The Healing Party

by Micheline Lee

  Agnes was only sixteen, a year younger than Anita, when she came to us from the orphanage as a live-in servant. Patsy and I loved her – she wasn’t like the other servants who averted their eyes and helped silently when called and then disappeared. Her skinny arms would wrap around me and I’d hear a whispered Why you so fat, Nat? in my ear. Alamak! she would cry, hoisting me up. Then boom, boom – I would feel each step she took up the stairs, jiggling and rocking to the music with me in her arms.

  After we moved to Melbourne when I was eleven, Dad continued to hold parties. Inspecting the house in Aquarius Court for the first time, Dad stood in the large lounge room and saw how it opened up into the kitchen and the family room; he imagined the space thronging with guests, and his mind was made up.

  But parties in Australia were not what he expected. I remembered the night he and Mum attended their first Australian party, held by a photographer colleague of Dad’s. They left dressed to the nines, excited and carrying a plate of cakes. They returned early that night, hungry and appalled. My sisters and I gathered around Dad to hear about the party. ‘No food except a few pathetic bowls of cold chips and crackers … No games … No dancing … Just loud music and people drinking their beer!’ Dad could not bring himself to tell the whole of it. Later we learnt about the shameful incident. Dad and Mum had waited to be offered at least a drink, but there was nothing being served. The guests were helping themselves to drinks from a big bin filled with ice. So Dad reached for a bottle but a man called out loudly in front of the other guests, ‘Mate, that’s mine. Didn’t you bring your own? You know, BYO? Aussie for bring your own!’

  Dad vowed to show the Australians how to hold a party. He invited all his workmates, clients and photographic models. Mum cooked for weeks in advance, and we bought a large freezer just to store the prepared dishes. My sisters and I were the kitchen hands. On the night of the party, the guests, eyes greedy, filled up their plates from two tables laden with hot Chinese dishes, and came back once, twice and even three times for more. After the meal, Dad made a speech, sang a Hakka folksong and invited guests to come up and perform. When no one came forward, he introduced a new game he had made up to mark our first party in Australia. He called it ‘Hula-Hula Aussies’. We moved all the furniture aside and the fifty guests sat on the carpeted floor in a large circle. Spinning around in the middle of the circle, Dad explained the game. A grass skirt he had been given as a visiting artist in Hawaii would be passed around while the music played. As soon as the music stopped, the person left holding the skirt had to stand in the middle of the circle, pull on the skirt and do a hula dance. Dad gave a demonstration, wiggling and hamming it up to laughter and wolf-whistles. He called Mum up to demonstrate the swaying hips and rotating pelvis for the women, but, always modest, she refused. Before the party, Dad had instructed me on how to operate the CD player. I would sit next to him, and when he secretly pushed his foot against mine, I was to stop the music. I wondered if anyone else noticed how the music kept stopping every time the skirt reached the hands of a pretty woman.

  After we became born-again Christians, we continued with the parties. Instead of games, however, we had dances, songs and acts put on in praise of the Lord. Everybody loved our parties, but they never saw what we, especially Mum, had to go through to hold them. Mum and Dad always had their worst quarrels beforehand. Mum suffered a week of nerves and non-stop cooking. Dad would chide her, ‘Be generous, show people a good time.’ Mum would snort, ‘You just want to show off.’

  This time, however, Mum did not seem able to put up a fight. She rubbed her rosary beads on the woollen skirt stretching over her distended abdomen and closed her eyes. Dad continued in a gentle but insistent voice. ‘The healing party is our chance to witness to the people. The Lord has promised to heal you. Let this party bring the unbelievers to Him!’ Sitting forward on the couch, Dad turned to her, one knee almost touching the ground. ‘Say yes, Irene.’

  Mum’s head tilted to one side. For a moment I imagined how they must have looked when he proposed to her. ‘Yes, Boon Chin, we must witness for the Lord,’ she said.

  ‘Praise the Lord,’ Dad said. They talked some more until Dad climbed the stairs to his studio.

