by Alice Pung
Around each toothpick marker my father glued a folded piece of paper. Each piece of paper was printed with a small flag of India. My father marked only the places on the map that interested him: his birthplace of Lucknow; Calcutta, where my mother was born; Bombay, where the great Sunil Gavaskar would bat on the streets with a plank of wood. He ignored Bhopal, Akola and Jaipur. He used swatches of brown silk to represent the Thar Desert and he carved the Eastern and Western Ghats, the Cardamom Hills and the Nilgiri Hills out of the remainder of the sandalwood.
My father mounted the model on a large slab of cork and left it to dry on the living-room table. When the model was dry, and the toothpicks secure, he placed it in the pond. He let the model drift in the water without securing it. It looked as if India had pulled itself away from Asia, ripping the Himalayas with it, and was powering itself through the Indian Ocean in whatever direction it chose. The Ganges would no longer flow into the Bay of Bengal but into all the oceans of the world.
It occurred to me one day as I watched the model float around the pond that India had roughly the same outline as Australia. When the model turned in the water so that Nagercoil pointed directly east, I could transplant the Great Australian Bight onto the Gulf of Cambay and transplant Arnhem Land onto Calcutta.
After my father had finished the model he returned to work on the garden. He placed a stone birdbath in the middle of our front lawn. On the edge of the shallow birdbath, the shape of which reminded me of a chalice, he cemented a sculpture of Brahma. In his four hands Brahma held a book, which I now know to be the Vedas, a sceptre, a string of pearls and a cup. Water was sculpted falling from the cup into the birdbath. If it rained for long enough, the cup would fill and water would drip off the stone into the bath.
My father grew palm trees along the side fence, planted strawberries in a stone flowerpot shaped like an elephant, and nailed a bronze sun wheel above the front door.
*
My mother packed the cupboards with our plates and cups, washed each of our tin dishes three times, and hung a mask of a god, whose name I have forgotten, in the cupboard where she stored our masalas, onions and chillies. The mask was green with two locks of thread on either side of the forehead, holes for the eyes and mouth, and a horsehair goatee. It had paper incisors, which tickled my bottom lip whenever I tried it on, and a glass dot was glued to its forehead.
My mother glued three crucifixes to the windowsill of every room and placed statues of Mary and Joseph on my bedside table. I kissed the stone feet of the statues every night before going to bed. My father had planted a rosebush outside my window, and on nights when the thorns scratched against the glass, or the wind swung the iron gates of our house against each other, or when possums ran over our roof, I would turn the faces of Mary and Joseph directly toward me.
This is an edited extract from The Ganges and Its Tributaries (McPhee-Gribble, 1993).
The Beat of a Different Drum
Simon Tong
Geelong. February, 1982.
Only one person was in the cool, shadowed tuckshop when I tottered in, starving for a reprieve from the badgering and the flinty heat. I took my time to write down my lunch order on the brown paper bag, making sure it was legible before handing it to the middle-aged woman behind the counter.
She looked at my order, chuckled, then crossed out the second ‘p’ in ‘meat pipe.’
My ears burned. She must think I’m an illiterate idiot.
‘Sorry,’ I said, sotto voce. She probably didn’t even hear me. I kept my gaze on the scarred countertop and my fists in the pockets of the school trousers I had put on for the first time that morning.
‘No worries, luv. It’ll be waiting for you at lunchtime.’
Why would an Australian woman three times my age, someone I had never met before, call me her love?
Searching the ground for something to kick hard, I gulped in a deep breath, gritted my teeth and scurried back out to face the waiting hordes of rowdy teenagers.
*
I wasn’t an angry child in Hong Kong.
I loved badminton, went to a public primary school and spent too much of my pocket money playing Space Invaders in unlicensed premises. My favourite outing was going to the public library in the Central district. I would run ahead, shove open the heavy glass door and plunge into the bouquet of old books. I peeked at the foxing on the coarse yellowed papers and wondered if the brown spots would coalesce into a discernable pictogram, a secret message slowly released by the book.
