by Alice Pung
At the hostel the elements were the same, only in different dilutions. Baby salad greens became lettuce, mustard became tomato sauce. Human-bud steak dripped with a sponge of red blood in the middle. Back then Kien couldn’t eat any of it, and she was about to burst with the baby who would grow up to be their eldest daughter. So he would secretly feed his wife two-minute noodles in their room because they didn’t want to offend the kindly white people, who of course would never understand that to his wife food that smelt and tasted of vomit and shit and blood was terrifying.
His employee at work, Ah Ung, understood. Each day Ah Ung opened the lid of his lunch container, which was a washed and reused tofu box. ‘I can only have my fish fried or steamed now,’ Ah Ung told him. ‘I can never eat prahok again.’ Prahok was a pickled kind of fish that he used to love too, until he realised that a decomposing human body gave off the same odour.
‘What was worse than smelling all those dead bodies,’ declared Ah Ung, ‘was seeing all those cattle trucks stacked with bodies to be dumped. One of them drove by when I was working in the fields once, and after the truck had stopped, I could see some arms and legs still moving through the metal grates.’ Ah Ung shuddered, and then shook his head and shoulders as if shaking off an unexpected deluge of dirty rainwater.
He looked at his own lunch. Kien had packed him three plastic boxes that morning. Leftovers sometimes tasted better the next day, particularly when she made ginger-soy prawns, because all the sauce would seep into the Cs of the crustaceans’ bodies. They were now eating prawns and durians, dragonfruit and Lindt chocolates.
But of late, sometimes he couldn’t even taste his food. Only a short-term guest, perhaps on a funded trip, would remember to feel grateful for every single day of their stay. Some days, he forgot. Quite often, he was forgetting. Stress at work was the same as going through a minor car accident every day, he had recently read in the newspaper’s lifestyle magazine. He didn’t even know that such a word existed – lifestyle – that a person could style their life like their hair. Some of the Australians seemed to think that if you had a near-death experience, or if you experienced great fear for your life, then it put everything else in perspective. True, but only for a little while. After a while, missing the bus to work, not understanding the growl of countryside Australians when spending a day picking fruit, waiting for your child after school – those were just as stressful. You began to sweat the small stuff again. Minor collisions happened in your head every day, and these entirely avoidable mishaps inevitably raised your fear premium.
STATE OF EMERGENCY
DAUGHTER—
After her China trip she came home to an empty flat in a new college, Ormond, a place held between green lawns and high gates, in a city where old trams crawled along crammed with people who were too polite or self-conscious to take empty seats.
At her new college she had a big double bed but she still curled in one corner with the blankets folded over doubly for warmth, so that half of the bed exposed bare sheet, like a half-iced cake. For a long time her fingertips missed the feel of another person. They felt as if something had been stripped away, felt raw, like new pink skin that had grown over burns, without the protective layer and with barely perceptible fingerprints.
She went back to work and sat at her desk, realising that she had spent more hours in her life staring at a screen than at any person, touching a plastic keypad more than she had touched anyone. What had been happening to her for so long? She was no longer the young girl who worried about being compared to cotton wool, once dirtied never able to be clean again. But what she now had was a sadness that she could not stretch to its inevitable end, and then let go.
Love was like notches on a speaker that could be cranked up and down, the decibels of desire, the frequencies of feeling. Sometimes she thought that she might have cranked it all the way up and broken the dial before the music had even started.
But slowly and gradually she settled back into her life of teaching students in the evenings, giving talks in schools and libraries, and going to work every day in her new legal research job in the public service. She had so many good friends, and leisure time to visit art galleries, museums and cinemas. She was content, and she realised that perhaps her parents were right – contentment rested in the concrete things.
She eventually scrapped her inchoate story about going to China, which was sounding too much filled with easy epiphanies. It didn’t matter to her if she never wrote another book.
Almost five years ago, her first book had come as a complete surprise to her. She knew nothing about what it was like to write one until she had finished it. ‘There is a box for you in the office,’ the principal of her college told her excitedly one day. ‘I think it’s your book.’
It had been about a month before the official launch, and she lugged the box upstairs. She saved a copy for Michael, her first sweetheart, who took up five chapters, put aside three for her family, signed one for the principal, and saved one for herself inside the box, buried in white plastic foam. Then she put the box away and continued with what she had been doing in her life.
So its success was unexpected.
She had written about the self-centred myopia of being young, and the paranoias, real and imagined, of her outworking relatives. Months before her book’s release, she feared the response of these people, who did not entirely understand the laws of the country, who regarded most outsiders with suspicion, who would not get the humour. Yet her aunties and uncles, relatives and family friends, had come to her book launch to support her. They brought all sorts of audio-visual recording equipment, and their children.
