Love and Vertigo

by Hsu-Ming Teo

  Otherwise, she stared out at the world through those flat, blank eyes that reflected you back to yourself. Those same eyes that stare out of the pewter-framed photograph as she held me, a wrinkled, grumpy seven-year-old, by the hand. Those same eyes that viewed the suburbs of inner-western Sydney—that made a new home in a new land—without giving any clue to her innermost feelings.

  I wanted to know her. I wanted to crack that black glass, to rip apart the opacity and find the person within. Like everyone else intimately related to her in her life, I wanted to do violence to her, to force her to surrender up her self to me. I wanted to take by force what would not be given voluntarily. That was no way of knowing anyone. But behind the shattered black glass lay another harder, thicker pane, and behind that yet another. For so much of my life, she looked at me with those vacant eyes that made me rage and cry.

  FAMILY BONDING

  Immigration forced us in on ourselves and moulded us into a family—fractious and often bitterly absurd, but a family nevertheless. Sacrifices were made, unasked for, and lifelong obligations were imposed. To us children, immigration was an irredeemable debt, but one for which we were grovellingly grateful at the time. And still are, I suppose.

  Few could ever guess Sonny’s relief at immigrating to Sydney. He hated school in Malaysia, for he was terrified of his teacher. She barked angry orders at him, contemptuously smacked his bony knuckles with her wooden ruler when he stuttered out wrong answers, and laughed at him when he tried to bribe his way into her favour with a clichéd apple (bruised and softened in his schoolbag) and a twenty-eight dollar silver ballpoint pen that he had stolen from the Patriarch’s office drawer.

  He was even afraid of the school monitors, especially Janet Lee, who was always immaculate even in the wilting heat, who paraded up and down the rows of schoolchildren with her white Dunlop sandshoes turned out at symmetrical forty-five degree angles because she learned ballet and took care to point her feet. Janet Lee, who stood in front of the flag and sang the Malaysian national anthem with her arms and feet in first position, as though she was about to dip into a plié at any moment. She watched Sonny fidgeting away, tapping his large shoes during the speeches and whispering to his neighbour, and she reported him to the principal. Then the Patriarch pulled him out of school in the middle of the year and sent us all to stay with Auntie Percy-phone in Singapore. It was the most unexpected relief.

  We learned how to swim while we were in Singapore, for Mum was determined to transform us into good Aussie kids and swimming was part of the whole deal. Four times a week Sonny and I went to Big Splash for our swimming lessons with Mr Ting. He made us put our heads under the water and blow bubbles, gave us foam boards and taught us to kick. Sonny was great at swimming; he took to it naturally. I preferred to splash around and could hardly wait until our lesson was over so that we could play in the wave pool or slide through the plastic tubes. It often rained in the afternoons: fat, warm drops of rain that dimpled the rocking surface of the pool. If it thundered, Mum would call out in alarm, telling us to get out of the water in case we got electrocuted. We’d clamber out and shake ourselves like wet dogs before wrapping gaudily coloured towels around us—sarong fashion. Then we’d beg her to buy us little packets of Nutella, which we would peel open eagerly, scooping out the melting chocolate paste with the small plastic paddles provided.

  A year later, when we were settled in Burwood, Mum enrolled us for swimming lessons at the Ashfield pool so that we could continue to be good Australians like Dawn Fraser, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun by then. Tony, our swimming coach, was determined to train us to swim properly, even competitively. Technique, he said. It all comes down to technique. With the right technique you can last the distance. (This was what my lovers kept telling me years later too.) Tony dropped us into the fifty-metre pool and I half drowned myself as I tried to flap my way from one end to the other in what was supposed to resemble a freestyle stroke. I sucked up chlorinated water through my nose and sneezed and spluttered. The meniscus of the water bobbed before my eyeballs and I stared in panic at the long stretch of blue before me. Sonny’s head was decapitated, a bobbing ball receding into the distance; so far away that I would never catch up. The water was alternately cold and warm with patches where someone ahead of me had urinated. I stopped swimming lessons as soon as I could, although Sonny continued and even swam for his school. Somehow, once we started swimming competitively, the fun was taken out of it. There was no more time to be wasted blowing bubbles underwater as we’d done with Mr Ting. Singapore had been an interlude to real life.

