Which just about wraps up the past and brings me to the point where, on the evening of the 5th of July 1966, I drove into the eight-car garage, where my pale-green Vee Dub was certainly the smallest and humblest vehicle. I noted that my dad’s Roller was missing, which meant I wouldn’t be spilling the beans to him, but my mum’s Jaguar was in residence. She’d be waiting for dinner and the usual chat, which promised to be nothing but small talk about the day – hers and mine – typically followed by her update on family business matters, which normally began with dessert and concluded over coffee in the lounge. Persistent, persevering, never-give-up Phyllis Koo was determined that I would eventually take over the chairmanship of the board of companies and conscientiously briefed me whenever I was home for dinner.
Although I affected only polite interest, she secretly believed that by some sort of mental osmosis it was all being filed away in my brain for later use. Tonight, though, I guessed I’d be doing most of the talking. If I’ve given the impression it was usually all one-way chat with my mum and that she was a bit of a fruitcake, I’ve been misleading. She was an acute listener, who wore an expression of absolute concentration that made you choose your words very carefully – it was another reason why my uncles secretly feared her. She was a woman of remarkable business acuity, and knew when to remain silent.
By some instinct – to call it coincidence would be downplaying it – she’d had the cook prepare my favourite dinner – lamb shanks and mash followed by jam trifle, two dishes she usually dismissed as ‘rubbish eating’, maintaining that such food came from those first-generation marriages to working-class women whose parents had almost certainly been convicts. Now she smiled sweetly, sighed and said, ‘So tell me about your yesterday and today. You were late home last night.’
‘Yeah, darts,’ I replied.
‘What did you have for dinner?’
Why is this a vital piece of information for mothers?
‘Lamb shanks,’ I replied, joking.
‘Oh no!’ she exclaimed, bringing her hands to her lips.
‘Only kidding, Mum. I can’t remember … Oh yeah, chips and peanuts … beer …’
‘That’s awful! You’d think they’d supply something decent for you to eat.’
‘They? Mum, it was at the pub. The pub doesn’t do food at night.’
‘The pub closes at ten o’clock; you got in after midnight,’ she accused.
‘Mum, ferchrissake! I’m twenty-nine years old! You don’t have to wait up for me to come home!’
‘I’m your mother, Simon,’ she said, as if waiting up for your 29-year-old son was an essential part of motherhood. ‘And please don’t swear,’ she added.
I sighed. ‘Well, yeah, I parked at The Gap for a while. I had a few things on my mind.’
‘The Gap!’ It was a cry of consternation. She grabbed my hand, sending the shank and potato on my fork flying onto the damask. ‘Simon, what’s wrong?’ She was plainly shocked and close to tears.
I’d momentarily forgotten that The Gap at South Head was Sydney’s most popular suicide jump.
‘Mum! Nothing like that.’ I placed my knife and fork beside the barely touched shank and mash, knowing I’d probably eaten the last of my dinner, then wiped my lips on the starched damask table napkin, a material that may add formality but to me always removes the joy of eating. ‘I had one or two things to think about.’
She was obviously relieved that I’d hesitated at the brink of death. ‘Think about what, darling?’ Her hand came to rest on my own, but this time it was a soft touch, all sympathy and understanding. Those hands were always beautiful and unblemished, the long painted nails perfectly manicured. I fleetingly wondered to myself what Little Sparrow’s hands would have looked like at her age.
The time had come to open up the can of worms I’d been carrying about for two days. ‘I’ve been offered a job in Singapore,’ I said, looking directly at her.
‘Singapore!’
I attempted to keep my voice casual. ‘Yeah, our New York office has bought a Singapore advertising agency from three Chinese brothers and they want me to be the creative director, in fact, to build its creative department from scratch.’
The sympathetic mother, comforting a would-be suicide, transformed in an instant to Chairman Meow. ‘What Chinese brothers?’ she snapped, her dark eyes immediately suspicious.
‘Wing, the Wing Brothers, Wing Brothers Advertising,’ I answered, suddenly realising that Singapore was a small island and doubtless all the leading Chinese business families, of which my mum’s was a notable example, would know each other. But then my grandfather had left in 1919, when she was four years old, so it was unlikely she’d recall the names of families. On the other hand, she had relatives among the Chinese upper crust.
