by Hsu-Ming Teo
England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales. Inside, outside, inside, scales . . .
It was as if I wasn’t there. I walked away to the brick building where the toilets were. It was cool inside and it stank. I leant my forehead against the brick wall and closed my eyes. I didn’t go inside any of the cubicles. There was no longer any need to.
Some time later, from a great distance, I heard the bell ring. It was the end of lunch and I had to go back to class. We would listen to some ABC recordings and sing along to ‘It’s a Small World After All’ or ‘The Road to Gundagai’. Then Mr Gardiner would open the left drawer of his desk and pull out his wooden recorder, and make us take our bone-coloured plastic recorders out of their red sheaths. We would open our ABC songbooks and he would make us toot mournfully together with him.
Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing over the sea to Skye . . .
The bell had stopped ringing and I should have gone to class, but I hadn’t moved. Didn’t even crack an eyelid open. I wished I could speed like a bird on the wing. Somewhere. Far away. We had come all the way here to Sydney and it wasn’t far enough. We shouldn’t have stopped. We should have pushed at the boundaries and found salvation in continual flight.
‘Grace?’
It was Niree. She was the last person I wanted to see. She said nothing. She took my hands and washed them.
Then she went into one of the cubicles and unrolled some toilet paper, wet it and sponged my legs. She threw the soggy paper into the loo and pulled the chain, flushing it away. She washed her own hands and took one of mine.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you to Sick Bay. Maybe they’ll let you go home early, you lucky thing.’
But when the nurse called my house, nobody picked up the phone so I had to wait, lying down on the sticky green garbage bag with the sour smell of my own urine on my clothes.
TWILIGHT TIME
Mum wasn’t home when I returned late in the afternoon. I’d waited until all the other kids had left school. I hid in Sick Bay and everyone forgot about me. The offices were closing up when I slipped out and walked home. I didn’t really expect Mum to be there because the nurse at school had tried ringing her a number of times to see whether she could come and pick me up. I thought that she must be out shopping, perhaps in Burlington Supermarket in Chinatown, searching desperately for the necessary ingredients—hot chillies, kaffir lime leaves, green peppercorns—that she needed to cook dinner that night; a dinner which would allow her and the Patriarch to pretend for a meal span that they were back home in Singapore. Nasi lemak. Laksa. Beef rendang. A dinner timed by the clink of bowls and the ticker-ticks of clicking chopsticks. A dinner broken by the Patriarch’s barked-out interrogatives: ‘Twelve times three? Seven times eight? Nine times eleven? Four times six?’ If I didn’t return enough correct answers between mouthfuls, after dinner he would take me into the kitchen, pour himself a cup of tepid Chinese tea, pop it into the microwave and set it on ‘high’ for one minute, then press the start button and make me recite the multiplication table.
‘Nine times one is nine. Nine times two’s eighteen. Nine three’s twenty-seven. Nine four’s thirty-six. Nine five’s forty-five . . .’
And if I couldn’t finish reciting before the microwave dinged, I would be bludgeoned by a frown and his cutting remarks. Then he would reset the microwave and I would recite it again. He was doing it for my own good because I was getting chances in Sydney that neither he nor Mum had had in Singapore or Malaysia.
I expected Mum to come home at any moment. Anytime now, she would erupt through the door, looking hot and harried, two plastic bags full of overpackaged Chinese groceries in each hand, talking nonstop, explaining and exhaling the frustrations of her day.
‘Ai-yo!’ She would look at the luminous green numbers on the microwave clock and give a start of alarm which may not have been exaggerated because we didn’t know what time the Patriarch would come home that day. He hadn’t said. She would look at me beseechingly because she knew that dinner was going to be late.
‘Be a good soul and help me prepare dinner,’ she would say, her arms flapping everywhere as she tried to decide on the most efficient way of cooking.
‘I have a social studies test tomorrow,’ I would say, protesting automatically. ‘I have to remember how to spell “Yarralumla”.’
