by Alice Pung
Brodie had mentioned loudly last week in homeroom how Dr. Markus had nominated her to give the closing address at Valedictory Dinner. “I had to say no,” she said. “Seriously, three weeks is just not enough time to craft a good speech. What was he thinking?”
But we all knew the real reason. The Cabinet was now held in such contempt by the student body that if Brodie got up to speak, her reception might be worse than lukewarm, and she didn’t want to be shamed in front of all the parents and teachers. She was a shrewd operator: with two more years at Laurinda, and reputations to repair, she had decided the Cabinet would lie low for a while.
But this was no longer about the Cabinet. It was about me.
I explained to Mrs. Grey how I felt that I’d let down the staff of the school (which was not entirely a lie, as I did not specify which staff), and that I should have been involved in more extracurricular activities. I lamented everything I had done to give offense to my fellow students and to the college. I told her how rewarding I had found the year to be for my personal growth. I pleaded to be given a chance to demonstrate the Laurinda spirit.
“I’m ready to join in,” I said.
—
It had taken me close to a year to work out what this school wanted from me: I did not need to be particularly accomplished or successful, I only had to appear to be, and all would be forgiven. Once I realized how simple it would be to do this, I knew Mrs. Grey would not refuse my request.
I had seen how, initially, no one had really clapped for Trisha but they had all roared for Brodie, how the Cabinet had used me as an instrument for their own glorification, and what a big deal both the administration and the Cabinet had made of the Equity in Education conference. And I had learned one important thing: this was how leaders were created here. If you looked the part, you could play the part. So that was how I’d ended up with a speaking spot at Valedictory Dinner.
That evening I wore a red dress my mother had given me. She’d made it with the cloth I had badly wanted at the beginning of the year. She also handed me twenty-five dollars so I could go to Tran’s garage salon down the road. I knew she was feeling guilty about not coming to the dinner because she had a shift at work. “Even if I went,” she told me, “it would be a waste of sixty-five dollars. I wouldn’t be able to understand the English. Why don’t you use the money to get your hair done and buy some nice shoes?”
All I could think about was how horrible I had been all year to my mother, all those arguments about the kilt, the plastic trays, those moments of wondering what it would be like to have Mrs. Leslie as a mum. Yet Mrs. Leslie was refined but without resolve. If I swore at her, she would cry. If I swore at my mother, she’d slap me in the face. Mrs. Leslie tried to treat her daughter like a friend and equal, but my mother always maintained that distance in which respect blotted out any hypocrisy. Mrs. Leslie could gently encourage Amber to be a doctor instead of a nurse, gently nudge her into classical instead of jazz ballet, but to Amber it would feel like a shove.
My mother did not care if I studied to be a nurse instead of a doctor, or a teacher’s aide instead of a lawyer. She didn’t care if I wanted to be an artist or sell cell phones. I had been reading all her mail and translating for her since I was nine, even accompanying her to the clinic during her pregnancy with Lamb. She knew I was capable of navigating life in this new world, even though she could not provide me with any maps. She never sat me down to talk about respecting my decisions and choices. She just let me make my own, all through my life, without question.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to go by yourself,” my father had told me the evening before. He had hoped to come, but with Mum at work there would be no one to look after the Lamb, and Dad said this was not like the Teochew Chinese New Year celebrations at the May Hoa restaurant, where you could bring babies and let them yell at the top of their lungs.
I was disappointed, of course. But deep down inside I knew too that I did not have to prove anything to my mum and dad. This was not about winning awards or being the best at anything at school, but about proving to myself that I could cope with life, that I would be resilient and always survive. I didn’t need to subject my family to my posturing.
I would do it alone. I would show the Cabinet that I was and would always be Linh Lam. I’d come to this school after an unexpected blessing, a full scholarship that felt pilfered from a more deserving girl. I’d come loose and curious and unattached, thinking that if I was principled enough and well liked enough, things would go my way.
When I learned that you couldn’t penetrate a tightly packed place like this so easily, I’d tried to make myself paper-thin so I could squeeze through the gaps. Now it was time to be straight-spined and focused, to ignore all else but getting into university. University would mean freedom, from Stanley but also from Laurinda.
It was only two more years, and two years did not seem that long.
Dad took some photos of me before I left—“to show your mother how beautiful you are tonight,” he said. He took lots with me standing in front of our brown curtains, a few with me sitting on the couch, and some with me holding the Lamb. He then handed me a small box. “Here,” he said gruffly. It was a bottle of L’Air du Temps. “Last month, Quang was selling some merchandise from the trunk of his car after work. Don’t tell your mum. She doesn’t like this sort of stuff. She thinks it’s fake—she won’t even use the Calvin Klein bag I got her.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
I sprayed some on and expressed my delight so that my father’s feelings would not be hurt. In all honesty, though, the scent reminded me of rich old ladies.
—
They had picked a beautiful venue for Valedictory Dinner, a historic mansion that was now an events center. The room had high, decorated ceilings, deep blue curtains tied with cream tassels, flocked brocade wallpaper and chandeliers. When I saw the paintings in the foyer of Lord Auburn and his ilk, it dawned on me that the school might once have owned this place.
