by Michele Lee
Like Mr Mercedes, in his fancy suits. He wants to schedule a meeting in the city this afternoon before I fly home for Family Time. I finish work early and I wait for him in his part of the CBD, on the corner of Bourke and William, surveying the surrounding buildings and wondering which ones Mr Mercedes might manage and which ones have vacant floors for daytime fucking. I sit, head tilted up, on the ledge of a public art sculpture. Or maybe it’s a fountain. Or both. Mr Mercedes doesn’t get out of his meeting in time so there’ll be no daytime sex for us; I leave the fountain sculpture and I catch the SkyBus to Tullamarine. At the airport, while I wait for the plane, I have a text conversation with Mr Mercedes and it’s clear that we both regret not being able to fuck each other’s brains out this afternoon.
By now I’ve gotten the point.
Five days have passed. Jackie Winchester hasn’t replied. I really have become a creepy Internetian girl and why should I need an answer, why should it matter, why should I need explanations from him when it’s just sex with me and I have sex with too many people, and how is it even possible that I can experience giddy hope and hot rejection when I’m obviously just a robot programmed to be on a permanent auto-fuck setting.
The plane is delayed by an hour. I arrive in Canberra closer to 8 p.m.
In Canberra, Dad once turned to me.
‘My Michele,’ he said. ‘You know what your daddy thinks?’
I was twenty-two. He still referred to himself as ‘daddy’.
‘What’s that?’ I said, half listening.
‘Imagine. He could have been the best actor, best daddy ever.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Me! In movies.’
An actor. Dad had unrequited ambitions? A creative streak?
It was easier that Dad was just Dad – crazy Dad.
He never had the chance to enter Laos’s Theatre Land; he couldn’t have been a trained actor in Laos. You couldn’t study theatre in Vientiane in the sixties or seventies, there wasn’t even a proper uni in the whole of Laos. I don’t even think you can study theatre now – you probably have to go to Thailand for that and maybe make it into the soap operas my Dad loves to watch. When Dad was on his scholarship at the Uni of Canberra he studied sociology and after he graduated he went on to work for the government agency ComSuper. Seventeen years later, when John Howard came into government and downsized the public service, Dad was made redundant. ComSuper gave him a big payout, given his seventeen years with them, and then Dad got a job assessing claims for the NRMA. At first he was well praised, given those seventeen years of experience. His NRMA manager felt lucky to have Chu Lee on her team and he felt happy that he’d won the favour of someone senior to him but nearly half his age. His next NRMA manager, also young, didn’t feel the same. She didn’t trust him. Dad thought it was something to do with his English. He’s always thought his shortcoming was his English skills. He quit his job, the second one he’d had in this career, finding it too stressful. He hasn’t had a job since then.
I think his English is fine. It helped win him that scholarship to the uni. Well, the Canberra College of Advanced Education as it was known at the time. I’d see those words stamped inside the covers of some of the older texts in the library, some rattyeared book about semiotics.
When I was born in 1980, Dad was a long way from imagining me at his alma mater. I popped out in the wee hours of a July morning, with jaundice. The doctors kept me under surveillance in a cot with a plastic hood. When I was ready and healthy, Mee had her photo taken with me. Her face was solemn as she placed one protective arm over me, her first ever little sister. While Mee was born in a refugee camp, without Dad to witness it, he was here for my birth. He christened me with a French name to seed the bond.
First we lived in Ainslie, in the inner suburbs of Canberra. Ee and Mee went to Ainslie Primary School and so I was learning English from them before I even went to Baker Gardens Preschool. When I was old enough to go there, I only had to cross the street.
I liked to play in the Baker Gardens Preschool playground after hours: it was a convenient extension of my own front yard given it was only a few hops, skips and jumps away. There was a sign on the gate that said ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’, which I interpreted as ‘Trespassers will be executed’. I understood that to be executed was a very serious thing.
Oh well.
I unlatched the gate and unleashed myself onto the metal and wood climbing-fortress, the kind of playground equipment that has now been replaced with plastic structures, spurred on by an increasing concern about the fragility of children. Once I saw a giant spider on the underside of the monkey bars. I stretched my arms extra far and grabbed onto the next bar. I swung past it.
