by Alice Pung
‘Ooh! Thanks!’ Marly could not believe her luck. She carefully tipped out the contents of the backpack on the floor and began to pore over the small cardboard box of pencils, the colouring book, the plush plane and the stencils.
Then she remembered her manners and what her mother had asked her to do.
‘Wait! I’ll be back,’ she said. She ran into the bedroom she shared with her parents and pulled out the box of toys she had saved. Bringing it to her cousin’s side of the living room, she said generously, ‘You can have a look in here and see if there is anything you would like to have.’
DaWei dived right in, and claimed the Duracell bunny. ‘Hey look, sister, look at this!’ The bunny had a drum strapped to its furry chest, and in each paw was a wooden drumstick. With operating batteries in its back, it would beat the drum; but the battery cover was missing, and one of the drumsticks was broken off at the middle.
Tuyet picked up the Rubik’s cube. ‘I had one of these . . .’ she said, and twisted it around.
‘Stop!’ cried Marly. ‘It took me ages to peel all of the stickers off and stick them back so the colours match on each side. You can’t mess it up – you’ll never be able to put it together again!’
Marly had given these toys to her cousins and they were no longer hers, so she knew she shouldn’t have been so bossy about what they would do with them; but it was hard to see someone else mess up your old toys. Tuyet ignored Marly, and twisted the cube this way and that, until the shapes were completely jumbled.
I bet she did that on purpose, thought Marly. Stupid cousin – I bet she thinks she’s too good to have my old toys. She will destroy everything!
The truth was, Marly had not expected Tuyet to be so tall, or so cool and grown-up, with her painted nails and beautiful mum. She thought that her poor locked-up cousins would both look more like DaWei, skinny and wide-eyed adorable, his face filling with joy over her old stuffed toys.
But as Marly watched closely, she could see that Tuyet’s hands were doing something hers had never been able to do. The colours were starting to line up on each side again: the blues with the blues, the yellows with the yellows. Soon, Marly could see that her cousin was going to achieve the impossible – she was going to solve the Rubik’s puzzle! And sure enough, in less than ten minutes, Tuyet had all the coloured sides matching again. She handed the cube back to Marly. ‘It’s pretty easy,’ she said with a modest shrug.
Marly knew it would be pointless asking her cousin to show her how she did it, because the cube would be jumbled differently each time. Instead, she said, ‘It’s yours now.’ But she felt an unfamiliar jealousy surge in the middle of her chest. Surely, she was supposed to be the one showing things to her new cousins, not the other way around.
When the adults arrived home, Marly’s aunty and uncle exclaimed over the house. ‘Look how high the ceilings are!’ ‘Incredible, the walls are so cool and sturdy.’ ‘Look at the beautiful wallpaper!’ Marly thought that the brown and green paisley print was horrible, but maybe Uncle Beng had no taste after being locked up for so long.
‘Aw, come on, brother, it’s nothing special. This is one of the poorer properties in this country.’
‘Then this must be a very lucky country indeed,’ breathed Aunty Tam.
They had four big suitcases with them. After she started unpacking, Aunty Tam asked if she could put a box in the kitchen.
‘What’s in there?’ asked Marly’s mum.
‘Our rice cooker.’
‘You brought a rice cooker to Australia?’ laughed Marly’s mum. ‘But we already have a rice cooker. And a microwave too!’
‘But this rice cooker is a National branded one, the best. We’ve had it since the refugee camp. We cooked all our meals in it. By the way, sister, what’s a microwave?’
Marly’s mum took Aunty Tam by the elbow and led her into the kitchen to show her.
Over the next few weeks her uncle’s family settled in. Mealtimes were much livelier now that there were seven people around the table instead of three. Marly’s father liked to tell terrible Dad jokes. Other times, the adults would talk, forgetting that the kids were still listening at the table. ‘I’m not sure what happened to Old Aunt Pek,’ said Uncle Beng gravely. ‘When I last saw her, she knew they were taking me away for re-education, and she gave me the gold Buddha around her neck. She said it would protect me from harm.’
‘She’s probably gone,’ sighed Marly’s mother.
‘Let me tell you, Duong, they worked us like slaves at that re-education camp! It was like a prison. And they took away my Buddha. They said it was a sign of greed because he was made of gold and so fat!’
