by Hsu-Ming Teo
In the late eighties, he abandoned jazz, zeroed in on hip-hop and basketball, and did his best to become black. His jeans grew voluminous—giant denim windsocks—and we occasionally suspected that hair might actually grow under the flipped-back Chicago Bulls baseball cap that he never took off. The LA riots after the Rodney King trial shook the foundations of his world, when he watched the televised images of black Americans looting and beating up Asian shopkeepers. Black was beautiful, black was best. He had only ever associated racism with white Aussies and Chinese.
Yes, the Patriarch was a racist. He was suspicious about budget petrol stations in Dulwich Hill and Lakemba because he was convinced that they were owned by Lebanese who watered down the petrol and ruined your car engine. He grumbled when Hong Kong Chinese and Vietnamese began to move into Burwood and Strathfield. He muttered darkly that Strathfield had been overrun by Koreans. He scowled when he heard people shouting loudly in Cantonese across the aisles of Franklins. He was incensed when a few Chinese patients tried to bargain with him to lower the price of his extractions, root canals and crowns; he was disgusted when they demanded that he add extra dental item numbers to their bills for work he had not done so that they could make larger claims from their health funds and cover the insurance gap. He disliked Indians because he said they smelled of coconut oil. As for the Japanese, who could forget what they’d done during the war?
At the same time, he loved the Tandoori chicken from the local Indian restaurant and was delighted that the Chinese restaurant in Strathfield Plaza now served dim sum every day. He was glad that his wife no longer had to make the drive down to the Burlington Supermarket in Chinatown to buy Chinese vegetables and stock up on Chinese ingredients since she could now buy them in the local Chinese and Vietnamese grocery stores in Burwood. He loved the cappuccinos served in Italian cafes along Burwood Road, spooning up the chocolate-dusted froth and licking it like an ice-cream, crunching happily on his almond biscotti.
He enjoyed the benefits of multiculturalism in the 1980s but clung to a belief in assimilation. He had immersed himself in Australian culture when he first arrived. He watched cricket in the days when Dennis Lillee was a star and the Australian team sported Afro hairstyles. He drank Tooheys beer and could sing along to ‘Come on Aussie, come on, come on’. He discovered the salty delights of meat pies and sausage rolls in the milkbar beneath his surgery. He learned how to barbecue and enjoyed it once Mum started marinating steaks in soy sauce, pepper, garlic and red wine, and leaving them in the fridge overnight. He learned to say ‘How ’bout a cuppa?’ and he became a member of the local RSL although he never went there. He stayed home every Saturday night to watch ‘Hey Hey It’s Saturday’, laughed with Daryl Somers, and admired Jackie MacDonald when she was still around. He thought they were ‘nice’. He loved to hate ‘Red Faces’, was contemptuous of the contestants, but morally outraged when Red Symons gave them insultingly low scores. ‘Cod!’ he’d say, scowling at Red in palpable irritation, not wanting to take the Lord’s name in vain but finding no other suitable exclamation.
And yet perhaps he wasn’t so much a racist as a misanthrope; his disapproval seemed to be directed towards the world in general, with no discrimination reserved for any particular race. His politics were conservative and his pleasure lay in complaining; he was the Chinese Bruce Ruxton. Like Bruce, dual citizenship pissed him off; he’d gladly given up his Malaysian citizenship to become an Australian. He reminded us constantly how lucky we were to be in Australia.
‘Just remember May 13, 1969,’ he told us, ‘and be grateful that you’re here instead of Kuala Lumpur. We could all have been killed. And if I hadn’t sacrificed my career and all the money I could make there in order to bring you kids here for a good education, like all the other Chinese, you’d be suffering discrimination by the Malays in the schools and universities. So just be grateful you’re Australian.’
When we started school, he made Sonny and me memorise the words to the first verse of ‘Advance Australia Fair’. It was an anthem that puzzled me for a long time because I mixed up the word ‘fair’ for its homonym in Humphrey B. Bear’s signature song in the 1970s and ’80s. Whoever wrote Humphrey’s lyrics certainly didn’t have kids like us in mind.
What a funny old fellow is Humphrey
He gets in all manner of strife
He leads a very exciting life
And honey’s his favourite fare . . .