Like many people who missed out on a good education, my mum compensated by reading eclectically. She managed to shoehorn a few bookshelves into our small apartment. Books were stacked two, three layers deep and they made the apartment seem bigger.
I loved the pictures of dinosaurs and animals in the science books my uncle sent me from Taiwan, but I liked the pleasure of words even more. The rhythm of a mellifluous poem was honey on my tongue, the shape of a well-balanced duilian made me grin and grin. I won the school’s essay competition every year; teachers marvelled at my vocabulary, rich and sophisticated for my age. I fantasised about growing up to be a writer.
Just before I finished primary school, I became obsessed with Jin Yong’s martial arts novels. I devoured The Legend of the Condor Heroes in one week, Laughing in the Wind the next. The protagonists were gallant, principled scholar-swordsmen, equally adept at calligraphy, music and poetry. I was enthralled with the I Ching, too. It presented a method for divination, but as I was happy with things as they were, I had no need for its prognostic powers. I was far more intrigued by the principles by which it purported the universe was governed.
Some primary schools used English for teaching, but mine used Cantonese. I was an attentive and conscientious student. Hong Kong’s quirky colonial education system awarded my good results by assigning me to a Christian high school run by the Lasallian Brothers. Every subject, except Chinese, would be taught entirely in English. Despite more than six years of classroom English, I couldn’t even understand the first question my teacher asked me on the first day of high school: ‘Are you a Catholic?’
Crossing the classroom threshold was like stumbling through a portal into a foreign country. I was robbed of speech, hearing and literacy. Each lesson was like a foreign movie without subtitles. I took hours to read one chapter in a textbook; I had to look up a word in the dictionary every few minutes. I didn’t make a peep in class, always dreading the glance from a teacher that might precede a question. My parents, who had barely finished primary school, couldn’t help. My marks deteriorated quickly. If it wasn’t for Margaret Thatcher’s intervention, dropping out at fourteen would have been my lot.
In 1982, Thatcher formally started negotiating with Deng Xiaoping to transfer the sovereignty of Hong Kong to China. The Cultural Revolution and all the subsequent madness were still fresh in people’s minds. My mother decided it was prudent for us to join the new wave of diaspora and we fled to Australia.
*
The whole plane of passengers from Hong Kong had crammed into the small Sydney airport transit lounge, airless as an underground fallout shelter, to wait for our connecting flight to Melbourne. The sluggish ceiling fans did nothing to alleviate the stifling heat.
I had noticed a middle-aged man and an old woman when we were still in the air. He reeked of sweat and unwashed hair; his well-worn vinyl shoes were scuffed from toe to heel. The woman, wearing traditional baggy trousers and loose blouse, her silver hair swept into a severe bun, slumped in a chair with her eyes closed.
When I saw the man saunter towards me in the lounge, I wrinkled my nose and looked away.
‘Excuse me, little brother, could you do me a favour, please?’
I stared at him.
‘Could you please buy a bottle of orange juice for my mother? She is very thirsty, but I can’t speak English. Here is some money. Very sorry for the bother.’ The pleading in his voice embarrassed me. There was a look in his eyes that I couldn’t read.
He thanked me profusely, but didn’t look me in the eyes when I handed him the juice and biscuits.
*
I knew the exact moment when my mother realised we hadn’t collected our luggage.
Turning away from the transit lounge’s warm window, I was about to ask her if she wanted another drink. She was frowning, and had a far away look in her eyes. Then they widened, and she gasped, ‘Our luggage!’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s still on the plane! What are we going to do?’ She stamped her foot, hammered the air with her clenched fists. I had never seen her panic before.
‘No, it’s not, Mum. They are transferring everything to the new plane for us. The pilot told us over the loudspeakers before we landed.’
‘But he spoke English! Are you sure you understood what he said?’
‘Ah. I did … I think.’
She didn’t relax until she could lay her hands on our luggage again in Melbourne.