Our front yard had many grass patches to play on and many trees and shrubs to scamper up. There was a lanky silver birch tree that shot to the heavens, on which Mum had tacked a few oblongs of wood to enable climbing up the crackled-skinned trunk. A magnolia tree dipped its porcelain-coloured flowers outside the master bedroom window, and when we eventually moved to Duggan Circuit in Calwell it was the one plant that Mum always longed for. She didn’t know the name of the plant and neither did I at the time. There was no default brain to consult on the yet to be mainstream internet. To the right of the house was a narrow forest of plum trees, a canopied grove that lent itself well to fairytale games.
Mee and I discovered a bird’s nest in the lower branches of a plum tree. It was a delicate concoction complete with miniature eggs (it was just like the Encyclopaedia Britannica said!) and we danced underneath it like forest nymphs.
Another time we found a black rabbit hiding in the iris clumps. Mum picked up the rabbit – she was the self-appointed handler of all animals, whether they were for our meals or for us to keep as pets. She put the furry little treasure into a hutch and Mee and I hovered over it, oohing at its fluffy hind legs. I don’t know where Mum got the hutch from but Life with Rabbit was a sweet time. And then the hutch was gone.
Or maybe it was refashioned into that pigeon coop in the garage. A small flock of pigeons flapped around inside, caged in by wire. I pitied them and I pitied myself – Mum planned to eat these birds like some bloodthirsty savage despite there being normal birds like frozen supermarket chickens to be civilly thawed and chopped and broiled.
Mum brought a turtle home too. It was an unexpected coup on one of the many fishing trips our family made to the slivers of Murrumbidgee River that wove through Canberra. Mum let the turtle roam the backyard at its own ploddy crawl. Mee and I followed closely, thrilled by this odd beast, the size of a large dinner plate, trying slowly to escape our fascination. Perhaps it had good reason to abscond. Mum soon picked it up and plopped it straight into a big pot of boiling water on the stove, shell and all.
Bloody hell! What wouldn’t this village woman murder and devour? The rabbit had probably gone the way of the stovetop, as had the pigeons, and the chickens that lived in the head-high coop she had built further down in the backyard.
To save money, Mum and Dad not only fished creatures from the local river, they lugged home dead pigs and cows from a farm they’d visit early in the morning, a few hours’ drive out of Canberra. With the smell of fresh blood pervading the house, Mum laid a drop-sheet onto the kitchen linoleum and on top of this she deposited that morning’s carcass. She studiously chopped it and bagged it, freezing the animal into meat rations she could cook for her family over the coming months. But there was some cooking to be done in the next few days: she’d make crackling out of pig skin, sausage casings out of intestines, blood jelly out of the fresh and fragrant blood, lard out of the fat scraped from under the skin. She’d also casserole the head into a green sludge stew, which was undeniably tasty, even if you found pebbles of teeth whenever you stirred the casserole with your fork.
Twisties and devon sandwiches were served at the birthday parties I went to at whiteys’ houses, and no one extracted teeth from their bowl nor did my friends’ parents own a plastic d
rop-sheet to keep their kitchen floors clean of pig juices. And when I ate dinner at friends’ houses, their parents served me supermarket snags, mashed potato and boiled peas and handed me a knife and fork. With embarrassment, I explained to friends that I hadn’t actually used a knife and fork before. One friend kindly excused me from the strange world of the dining table and in the living room she privately tutored me in the art of knife-and-forkery. How much tastier that tube of offal was when dissected with two silver tools, with Deb mash soaking up the grease and gravy.
‘How’s crazy Dad?’ I ask.
It’s Saturday morning in Canberra.
My little sisters, Ka and Tsong, have picked me up from outside a friend’s flat in O’Connor, where I stayed last night. Mum’s in the back seat. Everyone in the car is annoyed.
‘We would have told you about how crazy Dad is if you’d stayed with us last night,’ Tsong says. ‘Stupid Michele. Stupid Michele thinks her friends are better than her family.’
‘Oh come on, you know they are.’
‘Chele!’ Ka protests. ‘Don’t be mean.’
‘Alright, they’re not better. But they’re more fun. And guys, there’s nothing to do at Mum and Dad’s place. It’s so boring.’
‘Yeah but Chele,’ Ka says, ‘we don’t live with Mum and Dad.’
