Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

  Next, my grandmother says her version of grace. “Ah, Buddha bless our Father Government,” she exults. “Treating us better than our sons do. Giving old people money every fortnight.

  “Agheare,” she tells me, “when you are old enough and speak the English good enough, you have to write them a letter.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “In the letter I want you to write how much old people appreciate the money.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  She has a little think about it. “It’s so much. Oh, it’s all too much, really. I want you to write that.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “More filial than sons!” cries my grandmother, ignoring my father who is no longer smiling at the dinner table. “Buddha bless Father Government!” She calls it Father Government, like Father Christmas, as if he is a tangible benign white-bearded guru with an everlasting bag of cheques slung over one shoulder. Father Government looked after us when Motherland China didn’t want us, and took us in when that angry adolescent orphan Cambodia decided to abandon us to Brother Number One. My grandfather had died under Ah Pot, and my grandmother does not hesitate to adopt a new father for her children: “Father Government looks after all of us so well!”

  The only person who does not feel the permeating love of the Father is my mother. Certain people are blocking her way to the light of his everlasting abundance. My grandmother, to whom she hands all her money. And my father, who is still a dutiful son to his mother. So my mother does not make me promise to write any letters to the Father. Instead she sits at the table, penning out her primary-school words in letters to her parents. “Dear Ma. This new country is beautiful. We live in a big house, much bigger than the one belonging to Auntie Mao in Vietnam. Agheare is now two years old. She talks a lot. How is the family back at home? I hope Ba is not still sick. He will be happy here. We will bring you over soon.” She cannot write what she really wants to say because my grandmother posts off all the letters, while she is locked in this weatherboard house with thin walls.

  “Got any letters that need posting?” my grandmother asks in the early morning. “I am going to the bank, and I am going to take Agheare for a walk.” “Willing to walk” is the Teochew term for being filial, and my mother watches as her daughter gets ready to walk off with the other side. She stands at the sink, bubbles from the laundry soaking into her skin. Looking at her daughter, she curls her fingers into the suds, but she is clutching at nothing, just sheets of empty water. Wiping her hands on her blue tracksuit pants, she goes into the room and emerges with her letter.

  After my grandmother leaves, she thinks up the letter she really wants to write. At first it comes out as a blur of black cloud, but then words emerge from the smog. “Dear Ma, this family treats me like a servant, like that servant Red Bean that they brought back from China to work around the house and factory in Cambodia.” My mother pauses to remember the little servant girl with her shoulders always thrust forward and her face always burning vermilion, like a little red bullet. “Ma, why did you let me go?” she wants to write. My mother feels her own heart is a little red bullet, poking around in her chest, searching for a way out.

  *

  Lining up at the bank to collect what she calls her “old people’s gold”, my grandmother searches the faces of all the others standing there with their hands thrust deep in their pockets, and she wonders why they aren’t basking in the glow of the glorious government. In fact, a lot of them look as if they have sucked on seven lemons and forgotten to spit out the pips. She smiles at the white-faced, sallow-eyed sad-sacks. “Agheare, these people don’t realise what they have. Ah, just like your mother, always shuffling around with that face that looks as if it has been freshly dug out of the morgue!” She feels such love and simple abundance that she decides then and there she will spread good karma around by doing a good deed. After she collects her money, she walks with me to the shop in Footscray which has tanks in the windows and a sign stuck on the glass saying “Fish for food not for pet.” She buys a red plastic bucket and a bleary-eyed grey-scaled fish, and we board a bus.

  “Ma, what are we doing?” I ask. People on the bus watch as my grandmother sits down and places the bucket on the floor between her feet. She wedges her legs closer together to hold it in place. “We’re going to let the fish go.”

  “Why, Ma?”

  “Because Buddha has blessed us! Blessed us!”

  The fish is still thrashing around in the bucket, and water is splashing onto her fleecy pants. When the bus passes a little bridge, my grandmother decides that it is time to disembark. Standing at the small overpass bridge, my grandmother heaves the bucket up, onto the edge. “Little fish swim away and have a good life, and Buddha protect you.” She turns the bucket upside down. The fish falls into the water with a little plop. More accurately, into the brown diarrhoea sludge of the Maribyr-nong.

  “Umm, Ma, the water is muddy.”

  “Doesn’t matter, the Mekong is also muddy, and look how many fish they pull out of there every day. Ah, but you wouldn’t understand, and lucky for you to be born in this blessed land, you will never see the Mekong where they also pulled out muddy people that didn’t move, during the years of Ah Pot! Aiyah, those were terrible years, but wah, Father Government is so good to us now!”

  *

  When my grandmother and I return from our walk, the laundry is done and my mother is preparing lunch. My grandmother sits at the table and starts counting her Father Government money. Her Father Government money includes the money my father earns because he gives everything to her. “Here is twenty dollars for next week’s grocery shopping,” my grandmother says. Then she writes down something on a piece of paper. Marking down the exact amount, thinks my mother, making sure I come back with the change. “Make sure you put it in a safe place,” says my grandmother. She does not like giving out notes to be broken up. Whenever she goes shopping, she likes to give the exact amount. Getting wrong change can be ghastly if you do not speak the English, so she makes those pasty-faced young people behind the counter wait while she counts out her coins, right down to the brown one-cent pieces.