*
The sum total of what I knew about Australia came to three things: it had an opera house, kangaroos and Australians spoke the dreaded English.
My aunt said I was the first Asian student at the Christian Brothers’ school she had enrolled me in. I greeted that piece of news with indifference. I told myself I would be fine if I just sat quietly in a corner in class like I did in Hong Kong. Perhaps, at fourteen, I was too naive to be afraid. I was gripped by curiosity and glee.
My first day at school in Australia was stinking hot, the only kind of weather this desiccated country seemed to have. I squinted against the refulgent sun, the enormous expanse of bleached sky and the exposed open space. I was on a different planet. Even the thick air, superheated, utterly bereft of moisture (but so clean!), felt alien on my skin.
The principal took me to the classroom and sat me down at a desk by the door. The kids silently stared at me. The teacher, Brother O’Brien, was the second oldest person I had ever met. He was younger than my great-grandfather, who was in his nineties then, but not by much. He dressed like a priest in a black shirt and white collar, hunched behind a desk on a dais raised above us. His gaze behind his thick black-rimmed glasses swept through the whole class without his head moving an inch. His croaky voice had a strange cadence; I managed to understand a whole sentence a few times. No one said anything to me during the whole morning.
At the first recess, I followed the others out of the classroom. A surge of kids immediately swept me up and pushed-dragged me to a bench in the shade. More kids scampered over from all directions to join the ruckus. The crowd loomed over me, blocking out the sun, but the rising heat from the asphalt still turned the soles of my shoes into marshmallows.
I was the new animal at the zoo, fenced in by concentric throngs of teenage boys. Apart from the Lasallian Brothers in my Hong Kong high school, I had never met a white person before. The boys’ faces fascinated and unsettled me. One orange-haired kid’s face and arms seemed to be covered with hideous skin lesions, until I realised they were only freckles. Another boy’s eyebrows wriggled like a single furry caterpillar as he squinted and pushed the corners of his eyes upward with his fingers, bowing and yawping monkey noises at the same time. Another’s head was covered with little coiled springs of implausibly curly hair.
Their questions pelted down on me.
‘Are you from Japan?’
‘Are you from China?’
‘Do you speak English?’
‘Do you play footy?’
‘Did you come here by boat?’
Then they became a torrent.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Are you a virgin?’
‘Konichiwa!’
‘Toyota!’
‘Do you eat dogs?’
They were all hooting, making faces. There was nowhere to shelter. They were standing too close, yammering too loud. I had no voice to scream, no strength to shove. Leave me alone! I don’t understand!
Emboldened by my silence, or sensing easy prey, the circles of kids swirled, tightened.
‘Do you wipe your arse?’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
‘Do you eat raw fish?’
‘YUCK!’
‘Ching-chong Chinaman!’
‘Do you know kung-fu? Karate?’
‘How do you cook a dog?’
‘Come stand here in the sun, it’s cooler!’
The questions hurtled at me, a stinging barrage of blows. I dodged, weaved and parried. With grunts, with gestures and monosyllabic answers. I tried to snatch the words as they whizzed past. My inchoate replies were snuffed out by more questions, spat at me with increasing menace. I turned my face away, cowered, tried to hide from the heckling. Something warm in my chest coagulated, clotting my lungs. I shivered in the silver heat even as rivulets of sweat ran down my back. Leave me alone …
Finally a teacher broke up the crowd and told me to go to the tuckshop to order my lunch. I elbowed my way through the pack and bolted.
*
The mere thought of going to school would throw me into a sweat.
Robbed of speech again, but this time both inside and outside the classroom, I was stripped of my dignity and personality as well. I didn’t have the words to object, to defend myself, to argue, to cajole or control. My ethnicity made me conspicuous, but my reticence made me invisible.
People using simple words to talk to me annoyed me, their condescension made me dizzy with fury. They treated me like a child, assumed I was stupid – and I lacked the language skills to prove them wrong, to demand to be taken seriously. A fourteen-year-old boy doesn’t want to be a stuttering baby making gurgling sounds. He wants to be a suave Don Juan who can amble nonchalantly over to the emerald-eyed girl, make her laugh with his wise cracks and buy her a Sunny Boy to share.
