by Alice Pung
Even though Andrew and I walked to and from karate class together every week, I’m not convinced we bonded during that period. We were just too different. He was the boy of the family: a monosyllabic, grunting champion tennis player who smelled weird and punched holes in the walls to vent his frustration. I was on the primary-school debating team, jumped rope during recess, and had a defence mechanism that involved a unique combination of scratching and spitting.
‘What are you?’ Andrew asked one night, withdrawing from a fight after I had repeatedly spat in his face and clawed at his eyes, squealing like a pig. He wiped away the soup of saliva and phlegm that marinated his face, and looked at me with utter disgust.
‘I mean, really, Ben: what are you? Fight back properly. Be a man.’
*
Our music tastes were irreconcilable. It was 1993, and Nirvana had just released In Utero. Andrew would listen to the fourth track, ‘Rape Me,’ over and over again. He didn’t have a personal stereo, so Kurt Cobain’s ironic plea for someone to sexually abuse him droned in from the living room into everyone’s bedrooms, and even into the kitchen where Mum was cooking dinner. Apparently, it was what guys listened to. But even as an eleven-year-old, I thought the song was pretentious and embarrassing. Why would anyone want to rape Kurt Cobain? He was greasy, married to Courtney Love, wore flannel and clearly did not look after himself.
Instead, I immersed myself in another seminal album that was released the same year: Mariah Carey’s Music Box, a serious and studied meditation on love (‘Dreamlover’), bravery (‘Hero’), loyalty (‘Anytime You Need a Friend’) and profound loss (‘Without You’). I ordered it on the back of a TV Week catalogue, alongside Bryan Adams’s So Far So Good and Billy Joel’s River of Dreams. I would listen to Music Box endlessly on my Sony Walkman, for which I’d saved an entire sixty-five dollars. Because I wasn’t at the stage where I could discern what was cool or not, I tentatively asked my best friend James about Carey’s album, and whether he also loved it as much as I did.
‘Mariah fucking Carey?’ There was pity in his eyes. ‘What are you, a fucking homo?’ I shuffled in my spot, unsure of the appropriate response. ‘And what are those shorts you’re wearing, by the way?’ James said. ‘Are they fucking Mango?’ I looked down at the imitation Mambo-brand shorts my mother had bought me from Best ‘n’ Less – the ones I reserved for special occasions, like the Fridays James and I went tenpin bowling. What I had thought was cool – Mariah Carey, my imitation brand-label shorts – I now realised was actually supposed to be a source of deep, deep shame. At least I was feeling it now.
‘Listen, you can’t go on listening to that shit,’ James said, not unkindly, spraying Brut-33 deodorant into his eleven-year-old armpits. (I made a mental note: use deodorant.) Driving to the tenpin bowling alley, James told his mother to put on several CDs for me: The Twelfth Man’s Wired World of Sports II and Denis Leary’s ‘I’m an Asshole.’ Denis Leary’s song I could understand and enjoy – you would have to have been retarded not to. But being raised in a non-cricket household, the Twelfth Man went right over my head. He was boring. But because it was spoken word, all I needed to do was block it out, by privately looping Mariah Carey through my head.
*
Needless to say, there was an answer once I, as Mariah suggested, ‘reached into my soul.’ All of these things – the fashion parade; the gymnastics lessons; Mariah Carey; my lack of body hair; my almost religious commitment to mid-90s gameshow Man ‘O’ Man, the male beauty pageant hosted by Phantom of the Opera’s Rob Guest – pointed towards a particularly aggressive form of homosexuality.
When puberty eventually hit, all the teenage schoolyard boys – reeking of armpits, various penis odours and locker-room Lynx – were on the hunt for anyone remotely queer to exercise their knuckles on. God knows how, but I apparently passed the test. I learned which girls were supposedly attractive; I perfected my man-walk; and I had that rich baritone voice to hide behind. For whatever reason, my peers chose to look beyond my involvement in the all-female clarinet ensemble, and my art-class assignment submissions of semi-naked, muscled Christ figures. Being Asian helped. People never suspected you could be a racial minority and gay. Of course you’re not gay; you’re foreign.