  “When you go shopping tomorrow,” my grandmother advises, “try to get that older woman with the dark hair and moustache. I see those young ones looking at one another whenever I come. Young people these days, so impatient. I hope Agheare does not grow up to have that kind of nature.”

  What kind of nature will her daughter have, my mother wonders the next day, as she shops for the evening’s dinner. What kind of nature, if the girl is always being whisked away from her? The more people who love her, the better, my mother reasons as she picks out a cold fish from the market, but her heart cannot cling to reason. In the evening, she watches the family eat the fish she has prepared, the fish that my grandmother lamented cost too much – “Hah, some people don’t know how to save money! Could have got a bigger one from the other market for fifty cents less!” My grandmother sits me on the dinner table so I can poke out the fish’s eyeball with one chopstick. The eyeballs are my favourite part of the fish. “Like a little demon!” my grandmother claps her hands. The demented red bullet inside my mother’s chest tunnels its way in all different directions. It is going ballistic and making holes everywhere, holes in places where no hole should ever be. It is going to drive her crazy, it is going to push itself out and embed itself in her own flesh and blood. She wants this little daughter to be completely her own, but the girl is already doomed. She can see the signs of leaving already, in the glint of her black eyes. Well, my mother thinks, better the girl go to the other side of the Served rather than stay on the side of the servants.

  So when the child drops the chopstick, clambers off the table and clutches her leg with icky-fish hands and cries, “Ma! Ma!” the mother turns away. “I’m busy clearing up. Go and bug your grandmother.” After all, “Ma” is also the word she uses for grandmother, just two tones different.

  FROM a very early age, I know that my grandmother and my
mother do not get along. So I become an informer at the age of four, moving from one camp to the other, depending on which side offers the best bribes.

  “Agheare, what does your mother say about me when I’m not around?” my grandmother asks me.

  “Agheare, what does your grandmother tell you about me?” my mother asks in turn.

  I have no sense of loyalty. “Being good” is what each camp demands of me. I find out early that “being good” can mean completely different things. Being good for my mother is telling her what my grandmother says about her. And being good for my grandmother is telling her what my mother says about her. So I discover that being good means just being good to the person who is telling you to be good. Being good is when your grandmother gives you sweets for loitering around the room in which your mother and your third auntie are having a discussion.

  “Ah, Samso, don’t lament and suffer, because she gave me the same treatment when I first arrived too, except worse,” my mother tells my third auntie, who has recently arrived from Guangzhou, China. Clinging to the doorframe, I poke my head into the room.

  Soon my mother realises the point of these missions and nudges my aunt, “Eh, Samso, we can’t talk any more because she’s listening,” and they both give me a glare.

  I return to my grandmother’s room, where she is sitting on the bed waiting for my news, with nothing to report except that my mother and my aunt have stopped talking because they know I am listening.

  “Hah!” puffs my grandmother. “That means that they were talking about me! They must have been talking about me!”

  I don’t understand why they care so much about what each is saying about the other, but I am getting sweets and hair-ties from my grandmother so I don’t complain.

  And the stories go on. “Your grandmother is trying to turn you against me,” says my mother. “She is trying to make you hate me.”

  “Your mother,” my grandmother says, “knows bugger-all about anything. She is so very cruel to a poor old person like me.”

  “If you do evil deeds,” my grandmother tells me, “you will have a bad karma debt, and in your next life you will be turned into a snake or something terrible like that.”

  “You are so evil,” my mother tells me one night, very upset, “that I’m going to take your brother and go away with him. We will go so far far away to a place that you will never find us, and your father needn’t bother to look for us because he will never find us either. And you won’t ever see us again because we won’t be coming back. Ever.”

  “Ma, please don’t go,” I beg, feeling the worst kind of sinking fear inside me.

  Then it gets as terrible as it can get. “I am going to take your brother and then I will kill myself and you will never see me again!”

  “Ma!” I plead, “please don’t go off and kill yourself! I won’t be a word-spreader anymore!”

  I cannot eat dinner, and that night lying in the bed I share with my grandmother, I cannot sleep either. It is like someone is sitting on my stomach. My grandmother asks me, “What’s wrong? Do you need to use the potty?”

  “No, I can’t get to sleep. My tummy hurts.”

  “I’ll give it a little rub with Tiger Balm oil.”

  “No, it doesn’t hurt that much.”

  “Then go to sleep.”

  I lie awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering whether I will hear my mother and my brother get up in the middle of the night. What if they never come back because I am so evil? I decide to stay up so I will be ready when they go. I will hide the keys to the front door. I will put a chair against the back door. I will stand in the way or sleep in the entrance. But with my grandmother rubbing my tummy, I soon drop off to sleep. The next morning, I wake up to find with the greatest relief that they are still there.