  One night, in Singapore, we went to the hawker centre with Auntie Percy-phone, Uncle Winston, Auntie Shufen and their children. We crowded around tiny tables piled with char kway teow, steamed fish with ginger and shallots, chicken and beef satay with peanut sauce, gado gado and pohpiah. Little dishes of sliced chillies drenched in soy sauce dotted the table. Chopsticks clicked and people chattered and slapped at mosquitoes.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Sonny?’ Uncle Winston demanded. ‘How come you don’t take chilli? You’re not a real man unless you can eat the hottest chillies, you know. My father used to pick up those tiny chilli puddies—the hottest chillies you can find on this earth—and he ate them like sweet cakes. Here, have some.’

  He spooned a generous amount of chilli into Sonny’s bowl of noodles. Sonny picked up his chopsticks and ate. His eyes oozed tears and his nose dribbled. His larynx and tongue were on fire. Desperately, he sucked up coconut juice through a straw, then fished out the ice cubes to roll them around his burning mouth. Uncle Winston and the rest of the cousins roared with laughter while Auntie Shufen sat there, staring unblinkingly at Sonny and gnawing off pieces of satay with her teeth.

  ‘What a sissy! Can’t eat chillies. We’ll have to make a real man of you before you go to Australia, huh, Sonny? Huh? What will your father say, you sissy boy, you.’

  We worried about what he would say, but I think that Sonny and I have never loved the Patriarch as much as when we first saw him at the airport in Sydney. We hadn’t realised that we’d actually missed him until we saw his familiar Buddy Holly glasses searching us out, a thin man in a grey polyester windcheater, navy trousers and a white shirt with a tie because those were the days when departures and arrivals were still important psychological as well as physical markers of passage, and Asians dressed up formally to go to the airport. He exclaimed happily—even spontaneously—when he caught sight of us. He picked us up and nuzzled our necks, then pushed our heavy trolley out to the car.

  ‘You’ll love the house,’ he told us. ‘It’s got a rumpus room for you to play in and I’ve put a mini trampoline in there. Both of you also have your own bedrooms. There’s a big garden out the back too. And just wait till I show you Sydney.’

  The Patriarch was determined to make us fall in love with Sydney. He was going to take us up to the Blue Mountains on the weekend, drive us to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, make us walk around the Botanical Gardens to Bennelong Point, book us on a Captain Cook Cruise, show us the tourist face of the city. We’ll have a great time, he told us. He took us to Pancakes at the Rocks and promised me a birthday party at McDonald’s so that I could have an ice-cream cake and maybe meet the clown with the big red boots and the sinisterly smiling face. For those few weeks he was so happy to have his family with him once again. He wanted to do everything for us and everything with us. We hadn’t disappointed him yet.

  True to his promise, one weekend he decided that we should see Katoomba in the Blue Mountains and have a picnic in the park. When I think of family picnics, I hear the hiss of sizzling oil and the clang of the metal wok in the kitchen as Mum cooked rice vermicelli with pork, egg and vegetables. The Patriarch directed operations, packing green plastic plates and cups into a basket and searching for paper napkins. Sonny washed chillies, cut them into tiny pieces and wrapped them in plastic. The seeds stung his fingers and he dreaded the moment when he would have to confess that he could
not bear the taste of chillies. The Patriarch did not know this because we never ate together in Malaysia. In the early evening the servants would cook dinner for Sonny and me to eat in the kitchen. Mum and the Patriarch had their meal in the dining room much later. Immigration brought with it the novelty of shared family meals.

  ‘Wait till you see Katoomba,’ the Patriarch told us as he selected cassettes to play in the car on the way up to the mountains. He was nothing if not an organised man. ‘You’ll love it. You’ve never seen anything like it before. We’ve all got to get up very early tomorrow so that we can reach there before all the traffic gets on the road.’

  All our lives we would arrive at the Royal Easter Show, the premiers of Star Wars and ET, Christmas parties and school speech nights a good hour before anyone else arrived, just so that we could avoid traffic and queues. The Patriarch was not a man who enjoyed the company of the general public. And although he made Mum take driving lessons and eventually bought her a car, he was the one who always drove when we went out together.

