Lucky Ticket

by Joey Bui

  ‘Cool,’ I said.

  Over the next couple of weeks, Michaela and I always sat next to each other in the workshop and I found myself taking note of what she wore. A chunky grey jumper with thick cuffs, from which her pale, fine hands poked out. A velvet-collared shirt over a thin woollen singlet. I also liked the tone of wonder in her voice, and the way she drawled.

  The day we were workshopping her Portsea-bartender story, the professor said something like, ‘What we can see in the draft are sketches of two very dynamic characters who have a lot to say, but they need to be imbued with more confidence to really sharpen and propel the central question of the story, which is…’ Her hands circled, her wrists twisting as she spoke, as if she was unfurling a large ball of wool.

  ‘I can’t make them what they’re not,’ said Michaela. She ran her fingers through her half a head of hair.

  The first time we went out properly, at night, Michaela commented on the story I had written that was set in Vietnam, about a traditional medicine woman who treated a child struck by lightning.

  ‘Vi, I can really feel your connection to Vietnam,’ said Michaela. ‘There’s a realness, a feeling, that isn’t in made-up stories. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘So how do you know her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The medicine woman.’

  We were in Brunswick, sitting on iron stools in a bar called Naked for Satan. Michaela wore a black silk top, leather pants and the velvet-collared shirt tied around her waist. I looked to the side and counted the freckles on the back of a guy’s hand next to me at the bar.

  ‘I don’t know her, but she’s a legend in my family’s old village.’ I turned back to her. ‘The ancestral village.’

  ‘Were you born there?’

  For some reason I said yes.

  ‘Cool.’

  I thought it was sexual because I liked looking at her body, especially the bow of her red lips. As she talked, I stared at the fine blonde hairs on her forehead.

  In February, I invited Michaela to go with me to Springvale’s Lunar New Year festival. I hadn’t been there since I was twelve, but it was fun showing Michaela the dragon dance and the lucky envelope trees, and laughing at the Asian teeny-bopper kids in thinned, dip-dyed hair. Everyone stared at Michaela when she had her palm read, tried five different dishes she didn’t really like and lost about twenty dollars in the coin-toss booth.

  In the afternoon, Viet musicians went on stage to sing love ballads and traditional songs. Drunk men were watching from Café Baguette, nursing beers and shouting comments over the music: ‘It’s not like how it used to be!’ ‘Musicians these days all get plastic surgery!’ ‘She has lips the size of her arse!’ ‘They’re messed up in the head!’

  We watched a woman playing a traditional song on the dàn tranh, a Vietnamese zither. Michaela kept nodding her head even though there was no beat.

  ‘That’s really cool, really interesting,’ she said enthusiastically.

  After the final song, the festival organiser stood up to commend us for carrying on the culture of our mothers’ blood in a strange country. No one had made us more proud, he said, than the twenty-eight students who scored above ninety in their final school exams. As twenty-eight Viet kids in school blazers filed up on stage to shake his hand, Michaela chuckled into her fingerless gloves.

  At dusk, the musicians packed up and the speaker system played Top 40 hits again. The teeny-bopper kids started walking out to Springvale station, carrying large stuffed pandas and Pikachus.

  I had to drive Dad home because he had been drinking at the festival. I made him sit in the back because Michaela was in the front, next to me. Mum hadn’t come to the festival because she’d had a doctor’s appointment for her back—she’d been in pain for as long as I could remember, from her work at a packaging factory. When I dropped Michaela off in Camberwell, Dad stared after her.

  ‘Why does the white girl like you so much?’

  ‘What? We’re friends.’

  ‘Why is her hair like a druggie’s, huh? Is she a bad girl?’

  ‘Oh my god, it’s called style, Dad.’

  ‘What, do people in Camberwell not have enough money to style all of their hair?’

  He wheezed and the smell of yeast wafted to the front of the car.

  ‘Heaps of young people have hair like hers.’

  ‘Is she one of the gay?’

  I huffed, the way Mum did, to make him stop, ‘You don’t know anything.’