  “I don’t like word-spreaders,” my mother tells me. “You have been spreading words again, haven’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I didn’t.” I am lying, of course, and I know that she knows.

  “You told your grandmother that I said she was always wearing those clip-clop shoes to annoy me when I am sleeping. Who could have told her that story? The bloody spirits? I will never tell you anything again, because you are such a word-spreader.”

  As I sit at the breakfast table, in front of the egg my grandmother has boiled for me, I realise that there is no getting out of this mess. If I stop telling things to my grandmother she will stop loving me, but if I stop telling things to my mother she will stop loving me. On the other hand, if I stop word-spreading to my grandmother, my mother will love me again, and if I stop word-spreading to my mother, my grandmother will love me even more. I always spread my jam on toast all the way to the very edges – no millimetre of bread is left blank and uncovered. My word-spreading habits are similar. There is only one thing left to do, which is to stop talking altogether – but not talking when adults are speaking to you warrants a whack over the head.

  The questions become more difficult. “Who do you love more, your grandmother or me?” my mother demands.

  “You,” I reply.

  “You’re just saying that because I am asking you. I bet if your grandmother asked you the same thing, you would say her, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” I lie, but she had and I did.

  “Woe, who can trust such a child who lies?” laments my mother. “I can’t believe you anymore.”

  Then she asks again, “Who do you love better, your grandmother or me?”

  “You.”

  “But your grandmother bought you books and those coloured pens the other week.” She tries to catch me out.

  “You,” I reply stubbornly.

  *

  “Aiyoooo, your mother doesn’t even care for her kids,” my grandmother says with a tut-tutting of her mouth, “Always out there in the back shed working when she should know that the greatest role of a woman is to take care of her kids.” Then my grandmother sighs and shakes her head and tut-tuts with her tongue some more, remembering bringing up eight children, all literate and clean.

  “Aiyooo, your mother is always working and doesn’t even take the time to realise that you are not even wearing enough warm clothes,” laments my grandmother. “Your mother is always in that shed and doesn’t even have time to boil you an egg.” And so it is my grandmother who wakes up early to boil me the egg, and do my hair into two braids at the top of my head, and bundle me in little padded and patterned Mao suits sent by aunts from Hong Kong.

  “What’s the matter, Ma?” I ask in panic during the moments I catch my mother staring into nothingness, her eyes glazed and her features blurred. “Nothing,” she replies quietly.

  “Why are you sad, Ma?” I ask.

  “Nothing you would understand. You’re still a child.”

  When I am a bit older, I don’t know whether her answer is a lament or curse: “Just wait till you get older and have a mother-in-law like mine. Then you will understand. You will understand.” What will I understand? I wonder. Suffering? There are far better things to understand than the inconsolable hardships of life. Constantly sighing and lying and dying – that is what being a Chinese woman means, and I want nothing to do with it.

  They keep all these secrets, and tell them to four-year olds who cannot possibly understand the complicated channels of hatred, but are meant to keep quiet about such things. I do not understand the loneliness and desperation that would drive a person to find their closest confidante in a toddler more interested in collecting Easter Egg foil.

  “Did you know that your grandmother was never the only wife of your grandfather? Did you know your grandfather had two wives at once?”

  “Did you know that your mother was not your father’s first fiancée?”

  “Did you know that your grandfather made your grandmother give away a son?”

  “Did you know that your grandmother had two daughters who died in Cambodia?”

  Words with bones in them,
my grandmother calls them. Words to make the other person fall flat on their back and die a curly death, my mother says. The sharp ones, the ones you can use if ever you need a weapon to protect yourself.

  And so I was doomed, early on, to be a word-spreader. To tell these stories that the women of my family made me promise never to tell a soul. Perhaps they told me because they really did want the other camp to hear. Perhaps my word-spreading was the only way they could voice their grievances.

  Or perhaps my word-spreading is also the only way to see that there was once flesh attached to these bones, that there was once something living and breathing, something that inhaled and exhaled; something that slept and woke up every morning with the past effaced, if only for a moment. That there was a good beginning, and in this good beginning the stories would come like slow trickles of truth, like blood coursing through the veins.

  MY grandmother was possessed of healing powers, or so it was claimed by those who knew her back in Cambodia. Five sons, people exclaimed – seven children, all of them so bright! Of course, everyone chose to forget about the first two babies who died, because they were just girls. Back then, with the arrival of each child, she seemed to grow in stature, seemed to loom larger than before, unlike some mothers who turned into wispy-haired waifs after the birth of their third. Children were drawn to her. Wherever she walked, there was always a little one pulling at her trouser leg. “Ma! Ma!” they cried, and they followed her like lambs. She did not shake them off, so they sat at her side while she whirred away on her sewing machine, they crammed into her bed and drenched her clothes with their water-logged dreams. She never told them to piss off, because my grandmother never swore at her children, only at my grandpa.