by Alice Pung
The Youngest Con had immoral thoughts; they gnawed at his five-year-old conscience. He believed it was possible to expel them through his ear canal, so he knocked his head about.
I hate my brain.
I can’t control my brain.
It has bad thinking.
What bad thinking?
It thinks of being a lady.
He once asked a girl who bathed with him if her dick had dropped off. And then he helped her search for it.
Youngest Con was abnormally curious about sex. When they shared the same bed, Oldest Con turned her back to him so his foot didn’t dig into her crotch during the night. She slept on her front so her breasts weren’t groped when morning came. He held her face and pressed his lips against hers.
‘No!’
He did not remove his hand from his penis when he slept.
The Em said: ‘No!’
She said: ‘Jehovah is disgusted.’
So he whispered, ‘Sorry, Jehovah’… … each time.
*
Jehovah had been keeping a close eye on the Le residence ever since the Anh acknowledged his existence. Subsequently, Oldest Con served in the Theocratic Ministry for nearly ten years.
She would wake people up to the Good News of the Kingdom.
‘Good morning, Aunty! Would you like to live in this paradise on earth?’ she would say, and then she would flash a brochure at the householder to explain in plain Vietnamese how to arrive at this White Man’s Utopia.
She couldn’t recall how many times she’d heard ‘I’m not interested,’ or, ‘I’ve got my own religion.’
But only one time was a door slammed in her face, and that was in English territory. Maybe they didn’t like gooks with good news, maybe they didn’t like Jehovah’s Witnesses in general.
Waking up householders was unusual in Vietnamese territory. Even at nine o’clock in the morning the humming of industrial sewing machines could be heard and would continue being heard until the early hours of the next morning.
*
Preaching in the high-rise housing commissions was especially tedious in winter. The vile stench of urine, smackies shooting up in stairways, syringes scattered everywhere.
Nobody liked to open their doors in winter. It’s too cold.
And people were afraid … of white hooligans, of the Tax Commission …
Old women were locked behind security bars, sponsored to Australia purely to watch their grandchildren – often because the parents were looking for easy money at the Crown Casino. These old women welcomed Jehovah’s Witnesses with all the tea they had. Tea imported from Vietnam and India, China Jasmine tea, Ginseng tea …
‘Drink.’
‘Very warm.’
‘Very good for your liver.’
‘Drink …’
The old women wouldn’t let them leave. They even listened to Bible discussions. It might be a long time before they had company again. Jehovah’s Witnesses were often mistaken for charity workers.
*
When Old Con turned thirteen she decided to be an actor. The Anh and his Em went into hysterics.
‘NO morals, NO respect.’
‘NO employment, NO hope.’
‘I will not watch my Con make love to a strange man!’
And, above all:
‘What would Jehovah think?’
Oldest Con thought about that one, she thought long and hard. She wondered why the Anh and his Em were so impossible.
Was it their Vietnameseness?
Was it their Jehovah’s Witness-ness?
Or a lethal concoction of Vietnamese-Jehovah’s Witness-ness?
They economised a great deal more than the mainstream Vietnamese. They didn’t support their ancestors financially in the spirit world with American spirit dollars, or spirit cars, or spirit clothes. They didn’t sacrifice mangoes or bananas or cook lavish meals for fat, gigantic-earlobed gods. Their low income wasn’t a bother come celebration time because they didn’t celebrate.
Oldest Con was enclosed in the good news; it became a glass wall and distorted and magnified the splendour of the world. Through the glass the world looked sublime, its people extraordinary.
*
There was only one conclusion.
Oldest Con decided that although she respected his people, she could not be a witness for Jehovah. She stopped telling people the good news.
The Anh and his Em once again went into hysterics.
And now her spirituality was in ruins.
Her chances of surviving Armageddon were dismal.
Even so, the Anh and his Em still held hope. Oldest Con was an investment: she might prove to be profitable before her destruction.
