by Alice Pung
“Thank you, Mrs. Leslie.”
“She is a superb Vietnamese cook.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Leslie, but we’re not really Vietnamese. We are Chinese born in Vietnam.”
“Oh, is that right?” She wanted me to tell her more.
“We’re Teochew. Our ancestry is from Guangdong, in the south of China.”
All these place names barely meant anything to me—all I knew was that we spoke a dialect that several million people across China and Southeast Asia spoke, a language that sounded both medieval and childish.
“Really? How fascinating. I’ve never heard of that language. Can you teach me a few words? How would I say ‘eye’?”
“Muck.”
“Pardon?”
“ ‘Eye’ is muck.”
She looked confounded, and a little worried that I was making it up, until I pointed to my eye.
“I mean ‘me.’ How do I say ‘I’?”
“Oh. Wah.”
“Wah?”
“Yes, miss. That’s how you say ‘I’ in our language.”
“Okay,” she said tentatively, not knowing whether I was giving her pidgin shit. “What about ‘he’ or ‘she’?”
“Eee.”
“Is that right, Lucy?”
“Yes.” Those were the words. Miao was “cat.” Him was “bear.” Ka was “leg”—and she thought I was pulling hers.
“Well, I’ve never heard anything like it.” Then she looked down at my book. “You know, Lucy, our library has an extensive collection of East Asian art books.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Leslie.”
“We also have a wide range of Chinese history books. Perhaps you could find out a little more about your heritage in one of those.”
I liked Mrs. Leslie—at times I even loved her—but really, how would she like it if I suggested to her that she should read books about the Irish Potato Famine?
The next day she found me again in the same spot. I had to bid farewell to Professor Gombrich and his lesson on the Ghent Altarpiece.
“Lucy, a few friends and I were talking,” she said, “and I was telling them about your mother’s wonderful cooking. Do you think there is a chance that we could get the recipe from her?”
“Sure, Mrs. Leslie. I’ll ask Mum for it tonight.”
“Better yet, why don’t we invite you and your mother over for afternoon tea and a cooking lesson? I would love to meet her. Then she could show us how it’s done! Perhaps this Saturday? Does that sound like a fun afternoon to you, Lucy?”
It would have been a fun afternoon for Mum, if she believed in fun. But she believed in work. I assured Mrs. Leslie I would ask my mother that night.
“Oh, this will be too exciting!” she said. “I’ll ask along two other friends who’d absolutely love it.” She already considered it a done deal.
Of course, I did not ask my mother that evening. I could easily imagine her response: “What? They want me to leave my work and show them how to cook something? And then will they come home with me and help me iron my interfacing?”
My mother didn’t really have any friends, only a handful of other ladies in the same line of work. Whenever there was a large order, Aunt Ngo and Aunt Tee would get together to do the non-sewing tasks: putting buttons and spare threads in plastic envelopes, opening buttonholes, installing zippers. It depended on who had the right machine. They would cook together, but definitely not in a champagne-sipping way. “Ngo, while we finish this batch of buttons, can you check on the beef stock?” my mother would ask, or Aunty Tee, with pins in her mouth, would rush to the kitchen to turn over the roast pork. Then they’d all get back to work.
Professor Gombrich was getting mighty irritated with Mrs. Leslie, because the following day she interrupted his lesson on the architecture of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge to let me know that her friends could make it and to ask whether Saturday was still good for my mother and me.
“Mum can’t make it,” I told her. I didn’t enjoy disappointing someone I liked so much, so I quickly added, “But I would be happy to show you how to make rice-paper rolls, Mrs. Leslie.”
She smiled with relief, and when I saw her smile I suddenly realized the singular flaw in Amber’s face. Mrs. Leslie was a warm Audrey Hepburn in her older, golden years, while Amber was a morgue-faced model who thought that smiling might give her premature wrinkles.
“That’s wonderful, Lucy! Now, what ingredients do you think we’ll need? Perhaps you and I could go to your local grocery store to get them after school on Friday. I’ve always wanted to know how to use the authentic things in an Asian grocery store.”
