by Michele Lee
A wedding.
Although, to be fair, when I was fifteen I didn’t brainwash myself with bridal magazines. Rather, I spent a good deal of time creasing the pages of the formal special in Dolly. My Year Ten formal loomed. I wanted a nice up-do.
I don’t know.
I don’t even think I should eschew the traditional wedding fantasy because it’s not a part of my sticky rice and spicy papaya salad culture anyway. So, to translate into the appropriate context, I don’t recall longing to be kidnapped by a man a decade my senior and then taken to the kidnapper’s hut to have a dead chicken swung around my head, which in my people’s way of life would have meant me and the kidnapper were an item for life ’til death do us part and there would be no need for froufrou and no white beach in Bali.
And yet, I did pay $90 to see the Backstreet Boys last year. They sang and danced for me, and performed songs that pledged true love and they crooned about hearts broken when true love crumbled, and hearts determined to win back true love, to keep it. It’s not irony that drove me to the Telstra Dome for that $90 performance. It was the lure of true muv expressed through chart-topping pop music and synchronised dance routines.
We’re at Troika for an after-work drink.
‘To be honest, that sort of thing would send me running,’ he says.
That’s Tiger. The first thing you notice about Tiger is that he has an irregularly angular jawline, as though he played Face/Off with Roger Ramjet. He and I used to have sex. Tiger, that is. Not me and Roger Ramjet.
‘You have to understand,’ Tiger says. ‘When a guy hears that sort of verbiage, it makes him think the girl’s unhinged.’
‘Fuck that,’ I retaliate. ‘Why should I censor my feelings? Why shouldn’t I just tell Jackie Winchester how I feel? I’m not a guy. I’m a woman. It’s my prerogative to be emotional. I was reading an article the other day about Anthony LaPaglia and his wife, Gia Carides. He made a comment about her frequent flights of passionate anger and he said it was a woman’s prerogative to be emotional and insane. So I thought, yeah, I’m down with that. I’m down with embracing my inherent femininity.’
Tiger takes in my verbiage but from his vacant nod he doesn’t know who Anthony LaPaglia is. Tiger probably doesn’t know who Roger Ramjet is either, nor would he have seen Face/Off (which, despite its ludicrous premise, I did enjoy). Tiger once told me, one morning after we’d had sex, that he was like a sixty-year-old man at heart and as such he’s a pop culture dunce. He’s also a self-confessed emotional android. He told me that too, one time after or before sex.
We finish our peppermint teas and leave Troika.
‘If you’re back in time from the States, come to my goingaway drinks,’ I say.
‘At this stage, Michele, I can’t even say if I’ll be coming back.’
Tiger’s in a rut. He’s off this Saturday to Burning Man. I try to imagine him there, willing a self-awakening while surrounded by hippies in the Californian desert. I see him mechanically mimicking the way they undulate, tanned, in the heat with drug-thick blood. Some sweaty yogi jamming her sand-dusted cheek against his Ramjet jaw until unexpectedly he begins to emote and she raises her arms to praise the desert goddesses. I heard the festival started as something personal, when someone wanted to go out into the desert and burn an effigy of their ex as a way of getting over them.
I should send on Tiger with a fake-tanned effigy of Jackie Winchester, who’s not my ex in the sense that Husband is but who is online and retreating away from whatever it is he helped create with me.
The day is over. I was in another country yesterday and now I’m at home in East Brunswick in front of my laptop.
– Yesssss. Uh-huh. I did get your email.
– ’K. Cool.
– I’m going to reply. Eventually.
I feel less like Gia Carides, more like a kindergartener from Relationship School with a whole lot of moop.
Moop obviously means sadness, by the way.
– It’s just that, to be honest, this isn’t the right time to be emotionally invested.
We won’t be having phone conversations anymore. Text messages asking for the exact time of his impending arrival in Melbourne will go unanswered, leaving me feeling … creepy.
I should break the news to my fifteen-year-old self.
Not about Jackie Winchester.
