Banana Girl

by Michele Lee

  ‘Yes, in some parts,’ I said, imagining the banana plantations that some of the Hmong had bought up in Queensland.

  My cousins and I sat, imagining acres of harvest land, of fecund crops.

  Early in the morning, when I was still asleep under another mosquito veil, the cow was untied from its post and led to the kitchen. Her throat was slit and her blood drained. When she was dead, her torso was cracked open like a giant walnut, her intestines spilt out and her organs salvaged for a soup, her head removed.

  An orphan boy called Bee sat beside me. I was reading Overland. I’d had a review published in it some time ago and as a thank you I’d been given a year-long subscription.

  ‘Mai Xi?’ Bee said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How much will it cost to go to Australia?’

  I said, ‘About one thousand and five hundred US dollars,’ which was what it had cost when I’d booked my ticket the month before.

  It sounded like a lot to Bee. He thought about it and said, ‘But how about for someone younger, my age?’

  ‘The same amount.’

  Bee thought about this as I kept reading. ‘Mai Xi?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can you pay for me to go to Australia?’

  I said, ‘I can’t, actually. I’m sorry. I don’t have that much money.’

  It sounded illogical because I must have had that much money if I could be here in the first place. Bee wasn’t disappointed though; at least he’d asked. Another half-aunt had arrived that morning and quickly went through the rigmarole of ‘You’ve come’ and ‘Yes, I have come’ so that she could get to the real question of how much money I could send her and how regularly. I tried to explain that the standard of living was higher in Australia, that I made meagre dribbles of tax-payer money for my writing. She got the point. At least she’d asked.

  I put down Overland and commenced English lessons with Bee. He repeated after me but forgot everything when it came to saying words independently and without me saying anything first. Still, he seemed happy enough to be speaking his ABCs in the money language. My half-cousin, Lia – yes, the word for monkey – joined in too. The other Hmong Vang children who had arrived for hub plib gravitated towards the English lesson, seduced by foreign feminine looks, my ‘Yes, young man, you can take a picture’ appearance. Soon I’d got the attention of thirty or so children.

  ‘Mai Xi,’ a young girl said when the English lesson was getting boring and the whole group had agreed to lose interest. ‘What will we do now?’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘You tell us,’ another one said.

  ‘We could play a game?’

  Outside, the parents and older siblings of my thirty friends were standing around the house and in the backyard, here for the hub plib. I tried to explain to my new friends the concept of hide-and-seek but because it wasn’t entirely clear to them I said, ‘Here, I’ll show you,’ and then gestured for them to hide anywhere in the front yard and surrounding areas, before I then went to the front door, turned my back and counted to twenty, which was one of few things I could do in Hmong without worrying about whether I made sense.

  ‘Ib. Ob. Peb,’ I said.

  I imagined thirty kids skiving off into intricate hiding places, well-known to a local person but bewildering to someone like me, the boyish visitor.

  ‘Kob ig. Kob daub.’

  I was nearly up to twenty and trying to block out the excited twittering of the children behind me.

  ‘Neng kob!’

  I concluded with, ‘Ready or not, coming to get you,’ in English because I had no idea how to say it in Hmong and a game of hide-and-seek didn’t feel authentic unless someone proclaimed that ominous phrase before spinning around to hunt you down.

  I spun and realised, lo, that thirty children had taken the lead from a more enterprising child and had all hidden right in front of me in the exact same spot: in and around Uncle Lai’s four-wheel drive. Most of the children I could see plainly, some were ‘hiding’ right next to each other. I feigned obliviousness, and took my time hunting them, pretending I couldn’t see what I could see or that I couldn’t hear what I could hear, before ‘discovering’ them all in the one go.

  Thrilled and giggling, they said, ‘You found us, you found us!’

  Hide-and-seek was a hit.

