by Fiona Wood
What the hell was he doing? Her laptop was in there. Her lunch. Her jumper. All her English and maths books. Her precious camera, as good as new from Cash Converters. The day’s supply of tampons. Stuff she couldn’t afford to lose. She mightn’t be able to keep up with Billy, but she was determined not to lose sight of that bag. She followed him at a sprint. She’d kept up her fitness from Mount Fairweather, running at least three times a week still, and was no more than twenty metres behind by the time he arrived at, thank god, the year eleven and twelve centre. And miraculously – yes! – he was heading in the direction of the lockers.
Holly, Tiff and Ava arrived just in time to see Vân Ước apparently chasing Billy Gardiner, panting after him, into the year eleven locker area.
‘Oh, please, that’s just pathetic,’ said Holly.
‘She can run all she likes, but she won’t catch him,’ said Tiff.
Ava snorted with derision.
Billy had put Vân Ước’s bag down by the time she reached her locker. ‘Aren’t you going to ask how I did in my ergo?’
‘How did you do?’ Vân Ước and Holly spoke at the same time.
‘Aced it,’ he said, grinning, then turned to run back to the sport centre. ‘Six thirty.’
Holly walked up to her, standing too close. ‘He wasn’t talking to you.’ She and Ava burst out laughing at the very thought.
Vân Ước had no illusions about where she sat in the pecking order around here: rock bottom. But one thing, no matter how strange, was clear. Billy had made eye contact with her. He was talking to her, and it was an amazingly good ergo time. She wasn’t proud that she’d covertly researched Billy’s preferred sports. Some days it was as though her fingers had minds of their own when she opened her browser. She unzipped her backpack – still damp with his sweat – and, as she started unpacking her books in a daze, overheard Ava say to Holly, ‘Babe, you would so be going out with him if Head of the River wasn’t about to happen.’
Vân Ước could tell from Holly’s elaborately casual, oh maybe, I don’t know, it’s just a couple of friendly hook ups, how much she wanted it to be the case.
It took her most of the day to resettle; already a difficult task given that her first folio meeting was scheduled after the last period.
Ms Halabi, the art teacher, jumped straight in. ‘Tell me about some work I can’t wait to see.’
It meant so much to Vân Ước that the idea of not being able to share her vision for her art was terrifying, almost paralysing. But gradually her racing heart slowed to a normal pace as she talked through some of her concepts and plans for the two years’ work, and saw her teacher’s enthusiasm.
She showed Ms Halabi a handful of early studies, close-ups. She’d been shooting a secret treasury of small stamped-in pieces of metal that studded the footpaths around where she lived.
How they got there, and whether or not they had some functional purpose, she didn’t know. As a little girl, she’d imagined them to be valuable ancient coins working their way up from deep inside the earth: buried treasure. Even now, knowing there were no ancient coins in this land, they still held a magic for her.
Bright beaten pieces of silver, half buried in the blue-black asphalt. Maybe they were council surveyors’ markers. Sometimes they were encircled by a spray of paint. Stamped over by a thousand footfalls. Trampled. Modest. Unnoticed. She was going to make a piece of art that showed the iridescent beauty of these faux coins. She had chosen twelve and was patiently shooting them at all hours of daylight, as the sun played across their surface. She would make a grid that looked like a piece of shimmering chainmail. Imagining it was just the beginning. She’d have to shoot and compose one hundred and forty-four images to make a single folio piece.
She planned to apply the same patterning principle to some other materials. The next piece would be made up of photographs of the old, mottled green and purple glass tiles that still survived unobtrusively on some Melbourne city footpaths. They were skylights to the basement level of the Victorian-era buildings and looked like jewels erupting from the seams of buildings and footpaths.
She’d shoot and compose a similar number of these images. The folio would have six pieces in total. She wanted the work to show that the seemingly insignificant could warrant close attention, and the tiniest elements could be made monumental. Indeed, she wanted to invert the whole idea of what was/should be considered monumental.
Seen together, she hoped the pieces in her folio would create a picture of the city she knew – vast, but stitched together from tiny pieces and small moments.
She wanted her art to carry such a load of ideas, and was terrified her ambition would outstrip her ability, and that the work she produced could never quite glean her teeming brain, to borrow from John Keats.
By the time she’d finished trying to share the vision that was so clear in her mind, she could feel her face burning with concentration.
Ms Halabi was nodding. ‘Plenty of nice chewy thematic complexity and technical challenges to keep you busy for the two-year program. I can’t wait to see more. I want you to keep in mind that image of these pieces as a suite as you proceed, because this work is also going to drive you truly crazy at least half a dozen times. You’ll need to remind yourself how magnificent it will all be once realised.’
‘I know. It’s fiddly.’
‘I’ll leave you with two thoughts: one practical, one theory-based.’ The art teacher held up one paint-stained finger. ‘Five minutes spent cleaning a disc with a rag and some methylated spirits might save you two hours of photoshopping.’ She raised a second finger, also ingrained with paint. ‘And – consider the meaning of these images. Every time you’re working with them, ask yourself: what do they mean? And, even more important, what do they mean to me? The more specific and personal something is, the more its universality emerges.’
