by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)
Today, I don’t have to rebel so much anymore or strive towards redefining my identity as a Korean female in Australia. In the end, our years in Australia, and my move away from Perth, have helped both of us, my mother and I, to gain a new understanding of womanhood. Looking back, what I can say confidently is that if I had stayed in Perth, near my mother, we would have ended up leading insular, circumscribed lives. She would not have left my father, and she would not have been forced to confront the wider Australian society on her own. Of course, when I made my move, I had none of this in mind.
R E B E L L I N G T O C O N F O R M
JO CASE
When I was 15 years old, a security guard stopped me as I was leaving Woolworths, carrying four chocolate bars I hadn’t paid for. She said she was phoning my parents, then the police. But after the first call, which my mother answered, she let me go. ‘You seem like somebody takes good care of you,’ she said.
It was a long bus ride home. Mum greeted me from her bedroom doorway, her eyes small in a face swollen with crying. I stood in the grey light of that curtained room as she railed at me: that she was humiliated, that I was ungrateful, that she had never been so ashamed. It was as if she was the one who had been caught stealing. What had I even been doing in town? she asked. What other kinds of lies was I telling her? I remember feeling like I’d be trapped in that room for the rest of my life.
I’d expected her to be angry, but was shocked by her distress. As a parent now, I understand how your children’s actions can reflect on you as much, if not more, than your own. But then, I had no idea why she would take my transgression as her own moral failure.
These are the stories my mother tells about being a teenager. She got drunk once, when someone spiked her orange juice with vodka, and she was sick in the toilet all night and never got drunk again. She loved maths (‘It’s puzzles!’). She was one mark off being the dux at her all-girls’ Catholic high school. She had the marks for medicine, which she wanted to do, but she didn’t feel confident about her abilities, so she did an Arts degree at the University of Adelaide instead, graduating with Honours. Her first boyfriend grew up to drive a sports car, become a doctor and live in the eastern suburbs. Her second boyfriend was my dad. When she took him home to meet her parents, he was wearing a blanket as a coat and drove a van with ‘Vietnam wants Ewe’ and a picture of a sheep painted on it. I’ve asked my mother’s five younger brothers and sisters for incriminating stories about her, but they tell me she was a hard act to live up to. ‘Miss Perfect,’ said one of them, only half-joking.
So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that I arrived at high school, aged 12, as the nerd, the teacher’s pet, the square. Like my mother, I was smart, liked to do well and genuinely relished learning – particularly reading and writing. Both my parents were English teachers and I had learned to read aged three. Mum likes to tell how I loved the BBC TV version of The Secret Garden when I was five. When I found out there was a book, I begged her to buy it for me. In Myer, she argued with the saleswoman who tried to give us the picture-book version instead of the novel I wanted; I was forced to read a page aloud before the saleswoman would relent. ‘She thought I was a stage mother!’ Mum beams now, when she tells the story. ‘But you were the one who wanted it!’
For the first 11 years of my life, I didn’t think much about how I presented myself to the world, or how the world outside my family saw me. I did what I felt like, what my parents told me to do, or somewhere in between. Rebellion was usually about raiding the kitchen with my brothers and sisters when my parents were out and eating as many chips, lollies or bowls of ice cream as we could. I spent hours playing at the creek across the road from my house with brothers, sisters or cousins, coming home when my dad dog-whistled us from the porch. When I was up a tree and a group of teenagers sat under it with cigarettes and a whisky bottle, I was shocked enough to write up a report for the neighbourhood spy group I had founded.
The first six months of my high school diary catalogues dances made up with my cousins and performed on my front lawn (soundtracks included I Should Be So Lucky); swimming in my neighbour’s pool; negotiations with my parents (‘I was so nervous I wouldn’t be allowed to go to the shops by myself that I washed all the dishes without asking! They said yes!’).
