‘Definitely, but I realise now I’d stop going out with him if he wasn’t.’
‘But you kept me, your long-time friend, in the dark.’
Laura doesn’t answer right away. I get the feeling she’s picking her words carefully. ‘Yeah, does sound loserish in hindsight. But you were so caught up with Rosie and Lisa. You came from a time in my life when Mum wasn’t who she is now. I didn’t know if you could transition.’ She pauses. ‘Pina, Tim said you should get yourself to a doctor for an ECP.’
I feel a dull thud in my stomach. ECP. Emergency Contraceptive Pill. Three times I’ve been told this. Who ever thought I’d be having to think about it. No way can I be pregnant. I couldn’t deal with a kid. I can barely look after myself. ‘I will. Today. I’ll talk to my uncle. Or his girlfriend.’
‘Good.’ Laura sounds calm and confident again, but then that wavers. ‘So, you’re cool about my mum?’
‘Your mum’s always been so nice, Laura. It’s just a bit strange, you know, knowing there was all that all along. And I kinda feel bad that you didn’t think you could tell me. Like I was giving you vibes that I’d trash you or something.’ And I find my own mum’s lurking in my head. ‘Laura, do you think my mum’s cool?’
‘You know I do. Cool, wise, whatever.’
‘Whatever?’
‘Yeah, whatever. Well, unless she’s murdered someone or something like that.’
Has she? Something’s feeling sort of dead in me.
‘Hey, why do you ask?’
‘I’ll talk to you when I get back. I need more time here.’
We say goodbye, send each other phone-hugs, and hang up.
I walk out into the hallway and hear computer keys tapping. I’ve been heard too. ‘Good morning, Pina, I’m in here,’ Wei Lee’s voice sings out to me. ‘Just a bit of work before I take you out for the day.’
We’re soon getting around Melbourne and she gradually tells me about herself, but carefully never asking about me. I know I should tell her I need to go to a doctor, but the day’s going so well that my mood is finally lifting. I just want a peaceful, simple day.
In one funky fashion shop in Chapel Street, with those plastic models in the window that look like someone’s shaved away their inner thighs, waist and hips, she sees me stare longingly at a dress; deep blue, short, slinky and strapless. Wei Lee convinces me to try it on.
‘I’ll buy it for you. It would make your breasts look so good, and it does this swirly clingy thing around your butt.’
I can’t help but laugh. ‘Exactly why I’m not buying it, Wei Lee. I’m too fat!’ I moan at the heffalump in the changing room mirror. ‘I look like a cow!’ I cringe at her little frame. ‘You buy it. I wish I was you.’
‘But I don’t have the breasts and butt to fill it, Pina.’
‘You’re lucky you’re so thin!’
Wei Lee smiles. ‘When I was your age, I wished I was like you Mediterranean girls. Curvy, big boobs, sexy hips. I felt so embarrassed about my apricot breasts, saggy bum and these narrow slits for eyes. I even thought of having cosmetic surgery to open my eyes. They called me ‘scarycrow’ at school. Scary ’cos they thought my narrow eyes meant I was sneaky. Crow because of my black hair and stick figure. And maybe my clothes were a bit rag-like ’cos we didn’t have much money.’
Soon the dress is in a shiny bag in my hand announcing I’ve shopped at the shop on Chapel Street. We’re strolling along with gelati while I wonder if I’ll ever have the courage to wear that sexy outfit. The chocolate gelati isn’t exactly helping me feel I can wear it.
I freeze as I catch my reflection in a shop window. My stomach’s sticking out like I’m –
Suddenly, I want to fling the gelati and the dress at the me in that window.
Wei Lee has taken my arm. ‘Pina!’ She leads me to a nearby bench while people mill around us, some glancing over at the big blubbering girl with chocolate gelati dripping over one hand and the neat little Asian woman comforting her.
‘I don’t want the dress. I can’t look sexy. I’m fat, and I’m going to get fatter!’ I sob while she strokes my arm and waits. ‘I could be pregnant.’
Wei Lee hugs me. ‘Then there’s something we need to do today. You need to see a doctor, Pina. Get a test, and discuss your options.’
