Toyo

by Lily Chan

  She held Hiroto’s little hand as they raced up a lighthouse at the beach and he counted the steps “Ichi ni san shi go!” in an eager voice. His large head was balanced on top of his small body like an inverted snowman.

  When he was five years old, he serenaded delighted waitresses with a Tamaki Koji song.

  The waitresses shrieked with delight and gave them discounts on the bill.

  Lily, born three years after Hiroto, was placid in comparison. She sat in her pram watching the landscape and the adults as if all was a film reel rolling past. Occasionally she followed Hiroto around in obedient adoration, imitating his monkey squats.

  Toyo went dancing with her girlfriends, wearing a silver dress with a floral brooch pinned to her shoulder. Fox-stepping in the disco, she came face to face with her nephew Nobuhiko, the son of her dear sister-in-law Kazuko. He had grown into a fine young man, all cheekbones like his mother and gentle eyes.

  They both exclaimed, “What are you doing here?” at the same time. They burst out laughing. They were alight with the fever of dancing. He took her hand and they danced in the middle of the crowd, wriggling their hips and shaking their shoulders and giggling.

  That night, with Nobuhiko holding her hand and smiling his rare smile, with his face white like the moon and his eyes carved in the most beautiful curved shape, she saw in her nephew’s face the echoes of his mother and Okaya and Otoya and Ryu and all the brothers and sisters of that family, and they all danced with her, all of them together, under the disco lights spinning and spinning their multi-faceted gaze over her laughing face.

  the shipment

  Yoshio had been twenty-four when he started the coin laundry business. By the time he turned thirty he was a millionaire. He installed coin laundries at locations across Osaka.

  He took Toyo and Shuying with him to scout out new locations, asking for opinions on customer traffic, demographics and accessibility. Hours of each day were spent travelling between these outlets and emptying machine sockets and counting coins. It was a supposedly low-maintenance business that seemed to consume everyone’s time.

  On a scouting expedition, Yoshio parked his car and was accosted by an infringements inspector trolling the side street.

  “Your driver’s licence, please. Ah, you’re Chinese – where is your identity pass?”

  “It’s at home.”

  “You should carry it on you at all times. I will have to press charges.”

  Yoshio was summoned to the local magistrates court and fined forty thousand yen. Ordered to give his birth date in the Japanese Showa calendar notation, Yoshio refused. “I do not understand why I have to be here,” he said. He looked pointedly at the man sitting beside him, a Yakuza in handcuffs flanked by the police. “I am no criminal.”

  Toyo was aghast at the inspector’s strict adherence to regulations. “It’s a terrible thing, Yoshio,” she said, “that the Chinese are regarded as third-class citizens.”

  “The strangest thing just happened,” Yoshio said in a daze, emerging from his room on the top floor. “I was sitting in the chair, looking out the window. There were all these clouds in the sky. Did you see them? Hundreds upon hundreds, of all different shapes and sizes.

  “One cloud began to form the shape of Australia, the perfect shape of the entire continent, even with the small island at the bottom right. I had to look it up – it’s called Tasmania. Then another smaller cloud formed itself into the shape of an arrow pointing towards the western coast. I rushed out to call you to see, but by the time I looked up again, the clouds had scattered.”

  Toyo, Yoshio and Shuying dug out a map of Australia and looked at the cities scattered along its long coastline. He pointed to Perth. “There, that’s where the arrow was directed! We should visit it, see what it’s all about.”

  Shuying, attending to the growing brood of children – the newest addition to the family, Anabel, waving her hands, passed from arm to arm – farewelled Toyo and Yoshio at the airport.

  On the plane, Toyo looked at the brochures of Australia. Kangaroos and red dusty plains and blue beaches. The colours were vivid. They looked too good to be true. There was something white and clean and spread out about Perth, as if a god had taken Osaka or Kyoto and stretched it out on a garment; stretched out the roads and houses and people and telegraph poles so everything was further and further apart.

