In this matter of family she had been tenacious. Not only the Koo family genotype but also the Koo family history was in tatters before she came along. The memory threads would undoubtedly have frayed and failed during my generation had she not started digging into the past. Shortly after she married my thoroughly integrated, only slightly Chinese-looking Australian dad, she nominated herself as the family historian.
She claimed that if you looked hard enough, nothing ever completely disappeared. My mum insisted she could ‘smell’ the whereabouts of a family fact. While I might call it probability, or logic, or even lateral thinking, she trusted her instincts or, more precisely, like Little Sparrow, the ancestors. This was exacerbated by the visitations of Little Sparrow and her dreaded dream.
There’s nothing a Chinese family likes more than a bunch of signs and portents of prosperity. In fact, these become a sort of treasure trove supervised by the ancestors. All Chinese are beholden to their ancestors and seek their advice, and such a treasure as Little Sparrow’s dream is psychologically enormously powerful and motivating. Phyllis Koo, the young well-born Chinese bride, was no different. Her determination to search out every scrap of Chinese family history, along with all signs and portents, had become an obsession.
The fact that I must have been the plainest-looking newborn infant in the history of Crown Street Women’s Hospital filled her with delight. I was healthy and, moreover, unmistakeably Chinese in appearance. She had the raw clay to work with and, as far as she was concerned, nothing else mattered.
After four generations in the cultural wilderness, tracing the family’s fragmented history must have presented a formidable task to the would-be historian. In fact, it proved easier than she might have thought. My great-great-grandfather, like many Chinese peasants, had always been subject to some sort of authority, often bureaucratic and invariably punitive, and never threw away a piece of paper in case he might need it. All business correspondence, licences, certificates, approvals, receipts and documents, birth certificates, death certificates and mountains of accounts and ledgers were kept forever. Despite Ah Koo and Little Sparrow’s offspring intermarrying with gwai-lo, this oriental instinct seems to have persisted through the generations.
Searching in my father’s family archive – several tons of papers that filled two large sheds on the grounds of the Enmore casket factory – my mother dug out heaps of info. The patterns and trails left by buying and selling, the partnerships formed and dissolved, the political exigencies (otherwise known as bribes) and the commercial mistakes and triumphs produced a fairly clear picture of each generation. Carefully collated and looked at together, the result could be illuminating. She did a damn good job, and over a period of time a credible picture of the family’s past emerged.
But she craved the magic, the myths, beliefs, ancestral directives, anxieties, daily struggles and triumphs, and these didn’t come from receipts, account books or commercial records. Then, six months after I was born, she hit the jackpot. In an old tin trunk she found a manuscript consisting of fifty tightly written pages in a beautiful feminine copperplate, in total a hundred sides of that fine handwriting. The manuscript had been written by one of the twins, my great-great-aunty May, and ended shortly after her fortieth birthday. In those times good paper contained a large amount of cloth and so the document was perfectly preserved, although the ink was somewhat brown and faded. This journal proved to be the grand story of the first and second generations my mum had been looking for, and it included the entire Little Sparrow dream.
The manuscript – or journal, as it became known – told how Little Sparrow sent both her daughters off to The Valley School to learn the three Rs, despite twin girls being thought of as bitter rice. The twins were given similar-sounding English names, May and Mabel, although to Little Sparrow’s Chinese ear this may not have been apparent. On the other hand, it may have seemed like the right gwai-lo thing to do with twins.
As they were mere daughters, Ah Koo didn’t interfere with this altogether bizarre notion of educating girls, least of all twins with no prospects. They were notionally his wife’s servants and what she decided for them was none of his business. The girls were Little Sparrow’s but the boys were Ah Koo’s, and they worked hard in the market garden and piggery, which produced veggies and pork for the chophouse as well as supplying the new local shop with bacon and some vegetables. The chophouse, in turn, supported the small business Ah Koo had established to make coffins and glory-boxes.