About our family. My big brother Ee and my big sister Mee had the sticky rice and spicy papaya salad and chickenswinging kind of parties. They ended up marrying Hmong people. They willingly decided to marry and to make chickenswinging love with Hmong people.
Ew.
Yes. I’m grossed out by the thought.
And, to make it worse, there was no being kidnapped on my sister’s part. Her suitor wasn’t the ageing widower from a neighbouring village but a young Hmong man in America of the same westernised generation as her. They met in a Hmong chat room. And in 2001, with a conviction and daring that while typical of Mee was still puzzling to me, she packed up and exported herself to America. Shua met her at San Francisco International Airport and they drove for sixteen hours to Portland, getting to know one another in the actual flesh. And decisively she married him, a Hmong. But it isn’t just petulance that made me and still makes me like this, uncomfortable with the idea of consenting to marry another Hmong person, prompting me to joke. I always was the joker. Try to understand the psychology: as far as being the joker goes, I had to fulfil a function in my large family, and as the conflict-shy middle child I chose to be the court jester, and as far as the idea of Hmong-on-Hmong goes, there were never more than two thousand Hmong people in Australia and only thirty Hmong people in Canberra and eight of those were in my immediate family. My local community was my family so it’s hard for me not to be repulsed by the idea of getting freaky with a Hmong person, and in turn, I laugh nervously and proffer gags.
Although I should acknowledge that even when we were teenagers, Mee had begun to change, to soften. One year, in the early nineties, I was echoing my big sister as we chorused to my parents all the things we found repulsive in Hmong culture – its backward patriarchy, its relentless deference to the God of Saving Face, its embarrassing animist customs, and the traditional ceremonial garb Mum made us wear and be photographed in on the annual outing to Floriade. The next year, happy pants were out of fashion, that depressed grungy guy Kurt Cobain pulled the trigger, and Mee now dated a Hmong boy from Melbourne. He had a floppy fringe and he wore an oversized bomber jacket. It was a seemingly innocuous combination of hairstyle and attire, regrettably fashionable if anything, but a nineties trend borrowed from African Americans and subsequently regarded by Hmong elders as rebellious. She and the bad boy Hmong broke up but not before a scandal erupted in the community, a scandal which had involved him, flop and bomb, visiting and staying unchaperoned for too long in her bedroom. It was in the daytime but that hadn’t made the scandal less shameful. Who knows how many sleeves of that billowy jacket had almost been removed. Up and down the east coast of Australia, Hmongs tsked and tongues wagged. Our parents bristled with humiliation – of course no one saw this publicly, Mum and Dad had face to save. Soon after, Mee burnt the Valentine’s Day-esque gifts that she had received through the courtship – red satin hearts and single roses with beaded water-drops on the fabric petals. There was my sister with her own Burning Man Festival in our quarter-acre backyard. She stood resolutely above the synthetic fumes, cleansing herself of boys but clearing the way for a man, a fateful car trip in America, years later.
My big brother Ee didn’t wear bomber jackets. In reputable clothing and in Dad’s van he found his bride and in the one attempt. He went on a road trip from Canberra to Melbourne and the next week he returned with an extra passenger. Blia. Like Mee’s ex-boyfriend, Blia was from one of several hundred Hmong families who’d settled in Melbourne. She had very good Hmong manners and a face shaped like a red satin heart. She accepted Ee’s proposal, and so she had agreed to be kidnapped and to ‘run away’ to Canbe
rra with her thief and groom.
We had two ceremonies after she turned sixteen – the registration at the Births, Deaths and Marriages office in Canberra and then the chicken-swinging party back in Melbourne. Mee went. Being the sister closest in age to the groom, she became the ‘green madam’, which meant getting beaten by Blia’s Mum instead of Blia receiving this treatment for ‘shaming’ her family by running away. For his collusion in this, Ee knelt obediently before Blia’s parents and begged them for their daughter. They said yes. Mum and Dad paid a bride price, dead chickens were plucked and swung over heads like helicopter blades. Someone chanted a marriage incantation. For a culture with no performing arts history, a Hmong wedding was highly theatrical.
