Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

  “I can eat prawns too,” he told me as a concession.

  I plopped some prawns on top.

  “And chicken.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, I do. Bring it on.”

  I heaped the chicken slivers onto his plate.

  “And crocodile.”

  On went the croc.

  “And venison, too.”

  “Poor Bambi, eh?” I looked at him.

  “Oh, I love Bambi,” he raved. “He tastes just like chicken.”

  “That was chicken. I haven’t given you any deer yet.”

  “Oh.”

  “Would you like some?”

  “Yes please.” I had never seen a more eager carnivore.

  “Michael, I am impressed by the way you handle chopsticks,” said my father. Why did they expect every non-Asian to be a bumbling jab-you-in-the-eye fool with chopsticks, and why was a twenty-year-old Caucasian’s use of chopsticks something to clap about when little Chinese three-year-olds were using them like finger extensions? Why were white people so proud of their chopstick-wielding skills instead of seeing the abysmally low standards we had set for them?

  “Wah, where did you learn that?” asked my father. “Just like an expert!”

  “Thank you, Mr Pung,” he said modestly.

  There was, of course, no “Oh, just call me Bob/Joe/Jack, mate” from my father. My father’s idea of getting familiar with someone was to tell them war stories. He didn’t do it to sober them up or edify them, he did it to crack them up.

  “This fish reminds me of the Pol Pot years when the starved, dead bodies floated up the river during the flood. I got the job of dragging them to higher, drier land. We wrapped them up in a dry blanket and me and my mate grabbed on to each end. Every time we tripped, the blanket would get water-soaked and even heavier. Hah hah, so funny! There we were, both probably only weighing seventy kilos between us, trying to drag this dead body three times our weight, and listen to this – my mate turns to me and says, ‘Hope you’re not going to be this heavy when it’s time for me to drag you,’ and I say to him, ‘What do you mean when you drag me? I’m going to be the poor soul who will be dragging you!’”

  Unfortunately, most of his guests had no idea whether to laugh or cry.

  “Eat more fish!” my father would urge, “eat more fish!”, heaping it onto their plates. He did not believe in mental images leaving a bitter aftertaste. At home, whenever I told him not to mention certain things at the dinner table, he said, “I’m just talking about crap, you’re not actually eating it!” But here was this boy, eating at least six species of native and domestic fauna just to please my parents. What a champ you are, I thought, those animals did not die in vain after all.

  When it was time to present the gifts we had bought for my mother, my brother gave her a handbag. My sisters gave her things they had made – a little gold-sprayed macaroni frame and thingo to hang on the door. The thingo had Alison and Alina’s photograph glued to it. I gave her a new shirt. And Michael pulled out a bunch of flowers – little white jasmines wrapped in tasteful brown paper and tied with a raffia ribbon. “Tanks you velly march,” said my ma politely. I should have reminded him that the more garish the paper, the better, especially if it was bright red. My mother didn’t understand that sometimes the more understated things cost the most. All she knew was that the bigger and brighter, the better. Of course, she would rather have had a durian.

  “I didn’t know what was appropriate,” he said to her. “I even asked the gardener at college, and he told me to get these.”

  My mother didn’t answer because she didn’t understand a word he said. So I answered for her. “Oh, they are lovely. She loves them.”

  Does she like me? I knew he was thinking, I don’t know what she is thinking and she never gives me an answer when I speak to her. But on the other hand, she seems to be smiling a bit so that must be a good sign. I hope.

  I gave his hand a little squeeze under the table to reassure him of the lie he had been duped into believing.

  *

  I was well aware of my mother’s list of objections to potential husbands. Don’t marry an Aussie, they sleep around and have no morals. Don’t marry a Cantonese, they will gamble away the family fortune. Don’t marry a Vietnamese because they are charmers and spend too much. Don’t marry a Teochew because they are stingy and spend too little. But whatever you do, you must not remain unmarried! So now she was going to elaborate on her objections against my going out with a white boy, clause by clause, a week after their first meeting. “I bet he splits everything in half,” she began, “they are no good the way they do that. It means they can leave whenever they want. Does he split things in half?”