  They visited Kings Park, Scarborough Beach, the Pinnacles and Wave Rock. They strolled through the CBD and remarked how quiet and clean the streets were. The houses smelled like fresh detergent. The city was so green and blue, hemmed in by trees along the coast and the ocean and the river, stitching the land together.

  On their return, they discovered that the Yakuza had moved in next door to the house in Mino and barricaded the driveway leading to both properties. Toyo endured late-night drinking and music, cars passing by with shades-wearing passengers, tattoos peeking from wrists and shirt-cuffs.

  Yoshio visited the Australian Consulate in Japan and was advised by an eager official of the commencement of a new business migrants program.

  “I applied for permanent residency in Australia,” Yoshio announced to Toyo and Shuying. It was a spur of the moment thing. He was impulsive. He was excited.

  At first Toyo laughed and exchanged a look with Shuying. Yoshio often made these grand pronouncements and didn’t always follow through. But he began to pack and give things away. Cars. Books. Clothes. He sold the laundromat chain. He listed their houses with a real estate agent.

  “New things are good,” Yoshio pronounced. His eyes had that gleam she recognised from his ant-burning and toad-hunting and snake-catching childhood.

  She had built a hive for herself in Osaka. There were so many things to do. She owned so many clothes, so many items. She felt a mixture of fear and excitement. Yoshio’s face shone with complete commitment, that desire to follow things through until the very end. Seeing this, she felt it was the right decision to follow. But it was not without trepidation that she began to pack, to lift and deliver the contents of her wardrobe into boxes and cartons and containers, for her entire life to be sealed up like an Egyptian tomb and sent to Western Australia.

  She arranged a farewell party at a community hall. Towards the end of the night she made a speech, thanking everyone and asking them to visit her in Australia. From the crowd, Takeo called out in a choked voice, “Nesan! Don’t go!”

  Toyo watched Yoshio sign the immigration papers. Over the years the surname Zhang had become Chang, the guttural Zh amended to a bell’s chime Ch; now it was further anglicised with the g being lopped off, left behind.

  the castle

  The first time Toyo walked through the house in Floreat, she thought she had entered a castle. Built on top of a hill, it was triple-storeyed and spacious, with white walls and a sunroom. The roof was the colour of pumpkin. Out the back was a pergola crowned by generous blackberry bushes. Toyo plucked the hairy berries and popped them in her mouth until her tongue was stained dark purple.

  She collected the gum leaves falling from the trees bordering the driveway. She had never seen such dry, flat leaves, breaking easily in her hands. In her little studio at the back of the house she pressed them into clay she had rolled out with a pin. The veins and the slender curved lines rose up out of the clay.

  The red bottlebrushes were hairbrushes, their red spokes falling like fairy hair onto the ground. Around this time she saw May Gibbs’ gumnut babies printed in books and on stationery: the Snugglepot and Cuddlepie series, Little Obelia underwater, John Dory and swathes of fish, lizards, kookaburras and the sinister Banksia men with their pod-like eyes cracking open. The water-colours and drawings entranced her. She could not walk past the white trunks of gum trees without picturing these pudgy, wide-lashed creatures cartwheeling down their length, hiding under fallen gumnuts.

  Yoshio crouched down in th
e driveway with a video camera suctioned to his eye.

  “Look, see that?” he said. “Stay still. I think it’s a kookaburra.”

  The kookaburra sat in the tree. It was a strange bird. It looked unbalanced, as if its head was too big for its body. Its beak was long and sharp. She was startled when it began to cry – a ululating wail, a witch’s cackle. It was unlike anything she had ever heard.

  At night, in her own room, she remembered its laughter and tried to imitate it softly: a strange hybrid sound, somewhere between malice and glee.

  The sky was so blue it eclipsed any other blueness she had ever seen. When she walked along Cottesloe beach, the colour of the ocean met the colour of the sky in a convergence she wanted to capture. There was a calmness akin to when she visited the temples in Osaka. She would clap her hands twice, drop coins into the well and ring the bell, praying for happiness and prosperity for all of her family and friends. In Perth the temple seemed to be everywhere; the sky was a vast blue rooftop covering the entire city.