Blia was one of us, a Hmong Lee, initiated into our clan and in the strange, performative but culturally correct way that caused no scandals and set no tongues wagging. She lived in our house in Duggan Circuit, in Ee’s bedroom, the one up the back with a good view of the quarter-acre garden where gifts could be burnt, and vegies grown and bundled for Mum’s Sunday market stall. On weekdays, Blia Lee hopped out of the matrimonial bed, hoisted a schoolbag onto her shoulder and walked to high school with me. I didn’t tell anyone that she was my sister-in-law, a new bride. I didn’t think people at Calwell High School would get it.
I didn’t get it, not really.
I understood teenage life to be a crusade against all things Hmong and as far as things Aussie went, teenage life was supposed to be awkward and UHU-glued together with hormone-hyped turmoil, and dealt with through inflated cockiness and Top 40 music. Why would you abandon the bravado, turn off the Discman and reveal your pubescent limbs and secret flesh and half-formed soul to a man? How could you even have something to offer?
It’s Thursday. I’ve been back in Melbourne for four days.
‘So what are you hiding under there?’ Guy-normous says, going through the motions of a modern Aussie ritual: the steps required to fuck a girl after you’ve had two beers with her at the Alderman, dropped her off at her share-house bungalow on Albert Street and then received a text from her saying she would have made out with you if you’d only asked.
I get out of my aqua computer chair and take off my top. I stand in my bra. He nods with approval. He voices his approval. I move towards him. I take off his hoodie.
He’s wearing a T-shirt with Bruce Lee on it.
‘Hey, it’s Bruce Lee,’ I say, pointing at the image of Bruce Lee, who has his fists raised, his eyes emitting kung-fu fuck-you-ness at forty-five degree slants.
‘Yeah,’ Guy-normous says. ‘I thought you’d like it.’
I’d like it because … I’m … Chinese? Hmong, actually. I should be offended. Ah fuck it.
Guy-normous and I stumble-walk to my bed. His trunks come off. The guy-normous cock flops out, splendidly massive and monstrously veined. In his RedHotPie picture gallery he has five proud cock shots but only one of his Andre Agassiesque face. One girl asked him what he fed his cock. Other girls have told him they still felt it the next day. I take it in my mouth and, oh boy, I think I’ll feel this beast down my whole digestive tract the next day too if he keeps pumping my head down. Whether it’s my mouth or my pussy, when he fucks me I find it’s rather like being beaten with a log. He rears up above me, Agassi face contorted and mouth agape. He really does look like he’s won a grand slam.
I almost had sex with Mr Mercedes this afternoon, a daytime romp on my day off that we’d both been plotting but ultimately couldn’t make work. If I had met up with Mr Mercedes, that would have meant two guys in the one day and in the one bed. I haven’t done that before and not out of moral anxiety, just lack of coordination. As it was, the TRU Energy man had arrived, here to change my light bulbs. That’s not a euphemism. He took over an hour installing twentyfive energy-efficient light bulbs for the common share-house good in all the various rooms of the house. For free, as part of a government clean energy initiative. I’d organised this appointment weeks ago when in preparation for leaving for Laos and moving out of Albert Street I’d swapped the utilities bills over from my name to Sleek Surf’s name and seen the scheme advertised. Sleek Surf turned on the bathroom light earlier tonight, before I went on my date. I heard her complain audibly about the extra glare.
Friday.
And it’s not the Friday I wanted to have. A warped version of a Backstreet Boys song is on my mind – ‘Show Me the Meaning of Being Moofy’.
Moofy, of course, means downright shittiness.
It’s five days after Auckland and Jackie Winchester has made up his mind about me and about my suggestion to giveupcasualfucking. He hasn’t penned that promised email that he said he’d pen in reply to the verbiage I dumped on him in my rightful woman’s way.
He catches me on Googletalk to type three little words.
– Let’s be friends.
Sah-plat.
Dear Michele,
It’s me here! The older you! The wiser you! Ha ha.
So you wrote me a letter? I’m nearly thirty. I can’t find your letter but I thought I’d reply and let you know how you/I/we have been going so far.
So.
Um.
Hmm, not sure where to start.