‘Names?’
‘Mum, I just told you – Wing!’
‘Most well-born Singapore Chinese have English names they use with gwai-lo.’
I shrugged. ‘It didn’t occur to me to ask.’
‘I’ll find out,’ she announced.
‘Does it matter?’
‘Of course!’
‘Why is that?’
She sighed. ‘The Japanese murdered a number of the old Singapore families during the last war. Our relatives were lucky and got away in time to hide in one of our remote plantations in Malaya. After the war, a whole bunch of Chinese mercantile adventurers – business gangsters – came in from Hong Kong —’
‘Mum!’ I protested, ‘I haven’t even made up my mind whether I’ll take the job.’
‘Yes, I know. But you will.’
‘Huh?’ I gave her a quizzical look.
‘The fourth fledgling, the big one with the yellow mouth,’ she said, as if this explained everything.
‘Mum, what on earth are you talking about?’
‘The dream,’ she explained. ‘The fledgling that flew into and out of the baby’s mouth.’
‘Mum, are you feeling okay?’ I asked. ‘Not feeling a little Koo Koo?’ (It was a childhood joke, but I truly had no idea what she meant.)
‘Don’t be rude, Simon!’ she chided. ‘I mean Little Sparrow’s dream, of course. The baby. When the fledgling flies out of its mouth. That’s you going to Singapore,’ she explained, as if everything was perfectly clear and simple. I tried to recall the dream. It’d been a fair while since I’d had the benefit of one of Mum’s telepathic messages from Little Sparrow. Nonetheless, I knew that it was pointless to protest. I took a mouthful of lamb and chewed. ‘Okay, let’s have it,’ I said, resigned to listening.
‘Simon, don’t patronise me!’
‘Well, fair go, Mum. The chairman of the agency called me up to his office yesterday —’
‘You didn’t tell me it was yesterday!’ She looked genuinely astonished. ‘Why, that’s remarkable!’
I put up a hand to stop her in her tracks. ‘Wait on, Mum, will ya? Lemme finish!’ I took a breath before continuing. ‘He, Charles Brickman, offered me a job in Singapore and suddenly it’s an ancient prophecy come true, written in the stars, a message from the gods, ancestors, whatever? Jesus, Mum!’ I brought my hands up as if I was protecting myself from a blow, then slapped them down hard on the table. ‘That’s total rubbish!’
She didn’t react, but her mouth was the shape of a plucked duck’s arsehole. Then, looking down into her lap, she said in a calm, somewhat hurt voice, ‘Don’t poke fun, Simon. You don’t know everything.’ She looked up at me. ‘Now, when precisely did your chairman call?’ Before I could answer, she went on, ‘Just after one o’clock?’
‘Yes, but you couldn’t have known that.’
Her dark-brown eyes lit up. ‘Ha! I didn’t.’
I waited for the explanation that must follow.
‘I was at the dressmaker’s in Double Bay, Laura le Gay; you know, the jumped-up Hungarian migrant who pretends to be French. She always has the radio on in the background, very cheap,’ she added. ‘The music for the one o’clock ABC news came on five or
so minutes after I arrived. Skirts are up this year, it’s got something to do with Jean Shrimpton, that English model who came to the Melbourne Cup with her skirt up past her knees.’
‘It was Derby Day,’ I corrected. Wills were doing a promotion for Turf Cigarettes and I’d designed the point-of-sale artwork. Shrimpton was wearing a white A-line dress, and compared to the new miniskirts the girls in the agency were wearing, it was rather modest, and certainly not the big deal the press and TV made of it.
My mother dismissed my correction. ‘Anyway, now we’ve all got to do the same thing and wear our skirts up around our bottoms.’ I knew my mum was secretly very proud of her long, shapely legs, and Shrimpton’s skirt length at Flemington Derby Day wouldn’t be all bad news to her. ‘Well, I wasn’t going to throw out three perfectly good suits I’d bought in Paris last year, was I? I thought the skirts could come up just a little bit, perhaps to the middle of the knee. I trust Laura le Gay despite her silly carry-on; she’s such a good seamstress.’
