Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

  Now in this new country, my father was in a position to build his own dream home, in a location untainted by bad dreams and ominous paternal warnings. Every evening for a month, we pored over the details of how exactly our new house was to be built, this house with popping-out bay-window eyes, in muted hues of cream and white. We squished together on the floor in my parent’s bedroom in our Braybrook home, heads bent over plans, fingers pointing here, there and everywhere. “Such a big house for such little people,” my friends commented.

  As the house was being built, my father took his only day off work to drive us to its foundations. This was our weekly Sunday trip, to watch the temple being constructed and to worship the fruits of our labour. My thirteen-year-old brother and I walked on the set-concrete foundations, through the wooden-plank doorways and wahhed over the wooden-beam skeleton of the house, reckoning where the rooms would be and marvelling at the largeness of it all. After about ten minutes, we were thoroughly bored, but my parents would still be walking through the wooden ribcage of the house, hand in hand, looking up up and up towards where the upstairs area would be. And they would comment to each other on where things were going in the new house, comparing it to our neighbour Danny’s.

  Meanwhile, my sister Alina would squish her four-year-old feet into the mounds of soil dug up at the front, and later, the mountains of sand. She would smile her perfect-toothed, dribbly-chinned grin and fall on her hands. She would pick up half-empty chip packets the builders had left behind and shove the contents in her mouth if we weren’t looking, or collect Coke cans and the contents would pour down her front when we tried to snatch them away from her. Alison, who was seven, was more collected. She would walk up and down the mountain of building sand, careful not to step on nails. She would also stack small blocks of wood, building replica palaces for the indifferent ants. My mother put my sisters in dresses for these outings, though it was not as if we were going to church. I suppose she was practising for the time when we would move into this new life, a life of navy-blue and white tailored dresses and Mary-Jane shoes.

  *

  Before we moved, my mother packed away the colourful dresses and tracksuits with their little embroidered cotton patches of puppies and girls with woollen braids and appliquéd cat faces on the front. She stuffed them into a swollen orange plastic Brotherhood of St Laurence bag to be shipped off to those new Fresh-off-the-Boats-and-Planes who would, we hoped, marvel over them with the same awe and seemingly everlasting gratitude that we once had. Gone now were the days where a one-dollar plastic brown vinyl coat was a birthday present from the government.

  Now we could exchange our old clothes for new, and we could look at the recently arrived ones, noting their grey tights with yellow dresses and velcro shoes, and we could roll our eyes and think that although they didn’t know any better now, they would learn, oh they would learn to adapt or be laughed at. But they were the ones who were laughing, and oh how they laughed, with their mouths wide open and their eyes shut tight, and when they were not laughing they were walking around with their eyes wide open and their mouths shut tight taking it all in – all the things that we had taken in a decade ago. And we felt pity and resentment and plenty of embarrassment for their eagerness and their countryside errors. But most of all, unacknowledged envy of their pure, rooted-to-the-moment, everyday-is-a-wonderland existence, because it reminded us of a distant self we once were, we of the wide-eyed, shut-mouth stupor, we of the wide-mouth, shut-eyed delirium, when things were louder and funnier and lettuce was greener and gleaming concrete seemed newer.

  *

  When we moved into the new house, there were no more paper-chains from the Target advertisements strung up from the stipple-dot plaster ceiling. How could we even imagine sticky-taping the clean white walls with our painted-macaroni works of junk? Things needed to be different, things were whitewashed. Nothing could look too peasanty. No dark wooden furniture, but rather white and peach and pale green. Family came to visit, not to celebrate but to do the tour so that they could get home-furnishing ideas for their own houses, so that they too would look modern and not too peasanty. They did not even sit down long enough to have a cup of tea, or if they did, their conversation would always turn to the New House. “How much per square metre?” “Where did you get the glass table?” “Did the builder try and rip you off?”