  “No,” I lied. The truth was, I also hated splitting bills in half. You either kept to yourself or gave it your all. One way was a way to conduct your affairs so that you minimised loss. The other way was built on hope and love and longevity, things that the accountants and actuaries could not calculate.

  “Some non-Asians,” I said, very careful with my words, “like to split things in half because they think that it is true equality.”

  “Hah! Equality! What kind of relationship is determined by a calculator? Does he calculate things like that?”

  “No.” This time I was speaking truthfully, because I made sure there was never an opportunity to calculate. I didn’t want any arguments about money. Whenever we had to pay for something, I’d make sure my wallet was out.

  “You know, your Auntie Que had a suitor once who always walked a few metres away when they were at the checkout of a supermarket. Your grandmother gave him the evil eye, but he was so thick he never got it. Then she started making comments about how expensive bok choy was these days.”

  Yes, I thought, these little tests to prove whether you could live with the person for the rest of your life. I was not ready for that yet, I did not even look for these things.

  “Another thing, they are not as hard-working as we are,” my mother continued. “You don’t want to end up supporting your husband.”

  I wondered what was worse, being supported by your husband or supporting him. I thought of those women at home stuck between their four walls and their husband’s whims, calling their spouse “Elder Brother” and fighting a daily war against dirt so that their pretend brother could come home to a clean house.

  “Those Aussies, they see marriage as a light affair. You piss them off, they divorce you. And they hug and kiss other women all the time, like it means nothing.”

  I had met some of his female friends – girls with names like Cathy and Gemma and Louisa – girls who gave him big bear-hugs and kisses when they met. It was an Aussie thing, I decided. It was all innocent standard practice and it didn’t mean a thing. They didn’t have issues with physical contact like we did. Also, I didn’t want those amicable, easygoing girls to think that I was Michael’s Keeper – one of those little Asian chicks dressed all in black, glaring out of immaculately mascara-ed eyes and getting out the claws whenever another female came within three kilometres of her property. Cathy was an Arts/Science student with an earring through her eyebrow and Gemma wore long dyed Indian sari-skirts and wanted to be a third-world feminist.

  If they had any respect for you, they would ease up on the kissing part, you know, I told myself, after all, you’re his girlfriend.

  No, you idiot, it’s not them, I reprimanded myself, it’s you! You’re just too uptight.

  But at least I don’t go around kissing other people’s boyfriends in full view of their girls! Perhaps some of what my mother said is true.

  Don’t be stupid, you know she’s just working from broken stereotypes. You want to take the advice of someone who gleans their wisdom from Werther’s toffee ads? Believe me, if you were his Australian girlfriend, you wouldn’t have an issue at all with this.

  How do you know? So you think maybe it is a cultural thing, their touchy-feely tendencies? Perhaps I should ask h
im about it …

  NO!

  Why not?

  Because then he will know that you are insecure! That you blow little things into big grotesque carnival floats that cast shadows over perfect summer afternoons.

  Well, who do I turn to? Who can tell me whether the kissing is something they do all the time to mates or whether they’re just doing it because I’m his quiet little Asian chick who doesn’t like to cause a ruckus? If Gemma’s so interested in third-world women’s rights then she should understand and respect us, damn her to her hemp hell!

  What can I do?

  Accept it, the supposedly rational side of my mind advised me, if you can’t beat them or join them, then be “yourself”. Asian women are meant to be legendary in their patience and calm in such matters, aren’t they? Sit back stoically with an indulgent glint in your eye and he will love you ten times more for your generosity.

  Hang on there! I objected. Something is not quite right …

  Shut up, you’re meant to be practising your Zen tranquillity so that he will love you even more.

