by Alice Pung
During a break in the ceremony and chanting, I looked over at my mother and noticed that one of her arms was heavily bandaged. “What happened to your arm, Ma?”
“When you were at camp, the soldering torch I was using slipped,” she explained. The instrument she was using for her jewellery work was so old that it had burst into flames and given her third-degree burns.
“The job is dangerous,” my father told me, “so your mum is not going to be doing it anymore.” She was going to sell all her machines and take her framed Registration of Business down from the wall of our house.
So the day my grandmother died was also the day my mother finally decided to end her outworking career. It was a decision resulting from an accident – but the decision itself was no accident, it was one we had seen coming for a long time. I didn’t suppose my mother knew what she was going to do with her time now, but she had made the decision at last and I figured she would find something. After all, time was so finite, it was the only thing you couldn’t buy. “You can’t buy old people,” my grandmother had told me the last time I visited her, “you can hand over some money and buy a little child, but you can’t buy old people. So remember, Agheare, to spend your time well with your parents.” Then I remembered another thing she said to me, punctuated with the deepest saddest sigh her old lungs could exhale: “But who would want to buy a useless old person like me anyway?”
EVERY year for the past five years I had made a list of “fifty things to do before I die”. I now needed a new list every day, a list I would lose and forget, a list that told me to wake up and get out of bed and eat and walk and move and smile and bathe. This was my list.
Yet the exams came and went, and I sat them.
“Now your exams are over, you can go out and play,” my mother told me. “Go on, go and have fun while you’re young. Go out with boyfriends.” If I was in a normal state of mind, I would have keeled over and died of shock.
“Brush your hair in the mornings,” my father urged. “Make yourself look pretty.”
“Do some housework, that will keep your mind off things,” my mother advised me. “This is all your fault,” she would rail at my father. “See, you have spoilt her. Now she can’t even do housework, doesn’t even want to crawl out of bed in the morning.”
I could not muster the energy to see friends or to look presentable. When friends asked me out after final exams, I would tell them yes, yes over the phone. But immediately after hanging up, the anxieties would start to kick in. Oh no, I could not do it. I could not appear in public. They would be able to see through this rubber mask. They would know how unwell I was, and they would never see me in the same way again.
After much coaxing from my parents, and after I had taken on a deathly pallor, I agreed one day to go bowling for a distant friend’s birthday. My parents were so glad that my mother even drove me to Highpoint shopping complex and gave me forty dollars.
When I arrived, there were so many people. So many people in the mall, all scurrying to buy things or try things or keep their eye on things, and I wondered, was that all there was to life? During the whole ordeal, all I could do was smile. I smiled the way a skull smiles, all teeth and no flesh. It was eerie to my friends, this rictus of someone who was feigning that they were still alive when in actuality the shell had been cracked and the person inside had escaped.
I rolled one weak ball after the other down the alley. I used the lightest balls, but they felt as if they were ripping my arm off. So much energy to lift them and then drop them, and what was the point of all this?
Everyone pretended that there was nothing wrong with me, all playing along with my deceit. They didn’t know what else they could do, with a friend who had helped them with their assignments and edited their English pieces, who had counselled them through boyfriends and been the excuse for them to see their lovers.
I rarely went out after that. To friends who didn’t know about my condition, I wrote letters, each convivial sentence forced out like a self-inflicted punishment. There was only one friend, Kathryn, who could actually stand my company. Once she gave me a yellow gerbera and spent a day trying to cheer me up. She took me out to lunch and we went to the beach. I couldn’t believe that she could tolerate my presence, this big gaping hole beside her. She stayed on the phone with me despite the silences on my side because I had no more words to give. She talked to me as she was taking her dog for a walk, and invited me to her house where she played the violin for me. She was Goodness Incarnate, but I still felt the summer stretch ahead like a rope, a rope for a head that was now defunct.
I couldn’t imagine working at Retravision anymore. All the staff and all the customers would find out. Here is the Manager’s daughter, the one who couldn’t get into university. All that money, all that waste. “Don’t tell people how you are, don’t show your aunties how you are at the moment,” my parents commanded me.
I sat in my room wiping my eyes and nose with tissues, because I didn’t even have the energy or courage to read. Reading alarmed me, it confused me even more. I was frightened every time I came across a sentence that I was meant to understand but couldn’t. Eventually, this became every sentence I read. I would invariably compare my life to the words and feel deep in my belly that I was doing it all wrong. Nothing I read assured me that anything I did was right. People became blurs. The walls became my only constant companion, so white and pristine, and solid, but I knew they were just plasterboard, and that one heavy blow would reveal the hollowness inside, and the wooden skeleton of the house. I sat and slept in the same place, I spent days and weeks in the same spot. I no longer slept in my bed, but spread my blankets on the little space of floor between the bed and the wall, like a gap between cliffs into which I had fallen.
One day Alina came in.