  I went into the lounge room once he left. ‘You don’t have to have a big party if you don’t want to,’ I said to Mum. ‘A small party will be just right. Do whatever you feel comfortable with. Don’t let anyone bully you into anything.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Your dad is not a bully.’

  ‘I didn’t say he was.’

  Her hand fluttered around her throat. ‘It is not nice to talk like that. We will have a good party. Don’t worry.’

  *

  Later that day, when Mum had woken from her afternoon nap and Dad had gone out to meet with Geoff Atkins, I looked for an opportunity to talk to Mum.

  She sat in the family room, listening to an American preacher shout his message from the CD player. ‘Amen,’ Mum muttered, nodding her head. As he moved into the final part of his sermon, I went to the kitchen to prepare a pot of tea, determined to talk to her when the CD had ended.

  Dad had said that when he married Mum, he thought her profound because of her beautiful, enigmatic smile. He would talk about anything on his mind, philosophise, even read her his poetry or sing to her. She would keep quiet and listen, and always that smile played upon her lips. I knew what he meant. I had seen her with some men, particularly those with an eye for women. One of the leaders of the Charismatics was a dashing Maltese man. He knew how to wear a suit and he always smelt good. Everyone wanted a piece of him, but he would always seek Mum out. He would talk and gaze into her smiling face. She would say nothing, and afterwards he would tell Dad, ‘You’re a lucky man, Paul. What a woman – she just radiates wisdom.’ Dad would agree, even though disillusionment had set in soon after their marriage.

  ‘Your mother is a good woman,’ he would confide to me in my early teenage years, ‘but I am continually offended by the way she speaks. “Boon Chin, what for doing nothing?” she says when I am preparing my next artwork; “Boon Chin, stop showing off!” she says when I am telling interesting stories to try to make people happy. Or else she serves me a wonderful-looking bowl of noodles and spoils it with, “Here, eat it!” or “Why you never do the gardening?”

  It seemed to me that Mum was most at ease when she was talking to my sisters, or to her female friends from Hong Kong. With her I’d always felt left out. I listened jealously to her talk about nothing with my sisters – what they ate for lunch, who the new priest was, the latest news on the neighbours, where to buy cheap meat, who was wearing what and whether it suited them.

  When Mum became Charismatic, she found a new voice. She learnt to pray out loud, direct to Jesus. ‘Alleluia, praise you, Jesus. You are the way, the truth and the light! I worship you. I love you!’ My stomach would squirm, listening to her easy words of love to Jesus.

  There were only a few times in my childhood that I could recall being alone with Mum. Once was when we were visiting my grandparents’ shophouse on Rowling Road in Kowloon for the New Year holidays. Later, my feelings about that place on Rowling Road, or Loling Load, as we pronounced it, were of an infected household. There was my uncle with the gold tooth, who was always making sucking sounds and looking at us girls in a way that disturbed me. There were my aunts, who were not allowed to eat with the rest of us, but instead served us or waited in the kitchen until we had finished, and then were left to finish the scraps. There was the oldest uncle whom I saw torment a servant, making her carry a basin of water over her head and threatening to beat her if she spilt so much as one drop. A few times, screaming and banging broke out and my sisters and I would be forced out of the house. The sickness of my caged uncle seeped through the bars and under the door, wafted down the spiral staircase, found my grandparents, Agnin and Ayer, in their bed, and suffused every corner of the house. Even the unsuspecting guests in the front room below breathed him in. But at this t
ime, when I was about seven, I still did not know of this uncle’s existence and Loling Load to me was a thrilling, chaotic place filled with strange and debauched characters.

  It was the hot, drowsy part of the day after lunch had been eaten. About twenty of us were staying in the narrow two-bedroom house. My grandparents were in their bedroom upstairs and Dad, who as the educated son had a special status in the household, had the other bedroom for our family to share. My parents and sisters were up there taking an afternoon nap but I was not sleepy. I watched my aunts and the servant in the courtyard kitchen hosing down the concrete floor and preparing the next meal. Then I went to the front room where several cousins and uncles lay napping on the floor or benches.

