by Alice Pung
‘Huh?’
Marly was embarrassed that her cousin did not yet know how to say ‘Pardon?’ or ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’
‘I mean, is she a Crystal Barbie? Or a Bridal Barbie? Or what?’
‘She Pimross.’
‘Huh?’
‘She means Primrose,’ explained Marly.
‘Primrose Barbie? Never heard of that before. What does she do?’ asked Jessica.
‘Huh?’
‘That’s my doll!’ cried Kylie suddenly. ‘She stole my doll!’
‘Don’t be a sook, Kylie,’ said Marly. ‘You chucked her out, remember?’
‘No! It’s not fair! I didn’t say she could have her! I want her back!’
‘But she’s not yours anymore, you chucked her out,’ Marly repeated.
‘She stole my doll!’ hollered Kylie.
Soon, a small group of kids had gathered around.
‘It mine,’ said Tuyet. ‘I find her.’
‘Where, then?’ asked Kane.
‘In the . . .’ began Tuyet, and then she must have realised it was not a good idea to tell them exactly where. ‘Over there.’ She pointed in the direction of the school oval.
‘And where did you lose it?’ Kane asked Kylie.
‘I don’t know,’ Kylie lied. ‘Somewhere over there.’ She also pointed at the oval. ‘She’s my favourite doll. I’ve had her since I was eight.’ A tear rolled out of Kylie’s big green eyes.
Oh come on, thought Marly, you’ve only had her for one year, and it’s your own fault for chuck ing her away. Marly knew she should do something. She should speak up, because her cousin couldn’t speak for herself without the other kids making fun of her or pulling up their eyelid corners and yelling ‘ching chong, ching chong!’ She had to tell the truth. She took a deep breath.
‘She stole it from Kylie!’ accused Jessica.
‘No, you stupid derbrain,’ Marly finally exploded. ‘You know she didn’t. Kylie chucked it in the bin. She chucked it in the bin over there!’
Everyone looked in the direction where Marly was pointing.
‘You chucked her in the bin?’ asked Kimberly in disbelief.
‘But how come it doesn’t look dirty? How come the doll is still so new?’ asked Kane.
‘Because I didn’t chuck her in the bin – she stole her from me!’ repeated Kylie. She was crying now.
‘Nooo,’ said Tuyet. ‘I never stole. I clin eet.’
‘My cousin found the stupid doll and cleaned it and made the dress for her,’ said Marly. ‘Have a look if you don’t believe me.’ She pulled the doll out of bewildered Tuyet’s hands, and thrust it at Kane. Kimberly, who believed she was more of an expert at sussing these things out, took it from him. She examined the doll carefully.
‘You’re a liar, Marly,’ she finally said. ‘This dress is made by a machine. I know because my aunty Gwen has one at her house. That’s why the stitches are so neat. It’s made by an adult. There is no way she’ – and here, Kimberly jabbed the doll at Tuyet’s direction – ‘no way that she could make something like this.’
‘But she can!’ said Marly. ‘She can sew!’
‘Liar. You don’t have to stick up for your cousin. We know she’s a thief. Youse are all thieves. My mum says the chinks come here and steal jobs.’
It was that word that did it. Marly’s face started to burn, and her heart was like an exploding water bomb in her chest. She hurled herself at Kimberly, and grabbed at her hair with one hand, taking in a handful of those perfect brown ringlets, and snatched Tuyet’s doll with the other. She let go and gave it back to Tuyet. Kimberly started howling. ‘Waahhhh!’ she cried. ‘You pulled my hair!’ Kane made a grab for Marly but she quickly stepped back. She held her hands like knives in front of her face and chest. ‘I know kung fu,’ she said. ‘Hwaaah!’
‘What the . . .’
‘Karate!’ Marly yelled, realising they might not know what kung fu was, that they might have thought it was the same as ching-chong. ‘Karate! Fighting with bare hands! We invented the Chinese burn! We invented the death of a thousand cuts! Hwaaah!’ She rolled her hands round and round, hoping that it would look like she was ready to slice someone into a couple of salami chunks.
‘You are crazy,’ muttered Kane, but he backed away from Marly.
Marly felt victorious.
‘Hwaaah!’ she screeched again.
‘What is going on here?’
It was Mrs Louden, their teacher. She looked around and saw Kimberly and Kylie in tears, Tuyet holding a Barbie doll and snivelling, and Marly yelling like a hyena.
Kylie piped up between tears, ‘Miss, Miss, she stole my Barbie!’ She pointed a finger at Tuyet, who clutched the doll closer to her chest.
‘Did not! You throw in rubbiss. I find her.’
Mrs Louden looked at Tuyet long and hard. ‘Is this true?’
‘Yes.’
She then turned to Kylie and looked at her long and hard too. ‘Is that true, Kylie? Did you throw this doll away in the bin? Now, don’t lie to me.’
Kylie looked at the ground, and murmured, ‘But it was only a joke.’
‘She left it in there all day and didn’t go back to get it,’ said Marly. ‘I saw.’