I could just see Mrs. Leslie parking her BMW in the Sunray Station parking lot, next to the two-toned old trucks and the other cars with their paint peeling like eczema and their side mirrors duct-taped in place. I could imagine her stepping out in her clothes the color of soil and sand, among the housewives with their red-and-gold lace-edged nylon tops, purple polyester pants and twenty-dollar perms. We would walk past Second Life Academic Books, where the books were kept behind rope barriers due to the recent spate of thefts.
I could just see her at the market, Linh, marveling at the beauty of it all, extolling the parsimony of ethnic women and their ability to select ripe avocados and mangoes, bitter gourds and rambutans. Then we’d go back to her house to cook and she would tell her lady friends what a fascinating place I lived in, “so full of color and life, just like Ho Chi Minh marketplace!” and they would probably be envious that they hadn’t had the special tour.
And here is the question I would have wanted to ask all of them, but especially Mrs. Leslie: “Would you want to live here? Or would you want to do this only once before you went back to your ‘purveyor of fine foods’?”
I snapped out of my reverie. “No, that’s fine, Mrs. Leslie. My mother can buy the ingredients. We’re going shopping in the morning.” And then, to stop her from offering to accompany my mother, I added, “After her appointment with the Chinese herbal medicine doctor.”
“But what can I do to help?” Mrs. Leslie asked.
“Well, you can decide what sort of meat you would like to put in the rice-paper rolls.”
“Great! I’ll get the meat, then.”
Linh, I knew it was wrong and sneaky of me to suggest the meat, because it was the most expensive ingredient, but I didn’t know how else I was going to get it. Mum and Dad never gave me pocket money—I just asked them for things I needed and they bought them for me. How would I explain that I had roped myself into an afternoon of cooking instead of doing homework, or minding the Lamb, or sewing?
“Dad, can I have twenty dollars to go on an excursion?” I felt bad asking him so soon after he had returned from his shift at work that evening, smelling like carpet chemicals.
“What? I thought your school covered all those things.”
Not the chartered school bus, I thought to myself. Not the trip to Adelaide for choir camp. Not the field trips to Japan or France.
“No, this is an excursion to the special Secrets of Ancient China exhibition at the museum.” Two things my father loved—education and our heritage. He pulled out his wallet and handed me thirty dollars. “I only need twenty,” I said.
“Keep it for lunch.”
“I’ll bring lunch.”
“Just keep it.”
—
On Saturday morning, I caught the bus to Stanley. At the market, I bought Vietnamese and hot Thai mint, spring onions, cucumbers and bean sprouts. At the Asian grocery store, I bought vermicelli and rice paper. And then I went to Safeway.
As much as Mrs. Leslie wanted me to, I could not give them the “authentic” stuff. I could just imagine them spooning their fish sauce over their rolls, saying, “Ooh, this is very sharp and interesting,” while trying not to twitch their noses because the smell was as sharp and interesting as a lash on the bum from a whip soaked in vinegar. In the condiments aisle at Safeway, there were not the two-liter glass bottles of fish
sauce we had at home that we mixed with carrots and garlic, but there was a tiny six-ounce bottle made by a company called Ding’s Delight. The logo was a pointy triangle field hat with two chopsticks sticking out of it. It was $4.25. What the hell? I wondered. How could something so small, artificial and crappy cost so much?
When I arrived at Canningvale Railway Station, Mrs. Leslie was waiting. She opened the trunk of her car and we loaded the bags. We drove past Canningvale Village with its strip of artisanal shops, past the streets with rising old Georgian and Queen Anne houses, until we reached her gate.
As I unpacked the groceries, Mrs. Leslie reacted as I imagined a new mother would when opening gifts at a baby shower. “Ooh, what do you call this herb?” she would ask, bringing it to her nose to sniff. She was particularly taken with the rice paper. “It’s stiff!” she remarked. “I imagined it would have the texture of spring roll pastry.” Then she noticed the Ding’s Delight. Picking it up, she asked, almost accusingly, “Is this what you use at home, Lucy?”
“No,” I confessed, “but real fish sauce takes ages to make.” One truth and one half lie.