I pause. ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘So have you guys moved out now?’
‘Yes, into Ee’s old house.’
‘Oh.’
‘See? I really wanted to hang out with you.’
‘Stupid Michele,’ Tsong says.
‘Alright, alright. Michele is a bad sister. Worst sister ever. But come on, jeez, I had to spend three weeks in Vietnam with you girls, every day. I haven’t spent so much time with you in ages. Isn’t that enough for one year?’
Ka giggles. She thinks I’m funny even when she’s trying to be mad with me.
‘Ha ha!’ I trumpet. ‘Ka’s not mad with me anymore.’
‘Stupid Michele,’ Tsong says.
She starts the car and we begin our drive out of Canberra.
‘Mai Xi,’ Mum says in Hmong, finally contributing to the conversation. She gives me a sideways appraisal, evaluating my hair, the constant bane of her motherly existence. ‘Did you cut your hair like that on purpose?’
‘I sure did, Mum.’
Tsong and Ka laugh. Then they make grossed out noises. They think my rat’s tail is disgusting. I touch it and then touch Tsong’s shoulders.
‘Don’t distract me, dumbass!’ she squeals. ‘I’m driving. Ew, skanky rat’s tail.’
Ka and Tsong giggle and squeal. Mum is amused by what she’s created.
We arrive first at Yawg Yer’s house, in the western suburbs of Sydney. Yawg Yer and his wife live in Abbotsbury, in a twostorey house at the back of their property. They rent the other two-storey house at the front to a young family. Yawg Yer and his wife built both houses. Not that they’re builders. Yawg Yer came out in the seventies on a Colombo Plan scholarship too, like his little brother Yue Lee, like my Dad. Yawg Yer completed his bachelor degree and masters and then a doctorate and now he’s an internationally recognised expert in Hmong anthropology. Pob Yer, his wife, never studied. Like Mum, she was a housewife but now with the kids grown up she has time to work. This morning when we arrive, she’s in her fluoro work T-shirt and is about to leave the house for her shift at the Woolworths delivery bay.
Yet she says, ‘Of course. No problems. Sit, please. I’ll make it right now. Sit, Nej Chu.’
That’s what adults call Mum. It means ‘wife of Chu’.
So Mum sits. And Pob Yer, insistent that she has time to fry eggs and toast bread before she goes to work, starts making food. I’m not hungry but I am thirsty, and I go to pour myself a glass of water from the sink.
From beside the stovetop, Pob Yer exclaims: ‘No, no, Mai Xi.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘No, not drink that water. Here, here. Drink this.’
She points at the filtered water and points to a jug filled with the water on the cluttered counter, which is busy with other items I recognise from the benches and surfaces in Mum’s house – glutinous rice-flour sweets, packets of instant mee goreng noodles, a Tiger rice cooker. Even the way Pob Yer fries her eggs, sunny side up, is how Mum would cook eggs and the sort of bread Pob Yer toasts is the brand Mum buys.
Pob Khou and her son Nhia, a little older than me, arrive at the back door.
‘Oh, you’ve come,’ Mum says to them.
‘Nej Chu, you’ve come,’ Pob Khou replies.
‘Yes, we have.’
‘Yes, I have.’
They enter and sit down at the kitchen table. Pob Khou is tired. Her husband died last week from a liver failure; he’d been in hospital for the last year or so. That meant he couldn’t visit his eldest son, Nou Zas, when he died recently too from a history of ailments. It’s been a very hard few years for this family.
We sit in the living room. The children: me, Tsong, Ka and Nhia. On a cabinet to the side of the TV are numerous wedding photos of Mai Tsi, Yawg Yer’s eldest daughter. She stares out from one set of photos, her bridal face whitened with makeup and her lips exaggerated with lipstick.
‘I’m really sorry about your dad,’ I say to Nhia. ‘And your brother.’
‘It’s okay,’ he says. He doesn’t look too sad, as if death has no more weight than day-to-day things. I ask him what he’s doing these days and he tells me he’s unemployed.
He asks me, ‘You’re in Melbourne, right?’
‘Yes.’
He leaves it at that.
I can hear the pitter-patter of adult voices in the kitchen.