The lyrics were as arcane and incomprehensible to a kid as ‘Advance Australia Fair’, which was even more remote from my life because when the Patriarch made us learn it, and puzzled over it himself each night, it was still ‘Australia’s sons’ being compelled to rejoice, rather than ‘Australians all’ doing the same thing. The Patriarch still clings to ‘Australia’s sons’ because, in his attitude towards political correctness, John Howard is his role model. (‘I refuse to call a manhole a personhole,’ the Patriarch proclaims defiantly. So there.) Anyway, it was a puzzling song then: In joyful strains then let us sing Advance Australia Fair.
Fair or fare? And what did it all mean anyway? The fare was the fifteen cents we paid to the bus driver during the school holidays, when we weren’t allowed to use our bus passes for a free ride. That was quite straightforward, even though it didn’t make sense as far as Humphrey B. Bear’s honey was concerned. ‘Fair’ was much more difficult. Each year we had a school fair where girls sold the hideous cushion covers they’d crocheted and boys hawked wobbly edged, glazed clay ashtrays, bought by proud parents who didn’t smoke. Our entry into adolescence was heralded the first time Sonny muttered resentfully, ‘It isn’t fair.’ But most disturbing of all, to be ‘fair’ was to be white-skinned, even though E.M. Forster might have remarked that ‘the so-called white races are really pinko-grey’. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ was pregnant with all sorts of uneasy implications. Was it only white Australians who were supposed to advance? Or did ‘Australia Fair’ mean that only white people were Australians?
Like the Patriarch, I wanted desperately to assimilate. I wanted to wash myself into clean whiteness; bleach myself into Advanced Australian Fairness. Instead, I pissed my pants and was considered a dirty little Chinese girl.
SOFT-BOILED EGGS
Pandora was always alone in the house. She swung between days of listless loneliness, when dustballs flocculated around the fringes of the Persian carpets on the walls or caught in the crooks of porcelain statuette arms, and staccato bursts of frantic activity when windowpanes were squeegeed, bathroom tiles were scrubbed, clothes were laundered, dried and ironed, and we could smell curries simmering fragrantly all the way down the street like an aromatic finger beckoning us home.
On a good day, she yanked up blinds and jerked aside curtains, threw open windows and exclaimed loudly, happily, as sunshine and gusts of warm air wafted the heavy scent of jasmine and wisteria into the house. She played The Platters as she vacuumed, or wailed along with Aretha Franklin, demanding R.E.S.P.E.C.T. from the empty house. When she felt lonely, she ran up huge phone bills ringing Lida Lim in England, chatting to Wendy Wu, and begging Percy-phone to come and visit us. She went for a walk to Burwood Park and sat on a bench, watching other people strolling through the grounds leisurely, or striding determinedly across it to get to Westfield shopping centre. Then she came home and took out her recipe books and made all the Malaysian food that the Patriarch liked but couldn’t get in Sydney. On good days, she ventured out to the supermarket, the post office and the bank, and she wasn’t intimidated by other people. She took a train to the city and window-shopped. She stifled her loneliness in constant motion and ceaseless activity.
When we came home, she had a snack ready for us: dumplings, red bean buns, gooey Nonya cakes coloured a lurid slime green and dusted with desiccated coconut. I was happy to sit quietly and eat while she chatted with Sonny about how his day had been. He never told her about the teasing and the bruises that he bore on his skinny body like a pubescent Christ. Instead, he told her that he had heard a Louis Armstrong
album and he wanted to learn to play the trumpet. She somehow persuaded the Patriarch to buy Sonny a trumpet and sent him to trumpet lessons after school.
On her functional days, she was clever and competent. She sewed a blue library book bag for me and embroidered my initials on it in chain stitch. She finished off the gaudy tapestry pot holder that we girls had to make for school. She sponsored me for the school’s ten-kilometre walkathon and then walked around the neighbourhood with me because I was afraid to ring doorbells or knock on doors to ask complete strangers to sponsor me. Then, after I’d done it, she collected the money with me because I was even more afraid and embarrassed to ask for money. And she paid for all the sponsors who wouldn’t cough up the cash. In later years we just went through the White Pages and picked out surnames and initials, then wrote them down as sponsors so that we could save doing the rounds of the neighbourhood. Then she just gave me the money for all the so-called sponsors. It was our little secret, she said. She tested me on my spelling and signed my homework. She was my mother.