‘Hah!’ laughed the adults, though Marly didn’t understand what was so funny.
Although Tuyet liked to spend most of her time indoors, DaWei and Marly were always outside. They went on wild adventures around the house, looking for secret trapdoors. They pretended to be soldiers going to war, wearing pots over their heads as helmets and carrying rulers as swords. When no adults were looking, they even climbed the huge plum tree in the front yard and tried to leap off it onto the verandah.
DaWei taught Marly how to fold water bombs out of the Bi-Lo ads that came in the mail every Tuesday, and they had water fights on hot days. Marly had thought she would be too old to hang around with her little cousin, but she actually liked playing with him more than with Tuyet.
Tuyet had her talents too, though: she knew how to make amazing toys with things that Marly had thought of as junk. She folded origami animals from food wrappers, and made painted shields for Marly and DaWei out of Danish biscuit tin lids and foil. She also narrated stories for DaWei and Marly to act out, and they were always better than anything Marly could have made up herself. She and her cousins ate Coco Pops for breakfast and sometimes lunch, and often as a snack.
One evening, Marly’s father came home from his job at the Felix Food Factory with an enormous box.
‘Oh no, Duong,’ sighed Marly’s mum. ‘You brought home peanut butter again.’
Marly’s father got cheap discounts on jams, peanut butter and other things Marly’s mum didn’t know how to use, like custard powder and cheese sauce mix. Marly wished that the factory made Nutella.
‘No, this is even better!’ proclaimed Marly’s Dad. ‘It’s a television! I bought it after work from Spiros. He had it in his car boot. It’s his old one, but it’s still in colour. He even included the antenna.’
Marly and her cousins crowded around the television and helped him set it up. Marly was so excited! Now she would be able to talk about the shows the other kids talked about at recess at school, instead of just pretending she knew about them: the Sooty Show, the Muppets, Danger Mouse.
Television didn’t change their evening lives too much, because the adults hogged it, watching boring adult shows and the seven o’clock news. Marly wondered why the only Asians on TV seemed to be moustached kung fu masters, villains or criminals. During the day, while it was still school holidays, Marly and DaWei spent entire mornings and afternoons in front of the television, watching the children’s shows on Channel 2.
‘You lazy kids,’ Aunty Tam scoffed. ‘Why can’t you be helpful like Tuyet?’
It was true – Tuyet rarely watched the television. Instead, she was always helping her mum and Marly’s mum wash dishes, sweep the floors, peel vegetables or snip loose threads from the clothes they made.
‘Marly, DaWei, come and help us shell peas!’ called her mother.
What an annoying suck-up Tuyet is, thought Marly. She ruins it for all of us. Marly picked up a small rubber ball and hurled it at the television to turn it off. Instead, she knocked some incense out of their family urn on the mantelpiece.
‘Aiyoh!’ cried her mother when she entered the room to see what the noise was about. ‘You can’t keep still for one moment, can you? You always have to go and destroy things!’ Marly’s mum scooped the incense back into the urn with her hands. ‘You’re just lucky you didn’t
topple it over.’ The urn was in front of a photograph of Marly’s grandparents, who had died during the Vietnam war. Every week, Marly’s mum would light incense in front of the urn to honour the memory of her own parents.
Marly glared at Tuyet – it was her fault Marly was always in trouble.
The summer holidays were nearly over. Tuyet and DaWei had been enrolled at Marly’s school, and two weeks before school started, Marly heard Tuyet drilling her little brother behind their curtain on a Saturday morning.
‘Spell ball,’ Tuyet told DaWei.
‘B-A-L-L,’ replied DaWei, scratching his head.
‘Spell bat.’
‘B-A-T.’
‘Spell bicycle.’
‘B-I-C-Y-C-L-E.’
‘Spell beautiful.’
‘B-E-U . . .’
‘No!’ corrected Tuyet. ‘B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L! Now let’s do some sums. Seven times eight.’
‘Fifty-six,’ DaWei replied almost immediately, still scratching his head.
‘Nine times eight.’
‘Seventy-two.’