“Hello little one,” I said. “Come here. Come here to me.” She was in the green tracksuit of her school uniform, with the bowl haircut that I had given her. She came and sat in my lap. I put my arms around her, comforted by her familiar and strange musty smell of digging up insects during recess and relocating them to different parts of the turf.
“You are a champ,” I told her.
We sat in silence for a while. Then I heard her sniffling.
I could not believe it.
All my sadness was rubbing off onto her. It was contagious, this disease. I didn’t know what to do.
I decided there had to be an end to this. The next day I decided to do something useful. I decided to clean out the cutlery drawer. It doesn’t mean anything, the crowd in my head told me, Nothing means anything. Why are you even doing this?
Shut up, I said inside my brain, shut up. At least I am doing something.
But it means nothing.
Even if it means nothing, I am at least doing something.
Nothing means anything.
Shut up, I can’t hear you. La la la.
It’s all a waste of time.
I am picking up a fork now. The fork goes in this plastic compartment with the other forks. I knew it was all drivel, but I had to keep talking to myself to stifle the voices. Now I have a spoon in my hands. Where do you go, spoon? With all the other spoons over here … You’re going to live out the rest of your life doing things that don’t mean anything.
And now five chopsticks. Where is the sixth? Oh, there you are.
And then you’re going to die.
But I was still here when Judgment Day arrived. The results were to be released on Monday by post, but friends were calling up the hotline to find out their results early. Ninety-three, ninety-four, ninety-five. Incredible-sounding numbers, a thousand doors opening up to them. Just like the ancient imperial civil service examinations in China, which any poor villager could sit and so become eminent. With a 1200-year history of examinations behind us, who could blame us for being obsessed with tests? My grandmother had tried to tell me all these things, but my Chinese ears were not Chinese enough to pick up the sounds and meanings of her wor
ds. I had grown too old for Granny’s “in the past” stories. But I needed them now. Oh Granny, what did they do in the past when they failed exams? In the past, women couldn’t even take exams. I should consider myself lucky.
My parents wanted me to call up the hotline too. They told me that it would put an end to my torment, but I think they meant “our” torment – our collective torment. So I dialled the number and listened for the automatic voice prompts. After I punched in my student number, I waited to hear my final marks.
I hung up immediately.
I must have heard wrong. I gave a loud yowl. What a terrible joke. Someone up there really had it in for me.
My parents ran into the room, worried that I had leapt out of the upstairs window. All they saw was me with the cordless phone in my hand, looking at it.
I told them what I had heard over the phone.
I told them I must have heard wrong.
My father told me to dial again. I did.
I had not heard wrong the first time.
“You got your results now, you don’t need to be anxious anymore,” my mother told me.
How did it happen, I wondered. I was so drugged on the day of my English exam that I didn’t know what I was writing. I almost missed my Literature exam because I had drifted into on-off sleep on the couch. As for the other subjects, well, I didn’t even want to go there. Maybe there were parts of my brain that retained all the information, even though I thought I had lost it all like a virus-ridden computer that had crashed.
“You got into law at Melbourne University!”
“You got a scholarship from Monash University!”
“You got an award from the Minister of Education!”
I got out. I had got out. I was no longer stuck. Time to rub the circulation back into the ankles, time to get those forms in quickly, to make sure I was enrolled so that I could introduce myself at parties as “Alice, Arts/Law, hey how about you?” All was well, all stereotypes were fulfilled and everything was in its proper place. Onwards towards the Great Australian Dream.
You can pass go. You can collect $2000. You will be going to university.
The crowd in my head did not give me any applause, they just eventually scattered. But they scattered slowly, painfully slowly, like an irascible old person leaving a good seat at the theatre. It took months for all of the scattered thoughts to disappear. They were like vampires, needing my blood and energy to sustain them for that just one more day, that one more hour. But I would move on, move away, move up. They would die, and I would live.
THAT summer, before university started, I worked as a salesgirl at the shop and was put in charge of the mobile-phone counter. I realised that I always retreated to this place after something traumatic had happened. Who needs a mental hospital in which to recover when you have a landmark store smack-bang in the middle of Footscray? Post-nervous breakdown or feeling like a wreck? Nothing that a few extremely aggro hagglers won’t fix up. They’ll jolt you out of your torpor: “Whaddya mean this is two years outa warranty eh? I want me money back. Youse power points are shifty!”
To connect a mobile phone took at least half an hour. There were forms to fill and covers to choose. Then there was the call to Telstra for the credit check and connection. I could sense customers becoming impatient, particularly when it was their first time and they didn’t realise how long it would take. To keep them from going across the road, I would sit them down, make them instant Nescafé. I thought that mastering the art of small talk was difficult enough, but then there was also the Big Talk. I was not prepared for the Big Talk, or the desperate need for it, the sheer human necessity for a witness to a life of loneliness and misery. I met Mrs Christian, a beautiful but bleary-eyed Filipino woman in her early forties, who needed me to connect her to a mobile phone because her husband kept beating her up and bringing his mates home to “do” her. When the Telstra woman told me over the phone that Mrs Christian would not be connected because she lacked a permanent address and credit history, I didn’t know what to tell her. “Dey not going to connect me, I know.” She knew already, like all those used to an unbroken history of bad news. She knew the price you paid for wanting to leave your family to go to a country where you lost all your connections, so that there was no older brother to beat up your abusive husband.