Unusually for a Chinese peasant family, Ah Koo allowed his first son, Koo Lee Chin, to join the mounted New South Wales Citizens’ Bushmen. From the age of fifteen he’d worked briefly as a rouseabout and sometime drover further up north. Aunt May’s journal didn’t specifically deal with this anomaly. Firstborn males inherit and are not customarily expected to leave the family fold, but my mum reckons there must have been bad blood between father and son for this to have happened. Apart from the fact that Koo Lee Chin was fifteen when he left The Valley, no more is known about his relationship with Ah Koo.
Number-two son, Koo Sam Lee, was born with a harelip and had a great deal of trouble making himself understood. Remaining on the land, he was known as Silent Sam or Slow Sam by the local settlers who were buying up the cheap cleared land in The Valley. He took over the running of the veggie patch and piggery and was said to produce the best bacon on the Central Coast; in fact, his bacon would eventually end up contributing to the family fortunes. Today the six piggeries, all started by him with the help of Mabel, supply all the pork for the Little Sparrow restaurant chain.
My great-grandfather, by the way, was number-three son. He and a younger brother were trained by their father as carpenters so they could make the glory-boxes and coffins that he decorated with his fancy chisel work: the trademark open lotus flower on coffin lids and the fat dragon on glory-boxes. My great-grandfather married the daughter of a timber-getter, by no stretch of the imagination a rise in his social standing. The remaining two boys worked at getting, seasoning and milling the cedar wood for the family coffin- and box-making business.
All the boys left school at fourteen. With the exception of Silent Sam, who was said to be somewhat slow, all could read, write and count. None, however, particularly excelled at schoolwork.
The twins were different. The lone schoolteacher in The Valley, young Mr Thomas, an Englishman from Dorset, was a gifted and conscientious schoolmaster and a stickler for the three Rs; he encouraged good handwriting and a love of reading in the girls, and of arithmetic in the boys. Like all teachers in one-room schools, he taught children of all ages together. Bright youngsters could eavesdrop on the work of the more advanced students, and teachers could easily extend the more able students. So, even though the twins were withdrawn from school at the age of twelve to work in the chophouse, May and Mabel had developed far beyond what might have been expected of twelve-year-old girls. According to Mr Thomas, they had done the lessons he gave the few sixteen-year-olds who remained at the school. Moreover, regardless of age, the twins had long been his top two students.
May, in particular, seemed to have added the boys’ third R and was more than competent at arithmetic. Though she was far too modest to say so in her journal, it was not hard to see that the two girls were the brightest of the Koo children. May seemed to have benefited the most from her basic education, though, obviously, from the way she wrote, she developed a great deal further intellectually. But we know more about her than we do about Mabel, who helped her mother establish what was to become the Little Sparrow restaurant chain.
Neither twin married, although several dubious suitors turned up on the chophouse doorstep, only to be sent packing with a flea in their ear by the girls’ formidable brick-shaped mother. After years of feeding these roughneck timber-getters and bullock drivers, Little Sparrow had lost her awe of the dreaded male gwai-lo. Her twin daughters might be regarded as worthless back in China, but they were hard-working, clever, educated and obedient and she wa
s not about to give them away to drunks and layabouts, the only whites prepared to marry a Chink. What lies between your legs is better left untouched than ravaged by a drunken, dishonourable husband who will spawn a dozen unwanted children he has no ability or intention to feed. This cogent advice appeared in Aunty May’s Journal – the name by which it was always known in the family, even though May was my great-great-aunt.
Aunty May had a natural gift for storytelling, and her remarkable journal documented the first sixty years of Koo life in Australia, in fact, right up to two weeks before she died. Throughout the memoir, she claimed to be simply transcribing her mother’s words, but the document was more than just a chronicle of events. This gifted daughter allowed us to see her mother and father very clearly as individuals: Little Sparrow, the shy, obedient and self-effacing peasant woman growing in confidence and business acumen over the years, and Ah Koo, the patient man of modest expectations who dreamt of carving beautiful wood but needed permission from the gods and his ancestors to do what he regarded as a self-indulgence.