  Holding Hiroto’s and Lily’s hands she climbed the hill at the back of the house. It was sandy and held together by tufts of grass, sparse as an adolescent’s chin. They counted the steps they took, lifting their feet out of the sand, puffing up the hill. “One, two, three, four …”

  At the top they saw hills sprawling out towards the ocean, trees ruffled by the wind and a handful of skyscrapers and buildings dotting Perth’s skyline. One grandchild clinging to each hand, her hair blown back by the wind, turning towards the camera – Yoshio took a photo of them clustered like that, crowning the city, the earth unfolding beneath them.

  Toyo could not help but look at her grandchildren’s hair with zealous intent. She sat them down, fastened a black bib around their neck, brandished the scissors, the thick brush to flick away cut hairs. She gave the girls tight, neat bowl cuts. The lines arced past their ears and cut crescents across their necks and foreheads.

  In the park Lily stumbled about in her frilly orange dress. A little boy playing in the sandpit looked at her, then asked his father, loudly, “Daddy, Daddy, why is a boy wearing a dress?”

  Toyo was aghast. She raced to Lily’s side and clapped her hands over her ears. Lily looked up, puzzled, smiling. She did look like a little boy. But even so, Toyo could not forgive the boy’s question, his father’s embarrassed shrug.

  Among her possessions was a laughing buddha statue. Coated in black lacquer, he had a wide swinging belly and a necklace of beads, and his hands were held high above his bald head in joyous abandon. She placed him on a ledge at the entrance to the house, where he was the first to greet the guests. His hands hovered as if holding up an invisible mountain.

  It was a fortuitous position. Less than a month later, Lily, who liked to run through the entrance, miscalculated and toppled toward the ledge. She would have split her scalp on its tiled edge but for the buddha – as it was, her fall broke off his right hand. Yoshio taped it together again but it was a clumsy repair, the hand cuffed with black tape to the rest of the body.

  In the deep belly of the property was a swimming pool. Standing on the top floor Toyo watched her grandchildren swim below her like little white dumplings.

  She took a bus to her daily English classes in the city, and lined exercise books with lists of past and present tenses, verbs and adjectives and common phrases. Her class was full of Croatian, French and Chinese students. They struggled to speak the new language and greeted one another with effusive laughter, hugs and much patting of shoulders. They sang “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree”.

  After class she often had coffee and cake. She flitted through the malls with a quick eye for patterned scarves, crafts and cashmere sweaters. Her favourite place was the Laura Ashley store. She wanted to sleep in it. It was a paradise of checked cotton, bath towels, soaps in the shape of flowers, blouses and dresses in arrays of muted purples and sandy browns.

  Australians were so loud and big and colourful. Their voices seemed to resonate from somewhere deep inside their chests and project outwards. Perhaps they were tall and loud because their country gave them the space to be so. She watched the news with fascination. There was something loose and lolling about the way Australians moved their mouths. They smiled widely. Their crinkling eyes, their faces like moving landscapes, their wrinkles un­adorned. Here, women acted like men: they moved with quick assurance, voices ringing out without hesitation. She watched Yoshio play basketball at the Perry Lakes stadium, alternately turning her head to watch that and the women’s game on the adjoining court. At one break a woman stripped off her shirt, completely unselfconscious, revealing a sports bra. She towelled off at the bench and changed into a new shirt. Toyo’s mouth fell open.

  the wabi-sabi essence

  At times Toyo was overwhelmed by a compulsion to care for her grandchildren. She knitted tummy-warmers and jumpers and beanies and gloves. She cut out rows of paper dolls and opened her box of fabric and lace scraps to help Anabel and Lily glue their paper-doll creations into being. She set up a makeshift school in the tatami room where the children were summoned on Saturday mornings to sit with their legs folded underneath them and complete Japanese language exercises. They ruled vertical lines down their notebooks and copied the hiragana characters a, ka, sa, ta, na, moving on eventually to i, ki, shi, tchi ni. She gave the hiragana characters personalities, sounds, easily remembered visual cues.