The more specific and personal . . .
Fine.
Personal and specific were not muscles that got a lot of flexing in her family. But she’d try. Another solo flight. It’s not like she wasn’t used to that.
There probably weren’t two words that pushed her harder towards the gaping holes in her life. Gaps and question marks all over the place.
chapter 7
Every year, around this time, for as long as Vân Ước could remember, her mother got sick. It was as though she just disappeared, curled up inside her shell like a snail poked with a stick.
She’d realised a couple of years ago that it wasn’t as simple as her ba made out: her mother was more than just tired. Eventually it clicked that her mother’s slump time coincided with the time of year her parents had left Vietnam. They got the diagnosis last year: relapsing post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. This year it was getting treated properly. Not just the symptoms, either. This year things would be different. Fingers crossed.
It’s complicated (that Facebook cliché) was in fact the perfect description for her relationship with her parents. It was the same for all the first-generation Vietnamese Australian kids she knew.
The deal with parents who’d survived the sort of horror you didn’t even want to know about was that you shared the weight of all the risks they’d taken (for you), all the suffering they’d gone through (so you wouldn’t have to suffer), the deprivation they’d signed up for (so you would want for nothing), and all the terrifying dislocation they felt (so you’d have a home, feel at home). It was pretty tough, really. For all concerned.
If only the love and irritation could merge into a calm neutrality, but they didn’t. They were like oil and water. Each with a determined integrity. One or the other. No blending. No blanding.
Debi had helped give some context to that pressure to be happy, to be successful. Her mother had been a Holocaust survivor, which was right up there with the worst anyone’s parents might have endured.
This was everything she’d heard direct
ly from her mother about her parents’ exodus from Vietnam to Australia:
From when she was little, she’d asked questions. When had her parents moved from Vietnam to Australia? Her father told her they’d left Vietnam by boat, arrived in Malaysia, and been transferred to Australia. She’d stirred that up in her mind with Noah’s ark for a few years, but it clarified over time into the less poetic reality.
Her parents were ‘boat people’, though when they arrived in Australia the expression wasn’t so venom-coated.
Her mother was twenty-one years old when they left Vietnam in 1980. Her father was one year older. Her auntie, Hoa Nhung, who apparently lived in Sydney but whom they never saw, was on the boat with them. She was nineteen when they left. And why did they never speak to her? Why had she never visited?
Years after their eventual arrival in Darwin (via the mosquito-infested Malaysian island they felt so blessed to have landed on), after relocating to Melbourne (first stop Lansdowne Hostel), after compulsory but inadequate language classes, after settling for work in their second language that was less than it might have been, after the allocation of public housing, seventeen years after all that, Vân Ước was born.
So her parents were also old, on top of everything else.
Was her name, Vân Ước – Cloudwish – connected to the time no one would speak about?
Why the long wait?
Did her parents have fertility problems?
Did they not want a child?
Did they change their minds?
Was she an accident?
And who were the two little girls in the photo she’d found, snooping through her mother’s chest of drawers when she was twelve, and which she took out periodically to re-examine in secret? If it was her mother and Hoa Nhung, why was it hidden away? Why wasn’t it out in a frame, like Vân Ước’s horrible grade six graduation photo? Or her even more horrible First Holy Communion photo?
What was the story?
Because of her parents’ reticence it had become unthinkable to broach any of these questions with them. Her ba only ever said: Don’t ask your mother about it. It was a hard time. A bad time.
Vân Ước had eventually stitched together some possibilities – just what she’d gleaned from her own research. She only unfolded that ugly little garment – still full of missing stitches – in private, trying to understand exactly what her parents might have survived.
How was she supposed to feel about it? Proud? Fearful? Ashamed?
When she looked at her parents watching MasterChef on TV in a tired trance at the end of the working day, she could not connect the very ordinariness of them to what she’d read.
What they had experienced was obviously unspeakable. But didn’t they realise the extent to which not speaking made them strangers to her? Why couldn’t they imagine how odd it might feel to see your parents through the wrong end of a telescope?
She thought of demanding that they tell her their story, asking the difficult questions, but her courage always failed. She imagined Jane Eyre, stern-eyed, tapping her polished boot impatiently.
How did their experience fit with her life now? Across this unspoken gulf, where so much was implied but never spelled out, was it really all down to her to justify the effort, the sacrifices? To make it worthwhile? How could she ever do enough, achieve enough? Be enough? To compensate for – what, exactly?
So the boat story morphed from abstract fairytale to abstract horror as her understanding grew over the years.
She imagined an even more protracted horror story had come before the boat journey: a war, and the aftermath, living under the Communist Party regime following the fall of Saigon. And she was grateful she hadn’t thought to find out about that till years later.
She had read about it all now. Like the irresistible pain of wriggling your own loose tooth, she’d found it impossible to stop searching once she started. Every time she found something newly frightening, she challenged herself, with an adrenalin rush, to read it. Many accounts of that time reported grotesque brutality. Her parents were barely out of their teens when they fled. How had they coped with losing everything, with uncertainty, fear, violence?