  ‘What don’t I know?’

  ‘Oh my god, you’re so annoying.’

  ‘You think I don’t know anything, huh? You think I don’t know why you go to the festival this year for? You think nobody knows you’re Asian if you go with a gay druggie?’

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘Do not disrespect your father!’ he screamed, and banged the car door with his fist.

  I lost the feeling in my arms. For a moment, I panicked. I was glad he couldn’t see my face from the back seat.

  ‘You think I am stupid, Vi? Why don’t you let me speak to your friend? You think I can’t speak English? You are corrupted in the head. The druggie kid has corrupted you. Who do you think is on your side? The white people?’

  In the rear-vision mirror, I could see the look of concentration on his face as he tried to figure out who had wronged him, his small, dark eyes scanning the surroundings for a victim, his cheekbones bulging from his swollen, angry face.

  I suddenly remembered the same look from an incident ten years ago, when I was eleven, sitting in the passenger seat at a drive-through McDonald’s. The queue was slow and he was fuming. Suddenly, the car behind moved forward and hit us.

  In a flash, Dad leaped out of our car and screamed at the driver whose car had hit us. ‘Get out!’

  I watched through the rear-vision mirror as an old man with snowy-white hair and large, brown age spots on his face stumbled out, mumbling incoherently at my dad. Instantly, I felt shame flood my body.

  Dad’s gaze was focused on the old man. The next moment, he was over at the drive-through window, banging on the plastic shield protecting the cashier, a shellshocked girl who looked about fifteen. Soon the manager came to persuade Dad to wait in the carpark while our food was prepared.

  Watching through the window, I tried to convince myself of his childishness. I rehearsed a cool-headed lecture I would give him one day, when he was in a good mood, about what went wrong and how he should have handled the situation. I was used to playing all kinds of tricks on myself so as not to be scared when he was angry. He finally came back to the car.

  ‘These people are so dumb,’ he said vehemently, as he snapped on his seatbelt.

  ‘Mm-hm,’ I replied, my tone as noncommittal as I could manage.

  I heard somebody yell ‘Fucking chinks’ as we left the carpark. At home, the two of us ate our McChicken meals in front of the TV. It was one of the nights when Mum had acupuncture and physiotherapy until late.

  ‘Does it taste strange to you?’ he said. He put down the burger. I could tell from his wild eyes that his anger was returning.

  ‘No…no, not at all. It’s really good,’ I said, and gulped down the rest of my burger. Eventually he resumed eating too.

  For the first time, I didn’t enjoy the fries, but I ate all of them as quickly as I could and waited until I got to the bathroom to breathe properly again. Many times since then, I’ve hoped that someone made sure the white-haired old man got home safely.

  I glanced at the rear-vision mirror again now. Dad had finally fastened onto the cause of his troubles.

  ‘You’re an insolent girl, you always have been. It’s impossible to teach you. Nothing will cure you,’ he snapped.

  The word insolent in Vietnamese, mất dạy, is much sharper than the English translation, because it contains notions of disobedience and a lack of filial piety, the worst faults a son or daughter could have. Mất dạy also means uneducated, poorly rais
ed. It is like saying that someone is rotten to the core.

  When he realised I wasn’t going to respond, he slumped in the back seat, muttering to himself. At home, I cried in the bathroom with my knuckles between my teeth, hoping my parents couldn’t hear me through the thin walls. In the morning, Dad asked if I wanted to go out for breakfast with him, and I said yes. At the café outside the local mall, he smoked and read the newspaper on his iPad, and I ate scrambled eggs, bacon and a hash brown as quickly as I could, and didn’t remind him that I had asthma.

  When uni started again in March, my professor set up a meeting for me with a business adviser at a big professional services firm in the city. I saw Michaela before the meeting and confessed that I was nervous.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The meeting.’

  ‘Do you have to call it a meeting? What is it really?’

  ‘We’re getting lunch.’

  ‘So it’s just lunch. Who is he again?’