She was asked to give talks at universities and colleges, secondary schools, graduations and even aged-care conferences. She did radio and television interviews, wrote articles for magazines and for newspapers. People wanted to know what it was like to look through the windows of those concrete houses in Braybrook, what it was like to open the fly-screen doors and see a sliver of the life inside.
‘We’re very proud of Alice,’ her father would say to crowds at writers’ festivals, chuckling. ‘But if she had shown us the book before it went to print, there would have been parts we wouldn’t have let her include!’
‘You wrote that I wore a second-hand wedding dress!’ her mother scolded her one evening. ‘Your aunt told me! She said that her daughter read about it in your book!’
She waited for more reproaches, even excoriation. It seemed impossible that this should be the extent of it, but it was. She started to see her mother and father in a new light. They had a sense of humour! They knew their private lives were completely separate from the world their daughter had described in another language.
Yet she often felt guilty when she occasionally asked them to come along to her talks. They would drive to the venue, exhausted from the day’s work. They always came late, because the shop had to be closed and locked before they could leave. They would sneak in and sit at the back, but she always knew when they had arrived: it was like a sixth sense she had. She could feel their quiet swelling pride if there was a large audience.
On the evening of her reading at Ormond College, her father was driving in and her mother was supposed to come by train and tram. Her father arrived first and she led him into the enormous foyer, past the framed photographs of famous alumni like Sir Weary Dunlop, and through to the carpeted hall where chairs and a lectern had been set up. Soon, the room started to fill with people. Her father received a call on his mobile phone ten minutes before she was due to begin.
‘Your mother caught the wrong tram and is now heading somewhere she doesn’t know! She thought all the tram lines from Elizabeth Street led to your college!’
She asked him what number tram her mother had got on.
‘What number tram?’ he urged, his phone-voice too loud for the high-ceilinged, oak-panelled hall. Then he turned to
her: ‘Fifty-nine.’
‘She should have got on tram number 19. Where is she now?’
‘She says she doesn’t know, it’s too dark outside.’ Her father handed her the mobile. It was strange, having her loud mother condensed into this little block of vibrating metal and plastic, just as loud if not louder because you had to put the phone up to your ear.
‘Ma, where are you? What are you passing?’
Her mother had once caught buses easily. Number 219 and 216 from Braybrook to Footscray and to the city. But over time the trajectories had turned into smaller and smaller loops. From home to the shop to the loud yowling markets after work and then back home; and on her days off, to the malls, those clean places where you could wander into a Target store.
Once her mother’s train to work had terminated two stations before Springvale, due to a technical fault, and instead of calling a taxi or trying to find out whether there was a replacement bus, she had walked the distance of two stations. It took her two and a half hours, and by the time she arrived she was so exhausted she felt ready to collapse. Her mother didn’t trust the taxi drivers and she knew that her father didn’t either. He would rather his wife walked, because he had read in the papers about new-arrival taxi drivers from third-world countries who had no idea about directions.
‘Ask the person next to you,’ she advised her mother over the phone.
Her mother wouldn’t do it. She didn’t have the words.
‘When you pass the Seven Eleven on the corner, you will recognise Essendon Station. That’s where you catch your train to work in the mornings, remember? That is your stop.’
‘You’re confusing me! Aiyoh, I don’t know where I am. It’s all dark outside and I can’t see what is what. I have no idea whether I’ve passed Essendon Station or not.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘The tram will stop at Airport West near the shopping centre. That’s the shopping centre you always go to.’
‘Aiyoh, stuck in Airport West in the middle of the night!’
It was only 6.55 p.m.
‘Well, let’s send Dad out to get you,’ she suggested. Her father was by now a panic disorder personified.
‘We’re going to look up on the street directory what route the tram goes. And then you get off at the stop we tell you to, and Dad will pick you up from there.’
She took her father to the library, where Therese the librarian was packing her bag. ‘Sorry to bother you, Therese, but would you happen to have a street directory?’
‘Oh, I’m just packing to go and hear your talk!’ Therese did not ask why they were in such a state over a street directory; instead she immediately went to look for one.
‘My mother is lost on a tram that is heading to Airport West,’ she explained.
‘Oh dear. Oh dear indeed.’ Therese with her soft eyes was the only one who seemed to feel their plight, saw it not as a father and daughter carrying on about some small carelessness on the part of their wife and mother. ‘I have a better idea,’ she suggested. ‘Let’s look at Google Maps to see where the tram stops.’ Therese could see that their world had become a state of emergency.