Tuyet held onto the doll so tightly that her knuckles were white.
‘Let me have a look at that,’ said Mrs Louden, and took the doll from Tuyet.
‘Miss, Miss, she’s a liar!’ said Kimberly. ‘She said that she made the doll’s clothes herself too!’
Mrs Louden turned the doll around in her hands and looked at the dress with the carefully stuck-on gold stars, the crown and the clean hair. ‘Good job, Tuyet,’ she said, handing Primrose back to her. ‘Lovely stitching.’
Kylie’s mouth was a big bewildered O. So was Jessica’s.
‘Next time,’ Mrs Louden said to Kylie, ‘pay more respect to your things instead of throwing them away.’
When Mrs Louden walked away, Jessica said loudly, ‘I hate her!’ Kylie started to cry again.
At that moment, Marly realised how much she liked Mrs Louden. She was not only good and kind, but she was fair.
‘Finders Keepers, Kylie!’ gloated Marly, this time not caring what her friends thought.
Suddenly, Jessica grabbed the doll from Tuyet’s surprised hands. ‘I don’t care what the teacher says, this belongs to Kylie!’ Jessica ripped the lovely pink satin gown from Barbie, squished her tinfoil crown with one hand, and handed the doll back to Kylie. ‘Here, it’s yours.’
Kylie took the doll back, but without its new dress, it was just her old Barbie again in the fading yellow swimsuit, the one she didn’t want in the first place. Everyone could see this. Stupid, greedy Kylie, Marly thought angrily, she’s made a big deal out of nothing.
To hide her embarrassment, Kylie gave a sharp tug and pulled Barbie’s head off. She threw the two parts of the doll down at Tuyet’s feet. ‘You can have it,’ she said. ‘I don’t want it back. It’s got your germs on it. Gross.’ She nodded at Jessica and the two girls walked away in a huff.
The other kids started to move away. The action was over.
Marly looked at her teary cousin, with the broken doll at her feet. She didn’t care who was watching. She bent down, picked up Barbie and popped her head back onto her body. She handed it back to Tuyet.
‘Thanks,’ sniffed her cousin.
Marly felt free. She didn’t care what Kylie and Jessica thought of her anymore.
‘Let’s walk home together,’ she told her cousins when the bell rang for the end of lunchtime.
It seemed that Tuyet and DaWei weren’t too concerned about what anyone else thought of them either. It was as if the Barbie incident had never happened. Marly’s mum had given Tuyet a length of elastic from her sewing supplies, and the following day at lunchtime, Tuyet tied the elastic in a loop around two empty metal bicycle stands, while DaWei stood at the other end with the elastic stretched around his knees. Marly found them taking it in turns
to jump in and out of the elastic, and to hold the end.
‘You might want an extra person to hold the other end so you don’t need to tie it to the bike rack,’ she suggested. ‘Maybe I could hold it for you.’ Without a word, Tuyet untied the elastic from the bike rack, and re-looped it around Marly’s legs. And this was how Marly came to join her cousins at lunchtime.
She hunted with them on the oval, around and around, looking for lost treasure. Many times they would find one or two dropped wrapped lollies, and one lucky lunch they even found a dollar which they took to the canteen and bought five Redskins with.
Another lunchtime Marly suggested that they empty water bottles out into the sandpit to make quicksand. Soon, a corner of the sandpit was filled with light brown sludge that they stirred and stirred. Tuyet made little people out of twigs and hard inedible purple plums that dropped into the playground from a neighbouring tree, and they played Armies in the War. Tuyet made little chairs and tables out of Prima boxes, and rings out of Coke pulls. What was incredible to Marly was that they always found something in the playground to play with.
Every time Marly and her cousins walked past Kylie and Jessica, Marly noticed a new addition to the group – Kimberly. But they were doing the exact same thing as always, playing Barbies, and Marly secretly gloated that there was no way Kimberly, with her sooky ways and her high voice, would make as good a Ken as Marly had been.
Marly also realised that all the while she had been playing with Ken – making him go on adventures, telling jokes and creating a fearless character – she was being herself through a small plastic doll, when now, with her cousins, she could be herself all the time.
The other kids left Marly and her cousins alone at lunchtime, but strangely enough, Marly didn’t mind. She felt like she and her cousins were marooned on their own little island, but she had chosen it, and she was happy. They even had their own language – Cantonese – that no one else in the school could understand. Whenever Kane or Billy or Chantal walked by and called them names, Marly and Tuyet and DaWei would hurl back worse ones in Cantonese and laugh.
At home, the adults started to comment on Marly’s change in attitude.
‘You’re really helpful now,’ said Aunty Tam when Marly offered to hang out the washing with Tuyet.
‘You’re so much more focused,’ marvelled Marly’s dad, watching as Tuyet showed Marly how to make a spinning top for DaWei with an old metal wheel from a toy car.
Marly glowed at their praise. It felt good to be helpful.
