by Alice Pung
I look at his name badge. Pete. I feel my jaw slowly starting to drop open.
‘Then my parents split up and we moved up the coast with Mum. But the door had been opened for me and I knew there was another world out there beyond the whole football, meat-pie thing. By the end of my teens I knew that I was an egg.’
‘An egg?’
‘Yeah,’ replies Pete. ‘If you’re a banana, then I’m an egg – white on the outside but yellow in the middle.’
‘Oh,’ is all I can manage in response.
‘As soon as I finished uni,’ continues Pete the egg, ‘I moved over here and I’ve been travelling around ever since, though Hong Kong is home.’
Having finished his tale, he stares at me closely. ‘Are you okay?’ he says. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I don’t feel so good,’ I reply. All his talk about bananas and eggs has stirred things up a bit.
‘Travel sickness,’ says Pete. ‘Wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.’ And with that, he races off towards the kitchen.
I try to breathe but it’s not easy. I need some fresh air. I need sea air. As soon as I’ve finished breakfast I’ll catch the Star Ferry to Hong Kong Island, take Dad’s ashes over to Repulse Bay and say goodbye. And then … and then … well, then I’ll go shopping in Stanley Markets, because in a strange way that’s what Dad would have wanted. No big ceremonies. No big send-offs. Just his little girl doing something simple, enjoying herself, smiling with the sun on her face, and him watching over her.
‘Here,’ says Pete, interrupting my thoughts and placing a covered plate in front of me. ‘It’s an old Irish remedy for when you’re feeling queasy. Mum gave it to us whenever we were feeling bad, or sick, or just off.’
I imagine black pudding, boiled cabbage, pints of Guinness mixed into a thick gruel and I know that I’m going to vomit.
I take a deep breath. ‘What is it?’
Pete whips the cover off the plate and rather than puke, I smile.
‘Works every time,’ he says confidently.
‘I’m sure it’ll help clear things up,’ I say, picking up my knife and fork and tucking into my steaming hot plate of baked beans and burnt toast.
Hanoi and Other Homes
Sim Shen
The drive into Hanoi from the airport was disorientating – first the sweeping boulevards of the outskirts of the city, then the gradual pressing in of the characteristically thin and tall Vietnamese houses, then over the Red River and finally into the narrow alleys of the old city. I felt as if I had stepped back into time, and not just any time, but my own past.
If I tried hard, I could pretend that I was seeing my hometown in Malaysia – not the way it is now, another rapidly modernising South-East Asian city; but the way it once was, the way I remembered it as a kid. The little skinny shophouses with second-storey windows from which lines of washing were skewered on poles, slung out over the street to dry. Plastic wrappers, bits of paper, scraps of food and cigarette butts were underfoot. Little stalls on the street displayed the carcasses of roasted meats as they hung from hooks, steaming behind glass. People spat publicly; sometimes in front of themselves, sometimes by the side of the street. Men in singlets squatted on plastic footstools, languidly working away with toothpicks at the remnants of their latest meal. Little boys huddled everywhere there was some space, flicking marbles in the dirt. Hundreds of motorbikes sizzled past at each intersection, horns constantly beeping. A humid heat forced everyone underneath awnings on the sidewalk – and where there were no awnings, women raised their umbrellas against the sun.
Yet this wasn’t quite a vision of Kuching in the ’70s. The voices chattering at every street corner were only vaguely familiar, but not Hokkien or Teochew or Hakka. The roadside stalls sold beef or chicken pho, not laksa or satays. Internet shops punctuated the spaces between shops selling lanterns and fireworks. Women in traditional ao dai breezed past astride their bikes. Every evening the loudspeakers in the old city would start up and begin espousing (I assumed) the virtues of the revolution. And everywhere there were white faces with blond and grey and red and brown hair. And one of these faces belonged to the woman whom I was in love with then.