But even on a good day, her exuberance began to sag by mid-afternoon and by the early evening, as we heard the Patriarch’s car growling up the drive, it had deflated completely. Sonny sprang up from his sprawled position in front of the TV, snapping it off immediately. In a panic, the three of us scurried around the house tidying and cleaning and putting things away before he could come in. She shrank into herself and used us as a barrier.
‘That’s Daddy now. Go and greet him properly and bring him his slippers,’ she told us, as if we were dogs.
‘Hi,’ she said to him. ‘Dinner will be ready in half an hour. You have time for a shower first.’
‘Why is there all this water around the sink?’ he said, peering closely at the taps. ‘You’ve left the dishcloth sopping wet.’
He yanked open the door of the dishwasher and exclaimed in annoyance.
‘Hi-yah! Who has been using so many cups and glasses again?’
Sonny and I murmured that we had homework to do and we abandoned her, hurrying away to our bedrooms and hiding behind closed doors until dinner was ready. In the evenings, after dinner, she left the Patriarch sitting alone in the living room, in front of the TV, while she went out the back and did the laundry and ironing. She strolled out into the garden and stared up at the stars.
But on her bad days she curled up into a chair and stared sightlessly out of the window. She could sit immobile for hours, frozen into forgetfulness. As the years passed it became harder and harder to shake her out of it and make her look at you. We came home to a still house that exuded stale air and dejection.
‘Come on, lah, what’s the matter with you?’ the Patriarch said in disgust. Fear sharpened his tone and fatigue blunted his sympathy. ‘What kind of a wife and mother are you anyway? If I’d known you were going to be like this, I’d never have moved us here. I slave away in my surgery all day long and I come home to this.’
He looked at the rice Sonny had steamed and the tinned frankfurters and baked beans I’d heated up for dinner that night. We hadn’t learned how to cook yet, and we hadn’t been successful that afternoon in tugging Pandora from the tide of her oblivion.
‘You’re slack,’ he said, smacking out the new word he’d picked up from one of his Aussie patients recently. ‘All of you. Slack.’
Bad-temperedly, he swiped his arm across the table and sent the cheap china dishes with rice, baked beans and frankfurters smashing onto the tiled kitchen floor. Blood drummed in my ears and I pressed my nails into the flesh of my palms until the skin broke. I started to leak uncontrollably into my underwear. In a panic, I looked at Sonny, but I could only see his mop of thick black hair. He hung his head and stared fixedly at his lap.
‘Clean that up. I’m going to have a shower.’ He stopped at the doorway and looked at his wife. He tried to reach inside for some calm, some compassion, some of that elusive love he felt for her. All he pulled out was frustration. ‘You’re the one who wanted to immigrate and you just sit there all day long shaking legs. You’d better get your act together or I’m going to get a divorce. I’m sick and tired of this.’
She waited until he was out of the kitchen. ‘Get a divorce then. I don’t care.’
As soon as we heard him moving about upstairs, we slipped out of our seats silently and began scraping shards of china and scraps of food into a dustpan. My stomach growled and acid churned painfully. I picked up a tomato sauce covered frankfurter and slipped it into my mouth, chewing quickly. It tasted foul.
Pain exploded in my ear as she wrenched it hard.
‘Grace, you dirty girl! How can you pick food up from the floor and eat it?’ Then something snapped as she realised that Sonny and I were hungry. She knelt in the mush of rice and baked beans, wrapped her arms around me and stroked my back, clinging to me.
‘It’s all right, it’s okay,’ she said, and I didn’t know whether she was talking about me or about herself. ‘I know you’re hungry. I’m so sorry. I’ll cook something for you. I’ll cook . . .’
Her mind blanked out, and she couldn’t remember how to cook. She opened the fridge door and stared uncomprehendingly at the eggs, vegetables, cartons, glass jars of sauce, bottles of liquid—they made no sense to her. In that instant nothing looked familiar.