It feels so good to have someone take control of this gnawing fear in me. But I’m sure of what I want. ‘I know the options. But I can’t be, I can’t have … you know.’
As we head back to her car, she’s calling her doctor on her mobile, requesting an emergency appointment. Then she’s driving along, one hand on the steering wheel, one holding my hand, while I pour it all out about Scott and the sex we had.
Dr Nguyen has a pleasant waiting room, a pleasant face, and asks embarrassing questions softly and calmly. Wei Lee holds my hand, helping me along when I stumble over the details. I tower over Dr Nguyen just like I tower over Wei Lee, but I feel like a nasty germ under a microscope as I take an ECP, have a blood test for any lurking STIs, and listen to some advice about condoms and safe sex – both the physical and emotional sort. He’ll let me know if the blood test reveals anything and I’m to let him know if I notice anything or feel sick.
At his office door, he and Wei Lee bow and kiss each other on the cheek. His final words to me are spoken softly and warmly as he looks up to me towering over him.
‘It is very very unlikely that you are pregnant, very very unlikely you have any infections. All you’ve caught is a huge dose of experience and wisdom. May it serve you well.’
We drive the short distance back home, and all the while I’m thanking Wei Lee profusely. At least one rock has been untied from around my ankles, and I sure don’t ever intend to lug something like that around again.
12
Of pasts and panopticons
I HANG UP MY VERY CRUSHED DRESS, smooth it out with my hands, and am even beginning to feel like I could wear it one day and look reasonable in it. Then Wei Lee pops her head cheerily around my door. ‘Now, I noticed your gelati ended up on a footpath, and I figure it’s time for a late lunch. How about we stroll down Acland Street?’
So we do. The world’s on display around us; mixes of colours, sounds and smells are coming from shopfronts, conversations and laughter flow from pavement seating areas. I find myself staring at the people parade: ferals and business suits, women in hijabs and rabbis in black hats, metrosexuals in cut-off t-shirts and wog-chicks in cut-off hipster shorts, muscle marys and muscle marios toting designer-label gym bags, beggars’ rat’s nest beards, bottle-blondes with solarium tans, and respectably frocked old ladies who look like they were the originals of the neighbourhood.
We find a café and settle down. ‘Wei Lee, thanks again for, you know, the doctor.’
‘You’re most welcome – best to sort things out as soon as possible. He’s our doctor. He used to know my mother very well. I think he had a sweet crush on her.’
I smile at this efficient, neat, but very warm woman. I can see why my uncle loves her.
Wei Lee’s looking at me as she stirs the straw in her fruit juice. ‘I’m so glad you’re not racist, Pina, seeing your uncle with an Asian partner.’
It’s like she’s read my mind. ‘I felt a bit weird at first, to be honest, but now I think you’re really special. You and my uncle, you’re complete opposites, but you’re so good for each other.’
Wei Lee smiles happily. ‘Thank you,’ she says softly. ‘We think so too. And today you even had a Chinese-Malaysian doctor look after you. Too many Asians!’ The last phrase is an imitation of Pauline Hanson with Wei Lee’s Asian tweak to it. I laugh and some of my sushi roll falls through my fingers.
‘Do you have Asian girls at your school?’ Wei Lee asks.
‘Yeah.’ I don’t tell her that we tend to hang out in different groups and don’t have much to do with each other. It’s like we all picked a gang on the first day of Year Seven and never thought about it again.
‘I wasn’t v
ery popular at school. The stereotypical nerdy Asian girl beating the boys at boys’ subjects, you know, physics, maths, chemistry. I’d try to keep quiet so no one would pay attention to me. My parents were the school cleaners and made sure I went home with them every evening, and came to school with them every day. Can you imagine what that did to my reputation? The cleaners’ kid at a posh school they could hardly afford!’
After lunch, Wei Lee decides that ‘the day’s drama deserves a dessert’ in an Acland Street cake shop, one of several identical shopfronts along the street. Wei Lee is greeted cheerily by the owner, an old woman with an Eastern European accent. Her eyeliner, eyebrow pencil and lipstick are lavishly applied with the same decadent extravagance as the creams, jams and sugar sprinkles on her cakes and biscuits. She reaches out and holds my hand in her soft creamy-skinned one. She has fake nails – perfect pink talons. She gushes about how ‘bootiful’ Wei Lee is, how ‘sveet’ I am, and asks, ‘How is dat hansom vunderful man that luffs yu so much?’