The intoxication of this new relationship charged our explorations. Together we walked the old city, exploring like children in a room full of new and exotic toys. Our days were filled with new sensations – the bite of every dragon fruit, the smell of roasting meat emanating from the dog restaurants near the Red River, the endless chatter of spruikers and peddlers. Then at night it always seemed that a new city emerged – the rattle of motorbikes was replaced by the gentler pace of people strolling in the evening cool, glad to be rid, for a few hours, of the intense heat of day. The two of us would walk amongst them, with a freedom and exhilaration I had never experienced before. I had a three-month Asialink writing grant to absorb all I could see and hear, and write it all down.
There was something else about that time; a reconciling of the person I had been with the person I had become. I was clutching at almost faded memories of another time and place, though half my mind remained on the home I had left in Adelaide. That year marked the first time I could say that I had lived in Australia longer than I had lived anywhere else in the world. Yet the Vietnamese thought I was Viet Kieu, one of the returned. They often tried to speak Vietnamese to me, and I would have to smile apologetically and reply in English. Yet something of that false role suited me – the exile who had come home to a place that seemed familiar, yet changed forever. But the place I felt I was ‘returning’ to was not a real place any more – it belonged to the past.
I had moved to Adelaide when I was thirteen; old enough to remember Malaysia, but young enough to be able to unconsciously adopt the voices and mannerisms of the place that I had moved to. Even now my stepchildren laugh when I order in Chinese restau rants and lose my Australian accent – the words flatten out at the ends of sentences and inflexions bend, just a little, to the singsong nature of an Asian language. I often don’t realise it until they point it out to me. That way of speaking still survives like some kind of instinct, even though it’s often a year or two between conversations in a Chinese dialect.
*
Up near Sapa, right in the hill regions of northern Vietnam, while hiking an isolated trail at the back of one of the village markets, I came across a man who spoke Mandarin. He wore thongs that flapped noisily with each step he made as he approached, then greeted me as if he knew I would be Chinese all along. I stumbled along in my halting Mandarin, a small handful of half-remembered phrases. I had gone to Mandarin classes reluctantly as a child and those were the memories I was being forced to drag out now; pleases and thank-yous and how-are-yous and courteous forms of address – all the necessities of a well brought-up Chinese boy. It didn’t take long to expend the possibilities of the conversation in my faltering Mandarin, so the man said goodbye and walked off with his bamboo pole perched on his shoulder. To be truthful I don’t recall what we spoke about, yet I still remember what should have been an inconsequential encounter – someone who should have been a forgotten detail on an overseas trip, now imprinted in my mind.
I worked a few days a week helping my host organisation translate Vietnamese texts into English. Mainly I worked on The Twinkling Star Khue, a very famous and well-loved historical novel about a tumultuous period in Vietnam’s imperial past. The text had been mangled – translated from Vietnamese to French, then back to Vietnamese (for reasons I never really discovered) and finally into bad English; its journey to me was a ready-made metaphor for Vietnam’s recent history. Monks, courtesans and princes drifted in and out of the tale, adding to its otherworldliness. I excised strange French words and grammatical oddities that had survived the initial culling and out of that, something Vietnamese started to re-emerge. But like Vietnam itself, I was never able to bridge the gulf of culture and history because I never spoke the language – I had tried to learn a little Vietnamese before coming, but ca
me to regret not making the time to have proper lessons.
I worked on translating the book in fitful bursts and tried to write poetry in between. There were late nights in Hanoi when I would sit up at 1 or 2 a.m., my insomnia prompting me to stay up at the writing desk that overlooked the little alley where life entered and exited our little hotel. The odd motorbike sizzled past, unburdened by other traffic, and sometimes a cough or sneeze reverberated from a neighbouring building. Occasionally you could hear conversations drifting up from the street – human noises normally drowned out in the cacophony of Hanoi’s daytime hustle, but tantalisingly audible now. For a few short hours Hanoi was nearly silent, and I would fantasise that its inhabitants would finally allow some secrets to emerge.
*
I started a lot of poems then, but only a few were ultimately finished. Perhaps I was trying to capture something ephemeral, something that demanded experience rather than analysis or reflection. I still haven’t gone back to finish them, and doubt I ever will now, because that love-affair ended after I left Vietnam.