  That night Sonny could not sleep. He tossed in bed and thought of the chillies. The following morning he worried about it all along the Great Western Highway up to the Blue Mountains, dreading the moment when his masculinity would be shamed before his father.

  The Patriarch was oblivious to Sonny’s pain. He drove us to Katoomba first so that we could gape at the petrified claw of the Three Sisters. We hollered across the valley—the first and only time in the presence of the Patriarch—and he smiled in benevolent approval. We listened to the hissing recording of the story of how the Three Sisters came into being and peered into the binoculars—I couldn’t focus them properly and all I saw was a smudge of green at the bottom of the valley. We went into the souvenir shop and the Patriarch bought us a Three Sisters paperweight, a Sydney Harbour Bridge pencil sharpener and a plastic ruler with tiny photographs of the Blue Mountains glued along its length. This was our introduction to Australia before it became our home. Vast geographical and artificial structures were shrunk to fit a child’s hand, commodified into the implements of education.

  From the Three Sisters he drove us back to the town centre so that we could have a picnic lunch. From the car I looked at other families picnicking in the park. The smell of barbecuing meat and the hiss of fat sizzling on hot coals provoked stomach rumblings and mouth-watering cravings for meals as yet unknown and untasted. People were lying in the sun, munching on sandwiches, drinking Coke or beer or cups of wine from Coolabah casks.

  Then out we got, the Tay family, with a huge Esky and a brightly coloured groundsheet because it had rained the previous night and the Patriarch believed in preventing rheumatism and arthritis decades down the track. We found a shady spot because Mum didn’t like the sun and we unrolled the groundsheet. The Esky was opened, the ice-cream containers full of noodles removed. Paper plates were unpacked and dealt out like cards. Schweppes lemonade was poured into cups—what a novelty fizzy lemonade was to us back then—chopsticks paired up and handed round, and Mum started heaping noodles onto the plates. There we sat, cross-legged, solemnly shovelling noodles into our mouths with our chopsticks, sucking and slurping up the longer strands. They dripped from our lips like a tangle of worms. We were an incongruous sight in the park; we didn’t fit into the picture.

  ‘Where are the chillies?’ the Patriarch demanded. Mum unwrapped the plastic film and laid out the chillies. The Patriarch helped himself and offered them to Sonny. ‘Sonny? Want some?’

  Sonny was filled with shame. Slowly, hesitantly, he picked up a few pieces with his chopsticks and put them on his noodles. He took a deep breath and thrust a skein of chillied noodles into his mouth. Once again, his eyes watered, his mouth burned and the tips of his ears turned red. He reached for his cup of lemonade and guzzled noisily. He just could not do this. He tried to push the pieces of chilli to the edge of his plate but their hotness infested everything. He couldn’t eat that contaminated plate of noodles but he couldn’t go for a second helping until he’d finished the first plate. Waste not, want not, the Patriarch always admonished. Sonny’s stomach growled hungrily and he hung his head.

  ‘Sonny? Why aren’t you eating?’ The Patriarch had noticed his untouched plate.

  ‘Can’t eat it,’ Sonny mumbled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said I can’t eat it. The chillies are too hot for me. I can’t eat chillies.’ There. He’d confessed and his shame hung like a bright blade in the air, poised to strike him down before his father’s eyes.

  ‘Hi-yah! Then why did you want to take chillies?’ the Patriarch said.

  ‘I was trying to be a man. You’re not a man unless you can eat chillies.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Uncle Winston.’

  ‘Talk nonsense! Chillies have nothing to do with being a man. I tell you what, Sonny, you’ve got no choice, you know. Sex comes from biology, not from chillies. When you study science at school and dissect rats, then you’ll see. Give me your plate.’ The Patriarch took a spoon and scooped Sonny’s noodles and chillies onto his own plate. ‘Nah. Go and get some more mai fun. You have to eat or you won’t have any energy left to hike down to Wentworth Falls.’