The mash and lamb were almost cold, but I had to eat something. ‘Mum!’ I protested, really growing impatient. ‘What has this got to do with the time?’
‘Why, everything, dear! I’m not the doubting Thomas around here! If I don’t set the scene, you’re not going to believe me. Anyway, I was standing there wearing the pale blue Chanel suit skirt, and Laura was on her haunches pinning the hem up when I began to shake. The poor woman pulled back in shock and fell onto her bottom – I mean, really onto her bottom, varicose stockings in the air. It was as if she’d had an electric shock!’ Mum giggled at the recollection. ‘Imagine! She was wearing those old-fashioned pink bloomers and she claims to be such a fashion fanatic. I knew it was coming. It’s always like this when I start to shake involuntarily – not shake-shake, more a soft tremble. “I can’t help it, Laura. I have to let it come through,” I said to the poor woman.’
By this time, my mum had me. It was the way she told the story, not all mysterious and sotto voce, but as if it were perfectly normal, nothing to be upset about, just the daily message coming through loud and clear from Little Sparrow. At least she hadn’t said it was at precisely six minutes past one o’clock on a Monday afternoon; then I’d have really freaked out.
I was familiar with her Little Sparrow messages. They came through pretty regularly throughout our childhood, usually in response to some new behavioural lesson we needed to learn, but also, occasionally, for no apparent reason – or, rather, for some reason of her own that had nothing to do with us, perhaps some business decision or problem with the board. As an adult I was aware that Little Sparrow’s messages seemed to come at random. I’d even witnessed two of them and I have to admit they seemed to be spontaneous and uncontrolled, really quite weird. Moreover, there was simply no doubt that my mother believed in them. The Chinese are a contradiction: they can be highly intelligent and seemingly pragmatic, as my mother often was, clear, concise thinkers who don’t suffer fools or bullshit gladly, but, at the same time, be deeply superstitious, happy to receive guidance from their ancestors in their daily life.
‘So?’ I said calmly. ‘You had one of your Little Sparrow turns.’
‘Yes, not turns, messages – just after one o’clock.’
I pulled myself together. Okay, what did we have here? She’s at the dressmakers just after one o’clock and has a Little Sparrow turn. Big deal, so what? ‘Mum, what has this to do with me going to Singapore?’
My mother closed her eyes for effect and lowered her voice. I guess she had to ham it up a little bit using her Little Sparrow voice. ‘The yellow fledgling has grown. It has come out of the baby’s mouth and flown out of the dream.’ She looked at me, the suggestion of a triumphant smile on her lips, her eyes almost shut. Chairman Meow was practically purring. ‘Singapore,’ she said quietly. ‘It is flying to the land of my birth.’
‘I need a coffee,’ I said, furious with myself for falling into her trap.
‘Oh, darling, I’m neglecting you!’
‘No, you stay. I’ll get it. Shall I get you one?’
‘Simon, you know I never drink coffee at night.’ She rose and asked, ‘You wouldn’t like a brandy to go with it, would you?’ It was her way of saying she knew I was rattled.
CHAPTER THREE
SO INSTEAD OF THE anticipated resistance from my mother to the Singapore job, I found only delight and encouragement. Despite what she said about Little Sparrow and her dream, I suspected there was quite another reason for her elation. Surrounded by her family and their friends, it was inevitable that I should find a Chinese wife.
While to Brickman I denied any knowledge of Cantonese, my ambitious and careful mother had seen to it that we children understood and had a fairly good grasp of one of China’s four most popular languages. I was pretty rusty, since I now stubbornly refused to speak it at home. My dad barely understood a word, and I regarded speaking Cantonese as inappropriate and an affectation, since my mum had been in Australia from the age of four. The few ethnic Chinese I knew all preferred to speak English. Nevertheless, my sisters and I spoke Cantonese well enough to get by at a level that might be attained by a conscientious gwai-lo. My youngest sister, Helen, was the best linguist, but even she spoke it with an Australian accent. ‘The rest you’ll pick up in no time. Cantonese is an easy language. Besides, all the good families and big business people speak English,’ my mum assured me.
