by Michele Lee
I try to remember the name of the soup that my sisters and I had from a street-side stall in the Old Quarter of Hanoi. The soup was delicious. I batted away the blocks of blood jelly – I never had developed a taste for it – and just drank the orange broth. Tsong liked the soup too but she can’t remember what it was called. She’s my go-to person for Vietnamese – like many other Hmong people, she hung around Asian people growing up and she’s got plenty of Vietnamese friends. She’s also dated Vietnamese boys. I noticed too that she could speak a little bit of Vietnamese.
‘Hey, do you remember that splurty-shit woman in the toilet in Hue?’ I ask Ka.
She guffaws at the memory.
‘Oh my God! That was so gross! She was so sweet, I swear, and then when she sat down next to me it was just all explosions like when they do it in movies when they’re trying to be gross.’
Tsong and I burst out laughing.
In Hue, at the ancient citadel of the former royal city, Ka emerged distressed from the public toilets and whispered to me and Tsong about what she’d just heard in the adjacent squat. Instead of comforting Ka with an equally hushed sympathy, we burst out laughing. We thought it was hilarious to see her so disturbed and to imagine that she would have been unable to do anything about it as she rushed to finish up herself. We walked around the mossy ruins, laughing when we passed a stooped, slow-paced Vietnamese woman. It was as funny as me reclining on the beach at Nha Trang, on a lounge, under the shade of an umbrella, and being eagerly asked by a roaming trader if I’d like to buy something for my girlfriend. The woman had assumed that I was a boy even though I was in a yellow bikini. Tsong and Ka guffawed. And it was as funny as Tsong, left alone in the foyer of the guesthouse in Hanoi, being approached by an older white man. He pushed open the glass door of the guesthouse and, interrupting her MSN session on the computer, asked for her price. ‘How much?’ he said in that lilting tone Western men use when they believe that by imitating an Asian accent they stand a good chance of picking up. She gasped and told him indignantly, ‘I’m Australian!’ and he backed away, hands placed together and pointed heavenwards in a respectful apology.
Sweet Tsong. The one who so thoughtfully organised the trip to Vietnam this year. She used to be a crybaby, quick to pout, so enticing to prod. There’s a photo of her under the melaleuca tree in the backyard in Ainslie. She wears a spotted frock and her belly sticks out from underneath the empire line. Her whole face scrunches up. She’s about to burst into tears because someone has been picking on her, everyone behind the camera. She’s acerbic these days, quick to criticise and throw the insult. It’s her shield.
‘Stupid Vietnam,’ she muttered when the Old Quarter hotel failed to arrange for someone to pick us up at the train station. It was 4:30 a.m. We’d just come back from Sapa. We refused to get a cyclo because the first cyclo we’d taken, back in Ho Chi Minh City, from Ben Thanh Market to the War Museum, saw us ripped us off by nearly $30. The cyclo drivers went from jovially welcoming us to Vietnam to threatening us and upping exponentially the fee we’d agreed on. They barked and snatched the money right out of Tsong’s moneybelt. There she was, speechless, her shield gone. Afterwards she mused that she did like some parts of our trip but overall Vietnamese people were so pushy. She seemed to find no links – good or bad ones – to Vietnamese people in Vietnam and her own friends at home.
Husband calls. I’m in the car, Tsong is driving, and I’m staring out the window as Canley Vale blends back into Abbotsbury.
‘I’ve been on sites,’ he says. Paedophile sites, he means.
‘Nothing illegal, though? You don’t want to be downloading child porn accidentally.’
Tsong and Ka give me strange looks.
‘Not on top of what I already have.’
‘Exactly. Your computer would explode.’
‘But, to be serious, that’s the thing. These are quite public sites, they’re not buried away on the web. And frankly it’s amazing what these men say – and they’re all men – the way they rationalise their desires. Some of them call for a civil rights movement. They liken themselves to being discriminated against and being disempowered, like gay people, or coloured people. Like Hmongs, like you.’
‘I’ve always thought the Hmongs were like paedophiles.’
‘You are hidden. Even that war you had was secret.’
‘And we do have our own websites.’
‘Exactly.’
