by Mimi Kwa
‘Yep,’ says Kevin, ‘we caught him going through Annabelle’s backpack, then we all confronted him and tipped his bag upside down. All the stolen stuff is there, even my passport, and some stockings that went missing from the girls’ bags.’
Am I dealing with a cross-dressing, foot fetishist career kleptomaniac?
The bikini girl chips in. ‘Now he’s gone bananas. He flipped out when we confronted him and shouted us out of the room. He’s locked himself in there. You’ve got to call the police.’
I may be fourteen, but I’m nobody’s fool; I want to verify what they’re telling me before I call the police – Dad doesn’t like anyone in uniform snooping around.
I walk down to Bunkhouse Two – my childhood home – to find a crowd of a dozen backpackers standing outside my old bedroom door. ‘You don’t know fuck,’ the thief is shouting from inside. ‘I’ll kill you! Fuck off, fuck off.’
I’m used to the collision between the relics of my old life, before the backpackers existed, and my new life with strangers inhabiting every personal space, but this is still weird – a grown man is in my old bedroom, having a fit.
When the police arrive, the man is screaming, ‘I have a syringe. I’ll give you all AIDS.’ The officers call an ambulance, and I wait out front to show in the men in white coats.
An hour later, Dad calls again. The bus is fixed, but the two backpackers are still missing. Dad isn’t a good driver at night, so I will need to ‘hold the fort’ until tomorrow. Just another ordinary day at Mandarin Gardens.
I have school in the morning and homework due, so I study at the front desk and eventually crawl under it to fall asleep.
GALAGA AND SLASHED TYRES
IT’S A CHALLENGE TO HANG ON TO THE HONG KONG FEELING when I’m home at the youth hostel with Dad, or by the Swan River with Paw Paw, Granddad and Mum. None of my lives could be more seismically different to those of my friends and classmates, or of most adults I meet. Hong Kong is my secret life, and I discover more and more of it each time I go.
Aunty Theresa and I are drying off after our swim in Repulse Bay. She removes her bright-pink flower swim cap, tousles her short black hair back to life and applies a red Elizabeth Arden lipstick. ‘I don’t like you going with this boy without Brigit to follow.’
Later that day we’re at the club – eating club sandwiches, I am always thrilled to have club at the club – and I straighten up my posture on the blue striped bench cushion to give an impression of being older.
‘Mimi, you are a scholarship girl. I introduce you to many nice, intelligent people with handsome sons and pretty daughters for you to play.’ Aunty speaks with her mouth full, which she would never do around anyone else but me – and my cousins, I expect. ‘This boy should come in to meet me at least. And have some tea.’ Chew, chew, chew. ‘I am a very good judge of character.’ Chew, chew. She smacks her lips. ‘Waiter, one more sandwich, please.’ She winks at me. ‘We can be a little bit fat and still look like the super model.’ Aunty does a wiggle, purses her lips and tilts her head from side to side like she’s the cat’s pyjamas.
The boy Aunty is talking about is Felix, who I met on my last trip to Hong Kong.
On the first day of that trip, Dad had an argument with Aunty. They – mostly Dad – did a lot of Cantonese shouting in Aunty’s study, and when he came out he insisted I stay with him at the Park Lane Hotel.
I admit that at the hotel, I proceeded to eat the Pringles and KitKats, but only because I had to be there and they were there too. I also replaced them with 7-Eleven items. I don’t mind it at the Park Lane, but I do much prefer to stay with Aunty and Brigit.
In the morning, I watched hundreds of locals doing Tai Chi in the park below my seventh-storey balcony. It was as though they were all connected, facing the same direction, moving in unison, each dancing with their invisible partner. Their flat palms twisted gently, guiding energy around them.
That night Dad gave me a hundred Hong Kong dollars so I could wander around Causeway Bay on my own after dark in a way Aunty would never have allowed. It was exciting to walk among thousands of Hong Kongers, everyone going somewhere. I joined the foot traffic flowing towards SOGO department store, then walked past G2000 clothing and up a slight incline to Jardine’s Bazaar, passing by the bus stop where I usually got off if I was coming down from Aunty’s place.
A group of older teenage boys fell into step with me. ‘Hello, beautiful.’ I smiled and kept walking. They didn’t have much more English to say than that, so they awkwardly jostled with one another, laughing. ‘Bye, beautiful.’
