Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

  “Our family is all here in Vietnam!” Ly proclaimed. “What about Old Auntie?”

  “My mother is here too,” said Que.

  “Wah, that is just too good, too good!”

  “And my brother is just over there!” In the middle of the market-place, she suddenly bolted off, yelling, “Brother, Brother! Guess who I found? You will never guess who is here!” She came back dragging some dumbfounded young man by the arm. When my mother looked at him, it made her think about how strange life was, that she and my Aunt Ly were here eating noodles and seeing their former bosses, all skin and bones, wide-eyed and bewildered like village folk having lost all their crops.

  When my father saw my mother, he could not believe she was the same scrawny thirteen-year old operating the plastic-bag cutter. She was now twenty.

  “Hey, you’ve grown up, Old Lady,” he said to her, with a smile that almost split his face in half.

  Even though surviving was what they were doing in Vietnam, my mother and father began to “walk together”. Not alone, of course. Once my father went to the goldsmith and came back with a silver bracelet each for my mother and Aunt Ly. When Outside Ma found out, she exclaimed, “You be careful of this young man! A bracelet for each one of you! How very strange! You be careful that he is not one of those types of men who chase after two women at the same time!” But my mother knew the truth – she knew that my father really liked her but was too shy to make it clear. So he bought things for Ly too, because when they went out Ly was always trailing behind. My mother would ride on the back of my father’s bicycle and they would try to lose her. The more agitated Ly became, the more fun they had.

  Meanwhile, on the other side my grandmother was scared to death that my father liked Ly. Every time Ly came over to visit, my grandmother would give her the itchy eyeball glare. Although Ly had her charms, all my grandmother could see was that she couldn’t sit still and wore bright yellow stilettos in the strappy, ankle-snapping style of the era. “Kuan’s mother doesn’t like me,” Ly told my mother matter-of-factly. It didn’t bother her much.

  “If you didn’t dress like such a shiny red Ung Bao package, maybe she would stop it,” my ma suggested helpfully.

  “Hmmmph!” she said, “I am only enduring the insufferable atmosphere of that house because you are my sister. And this is what I get in return!”

  *

  One day, my mother came to return my father’s bicycle. If she had known that someone else was present, she would not have come. The evening before, she had gone out with my father and he had given her his bicycle to ride home because it was getting very late. “You can return it to me in the morning,” he told her.

  So there she was, at the front of his house, with his bicycle. She saw an unfamiliar pair of shoes at the front doorstep. Pale blue with closed toes and thick heels. She thought that Aunt Que might have had a friend over. But they were unfamiliar shoes, and she knew all Que’s friends. She didn’t have many, because she could not speak much Vietnamese, and my grandmother clung tightly to her in case she learned of the depravities of Saigon from charming dope dealers.

  Que opened the door. My mother told her, “Little Aunt, I have come to return your brother’s bicycle.”

  “Ah Kien, come in! Come in!” she enthused. “Don’t bother about taking off your shoes!”

  “No, Little Aunt,” my mother said, “I don’t want to bother you when you have visitors.”

  Que looked down at the blue shoes on the doormat, noticing that my mother had noticed. “No! No! It’s alright. Come in and have a little sit,” she insisted.

  “Who’s that?” my mother heard my father’s voice from inside the house. Then he muttered to someone inside the house, “just a moment,” and appeared at the door.

  “Um, brother, here is your bicycle,” she said to him. Except at that very moment, she didn’t feel like gracing him with “brother” this or that – she had heard the “just a moment” from inside and knew that he had been chatting with the owner of the blue shoes.

  Turning to leave, she thought how stupid she was, thinking that a man nine years older was falling madly in love with her. After all, she was younger than his little sister Que.

  “No, it’s no bother, please come in,” he insisted.

  “No, really, I’d better go and not be a nuisance.” But in all honesty, she was filled with curiosity. She wanted to see what this new girlfriend of his was like. She knew it was wrong to go in, and she knew her mother would yell, “Don’t you have any shame, girl?” if she ever found out.

  In the end, it was my grandmother who decided for her. She came out to see what the fuss was all about. “Ah Kien, you are here!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes, Old Aunt,” my mother muttered, keeping her eyes lowered, which also unfortunately meant that she had to look directly at the blue shoes.

  “Come in! Come in!” She had never seen a family more adamant for her to come in and drink their tea before.

  “Um, my mother is expecting me home soon.”

  But my grandmother had already grabbed my mother’s arm and was leading her inside.

  *

  And then my mother saw her in the living room, sitting in the chair opposite my father. There she was, still smelling of newly pressed hair and sweet chemicals, a fresh perm on her head with two black pieces that curled like little crescent moons on her high cheekbones. She obviously had mascara on, thought my mother. No one could have eyelashes that long, just like the eyelashes on one of those wah-wah dolls. She wore a dress with a high collar and big buttons down the front, but no sleeves. Her skinny ankles were crossed, her hands were in her lap, and her back was straight.