But in the end I would give in because if I didn’t, the Patriarch would be in a Bad Mood if he got home and dinner wasn’t ready on the table. So I would measure out the rice and rinse it three times, then measure out the right amount of water to cook it. The Patriarch didn’t like rice which was too dry, but he also didn’t like it to be too soggy because he always said that’s what Chinese restaurants did to fill up the space in your stomach. They overcooked it with too much water so that the individual grains of rice swelled up and gave the illusion of bulk. That was cheating, he said disapprovingly.
During these preparations the phone might ring and if it was Auntie Percy-phone or Wendy Wu, Mum would tell them how afraid she was to take the train by herself because that necessitated asking for a ticket from the ticket seller, who might not understand her Singaporean accent. I would listen to her telling them about the impossibility of finding a parking space in Chinatown, and how easy it was to get lost around Haymarket. Poor Mum. She would never be able to navigate herself around Sydney. She was afraid of the city because she was always getting lost; she was baffled by construction sites, the temporary concrete barricades and witches’ hats that suddenly transformed the contours of the streetscape. She didn’t know where to step. But finally, she’d say in a burst of palpable relief, she had made it home, safe at last.
Perhaps she was lost again, because the house remained empty throughout the afternoon. I was glad that nobody was around when I got home from school; I didn’t want any witnesses to my disgrace. I went into the bathroom and stripped off my urine-drenched underwear and my blue-checked uniform. I didn’t look at my body in the mirror because I was ashamed to catch a glimpse of it. I was ashamed of its rotundity, ashamed of my lack of control over it. I was angry at my body’s betrayal.
I had a quick shower, lathering my body with soap, scrubbing my hair with the baby shampoo we still used. In my fresh underwear, I carried my stinking clothes to the laundry and filled up the sink with hot water and soapsuds. Then I scrubbed and rubbed and drubbed my clothes viciously until my hands were red and raw and wrinkled. I drained the water, rinsed my uniform and panties, rinsed them again, then turned off the tap and wrung them dry. My hands were too small and my fingers too weak. I didn’t manage to squeeze out very much water and my clothes were still sodden and heavy when I carried them outside into the backyard to hang them on the Hills Hoist. They dripped over the Patriarch’s chilli bushes and lemon grass plants.
By that time I was so tired that I just wanted to sit down in front of the TV and lose myself in ‘Bewitched’ or ‘I Dream of Jeannie’. I went into the living room and jerked in fright.
My mother was sitting on an armchair by the window, staring out onto the street. I realised that she had been home all this time. She must have been home when the nurse tried to ring her. Why hadn’t she picked up the phone? Why didn’t she say anything or make any sound? I went over to her.
‘Mummy?’ I said, then remembered that Sonny wanted me to call her Mum, which was what all the other Aussie kids called their mothers. There was something wussy about ‘Mummy’, he claimed. ‘Mum, were you in all day? Did you hear the phone ring after lunch?’
She didn’t reply, just stared at the black electricity cables singing out over the railway tracks across the road. She’d been ignoring me for most of my life. I should have been used to it by then.
Pandora was the one who decided that we should live in Sydney. I was conceived in her anxious anticipation, in that limbo space–time when her hopes hovered between two cultures, two lifestyles, two possibilities. When she left Singapore and Malaysia behind in her imagination but had yet to set foot
in Sydney. When she temporarily abandoned women’s magazines with their sensational stories of Hollywood stars to haunt travel agencies instead, picking up free brochures on package holidays in Australia. When her fingers traced the flat silhouette of Sydney Harbour, the serrated arcs of the Opera House pricking the fluid iron bend of the Bridge.
Engrossed in glossy tourist photographs of Sydney, she barely noticed my weight in her belly. Her body was light with hot hopes. I was born in her distraction. She pushed me out of her body in a fit of absent-mindedness, her attention already engaged elsewhere. Her energy and solicitude were focused fiercely on Jonah, as if she could, by sheer silent will and assiduity, force him to tell his mother nonchalantly, ‘Okay, see you, bye!’ and migrate to Sydney.
