by Alice Pung
At school they were taught that generosity meant telling the other person: ‘I really want this, but I think you should have it.’ That would show your magnanimity of spirit. Her parents’ way was to pretend that they didn’t want it at all. That was how they showed their love, by not making the other person feel bad for taking something they might have desired.
‘The soup-filled dumplings are the speciality here,’ she said, ‘so let’s order four trays of them.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said her mother. ‘Just order one, for a taste.’
She had learned long ago not to argue with such reasoning, but she privately thought that if you went to a specialty restaurant, you ordered the speciality dishes, not the cheapest things on the menu; yet that was just the way her mother was. It made her feel a pang of sadness, for the things in life her parents had forfeited.
She looked around the table – they didn’t look all that sad. Exhausted from the day’s work maybe, but not sad. This meal was quiet, and focused on eating.
‘What’s it like to be sixty, Dad?’ Alina asked.
‘Nothing much.’
‘What do you mean, nothing much?’
‘I’m not an old grandpa yet!’
KIEN
FATHER—
His kids were keen on birthdays. He wasn’t, at least not for himself. He didn’t want to be reminded that he was aging. He and Kien had never celebrated their birthdays, but he remembered one year when he had wanted to do something for her.
When she turned forty, he took her to Starshots studio to have her picture taken. The make-up artists spent two hours on Kien. They styled her hair, and even gave her a set of false eyelashes. He’d never told her that she was beautiful. In fact, when he was younger, he’d even hoped that she would not think it of herself, because he didn’t want her to leave him. She never wore make-up in her twenties, and before she turned thirty she got one of those old-granny perms from Veronica, the home-garage hairdresser. She told him it was easier to manage.
When the Starshots photographs came in, they both pored over the small sample prints, in order to choose larger ones. His wife looked a different person with all that make-up on her face. She picked out a couple of photos she liked, and he blew them up to the size of oil paintings. He had them framed in gilt frames and hung the largest one in their living room. There were barely any pictures of Kien in her early twenties. When he thought about it, he realised that their lives had never been about looking at themselves in the past.
‘Lucky they all look like Kien,’ he would say of his children, ‘and not like me.’
*
Kien was always going on about how slow he was. ‘You’d never come late to pick up your children, but you always come late for me and make me wait at the train station.’ He was used to her complaints. Three decades of marriage and he could not imagine having such arguments with anybody else. Those Australians on television always made up with ten million apologies and flowers and sweets, but he and his wife never said sorry to each other. They knew that they’d still be together. There was no conceivable way they would not be. Their love was a closed circle.
He thought about the few church weddings he had been to over the years, and how there was a part of the ceremony when everyone had to be silent while the vows were made. Love, honour and cherish. In sickness and in health. For better or for worse. People had to remind each other of these things because life was so comfortable here. Because they had been brought up expecting separation from their parents once they reached a certain age, these new adults had to learn to depend again.
What was wrong with dependency, he wondered. If you didn’t depend on anyone, you died.
*
My old man, Kien said to him, as she fed him a green leafy vegetable at the restaurant table. He was suddenly aware as he was chewing that his daughter was watching him. Crap, he thought, she might even write about this. He had only just turned sixty and already his wife was shoving bite-sized pieces of food into his mouth. But it wasn’t that. It was that they were acting like lovelorn teenagers, he and Kien – that was what his daughter’s astonishment-face was about. When had this happened? He had no idea until he saw it through her eyes. But when he examined it, it wasn’t puppy-love playfulness. His wife wasn’t a particularly playful person; she took things too seriously, which resulted in her taking tablets for her blood pressure.
It was just love, he concluded, love that could adapt and change. She was too careful, his daughter. She thought and thought about potential partners and never did anything about it. She weighed up the pros and cons, as if perfect adulthood were something to be totted up. She was never any good at maths. Why was she doing this? She was going to be thirty, but it was as though she couldn’t wait to be sixty, and all the intervening years were just getting in the way.
He wished that his daughter would go out more, yet he himself had never set foot in a nightclub. Why did people want to romance in dark-lit places? Because in the dark, the other person’s chins sank away in shadows and their eyes lit up like possum orbs. They could hide their shonky teeth and oily skin. Those women back in Cambodia bloomed at fifteen and their faces rotted at twenty, at least the ones in the clubs and brothels, not that he had visited such places, but he had seen them during the day, buying fruit in Phnom Penh’s New Market. Even the swanky bars in Melbourne, which his daughter assured him were absolutely safe, he felt wary of. Why sit around drinking a small glass of Coke through a straw in the company of drunkards? Even if there were no drunkards, even if it was in one of the almost-all-nighter coffee shops near his daughter’s university, well, why did it have to be so dark? People were always keeping themselves in the dark.