My partner is seven months pregnant now. Like most Australians, she has travelled widely and lived in a number of other countries too. And the child in her will be born here, will always call this country home, the same way that I will somehow always refer to Malaysia as one of my homes. In that spirit, we’re going to try and find this baby-to-be a name that is both Chinese and Australian – some fruitful amalgam of both sides of her family. Sometimes I feel her moving inside her mother and she’s a puppet moving upon strings that stretch to Malaysia and England and Australia and Finland and everywhere else that her ancestors came from. But perhaps that’s not the right analogy, because no one pulls those strings, and we all move of our own accord. We travel and make unexpected trips to places and sometimes we discover surprising connections to other places we thought lost to memory or time or both.
Publication Details
SHALINI AKHIL’s ‘Destiny’ appeared in Meanjin, Vol. 63, No. 2, 2004.
KEN CHAU’s ‘The Early Settlers,’ ‘The Terrorists’ and ‘The Family Tree’ appeared in The International Terminal and Other Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (University of Newcastle, 1988) and in Other-land, No. 4, 1998.
TOM CHO’s ‘Learning English’ appeared in Yen, June/July 2003.
AMY CHOI’s ‘The Relative Advantages of Learning My Language’ appeared in the Age, 13 July 2002.
BON-WAI CHOU’s ‘The Year of the Rooster’ appeared in Meanjin, Vol. 66, No. 2, 2007.
CHRISTOPHER CYRILL’s novel The Ganges and Its Tributaries was published by McPhee-Gribble in 1993.
MATT HUYNH’s ‘ABC Supermarket’ and ‘A New Challenger’ appeared in CAB: Collaborative Autobiography (2007):
JENNY KEE’s A Big Life was published by Penguin Books in 2006.
KYLIE KWONG’s My China was published by Penguin Books in 2007.
BENJAMIN LAW’s ‘Towards Manhood’ is based on work that first appeared in frankie magazine, December 2005/January 2006. Sections of ‘Tourism’ first appeared in frankie in May/June 2008.
HAIHA LE’s ‘Gingseng Tea and a Pair of Thongs’ appeared in Cau Noi (The Bridge): An Anthology of Vietnamese-Australian Writing (Casula Power House, 2004).
Sections of LIAN LOW’s ‘My First Kiss’ were read at the Victorian Arts Centre, June 1996, as part of the Irene Mitchell Short Play Award.
PAULINE NGUYEN’s Secrets of the Red Lantern was published by Mur-doch Books in 2007.
THAO NGUYEN’s ‘The Water Buffalo’ appeared in Cau Noi (The Bridge): An Anthology of Vietnamese-Australian Writing (Casula Power House, 2004)
PHILLIP TANG’s ‘Teenage Dreamers’ appeared in Peril: An Asian Australian Journal, October 2006:
OANH THI TRAN’s ‘Conversations with my Parents’ appeared in Halfway Between Ca Mau and Saigon:
CHI VU’s ‘The Lover in the Fish Sauce’ appeared in Cau Noi (The Bridge): An Anthology of Vietnamese-Australian Writing (Casula Power House, 2004).
Contributors
TANVEER AHMED is a psychiatry registrar, writer, comedian and former television journalist. He sits on the Advertising Standards Board and was chosen by a prime minister’s committee as one of 100 future Australian leaders. He co-hosted the Channel 7 game show National Bingo Night, on which he played the part of the Bingo Commissioner.
SHALINI AKHIL is a Melbourne-based writer who has dabbled in stand-up comedy. She has had work published in Meanjin, Girls’ Night In 4, the Sleepers Almanac, the Age and in Silverfish New Writing 7. Her first novel, The Bollywood Beauty, was published by Penguin Australia. She is currently working on her second.
TONY AYRES wrote and directed the feature film The Home Song Stories (2007) and directed Walking on Water (2002). He has written and directed numerous television dramas, short films and documentaries.
SUNIL BADAMI studied communications at the University of Technology, Sydney and writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has written for the Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, the Australian, Meanjin and others, and his work was included in Best Australian Stories 2007. He is completing his first novel.
BLOSSOM BEEBY was born in South Korea and left when she was five months old. She was adopted by a loving family and grew up in Adelaide. She now lives in Sydney and is finishing her law degree.