  ‘He works at this big firm I’d like to work at.’

  ‘Oh, that’s who he is? Does he even have a name?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. God, you’re such a cocksucker.’

  She smiled at me; her teeth seemed whiter than usual against the red lipstick.

  She was irritated that I wouldn’t go to a party with her that night. I had a shift at a dim sum restaurant, and knew I would be too tired afterwards. People always yelled at me from both sides of the floor, and my feet hurt from the beat between the kitchen and the tables.

  The next morning, I drove Mum to the Springvale remittance office. She was sending five hundred dollars to our family in Vietnam. Before we left the house, we sat on her bed and spread out the cash, bank statements and receipts.

  ‘Auntie Trang’s husband, Đức, do you remember him? His right hand got caught in a factory machine last week and he has to get surgery,’ she said.

  She put on her glasses and picked up the spiral-bound notebook where she kept a record of all her expenses.

  ‘They’re going to sew skin from his bottom onto his fingers. I know, it’s disgusting. He won’t be able to work for a while.’

  She pinched her forehead and reached for a bottle of tablets by the bed.

  ‘We have to buy more fish-oil tablets for your grandparents too. Their joints are hurting lately. Can you get them?’

  ‘Okay, but you know you can get them yourself. It’s really easy, you just have to say fish oil.’

  ‘They won’t understand me,’ she said dismissively.

  ‘Yes, they will. I’ve heard you say it, fish oil, you say it fine.’

  ‘Just go, okay, Vi?’

  She checked another page in the spiral notebook.

  ‘I’m not going to collect the lottery until April,’ she said. She was part of hụi, lottery game, in which a group of Vietnamese, usually friends or family, pools its money and each person takes a turn to collect the lottery when they most need it.

  ‘How much did our groceries cost last week?’ she continued, as if to herself.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have bought those new orthopaedic shoes. Do you know if your dad has any money left?’

  I wanted to beg her to stop talking about money.

  ‘No, I don’t. Why don’t you ask him?’ I said testily.

  She looked at me, her lips pursed.

  ‘What?’ I glared at her.

  After the remittance office, I left her in the Chemist Warehouse carpark. When I got back in the car with the jumbo tub of fish-oil tablets, she was still muttering numbers under her breath, the spiral notebook held up to her face, the other hand massaging her temples. She would soon make a mistake and ask me to look over the numbers. I tried to swallow my frustration. To distract myself, I stuck my hand inside the tub of little capsules and rolled my fingers around. The capsules rattled gently, plastic against plastic. How many were in there? Say, eighty, a hundred, more, too many to count. Mum smacked my hand and told me to start the car.

  ‘So do you spend all your time sucking dicks?’

  I jumped. Michaela was peering at the screen over my shoulder. I had gone to the library to edit an application for an internship. I glanced at the guy studying on the other side of the table, and laughed loudly.

  Michaela sat down next to me and twisted my laptop towards her.

  ‘What has especially attracted me to PwC is not only its number-one ranking as a worldwide business consulting provider…’ Michaela read. ‘Da da da.’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘The qualities I have to offer this firm include…’ Michaela held up a fist by her mouth and wanked an imaginary penis. I looked up at the guy again.

  ‘All right, all right.’

  ‘Hey, I never knew about your strength in advisory services.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’

  She held the imaginary penis again and licked up its shaft.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘I’m gonna be late for work if we want to have coffee first.’

  I packed up my things and we headed out into the courtyard.

  ‘Speaking of cocksucking, that reminds me.’ She paused dramatically.

  ‘What?’ I stared at her as we walked.

  ‘I ran into Colby yesterday,’ she said, rolling her eyes. Colby, her ex.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, he asked for a lift home.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Then he made me stop at Woolies, and I didn’t even need to get anything. I was being fucking nice.’

  ‘He thinks the world revolves around him,’ I said automatically. I had said this before about her exes.

  ‘You know what he wanted to buy?’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘Condoms. He bought fucking condoms. He made me drive him to Woolies to buy him condoms.’