Little Sparrow went on to open a restaurant known as Little Sparrow’s Chinese Chophouse in Gosford on the Central Coast, which would prosper beyond her dreams. Ah Koo became renowned for his carving, and established the foundation for a business empire that was worth far in excess of the gold he had hoped to obtain from New Yellow Gold Mountain. It allowed him to earn a modest income.
May’s description of Little Sparrow’s dream was colourfully and masterfully described and, together with the interpretation in Chinese characters discovered by my mother, was a complete narrative. She told how her mother insisted on calling it ‘The answer from the gods’, because it finally allowed her husband to be granted his secret wish and led eventually to good fortune. In fact, my own earlier description of the visit of Ah Koo and Little Sparrow to Sydney for the dream interpretation simply does not do justice in tone or mood to her writing.
The family, we were told in the journal, moved in 1897 to the newly declared village of Gosford to meet the growing demand throughout the Central Coast for Ah Koo’s handsome cedar coffins and glory-boxes. These cost very little more than the plain, fairly crudely made glory-boxes and coffins used by the common people at the time. Soon, every young girl dreaming of wedding bells simply had to have a fat-dragon glory-box at the foot of her bed as she prepared for married life, and the dead could now be buried with a modicum of family pride in a beautiful lotus-blossom cedar casket.
Ah Koo’s fame soon spread even further and orders began arriving from Sydney funeral parlours, where more affluent customers sometimes requested a personal motif on the coffin lid or sides. This was usually a hastily dredged-up or invented coat of arms or some similar decoration, the Masonic emblem and a lodge number being the most common. According to Aunty May, this presented an obvious problem: while the coffin could be made in advance, the personal carving could not, unless notice was given a week before the recipient finally carked it. On the other hand, while a personalised casket involved very little additional work, Ah Koo could charge three or four times more for it. He was a Chinese peasant who instinctively grabbed every opportunity to make a penny, and he simply couldn’t allow such an obvious one to pass. His sons were excellent carpenters but none of them possessed any talent with a chisel, so he decided he must make hay while the sun shone, never suspecting for a moment that he was beginning a dynastic enterprise that would eventually dominate the Australian funeral scene.
So, in 1901, the year of federation, at the ages of fifty-eight and forty-eight respectively, Ah Koo and Little Sparrow decided to move to Sydney. Unlike most of the population, for whom the making of a nation called Australia was a happy event, for my great-great-grandparents it was a time of sorrow. This was also the year of the culmination of the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising that had attempted to rid China of all foreigners and Christians. An eight-nation alliance involving Russia, Germany, Austria–Hungary, the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Italy and France was sent to quell it. Australia, eager to support the motherland’s interests, sent a token force of three hundred from the New South Wales Citizens Bushmen’s Contingent. In one of those instances where truth proves stranger than fiction, Koo Lee Chin, Ah Koo’s number-one son, was part of the contingent. He died of typhoid near the Chinese forts at Pei Tang, which the Australians had been sent to capture.
When the family moved to Sydney, Mabel was left behind to run the Gosford chophouse, and Silent Sam remained in The Valley to run the piggery, along with number-four and number-six sons, who continued to supply the raw cedar for the rapidly expanding business. My great-grandfather had married hurriedly and my grandfather was a toddler when the family moved to Gosford and then, some time later, to Sydney. (May did not record the feelings of my Christian great-grandmother at moving twice and leaving behind her family and friends in almost as many years, but it seems that while she was illiterate, she was a good mother and caring wife.)
Little Sparrow opened what was termed a Chinese restaurant, as opposed to a chophouse. The usual strong Chinese family ties prevailed and everything concerning business was kept within the family. Aunty May became the bookkeeper and so was in an ideal position to know and record in her journal anything of historical interest, including the family fortunes as they grew.
Little Sparrow and Aunty May were the true business brains, or so it seems. As the coffin-manufacturing business prospered, they took it over and opened the first funeral parlour in Sydney, as well as three further restaurants. The rest is history. Over the next forty-five years, they bought real estate, opened more and more Little Sparrow restaurants, Gold Chisel Caskets became known Australia-wide, and the family opened several Blue Lotus Funeral Parlours in every state capital. Today there are forty altogether.