  “Are you listening to me?” demanded my mother. “Honestly, I don’t know what’s going to become of you. You sit there like a bloody taro when I am trying to teach you important things, and it’s as if you can’t hear a thing! Must be diseased with love – your brain has turned to rot!”

  “Ma, they’re not all like that, you know,” I told her.

  “Like that, like that,” she sighed, “you know, you’re beginning to be like that too.”

  *

  I didn’t know what being like that was, but it was making my life progressively worse. Whenever we walked past her friends in Footscray, the jewellery-store wives behind their glass counters, they would ask the inevitable question – “Wah, daughter so big now! Does she have a boyfriend yet?”– and my mother would tell them “No.”

  I wanted to interject, but instead I smiled through gritted teeth until I could feel my face ossifying. She was only doing her duty as my mother to package and sell me as best as she could. She would not acknowledge that this package might have already been bought.

  After many stormy looks in my direction, she exploded at the dinner table one evening. “Ah Hua saw your daughter kissing Michael!” she proclaimed to my father. She did not speak to me, but gesticulated wildly, doing a pretty good impersonation of her friend Ah Hua, except seventy decibels louder than the original: “‘Wah’, Ah Hua said to me, ‘Sister, didn’t you say they were just friends? They seem very close for friends.’”

  Goddamn idle scuttlebutts! I thought. Bloody rumour-starter. She’ll be sorry.

  “When was this?” I demanded.

  “At your sister’s seventh birthday.”

  “You mean at Alina’s birthday last weekend? In this house?” I was flabbergasted. Woah, this Ah Hua was getting delusional as well. What a sick mind.

  “How am I meant to know where?”

  I tried to recall what particular acts of sin and fornication we got up to at my sister’s birthday party in the presence of sixteen schoolkids.

  Then I remembered.

  Because he looked so cute in the pink spangly fairy crown one of the little girls had shoved on top of his head, I kissed him, in the same way I had kissed the little sisters and cousins and girls at the birthday.

  “I gave him a peck on the cheek!”

  “What shame!” lamented my mother. “What could I tell her? ‘Heh, young people, I don’t know what they get up to these days’? She probably thinks that I’ve let you run wild!

  What humiliation!”

  I wondered what my father would say about all this, but he was so embarrassed at the mere mention of the topic that he simply said to my mother, “That woman should control the nervous tic in her eyeballs.”

  In response, she turned to me and warned, “And you stop kissing that boy!”

  IT was 10.30 p.m. I parked my car in front of the gates of his college, did the automatic head-swivel action to see if we were being watched, and then we kissed. I yanked up the gear-stick and twisted the keys to stop the motor.

  He unbuckled his seat-belt and shifted about uncomfortably. “Ummm … look what time it is.”

  I turned the engine back on and looked at the digital clock on the car.

  “You should drive back. Your parents … you know.”

  I sighed. Hand back on the brake. I knew my snatched moments of joy were selfish torments I inflicted on my parents. I knew they would be waiting up, all night if they had to, watching for my car to pull into the driveway. They would pretend they were watching television in their room, but I knew better. Sometimes, my mother’s face would peer out of the window, black shadow against the flickering background.

  My parents let me see as much of Michael as I wanted – twelve hours a day if I so desired – but of course there was a catch: he had to see me at our house, and I was not, under any circumstances, allowed to take him upstairs. And for that matter, if any boy could get it up in my parents’ home to deflower me in the urine-stained bed I had shared with my grandmother for seven and a half years, he’d have to be extraordinarily gutsy, or have some kind of scatological obsession.

  Of course, my room didn’t look like the grotty history it concealed. When we moved into the new house, my parents let me keep my grandmother’s bed, and for years it was the only thing in my room besides a stereo on a small black stand that had once been a Sony display cabinet at Retravision. My room was a huge, huge room for such a small, small person, and it was painted entirely in white, with heavy pink wall-to-floor curtains covering the wide windows. Smelling like Imperial Leather soap, it was exactly the sort of room one would see in an American movie, belonging to the blonde-haired sixteen-year-old sweetheart. Most of the time I didn’t see what was there. I only liked the spaces. The more empty space I could make in the room, the better.