  After seeing our place, Aunties Que and Anna bought land in the area too – Aunt Que immediately across the road from us, with the Maribyrnong River as her back view; and Aunt Anna behind our house so that we were neighbours. When my grandmother’s Buddhist monk came from Vietnam to visit her, she brought him to our house to bless it. Even though our property was an irregular skirt shape, he lauded my father’s fine choice. All the feng shui elements of our house were in balance, and it was to be a place of much happiness.

  “Do not build your house on a hill where the back slopes down,” advised the monk, “because all your luck is going to slip down that hill.” And so my Auntie Que sold her property before she could even plan for architects to come and have a look at the land, and she moved away from us.

  Aunt Anna, on the other hand, stayed where she was – the monk had said that her land was good. My father helped her with the architectural plans, and within a year another Avondale Heights mansion had arisen. Around us were palaces with Don smallgoods trucks parked at the front or white panel vans to carry the bolts of fabric or dumpling pastries to the factories in which family members worked. And work they did, for we would only see the vans and trucks parked in their driveways very late at night, or very early in the morning when we were heading off to school to embark on our own first steps in fulfilling the dream.

  *

  Yet there was still a piece missing. My mother could feel it, even after we moved the Buddhist shrine away from the room beneath my parents’ upstairs ensuite toilet. The Jump Rope for Heart mascot was still hammering away in her chest, and in the mornings she would wake up with black crescents under her eyes. Even so, she would wake up at six or seven and set about her work. When all else stopped, physically, mentally and spiritually, work was her only constant, the life-raft she built with whatever little life spark she had left in her.

  The second revelation came, as dramatic as the first, yet to act on it was no easy matter. “I know why I have been feeling this way!” she cried, shooting up in bed a second time. She couldn’t find the little glass jars of gold she had buried in the backyard when we first moved to our old house in Braybrook; the jars of gold we kept as a residue of the fear left from the old country – the fear that money could so easily become worthless pieces of dirty paper, and the conviction that the only permanent security was gold. “We haven’t dug them up yet!” she cried. “I remember there being four more jars of gold we haven’t dug up yet!”

  “Are you sure it exists?” asked my father. “Are you sure?”

  But she could not remember. “But I had the dream,” my mother said, “and in my dream, I remembered we buried them!”

  “Are you sure you didn’t turn them into jewellery to sell?”

  “I can’t remember, but I can’t have been feeling this way for so long for nothing! There has to be a reason, and if it is not the shrine being in the wrong place, it is our gold being in the wrong place!”

  My father’s ears were getting irritated and tired, and he had to think about his business meeting the next day with the suppliers from Hitachi. “Well, how are we going to get the gold back from the new owners of the Braybrook house hah? As if they are going to let us come over and dig up their backyard for jars of gold!”

  “That Cantonese Chicken Market lady!” lamented my mother. “She works in Footscray and she doesn’t even remember to return our mail to us! Woe, how are we ever going to get the gold back?” My mother thought about the endless suffering ahead if the gold was not dug up, and she sighed her ten-thousand-sorrows sigh. All that hard work, all that effort – buried and forgotten!

  Finally, my pare
nts devised a plan. They would go back to the old Braybrook home, and they would dig up the backyard. And of course, the Chicken Market lady would let them in.

  “Aiyah, aiyah, of course you can come!” urged the new owners of our old house when my mother called and told them what she needed to do. “Come as soon as you can!” The Chicken Market lady’s voice was throbbing with anxiety. She was scared to death of the ancestors, everybody was. My mother had told her that she needed to go back to dig up the remains of her ancestors from the terrible years in the old country. They were unquietly resting in urns buried throughout the backyard.

  While it was my father who had concocted the plan with my mother, it was actually my Auntie Anna and my mother who executed it. Equipped with shovels, incense and bulldust Buddhist mantras, they knocked on the familiar front door. “Cut down our plum tree at the front,” muttered my mother to my auntie.