It’s funny. She wanted to come, the Patriarch wanted to stay behind. Now that they were here, she wanted to be somewhere else. These days she stayed in the house and wandered in her mind, so that when I found her, she was just gone. Somewhere. Over the rainbow. Into the land of Oz. But at this stage it wasn’t too bad. Reclamation was still possible and there were weeks when she was just full of energy and a religious zeal to clean and scrub and launder and wipe and dust and eradicate dirt from the house. To instil order into her uncontrollable life.
Now her silence and stillness were terrifying; I was so afraid for her, and for myself. I went to my room, took a black texta out of my schoolbag and came back to the living room. She hadn’t moved at all. It was as though she was paralysed. Or dead. Unscrewing the cap, I took her limp, cool hand and wrote on the back of it: SSFAG. Super Safe From All Germs. (Later on, when she discovered the graffiti, she would twist my ear painfully.) I screwed the cap back on the texta carefully so that it wouldn’t make a mark on any of the furniture and upset the Patriarch.
‘Mum,’ I said again, shaking her shoulder violently. She shuddered into consciousness and looked at me.
‘What time is it?’ she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I was just thinking about Auntie Wendy Wu, Miss Telecom, you know. How much fun we used to have.’
She lapsed into silence, and I didn’t know what to say. Then, finally, she spoke again: ‘I suppose I’d better start cooking.’
I followed her to the kitchen where she took out some minced pork and tofu from the fridge. Briskly, competently, she chopped up some garlic and lit the gas burner under the wok.
‘How was your day?’ she finally remembered to ask as she spooned peanut oil into the hot wok and swirled it around.
I didn’t want to tell her that I’d pissed myself at recess. In her distress, her terror of alien life in the inner western suburbs of Sydney, how could there be room for my own tale of shame?
‘Fine,’ I said, not looking at her.
‘True, ah?’
And then I couldn’t help it. I burst into tears and told her that I wanted to die, and if I couldn’t, I wanted to change schools. I wanted to go to an all-girls’ private school. The words poured out in melodramatic style. There was no stoppering them. In my veins, too, flowed the blood of generations of Lim drama queens.
My mother’s eyes went helpless with panic. She didn’t know how to comfort or soothe. Then she snapped off the gas. Leaving the wok with its sizzling oil and garlic, she went into the living room and put on an LP. The Platters. ‘Twilight Time’.
‘Wendy Wu used to dance with me, you know,’ she said. ‘Let’s dance.’
‘Don’t know how to.’
‘It’s easy. Look.’
She took my hands and pulled me into a dance. We waltzed around the living room, bumping into the beanbags, and she told me again how much she loved to dance when she was young. She was a beautiful dancer; I was duck-clumsy by comparison. We circled and circled and circled as greyness crept in through the windows. I got tired after a while, and I flung myself down onto a brown beanbag and watched my mother waltzing solo. Gracefully, she turned and turned and I knew she didn’t see me anymore. Alone in her own world. Lost in her own thoughts. Lost to me now.
Dinner would be late that night, the Patriarch’s rage unbearable. Even as I write the smell of burnt and blackened garlic haunts the air.
ADVANCE AUSTRALIA FAIR
I didn’t tell Sonny what had happened at school that day; I knew that he had his own troubles. He was still skinny and small at that stage, and he came home from school sporting ugly bruises every day. He took to wearing the grey long-sleeved winter school shirt even in the baking heat of summer so that his bruises wouldn’t show. Even worse than the bruises were the questions that might follow, and the promise of retribution if he dobbed. One of the first Aussie words Sonny learned at school was ‘dob’.
‘Hey! Ching-chong Chinaman! You’d better not dob, or else,’ they told him.
Like me, he tried to hide in the toilets at first, but it wasn’t a good hiding place for boys. There were few cubicles and it inspired the bullies to disgusting, horrifying acts of brutality when they found him there. So he simply resigned himself and endured their torments for the first half of lunch, until the library opened and he could find shelter among the shelves of books. He became a library monitor until he started to grow taller and discovered in himself an aptitude for swimming and basketball that gained him entry into the bully boys’ circle. But until then, he buried himself in stories about Biggles. Later, in the early 1980s, someone graffitied the wall of a building facing Raw Square, just across from Strathfield Station, where private and public schoolkids gathered at the bus stands each afternoon to eat hot chips and potato scallops, flirt and chat. The profound message that shocked and confronted the public: ‘Biggles Flies Sopwith Camels’. I wondered whether it was Sonny’s doing, though it seemed so uncharacteristic.