I can’t go anywhere in Hong Kong without stares and advances, but I’m used it, and I kind of like it because I don’t feel very pretty at home.
‘You want bag?’ I sidestepped a collection of leather handbags swinging towards me.
‘You want watch?’ A man showcased a display of copy watches, like The Price Is Right host Ian Turpie. ‘Very nice price.’
His voice followed me as I pushed my way through the hawkers to a trinkets alley that widened to reveal my favourite clothing shops, tucked away in miniature garages. I rummaged through rails of jackets, skirts and tops, as a group of men and women stood around watching me.
The thick black sky was impossible to see as I walked back towards G2000 and SOGO with the light of neon signs in my eyes. In my ears was Cantonese and the rattling of trams. Laughter, car horns and video games.
Video games! I followed the sound down an alley I hadn’t explored before. Beeping and blipping musical scales were coming from beyond an open door. ‘GAME OVER!’ An Atari Alien glowed, strobed and blacked out on the wall like it was clinging to life, before lighting up again. I descended the stairs, one Dunlop Volley at a time, to electric applause – the sound effects of a Hyper Olympic game – as I arrived in a room full of video games and teenagers. It was so dark and noisy, no one noticed the outsider. I exchanged notes for coins with a cashier, instantly recognising Donkey Kong, Wonder Boy and 1943.
Then I noticed a boy playing my favourite game, Galaga. I put a coin on the glass ridge above the control panel to indicate my turn behind the owners of two coins in front of mine, and waited.
It amazed me that the same video games existed in Hong Kong as at Happy Granny’s down at Scarborough Beach. This arcade had the same grungy feel about it, too: young men smoking, pretty girls with too much make-up and too few clothes, everyone just standing around. But not one of them was scruffy and unwashed like the beach bums at home. They were wearing spotless white T-shirts, jeans with custom rips, sparkling earrings, slicked-back hair and ponytails. They leaned on the walls and games.
It seemed I was the only female in the room who was actually playing the games and not just acting like decoration. A bunch of girls whispered and laughed behind their hands, and the body language of the boys indicated I was an unworthy opponent; they appeared extremely uninterested when it was my turn. I fired at the bugs and ships and aliens with my trigger finger, quickly approaching level thirty-two. I’d never got past that stage, but I had an audience now, so I tried harder. From the corner of my eye I could see the girls and boys looking from the screen to me, bewildered.
Afterwards I went to the park with a few of the boys and girls to drink liquor and smoke. The boys performed some kind of fight club, probably to impress the girls. The toughest boy was wearing a grey muscle singlet, jeans and an open shirt rolled at the sleeves, a packet of Lucky Strikes peeping out from his pocket.
‘He is doing the push-up to impressive you,’ said an older boy who was sitting beside me, the most clean-cut of them all. He was wearing tan chinos and a collared shirt with brilliant white sneakers and a broad toothy smile to match. ‘I’m Felix.’ He offered me a cigarette. ‘Like the cat.’
He was the only one in the group who spoke English well. When I learned he was a nineteen-year-old real estate leasing agent, I suddenly realised these kids were all much older than me. But none of that mattered – Felix made me feel welcome, a
nd it was a good feeling to be with people closer to my age than Dad. Felix translated their questions about me and about Australia, and my questions about what each of them did, where they lived, and what they wanted to do in the future. One worked at G2000, which explained her outfit, and the tough boy was a mechanic, which explained his.
So, that’s how I met Felix. I never saw the others again, but he became a friend, never too shy to call up to my hotel from the lobby and ask me out for a meal.
On this trip he calls me at Aunty’s place. ‘Meee-meee,’ Brigit sings each time, ‘it’s the Mr Felix on the telephone.’
When he finally comes to tea with Aunty, he’s wearing a suit and tie, and he bows and says ‘yes, Aunty’ a lot. The two break off into Cantonese, and I wonder what they’re talking about.
When Felix and I head out after tea for a daytrip, I see that he has borrowed his boss’s Audi convertible and parked it next to Aunty’s neighbours’ Jaguars and Rolls-Royces.
The Chanel scarf that she has given me for the ride streams backwards with my hair, and Felix puts on a Cantonese pop CD and sings along loudly. I laugh at what a contrast all of this is to life back home.