In any case, I was busy convincing myself that I was infatuated with Kate, a girl from my extracurricular acting class. She was misanthropic, liked Radiohead, was obsessed with Jonny Greenwood and smelled nice. She had lovely feet. I had severe scoliosis and a Tori Amos rarities collection. In our area, and in this era, this was as close as the youth got to cutting-edge. A few months into our friendship, I sent Kate an anonymous Valentine’s Day card with Elliott Smith lyrics scrawled all over it. She called my bluff and asked me out on a date during an online chat. I became flustered, confused, and – somehow knowing in my gut that this would be wrong – typed something like ‘Uhmnoth-anksokaybye.’
Then I made my online profile invisible.
(Knowing my teenage self, it’s very likely I then spent the next few hours looking at homosexual pornography.)
The next time I saw her, Kate had put on weight and scowled a lot. Later, she would email me to tell me her misanthropy and weight gain had more to do with a chemical imbalance in her brain than anything I did. But being self-obsessed goes hand in hand with being young and gay, and I couldn’t help but feel partially to blame.
‘What’s the problem?’ Mum asked one night, after she found me heaving and dripping snot all over her sofa. I was crying so hard that I couldn’t breathe, and sounded like I was caught in a strange combination of having sex and shitting myself from food poisoning.
I couldn’t even speak. ‘I-HAH-AVE-SUH-UH-UM-THING …’ I gasped.
‘Yes?’
‘SU-UHM-TH-ING … TO-OO … TE-EHL … YO-OO.’
Mum patted my shoulder comfortingly and smiled.
‘I have no idea what you just said.’
‘I ha-ave sum-thi-ing,’ I choked, ‘to tell you.’
‘Hmmm,’ my mother said, concerned. ‘Is it bad? Are you on drugs?’
I shook my head.
‘You’ve gotten Rebecca pregnant.’
‘Oh go-oh-od – no!’ I continued sobbing.
‘Um…’ Mum said, as though she was on a gameshow. ‘You’re gay.’
Tentatively, I nodded, still blubbering.
‘Okay. Well, what’s wrong with that?’ Mum asked. ‘There’s nothing wrong with being gay.’
I looked up at her. ‘Ree-heeh-ly?’
‘Gay people can’t help it,’ she said. Her reaction surprised me. ‘It’s just that something went wrong in the womb, that’s all.’
*
After I came out, it was strange not having something to be constantly anxious about. So I chose to focus again on my body. A moment from high school was still haunting me, from Moreton Island on Year 12 camp, when a girl called out to me as I got out of the ocean: ‘Ben! Oh my god: if you had tits, you’d have my ideal body.’
Having hovered around the 49-kilogram mark for most of my postpubescent life, I was sick of it. I hadn’t grown taller or put on any weight since I’d left high school. My aim was to build some biceps, stack on some muscle and stop looking like someone had draped skin over a skeleton. My metabolism was like a furnace. I would devour veritable troughs of food, only to crap it all out minutes later. It made weight gain extremely difficult.
However, my friend Daniel (so aggressively heterosexual that he once shat on a toilet seat by mistake) had recently become noticeably beefier. When I went to hug him each time I saw him, it became increasingly difficult. He was becoming a truck. Daniel’s advice was simple: go to the gym; invest in protein shakes. So I did exactly as he said: I joined the gym, worked out like a demon and swam laps every other day. If my life were a movie, this period would be a montage of protein shakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, bananas, bench presses, swimming laps and grunting. Sweat would trickle down my face.
About a month later, I’d put on five kilo
s. On a body size like mine, this was conspicuous and noticeable. Then I put on another two. Encouraged and exhilarated, I decided to be adventurous with the protein shakes. Into the mix went: protein mix, milk, bananas, Milo, a tub of Milo dairy dessert, Weet Bix and two raw eggs. But Asians aren’t known for having a strong tolerance to lactose. Five hours later, the resulting farts were indescribably rancid.
‘Jesus,’ said my sister Tammy that night, choking. ‘Dear fucking god, what is that smell?’ The farts would not stop.
Later, when my boyfriend Scott had marched back from work, sleep-deprived and tired, the farts had still not subsided. Tammy had opened all the windows and doors, gasping. By bedtime, my bowels were still putting on a musical, one with both an auditory and olfactory score. Sighing, Scott endeavoured to ‘massage them out’ of me, rather than having me leak gas throughout the night. He was tired and needed to sleep.