‘I’ll cook something,’ she repeated. Then she sank into a chair and started sobbing jerkily. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
While I went upstairs to change my underwear, Sonny cleared away the mess and put the dustpan and broom away tidily. When I came back down, he was hugging her tightly. They were enclosed in a circle that excluded me and I was jealous. I stood there, waiting to do something, wanting to be useful.
‘Never mind,’ he whispered. ‘Never mind. I’ll kill that bastard.’
‘Don’t talk about your father like that, Sonny,’ she said automatically. I brought her a box of Kleenex and she wiped her eyes and honked hard into a tissue. ‘And don’t use such bad language.’
She made an effort to pull herself together. She opened the fridge door again and took out some eggs. At such times, there was only one thing she could do. She made soft-boiled eggs. Perfectly timed, so that the albumen wasn’t too runny or the yolk too hard. Making soft-boiled eggs was an automatic action, below the level of conscious thought. She dribbled soy sauce over them and sprinkled pepper. Then, with the toast Sonny had made and a banana and pieces of orange on the side, she took a tray up to the Patriarch’s study. In silence, she offered the tray to him. With both hands.
It was—I don’t know what. An apology, certainly; an acknowledgement of culpability. A gesture of submission, perhaps. And a statement of distance between them. A formal change in relationship; not so much the intimacy of husband and wife, but Patriarch and woman. A barrier thrown up between them that he recognised and tried to batter down with sex late that night, after they assumed we’d gone to sleep.
‘I love you,’ he told her as she lay passively in his arms. ‘I’ll bring some take-away back tomorrow night for dinner.’ It was his way of making amends. Always, he found it so difficult to apologise to his wife. It was not in his nature, or in his culture for that matter. To him there were no good or bad husbands, only good or bad wives, obedient or disobedient wives. Increasingly, as his irritation and frustration with her compounded, he treated her like an intractable child. He scolded her and mocked her in front of us, using us to twist the knife of guilt he stabbed her with.
‘What kind of mother are you to let your own children starve?’
Sonny and I learned to cook shortly after that. We waited until she was having a good day and hung around the kitchen, watching her carefully. We took down simple recipes and begged her to allow us to help with the more difficult dishes. Eventually, between the two of us, we took over the cooking altogether.
To this day I gag reflexively at the smell of soft-boiled eggs.
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND OF LOVE
Dreams of falling are common in that liminal time
–space between waking and sleeping. In his early adolescence Sonny used to dream that he was sliding downwards slowly through thick panels of air. There is nothing graceful about his movement through space. Overgrown and awkward, his limbs splay outwards, knobbly knees and elbows bent at the joints like a cartwheeling swastika. He swims in translucent syrup, so alive, so aware. He feels the air caressing every hair follicle on his supersensitive skin. Overhead the sky arcs electric blue. He’s in a state of orgasmic excitement, his muscles taut as twisted piano wire, his cock erect like a fifth limb. Gentle waves of wind wash in and out of his shell-shaped ears. He thinks: not falling, but flying.
And then he looks down. If he’d thought about it at all, he would have said he was planing westward through the air above Parramatta Road and, although unsure of his exact location, he expected to see the red-tiled roofs of inner western Sydney. Perhaps the billboard where, in the early 1990s, giant cut-outs of Elle Macpherson’s feet used to spear the sky as she leant forward on her elbows to frame her famous tits. In those days she lounged in behemothic splendour in her white underwear, looking across to McDonald’s, looming comfortably over the snarled traffic inching west.
Or perhaps if he twisted his neck sideways he might glimpse the burning vermilion box of the Millers storage building further along Parramatta Road at Petersham. Perhaps rows of tiny terraces with ramshackle weatherboard extensions opening into squares of unkempt garden where rusty Hills Hoists sprouted like vicious weeds from broken concrete yards, and ragged banners of limp laundry lined the shotgun-gleaming railway tracks barrelling towards Blacktown and beyond.
But in his dream he sees none of this. Instead, he looks down and suddenly sees a neatly mown lawn with a black rectangular hole gashed out in the middle of the field. When he notices the mound of dirt beside it, he realises that it’s a freshly-dug grave. His grave. At that moment the dark earth rushes up to meet him and he is gripped by terror. He jolts awake. Not flying after all, just falling.