We drive to Stanley for lunch, and Felix enjoys showing me around. Although I’ve been many times, it’s refreshing to see it through the eyes of someone new. He buys me a gift: a Felix the Cat T-shirt. ‘I probably not see you again. This is to remember me.’
I wonder what Aunty said to him. I’m going back to Perth in a couple of days anyway, so who knows what will happen to our friendship? Felix must sense that too. Monkey left, Lukin left, now it’s my turn to leave a friend, although he’s the one letting go first.
The weather is balmy, and it’s exhilarating to see tropical jungle foliage rush by as we climb Tai Hang Road with the top down, back to Aunty’s place at Peace Mansion.
Felix flashes his toothy smile. ‘It’s like I’m driving the movie star.’
Back home in Perth, on another stiflingly warm summer afternoon I’m riding with Dad in our Volvo. Dad wears his signature checked shirt over a white singlet tucked into his brown-and-black sarong, tied nappy style. He has deck shoes on, and a thick gold chain dangles around his neck. A black cotton cord with a clip at one end is tethered to a leather coin pouch in one pocket, while a number of pens – along with a highlighter, just in case – peep over the top of the other one.
Dad drives his Kwa Car slowly – and dangerously. He’s singing his favourite line from the song ‘Just Born to Be Your Baby’, about lumberjacks and kings. As our Volvo has KWA on its numberplates, there’s no escaping identification, no matter how embarrassed I am. Dad’s driving is neither aggressive nor defensive; he just appears to be completely oblivious to the cars around him, the cogs in his head turning on his next court case or get-rich-quick scheme.
‘Dad. Dad! Watch out!’
We swerve to miss a family of ducks crossing the road alongside Herdsman Lake.
‘Buddy Hell. Jee-sussss Christ. Buddy ducks.’
We swerve back into our lane as oncoming traffic is forced into chaos by Dad’s last-minute manoeuvre.
‘Omigod, Dad!’
A small stone hurtles directly towards us, connecting with our windscreen. Horns toot and there are a few shouts of ‘fucking Asian driver!’ as we pull over to the side of the road. I watch the family of ducks slide into the lake.
The windscreen is completely shattered in a crazy-paving safety-glass pattern, but somehow it remains intact. ‘I can’t see now,’ says Dad.
I watch him eye off the rear-view mirror stuck to the cracked windscreen. ‘No! Dad!’
But it’s too late – he yanks the mirror inward, bringing thousands of glass fragments tumbling onto us both. ‘Now I can see.’ He laughs his kookaburra laugh. ‘Ahahahaha.’
I look down at the mountain of glass on my lap, caught in the folds of my skirt, in the sides of my sneakers and covering the floor.
‘You can clean it up when we get home. Keep the glass on your lap. You can use your skirt to carry it to the bin. It will save time, save time.’ He laughs again.
A few days later, a group of girlfriends are over at my place, giggling and carrying on like teenagers are prone to do. All nine of us pile into the Kwa Car so Dad can drive us to Swensen’s, an ice-cream parlour down at the beach. We show little regard for seatbelts or passenger numbers, with five girls squashed across the back seat and three in the boot. My friend Attalie is on my lap in the front.
‘Mim, have you got the air conditioner on? Mr Kwa, is the air con on?’ Zarn asks.
Attalie, who is wriggling to get comfortable on my lap, reaches out towards the windscreen, her hand going right through. She is quite stoned and squeals as a breeze washes into the car, and our laughter intensifies as everyone realises there’s no windscreen.
It’s dusk and Dad starts to sing, winding down his window to ‘let in some fresh air’. More uncontrollable laughter. He sings ‘Moon River’, ecstatic to have a captive audience, and we laugh even harder. ‘Your dad is hysterical, Mim,’ my friends always say.
BROTHERS AND BIKIES
ANGELA INSTRUCTS ME TO PLUNGE THE SOILED CLOTH NAPPIES of her first child into a large laundry drum and teaches me to rub a safety pin with soap so it will glide smoothly through the triangulated cloth nappies when I change him.
The new baby is my brother Adrian, an Earth Dragon born in a double lucky number eight year, 1988, and given the Chinese name Wai Lung.
I love him so, and Angela softens enough to let me hold him. I walk him around the 23-metre swimming pool and pat his back as he wails with a sore tummy. ‘There, there. Shhh-shh-sh.’ He is so tiny in my arms. I whisper to him that I wish I could protect him from the craziness he has been born into: the madness of Kwa.