  My mother suddenly felt young and foolish, just like those people the popular love songs were always mooning on about. Her hair was a mess from the bicycle ride. “Oh,” she said to my grandmother when she saw the other woman, “oh, uh, err, Old Aunt, I see you have visitors. So I will leave and not bother you now.” She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but she was jealous. She was furious, too, at my father, because he had told her to come today. She wanted to smash that bike of his. She decided that she would leave and give it a big kick as she walked away from that house, and never look back. Perhaps she could even puncture the tyre with the sharp end of her shoe.

  “Oh no, don’t leave,” my grandmother said to my mother. “Take a seat, take a seat, Kien. I am sure Sokem doesn’t mind!” When my mother realised who the visitor was, she froze. Sokem! All the muscles of her face pulled downwards. So that was the meaning of all this! How had she ended up here, my mother wondered. Ah, men, she thought, such liars! Such cheats! Her mother was right.

  Now Sokem had come back to claim what was hers, and the fun for my father was over. They were going to fulfil my grandfather’s wishes and go ahead with the arranged marriage.

  During Ah Pot’s terrible years, my grandfather had died of starvation. He had set off with his first wife when those black thieves the Khmer Rouge evacuated the city, and he had been allocated to a different work camp. It was a terrible journey, a parade of the desperate and the dying. The further they walked from the city, the more money flowed in the streets. But it was all useless, and banknotes would float through the air to fall uncollected into the dust. Cars were driven halfway and then dumped in ditches. Luckily, my mother’s parents were clever enough to veer off the path one night and lead the family into Vietnam. Otherwise, like Sokem’s parents, they would have died under Pol Pot.

  Before they died, Sokem’s parents told her that they had left some gold buried for her in the house, and that she should go back and look for it when the war was over. After the Killing Fields, Sokem miraculously found her old house – it had not been levelled – and dug up the gold. She then set off with her servant and young niece – the only survivor in her family – to look for my father.

  But when my mother sat down, my father pulled his chair closer to her, away from his fiancé. Then my mother realised what was what. My grandmot
her also said to Sokem, “Ah Sokem, this is Kuan’s friend, Kien.” She introduced my mother as my father’s friend instead of Aunt Que’s friend. She said to my mother, “Ah Kien, how is your mother? Is she well? I have not visited her in a while.” My grandmother was very good at putting bones in her words, bones to make the other person choke.

  But Sokem was a lady, and she did not gasp and splutter. She still sat very straight, her face a stone mask, but the corners of her mouth dropped. She realised that my grandfather was dead, as well as her own parents, and that there was nobody left to enforce the promise my father’s family had made half a decade ago. My mother could not look at her.

  “Ah, it was good of you to visit us today, Sokem,” my grandmother said, standing up. “Good to see that you are well.” Sokem slowly uncrossed her ankles. As my grandmother walked her to the door, Sokem muttered, “I am going, Old Auntie. Send my regards to Kuan and your family.”

  My parents could hear my grandmother saying to her, “Take care, Sokem, take care.” And then the door closed, and Sokem was outside the house, but my mother was still inside.

  I AM in my parent’s wedding photos, with a lolly in my hands. My parents stand behind a table of oranges. Behind them is a double happiness character cut out of red paper stuck on the wall with glue. In her wedding photos, my mother is wearing Aunt Que’s wedding dress and my father is in one of his grey suits with the wide trouser legs and small ’70s lapels. It is a wedding for show, but there are not many people at the show. The only attendees are my grandmother, my Aunt Que and her new husband, Uncle Suong. All my mother’s dreams of being the beaming bride are condensed into one spontaneous afternoon in our rented Footscray house in a borrowed dress, and only because someone came up with the bright idea of posing my parents for pictures among the residues of Aunt Que’s wedding. My mother carries a fake bouquet of flowers in her lace-gloved hands.

  All this to cover up the fact that there was no wedding back in Cambodia. No ceremony, no festivity. Not even an engagement period. From my parents’ accounts it sounds like they were married in the bustling tedium of an ordinary day in Vietnam, wearing the best clothes they could find, which were no more than ordinary; but I like to think that their real marriage occurred in the darkness of the night, a night of visiting both sets of parents before setting off to find a way out of Southeast Asia. Everyone knew that Thailand was the place with the refugee camp, the place that got people out of this bombed country and into one of those other democratic countries where you could buy Coca Cola in cans and not in plastic bags, where you could even throw the precious cans away.

  Before my father asked my mother to marry him, he knew he had to have something to offer her, something more than a ride on the back of a bicycle or a silver bracelet. Yet what he had to offer was not something tangible, like a gold ring, or even a house in which to live. All he could offer her was a promise, something for her to picture in her imagination. It was quite a feat, to offer such an intangible, especially when he could not even call up any images out of which to construct this dream. It left a lot to the vagaries of her mind, and everything to her imagination.

  He told her that he was heading to Thailand. He told her that he was getting forms processed for himself, his mother and his sister, Que. My mother saw him with American dollars in his pockets and a new Chinese-American wife, and they would both spit out the English like broken bones, spit it out like the way he was spitting out this existence here and now.

  She tried to pretend that she didn’t care. “When do you plan to go?” she asked.