Over sweets and coffee, Wei Lee tells me more about herself. Our conversation is punctuated a couple of times by gregarious commentary from the owner about how lucky I am to have such a wonderful uncle, how the two lovebirds really should get married and produce ‘bootiful babbies’, how lucky they are to live in an Australia where people can be free to ‘mix religions and races like in a cake mix’.
Wei Lee’s in her early forties, a senior partner in an architecture and interior design business. ‘I like doing the exterior and interior so they complement each other,’ she tells me.
Her parents were Vietnamese refugees. ‘“Boat people” they called us,’ she remembers with a sneer. ‘As if we came from a boat rather than a place called Vietnam. As if we had no name. We were Vietnamese, we’d had a home, and a war destroyed that home.’
In Australia, her parents did shiftwork as cleaners; sleeping little, spending little, living on dreams for Wei Lee’s future. ‘I can’t remember much about Vietnam, except scenes like film footage on a cutting-room floor. Blood on a footpath forming a red stream in the cracks. A car bombed and burning in the street. My grandmother hugging the dead burnt body of my uncle.’
She stirs her little cup of pitch-black coffee slowly, as if pushing through thick depths. ‘And the worst one, Pina: a piece of film projected into my heart that I wish I could edit out. My mother on the floor of our hut, trapped in the arms of a soldier who was pushing on top of her. She was struggling, begging, until her eyes happened to turn to me at the door. I was trying to figure out this strange and scary adult behaviour. She stopped struggling. She whispered something to the soldier. Her mouth pulled into a smile for my sake. But I could see her frightened eyes and her legs where he’d pulled up her skirt. He let her go, muttering something low, and watched her with a hand on something metallic and shiny belted across his chest. A gun.’
Wei Lee drinks the coffee in one go. She beckons to the woman for another with a friendly wave and smile, even as her eyes stay black and luminous. ‘I remember my mother approaching me, straightening her skirt, kneeling in front of me on those trembling legs. I can still see that smile, far too cheerful. Her eyes were dancing in her face like an hysterical clown. She asked me to go and play outside. She wanted to have some time to play with her friend, and she’d come and call me when I could go back in.’ The coffee arrives too quickly. Her story’s momentarily interrupted with some more gushing from the cake shop owner.
Wei Lee begins stirring this coffee like the first. ‘I waited for my mother to call me in but she didn’t. I’d been raised to be obedient, but I was scared and curious.
‘So I slowly crawled to the window of my parents’ bedroom, knowing I’d be in trouble if I was caught. Then I watched a slit of a scene through the glassless window. It flicked on and off as the breeze lifted the bamboo shutter to and fro, revealing and concealing my mother biting her lips while her shaking fingers used my father’s shirt to clean away bloodied knife cuts on her shoulders and chest, and wipe up blood on her thighs. Then she put on a dress, a silk one with lots of flowers that she always wore when she was in a happy mood. Over that she draped a woollen shawl – on this hot day – to conceal the teeth marks, bruises and knife cuts on her neck and shoulders. Last thing I remember is the way she doused herself in perfume so that even at the window I almost sneezed. I ran away then and she found me sitting away from the window. I allowed her to play this happy, smiling, perfumed, silk-dressed mother who walked slowly with me down the dirt road to my grandmother’s house. She left me outside with my cousins and went indoors. I heard the wails.’
‘I’m so sorry, Wei Lee,’ I whisper. So many stories I’m hearing. Everyone and their mother has a story. Why wasn’t I aware of this before? Why am I hearing them now? What about the Vietnamese and Cambodian girls, and refugee African, Middle Eastern and Eastern European children at my school? What stories do their families have? Maybe I never stopped living on the surface enough to even look like I cared to know. Even my own disgusting experience with Scott pales into insignificance.