Angela appreciates my help, but with a newborn on the scene, it’s not long before she gives Dad an ultimatum: ‘Her or me.’
Dad sets me up in an apartment of my own, next door, the same one Monkey and her parents used to live in. Dad has partitioned it in two so he can take over the living area as his ‘legal office’. On my side I have two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen with an empty fridge. I fill it with frozen stews and casseroles Mum cooks for me. Paw Paw buys me boxes of cereal, and Granddad gives me a weekly allowance so I can buy my own milk and eggs. I use the second bedroom as my living room.
It’s lonely living alone, and to-do lists are still shoved under my front door.
My latest job is helping Dad with his legal ‘work’. He has become notorious for suing anyone and everyone. He sues the insomnia-relief tablet brand Mogadon for keeping him awake, with no luck, and Berocca for the same thing – another loss. ‘I lose some, I wins some,’ Dad says. ‘But I win more than I lose, so they can’t kick me out.’
There’s a large boulder on the verge outside our house in exactly the same spot it’s been for twenty years. Dad has reversed his Kwa car past it every day for half that. But one day he misjudges the gap and ploughs into the rock, damaging his car and leading him to the next logical action: sue someone. He files in court against our neighbour, and it turns out the rock protrudes twenty centimetres onto council land. Both Dad and council staff measure it, confirming he’s right.
This is a win for Dad but just one of many weekly cases involving Mr Kwa, who these days attends court like it’s his full-time job. A faulty product, bad service, poor design, ‘I just don’t like it’ – these are all the sorts of things to put a bee in Francis Kwa’s bonnet. Look at Dad the wrong way and you can surely expect a summons.
Soon, in the Year of the Metal Horse, Angela and Dad have another baby, Jerome, who is also adorable beyond belief.
Mandarin Gardens gets a new lease on life when new managers Don and Sarah move in with grand plans and dreams to enhance the backpackers’ community spirit. They live in the unit beneath mine and begin hosting regular BBQ events, including Christmas lunch. The couple take me under their wing, becoming my good friends. I’m sixteen now, up to my fina
l year of high school; Sarah is only nineteen and Don at least twenty years older.
Down by the pool, Don builds a bar and sets up a TV. Whenever I scrub clean the pool tiles with a toothbrush, one of the jobs on my list, I sit up at the bench with him to watch the Gulf War unfold.
One day, Angela screams at Dad, ‘They’ve ripped out a page of the book. They’re stealing from us!’ She’s talking about the ledger where we record rent paid in cash.
Don and Sarah plead with Dad, but he is resolute, so they pack their belongings, clothes and few pieces of furniture. Two more people gone, along with our sabotaged friendships.
I know they didn’t steal from us, but by the time I find the missing page hidden in Dad’s study, confirming their innocence, it’s too late for me to go into battle. They’ve already been gone a month, during which Dad said Don slashed his minibus tyres in a wholesale supermarket carpark and grabbed Dad by the throat in the toilet paper aisle. According to Dad, Don threatened to kill him, so Dad filed a court action. Not long afterwards, Sarah left Don.
Mandarin Gardens is their undoing, and they are ours. The 4.5-star backpacker travellers’ resort begins an accelerated decline.
Dad and Don go to court over the accusations. Dad sues over the death threats, and Don over unfair dismissal; Dad countersues for theft, and Don for slander.
Don contacts me to ask if I’ll testify as a witness for him, but in the end, when the hammer comes down, I choose family. Kwa blood runs thick, and I side with Dad as I always do. In a letter to Don I say how sorry I am – and, understanding what a difficult position I’m in, he forgives me for turning him down. I am ‘still a kid’, he says, ‘don’t worry’.
In summer, Mandarin Gardens still promises sexual opportunity for twenty-somethings traversing the world on life’s big adventure. I never know what combination of people each day will hold or what they’ll do: what friendships, confrontations, altercations and alienations will transpire. Many of our guests confide in me like I’m Oprah living in a soap opera, and even when they don’t, I still overhear a great deal. I never know what life-changing lesson a day at the biggest youth hostel in the Southern Hemisphere will teach me. There’s constant excitement and abandonment, new friends coming and going, and promises of postcards and staying in touch. I grow accustomed to getting close and letting go, but I long to be normal like my private school meat-and-three-veg friends. They think my life is exciting, but all I want is theirs.