  “I’m going to get the forms processed this week,” he said. If he was waiting for her to cry, she thought, then he would have to wait until the ancestors got up and started dancing jigs around them.

  “I can make one for you too.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “If you would like to come with me, then I will ask your parents.” And that is how my father proposed to my mother. There was no romantic melodrama, but I like to think that my mother, when she was young, had enough room for all the unknown pictures to grace the gallery of her mind, to have her vision framed by this moment of truthful sincerity.

  They said their farewells to their families, and my outside grandparents gave them as many gold jewellery pieces as they could afford to part with. Then my parents set off on foot with my Aunt Que and my grandmother. They walked through the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia, often sleeping on the bare ground at night, finally reaching Thailand.

  There they spent one hot, sleepy year in the refugee camp.

  There was no starvation at the camp. There was much waiting – at the food queue with bowls in hands, at the well with buckets on backs, on mats on the floor waiting, waiting, waiting. And in this long hot listless wait, I came into existence, made my mother’s stomach swell up so that from sideways she looked like a long standing papaya.

  My parents watched as my mother’s stomach grew rounder, and wondered whether the child would come during Christmas in the camp, and if so, they knew that this child would squander their chances of getting out, of going overseas, for at least another year. They could be stuck in the camp for over half a decade. The refugee building was more of a wooden shack of many levels, made colourful by the kind-hearted Christian aid agencies and their festive cheer, their persistence in bringing light and life into the lives of those stunned into catatonia by darkness and death.

  During that year, my father studied English in a small shack with a Vietnamese teacher so that he would have a better chance of getting out. My grandmother had taught him that with study, anything was possible; and that even though everything might be lost, there was always learning to bring about a redemption. And although my mother only had one month to go before her firstborn would come, her stomach looked three months younger.

  When the family were finally accepted as refugees, my father was asked, “Canada or Australia?”

  He knew nothing about either country, except that Canada had snow. So Australia it was.

  PART III

  “AH !” My mother’s eyes flung open like shutters. It was early in the morning, or late in the night, or at that stage where it is neither morning nor night. She shot up in bed and looked at my father. “I know what the matter is now!” she cried, “why I can’t find peace in this house!” Her hand nudged my father on the shoulder. “Ay, old man, wake up, wake up, I’ve found an answer!”

  My mother had been having nightmares ever since we moved into our new house. She lay awake, tormented by on-again, off-again sleep, and could find no peace. “Aaarghhh,” she would moan, clutching her heart in the mornings, “my heart is jumping to death.” When she told me this, I had an image of the Jump Rope for Heart mascot in primary school, a red squirty shape skipping to near collapse inside her chest.

  My father opened his eyes slowly. He groaned.

  “Aiiiee,” wailed my mother, “it is so glaringly obvious to me now why we have been having all these troubles! I can’t understand why we failed to see it before!”

  “Ahhhh,” my father muttered, “I am so tired. Tell me about it and then let me rest!” His hands went to his eyes, his thumbs digging into the hollows at the corner of each socket and moving in small circular motions. This was his wake-up massage, learned from his acupuncture training in China when he was sixteen.

  “It’s our toilet!” said my mother fervently. “It’s our toilet!”

  My father’s hands stopped moving. Had my mother gone dingdong? “Which one?”

  “Our toilet! In this room! The ensuite toilet!” cried my mother. “That’s the answer to the problems I have been having!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just had a dream,” cried my mother, “about our Buddhist shrine, you know, the one downstairs with your father’s picture on it! Aiyoh, how could we be so stupid as to put the family shrine in such a place?”

  “Hah?” My father was befuddled. “I thought we agreed that the study was the best
place, no kids coming to whack Ah Bah’s photograph off the shelf!”

  “No, no, no!” cried my mother, “you don’t understand! The shrine downstairs is directly below our toilet upstairs! That’s why I have been having such troubles! That’s the reason!” We were crapping on our gods and ancestors. That was why there was no peace in this new house, why my mother clutched her heart every day and complained of the largeness of everything. Once we moved the shrine to a more auspicious place, all her troubles would be alleviated.

  *

  Dreams about ancestors and gods were serious matters, to be discussed over the breakfast table or over dinner. “Last night,” my father would say, “I had a dream about Ah Bah. It is not right for me to go back to Cambodia this year.” My father had been saying that for the past one and a half decades. Ah Bah’s ghost, the ghost of my solemn-faced grandfather, was still floating around in the Mekong, molecules of his soul extending as far as Melbourne, warning my father not to go back. After a while, my father began to abandon his plans to follow in the footsteps of Uncle Pheang, who already owned six banks in Cambodia and went everywhere in a black bulletproof four-wheel drive with four bodyguards. Since there was no going back now, there was only one way for our little nuclear family to go and that was forwards. Forwards to the Great Australian Dream.

  I thought about how my grandmother had saved up the profits from her plastic-bag factory to build her triple-storey terrace house in Phnom Penh. A week before they were to move in, Ah Pot’s men were swarming across the city, and a week later all the residents of Phnom Penh were prodded into the countryside to work or die, or in most cases work and die.