Marly could not believe it. She couldn’t spell those last two words when she was in Grade One. She found it incredible that these two cousins, who had only spoken to her in Cantonese, could spell words perfectly in English. And they knew up to at least their nine-times tables! They were geniuses! She wondered what else they were hiding from her.
‘Hey kids, you guys are really good at maths,’ said Marly’s father, overhearing them. He was sitting on the couch, reading the local paper. Uncle Beng was next to him filling in some forms. ‘Marlin here is very bad at it. Aren’t you, my girl? I always tell her: Marly, without geometry, life is pointless. Ha! Ha! Pointless!’
Marly hated how her father laughed at his own jokes, which no one got except for him.
‘But she is good at other things, eh?’ He ruffled Marly’s hair. ‘Like talking in English. I swear, this girl went to school and about three months later she was speaking like a local. Speaking non-stop, too!’
‘Stop it, Dad!’
‘Hee hee. Marly, what English names should we give your cousins for school?’ Marly’s father asked her.
‘What’s wrong with the names they already have?’ asked Uncle Beng. ‘Tuyet means “snow”, and DaWei was a special name given to us by a Hong Kong friend, who told us it meant “big and great” in Mandarin.’
Big and Great, thought Marly. Oh boy. The kids at school are really going to love a boy who calls himself Big and Great. And there was no snow ever, not in Melbourne anyway.
‘I like Fanny,’ piped Tuyet. ‘There was a girl at the camp named Fanny Yip.’
‘No, that’s a terrible name!’ said Marly. ‘Kids will laugh at you.’
‘Why? I like fans.’
‘Yes, tell us, Marlin,’ Marly’s dad asked, turning towards her, ‘why is that a bad name?’
Marly didn’t answer. Instead, she said, ‘Why don’t you call yourself Jackie?’
‘That’s a boy’s name!’
‘No, it’s not. If you call yourself Jackie then your brother can call himself Jermaine and we would all match, like the Jackson 5!’
When Marly’s family had arrived in Australia, the first song they’d heard over the radio was ‘I Want You Back’ by a band called the Jackson 5. It was one of the strangest, most beautiful and exciting songs Marly had ever heard. The only part of it she understood was when the lead singer went through the first three letters of the alphabet – A-B-C. The Jackson 5 were always on the radio then. Before they came on, the announcer would always say, ‘Before there was “Off the Wall” or “Thriller”, before Michael went solo, there were the Jackson 5: Michael, Marlon, Tito, Jermaine, Jackie and Randy!’
Her father had suggested Marlin as a good Australian name for her because he thought that was what the girl in the Jackson 5 was called, and it also sounded a lot like her real name, MyLinh. Marly loved it. It was only much later that she’d found out all the Jackson 5 were boys. Even worse, the name Marlin was actually spelt ‘Marlon’!
Luckily, when she’d started school, none of the kids had realised she had a boy’s name. And Marly had never told anyone about the mistake. Anyway, there was already a boy in her class called Jesse, who had the sides of his head shaved, and another boy who smelled like Imperial Leather soap called Kim, and a popular girl who called herself Sammy. So Marly thought that Jackie and Jermaine were excellent names.
‘No way!’ Tuyet was horrified.
‘It’s better than Fanny.’
Uncle Beng looked quite pleased. ‘Jackie, ay?’ he muttered. ‘Jackie, Jackie, I like it. But it does sound like a boy’s name. So DaWei, you can be called Jackie, and Tuyet, you can be called Jermaine.’
‘Jackie’s good,’ smiled DaWei. ‘Like Jackie Chan.’
‘Who’s that?’ asked Marly.
‘A famous Hong Kong actor.’
‘We’ve never heard of him.’ She hated how her cousins were always name-dropping famous people they’d heard of in Hong Kong, as if they were hanging out with stars all the time.
‘Yeah, well, you will soon.’
Marly stuck out her tongue.
‘But I don’t like Jermaine,’ protested Tuyet. ‘It’s not a pretty name. What about Cinderella?’
‘Oh nooooo.’ Marly put her palms on either side of her face and made her mouth into a massive ‘O’. ‘The kids at school will really, really tease you.’
‘You make this school out to be so bad,’ complained Tuyet, ‘as if it’s filled with kids who will pick on you for any small thing. I bet the kids won’t even care when they find out that DaWei and I know our times tables up to fourteen times fourteen.’