‘Last time we were here Mum took ages,’ Tsong moans, affecting the childish poutiness that she still likes to adopt in front of family. She’s twenty-five.
The pitter-patter stops. Mum doesn’t take too long this time.
At the front door, looking out at his other property down the bottom of the slope, Yawg Yer wishes me well in Laos.
Pob Lou is dying. That’s why I’ve come up to Sydney with my sisters and my mum. Tsong texted me a few months ago urging me to see Pob Lou as soon as I could. She suggested I come up on a Friday and she’d drive me to Sydney on the Saturday. I booked a flight and here I am at Yawg Long’s house – Pob Lou’s been on rotation at her sons’ homes, having spent many years with Yue Lee in Canberra and then shifting to Sydney in the last year. She’s already spent time with Yawg Yer, and with Yawg Khou, before he died.
I don’t remember her other son, Yawg Long. True, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Hmong people in Sydney, it might even be fifteen years since I’ve visited. Yawg Long and his wife regard me curiously.
Mum explains: ‘This one is Mai Xi. The second oldest daughter.’
‘Not the one in America?’
‘No, this one is in Melbourne. She’s not married.’
‘Oh.’
‘Not married?’
‘No.’
‘What does she do?’
‘Working. This one works very hard.’
They nod, remembering that Nej Chu, wife of Chu, does indeed have four daughters, one of whom is unmarried and works very hard.
‘I don’t want to go into Pob Lou’s room,’ Tsong says. ‘It’ll make me cry again.’
‘I’m going in,’ says Ka.
Yawg Long accompanies us. The room his mother, Pob Lou, sleeps in is somewhat like a bedroom within a storage closet. I notice a potty, too. The curtains are drawn but the heat is coming through. It’s a hot September day. In the car, Tsong had announced that it was going to get up to thirty degrees in the western suburbs.
Summer is coming.
Pob Lou’s very old and so small, as if she is shrinking before me in her single bed. Yawg Long leans over her and gently shakes her shoulder.
He speaks in Hmong: ‘Mum, Nej Chu is here to see you. Wake up.’
Pob Lou rouses, lifting her
head. She keeps one eye closed and the slit it makes is like a squashed seam in a cushion.
Mum sits on the bed and lovingly strokes Pob Lou’s head.
‘Pob, it’s Nej Chu. I’m here with Mai Xi. You remember Mai Xi?’
I spent so many weekends at Pob Lou’s flat on Ballumbir Street in Canberra, before she and Yue Lee moved into their bigger house in Gowrie. When I wasn’t gliding on Yue Lee’s water bed enjoying the novelty of the mattress rippling underneath me, I used to stand on the balcony amongst Pob Lou’s succulents and I’d lean out over the railing to view the busy street below and the shopping centre ahead of me. We didn’t have a balcony at our Ainslie house and we lived on a quiet street, with no shops on it, only the preschool. Being close to Civic made the trips to Pob Lou’s house exciting; I certainly didn’t visit because she was a kindly surrogate grandmother, I had been terrified of her of as child. She had no problems cantankerously telling us off, as if we were her own grandchildren. She was, after all, the most senior Hmong person in Canberra.
Pob Lou, now so diminutive and fragile, focuses on Ka, who is standing in front of her as straight as an exclamation mark. Ka smiles brightly at Pob Lou.
‘Mai Xi,’ Pob Lou says to her.
‘No, I’m here,’ I say gently, in Hmong. I’ve sat down on the bed too, near Mum. Pob Lou looks over at me, at the sound of my voice. I’m not sure if she can see me clearly and whether she would recognise me if she could. The last time I saw her, in the Gowrie house a year or so ago, she had told me she was seeing spirits. They were touching her legs and so she didn’t like sleeping with the lights off.
Mum says, ‘Mai Xi’s come very far from Melbourne to see you. Very far, for you. She’s here now. Pob?’
Pob Lou’s very tired. She goes back to sleep.
Yawg Long gets out a digital camera from the wardrobe and points it at me. I stand up to pose. He takes a commemorative picture of me so he can show his mother later when she rouses.
Nhia takes us to have yum cha in Canley Vale. The restaurant does a $16 buffet on Saturdays. It’s run by Vietnamese people so there are a few Vietnamese dishes to choose from too.