In the second half of the year, this is eclipsed by a meticulous chart of shifting alliances, as the girls in my class become friends, then enemies, then sort-of-friends. Pairs form into quadrants, then split and recombine as new pairs. Girls feel ignored, then hounded, then baffled by one another. I am part of the dance, but always a step behind, never in the lead, often performing the wrong steps.
I was on the bottom rung of middle popularity. Not reviled, but not included in the rounds of parties and Friday nights at Skateline either. I wouldn’t have been allowed to go anyway, which my friend Kirsty kindly offered as the probable reason why I was regularly left out. Mum believed that parties at 13 were only appropriate for someone’s birthday and that Friday nights should be parent-supervised. Mum was also responsible for my regulation pale-blue socks, black lace-up school shoes and knee-length summer uniform at an outer-suburban public school where many of my classmates got away with jeans and sneakers with their school jumpers every day.
‘Life is not a fashion parade,’ Mum liked to say, often when she was telling me I couldn’t have a pair of skin-tight ribbed denim bubble-gum jeans, or wear eye make-up to school, or have black clothes, which she said didn’t suit me. But I knew part of the code to fitting in was looking right, which I didn’t. I stashed contraband in my schoolbag – my chunky white fish-erman’s-knit jumper, white socks and sneakers – and changed into them in the school toilets. I don’t know that this made any difference to how people saw me, but it made me less self-conscious. For a while, Mum taught at my school, making the whole enterprise trickier. I not only had to sneak my clothes out of the house; I also had to avoid her in the schoolyard. More than once, she’d bellow across the asphalt, ‘JOANNE CASE! Change into your proper uniform now!’ Now, I think this was more exposing than just doing as I was told. But it felt worth the risk.
In the last month of the first year of high school, my diary mentions how cute a boy in my class has become. He lived at the end of my street, opposite a scrawl of creek that wound itself through grass that was dusty brown in summer and calf-high green in winter. We sometimes straggled home together. He was kind, funny, unremarkable. Then, almost overnight, the next wave of puberty swept him into defining handsomeness. He pierced his ear and swapped his uniform for football shorts that finished at the curve of his upper thighs. I admired the inward curl of his Scottish accent, the handsome squint of his liquid brown eyes, and most of all his legs in those shorts. Perhaps, in his transformation, I saw potential for my own. Or perhaps it was a simple case of first lust.
He took over my diaries for the next year and a half. I recorded what he said to me, what he said to other people about me, the tone of his voice, how he looked at me, how he looked at other girls. I analysed all the possible meanings of these isolated observations, chose the most likely, and pieced them together to make a picture. Does it mean he likes me? As in my analysis of my friendships, all this frantic cataloguing of frivolous detail had a serious underlying intent: to figure out what I might be doing wrong, and how to fix it.
‘Why do you hang around Jo?’ Kirsty’s new friend from art class asked her. ‘She’s such a nerd.’ The new friend was sharp, sarcastic, funny. She was mean, too, always on the lookout for raw material to press into the service of the humour that defined her. She was more popular than us, with access to older, better-looking boys. Kirsty told me this story for what happened next: my crush was in her art class; he defended me. (‘Yeah, but she’s nice,’ he said to the mean friend.) I could tell, from the way Kirsty told the story, that I was regular material.
Second year of high school: our new teacher had decorated the classroom with images of cats, which she vocally adored. Sometimes, when he
r back was turned, someone would meow, usually The Crush’s best friend, a solid boy with protruding ears who somehow went out with all the hot girls. One day, the teacher berated The Crush and his friend by name. ‘I only know the troublemakers so far,’ she said. A bit later, she called on me, using my name too. She knew me for the other reason, of course: because I was a good student. But The Crush swung around and high-fived me. ‘JO!’ he shouted. ‘We’re TROUBLEMAKERS!’