I ask him about how things are going with the Naturopath. They met up last night, after work. I can hear him smiling. She’s coming back to his place tonight and they’re going to stay in to watch DVDs. She’s going to wear trackies. So is he.
‘That’s very muvvy,’ I say.
After the phone call, I explain to my curious sisters that I was speaking to Husband. That instantly explains the child porn joke; they’ve always found him to be inappropriate. I don’t explain what muv is, what it means to be muvvy. We’ve pulled up at Pob Khou’s house.
When I was last in Sydney some fifteen years ago, hanging with Hmong people, Yawg Khou was alive and he was in this very driveway walking towards this house. Nou Zas had been alive too. Pob Lou, a crabby biddy but a mobile one, would have had no trouble visiting her son and grandchildren. Everyone was alive and healthy. Those Hmong Lee boys had yet to drown. They were among the first Hmong in Australia to die, and at such a young age, just teenagers. It was 1989 and they’d been on a daytrip to the Royal National Park to celebrate a birthday. They’d hired canoes and perhaps it was the invincibility of youth that made them decline the life jackets, maybe a lack of cash. They weren’t strong swimmers and three of them drowned. It was so sad because it was a preventable set of deaths, and we witnessed our own mortality. Few counters in Australia had our mee goreng noodles and our jugs of filtered water. No more than two thousand Hmong, spread across the country. Secret, hidden.
We pick up Mum, who had opted to stay talking with Pob Khou rather than come to yum cha.
We drive to the Westfield at Parramatta.
‘Do you remember how you guys told me that I was adopted because I was so dark?’ Ka says in the car to me and Tsong. ‘You told me that I was born inside a pot plant, that’s why I was so black, because I was dirty. You said you guys found me in the pot plant by the side of the road.’
Tsong and I burst out laughing. We can’t remember saying it but it sounds like something we’d fabricate.
‘Well, Ka,’ I say, ‘I think for my next tattoo I’m going to get nine fish, one for every person in our family. But I’ll have eight swimming together on my hand and then one all by itself on my elbow and in a pot. That will be you, the black baby.’
‘No, Chele!’ she squeals. ‘Don’t be so mean!’
‘But you are the baby!’
‘I’m only a baby ´cause you still treat me like one!’
‘I only treat you like a baby because you keep acting like one!’
She laughs at me. She finds me funny, still.
Sweet Ka. Now twenty but still the baby. A few years ago she dropped out of Lake Tuggeranong College, only months before she would have been able to graduate from year twelve. We should have seen this coming. In Calwell High School she had been a troublemaker and had hung out with other troublemaker girls. The teachers put these girls into a special life-skills class – a modern-day deportment class – to try to fix their unladylike behaviour. Ka had once told me, in a matter-of-fact way, how she’d had to bash a girl. She’d had to sort that girl out.
We park in the massive tiered car park of the Westfield shopping complex and go inside to browse David Jones. Ka works at David Jones in Civic, back in Canberra, and has a $1000 staff voucher that she won last Christmas. The deal was that whichever David Jones section in the whole of Australia most increased their Christmas sales would be rewarded with in-store credit. Ka’s section won.
‘Yeah, the area manager came last year and he was like, ‘This is the worst store ever’. It was. And then we won!’
&
nbsp; ‘How did you do that?’
‘We just worked really hard. Oh my God. It was like the busiest time ever.’
‘I think that’s very good, Ka, what you accomplished.’
Ka’s already spent some of the voucher on home-wares but she wants to see if this store might have things that the stores in Canberra don’t. Now that she’s living out of home with Tsong she needs to equip her house with useful goods. We go into the kitchen section, joining other Saturday shoppers, and stand in front of a wall of non-stick frypans. Mum would like a new one, actually, for making rice-flour crêpes in, and yet instead of asking questions of a stray salesperson she turns to us and outlines an essential checklist of frypan features, as if she’s the one trying to increase her sales for a $1000 voucher.
‘Look. Here,’ Mum says, pointing. ‘Always pick a pan this big. Right size. And you only use for crêpes, you want it to last. Nothing else. Okay?’
Ka grins at Mum fondly.
‘Yeah, ever since we stopped living with Mum and Dad we get along with them so much better,’ she says. ‘We love our Mummy!’