I was always angry, feeling a compulsion to withdraw and reach out at the same time. I had no one to talk to about these feelings. I couldn’t tell my mother; it would only upset her. Were my feelings less real if I couldn’t articulate them? Were they festering into something pernicious? If I couldn’t express myself, then who was my self?
What to do when I thought I had pronounced a word perfectly and no one could understand me? I found using irregular verbs particularly difficult, although I had memorised their inflections years ago. Verbs are not conjugated in Chinese; the temporal flow of events is entirely indicated by adjuncts like ‘last week’ and ‘tomorrow.’ I wasn’t used to matching a verb’s tense with the action’s place in time. What to do when I thought I had nailed a tense and people were still confused and I was confused about why they were confused?
I buried my nose in my beloved martial arts novels to escape. Even at their most abject, the swordsmen never sulked in gloom. Even when they were nailed to a slimy wall at the bottom of a black pit half-filled with fetid water in a far-flung hell hole, subsisting on cockroaches and rage, they were always plotting their revenge. I could do without the cockroaches, but I had plenty of rage.
*
Stewart was in my science class; we both liked Asimov’s robot stories. I envied his swimmer’s physique; he thought it was cool that I could read Chinese.
‘Did you see Nigel sucking Brother Smith yesterday?’ I asked Stewart.
‘WHAT did you say? Nigel did WHAT?’
‘Sucking Brother Smith. Because he wanted Smithy to pick him for the football team.’
Stewart stared at me.
‘Do you mean sucking him or sucking up to him?’
‘Ah. I don’t know. What do I mean? What’s the difference?’
Stewart looked away, shaking his head. ‘Bloody hell …’
‘By the way, what is a wanker?’
‘Oh god.’
Stewart was very patient with me.
*
I discovered that soap operas were excellent learning aids: their plots universal and repetitive, the
histrionic acting transpicuous; I could concentrate on the colloquial dialogues. I watched the cast of Sons and Daughters squabble and The Young Doctors flirt with the nubile nurses. I sat in front of the TV and repeated the dialogue line by line. I copied the rhythm, the idioms and the tone. I discovered that to learn to speak is to learn to listen.
I couldn’t formulate sentences quickly enough to converse at normal speed, so I took to planning for a conversation like for a game of chess; the first ‘hello’ was the opening gambit. I anticipated all the possible responses from my opponent and devised my replies accordingly. Preparing such a script gave me the semblance of a spontaneous speaker in common situations like asking for directions or ordering fast food. But I was still utterly useless when talking to girls, who always came up with startling lines that reduced me to a stammering idiot. When I did finally think of a witty response, it was usually hours after they had left.
No English teacher in Hong Kong had ever mentioned the prosodic characteristics of the language. It has its own distinctive pitch, melody, tempo and tones. Even meaningful noises, like a gasp of surprise, a moan for pleasure or pain, a grunt for admiration or contempt, are all different in English and Chinese.
Curiously, dozing in a busy shopping mall helped me to tune in to this. In the never-never land between wakefulness and sleep, vowels and consonants receded while the musical quality of English became prominent; its intonations tintinnabulated like glass bells, its distinct rhythm became a drumbeat I could clap to.
My relationship with English became a lot friendlier once I started to learn not just its grammar and vocabulary, but also to listen to its music.
Battlers
............................
Pigs from Home
Hop Dac
Pigs in real life, I’m told, are meant to be charming, but no pig has ever endeared itself to me. George Clooney may have mourned the death of his companion of fifteen years, a Vietnamese potbellied pig called Max, but the only name I’ve ever given to an incarnation of the porcine genus was ‘breakfast.’ Of all the animals one can keep, pigs are by far the worst smelling. Pig shit is the most repulsive smelling of all shits. No pig has ever been a friend of mine.