Love was having all the lights on, and it was love at first sight with Kien. Well, no, that was a lie. He knew Kien when she was thirteen and working in his factory, of course, but he did not fall for her then. He was not a Happy Uncle. He was fond of the kids who worked there, although Kien told him that she had been scared of him. All of the little girls were – he was the foreman, he came down every once in a while to see what was happening.
So it was love at second sight, if you wanted to be precise about it. But how could you be precise about such things? It was first sight for him, because his life began when he was thirty, after he left the Kingdom of Hell. Bang! It hit him like that. If Kien had asked him why he loved her back then, he would have said Because I can feel feelings again! Singing it loud to her like the opening line of the opening number of a musical.
He had waited for Kien with the anxiety of a child. How young she was, and how she made his heart come back to life. How he fell for her. How high and how deep and how single-mindedly.
Sometimes he looked at his wife and thought, this is what I have done to another human being. This is what my love has demanded of her. Three decades and four children later, and she was a middle-aged woman who still could not read or write, but who commanded staff at his store, carried vacuum cleaners and food processors and laptop computers from the warehouse to the shop floor, and sold the most stock of anyone.
And now she was sitting there without thinking, feeding him with a pair of chopsticks. ‘My old man, what are you thinking about?’ she asked. Inside, he felt the same as when he was thirty. That was when he was born again. Not born to Christ or even to the Buddha, but just born and that was enough.
MIRRORS
DAUGHTER—
Her mum and dad, as they walked from the restaurant towards the car park, were holding hands. They had been doing this quite a bit recently in public, but the way they did it suggested that each thought of the other as a child whom they wanted to guide. And each believed the other did not detect this thought. A person was full of unexpected surprises, to themselves and to others, she realised. She had seen married couples habituate themselves to each other’s small annoyances. ‘Typical, he a
lways gets anxious whenever we have to meet someone new.’ Or, ‘She’s really shy, she’ll never do that.’ But how could you anticipate a person’s behaviour two decades down the line? You couldn’t.
She remembered the times when she had been particularly melancholy in China, and where she had gone. She liked to visit the Hou Hai district, with its stone bridge and still lake. Hou Hai meant ‘The Back of the Sea’, and it had once been a quiet place, before the bars crammed themselves into the streets like a line of contesting cancan dancers, leaving a small concrete area for the elderly to conduct their public lives. She liked to watch the old people dancing in this public square to music pumped through loudspeakers.
She had not seen any public kissing or embracing in Beijing, just a lot of spitting. But in Hou Hai she saw ancient men and women linked arm in arm hobbling down the streets, their austere army-green and brown padded coats blending in with the ancient trees. While the young people filled the expensive wine bars and claustrophobic nightclubs, these old people formed their friendships outside for free.
She stopped and watched them dancing closely and became suddenly teary for no reason. They really weren’t even very good. Some of them just swayed like rickety branches. But she realised: these were people who had toiled together through the decades, through the Cultural Revolution, through severe times. This bright shining Beijing was beyond their wildest imaginings. They had stayed together through all the hard years and could still come out and dance at night. These were people who had probably never worn make-up in their lives, but on their faces were calligraphy lines of experience and love. They were each other’s mirrors.
WAITING
DAUGHTER—
‘Your dad will pick you up from the university after work,’ her mother had told her over the phone, ‘if you want to come home this weekend for dinner.’ And she stood at the gate of her college, waiting for him.
After three years teaching at Ormond College, she was back at Janet Clarke Hall, this time as writer-in-residence. She had spent most of her twenties living out of her family home, and over the years the halls of learning had become her new home. Some of her students had become residential tutors themselves, and a few had travelled the world. They sometimes came back to visit her in her flat. She loved seeing them, their faces flushed with all the possibilities ahead. She loved remembering when they had first arrived as freshers at seventeen or eighteen. She cried every year at the valedictory dinners, as each group departed into the world, and vowed every year to dispense with this ridiculous sentimentality. But she found she couldn’t – when the end of the evening came, she would feel achingly proud of them; and here they were eight years later, sitting in her flat telling her that they were working at the Austin Hospital, or had just spent a year in Cuba learning Spanish or in Cambodia clearing landmines, or that they were teaching high-school students Hamlet in Warrnambool.
‘We didn’t think about a future when we were in our twenties,’ her mother had told her once, matter-of-factly.
‘No, we never made plans about how the rest of our lives would be until we came to Australia and learned that people here could plan their futures,’ her father added.
When her father picked her up in his trusty blue Toyota Camry (he had picked the model with the most airbags), the first thing he said to her when she climbed in was, ‘Guess what? Your land has gone up in value.’
‘Really?’ She hadn’t driven past it for a year or more. She had no interest in revisiting a patch of grass with weeds and dandelions growing on it. To her, the land existed only as a number on her monthly bank statement.
‘Yes, by such an incredible amount too!’ He told her how much. It was probably because her migrant neighbours from Turkey and Vietnam had started building their enormous mansions. Big Georgian pillars at the front, bay windows and two-toned rendered brick.
