes every morning before it can actually run. This was not mentioned by the man at the car lot who took your family’s savings in cash. Ma Ma has gone all the way down the thirty front steps to do this while Ba Ba is showering. On the way up, she trips.
“Don’t tell Ba Ba,” Ma Ma says.
You don’t understand why. Ma Ma has always told Ba Ba everything. Looking down, you see that Ma Ma’s hands are clutched together tightly. You’ve noticed that Ma Ma’s hands tremble slightly these days as she serves dinner, as she mops the floor, and as she clutches the curtains and looks out the windows of Big Scary.
They are not the open hands that used to play mahjong with her friends on the island. The relaxed fingers that moved the softly clinking tiles adorned with Old Land characters and watching eyes.
Ma Ma goes to hide in the bedroom. You keep your promise and don’t tell Ba Ba about Ma Ma tripping on the steps. He approaches you in his overalls of a million trades, and you wonder if he is going to hug you, like he used to lift you up inside his arms when you were small. Instead, he says, “Look at you, such a big girl now. Be good at school and listen to what your teacher tells you.”
You think he might pat you on top of the head, but he wipes his hands on his shabby overalls instead.
“If you get an A on your first assignment, then Ba Ba will find a way to get you that toy pony, eh? Don’t look so sad.”
You smile for Ba Ba and watch him descend that front staircase with his hands shoved deep into his empty pockets. At the bottom is Mrs. Huynh with more groceries, waiting eagerly to go up. Ma Ma cannot hide her relief when she sees Mrs. Huynh’s face peer through the bedroom doorway. Her ankle has swollen, and Mrs. Huynh tuts as she presses a frozen bag of vegetables on it.
Mrs. Huynh keeps repeating “doctor,” but Ma Ma looks scared and shakes her head. She rubs her belly uncertainly. Mrs. Huynh kneels down
to your level and tries to tell you in her broken English about Dr. Vo. He is very far away, in a different suburb, but he is a good doctor. The best doctor. He can speak the same language.
Ma Ma fears doctors. She’d rather not know if she has a medical condition, preferring to think that if she pretends it doesn’t exist, it will go away.
What Ma Ma fears even more about doctors is that they cost too much money.
Everything costs too much money.
It’s better you walk to school by yourself without Ma Ma anyway, as you are currently burning with embarrassment. You are wearing someone’s old uniform with visible worn patches on the knees and elbows. A shirt with a collar that won’t sit straight; a fleece jacket that is no longer fleecy with a wonky zip. And, worst of all, boys’ shoes. They are huge and grey, with black Velcro straps. It feels as though your two feet are encased in blocks of ugly concrete. You are sinking and drowning in them.
“Walk straight up to the man down the street holding the stop sign. He will let you cross the street, and from there, you will see the school. Do you understand, Meixing?”
You nod, even though it all sounds too hard. There are too many things swirling in your mind; you can’t seem to concentrate on even simple instructions. But they are not simple. This is not something you have ever done before. And you have to do it alone.
You should hug Ma Ma and let her rest, but something selfish inside of you wants her to come with you, almost demands it. Because she is your mother.