‘And crazy Dad?’
‘He’s alright. He’s getting pretty old. But he’s not so annoying when you don’t have to live with him.’
Mum unhooks the most suitable crêpe pan and Ka gets out her voucher.
And we drive. We go to Cabramatta because Mum wants to get bulk sacks of rice from a particular Asian supermarket she always comes to when she’s in Sydney. She also wants to buy caps with Australiana-themed insignias. She’d borrowed a cap like this from a young Hmong boy, Lue, but she lost it. Lue is the son of the Hmong ambassador who’s been working at the Lao embassy. Mum and Dad don’t make a big deal about there being an ambassador in Canberra but I didn’t even know Hmong people did diplomatic work.
Fisher Street in Cabramatta is lined with two-dollar shops and Vietnamese restaurants. It’s just shy of dinnertime so there are bored staff waiting inside, watching us pass by. There are some white men sitting down or strolling, and Eurasian children nearby. We go right to the end of Fisher Street and it feels like we won’t find the caps, even though Mum says she remembers seeing them on this street, one time with my niece Beanpole. We pause outside a shop and notice upon closer inspection that in among the plastic and synthetic bric-a-brac are a few columns of red, blue and white caps. The Australia caps! Mum takes about ten minutes to select the best designs – she needs to get a few for gifts, as well as replacing Lue’s cap. Again, she explains to us why we should choose certain ones and not others, as if we’re the ones needing to buy caps, not her.
Sweet Mum. She gave up on growling at us when she got outnumbered. Now she likes to pass on knowledge, to instruct us when she can, or cook us food, or retell stories about Beanpole and Elf, our nephew, so we know what they’re doing when we can’t be there to see it ourselves. She knows that the Hmong can feel hurt, they can grow weak inside beds or in hospices or wards, surrounded by nurses and bleeping machines. They die, and they always have been able to.
It’s hot, as the weather forecast predicted, and we enter a bubble-tea joint across from the train station. Tsong orders refreshments for all of us, assuming the organiser role that she sometimes takes on. Not so much a shield, just a professional trait. She’s a conference organiser during the weekdays.
We’re the only people in the store and we sit under a whirring fan.
I watch a train hunker by.
I’d once alighted from a train at that platform with a Hmong girl called Houa. We walked to a games arcade so she could meet someone out the front to pawn her necklace for heroin. I didn’t really think of Houa as buying drugs at the time, even though she didn’t hide it. Even as we caught the train and the bus home to her house, back to Liverpool, and even when she dropped in at a friend’s house to smoke the heroin in a bedroom that I didn’t go into, I was unblinking. I didn’t really have an image of what a heroin addict was. To me, it wasn’t a Hmong person.
I knew what a drunken Hmong girl was like. Years later I was in Sydney, after uni. I was at the spring races with a girlfriend who had gotten us VIP media passes. Women in strappy dresses and three-inch heels traipsed past us, from sponsor tent to sponsor tent, gripping flutes of champagne. A diligent team of workers – migrants like Pob Yer or Mum – contained the bins when we piled them high, and stooped to pick up our trash when we missed. I didn’t know what was worse, jostling among the crowd in the day or continuing at night to Oxford Street with Hoppy, a window-cleaning surfer and my infrequent fling. Me indulging a blue-collar fantasy as if I’d always come to Sydney to visit Paddington and Randwick and not the western suburbs.
Ee. Mai Thao Mi. Mai Xi. Bo. Tsong. Xang. Ka. Seven bananas.
What if Dad had been given the scholarship to Sydney Uni? We may have grown up in Sydney and been locals at Cabramatta shops and Canley Vale yum cha. Our house would have had a balcony after all, overlooking a big backyard, big enough to fit a second house.
Dad’s education in Vientiane made him a stranger to his siblings. When he would return home to the village in Xieng Khuang province he’d climb into bed and his younger sister would cry, not wanting this stranger to join her. It was the same gift of education that had ripped him out of Laos with his wife left perilously behind.
He was the odd one in his own bunch. Off he dropped, into Australia.
Splat.