  Mum came into the front room. Daintily stepping around the bodies strewn across the floor, she made her way to the outside porch. I followed her. ‘Ping Yu, come!’ she called out to the rickshaw driver, who was allowed to park his trishaw on the footpath in front of the house in exchange for free rides. Curled up asleep in the passenger seat, he did not hear her. Half a dozen children in the street started shouting out his name and throwing small stones.

  Ping Yu finally woke. ‘Where to, Madam?’ he asked, manoeuvring his rickshaw closer to the porch where she waited.

  ‘Nam Cheong Street,’ she said.

  I called out to Mum to ask if I could come with her. She said yes. Unable to believe my luck, I squeezed onto the plastic passenger seat next to her.

  We alighted in an old part of town, where it was thick with crowds, traffic and the acrid smell of open gutters, food frying and car fumes. Shops crammed the streets, their merchandise spilling out onto the footpaths and causing us to edge towards the drains. Mum kept a protective hand on my shoulder. She seemed to know which shops to go to. We walked in and out of one shop after another until it seemed we had been in dozens. Shopkeepers crowded around her. Most of the time she ignored them, except when she wanted to know the price of a pretty item. She reached for bolts of fabric, unfurled them with a smooth flick of the wrist, and yards of shimmering colour would float in front of her. She walked away if she thought the price was too expensive; if it seemed reasonable, she got down to business. She told them how many shops she had been to, how she could go into the next shop and get a better price. In a haughty voice, she told them that their item was not worth even half what they were asking. If they did eventually come to a deal, it was all friendly goodwill – they would then chat about the heat and humidity, how busy it was and how Kowloon was getting too crowded.

  Just when I had tired of the heat and the noise, Mum, laden with shopping bags, led me away from the main street down a cool laneway. Up winding stairs was a door with a sign on it saying Fine Tailor. Mum seemed to know the lady who opened the door. The tailor stood my mother in front of the mirror and swathed, pinned and tucked the gleaming fabrics around her in a multitude of arresting concoctions. All the while, in a mixture of Cantonese and English, they chatted about clothes, figures, fashion, their husbands and the shop’s clients. When they laughed, they covered their mouths with their hands, as though telling secrets.

  I never saw Mum so confident and self-possessed in Australia as she had been then. Maybe it was because of the change in culture, or maybe because my perceptions had changed as I grew older. That day, though, I followed her around, dizzy with admiration and feeling the chasm between us deepen.

  *

  Returning with Mum’s cup of tea, I placed it on the side table and sat down in the armchair facing her. She smiled at me, pleased that I was listening to the American preacher. Sitting opposite felt too direct. I moved to the space beside her on the sofa, where we wouldn’t have to stare at each other if we were to talk. Mum let out a gassy burp and I caught a whiff of something rancid, the smell of the cancer eating her insides. Please help Mum, don’t let her suffer, and please help me get to know her, I prayed in silence, and wondered how I would start our conversation. The CD whirred off.

  I decided to appeal to Mum’s strong sense of family duty. Mike, her highly esteemed nephew, had rung earlier from Hong Kong. ‘Mum, did you know that Mike is writing his family’s history?’ I began. ‘He said we should write our own history.’ It was true that Mike was writing his family history, but I made up the part about urging us to do the same. ‘Since I’ll be here for a while, we could spend some time talking about your family.’

  ‘What for ask me? Ask your dad. He is the clever one,’ Mum said.

  ‘You are too!’

  ‘What for I need to be clever!’

  She had said similar things before. If I challenged her, she would look at me as if there was something wrong with me. Why didn’t I understand it was not her job to be clever? ‘We have heard all of Dad’s stories.’ I said. ‘Several times! We could repeat them back to you word for word. But we never hear your stories.’