The Anh and his Em had a mortgage to pay …
Legends
..........................
Teenage Dreamers
Phillip Tang
My father had a sixth sense. He knew when people would die.
We were watching a Leslie Cheung film together – a Wong Kar-Wai one with swollen colours, Happy Together – and my father was enthralled, totally outside himself, his small feet embracing the seat in front of us. In the dark of the Chinatown cinema, he massaged his wrists.
Leslie’s character was bleeding in an old lover’s doorway.
Without warning, the sound of sobbing leaked through the warm air of the cinema. At first, I thought it was one of the girls in school uniform, hugging each other in the front row. Their Leslie was hurt on screen. They had iPods in their ears, playing his hits, I guess.
But it was my father who made a sound like a ruined gate, his hands clamped to his cheeks.
I kept my eyes nailed straight ahead.
Ever since my mother had left him, my father had become obsessed with Leslie Cheung. I could picture him – a short ball of a man with grey-shot hair amongst the throng of girls, screaming at Leslie’s concerts. He simply studied the singer on stage with the dreaming eyelids.
‘He’s a Solo Man like me,’ my father said after one show, sprinkling in English he learnt from TV. ‘So lonesome tonight.’
If he had been somebody else’s father, I would have thought he was infatuated with Leslie.
While he continued crying in the cinema, I wondered if it would make me want to see him more often, or not again for another three months. Even though the rows of seats were mostly empty and I could hear a truck rumble in the outside world, I still flushed with embarrassment. One of the iPod girls turned to twist her face at me.
‘Ba,’ I said. ‘Do you want a tissue?’
‘He’s going to die.’
‘Come on, you’ve seen this film three times, he doesn’t die. Maybe emotionally, isolation, you know–’
‘Suicide.’
‘That doesn’t happen. How do you even know that word? Take this tissue.’
He wouldn’t stop crying.
‘He was such an April fool.’
‘Don’t be stupid, he’s still alive.’
He unmasked his face to me and looked more serious than I had ever seen him before. ‘He’s going to die next month,’ he said with a metal sting to his words.
My mother always used to say, ‘Too much drama. Your father is a victim.’ Now I knew what she had seen all those years they were together.
I felt my chest flatten in the hot air of the cinema. I arranged my wandering limbs into the leather seat, and I believed him. The previous Spring Festival, my cousin, Fat Lydia, had emerged from hospital with a new lung blown into her. Everybody gave her red envelopes plumped with dollars, teased her about her first grey hairs, and laughed clumsily in chairs around her bed.
Except for my father. He said she’d be ‘returning home’ soon.
Her lung didn’t take and her funeral was two weeks later.
I hadn’t believed him then, or cared about Fat Lydia, but the idea of no Leslie Cheung in the silver-screened world made my stomach tense. I was a fan too, though I didn’t go to Kinko’s to get posters of the star lam
inated, like my father did. I listened to him talking about Leslie’s childhood. His story was recited into the air every other night. My father’s voice was wet with pride for the other son he never had.
Sitting up in the aisle, waiting for my father to stop whimpering, I realised Leslie’s childhood had become muddled with my own; I had reframed his history around mine. Was it me who loved Gone with the Wind? The problem was, some patches of our backstory overlapped. My parents were never at home – working in factories – just like Leslie’s. Other things were obviously fantasy: just like my father had an imaginary Leslie son, I had an imaginary Leslie father. He was the tailor to Cary Grant and other A-list stars; he didn’t work in a Hills Hoist factory. He didn’t live in a weatherboard house in Footscray.
In the restaurant after the movie, my father seemed resigned to the fact of Leslie’s death.
‘Do you have enough money to pay for your own ticket? You should get a real job,’ he said, ripping the crackled pork skin from the shell of bone.
‘Ticket for what?’
‘For Hong Kong, of course, that’s where he was born and where he will die. Beautiful stories. Beautiful pictures.’