I can’t say I was thrilled by the thought of finding myself in the midst of her family: an ancient senile great-grandmother, a great-uncle and his wife, Fiona, their kids, my mother’s cousins, who between them had two daughters and three sons, my second cousins. The girls, already married, had produced a pigeon pair each. My mother kept track of every birthday and on Chinese New Year everyone received generous red envelopes known as hong bao. I forget how many additional relatives there were but my mum kept in touch with one of her cousins, who had two sons, my second cousins, Patrick and Henry Kwan. One was in Chinese antiques and the other a sociologist who worked at the university.
Another second cousin, Bryan, lived in America. He never married, a fact that worried his grandmother, Fiona, no end. But whenever the subject came up, my mum would declare with a sniff that if she’d use the eyes in her head, she’d realise he was as camp as a row of tents. ‘A Chinese man with a lisp, my goodness! I daily thank the gods we don’t have to contend with that,’ she’d say smugly, although I’m sure the possibility had crossed her mind more than once where I was concerned, and she might even have consulted the gods herself. I think it might have been the outrageous psychedelic neckties I wore. But the number of bunnies she’d witnessed coming and going must have reassured her. So the onus was on me to be the male supremo of my generation. My duty, besides becoming chairman of the family’s businesses, was to spawn a squad of boys to carry on what my mum regarded as ‘the honourable Koo surname’ and appear as Chinese as possible.
‘With my pure blood mixed in with your father’s, no one will know they’re not 100 per cent Chinese … A bit fair-skinned, maybe, but that’s nice, that’s good,’ she’d sometimes say.
‘It works both ways, Mum,’ I’d reply. ‘What if they’re throwbacks and turn out tall, blonde and blue-eyed?’
‘Impossible! It’s not in Little Sparrow’s dream,’ she’d say, tightlipped, although you could almost hear her heart skip a beat.
I sometimes wondered, considering how it all turned out, why, when I discovered my mother approved of me going to Singapore, I didn’t reject the job offer. I doubt it would have affected my career. Charlie Baby wasn’t a man to be crossed lightly, but he was a pragmatist and knew the value of biding his time. Also, the Wills advertising department would certainly have put the kibosh on the move. But none of this would now be tested. My acceptance might even give Charlie a certain amount of kudos in the New York office.
My several reasons for taking the Singapore position were complex. I’d been promised a one-man show at the Rudy Komon Gallery in Jersey Road,
Woollahra, for which I would need at least sixteen paintings. After a year I’d completed six, and except for one, or maybe two, they were nothing to write home about. I was in a bit of a painting rut and couldn’t see myself emerging from it in the near future. Too many cigarette packs too soon, I guess. So that was certainly one reason. Three years in Asia, I told myself, and I might see things differently or, at least, be reinvigorated.
Another reason was the chance to prove myself. I had resisted entering the family business, but I hadn’t shown any real aptitude on my own. I’d huffed and I’d puffed and, while I may have loosened one or two roof tiles, I hadn’t blown the house down. Sure, I could draw and paint a bit and had all the makings of a pretty good advertising man. I earned enough to run the Vee Dub, buy my own gear and generally pay my own way. But then of course I didn’t pay rent. I’d mumble some excuse to myself about needing a studio for my painting, but really that was bullshit. At twenty-nine, I hadn’t climbed to any dizzy heights or, for that matter, scaled the foothills of a personal achievement that might make my family sit up and take notice. I was simply a paid employee, and my executive supremo was an irascible semi-cripple with a rapidly advancing lung condition and thoroughly unpleasant manner.
It was high time I got away from everything I knew. I was kidding myself if I thought I was free and independent, or that I was unaffected by my family’s major areas of business. When you grow up and just about every conversation in the home has something, directly or indirectly, to do with death, it gets under your skin like an itch. You find yourself watching a passing funeral procession to see if the hearse is being driven by one of your dimmer cousins, or if the deceased is being sent to their eternal rest in a Gold Chisel casket. I recall an incident when I was a six-year-old and one of the kids in my class announced that his grandma had died.
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