Since my parents weren’t coming, there were extra spots at our table, and Katie had asked to bring her cousin along. I found my place and met Katie’s grandparents and her older brother, who were exactly as I’d imagined: cheerful, kind and earnest. Then her cousin came back from the bathroom, and I almost fainted.
“Well, hello, Miss Salmon Ella,” he greeted me. “Fancy seeing you here at this fancy dinner.”
“Fancy that,” I replied.
“You’ve met my cousin before?” Katie asked, bewildered.
Before I could reply, Richard said, “Oh, yes. Your friend and I have met exactly twice. Once at the Year Ten social, which you had decided would be too terrible to go to, and the second time at the debating finals, which you clearly didn’t qualify for.”
“Rub it in, why don’t you?” Katie playfully retorted to her cousin. “You’re such a dick.”
—
The night began with a slide show of images from our cohort’s four years at the middle school campus. There was Katie in Year Seven reading Anne of Green Gables, girls playing sports, Amber as Juliet in the school play, and the class cooking for International Food Week. Even the girls who had never really felt they belonged were getting nostalgic, I noticed, but I didn’t feel very much until the photos of this year came onto the screen: the social and the girls dancing in outfits their mothers did not know about, the Cabinet’s debate with the Auburn boys and, near the end, a shot of teachers sitting in the staff room with mugs of tea. Ms. Vanderwerp was there, smiling into the camera with her cup and eyebrows raised.
After the main course, Mrs. Grey made her farewell address. Then she introduced the guest speaker, who had been named Young Leader of the Year for her work teaching Bangladeshi street kids how to paint with oils. Her name was Markita White, and she was Chelsea’s older sister.
Where Chelsea’s passion was expressed as an angry adolescent tirade against authority, Markita’s was like a hot geyser spraying goodwill on one and all. “It is a great gift to b
ring creativity to the lives of the most disadvantaged young people in the world,” she enthused. “And to take them seriously as artists by letting them use the materials and learn the techniques of the old masters.” She flicked through a slide show and talked about the poor kids with their pleading eyes, distended stomachs and reaching hands—hands outstretched for paintbrushes. People in the audience were calmly tucking in to their salmon. The last slide flashed an image of Markita White in sunglasses and safari clothes, her arms around two small brown children. Everyone applauded.
Then, while dessert was being served, Mr. Sinclair stood up to introduce me. “I nominated Lucy Lam to speak tonight,” he said. “Not only is she an insightful student of politics, she also espouses the values of honesty and humility that make for a lifelong learner.”
It must have been a baffling introduction for anyone used to the way Laurinda unfurled a list of achievements like a long banner. Mr. Sinclair had even left out the thing the school considered most important: that I was the inaugural recipient of the Equal Access scholarship.
Now I was standing onstage.
“Thank you, Mr. Sinclair, and thank you, Mrs. Grey, for giving me the opportunity to speak this evening,” I began. “My mum and dad are not here tonight, but their names are Warwick and Quyen Lam. We came to Australia on a boat from Vietnam when I was two. We are Teochew Chinese. I come from Stanley, one of the most socioeconomically disadvantaged suburbs in Victoria. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics…”
I was speaking the truth, and rattling off some impressively grim numbers, but my heart wasn’t in it. My figures stacked up on top of one another like worthless currency, as I looked out at the audience and they smiled back at me. A desire to please started to rise up in my throat like sick, but I suppressed it.
It was really awful to speak after Markita White! Damn it, her tale of slum-dwelling South Asian kids had trumped my carefully crafted script, because now people were listening to me as if I were just another poor child with outstretched hands, to be helped by Laurinda.
Was this why Mrs. Grey had let me stand here tonight—to bring diversity, to demonstrate that the school was charitable and I was deserving of its charity through my stoicism and spirit? To give a talk that would stir a few warm feelings before everyone went back to stabbing their raspberry chocolate tortes with their little silver forks? To be “that impressive Asian scholarship girl” parents would speak about on their drives home because they’d forgotten my name, while their own kids went to an after-party?
I’d expected my declaration of allegiance to Laurinda to be easy, especially since Mum and Dad wouldn’t be there to witness their daughter telling everyone about the awfulness of her ordinary life in order to demonstrate the ways in which this extraordinary school had lifted her out of it. I had to do this because I hadn’t yet accomplished anything illustrious for Laurinda. All year I’d just been trying to survive. All year I’d been searching for a sense of belonging. All year I’d been looking for my voice. And now here it was, going out clear as a bell to hundreds of people, and I didn’t even recognize it. At Christ Our Savior, I’d never had to spin some tale of triumph against the odds because we had all been in the same boat.
I kept reading. “Leadership assumes that you have certain exceptional skills, and the confidence to make decisions that will affect other people. It assumes you possess wisdom, discernment and good judgment. Laurinda is a school that cultivates leadership in all its students….”