I picture him a few years younger than I am now. He’s away from home, in Vientiane province, a young student walking past the grand French Colonial architecture of the government buildings. Dad still has a full head of hair, and a mouth full of croissant. He is imagining his future, the way that an education encourages you to do. He sees an Australian degree, an Australian job, more children and his own house. In some ways everything he wished for he got.
Husband texts me a link to a site in case I want to see for myself how similar paedophiles are to Hmongs.
While he prepares for a stay-in movie night with the Naturopath, my family and I make it back to Canberra around 9 p.m. I get dropped off in Griffith, a Toorak-like suburb in the centre of Canberra.
It’s party-time tonight. Wombo, a high-school friend, is having a housewarming.
‘Pick me up later, Chauffeur!’ I tell Tsong.
Ka giggles at me from within the back seat.
‘Stupid Michele,’ Tsong mutters and drives off.
Wombo’s renting an apartment on the top floor and has come down to greet me. ‘Shelly!’ he says, wrapping his arms around me.
He takes me up the stairs and he shows me around the compact space of his new rental apartment. His bedroom is minimalist in its decor, and above his bed he has hung an abstract painting with a distressed industrial feel. I imagine Wombo as someone who’ll collect modern art – Australian and international – when he buys his own home. He was always an aesthete, even back in high school when he hadn’t yet outgrown the baby fat and wombat frame that had led to his nickname. Unlike Subaru, who was originally from the Sunshine Coast and always fat-free and lean. As a lanky teenager, Subaru had delighted in not caring about his diet or how anything looked except the latest-release Holden gracing the pages of car magazines; however, his first car had been a hand-me-down Subaru station wagon that he’d used to earn money delivering pizzas.
Subaru’s in Canberra this weekend for the housewarming. On the balcony, he points out his new Holden to me, the azure Commodore sedan parked below and which he’d driven up in today. Subaru has achieved his dream job and now works for Holden in Melbourne and he can swap cars every year – the shiny ones that grace magazine covers – without paying much to upgrade to the latest model. He knows I’m not too interested in the specs of his new toy, beyond what the exact colour is. When we were teenagers, I would sometimes flip through his Wheels magazines but when he’d patiently explain to me what torque was or how an engine worked I’d glaze over and he’d laugh at my sincere but glassy eyes.
‘Guess what?’ I say.
�
�Waddup?’
‘Tsong and Ka. They’re obsessed with you. They want us to get back together.’
He chuckles. ‘Why?’
‘You’re the one that got away. The only boyfriend my family ever liked.’
Subaru and I had dated for three and a half years, into our early twenties.
‘Well, you can’t beat dating a guy like me, you know that?’
‘Yeah right.’
‘I see you’re missing a bit of, eh, Subaru action?’
‘My Mum’s got the bone for you, not me.’
He keeps chuckling.
‘At the least, my sisters insist that you donate your sperm to me so that you and I can have children.’
‘Listen, Mishie, if neither one of us is married in ten years, we should do it. Hook up.’
I laugh at the unlikelihood of this. Although, if we were left with no options, Subaru and I had always agreed that we would make cute children.
I want to have a baby. I want to have three – a white one, a yellow one and a black one.
I told Mum about my plans. Her face darkened. I was only in year two and at that age I didn’t know that having three differently coloured babies required me fucking three differently coloured men. I thought that babies came in boxes, like the life-size dolls in the toy section of Woolworths in Civic. A few years later, when I did find out what fucking meant, in my astonishment I went into the kitchen, interrupted Mum and asked her, ‘Mum, do you and Dad fuck?’
Her face darkened again. She grunted at me in Hmong.
I retreated into the corridor, quickly interpreting her grunts as meaning yes.
I don’t know what sort of mother I’ll make, how comfortably I might explain fucking to my daughter, if I ever have one. I was Ka’s second mummy but a need for sex education never came up. She was so dear to me, right from that very first moment when they brought her home from the hospital in 1989 and she was put into my arms, a little package of talc smells and translucent skin. I held her for hours. I already had three other younger siblings, and I had seen the joy of babies before, but this one was different. I was a very big nine years old and Ka was my first attempt at opening one of those toy boxes and leading, by the hand, a life-size doll into the world.