I remember this as the moment when I decided to become a troublemaker. But it wasn’t as sudden as that. Earlier in the year, I’d stopped answering questions in class unless called on. When tests were handed back, I kept the results to myself. Neither of these things stopped me being dogged by charges of nerd, square, etc. Maybe it was because our identities had been set long ago, in the first months of high school. Or maybe I gave myself away in a hundred little ways I didn’t even consider, in the moments I wasn’t being vigilant about not being myself. And so I started to deliberately fail the subjects I wasn’t interested in. Maths went first. When I failed my first test, I loudly announced my results as we left the classroom, both elated and secretly wounded. I didn’t like not being good enough, even if it was part of the plan.
My parents trusted me. It wasn’t until the first bad report cards that they realised what I was doing. Mum tells me now, still astonished, that I told her I wasn’t good at Maths anymore because I stopped knowing the answers. ‘It had always been easy for you,’ she says. ‘You didn’t know you were supposed to work at it.’ I wonder if there’s some truth in that too. I was too busy fitting in, becoming a new version of myself, to work at untangling abstract codes I didn’t care about.
Maybe this is when Mum started to search my room, my desk drawers, my schoolbag; random raids for inside intelligence on this teenager I was becoming. She would scour my school diary and interrogate me on the meaning of notes my friends had scrawled in it. (‘They shouldn’t be writing on it,’ she said. It was for school, and she had paid for it.) She picked out the scraps of paper in my pencil case that were messages we’d been writing to each other in class. (‘You shouldn’t be writing notes in class,’ she said.)
Until then, I had grown up in her image, both by accident and design, reading the books she had loved (Little Women, Noel Streatfeild), playing tennis on Saturdays just like her and Dad. Now I wanted to quit tennis and spend my weekends at the local shopping centre with my friends. (‘I will not have you just hanging around,’ she said.) I refused to read the books she recommended – Pride and Prejudice, Emma – just because she recommended them. (Now, they’re among my favourites.) I would not be her.
In Year Nine, someone brought a palm-sized bottle of Jack Daniel’s to Kirsty’s birthday sleepover. We all passed it around during the séance that came after the birthday cake. We probably managed a couple of mouthfuls each, but convinced ourselves we were drunk. We rang some of the boys in our class, getting more daring with each phone call, starting with the boys we hung out with on the basketball courts and progressing to our crushes. We told them we were drunk and sang the song from Top Gun, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, down the phone. At school on Monday, they gathered by the toilet block and serenaded us with the same song as we walked past. ‘You girls are weirdos,’ they said, and it felt like a benediction. It was better to be a weirdo than a nerd.
In real life, nothing would ever happen with The Crush (or any of my crushes, though a couple briefly brushed up against reality). On paper, it was a different story. My friends and I spent our time in class – and after school, and on weekends – writing elaborate, illustrated stories, where caricatured versions of our crushes would fall in love with us. A kind of fan-fiction version of our real lives. I think I led these games: they recurred across my friendship groups for years.
My French teacher approached me in the schoolyard. He said I was throwing away my future – that I wasn’t like my friends. ‘You’re better than that,’ he said. ‘Better than them.’ But I didn’t want to be better than my friends; I wanted to be exactly like them. My post-school future was years away. I was focused on making the present bearable. I’m not even sure what he meant. The only real difference I can remember is that I used to work harder than my friends and that unlike Kirsty, whose volume was permanently turned up to 11, I had been quiet and conspicuously polite.
My parents arranged for me to change classes halfway through that year, but it didn’t change anything. It wasn’t as simple as Kirsty’s influence. When a boy in my new class kept annoying me, I grabbed his schoolbag off his desk, walked out of the classroom and threw it off the balcony to the asphalt two floors below. I was called into the school office and made to apologise to him by the teacher who witnessed it, but the victim was actually quite impressed. Not only did he leave me alone after that, but we became warily friendly. (Years later, I would introduce him to his first real girlfriend, my cousin.) My French teacher stopped me at the classroom door after I decided not to hand in a test I knew I’d done badly in. ‘Hand it over,’ he said, and repeated his demand as I repeatedly refused. Eventually, I pulled it out of my schoolbag and tore it into tiny pieces over the bin.