Ah Koo worked until the day he died at the age of eighty-three. There is a story told, one my mother loves to repeat as vindication of Little Sparrow’s dream, that Ah Koo suffered a sudden heart attack while carving a fat dragon. As he fell to the floor of his carpentry shop, he inadvertently stabbed the number-eight chisel into the heart of the wooden carving in exactly the manner it had appeared in Little Sparrow’s dream. Whether this is apocryphal I can’t say, but Phyllis Koo – aka Chairman Meow, as my dad calls her when he’s pissed – believes every word is true.
Ah Koo was taken by the first funeral car they owned from their first funeral parlour and cremated in the first New South Wales crematorium, built at Rookwood Cemetery, in a coffin he’d helped make. Aunty May notes in her journal that his ashes were placed in the miniature fat-dragon box he’d originally carved as a portable sample to be used for selling glory-boxes to hopeful maidens. This reminded her that her father had always felt guilty because he’d ceased making fat-dragon glory-boxes when they moved to Sydney. The coffins were in such demand that Ah Koo had no choice but to devote himself to them, despite being conscious that he was disobeying the instructions of the gods, who, according to the soothsayer, had commanded him to make both items, though, curiously, not children’s cradles, the third carved item furnishing the dream. As a consequence, he would carve a fat dragon in the week before Chinese New Year to be used as a centrepiece at the family banquet. The dragon that ended with the chisel through its heart, if the story is true, would have been for Chinese New Year 1925, the year of the ox.
Ah Koo’s ashes, snug in the little fat-dragon box, were sent back to his village in China. Little Sparrow, not one to miss an opportunity now that cremations were becoming popular, soon found a competent wood carver and began a line that continues to this very day. The funeral parlours supply a fat-dragon ashes casket or, as my dad puts it, a gone-to-glory-box.
There’s not a lot more to know concerning the family, except that as there was a shortage of Chinese women in Australia, the boys, all teetotallers and good providers, married Caucasian girls from poor but respectable working-class families, and the genetic blending my mother was determined to reverse duly commenced.
Little Sparrow lived to the age of eighty-five, dying in 1937, the year I was born. By Chinese peasant standards of the time, she would have been regarded as an old crone. In fact, she outlived the twins as well as her first son: Mabel died at thirty-seven in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919, and Aunty May died in 1932 of TB (tuberculosis) at the age of fifty. My mum, with the help of a live-in nurse, cared for the old woman during the first two years of her marriage to my dad, and to the very end Little Sparrow remained sharp as a tack. Mum formed a tremendous affection for her. Three days before she died of a stroke, she had promised my mum, ‘I will send you messages after I go to my ancestors, granddaughter-in-law.’ The subsequent telepathic messages from beyond the grave, received over the years from the old matriarch, were to be my mother’s justification for a great deal of the Chinese-style hocus-pocus we were forced to endure as kids and, occasionally, as adults. In most other things, Chairman Meow appeared to be quite sane and very bright and was, as you might have guessed, the true chairman of the board.
There was a rather nice appendix to Aunty May’s story. Rummaging through her papers, my mother came across a bundle of love letters between her and Mr Thomas, the schoolmaster. These were always addressed to ‘My Beloved Darling Duncan’, to which he responded ‘My Darling Lotus Blossom’. The letters revealed that from the age of fifteen, when the family moved to Gosford, May had corresponded with him, first as a friend and later as a lover. He was fifteen years her senior, and they met twice a year when she visited The Valley to collate and reconcile Silent Sam’s accounts. She wrote to him every week of her adult life. When he died, only two years before her own death, Aunty May had been careful to recover her letters. Nosy Mum read every one of them in sequence and, apart from uncovering a great deal more family minutiae, discovered that May’s twice annual visits to The Valley were to do with somewhat more than sharing tea and scones with her old schoolmaster. Aunty May definitely didn’t die physically unloved and unwanted by a good man, although why they never married remained a mystery.
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