I plucked the soy sauce from a small plastic basket on the table for my father. His Kodak memories were making me even more muddled.
‘Accountancy is a real job.’ My face was filled with heat. My parents had pushed me into it. It wasn’t my problem that the moment I actually found satisfaction in my work was the moment they lost pride in it as a profession.
‘I’m not going. There’s SARS,’ I said. Hong Kong always had the fragrance of death, even before the disease came along. An old man shouldn’t be going there. ‘You wouldn’t even come to my graduation.’
‘We’ll buy face masks.’
‘Paper won’t stop it. I’m staying here.’ I was starving and put some plain rice in my bowl.
‘Poor Leslie. If he wasn’t a gay, he would be happy,’ my father said, slipping his eyes from my gaze. ‘It’s not his fault.’
I never enquired about my father’s private life, but in that pause, I felt I was compelled to do so. We were silent for a long time. The drawn sound of Vietnamese voices stretched from the kitchen. My noodles still hadn’t arrived. The tiled floor felt cold, even through my runners. I dragged the plastic tablecloth between my fingers to keep my hand steady.
A question formed on my lips before I knew I was even asking it.
‘Are you happy?’
My father’s fingernails pressed crescent moons into his hand. A pause.
‘Yes.’
‘Right.’ I pushed up a smile. ‘Why don’t I see if they’ll play that Leslie song, like they did last time?’ I went off and asked the woman to put it on.
Leslie’s voice shone into the room. It was a narrow restaurant, slotted into the street like all the others, but in ours, his voice breathed through it. We both stared out the red neon-buzzed window to the street below.
‘We’ll have to make a sign to carry,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘For his funeral.’
My father lifted his eyes to mine and swiftly back down. He picked up his chopsticks and wiped the oily ends on a tissue.
‘You loved to draw when you were a boy.’
*
On 1 April 2003, Leslie Cheung jumped from the twenty-fourth floor of his hotel. In a note he said, ‘In my life I did nothing bad.’
My father and I carried a big placard that read, ‘In my life I did nothing as good as you, Leslie.’
Destiny
Shalini Akhil
I was very young when my obsession started; sparked by the cartoon version, it intensified with the television series. Every weekend I’d be rendered speechless from the first bars of the intro to the closing credits as I watched in awe, stretched out flat on my belly on the lounge-room floor. Every year, I’d get the show bag from the Royal Easter Show, and when we got home I’d sneak up onto the garage roof and fight off make-believe villains whose faces always ended up resembling those of my brothers. They were no match for me: my reflexes were lightning fast, my aim was true and my hair flowed like streamers, dark and glossy in the sunlight. It felt right, being her. A perfect fit. It was destiny.
When I grew up, I would be Wonder Woman.
Then one day, my grandmother came to stay with us. She stayed for a while, and she watched Wonder Woman with me. After a few sittings, I thought she was ready to hear my secret. I told her about my destiny. Though she commended me for thinking about the future, it seemed she wasn’t as sure about my choice as I was. As we discussed my plans, my grandmother reminded me that I was Indian. It was then I began to realise I could never grow up to be exactly like Wonder Woman.
My skin was the wrong colour, my eyes were the wrong colour, and my legs just weren’t long enough. Not that it would have made a difference if they were, because my grandmother didn’t like the way Wonder Woman dressed. I tried to explain to her that what Wonder Woman wore was a costume, a special costume to fight crime in. But my grandmother kept saying she thought it looked like she’d left the house in her underwear – like she’d forgotten to put her skirt on. You can fight all the crime in the world, she said, but if you leave the house without putting your skirt on, no one will take you seriously.