  At other times she found her grandchildren irritating. They were loud and ran around and disturbed her peace.

  “I don’t want to be a grandma who is tied down by her grandchildren,” she told Shuying. “I want to be able to do whatever I want, whenever I want. I’m not going to be at your beck and call.”

  Shuying understood. She was a good girl.

  Still, the grandchildren were delightful sometimes. Hiroto was a cheeky rascal. Lily was quiet and sensitive. Anabel was born with a pugnacious sulk.

  Toyo dug out the zinc suncream tubes and marked fluorescent designs on their bare bellies, their soft skin. Hiroto wanted to be a ninja turtle. Lily was a princess. Anabel was a rabbit. They posed against the wall as she took photos. Her grandchildren were three paintings, adorned with zinc cream, washing away in chlorinated water.

  She held her wriggling grandchildren against the halo of her being. She tried to pin them to her image of the perfect Japanese child, but Australia infiltrated their skin; it contaminated them; it made them boorish and uncouth. Her earnest adherence to the Japanese wabi-sabi essence crumpled before their failure to engage. She demanded to know why her grandchildren were not quieter, more polite; she harangued Shuying about their inarticulate replies.

  “But Mother, the children can’t speak Japanese very well.”

  Toyo did not excuse them. They banded together and whispered secrets in easy English and she felt the sting of being an outsider in her own home. The world should be just like her, it should be Toyo from head to toe, Toyos bowing on every corner with genteel Japanese falling from their lips, smiling, neatly lipsticked lips, patting them on a tissue paper to gleaming moistness. Everyone had a role to play. She played hers well. She wanted everyone else to follow the script.

  When her family closed their eyes to pray before the meal, she monitored their piety. If a grandchild flickered their eyelids or fidge­t­ed during prayers, she pinched them with a pair of chopsticks or threw a missile of some kind – a slice of cucumber, a carrot, a spinach leaf – at their face, and glared at their surprise.

  on the pearl train

  A young man boarded the carriage, dark hair falling over his eyes, and Toyo watched him lope towards a seat. The light caught his face in myriad perfect planes. She netted a life story for him based on his posture, his clothes, his sneakers, his grin.

  Other people watched films, birds, the weather, the news. Toyo watched people. A young couple leaned into each other, lips brushing, touching, ling
ering, his arm on the seat of the train, the other around her shoulders. It was as if Toyo were an extension of the train, her white cardigan merging with the seat cover while their bodies gravitated towards each other as the train shuttled along the rails from station to station.

  Toyo felt a ripple of vicarious warmth settle in her chest, spreading in circles to her arms, her face. She remembered Ryu’s boyish face leaning towards her, his eyes half closed in yearning. She remembered his face leaning in slowly towards hers until his skin, his cheeks, became her world, her range of vision. She remembered his lips resting gently on her lips, cushioning them, rising and falling with each breath.

  Yoshio’s business banker invited Yoshio, Shuying and Toyo to luncheons at his skyscraper office on the top floor. He opened bottles of red and served canapés. The cheese oozed on their plates; olives glistened. Toyo enjoyed dressing up for these lunches, practising her budding English on the guests, the banker’s other clients, and soaking in the grand view from the boardroom. She could see the Swan River looping beneath her like a deep blue thread, the curve of the freeway, the buildings dotting the horizon.

  One of the banker’s clients was a Japanese businessman who had migrated to Perth with his wife. He was stout and middle-aged, radiating the sheen of commercial success. She was elegant and reserved, her smile suppressing some inner amusement. From the outside, the couple were immaculate. Toyo thought that perhaps it was too perfect and polished, that it was just that – a surface sheen, tricking the eyes.