  The much-loved and peed-in bed was covered in many layers, like the princess with twelve petticoats I once read about in a fairytale. It even had a faux-Victorian valance – a pale purple skirt all the way around the bottom segment, concealing four knobby wooden legs.

  Once I took Michael upstairs to my room while my mother had gone out. I didn’t necessarily want to sleep with him, I just wanted to see what he looked like in my room, and let the image set itself in my mind for eternity so that every time I felt the walls closing in, I would be able to pull it out of my mind like a developed Polaroid tucked carefully between the pages of an illicit diary. And then I would be able to tell myself, hah hah, I broke a rule, and the frisson and the crude sense of accomplishment in breaking the rule would be my consolation and my power.

  If we really wanted to sleep with our boyfriends, as I knew many of my classmates did in high school, none of us would be stupid enough to do it at home anyway. A girl from Hong Kong in my English class lost her virginity in the cinema, but we never asked her what movie she was watching in case she burst into tears because it was inane and forgettable trash. In fact, we weren’t even supposed to find out about it, except that her boyfriend thought it was a neat trick to brag to his mates, and then word got around to the girls’ school and it was the end of Sherry’s academic career. I saw her alone on the train, hair neatly tied back in a ponytail, staring straight ahead, pretending she couldn’t see anyone. Any greetings of “Hi Sherry!” were met with suspicion – she thought that we were teasing her. Then the next time I saw her on the train it was in the lap of the boyfriend, although a few months ago she wouldn’t even hold his hand in public. She sat slumped like a ventriloquist’s doll and glared at any girl who dared cast looks at her boyfriend.

  What did my parents think – that I was so uncontrolled I would not be able to restrain myself whenever there was a bed around? In that case, Michael and I had better not walk through the furniture department in Myer, or who knows what progeny could be created to torment us in the future, the way we were tormenting them? Or were they merely afraid that I was so stupid and meek that I would let my
boyfriend take advantage of me? Probably it was the latter, because the idea of your daughter having kinky thoughts of any kind was a terrible, terrible one.

  Michael entered my room awfully reluctantly because he knew we were breaking The Rule, and he was a kind boy, a decent boy, a boy who wanted to be with me not because of sex, obviously, because otherwise he could have dated the girls flinging themselves at him in college (or so I thought). He sat awkwardly on the edge of the bed, shoulders slumped, worried like hell about the return of my mother. I looked at him, and the image I saw was not one of a suave, languidly-leaning-on-one-elbow Casanova – the kind of person that my parents feared above all else. Didn’t my parents know that I would not have gone for that type? Couldn’t they see that Michael was more anxious than I, and that I wasn’t planning to ravish him? I was nervous myself; it was the agitated frisson of pretending to do the forbidden. “I like you,” I said to him. I like looking at you. I like the perfection of your eyebrows and your angular face like a Lucian Freud painting. I like your fingers that are much prettier than my own. I like the fact that you are sitting on that bed even though I told you about its distasteful history. I like the fact that you don’t make a big deal out of my pretentious room. I like you sitting here and instead of being my chattel you could become a permanent fixture. I could keep you in the wardrobe and feed you bits of food, and we would be happy living this closeted existence until we were discovered.

  Or more likely, until the doorbell rang.

  *

  “Just tell her the truth,” he said to me later when my mother had left, and my shakes had started. He spoke as if the answer were that simple.

  My mother had returned from picking up my sisters from school and seen me come downstairs to open the door. More importantly, she had seen Michael following behind me.

  The first question she asked was, “What were you doing upstairs with the boy?”

  “We were vacuuming.” If my face were any straighter, you would be able to sign an affidavit above my eyebrows.