So we started to think about what an Indian-girl crime-fighter might wear. Truth be told, I wasn’t too impressed with Wonder Woman’s choice of outfit either; in the cartoons her pants had looked okay, but in the TV series they looked a lot like those plastic protector-pants they put over babbies’ nappies. Initially, I had tried to make up reasons why she’d wear them – maybe she needed the extra padding just in case she ever fell over, or maybe the seat in her invisible jet wasn’t very comfortable. But no matter how I tried to explain it to myself, I couldn’t really see why they thought putting Wonder Woman in a pair of sparkly nappies would make her better at fighting crime.
My grandmother suggested that Indian Wonder Woman could wear a lungi. That way she could run and kick and squat and jump, and still keep her honour. I wasn’t so sure about that, so my grandmother made me a deal. She said that Indian Wonder Woman could wear a lungi over her sparkly pants, and that way if she ever needed seven yards of fabric in an emergency, she could just unwind it from around her waist. She could use the fabric to wrap the bad guys up in and then tie them up with her rope. I thought that sounded like a good idea. We sketched a lungi over Wonder Woman’s legs.
My grandmother didn’t really like Wonder Woman’s top, either. She said that super heroes should have functional clothing, and that a strapless top just wasn’t practical for a lady as active as Indian Wonder Woman would be. She liked the colours, though, so we kept the basic design and added some shoulder straps. I wanted them to cross over on the back, and my grandmother said she could sew me a top like that, so we drew it into the plan. Finally we moved on to her accessories. My grandmother thought that all of her accessories should be made of 24-carat gold, and that her earrings should be more than just two red studs. Maybe they could be crafted from rubies instead; that way they’d still be red, but better than before. I didn’t really mind about the accessories; all I wanted was a red Wonder Woman top with criss-cross straps at the back.
At lunchtime, my grandmother mentioned that rolling rotis was like a magic power. I didn’t really believe her. But then I watched her as she rolled them one after the other, and they all turned out perfectly round. I don’t know how she did it, because when I tried, they looked more like blobs or squares. When my grandmother rolled her rotis, they spun slowly around and around underneath her rolling pin, and she didn’t have to pick them up and stretch them out with her hands like I did. I was a little disappointed, but she said that it had taken her a while to learn, and that she’d train me. My grandmother said that the magic rotis were very good with super-hero eggs, so I asked her if she would make some for me.
My grandmother chopped up some onions and some chillies to add to th
e eggs. She said they would make me run faster and help me to see better in the dark. She fried them in a little oil and we both coughed; she said that was a good sign that the power in them was very strong. She beat some eggs and poured them into the frying pan and stirred them around till they were done. She sprinkled some salt over the eggs and divided them between two plates. My grandmother said I could pick the chillies out into her plate if they were too hot for me, but I managed to eat some of them. The eggs tasted good with the magic rotis.
I felt sorry for the old Wonder Woman. I imagined her eating her peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches alone, without a magical grandmother to suggest wearing a lungi over her embarrassing sparkly nappies. That day, I decided to change my destiny.
When I grew up, I was going to be Indian Wonder Woman.
Dancing Lessons
Cindy Pan
Daddy took my hand in his firm capacious one and we walked the cows’ trail towards the dam. The water lilies were still open. Vibrant cerises and melting lemon yellows merged with the snowiest of whites in their crisp, sharp petals. How I would like to spend my days basking on those cool, emerald lilypads, nestling inside the lilies at night. The sun was going down and the breeze was cool.
‘Yes, Liang Liang. You will be the first.’
‘Do you think so, Daddy? Really?’
‘Yes. No one has ever do that before. Many people can winning Nobels prizes, but no one has ever winning Nobels prize in every single categories before. No one!’
‘But how?’
‘What?’
‘How will I do that?’
‘You are genius! For you, you will have to working very hard but if you trying very hard, you can do it. I know you.’
‘I will try hard, Daddy. I always try hard, but I don’t know if …’
‘No, Liang Liang, I know you,’ he paused and considered, adding suddenly: ‘I’ve known you all your life!’
‘Well … I’ve known you all my life too,’ I countered. I had hardly realised I had known him for so long.