All year we’d heard dozens of clichéd leadership speeches, and here I was making another one. It was all bull, and I saw red. I’d been a leader before, and I knew that it was not this rubbish about how everyone could be one if only they participated in enough public-speaking, merit-scoring activities. It was not about increasing my profile or clawing my way past rivals or crawling out on top of the competition heap. I glanced down at my speech and knew in a heartbeat that I could not deliver the rest of it. I wasn’t even anxious anymore. Peering out into the audience, into all the satiated faces and encouraging smiles, I began again.
“I used to be a leader,” I said. “At Christ Our Savior I was a leader because my peers respected me enough to vote me onto the student representative council. At home I was a leader because my parents treated me like an adult with responsibilities. But when I arrived at Laurinda, my mentors here told me that leadership was all about standing out. You had to stand out here because this is supposed to be an outstanding school. But I don’t have any special talents like my friend Trisha. I’m not a history buff like Katie, or a debater like Brodie. Nothing about me stands out.
“However, I have a letter from Laurinda which my dad keeps in a special photo album with all my childhood pictures. It’s a letter saying that I am the inaugural recipient of the Laurinda Equal Access scholarship. That means something to him, my dad who has no idea what ‘inaugural’ means because he didn’t even finish high school. So I thought long and hard, and realized that what makes me special at this school is that I come from Stanley, and no one else at Laurinda comes from there.
“Stanley is a place where many people work in banking and advertising—that is, their mums clean banks and their brothers put Safeway ads into mailboxes. It’s a place where people have four cars in their driveways—but only one that is working. It’s a place where the bogan and the bogasian sometimes coexist peacefully, but more often don’t.”
Whereas before everyone had been half dozing, a few students and teachers now chuckled awkwardly. But not Mrs. Grey. I could see her at the front table, her hand clamped tightly around her upright fork, a disapproving metal exclamation point. The speech I’d shown her was still in front of me, but it didn’t matter anymore—not the passage about tradition and unity, not the accompanying out-of-context Confucius quote, nor the final cliché about how what lies ahead of us is nothing compared to what lies within us.
Sure, I had just told a self-deprecating joke, but it was no more of a joke than the entirety of my prepared speech. Sure, I was not as polished as Markita White or Brodie, but at last I had my true voice back.
“So you can understand that when I first came to Laurinda, I wasn’t sure whether I’d ever be up to scratch. All year I’ve been scared of not being good enough, smart enough, of not being ‘leadership material.’ ”
I looked around the room and could see many students nodding.
“I had so much to learn about my new school, my teachers and the new friends I would make. I wanted to understand the people who seemed so different from my friends back in Stanley. For nearly all of the students here tonight, graduation simply means moving on to the last two years of high school and then, hopefully, on to university.
“But for some of my old friends, graduating from Year Ten will be the last of their formal education. Many of them will never come to a dinner where they use three different forks. In the future, the only politics they will know will be from the television. The last literature they will read in their lives will be their Year Ten English texts. The only professionals they will regularly see will not be their friends, but their family doctors.
“We are all born into a particular set of circumstances—a home, a family, a neighborhood. And to adapt to new circumstances takes time. At Laurinda I had to start from the beginning, and to take baby steps again. So I knew I wasn’t going to shine straightaway and make this school proud.”
I didn’t dare look at Mrs. Grey at all now.
“But teachers like Ms. Vanderwerp and Mr. Sinclair showed me that good leadership does not necessarily mean loudly stamping your boots,” I continued. “It can also mean treading lightly like Aung San Suu Kyi. She said that if you have enough inner resources, you can be by yourself for a long time and not feel smaller because of it.
“I have a baby brother. I’m responsible for looking after him a fair bit when I’m not at school. When I walk him through a busy street, he’ll suddenly stop in the middle of the footpath and squat down, not caring
that people’s legs are swirling past him. His attention will be completely focused on a dropped bubble gum wrapper, or a snail, or a dandelion growing out between the cracks of cement.
“I used to tug his arm to get him going again because he was wasting time, but one day I just stopped and squatted there with him. I realized he was learning by being still, by noticing all the small, discarded things that we usually pay no attention to.
“So, while we are all aiming high and marching forward in harmony, I think we should remember that looking down does not mean you’ll get vertigo and feel sick and lose your footing.” Oh my God, I thought, that was a really terrible, stumbling metaphor, but I had to continue. “It might also mean you notice what is good and what keeps you grounded. You don’t make wrong judgments based on the opinions of others.”
I had to finish the speech before I ruined it, before I let loose with a profanity and told people where to go.
“So for me, leadership is about building your own character before you start influencing anyone else. To be a true leader, I think you must first learn what it is like to follow, even if it means squatting on the ground with a toddler to look at old things in a new way. And to follow without losing your own moral compass, you have to know yourself and appreciate where you come from.
“My name is Lucy Linh Lam. Thank you for listening.”
Phew.
—
“That was such a great speech,” said Brodie when she came up to me afterward, and for the first time ever I knew she meant it, because it came through gritted teeth and she threw in a backhanded compliment: “I didn’t know you had it in you.”