  The Chicken Market lady did not welcome my ma and my aunt into the house, but instead told them that she would open the gate leading to the backyard for them – “more convenient”. “She just doesn’t want ancestor-diggers in her new house,” muttered my mother.

  When my ma and aunt came into the backyard, they noticed that our old lemon tree was still in its corner, with its lemons hanging from the limbs like big bright yellow eyeballs watching without blinking.

  My ma lit incense sticks and bowed in various places in the backyard before sticking the sticks in the ground. My auntie stood over them and recited Buddhist prayers. These incense stalks were little markers for those coveted pots of gold. They burned in the wind, and the orange glow went out of some of them, but they were not relit. There was no time.

  The sky was grey so my ma and aunt set to work quickly with their shovels, while Chicken Market lady stood by. “Did you find it yet? Did you find it yet?” she kept asking anxiously. Later, as the sky began to spit rain, she watched from our old kitchen window as my auntie and my mother dug holes in her backyard.

  The souls of seven dead kittens were dug up in the process, and old childhood toys with the plastic palely discoloured. A lot of stones and rocks and stubborn grass-roots clung to the dirt, so they dug, deeper and deeper, and the incense sticks burned out one by one in the wind. Finally, when all the markers had been explored, and the holes had been made, my mother dropped the shovel.

  “Didn’t find anything,” my mother sighed, her hands hanging limply at her sides. The Chicken Market lady flung her hands up to her head. No, this cannot be! she wanted to cry, get these disturbing ancestors off my property. Try harder, dig some more! But then she took one look at my mother’s face, black crescents beneath the eyes, rain-soaked and steeped in defeat, and she kept her mouth shut.

  “KIM” was both the Vietnamese and the Chinese word for gold, so all the jewellery shops were called Kim Heng or Kim Huang or Kim Ngoc, depending on the family name of the owners. These little shops epitomised Family Business, and there were so many of them down the shopping strips of St Albans, Springvale, Richmond and Footscray that I had trouble remembering their names, so that they melded into one continuous never-ending counter filled with red velvet and 24-carat gold. The owners of the jewellery stores I herded into one collective noun – the Kims. One Kim had her daughter’s dental surgery above her shop. Another Kim had two sons working there. A third Kim wore make-up like the actors in Farewell My Concubine and painted her eyebrows three centimetres above her real eyebrows, or where her real eyebrows would have been if she had not plucked them out.

  One day after school I went with my mother while she did her round of visiting the Kims. I was still in my school uniform, and my mother let me collect the money for her, put it in a used white envelope and double-check that it was the right amount. “Look how much I make,” she told me proudly as I counted the $50 and $100 bills. “All in one day.” Yet I knew it was not all from one day’s work. It was weeks and weeks of labour. It was just that the pay all came at once, when she did her rounds of the shopping strips. “This is my daughter,” she told all the Kims. “My daughter is in Year Eleven. She is going to become a lawyer.” Hey – since when was I going to become a lawyer? Even I hadn’t decided that yet. It was because I was terrible at maths, my mother told me in the car afterwards, and had no way of ever becoming a doctor. She secretly hoped that one of the Kims’ sons was studying to be a doctor.

  The Vietnamese lady Kims made themselves look very attractive. They painted their faces with powder and foundation and sometimes the hue did not match their necks, but that didn’t matter once you saw the face. The Chinese lady Kims, on the other hand, seemed less chic. They had tight perms and an earthiness about them, a turnip-and-carrot-soup sort of existence. Their lives, like my mother’s, seemed removed from their gold. They worked for the gold, but they did not own the gold – the gold owned them. What were they working for? What indeed? They did not work to prettify themselves, they did not work for the status and prestige because it was dirty work, it was work with dangerous chemicals and blackened fingertips. They worked for their children, and when you are a child with parents killing themselves with dangerous chemicals just so you can live a comfortable life, there is no comfort within, just a gnawing guilt only to be alleviated by being at the shop after school, helping your parents read the stacks of letters and bills and notifying them of their business registration renewals. The kiddie Kims grew up fast, they had business acumen inculcated in them early. Meanwhile, the Mr Kims only made special appearances at the shopfront to deal with a difficult customer or to count the gold. They usually sat at the back of the store with files and surgeons’ scalpels, making more jewellery or adjusting customer purchases – fixing wedding and engagement rings that were too wide, or bracelets that were too loose. They also polished the pieces to a gleaming yellow and did a whole host of other things I did not see or understand.

