Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

  “You’re not much help,” he muttered.

  “I told you to go home, but you didn’t take my advice. Board the train if you don’t want to put your back-door virginity at risk.”

  “I’m not leaving you here alone! What do you think will happen?”

  “Nothing. We’ve just been standing in the middle of the street talking for too long, and any two people who are stationary for more than three minutes are suspected of carrying stuff. Remember, this is all your doing. Keep walking and ignore them.”

  As we kept walking, a stupid smirk appeared on his face.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Heh. Now that I’ve put your life at risk, I’m going to have to escort you back from the station to your father’s shop every day.”

  My knight in shining aluminium foil, please don’t feel it necessary to martyr yourself. My pa will kill you if he sees you. Thinking of my father, I walked a little slower.

  “What time does your dad’s shop close tonight?” he asked.

  “Nine o’clock. It’s Friday – late-night trading.”

  “Errr … it’s only six-thirty at the moment.” He had stopped in front of a shopfront with neon lettering on the outside declaring Hai Duong Vietnamese Noodles. Mr Hai Duong himself was probably inside declaring, “Wah, isn’t that the Newtone Electronics daughter and what is she doing loitering with scruffy white demons?”

  He looked at me. “Umm … want to grab some dinner then?”

  I hesitated, and tried to think clearly.

  He really likes you, I told myself.

  No way, he likes the idea of you, the less feeble part of my mind insisted, he’s probably a sinophile. Don’t forget that he’s doing an Asian Studies major. You’re like his third-world trip or something. He’s too broke to go overseas so you’re his substitute exotic experience. You go to dinner with him now and he’ll think you’re going to be his Cheery Chysanthemum forever, or at least until he gets bored of you and the next little Oriental Oleander comes along. Then you’re going to be sorry.

  Bugger, what’ll I do?

  How the hell am I meant to know, I’ve never been on a “date”before! But you’re not going to last long if you keep using words like bugger, because authentic Chinese chicks don’t speak like that, you sound like a bloody ocker.

  Well, what am I supposed to do?

  Firstly, stop having this dialogue inside your head because he’ll realise that you’re not only slow but insane too. Secondly, tell him no, tell him he’s a show-off and a sinophile only interested in your ethnicity, tell him you don’t do conventional Karate-Kid-Part-II romances, tell him you have to head back before it gets dark, tell him you have to help your father sell Walkmans, tell him you have to go to the May Madness Sale at Forges to buy plastic tofu boxes for your mother, tell him you have to go to the local pool before closing time to check out those fabulous homeboys getting changed into their flannelette shirts and trousers before they retreat back to their com-pu-tahs, tell him you have to find a way to dispose of those prying Indochinese interlopers who will stare at you and report back to your relatives when you eventually tell him … “Umm, yeah, okay.”

  Bugger.

  After all, what’s the big deal? I reasoned to myself, have some humility. A young man casually mentions that you might have dinner together and you think he’s asking for your hand, you think you’re going to end up being his little Indochinese wife and in a decade’s time you won’t be fascinating enough any more because he’s just drawn to the idiosyncrasies of your culture, and he has no idea that your culture extends to looking after your folks in their decrepit dotage and constantly looking out for ASIO which has caused you to develop a nasty compulsive head-swivelling habit. And of course he has no idea that ASIO really stands for Asian (Southeast) Investigation Organisation, but if you tell him, perhaps one day when you’ve both graduated, he can help you sue the organisation for causing you chronic pain and suffering …

  I was still not convinced.

  Oh, come on, Voice of Reason cajoled, you’re turning into one of those anxious killjoy Asian women who worry so much that they end up with dried-fig faces at the age of thirty; come on, you’re only eighteen, just sit down, just relax, just have dinner, and don’t take things so seriously.

  So we entered the mirror-walled, plastic Ikea-chaired surroundings of Hai Duong, and when we sat down, he asked me:

  “What will your father say when I ask you to be my girlfriend?”