It didn’t occur to me until years later that some of the popular girls – the girls who boys like The Crush actually went out with – got good grades too, though they were never classified as nerds. And they weren’t showily badly behaved: they kept their heads down and did their work (or quietly didn’t do it); they rebelled by laughing when the boys disrupted the class. When they broke the rules, they did it slyly, behind the backs of parents and teachers. But I rebelled like a boy. Maybe being a popular boy was more tangible than being a popular girl for me, the rules easier to understand. I was quick-witted, and the easy banter and friendly insult-exchange of boys came naturally. I was friends with some of the popular boys, but the popular girls were not only out of reach – some of them actively despised me. They covered a page of a mutual friend’s diary in pointed insults designed for me to find (I was ‘a disgusting little piece of filth’ as well as a ‘square’). They told another boy in their group, who had miraculously asked me out, to dump me. He agreed and one of them delivered the news on his behalf.
Suddenly, when I was halfway through Year Ten, Mum was in bed a lot. I don’t remember much about this time: white sheets, her closed bedroom door, the sound of her crying. Her absence from the rest of the house. And then she was gone – in hospital – and it was just us. Dad had been on stress leave from his teaching job for over a year. I got up in the middle of the night once, before Mum retreated to her room, and she was on the phone to his doctor, waiting for Dad to come home from a drive. She didn’t know where. Dad had fractured, but not yet come back together. He’d never been the one to take care of us on a daily basis anyway; Mum was the practical one. When she fell apart, the pieces of him were left in charge of us five kids.
I’d like to say that I remember purposefully stepping in to help, rather than complaining about being responsible for meals, along with my eldest brother, and having to cook the same things on rotation (especially fish fingers, which I hated, three times a week). I’d like to say that I was worried about Mum. But when I dig for a memory of how I felt, there’s only a blank nothing. Mum remembers Dad bringing me to visit her in hospital: I was wearing shoes with holes in the toes, jeans torn at the knees. She says she felt a sick shame, looking at me, frayed at the edges, my appearance mirroring her neglect. I don’t remember the visit, but I remember those shoes, those jeans. I loved them. For the three months that Mum was in hospital, no one was in charge of how I presented myself to the world.
We moved house in Mum’s absence; her extended family helped Dad move us five kids and our belongings. There were only five finished houses on our long street. The rest was zoned for construction. From my bedroom window, I could see the farmhouse and stables left behind after our housing estate was carved out and divided off. The kids who lived there walked around in mud-spattered gumboots.
When Mum finally came home, she spent most of her time in her bedroom again, the curtains permanently closed against the world. She was too distracted by her own mysterious battles to monitor me as she once had. Most evenings after dinner, I hung out at the skate ramp at the end of our street, hoping to see my latest crush, but flirting with anyone who’d flirt back. At a family picnic, my cousin showed us how easy it was to shoplift from the Kmart near his house. I tried it at our local shopping centre after school, then proudly distributed chocolate bars to my friends at the bus-stop. I became addicted to the rush of getting away with it, and passed on my trick to the friends who were supposedly a bad influence. On weekends, we lifted small things: a bracelet, a desk toy shaped like a J, junk food. Then I graduated to clothes, gradually assembling a wardrobe I otherwise couldn’t afford: coloured denim cut-off shorts, a diamond-patterned bodysuit that buttoned at the crotch. I told Mum that they were Kirsty’s cast-offs. And then I got caught.
At the end of that year, my friendships mysteriously dissolved. I spent a few weeks walking what I hoped was purposefully around the schoolyard at lunchtimes, too shy to impose myself on another group, until I collided with Brigitte, whose best friend had dumped her. She was boy-crazy in the same way I was, with minimal links between our targets of desire and any real-life possibilities of success. We collected souvenirs: a coin one of our crushes had dropped, a bus ticket. We were 16 years old, behaving the same way I had when I was 12.