‘What should I do with the land?’ she asked her father.
‘Hold onto it,’ he suggested, ‘and perhaps you can build some townhouses and rent them out.’
She thought about building her future family home on the block, a house that might look identical to all the others in the street. The outside did not matter anymore. But she knew it was no fun doing this on your own, not sharing the marvel of seeing something rise from the ground with someone else. Independence was sweet, and it had kept her clear-headed and happy for the greater part of her twenties, but she knew that at some point she would bump up against the raw edges of her selfishness. Not being able to plan the rooms that would one day awaken the babies sleeping in her bones, not being able to build a life together, only thinking for one person – perhaps that was what the span of this decade was for, but now she wanted something else.
‘I don’t think I’ll build a rental property on it, Dad.’
‘Then what do you intend to do?’
‘I think I will wait.’
She would wait.
NIGHT-TIME AT HOME
FATHER—
He and Kien had bought the enormous black table a decade ago, at a warehouse sale. ‘Granite is harder than marble,’ he told the kids. Before then they had not known that granite was a slice of rock, cut off and polished. He wondered how these kids could not know that. At the warehouse, Kien had tapped the table with her knuckles. He saw that she still had black dust around her nails. When she first started working, she would get terrible injuries – scalpels slipping and embedding in her palm, cuts to her fingers, burns on her arms. But now the skin on her hands was as tough as that of the peasants who had lined up to receive acupuncture from him all those decades ago.
His wife’s hard hand, tapping on one of the hardest rocks of all: at the sight of this, he decided on the table. ‘Let’s take it.’
When they eventually moved into their new house, the family sat around the table for at least half an hour each day and ate together. They had built an open-plan kitchen, which meant that the cooking was shared – with his wife as task-master, and he and one or two of the children as sous-chefs. His kids would always complain that he washed the vegetables too slowly.
‘Don’t waste water, Dad,’ Alina would say.
‘You’re washing all the vitamins out of the lettuce,’ Alison would remind him, but they had got used to his careful ways, and they were affectionate.
‘A little bit of dirt in the food helps build up the immune system,’ said his eldest daughter.
As usual, his son did not say much, but he knew the boy had inherited his habit of cleanliness.
After dinner, they would all go upstairs. He and his wife would go to their bedroom, the kids to their separate rooms. It was different, this sharing a room with his wife and having no kids present. Kien would go to sleep at least three hours before he did, because she woke up at six in the morning to work. It had been her habit since she was thirteen. She would sprawl stomach-down on the bed, head facing the television, with it switched on to some DVD drama or late-night movie, until she fell asleep.
He would read newspapers, sometimes cutting out a clipping of his oldest daughter to put into a big black folder of all the articles he was collecting about her. The daughter who had moved out of home and somehow found her way into the world. Sometimes he would look at the picture of her that they had on their dresser, her hair still tied with two ribbons that her grandmother had put in, on her kindergarten photo day. In that photo, she was cutting something out with a pair of yellow scissors.
She had brought back a Chinese edition of Barack Obama’s autobiography for him from Beijing. She told him that it was the bestselling book in China at that time. He didn’t see what the big deal about this book was, but maybe it was just a bad translation. Maybe it was a cultural thing and he did not understand good writing in America. His favourite English book that his children had bought him was How To Win Friends and Influence People. Sometimes he felt that he had raised four foreig
n creatures who were now cultured in things that he could not even begin to imagine. He liked that about his kids – how they said thank you to each other, and how they apologised if they so much as accidentally nudged one another. He liked the fact that his daughters were demonstrative with their affection for each other, how the oldest called the youngest one ‘pet’.
He liked these quiet times at night, when he could get up and walk into any of the rooms of his children and see them on the computer, or rearranging their blankets for bed. Before bedtime, he would go back downstairs, and sometimes one or two of them would be down there, getting a drink, looking at one last snippet in the newspaper underneath a single light-glow. Sometimes his son would be there, reading, because of his insomnia.
‘Go to bed,’ he would tell them. ‘It’s late.’ They would shuffle around, finish up their reading, talk to each other for ten minutes more. But they always headed upstairs, and he marvelled at this – that they were considered ‘grown-up’ in this country, but that he could still ask this of them and they would do it. Not because they felt a particular need to, but because they cared about his anxiety about their lack of sleep. It was a complicated way to care, and he knew – as he never knew before, never knew when they were children – how much his children accommodated him, and accommodated his fears.
He made sure all the windows and doors were shut. He made sure all the knives and sharp kitchen utensils were in their drawers, and that there was nothing on the tiled floors that might trip anyone. One of his fears was that a robber might come into the house late at night and if he did not hide the knives, they would have a weapon ready to hand. He also did not want any burglars to trip up, because he had read somewhere that he could be sued if they injured themselves on his property. It seemed to him to be an insane legal system, but this was the price you had to pay if you wanted a system that put a person first.