  *

  My cousin Melanie had recently married her skip boyfriend, although I don’t know why he called himself that. “Hey I’m just a skip!” he kept insisting, “I won’t be offended if you all call me that, ha ha!” He grinned like a goof at his own generosity, not realising that all my other relatives had already determined from day one that they would refer to him as the Round Red-haired Demon, even in Melanie’s presence. They congratulated themselves on their own magnanimity of spirit – after all, we were well known for calling “our own people” such affectionate names as “Horseface”, “Toothless Aunt”, “Duck Brother” and “Big Fat Potato”.

  Big Fat Potato was the boy to whom I was to have been betrothed according to the whims of his mother. When that hadn’t worked out, she quickly put him on a plane to Vietnam and he came back with better goods. Oh, much better! The girl was beautiful and shy and sweet, and I wondered whether she knew she had ended up with the son of a Permanent Pincher. Perhaps she didn’t know. Perhaps he seduced her with a suitcase loaded with Ferrero Rocher chocolates and Gloweave shirts.

  I was not invited to the wedding, of course, so the first time I ever met Big Fat Potato was when I accompanied my mother to the Grand Opening of his mother’s new grocery store. There I saw a skinny young man with his chin almost touching his chest, watching the register. He looked like a sad squid with a big head. “Ay.” His mother grabbed him by the shoulders and glared at me: “This is Tim.” Her chin was as high as her son’s was low, and she thrust him forward as if to say, Look here, this is what you could have had if your parents didn’t think you were too good for him. Now that he’s married, your snobby old man has not only lost a son-in-law but also a Chinese Grocery Store, mwwaahhh hah hah, go suck lychees and dieeee!

  I barely glanced at the son, as if to say, Dear Aunt, you can shove durians up your Chinese Grocery Store for all I care.

  “Hello,” I muttered.

  He glared at me with lowered eyes, as if to say, You are the one my ma thought would make me a good wife, so you must be a traditional tea-pouring, tale-telling bitch and I hate you.

  “Hi,” he mumbled.

  Should I ask questions? I wondered. “How is your wife?” No, too personal. How did you know about my wife, you gloating gossip? “How’s business? Must be good working here hah?” I’m stuck at my mother’s store selling Vietnamese beef jerky, how do you think business is? “Having fun at the counter?” Ecstatic fun, would you like me to dance the merry little “Buy Korean Gingseng” jig for you?

  Fortunately, my mother broke the silence by exclaiming, “Wah! Your son! Married now! And your daughter-in-law is so beautiful, so useful, so helpful, so good!” Too bad the girl couldn’t hear these compliments because she was packing boxes in the back room.

  “You know,” my mother said, “my niece got married recently too, but she married a white ghost. I always tell my daughter never to pick one of them because you know how they tend to sleep around.”

  “Oh, but they’re not all like that. Also, having a white son-in-law could be good,” declared Fat Potato’s mother, “more people kowtow to you, you know.”

  Of course. Melanie’s father knew that very well. We could never escape the counter-effects of colonisation, they were passed on two generations and more. “When Melanie takes the Round Red-Headed Demon back to Cambodia for the honeymoon, they will be swamped by kowtowers from all sides, heh heh!” boasted Uncle Frank. He loved his new son-in-law as much as his own child. The white skin did the trick.
The white skin would ensure that Uncle Frank got the respect his own small sense of self denied him. We were funny that way, always believing that we were rescued by white people even when the white people didn’t see themselves as our rescuers – in fact, they probably thought that we were self-sufficient, hard-working heroes from Hanoi or Hunan who manufactured their T-shirts and married their sons.

  But we were also hypocrites. We loved them for their easygoing natures, their laid-back generosity, their simple acceptance of our culture, or whatever we told them constituted our culture. We fed them fluorescent yellow lemon chicken and sludge-black beef in black-bean sauce and they lauded our fine Chinese cuisine. Anything nuanced, like brown braised chicken’s feet (we were never wasteful) was also cultural but in an idiosyncratic “only the Chinese eat that” sort of way. We loved their country, their supermarkets and their sheer genius in inventing Glad-Wrap; and the more we loved these things, the more it made us realise how much we hated the dirt, the sludge and the smells of our homelands, the squelchy grottiness of our markets and the self-abnegation of our souls.