Show-off, thought Marly sourly.
‘The kids will tease you at school for being know-it-alls,’ she said. And worst of all, she would be related to them.
‘What kind of ridiculousness is this?’ scoffed Aunty Tam as she came in, dressed in a sequinned pink shirt and pleated white skirt that fell past her knees. She had a string of pearls around her neck, and black high heels on. ‘Marly, stop making up such madness to scare your cousins. No one picks on kids for being smart. They respect them. Now, who wants to go to the supermarket with me?’
‘Me! Me!’ cried Tuyet and DaWei.
‘I think our kids have head lice,’ said Aunty Tam, and suddenly they didn’t look so eager.
That night, Marly watched as Uncle Beng filled out the school forms with DaWei and Tuyet’s new English names. He wrote down: Jackie and Germainn. Marly was still so cross with Tuyet that she didn’t tell her uncle that he’d spelt Jermaine wrong.
‘Time for haircuts!’ called Uncle Beng from the backyard. He was sitting in his shorts and singlet. It was so hot Marly thought you could probably break an egg on the cement ground and it would begin to fry. Except, of course, an egg was food, and her family never wasted food.
‘Me first!’ DaWei came bounding outside and sat on the little stool in front of his dad.
That afternoon, Aunty Tam had returned from the chemist with a big bottle of something that smelled suspiciously like pee. She lathered it all over DaWei’s and Tuyet’s hair, and then made Marly do it as well, and then the adults put it in each other’s hair. Marly’s mum and aunty had also washed out all the sheets and blankets and hung them to dry in the sun.
Uncle Beng put a big plastic soup bowl over DaWei’s head, like a helmet. DaWei looked like the Hot Soup Superhero, sitting there smiling and tapping his feet on the concrete. Uncle Beng started to cut around the helmet, being careful around the ears. When he was done, he lifted the bowl from DaWei’s head. ‘Ta-dah!’ he exclaimed.
DaWei’s black hair was perfectly bowl-shaped. He looked like a mushroom, or one of those olden-day monks that Marly had seen in a history book once. The ones who wore brown sacks for clothes and stopped talking for years.
Oh no, thought Marly in horror. When Uncle Beng asked, ‘Well, who’s next?’ she ran back inside and grabbed Tuyet. ‘I thin
k your dad wants to cut your hair!’
Tuyet turned pale and put her hands up to her long black hair. ‘No!’ she said with dread. ‘Not again! It’s not fair!’
‘Come on, Tuyet, it’s not so bad,’ coaxed Aunty Tam.
‘No!’
Marly looked at Tuyet, surprised. She was sick of how Tuyet acted around adults, always so helpful, always so eager to do crappy jobs like wash vegetables and hang out the laundry. This was her chance to show that even though she was younger, she could be the bigger girl.
She turned around and bravely marched outside.
‘Uncle Beng, I’ll go next. But I don’t want the bowl.’
‘How else am I going to cut straight?’ he said.
‘Well, you could just start with my fringe. And then cut my hair beneath each ear, and then all around. My mum does that.’
‘You’re a really bright girl. Back at the refugee camp, a girl like you would be giving haircuts for everyone!’
As Uncle Beng snipped away, Marly saw her chance to ask him something she had always wanted to know. ‘Hey, Uncle Beng, how come you guys were stuck in Vietnam and Hong Kong for so long? Why didn’t you try and escape?’
‘I sold everything we owned to get tickets on the boat,’ Uncle Beng explained.
‘You mean the boat we came here on?’
‘Yes. I got tickets for both our families, plus your aunty’s mother. But the week we were about to leave, your aunty’s mother got very sick. We had to decide what to do. Your aunty Tam couldn’t leave her mother. Finally we decided that your father’s family would try to make it to Australia first, and then sponsor us to come here as soon as he could. Ah, who knew it would take more than seven years.’
‘But what happened to Aunty Tam’s mother?’
‘Oh, she died. It was very sad. Never talk about it with your aunty – she is still heartbroken. Her mother wasn’t even very old. And your poor aunty Tam had to raise these two kids all by herself when they dragged me away for re-education.’