  ‘What a little shit.’

  ‘You know what else he said?’ Her voice was heavy with sarcasm.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said you’re hot for an Asian.’

  She turned to watch me intently. I felt instantly scared and pleased at the same time, and was a beat too late in my response:

  ‘He’s trying to make you jealous.’

  ‘Yeah, he really needs to get over it,’ she grunted.

  ‘He’s obsessed with you,’ I said, relieved.

  When she stopped talking, I allowed myself to relish the thrill that Colby had called me hot. For an Asian.

  As we walked across one of the Melbourne University lawns, I spotted a sea of bright blue T-shirts, where the kids from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations were sitting, the Asian culture club. The last time ASEAN had a barbeque on the lawn, one of the girls was going to give me the spiel, but my friend Kieu intervened, saying, ‘Don’t bother, Vi’s completely whitewashed.’ She smiled at me and the other girl laughed. It was a compliment. Then I pretended that I was in a hurry to get to the tram stop.

  Kieu always made me feel guilty. I knew Kieu from my first high school, in Springvale, a hub for the Vietnamese and Chinese communities. She was the one who started calling me Vi in Year Seven, even though I had an English name, and it stuck. Kieu was my best friend for a year. She didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of her. She wore pants that fitted badly, when all the girls at school, including me, were folding our skirts up around the waist so they’d be shorter. While I dreaded being weighed in PE class, Kieu’s mum was making her drink malt to gain weight. She used to crawl underneath tables and prank us by jiggling the fat on our calves. She had really bad acne then, and a weird mullet haircut, which she straightened every morning. We pranked each other and argued all the time. Even though we each had our separate groups, nothing was more fun than fake-fighting with each other.

  In eighth grade, some of the boys thought they were going to join gangs. Kieu’s two older brothers were in one. When Kieu tried to convince me that she had joined the Springy Boys, I tried as best I could to deflate her ego.

  �
�What kind of gang is it? Do you guys get together for coffee? Sleepovers?’

  ‘It’s not about what we do. It’s like how we protect each other.’

  ‘What do you need protection from?’

  ‘The other gangs.’

  ‘What other gangs?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kieu. ‘I mean, if you ever got in trouble, I would protect you.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. You’re one of us. I mean, you know me. So the gang would protect you, because you’re my sis. No questions asked.’ ‘Well, thanks for that.’

  My happiest memories of high school were the evenings after school when we walked together to the bus stop, bickering and annoying each other. I confused myself once by thinking that I might be in love with her. Right before I left, I wanted to tell her.

  We’d become a little sweeter then, because I was leaving. On the last day of term, school finished at lunchtime and we hung out on the outdoor basketball court. I sat cross-legged and Kieu lay down with her head on my lap. I tried to absentmindedly touch her hair, the greasy, mullet-cut hair that I so often made fun of. The rough concrete irritated my thighs—I was wearing a skirt—but I didn’t want to move; I didn’t want her to sit up.

  As Michaela and I continued across the lawn, I pretended I didn’t see Kieu among the ASEAN kids. We swept by, and I knew we looked good, with our racial contrast, her half-shaved head, our lipstick, and our skirts that were short in the front and long in the back, lifting and swooping over the lawn.

  After coffee, I took the train back to Springvale for my evening shift at Gold Leaf Restaurant. Colby sent me a Facebook friend-request as I was waiting at the platform at Melbourne Central. I knew Michaela would see it if I accepted his friend-request, especially on the same day she’d told me he said I was hot. For an Asian. In fact, I could imagine her taunting him to do it: If you think she’s hot, why don’t you add her? I put my phone in my bag.

  The Cranbourne train arrived and I got on. It was full, so I leaned against a railing by the door.

  More passengers got on at South Yarra and Caulfield stations. By the time we were at Oakleigh, I was pushed near a middle-aged woman who was yelling on her phone.

  ‘Yeah, I’m just about to get off. Third carriage, third carriage, or maybe fifth, I don’t know. I said fifth!’ she shouted.