  But most of all, we hated ourselves for loving them.

  *

  I grabbed a paper napkin from the metal napkin box on the table and started wiping my spoon and chopsticks with it. Then I started wiping his utensils.

  His eyes widened. “Umm, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Saving you from Mr Salmonella.”

  “Isn’t that a bit rude?”

  “Look around you. Everone else is doing it. That’s what these napkins are for. The restaurant owners don’t care. Saves their poor high-school sons from having to wash the dishes too thoroughly. We’re actually doing them a favour.”

  He didn’t look too convinced, but he saw that at least three other tables were doing the same. He also noticed for the first time the fourteen-year-old son of the owner, still sweating in his white shirt with his private-school tie loosened around his neck, taking orders from the table opposite us. He turned back to me. “So … umm, how about it?” His eyes, I noticed, were the same colour as the amber jar of fish-sauce on the table.

  I liked fish-sauce.

  I didn’t know what to say or do, and it was my turn to speak. What could I say? “How about what?” Come on, you know exactly what what implies, you’re just prolonging his torment. “Oh. You want to go out with me. Sure. Get in line, and get your folks to make an inventory of their assets and real estate, including any small businesses they own, and then get them to put forward a tender submission to my folks.” Or how about, “I’d love to be your girlfriend, but my darling, first you need to get a bowl haircut, you need to get a shirt-and-tie combo, you need to stop making up silly sonnets and start thinking about our mortgage and how you can give my parents Eurasian grandkids so that we can improve the gene pool for the next generation, because Eurasians are meant to be the most beautiful people in the world according to my pa, The Reader’s Digest and Han Suyin.”

  Then I thought about Cousin Melanie parading her husband around to our dirt-poor relatives in Phnom Penh and it wasn’t so funny anymore. I suddenly felt very sad, and not so good about myself.

  He just wants to screw you and sow his wild oats, I told myself, and then not even the Fresh-off-the-Boats at Footscray Swim Centre will want you, and all your eggs will dry up and you’ll be a sorry case, a warning to future delinquent daughters. And then what will you do hah?

  I didn’t know what to do. I remembered once unpacking a new washing machine for a middle-aged customer. He stood admiring the product, nodding his approval. “I could get one for half the price at Cash Converters, but there’s nothing like brand-new goods, you mark my words, young lady. Cost me a week’s wages, but worth it. Brand-new.” And then: “That’s how we Chinese like our women too.” Wink wink, nudge nudge. I imagined the neat young homeboys with their severe expressions and their shirts tucked into their pants diligently packing me into a cardboard box, sealing the top with masking tape and sending me back to my manufacturers. “No good, is broken.” And their mothers standing over them, boxing their ears and shouting, “Aiyah, stupid boy! How could you pick one that was broken hah?” Hands shoved in their pockets and looking sheepish, they would protest, “But Ma, how was I to know? She did sell us a new microwave, remember?”

  I started to laugh. Good, good, treat it as a joke, because you’re taking this whole thing far too seriously. Laugh so that you won’t squirm when he says, “I was only kidding, hah hah, I just came back with you to meet Franco Cozzo,” or when he tells you, “Heh, what a joke, I was only mucking around, hasn’t your mother ever told you that we white devils do that all the time, we get our kicks that way?”, or when he says …

  “I am serious, you know.”

  Oh.

  How serious? I immediately wanted to ask. I told myself to shut up.

  Come on, Voice of Reason coaxed, just say yes. Come on, look at him, he’s cute, and other girls like him, and he doesn’t seem the type of boy who’s going to make you wear Hello-Kitty apparel or hold his hand because helplessness is so endearing, and oh, come on, he has fish-sauce eyes for crying out loud!

  But I couldn’t stop the other commentary that was going on inside my mind. I wanted to ask him whether he planned to go to Southeast Asia anytime soon, because there he would meet girls ten thousand times nicer and milder and good-er than I was, girls like Big Fat Potato’s wife who would graciously slink into the corners and sit in back rooms grateful just to be here. Girls who would dote on him, who’d do more than wipe the salmonella from his spoon and fork.