  Hub plib began. Uncle Lai and I sat by a round table on which perched a cooked chicken, recently sacrificed, with small gifts of sweet biscuits and boiled eggs tucked around its plucked thighs. Joss sticks had been lit and ribbons of smoke wavered up into the air. In low rhythmic voices, the elders began chanting prayers of welcome and good luck. I couldn’t understand everything they were saying but basically it was something like, ‘You’ve come, Mai Xi and Lai, from far-off places. You’ve both had long, hard journeys. Thank you for coming.’ Uncle Vanxahy spoke above the others and apologised to Uncle Lai and me for the paltriness of the ceremony. Uncle Vanxahy couldn’t give me money but he had killed the cow for us. Uncle Lai and I held out our hands and the male Hmong Vang came forward and tied white strings of wool around our wrists while still reciting prayers of good health and wellbeing. A local Lao boy approached me and said sheepishly, ‘I am Lao so my Hmong is not so good but here I go anyway.’ I thought to myself that if this bloke wanted to have a competition about bad Hmong, I’d take the blue-icing-piped cake. After the men were done, my half-aunts, my female half-cousins and other Hmong Vang ladies came forward; some picked up packets of sweets from around the chicken and placed these sweets in my lap. By the end of the ceremony, I had a thick bandage of white strings around both wrists.

  It was time to eat. The Hmong Vang had brought two long benches into the living area and placed them together lengthwise to form a long dining table. Tubs of rice were distributed evenly upon the surface. Bowls of the cooked cow were brought out. Plates of fried vegetables followed, as well as chilli.

  ‘Eat, Mai Xi!’ Uncle Vanxahy commanded as he cast his eye over the food.

  I served myself rice and chilli and Uncle Lai quickly noticed I had omitted serving myself any meat. ‘You’re vegetarian?’ he said. I wasn’t, and despite the meat being assuredly free-range and organic, I’d met the meat when she was a cow and I’d shared a cart ride with her, and because I anthropomorphised her, I couldn’t eat her. Embarrassed, I lied to Uncle Lai and said I wasn’t very hungry.

  Uncle Lai and I were leaving to go back to Vientiane. The Hmong Vang, young and old, gathered around the porch. From the passenger seat of the four-wheel drive, I took a picture of my relatives waving me goodbye.

  ‘We’ll meet again,’ they said to me.

  And I said, ‘Yes, let’s meet again.’

  Uncle Lai dropped me off on Rue Manthatulat in the sleepy heart of Vientiane’s tourist centre. I had Uncle Lai’s mobile number just in case something happened. He drove off in his ute with the young man, the one in the neat shirt and pants. I wondered how he’d gone with his girlfriend last night. Hmong courting is very sweet. In its early stages it involves standing at night outside a girl’s house, cheeks pressed against the thatched walls and cooing compliments to her between the cracks.

  I found a guesthouse in a side street for about $8 a night and flopped onto the double bed. It was strange to be inside a proper house. The tiles were polished, the ceilings high, the architecture French Colonial. There was a dark wardrobe and there was a bar fridge.

  When we were together, Husband had always wanted to go to Laos and I’d been an obvious travel buddy. Why wouldn’t I want to see this country, the place my parents had come from? But that was it: where my parents were from. I was from Canberra. I had my own roots and I objected to holidays in Laos.

  Now I didn’t. Laos was captivating. It might have been fun with Husband in Nam Hi. He would have eaten the cow.

  For dinner, I chose a restaurant on the main street, and over noodles and a big Beerlao, I reviewed pictures on my camera. The last picture wasn’t from Nam Hi, it was from
the roadside on the drive back. Uncle Lai had pointed to a group of young boys walking along the road and said, ‘They’re Hmong.’ He’d previously said that he was able, by sight, to pick out Hmong from Lao or any other ethnic tribe. It was something in the way Hmong people stood and moved.

  We’d swung the car around. I grabbed my camera and got out of the car.

  ‘Can I take your photo?’ I said in Hmong. I felt predatory. They nodded yes and stood still. Uncle Lai got his camera out too. We closed in with protruding lenses.

  A bit of Hmong trivia: we have blonde-hair genes in our gene pool. The Chinese used to come into Laos a-hunting Hmong, on the lookout for Asiatic-looking children with telltale hair. Mum remembered two fair-headed kids in her village being hidden until the Chinese left.

  This roadside group was like a litter of tabby cats: some of the boys had brown skin and streaky brown hair, some had black hair, and one was a cool blonde. I stared at his photo, at his straw-coloured hair. In Laos i’d found a reverse banana, white on the outside and yellow inside.