She told me that her friends Gloria and Margaret were coming with their daughters. It was then that I noticed the table had been set with dips and a cheese platter. “You know them from school,” she said. “Brodie and Chelsea.”
Of course, I thought. Of course their mothers were all friends.
It was eleven-thirty but Amber was nowhere in sight.
“Amber’s probably still in bed,” explained Mrs. Leslie. “I’d better go and wake her. She shouldn’t be sleeping in this late. I bet you got up at a very early hour, Lucy, to go to the market and get all these things!”
Amber came out in her pajamas—small shorts and a white tank top—rubbing one eye. If I could capture this image and beam it into the brain of the loneliest and meekest Auburn boy, I thought, he would be a happy soul indeed.
“You’re here early,” she murmured. “Why?”
“You slept in late,” corrected Mrs. Leslie. “Come and help us set up.”
“I’m going to get some breakfast first.” Amber wandered to the cupboard and pulled out the Special K. “Want some?” she asked me.
“No, thanks.”
“Mum, Brodie, Chelsea and I are going out afterward.”
“Where to?”
“Just out. Maybe some shopping.”
Mrs. Leslie looked in my direction, and Amber realized her mistake in mentioning this in front of me. “You can come too, Lucy. If you want.”
“No, thanks, I have to get home and help my mother with some things.”
I really didn’t want to hang out with them, Linh. Firstly, Amber had invited me but her tone implied the opposite, and secondly, I imagined they’d only go to shops where you’d emerge with stiff cardboard bags lined with tissue paper.
The other two mothers arrived at noon, with champagne and flowers and chocolate truffles wrapped in fine tissue paper. Around their necks were rose gold chains as thick as fingers, and silky scarves that smelled of perfume.
Brodie’s mother was Brodie in thirty years’ time. Her hair was cut into a bob as even as the blade of a cleaver. She had deep-set black-currant eyes, a long nose and large Julia Roberts lips. She was what Jane Austen would call a handsome woman.
Chelsea’s mother, on the other hand, was a surprise. She looked like a version of Chelsea that had been taken out of the fridge and left to thaw for too long. Where Chelsea had bronze-brown hair, her mother’s was copper, and Mrs. White’s paler skin was flecked with freckles. With a big, friendly slab of a face, powdered like a doughnut, she was also the fattest of the three.
“Oh, this is delightful!” she laughed, seeing the ingredients set out on the counter. “What can I do, Lucy? Would you like me to wash these herbs? You are the head chef here!” I soon realized that Mrs. White found most things delightful, and the more she found them delightful, the more Chelsea found her unbearable.
Chelsea and Brodie had headed straight for Amber. They stood to one side of the granite island that floated in the middle of the large kitchen, while the mothers stood on the other side. I stood at the end.
“So, we get to meet your little Pygmalion project at last,” Brodie’s mum, Mrs. Newberry, said to Mrs. Leslie. I had no idea what a Pygmalion was, but it had the word pig in it so I was sure it was not flattering. She turned to me. “How do you do, Dianne’s fair lady?” She extended her hand, heavy with rings, expecting me to shake it, so I did.
“Dianne, she is just as darling as you said she would be,” proclaimed Chelsea’s mum.
“Do you know who clamored to be Lucy’s mentor at the start of the year, Gloria?” Mrs. Leslie asked Brodie’s mum.
“Who?”
“Gracey Gladrock’s daughter.”
“Oh my God!”
“Deliver us from evil, and forgive us our trespasses,” muttered Chelsea’s mum, snorting with laughter.
Before I arrived, Mrs. Leslie had cooked some prawns and stir-fried some beef with sesame seeds, garlic and oyster sauce. Now she set everything out like a production line, and we were ready to roll.
I had no idea how Brodie’s mother was going to do anything, because she had long fingernails with white tips. So I got her to dip the rice paper into the plate of boiling water; I figured it would not hurt her fingers as much as it would any of ours. As I showed her how it was done, she remarked, “Well, would you look at those dexterous Asian fingers. So fast!”