  ‘What for talk about the past? The past is the past. Why don’t you —’

  ‘So what were you like as a child?’ I said.

  She made that high hmmmph sound through her nose that she often made when she thought something was a waste of time. ‘Just a child. Just like any child.’

  ‘But what kind of child were you? What did you like doing?’

  ‘Play, climb trees, that kind of thing, la.’

  ‘What games did you play?’

  ‘Uh … Tim Kong Kong.’

  ‘How do you play it?’

  ‘You throw a tin or something and then have to hide. Quickly, quickly hide. When he gets it he will try to see you.’ She opened her eyes wide and turned her head slowly from side to side as though searching. ‘If he sees you, he says, “Eh, Voon Leong, there you are,” and then you are out.’

  Thrilled that she should share so many details, even if only for a childhood game, I kept the questions coming. ‘Where do you throw the tin?’

  ‘You throw it far, la.’ She gestured with her hand.

  ‘How many people play?’

  ‘Can be many children. The more the better.’

  ‘Were you good at it?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, I was very good at hiding. They could never find me.’

  ‘Did your sisters play too?’

  ‘No. My mother always told me off for being a tomboy.’ She reached for her book. ‘What for you need to know about a child’s game?’

  ‘Okay, we’ll leave the game. Were you a tomboy?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Climbing trees, that kind of thing.’

  ‘What was your relationship with your mother like?’

  ‘Good. I am her daughter. She is my mother.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  Mum’s hand flapped around her neck. ‘A good woman.’

  ‘Did you talk with your mother much?’

  ‘Why not? She’s my mother.’ She turned around to look at the clock.

  ‘Do you have a favourite sister?’

  ‘All my sisters. Sisters will always be close.’

  ‘Were you close to Monica?’ I asked, knowing from another aunt that Monica, the eldest, had been the big boss.

  ‘Of course, she’s my sister.’

  ‘What was Monica like?’

  ‘What for ask? You know her.’

  ‘Yes, I know her as my aunt, but what was your relationship like as sisters?’

  ‘Such silly questions.’

  I kept pressing her until finally she took up her book and put an end to our session. I told Mum we would spend at least a few minutes every day talking about her life. I could be a bully too.

  ‘HELP! COME NOW!’

  I jolted awake. Flinging off the bedclothes, I sprang to my feet. Mum called again, her voice, distressed, coming from the bathroom. I raced to the bathroom and threw open the door. Her wheelchair was empty, parked beside the closed shower curtain. I pulled aside the curtain, fearing she had fallen on the floor. Instead, she sat wet and naked on the shower chair. She gasped and her hands flew to cover her
self.

  I snapped the curtain shut. I struggled to compose myself. Perhaps it was the fact that this was the first time I had seen my mother naked, or that I had not seen her when she was healthy and now that time had passed forever, or that the only part of her tired body that looked taut and vigorous was her swollen stomach where the cancer grew. Passing her a towel around the curtain, I asked if she was all right. She exhaled heavily.

  ‘Where is that girl?’ Mum said. ‘Rosa left, so this new girl comes. The new girl is no good! She has to wash dishes in the kitchen and wait where she can hear me call!’

  ‘I’ll help you onto the wheelchair.’

  ‘No! The girl is supposed to help me!’

  ‘But you’re cold. Let me —’

  ‘Caroline! Caroline! Come here!’ Mum shouted, her voice quavering.

  Sticking my head out of the bathroom door, I also called, ‘Caroline! Caroline!’ When there was no answer, I went to find her.

  Two voices could be heard in my father’s studio. As I approached on the stairs, they did not notice me above their talking and laughing. Through the studio’s doorway, I saw an attractive woman around my age standing with Dad in front of his large worktable. She wore the Red Cross uniform tight and short. Dad said something, his eyes rolling sideways towards her. In response, her shiny blonde ponytail bounced and swung, and her shoulders shook with laughter. He pointed to a print still wet on the table. Leaning over, she gasped, ‘Oh’ and ‘Wow.’