‘It’s nothing unusual, Pina. That’s what happens to many women in war. And so many women will do anything to save their children’s sanity, or at least try to.’ Wei Lee smiles and sighs. ‘But life with my parents here in Australia wasn’t so perfect. They came with the legacy of war and a culture that had no place here. So they tried to raise me as an intelligent Asian girl, not a Western girl. I could have a career but not go to school camps. I could compete in national maths competitions but not attend school dances. And they never spoke of the past, so slowly it was like a cavity digging deeper into me. Especially my mother, whose lips would clamp shut the few times I tried to ask what had happened. “Do not call the past back,” she’d say. And yet, they raised me caught in between that past and the present. So in the end, I fitted nowhere, an intelligent lonely Vietnamese girl supposed to instantly turn into an Australian.’ The short black is sipped slowly. ‘You know, the first trip overseas I ever made was back to Vietnam. And there was the spot where I’d squatted for hours.’
‘She never talked about being raped?’
‘No. It was shameful, a curse on a woman, despite the fact she had no choice. Well, she had a sort of macabre choice. I think she let it happen as it did so that I wouldn’t be frightened or come in and get both of us killed. She didn’t want me to see because she didn’t want me scarred. But it did scar me in a way that’s made me be strong and love my parents.
‘So when they made my life as a teenager in Australia unbearable, or when the students at school bullied me, I stayed silent. I endured those scars so that their own wouldn’t open and fester again.’ Wei Lee throws back the rest of the coffee.
I’m running my little cake fork in the last blob of cream left on the side of my plate. So many thoughts fogging and hurting me. It hurts to know people’s realities, but somehow it makes your own hurtful reality a little more manageable.
The cake shop owner comes over and exclaims with delight over how we’ve eaten every crumb on our plates. We stand up to leave and she makes a little package with a slice of chocolate cake for my uncle. ‘It’s so nice to see sweet young cupple like your uncle and aunty dese days,’ she says to me.
Wei Lee smiles and thanks her.
On our way home, as I carry the cake package, I notice Wei Lee’s gone quiet. I try to distract her. ‘How did you meet my uncle?’
Wei Lee looks up at me as if coming back from quite a depth. She smiles that smile I’ve come to know from adults who are all lovey-dovey with each other. I hope one day someone smiles like that when they’re asked about me.
‘I met him about seven years ago. He was preparing legal documents for my firm. Bit of a bewildered Adelaide boy in a big city. We became friends. I introduced him to places and people. He went off and explored. It wasn’t the right time for us, so we stayed friends for a couple of years while he had other relationships. But about five years ago, his then partner saw me as a threat. Donato dec
ided that in order to give his relationship a good go, I should bow out of the picture.
‘I was furious, Pina, devastated. He’d become my best friend and I couldn’t deny to myself any longer that I loved him, even as I told myself I never wanted to see him again. Well, six months later, he turns up again at my firm with more legal work. His relationship had ended soon after I walked away from him but he’d been too embarrassed to contact me, thinking the last thing I’d want was to see him again. But those six months had taught us something. We really loved each other. We just had to accept that. So we moved in together and designed our Narnia.’ She smiles again.
‘Will you get married? Nonna’s going to ask that as soon as you step through her front door.’
‘We feel married. Maybe we’ll have a lovely commitment ceremony. We’ll see. The future can be planned but it can also hold its mysteries. We’d like a baby very soon, either our own or, if we can’t have any, we’ll adopt. We’d each take part of the week off to care for it.’
‘Don’t your parents want you married?’
‘My parents have died, Pina. Don’s seen me through both their deaths. Both from cancers. Possibly due to the chemical warfare in Vietnam. Maybe that’s how I’ll die. After all, I was there too. So that makes me more determined to live a full life every day. And that makes Don and your family my family, and all our Narnia friends here are our family too.’
Back at Narnia, Wei Lee puts Zi Don’s cake in the fridge, then heads into the study to check her emails and answer phone messages. I wander in and browse through her books while she smiles at me. I look at the antique table with the hideous model on it. It sure looks like a prison or a hospital; lots of long red-brick buildings with lots of little windows in a circular pattern. In the middle is something like a watchtower.
‘I made that for Don,’ she says, putting the phone down. ‘It was for our first anniversary.’ She winces at my raised eyebrows and dubious face. ‘It’s a model of a prison. Do you know anything about the nineteenth century architect Jeremy Bentham? This is his panopticon model of the perfect prison.’
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