“Yes, Asians do seem to have more nimble fingers,” said Mrs. Leslie. “When I was in Suzhou”—she pronounced it Shoo-zhoo, trying to make it sound more exotic, I suppose—“I visited a silk factory, and there were girls around Lucy’s age, all with such small and delicate hands, embroidering silks. The owner told me that it was a four-thousand-year-old tradition, that sort of handicraft.”
“How delightful!” exclaimed Mrs. White. “We’ve never been to China.”
“You know which other people have nimble fingers?” asked Chelsea. “South Americans.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Leslie loved stories about different cultures.
“Yeah, when we went to Venezuela two years ago, they stole my camera! Remember that, Mum? Those filthy, unibrowed pickpockets…”
Chelsea’s mother’s laughter stopped like the last sputters from a faulty tap.
“Oh, yeah, I remember you telling us about that, Chelsea!” piped Amber. “And how that hot waiter, Javier, was actually so gay on his day off, wearing a black tank and cut-off jeans.”
“Don’t you remember, Mum?” Chelsea insisted. “And how you said—”
“Well, I have to say, this is a real treat, Lucy,” said her mother, cutting her off.
We finally sat down to lunch one and a half hours later.
“When Don was returning from Europe, something quite funny happened,” Mrs. Newberry said to the other mothers when she had poured herself a glass of wine. “Would you like to hear it?”
“Oh, yes, please!” said Mrs. White. She clapped her hands twice. “Is Don back from Europe already?”
“Yes. He came back last week. Anyhow, on the flight, he was put next to this garrulous, obese loudmouth in a navy polyester suit, who just wouldn’t shut up.”
“Oh, I can see Don loving that,” commented Mrs. Leslie.
“The man kept talking about how he was doing international business and opening up an import and export business in Asia, that kind of man.”
What kind of man? I wondered. A businessman was a businessman, someone who owned his own business. According to my parents, they were all to be respected—unless they were in a crooked business like dealing drugs.
“I can just imagine the poor man,” commented Mrs. Leslie. “From somewhere in Queensland. Ipswich, most probably.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Mrs. Newberry was stabbing the air with her rice-paper roll, but miraculously no prawn fell out. “Then the flight attendants come with drinks, and Don thinks, thank God, I do not want to
hear about shoe manufacturing for the entire flight. Jesus!”
“Naturally, the good Lord did not come and save Dad,” said Brodie wryly; she knew how this tale ended.
“Anyhow, Don was leaning back in his chair, enjoying the wine—as much as you can enjoy the abysmal wine they serve in business class these days—when all of a sudden the man next to him started to cough and clutch his arm—”
“Oh, I know where this is going,” said Chelsea.
“Yes, and would you believe it, in less than two minutes the first-time business class flier next to him had a heart attack and died!”
“Oh. Oh, how dreadful.” Mrs. Leslie put her roll down on her plate.
“But there were absolutely no spare seats on the flight,” Mrs. Newberry went on. “So Don had to sit next to this guy until they reached the Hong Kong stopover and four flight attendants took him away!”
“How horrible!” exclaimed Mrs. White, but she couldn’t help laughing.
“How hilarious, you mean!” exclaimed Mrs. Newberry. “And this is the funny part—can you imagine Don next to a paunchy dead man in a cheap acrylic suit for that stretch of time? ‘Well, thank God he finally shut up’ was what Don told me when he got home.”
“Your man has a black sense of humor!” roared Chelsea’s mum.
“Doesn’t he!”
It dawned on me, as I watched the three older women together, that they had known each other since they were at Laurinda—and that perhaps they had even been the Cabinet of their day. There was the uneasy way Mrs. Leslie laughed at Brodie’s mum’s jokes, and Chelsea’s mum’s sidekick role—she would turn from one woman to the other, watching their faces very closely, so she could always align herself correctly.
Mrs. Leslie must have noticed the look on my face, because she quickly became sensitive and apologetic. “Oh, we should have known better than to talk about such dark things in front of you, Lucy.”
“What the hell, Mum? I doubt Lucy from Stanley is going to be put off by that lame story.”
How did Amber know I was from Stanley? Perhaps mother and daughter talked more than I thought.