  Later that afternoon, after a long bushwalk and the exotic experience of our first Devonshire tea, we drove back to Sydney, back down the Great Western Highway. The setting sun seared the backs of our necks and baked the vinyl car seats. We had to stop by the side of the road once, while I was sick, but I didn’t get told off. The Patriarch was in a buoyant mood. His kindness was stunning in its breadth and duration. I loved my father so much. He pushed his favourite Carpenters cassette into the machine and turned up the volume. Music swelled in the car. The Patriarch warbled in joyful song, wondering, along with Karen Carpenter, why birds had suddenly appeared. Mum, Sonny and I joined in the chorus. Absurdly, happily, we flapped our arms like wings and assured the Patriarch that we too longed to be close to him.

  A CURE FOR INSOMNIA

  When I think of my first year in Australia, I remember long nights of insomnia followed by bedwetting that would arouse the Patriarch’s wrath in the morning, earning me roars of rage and a burning twisted ear. Mum could not understand why, at the age of eight, I started wetting my bed when I had never done so before. Neither could she understand why I could not fall asleep in our new Burwood house.

  ‘No ghosts to scare you here,’ she told me. ‘Everything’s all right, isn’t it?’

  Her statement of reassurance became a plea for comfort instead.

  My mother would make me a cup of Horlicks every night to help me fall asleep. There were no bedtime stories. Ours was not a storytelling household. Bedtime was signalled by the sound of the kettle burbling and the clinking of a teaspoon against china as Horlicks was heaped into the Colgate mug that the Patriarch had given me on my fifth birthday. A sales rep had given it to him, together with a pen and a black calculator. My nightly ritual of Horlicks ceased only when I was twelve.

  It stopped for three reasons. Firstly, I discovered that the sugar content of Horlicks far outweighed its soporific effects. I was, by then, battling weight problems in my head, starving myself into skinniness, sloughing off my excess flesh. Secondly, by this stage my mother was Renewed, even Born Again. It would be a few years before she divorced our family and married God; still, the cup of Horlicks was no longer presented with a mother’s love but with the fear of the Lord. Acceptance of my bedtime drink now entailed hours spent in repentful prayer, me on my knees on the carpet, admitting to and wrestling tearfully with a myriad of trivial sins before my mother confessor, while the cup of Horlicks cooled on the bedside table and the hot milk formed a wrinkled beige skin on the surface. Thirdly, and most crucially, the Patriarch discovered the longstanding crime that had been committed in his household and forbade me to drink Horlicks at night if I wasn’t going to clean my teeth afterwards.

  ‘It’s a filthy habit,’ he said. His shock was profound, his disappointment in us de
vastating. He had taken exquisite and unparalleled care of our teeth since the first raw stump had swelled painfully through reddened baby gums. When Sonny and I were old enough to clean our own teeth, he brought home from his dental surgery a large plastic model of lolly-pink gums and even, American-white teeth. Other kids, before they went to bed, might learn about Red Riding Hood: ‘Grandma, what big teeth you have!’ The Tay children learned the names of our individual teeth. Starting with the two front ivories of the First Incisors, the Patriarch rehearsed the awesome geometry of those large white plastic teeth which marched uniformly away from each other along the grinning arc of the antiseptic gums. First Incisors, Second Incisors, Canines (the dog teeth which were also vampires’ teeth), First Premolars, Second Premolars, First Molars, Second Molars and Third Molars—also the Eighths, or Wisdom Teeth.

  He taught us how to brush our teeth properly, the way he tried to teach his patients who trembled on his dental chair as they exposed maws of dirty, rotting teeth with the stale stench of decay and gingivitis. Always use a toothbrush with soft bristles so that you won’t wear away the enamel. Don’t brush too hard or vigorously or you may get abrasion cavities. We nodded solemnly. Move the brush in gentle but thorough circular motions, thus. And don’t neglect the gums. Because of the fluoridisation of Sydney’s water, dental problems are less likely to result from caries and tooth decay than from periodontal disease, which is a terrible consequence of improper and careless brushing. Yes, Dad. He brought home glossy A4 posters, supplied by the Australian Dental Association, showing soft, pulpy, reddened gums and stumps of yellowed teeth in various stages of disease. We had one each to Blu-Tack to our bedroom walls, in place of the INXS, Boy George and Duran Duran posters that other kids decorated their rooms with. But above all, he commanded us, we were to go forth from that day forwards and Floss.