  I wanted to know whether he wanted to go out with me just to spite his parents. To say, look here, you Capital-L Liberal folks, I’m different from you, I’m going out with this authentic, culturally oppressed ethnic minority, and she’s going to give our kids the third-world gene, and there is nothing you can do about it! Then I realised that if I still had head lice and scabies he would not have given me a second glance.

  I wanted to know whether it was only because I was “exotic”, and if so, what that word meant to him. If he told me he liked my almond eyes and caramel skin, I would tell him to buy a bag of confectionery instead, because I was sick of it all – how we always had to have hair like a black waterfall, alabaster or porcelain skin, and some body part or other resembling a peach. I wanted to ask him whether one of his reasons for going out with me was to test out the rumour about Asian girls’ gynaecological advantages. And finally, I wanted to know why, out of all the girls in his college who liked him, he had picked me.

  But then I thought, bugger it. I didn’t want to marry him. And if I didn’t want to marry him, then why go through all the trouble and torment for something so impermanent? Dating – my Auntie Chia’s first and only “date” was at thirty-two, in Safeway, and she had been sent there by my grandparents to suss out whether her fiancé was a cheapskate. Why should I even give it a try? Soon enough he would discover that I wasn’t the flippant, fun or exciting girl he liked, especially with the head-swivelling compulsion and the multiple neuroses. Going out with him would transform me into Woody Allen with a black wig. In half a decade’s time I would be someone’s serious wife, and he would be history because we Southeast Asians don’t do the Bridges of Madison County thing. Or perhaps in half a decade’s time I would have the matchmakers avoiding me like the plague, whispering to each other, “Oh, there’s the one who does the dating thing, goes out with one after another to try them out.”

  I didn’t know which was worse. I could already feel the ASIO spies disguised as diners watching me.

  Bugger it, why couldn’t I have something simple and spontaneous and not-so-serious? Bugger. Bugger. Bugger. Then I realised, why not? Just give him a simple and spontaneous and not-so-serious answer to show him that you’re a simple and spontaneous and not-so-serious person. Why not why not why not?

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I can’t.” Great. Now you sound like fi
fteen-year-old loser whose parents won’t let her go out. What are you going to say now? “It’s not you, it’s me?” Oh, but it was so true!

  We both sat there looking pretty tormented. When our food arrived, we let the noodles soak. He half-heartedly plonked in a spoon.

  “You know, I don’t know how to do this.”

  “Don’t worry, they automatically lower the MSG content for Caucasians and you can use a fork.”

  “No! I mean, I’ve never … you know, asked anyone … like … well, you know …”

  “Oh.”

  “Perhaps I’ve gone about it the wrong way. I’m an idiot.

  Sorry. I’ve mucked it up. Crap.”

  “No, you haven’t. I think I’ve mucked it up.” I paused, and realised that I didn’t say these words merely to make him feel better either. I wanted to cry. This was terrible and confusing and I had mucked it up by thinking too much, and now I had hurt this poor amateur Asian-asker-outer by frightening myself with fears before anything had even happened.

  “Well …” I said, and paused. Where could I begin?

  “Err …” I began again. How could I begin? Oh, what to say! Oh, what to do!

  Luckily he came up with a simple solution.

  “Ummm … can we un-muck it then?”

  Anything to get rid of this sudden sinking feeling I had in my gut, this feeling of cowardice. This feeling of missing out on something I wasn’t even sure I wanted. But worst of all, this feeling of missing out on something I might have chosen for myself.

  “Okay.”

  ONCE we resolved to un-muck things, it became much easier. After all, I thought, it was time to loosen this small and tightly coiled life of mine and do the things that ordinary young people did, like falling in love without being under the spotlight of the Indochinese (in)security cameras. So I went on my first date. And my second and third. Woohoo, I thought, I’m doing well. At least I beat Aunt Chia’s record, and in none of those dates did we venture near a supermarket. In fact, I didn’t even let my parents know I was “going out”, and we visited places and suburbs where no one would ever recognise us.