  Sober Sonny liked banana girls. I’d met him up north in the enchanting town of Luang Prabang. Now we slept – or attempted to sleep – on the overnight bus travelling back to Vientiane. It was dark outside on Route 13 and as the bus shook through the mountains, Sober Sonny tried to snuggle into my shoulder but I leaned away. He was staying on in Laos for several more weeks whereas I was catching my plane home the next night.

  In the morning, when we arrived in Vientiane, rather than stumble into the first place that would have us, Sober Sonny wanted to search for optimum accommodation. He used the most current version of the Lonely Planet and decided to go with the guidebook’s pick: Syri Number 2, a guesthouse in a back street near the stadium and the tennis club. The room was basic, the colourful bed cover and curtains faded. There was visible grit in between the tiles and faint stains on the wall, in cloud shapes, like the clouds of sores on my skin. I’d been bitten daily and nightly by bedbugs over the last two weeks.

  ‘Well, it’s okay,’ he concluded about the room. He was Norwegian, and he was tall and lean and healthy and blonde and he had perfect English and a photographic memory. He was methodical and well prepared. He would make the perfect camping companion.

  We napped, me still avoiding his efforts to snuggle. When we woke up, we left our backpacks in the room and then walked. We got lost somewhere near the market, then we re-oriented and walked for a long time until there were fewer and fewer tourists around us. We saw the sign for the COPE Museum and walked towards it, crossing the road, and pausing momentarily when we had to wait for motorbikes, utes and song thiews to go by.

  The COPE Museum was an educational facility about the cluster bombs Americans and Thais had dropped over Laos during the Secret War, the covert sister war to the Vietnam War. A cluster bomb was ingeniously and cruelly designed to explode in the sky and disperse smaller shards of munitions over a vast area of land; I flinched, imagining that deadly sort of rainfall. Some cluster bombs landed, unexploded, and then would erupt when struck accidentally by a farming tool or lobbed by playful children mistaking it for a toy. There were still plenty of unexploded bombs buried in the landscape. Laos was a strategic place for Vietnamese communists to sneakily travel through and thus a necessary target for the Americans: two million tonnes of bombs were dropped, which equated to a bomb raid every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day for nine years. So said the posters on the walls. There were informative displays throughout the room as well: a table of prosthetic limbs, a replica of a village house filled with household items fabricated out of spent cluster bomb shells.

  In one corner we stood by an open bomb shell – built to scale – suspended from the ceiling. Its bomblets tumbled out like baby spiders spraying from a burst sac. Bombie is what Lao people call bomblets. A man called Ta hit a bombie with a hoe and lost both his arms, an eye and all of his family’s livestock, which was sold to pay for his rehabilitation.

  On one wall there was a big map of Laos with red dots to indicate where the Americans had dropped a cluster bomb – the southern finger of Laos was almost completely red. Mum and Dad were from villages in north-eastern provinces, also red with dots. The Lao Communists had been based there in a honeycomb of caves. The Americans tried to extinguish them with air raids and with chemical bombs but it hadn’t worked. The wily, faithful Communists resisted the bombs, running into cave canals and then into airtight oxygen rooms that the Russians had equipped them with. Thousands of Hmong had been allied with the C.I.A. and thousands had died for the American project and when the Communists took power, they ordered American sympathisers like Hmong into reeducation camps or they tracked them down and killed them.

  Mum hadn’t fought for the Americans but she was Hmong and that was dangerous. On the map, I could see the squiggly line representing the Mekong. Mum, pregnant with Mee, nearly drowned crossing that squiggle trying to get to the refugee camp in Thailand. After her holey boat had upturned, Mum clung to the mangroves and she thought for sure she would die, that she wouldn’t join Dad in Australia. She hoped the Hmong man she’d shared the boat fee with would at least save her small son Ee, who was flailing in the river. The man managed to rescue Ee, and Mum too.

  ‘May I take your picture?’ Sober Sonny said. ‘I’ll upload the pictures onto my server when I’m back in Norway. I’ll send you the link. The photos won’t take up any of your hard drive, unless you download them. I’ll put up thumbnails, but also I’ll upload ones with a higher resolution too.’