A few hours later, it was still going.
‘Benjamin,’ Scott finally said. ‘This is a new low. Even for you.’ He said this firmly but gently, as he lovingly guided the gas from my bloated abdomen towards my anus.
In the dark, I nodded. Then I farted. Groaning and waving his hands, Scott got up and opened windows and doors. Tammy screamed – she could smell it from the next room. It was official: I was repulsive. But while my bowels continued to spasm, expand, then lazily yawn out sulphurous gas into the night, I couldn’t help but think, ‘Being disgusting. That’s manly, isn’t it?’
The Lover in the Fish Sauce
Chi Vu
In the darkness the only thing visible was the glow of Trung’s watch. Then a sudden change of light and loudness. Trung turned and watched the way Diep tucked her hair behind her ear with a small, efficient movement. Her blue loose-fitting dress looked white in the brightness from the screen. Trung got her to skip afternoon classes to see this.
They were almost alone in the cinema. Another couple sat right in the centre, and an old guy sat in the third row, his arms outstretched over the two seats on either side of him. Trung put his arm around Diep’s shoulders. Warmth and dampness. His arm was heavy given his slight build.
The air con was dry, the velvet curtains dusty, there was a little bit of rubbish around on the seats. Popcorn, cardboard containers. Small plastic wrappers especially crinkled up, hiding under seats.
Diep took Trung’s arm off her shoulder. In that moment she felt his body tense up, so she held his hand. The touch of two palms, smooth and light. They smiled and their teeth glistened in each other’s peripheral vision, but neither of them looked at the other.
Later the titles on the screen had a more adventurous appearance – jungle and bamboo font, with diacritics on them.
‘This is a funny movie,’ Diep puzzled.
‘It’s not a movie,’ Trung said, ‘It’s an advert.’
Diep leaned forward. ‘Oh, it’s a Viet company.’ She squinted harder at the screen.
‘It’s my father’s company,’ Trung said finally.
‘That’s why you took me here …’
‘Do you like it?’ Trung realised his voice was hard as soon as he said it.
‘Yeah, sure I do,’ Diep smiled and looked downwards.
*
Twenty minutes into the promo Trung got quite sick. He ran away from the seat while the movie was still playing. Diep sat there not knowing what to do. She looked at the nearly empty cinema. She watched the men on the screen; a buff businessman was dashing across the pedestrian crossing with his tie fluttering about his engorged neck, slashing his pale chiselled jawline.
Then cut to an interview of another man, older but also well built, talking about what he loved about his job and his company. He said to camera: ‘It is a cutthroat industry, but supportive.’ High-powered keywords spun across the screen before landing on the front middle of the frame. What were the words? Diep involuntarily turned her head sideways to catch the spinning words, but could not read them.
Trung returned to the seat, moving slowly. His footsteps were unsure on the plush multicoloured carpet. Diep immediately stood up and put her arms around him, helping him sit down. He had an acrid smell about him.
She cradled him in the diamond of her crossed legs, his head at her knee. Diep leaned forward, looking at his feverish temple. Trung was trembling as though to shake off the beads of sweat on his skin. Diep thought that they were not familiar enough for her to be holding him this way. She was falling for him as he lay semiconscious in her lap.
Trung looked up, unfocused, towards her small breasts. And he was shrinking back into a little boy. His hair seemed to melt into his head. The eyeballs beneath his eyelids were getting bigger and protuberant. His skin turned a translucent orange-pinky colour, so thin and succulent that it revealed his blood vessels and the tiny bones of his web-like hands.
When he shrank so small, he went and crawled into a plastic Vietnamese take-away container and lay there. Like an embryo in the fish-sauce bag. The liquid through the light looked like amber with trapped flecks of chilli.
Diep poked gently at the plastic bag with her finger. The embryo bobbed silently inside the sac, suspended in the tangy, soured amniotic fluid. The embryo seemed to curl tighter in response, sucking on one of its webbed fingers.
Diep thought this was rather strange but didn’t say anything.
*
A few days later he rang Diep up.
‘Hi …’
‘Trung?’