Hey! We’re sort of like old lovers, accidentally catching each other’s eye on the street, reliving all the bad bits of our relationship. But then, well, we’ve seen each other, we’re obliged to talk. We say hi, and I want to tell you about how I’m going but I’m unsure, and you stare at me, and I feel clumsy and I say the first thing on my mind.
‘Neurotic is chic these days!’ I say.
‘Are you talking about yourself or Jackie Winchester?’ you say.
‘Um. Well, I’m talking about us, Michele.’
‘I’m pretty sure this isn’t about me, it’s about you and boys.’
Then you walk away.
Fuck, why did I deny that I was indirectly speaking about Jackie Winchester? Fuck fuck fuck. You’re me, I’m you. You’d know when I was I lying. And now you’ve left. I want to text you and add a postscript to this conversation but I can’t do that because I deleted your number after we ended things. I was very mad with you that day. That’s why I deleted you from my Facebook friends too.
You stop and turn around. You march back to me.
‘You didn’t delete my number or delete me from Face … Face-thing. That’s not even possible – I don’t have a mobile or a Face-thing. You deleted the Backpacker, Michele. The other night. Because after four years of you guys doing – ew – computer sex, and him coming back to Melbourne this year for a holiday, now he’s got a girlfriend in London and he’s stopped talking to you. You say you’re into this Jackie Winchester but you thought you’d be ‘emotional and insane’ and you erased the Backpacker.’
‘No I didn’t!’ I protest. ‘Sure I was falling for that fuckwit Jackie Winchester but I still had room to feel hurt by the Backpacker. And even if I deleted him from Facebook, he can still get in contact with me, send me an email.’
‘Why would he want to give you an email? You’re mean.’
‘No! Never! I’m supportive! I like that my exes have new girlfriends. Ask Husband! I like that he’s started seeing that Pole Dancer Naturopath person girl. She sounds great! And ask Four Track! I like that he’s never had a girlfriend after me. Never! And Subaru! I like that we have sex every time he breaks up with a long-time girlfriend. See? I get along great with all my exes! I’m so supportive.’
‘Then what about the Backpacker?’
‘What about him?’
‘Oh puh-lease, Michele! If this is me at thirty then I don’t want to know.’
‘No Michele, don’t worry, I’m not thirty yet! We’re not yet thirty!’
But you’re walking away, you’re running.
Love,
Michele
In Laos on my Asialink residency, along with playwriting and getting in touch with my Hmong heritage to inform my artistic practice, I will go on a man boycott. I need to disentang
le. For three months, I’ll just write.
I forget to tell Goose about my good intentions. She’s come over this Friday night, a week on from Auckland, to have a girls’ night in with me. You know, do girl things and bond and be friendly and supportive. Yet she’s sitting in my room, arms crossed, chin pointing towards her chest like the tip of a dagger. Above her head, the cracks in my wall flare out like a crown of unfurled claws.
‘I’m disappointed that you didn’t make my super 8 film screening,’ Goose says.
By the way, I didn’t see her super 8 film screening last night.
‘To make it worse, you chose to have sex with some guy.’
‘No, no,’ I reassure her, thinking of Guy-normous. ‘It was just meant to be a date.’
‘Did you have sex?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘But you’d come back from Auckland, where you had sex with that other guy?’
‘Well, yes. But that’s over. Apparently Jackie Winchester and I are just going to be friends now.’
She isn’t pleased. Neither am I about the Jackie Winchester situation but I don’t think this is the right time to seek support from her.
‘I didn’t realise the super 8 film screening was an important event for you,’ I say.
‘I invited you numerous times.’
‘Yeah but it was in group emails.’
‘So you want me to personally invite you?’
‘Look, I don’t mean to sound condescending but I put on a lot of shows and I don’t expect people to see everything I make. But when I do, I campaign for it so people know it’s important.’
‘I’m creative too. I wanted to share what I’d done.’
‘Okay.’
‘This isn’t the first time, you know. When we had the screening the first time in our backyard you didn’t come.’
‘I had to see a play on the same night. And the Backpacker was here.’