*
She’d given talks to hordes of schoolboys, old people in bookstores who fell asleep, principals of high schools, ladies in book clubs and young men in jails. She was never nervous, not even when smart-alec audience members yelled out about ching-chongs eating dogs, not even when the security staff took her aside and warned her not to get alarmed if some of the child wards acted up and had to be physically restrained.
But now she began to get the jitters. Her father’s panic permeated everything so that nothing was normal anymore. His fear was casting shadows on her newly built white middle-class existence and making her walls crack loose like chalk. The roomful of kindly friends, fellow tutors, supportive staff and people who had driven an hour to get here, waiting, waiting, for her to read – they became a pinprick of receding light as the lens of her world became smaller and smaller.
She and her father had fidgeted through the poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s reading and she hated herself for not being able to appreciate art and poetry after spending a decade studying it. All her father could think of was losing his wife on a tram bound for the safe suburbs, the last stop being an enormous well-lit mall in Airport West. Over the years her parents had learned a kind of helplessness. They lived like acrophobes on the precipice. She was irrationally annoyed at him, in fact, angry at them both. But she felt a gnawing guilt over this anger.
When it was her turn to go up to the lectern, she tried to make a joke of it. ‘My mother’s stuck on the wrong tram, so Dad might have to leave in the middle of this to call her up to see where she is.’
During a break in her reading, her father popped out to make the call. He came back looking relieved. ‘Your mother is on the way home. She waited for the other tram on the opposite side of the road.’
She had to sit down. Her legs were shaking behind the wooden lectern.
THE KNIFE
DAUGHTER—
Most Friday nights, she still returned home to her parents’ house. One evening, there was a new addition to the top kitchen drawer. It was the first time in ten years that they had had a sharp knife in the house, besides the cleaver. Her mother had decided it was time and went out and bought it because it was ridiculous how long it was taking to scrape the scales off a fish. The blade was about twenty centimetres long and five centimetres wide, and it had a pointed tip.
‘Wah, look at that. If you slipped and fell while carrying this knife, you could kill yourself,’ her father exclaimed.
‘Anything could kill you, Dad,’ she said. ‘Walking down the street could get you hit by a car.’ Down by the Maribyrnong River trail he had explained in great detail to his daughters three possible ways a person could die on the walk: they could slip down a slope and fall into the river and drown, they could get bitten by snakes hiding in the long summer grass, or an unexpected bushfire might come and incinerate them.
So it wasn’t enough for him to hide all the knives in the kitchen drawers every evening before bed. Her father took the new knife into the garage and started to saw off the pointy tip with another knife. It took some effort, but finally the tip snapped off. But then he looked at what he had done and realised something. He realised that with the triangle of the tip gone, he had made two sharp edges instead. So he got out the knife-sharpening stone which they had had for thirty years and filed away at those two edges.
He emerged from the garage a short while later and went quietly upstairs. When he came back down, he had a band-aid on one finger. He hoped that no one would notice at dinner, but Alison did.
‘What happened to your finger, Dad?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ he muttered.
Clearly something must have happened, his daughters thought, or else there would not have been a band-aid on it. It didn’t take them long to connect the mishap with the knife and the forty-five minutes he had spent in the garage.
‘Dad cut himself while trying to cut away the sharp tip of a knife with another knife!’ became the family story they liked to pull out that week his finger was bandaged.
DOGS AND CATS
FATHER—
This was too compassionate a country, he thought. They were swept from the camps onto planes, and this meant that the lee-and-lah loiterers had also been swept on board. They became the gangsters, the drug addicts and the troublemakers. One evening, after he and his eldest daughter had locked up the shop and walked to the car park at the back, they saw a man sprawled on the gravel, face down. His daughter took out her mobile phone. Its backlit screen made her face the same shade of blue as the lights in the public loos that made veins invisible, made it impossible for men like the one lying there to shoot up.
‘What are you doing? Get in the car!’
&n
bsp; Only after they had driven for three minutes did he let her call 000. She had not the faintest idea about the dangers of the world. Did she think that she could just stand there over that body and call the ambulance and wait with the man until they came? Sometimes he didn’t know what to do with his kids.
Children Down Under were a different breed. Some of them were like pets that would roll over waiting to be tickled, not realising that to lie squirming happily like that was to expose the softest part of your underbelly to the boot. ‘Tickled pink’ – that was an Australian expression. It meant you were extremely pleased. But they baffled him too, sometimes, with their jokes that didn’t make any sense.
‘Dad, do you want to hear a joke?’ his son had asked as a very young boy.
‘Okay.’
‘How do you know if your house has been robbed by a Vietnamese?’
‘How?’
‘Your dog’s gone and your homework’s done.’
He knew that his son had most likely been parroting something he heard in the schoolyard, but it was bizarre what his kids could joke about.