  Sometimes the Kims would do runners, those that were going bankrupt. One week they would accept wares from my mother, the next week they were nowhere to be seen, their stores had closed down and the windows were covered in newspaper. Such a shame to go bankrupt, that was why they told nobody – but it also meant that they did not have to pay off their debts to the outworkers. My mother could not stand debtors who made false promises.

  One time, some Kims owed her and had not paid for many months. So she paid them a visit. She brought in a big old coat and a bread bun in a plastic bag and sat in the chair reserved for customers. She waited patiently until the Kims were done serving their customers. They tried to ignore her. More customers came in. She still waited. In between intervals of customers, she told the Kims she was waiting for her payment. She waited until closing time. The other Kims from the block and from the other suburbs’ stores had warned my mother that this Kim was going bankrupt, that they were soon closing down because Mr Kim loved Crown Casino too much.

  “We can’t pay you yet,” the Lady Kim said. “We don’t have the money.”

  “That’s what you always say, sister.”

  “But this time we really can’t!”

  “Well, I am going to wait here until you can pay me,” my mother said. “Because I am not coming home tonight without my pay. You haven’t paid me for three months. My husband will think I wasted all those hours of my life doing the work. I will be too ashamed to go home without the money.”

  “Well, there is nothing we can do about that,” said Mrs Kim. “As I told you, we have no money.” She could see my mother looking at her cases and cases of gold.

  “Chinese people shouldn’t owe any debts,” said my mother.

  “Come on, we are going bankrupt! Our house is going to be sold,” entreated Mrs Kim as she started packing up all her trays of jewellery, hoping my mother would get the message.

  “Why don’t you go home?” Mr Kim beseeched her.

  My mother started to unwrap her bread roll. “Can’t,” she said. “Not until I get paid.”

  “Well, you can’t stay in our store!”

  “You just
pack up and don’t mind me. You can go home but I am going to stay here overnight.” She leaned back in her chair.

  In the end, frustrated and feeling sorry for her, the Mr Kim took out a gold bracelet from his tray and told her, “We’re going to give you jewellery for surety until we can get the money to pay you back.” My mother watched as he carefully measured the bracelet on the scales to make sure it weighed as much as my mother was owed.

  When my mother got home that evening, she showed us the bracelet. It even had little cubic zirconias in it. Two months later, when the debt-owning Kims sold their store, they called my mother up to tell her that they had money for her. She returned the bracelet and collected the money.

  Perhaps the Kims did not know enough about the Australian law to figure out that outworkers were not subject to protection in debt matters. We all came from countries where the laws were scattered and broken, and where they could be bought with bribes, where wars happened and currency was rendered worthless at the flash of a bomb, so that the only dependable commodity of trade was gold. The Kims were used to trading on the basis of word of honour, so this became our business protocol. And when the word was not honoured, the worker was all alone. Most of the Kims were decent people; and, locked out of the language of the outside world, they knew they had only their outworkers to keep them in business. No sane Australian would be willing to work under such conditions, for so little. And yet, the dollar they paid kept dropping.

  “Ten dollars a ring? You have got to be kidding me!” The Kim flung up her hands in horror.

  “But that’s how much I always charge for the ones with the stones in them.”

  “No, I can get it from that new man from Vietnam. He only charges eight dollars.”

  My mother would leave to go to another store. But then she found out that the new man from Vietnam had been there too. She would then have to come back to the first store and try to bargain them up.