Old women would pat my hand – “Don’t be so anxious dear, I’m not in a hurry” – and tell me that they weren’t even allowed to see their grandkids, let alone buy them DVD players for Christmas. “Your culture, dear, now you’ve got it right, you look after your elders.”
And then there was Miss Beauty Queen Emilia, who frequently visited but rarely bought anything. She wore rubber gloves soiled with garden dirt, tracksuit pants and a glittery blazer. “Can’t buy anything today,” she would say, “only have fifteen cents.” And she would open up her coin purse to show me. Whenever she did buy something, she would get me to type her name on the receipt as “Miss Beauty Queen Emilia”, because that was what she claimed she had been back in Cambodia. And there was the blind Vietnamese man in the blue Wedding-Singer-like blazer, who, like Miss Beauty Queen Emilia, would also not buy anything but would want a female salesperson to walk him through the entire store. He clutched our arms so tightly that we were afraid we’d be amputees by the end of the round, but we humoured him for many months, until my uncle decided to be the escort one day. After that, the blind man was not too sure about his tours anymore, and would want to hear our voices as well. Or there was the man in the motorised wheelchair who dressed in a leopard-print cloak like a sedentary Tarzan, who bought speaker-wire every fortnight for some obscure purpose, and the director of the funeral parlour down the road, who bought an inexplicable number of blank video-tapes every week.
My mother brought my father and me homemade three-course meals for lunch – roast pork, rice noodles, bitter gourd soup, banana-tapioca pudding. She spent the remainder of her time driving my sisters to school and picking them up, and in between she sat with us in the lunch-room during our lunch-breaks. The lunch-room was the place where all the idle scuttle-butting went on, about difficult customers we’d had that day and customers who were building new houses in Caroline Springs or Sydenham. My aunties and mother would have yelling sessions about how they saw this or that woman and how they were now aging like a dried longan, and call it a good conversation. Meanwhile, the non-Chinese employees would huddle over the Herald Sun, quietly scoff down their pizza or take-away fried rice and get the hell out of there as fast as possible, since they had no idea whether our yelling was about them or not.
*
Those innocent aunts who had started off living in the housing commission flats were now married and also working in the family business, and Aunt Sim was due to have her first baby. I remembered when Aunt Sim first arrived from Vietnam – she was fifteen and she clutched a new boxed doll in her hand, probably the only doll she had ever owned, but she willingly, smilingly handed it to me, an already spoilt-rotten Australian kid with too many toys. Aunt Sim did the work of four people at our other shop in Springvale. Not only was she a salesperson, she also did the accounts, office administration and stock orders and she did it all in such a gentle and efficient manner that after a while it was easy to forget the miracle of how she managed so much. When she went on maternity leave, my father did not know what to do.
Then a surprising thing happened. Over dinner, my mother announced, “I’m going to go and help out in the store.” She looked at my father. “You know, just to keep a lookout and watch to see that there are no shoplifters.”
We were stunned.
“What a good idea.”
“Mind you, just while my sister goes off and has her baby.”
“Yes, you would be of so much help since we are so short of staff.”
“Might as well go help out the family business,” she said.
So that was how my mother decided to go back out into the world again.
She did not buy new cloth
es for work. She wore her old clothes and no make-up, and she used the same tactics to sell as she used to bargain at the market in Footscray. She had suddenly caught on to the way the market-place operated, and realised that she did not need to know the technical specifications of a widescreen plasma television to sell one. All that mattered was that the price was right. And she was a master at haggling. The same skills she had used with the Kims she now brought to our franchise. Springvale had the biggest Chinese-Cambodian community in Victoria, and my mother seemed to know the art of selling better than we who had been educated here, we who were sent to expensive corporate training workshops in the Head Office.
She was not relying on us so much to translate the English. She was picking it up, very slowly. I wrote out step-by-step pictorial instructions, on a little sheet for her to keep in her pocket, on how to type up a receipt. And we discovered an extraordinary thing: that customers tended to trust this forty-something housewife more than a trained salesperson. My mother was bent on not letting customers walk out of the store. “Ay! Ay!” she would call from halfway across the store, “Sir! Ma’am! Come back! Come back and I will do better one for you, I promise.” Sometimes she even dragged the Asian customers back into the shop. To ordinary Australians that would be harassment, but to Southeast Asians it was a convincing sale, it meant that the seller wanted your business so much they were willing to chase you down the street to give you a good deal.
My mother could identify with the new migrants, even those from far-off countries like Sudan and Ethiopia. She knew what kind of products they would ask for, and she knew they would be comfortable bargaining. She knew how to say the numbers in English, they knew how to say the numbers in English, and so a deal was struck. She knew that they had to carry their goods home on the train or bus, so she secured them extra tightly with pink twine.