  I posed. I lolled around over the bedspread. But I refused to undress. I didn’t want to have sex again – we’d had sex once in Luang Prabang. For him it was the beginning of a travel fling but I was resolutely uninterested in having any more sex with him. He didn’t understand how a person who had interest could lose it so quickly. I could have said, ‘It’s me, not you. I’ve recently broken up with my boyfriend, with Husband.’

  Sober Sonny and I ate dinner at an Indian restaurant and ordered too much food. I wrapped up a portion of the leftover dosai and got a tuk tuk to Wattay International Airport for my flight home to Melbourne.

  I arrive at the Wednesday night session of the Dali exhibition late; pre-emptively edgy, too. I haven’t seen Goose since she was at my house the week I got back from Auckland and neither one of us appeared to be having a good time. But I can see she’s smiling at me now, not too brightly but it’s not forced either.

  I smile back.

  The Dali exhibition is laid out chronologically. Starting with the early years of Dali’s life, Goose and I begin by studying landscapes of the coast of Cap de Creus. There is a quote from Dali where he says he can remember every rock on this coast. He left that coast and that young man behind and moved to the city. I cram into a booth to watch his art school film, An Andulusian Dog. Others around me wince when a black-and-white eyeball is sliced up close with a razor. Some leave, others stay. An unsettling sequence of images play out, pictures that don’t evoke childhood rocks or bucolic coastlines.

  ‘My friend installed that,’ I say to Goose, midway through the exhibition. Dali had been in London. I point to his work called Lobster Telephone.

  ‘Who’s your friend?’

  ‘You’ll meet him tomorrow.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He’s an art coordinator here. He hangs shit.’

  I’d met him on the internet. He’d sent me an RSVP email – shyly written, not too wordy – with the password for the photos he’d opted to keep on a private setting. I prised the photos open and an unassuming face peered back at me. In his emails he told me that he used to skateboard, he still occasionally broke into factories and climbed onto their roofs, he spoke with a Frankston accent but he collected art. We met at the Alderman and I remember, of all things, that he had a red messenger bag and he indeed had a Frankston accent. Afterwards he walked me back to Albert Street, which was a three-minute ride or a ten-minute walk away, if you were wheeling your bike because the gi
rl you were with was stubbornly on foot, still resisting becoming a part of Melbourne’s bike culture.

  When we got to Albert Street, my housemates must have been hidden in their rooms. We took over the empty, quiet kitchen: we turned the lights on, we smoked a joint by the door, we boiled the kettle and rattled through the cupboards for mugs and through the drawers for teaspoons, we flicked through the short stack of FHMs that happened to be on the kitchen table. As you do, in a share-house of four women. My head dipped forward. There was a section in the FHM devoted to barely legal girls sending in amateur soft porn selfportraits. From reading the minimal explanatory text around the photos I surmised that this was a regular section and if I too was barely legal, I too could send in pictures for future editions.

  ‘Give me a tongue fuck,’ I said to him when he eventually decided to leave.

  We were on the back doorstep and he had his helmet in his hand, poised for wearing. He said yes to me and we pashed forcefully. I couldn’t taste the pot or the tea, just tongue.

  We’re just friends now. Let’s call him Polar Bear.

  After the Dali exhibition, Goose and I meet her work colleagues at Chocolate Buddha in Fed Square for a late dinner; it’s taken nearly two and a half hours to trawl through Dali’s life. There was a lot of work to see and a lot of people in the gallery; sometimes we had to queue in front of an artwork to glimpse it. Goose’s work colleagues are all women, the sort of women that Polar Bear would define as being ‘Brunswick Girls’. No one wears makeup, or if they do it’s not lathered on in visible layers; the haircuts are feminine without being too stylish, the clothing too; there’s an overall practical appearance. Brunswick Girls may enjoy art like Dali’s but unlike Dali they don’t want to rule the world, they want to help save it. One woman is speaking about doing aid work on Christmas Island. I can see the top of her pants tug down as she leans forward to talk. The bar of her black G-string rides up. It makes me wonder what a Brunswick Girl must be like in bed, if these days all women wax their pussies FHM-style.