KEN CHAN was born in Shanghai and grew up in Sydney. He was a diplomat, Administrator of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and a member of the Refugee Review Tribunal. In 2006 he received a doctorate from the University of Canberra for his interlinked stories of Chinese family life in Australia.
LILY CHAN’s parents were Chinese migrants who settled in Far North Queensland in the 1970s. At seventeen, she moved to Brisbane, where she completed degrees in commerce and arts at the University of Queensland. She now lives in Sydney and works in the financial services industry.
KEN CHAU is an Australian-born Chinese poet based in Melbourne. His poems have been published in Australia, France, the UK and the USA. He is currently seeking a publisher for his collection of poems, Strawberries for Mr Promise.
JOO-INN CHEW works in general practice and refugee health in Canberra. She has had stories published in anthologies, and is editing a collection by local GPs. She and her partner are expecting a baby in 2008.
TOM CHO is writing a short-fiction collection that explores the themes of identity and popular culture. This collection, which will be published by Giramondo Publishing, is part of his PhD in professional writing at Deakin University. His stories have been published widely, with recent publications in HEAT and the Best Australian Stories series.
AMY CHOI is currently working on a travel book and is a contributor to the travel pages of the Weekend Australian. She also has a column in the Age in which she writes about things she has bought from op shops. She lives in Melbourne with her partner and their two daughters.
JAMES CHONG is a doctor and PhD student. He was born in Kuala Lumpur. When he was six months old, his family relocated to Scotland for eighteen months before moving to Australia. He lives with his wife in Sydney.
BON-WAI CHOU was born in Chicago in 1968 but spent her earliest years in Hong Kong. At the age of seven she moved to Australia with her family. She has an MA in economic history from the University of Melbourne and completed further studies at the Johns Hopkins Centre, Nanjing University. She works for the Australian government.
MEI YEN CHUA is a freelance writer and book indexer and is compiling a cheap food guide to Brisbane for publication in late 2008.
CHRISTOPHER CYRILL was born in Melbourne in 1970. He started publishing his poetry at the age of fourteen and his first novel, The Ganges and Its Tributaries, was published by McPhee Gribble in 1993. His second novel, Hymns for the Drowning, was published in 1998. He is writing the twelfth draft of his next novel, Crown and Anchor.
HOP DAC has worked with the National Young Writers’ Festival and Short and Swe
et and is a co-founder of Sunday Drivers Press. A collection of his short stories, Croak & Grist, was recently published by Paroxysm Press. Born in Vietnam, he was raised in Western Australia, where he studied fine arts, and now lives in Melbourne.
ANH DO is an actor, film producer and stand-up comedian.
KHOA DO is a film-director, screenwriter and teacher. In 2005, he was named Young Australian of the Year.
MIA FRANCIS is a writer based in rural Victoria.
ADITI GOUVERNEL was born in Mumbai and grew up in Canberra. She is currently in the US working on her novel.
LEANNE HALL lives in Melbourne. She works as a children’s bookseller by day and studies publishing and editing by night. She has had work published in Sleepers Almanac, Going Down Swinging, Best Australian Stories, Meanjin and Allnighter.
JOY HOPWOOD was the first regular Asian-Australian presenter on Play School. She now runs her own production company, and is also a painter and musician.
MATT HUYNH is a Sydney-based comic creator, artist and freelance illustrator. His comics have been awarded the Ledger Award for best small-press title and best new talent, and he won the 2007 Cut and Paste Digital Design Competition.
JENNY KEE is a fashion designer and artist. Born in Sydney in 1947, her designs have been internationally influential since the 1970s, and her artwork has been exhibited widely.
KYLIE KWONG is a chef, restaurateur, television presenter and author. Born in Sydney into a fourth-generation Australian-Chinese family, she honed her cooking skills in some of Sydney’s best restaurants and now runs her own restaurant, Billie Kwong, in Sydney.
KEVIN LAI lives in Sydney. Having studied media and culture at Macquarie University, he has written for various newspapers and magazines across the country. He is now pursuing a career in advertising.
JACQUI LARKIN (née Soo) is a third-generation Australian-born Chinese. She is a university lecturer and psychologist. She is married to writer John Larkin and they have three children.