‘Yeah. Do you want to get some food later?’
‘All right. Whereabouts?’ She sounded pleased to hear from him.
‘Maybe the city.’
‘Are you all right?’ Diep asked him.
‘Yes, of course I am.’ He deepened his voice. ‘I’ll pick you up from school.’
Diep hesitated. ‘I want to go home and change first.’
‘Okay.’
She told him to pick her up from the Victoria Street shops. They set a time.
*
Trung was given his white sports car as a present for completing Year 12 with such a high mark. It was a very expensive car with P-plates on it. His parents celebrated his results at a Chinese restaurant in the city. They ordered two crabs and a very large cray-fish. They spent much time taking photos of their son with the cooked crayfish.
Diep was waiting on the bench at the bus stop on the busy shopping strip. She wore a light beige skirt and T-shirt, with thin sandals. Trung opened the car door for her. Diep sat with her arms folded and her pointy knees close together in the plush moulded interior of Trung’s car. The air-freshener in the car overpowered her small, dark scent. Trung took corners too fast but kept within the speed limit the entire time.
‘We’ll drop by my place,’ Trung said. ‘I’ve just got to get a jacket.’
‘Oh,’ Diep said.
‘Won’t be long.’
They got off the freeway and turned down streets with roundabouts and wider and wider lawns.
*
It was a house with a sweeping concrete driveway, neat lawn and some indistinctive shrubs. The entrance was high with columns on each side. Two marble lion-dogs guarded the front entrance. Above was a balcony with cream-coloured tiles. The house reminded Diep of the houses she saw in Vietnam when she visited her relatives, but wider, fatter and whiter.
‘Are your parents home?’
‘It’ll be okay. Want to say hi?’
*
Inside the house, Trung’s parents were watching Phim Tap, a serialised video. Trung’s mother had jade earrings, immaculately carved eyebrows and pale soft hands with shimmery-pink nail polish. His father, Mr Cuong, looked older, but still had strong powerful shoulders. Trung addressed his father first, then his mother.
‘Bo, Me, I’m home.’
‘Con,’ his father said, not glancing at him.
‘This is my friend Diep,’ Trung continued.
Diep was introduced to Trung’s father, Mr Cuong, and Trung’s mother, Mrs Cuong. Diep held her arms in a pose t
hat could pass for politeness or nervousness. She noticed that Mr Cuong was watching her, even when she stood up to look at the black and white photo on the mantle, of a simple-looking man in a traditional ao dai.
‘Are you getting a jacket?’ she asked Trung, who then disappeared. Diep turned around to see Mr Cuong’s eyes were still on her. Diep sat down next to Mrs Cuong.
Trung was back in the room, wearing a faded sports jumper. Mrs Cuong saw the jumper and exclaimed in mock horror, ‘Our son the doctor.’
‘Med student, Mum,’ Trung teased.
‘Doctor to be,’ she corrected herself.
‘Where do you study?’ Mrs Cuong asked Diep.
‘Richmond Girls.’
‘What do you want to be?’ the woman continued.
‘A nurse,’ Diep said, looking at Trung with half a smile.
Across the lounge room, Diep noticed three large black lacquer panels on the white wall. She saw flecks of red on one of the panels, the one with the peasant riding an ox that was tilling the soil. It was unusual to see red flecks on a black and white son mai. It was very pretty and vivid.
*
There were lounge seats with thick cushions, a cane armchair with a high back, tropical plants in brass pots sitting on small tables, and on a wall were black lacquer son mai panels depicting village life – a boy blowing a flute while balanced casually on a happy ox. It was a room several stories above street level. In the middle of the room was a wide coffee table with a large crystal ashtray. A cigar was smouldering away in the ashtray, its blue-grey plume lifting up slowly until it reached the movement of the ceiling fan, which chopped up the smoke into a pale haze.
The dark, skinny man tried to make out the pulsating light on the shiny, beige floor. Its rhythm matched the throbbing in his back, head and hands. The man recognised it was the reflection of the overhead fan. He continued to crawl.
There was another man standing over him, the owner, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, leather belt with a gold buckle, and a French watch. The owner made the discovery a week ago. He had talked to his suppliers and found out that the amount going in was considerably greater than the products produced.