How would she have coped?
Not well.
But would she have had the ingenuity and the guts to escape?
Not likely.
So, frustrating though her gentle parents were, demanding though they were, dependent though they were, they were also her heroes, her superiors in every sense, and she would rather die than disappoint them. Even if it killed her.
Gaps and question marks were only part of the problem.
How was she ever going to convince her parents that having an artist for a daughter would not be a complete disaster? At least she wouldn’t have to face that conversation till next year. What a wimp. She could virtually hear Jane tsk tsk-ing in annoyance.
chapter 8
After a telephone conversation with her mother’s doctor, confirming her antidepressant dosage – from a quick check of the pill package that morning it looked like she’d stopped taking the medication – Vân Ước was running a few minutes late for homework club.
She arrived as the last students were hurrying in. Vân Ước picked up a grizzly baby, Iman, from her mother, who was sitting with a tutor going through a pile of forms from an insurance company. Iman, happy to be mobile, started flicking the end of Vân Ước’s plait back and forth across her own nose, one of her preferred games.
‘Did the drink delivery arrive yet?’ Aatifa, one of the helper mothers, asked her.
‘Yeah – it should be in the back fridge,’ said Vân Ước. Aatifa took off to start organising the afternoon snacks they handed around in the last ten minutes of class, and Vân Ước made for a table where she could see a group of tutors with no students allocated to them. She paired the boys up with students, and headed over to the primary school area, of which she was notionally in charge. Everyone was settled and occupied except for one tutor who was trying to deal with a mother who’d walked in hoping to leave her three children that afternoon.
Vân Ước explained to the mother that the kids couldn’t stay for today’s session, but would have to enrol, and gave the mother some forms to take away, first going through them to make sure she understood everything. She did a lap of the early secondary tables and handed out some extra stationery.
She greeted people, answered questions, made sure that Matthew, the least obnoxious of the guys from her old primary school, was paired with Thy Ngô, now in year eight, who had spoken to her with such excitement about maths last year, and as she walked the familiar rounds she tried to imagine what Lou and Billy would make of it.
By halfway through the hour, the volume had increased from a buzz to a roar. It was a hot February day and gusts of air that came in just stirred up the heat and added some grit to the mix. Faces were sheeny with sweat, and a generalised end-of-summer’s-day waft of body odour and deodorant wrestled it out with the church hall’s own smell, also strong on a hot day, an amalgam of cedar, biscuits, books and dust.
She could see where Eleanor, who ran the show, was based on the knot of people surrounding her. Parents trying to ask about everything from scholarships to legal problems, a few shell-shocked-looking teachers who’d brought student tutors along for their first sessions, some little kids who just liked being near Eleanor’s knees, and a few regular volunteers who had first-session-back questions.
Vân Ước remembered her first time here as a student, a super-shy fifth grader. Eleanor had introduced her to Debi, saying, Now, you two, you’re going to get along like a house on fire. That had alarmed Vân Ước, but she took her cue from Debi, who smiled calmly and said, So, what are you reading, Vân Ước? And at the end of the session, she’d said to Vân Ước, You are a terrific reader. See these big girls, here? Vân Ước had looked around at the older girl
s who were tutoring students at surrounding tables. That’s going to be you one day. You’ll be helping the little ones. Vân Ước couldn’t believe it, but she was proud to be called a strong reader. And it had made her parents happy when she reported the comment back to them that night.
Thinking of her parents brought her back to the doctor conversation. No matter how many times she went through it with her mother, the concept of medication taking a while to work never really sank in. Her parents both expected to take a pill and feel the benefits now. The medication the doctor had prescribed for her mother called for perseverance and some dosage adjustments. Her mother had started feeling better, but was ready to throw in the towel after a week of feeling less well again. Now there’d be another conversation going over everything again. She sighed deeply.
Iman, still on her hip, sighed deeply too.
She had to laugh.
chapter 9
On Saturday morning she woke with a niggle. Groan. Monday was casual clothes day, which definitely warranted an after-breakfast, before-homework free writing whinge. Topic: money, and lack thereof.
Well, clothes. The embarrassment of looking wrong on casual clothes day. Always a headache.
My school uniform has always been bought second-hand. Even so, losing a blazer or a jumper would be a small disaster. (It’s never happened.) It’s hard to believe how many extras and bits of clothing compulsory sport calls for. I worry about being shabby, and not having all the bits. (Rich kids don’t care if they look shabby.) I have worn every uniform garment I’ve ever had through the cycle of too big, fits, too small.
Even though I’m a member of orchestra, I’m careful to be the second-best oboist, not the best; my parents won’t ever be able to afford the orchestra trip to Europe.
I keep to myself, partly to make sure I don’t get asked to things and have to say no. I can’t afford coffee after school, except occasionally. I can’t afford taxis home after parties. I can’t afford the sort of clothes and shoes people wear to parties. I can’t afford the presents or alcohol people bring to parties. I can’t afford the ticket for the cinema, except occasionally. I don’t go to concerts, theatre, ballet or opera. Art galleries, at least, are free, other than for visiting exhibitions.