That day when I pissed my pants, I knew better than to try to find Sonny after school. I wanted him to say that it was all right, but at the same time I hoped he hadn’t heard about what I’d done or he would be furious. He wanted us to fit in with the Aussie kids. Hated it when we did anything to make ourselves stand out. Tried to correct my accent and my syntax all the time so that I didn’t sound like I’d just come straight from Malaysia or Singapore. He was ashamed of me at school, because he was ashamed of himself too. He faded into the brickwork when the school bell rang, became invisible while the hordes of schoolkids—including the bully boys who picked on him—stampeded out the gate and poured down the streets to invade Burwood and Strathfield stations.
It wasn’t just that we looked different; our accents and the Singlish we had grown up speaking marked us out as pariahs in the playground. Everyday English was a minefield of mispronunciations for us.
‘Hey, Kylie, Poo here has cu-cum-ber on her ham sandwich.’
‘Cu-cum-ber, cu-cum-ber, cu-cum-ber!’ they chanted.
‘It’s cu-cumber, Grace,’ Niree informed me kindly.
It’s not ca-land-er, it’s cal-ender; it’s not sword, it’s sord; your orange drink isn’t tan-jee, it’s tang-ee; you don’t ‘on’ the TV, you ‘turn it on’.
We grew to hate the sound of our voices, and those of our parents. They loved all things British, but they couldn’t speak English. Their accents, their syntax and their vocabulary mirrored in language our cultural difference and our social leprosy before the age of multiculturalism. Even when we were right, we were wrong. So, for example, one of the bully boys told Sonny, ‘What’re youse gonna do, eh? Just youse try dobbin’ us in, mate. We’ll thump ya good.’
‘Well,’ Sonny muttered.
‘Eh?’
‘You’ll thump me well, or hard even. But you don’t thump me “good”,’ he said boldly, stupidly.
‘Hey, listen a this, guys. Slit-eyes here’s tryin’ a teach us how to speak English. Hey, Chink?’
One of the boys caught him in a headlock while someone else kicked his bum.
‘Go-o-o-o-o-o-al!’ hollered the kicker.
Sonny ended up hanging out with the other ethnics at school, mostly Italians and Lebanese then. When more Chinese moved into the area
and started coming to school, he scuttled thankfully into their midst, huddled with them near the library at lunch time in what the other kids came to call the Great Wall of China. But he didn’t find his place there either. They mostly spoke Cantonese, and we didn’t understand it because neither Pandora nor Jonah spoke it at home. Jonah’s mother tongue was Hokkien, Pandora’s was Teochew. The new Chinese boys and girls dyed their fringes orange and dined in Chinatown. They listened to Michael Jackson and Cantopop singers such as Alan Tham, Leslie Chung and Teresa Dang. Later, in their late teens and early twenties, they hung out at karaoke bars and Chinese casinos. At a time when teenagers were watching rebellious Tom Cruise and tedious Ally Sheedy movies, they watched Jackie Chan in the Armour of God, Police Story, City Hunter and Drunken Master.
Sonny enjoyed the action and loved the kung fu. He wanted to take it up, to practise bisecting inanimate objects with a rushing roar of ‘hah!’ like Uncle Winston before him. He even learned to enjoy braised chicken’s feet at dim sum. But otherwise, Chinese culture was foreign to him. He found himself making gauche mistakes when he went out to dim sum with his Chinese friends. When one of the girls poured tea into his cup, he did not tap the table with his fingers to thank her. They wondered disdainfully why he couldn’t speak any Chinese dialect properly, and deliberately spoke in Cantonese when they didn’t want him to understand. To them, he was an Aussie; he didn’t belong. He drifted out of that group and retreated into the dimly lit, trumpet-dominated world of jazz.