‘How do you know how to make this stuff?’ she asked Tuyet in awe one day.
Tuyet shrugged. ‘Hong Kong was a big city full of poster ads about the latest cool gadgets and toys and stuff. But we were stuck in the refugee camp and I had to look after mum and DaWei. I wanted him to have toys so I collected old clothes and broken clocks and made them myself.’
Marly began to realise that her cousin had never been a suck-up, that she’d always just been serious and responsible. Tuyet had never gloated about all the stuff she knew, and she was always patient. ‘Here,’ said Tuyet, handing Marly the wheel attached to a wooden chopstick. ‘Give it a spin.’
Things continued like this for three more blissful weeks, although Marly didn’t see her cousins much over the weekends. They were always out with Uncle Beng and Aunty Tam visiting friends who had arrived in Australia earlier and now lived in the Commission flats.
The Commission flats were buildings that rose so high they seemed to poke the sky. Aunty Tam liked them because they reminded her of the apartments of wealthy people in Hong Kong. She’d never been inside a Hong Kong apartment, of course, but she claimed they had the same black-and-white floors and modern kitchens, and bathrooms that had a shower on top of a bathtub and no squat toilet. To her, these were luxury.
When they came back, their eyes were filled with awe over all the rooms that could one day be theirs, and all the spaces they could keep their things.
Then, one day, they got it. A place of their own.
‘It’s on the seventeenth floor,’ said Tuyet, grinning. ‘And it has its own playground. You can come over and play any time you want.’
Marly felt a small stab of t he old jealousy – she was supposed to be the one giving her poor cousins all the stuff they never had, not the other way around!
But deeper than that was another strange feeling: an aching empty sort of feeling. She had always known that her cousins would not be staying with them forever, but while they were around, it felt as if she had her own siblings – annoying at times, but often full of unexpected laughs.
She’d started off with such good intentions to show her cousins around, but when they’d arrived and she’d realised how embarrassing they were, Marly had wanted nothing to do with them. She had been so mean to them.
And now, just when she’d realised she felt much happier being with them than with her other supposed friends, they were leaving. And going to a new school as well – one that was closer to their new home.
She watched sadly as her cousins prepared to leave.
Moving weekend was a day filled with sunlight and blue sky. Aunty Tam and Uncle Beng helped Marly’s parents clean the house. Finally, they took down the navy curtains with the polka dots. When the curtains came down, Marly could see that her uncle’s family had already packed their bags. They had also stripped the bed so it was just a bare mattress again.
Marly gave Tuyet the Rubik’s cube to take with her, and DaWei the Duracell bunny. She watched as Tuyet fiddled with the cube and in only a couple of minutes had the colours lined up on each side.
‘Back at the camp,’ Tuyet said, ‘we spent years in one room. There wasn’t very much to do, and one time the Red Cross gave me a Rubik’s cube as a Christmas present. I spent months trying to work it out.’
Marly had never spent months trying to work out one simple problem. When the cube had gotten too difficult, she had just tossed it aside and played with her other toys. When Duracell bunny got a broken drumstick, she’d just tossed him aside too. She’d never stuck with something. Instead of showing her friends who she really was, she’d been so scared of losing them that she’d just worked on getting rid of her cousins, which was easier.
Tuyet and DaWei, on the other hand, had turned up ever y afternoon to walk home with her after school. Even when she walked in front of them and pretended they weren’t there. They’d brought her lunch when she had forgotten it. And they’d let her join in when they saw she had lost her friends. They understood that family always stuck together.
She could not imagine going to school on Monday morning and being alone again at recess. But Marly knew she was tough, she would sort something out.
‘That’s it then,’ Marly’s dad said after they had loaded all their suitcases in the car. ‘Say goodbye to your cousins, Marly.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ scoffed Marly’s mum. ‘This isn’t a serious farewell! They’re just moving fifteen minutes’ drive away! They’ll still all see each other every weekend when Tam comes to help me sew.’
Marly was very relieved.
‘See you later, Germainn and Jacky!’ Marly said, for old times’ sake.
‘Hey!’ said Tuyet. ‘Just you wait. I’m going to change my name when I get to my new school.’
‘Not me,’ said DaWei. ‘I like Jackie.’
‘What will you change your name to?’ Marly asked Tuyet.
‘Primrose.’
You have got to be kidding me, that’s almost as bad as Rapunzel, thought Marly. But over the past few months, she had learned not to blurt out the first thing she thought.
‘What about Rosie?’ she said instead.
‘Rosie,’ Tuyet repeated thoughtfully. ‘I like that. Maybe I will. Here. This is for you.’ She gave Marly something in a white plastic bag. When Marly opened it, she saw that it was the elastic they played with at lunchtimes.
‘But I can’t play with this by myself!’ Marly protested.
‘I
guess you’ll have to make some new friends again, then, ay?’
Marly smiled. She supposed that she would, when she went back to school. But that was tomorrow. Now, she watched her father drive her uncle, aunty and cousins to their new flat. She was back to being an only child again, with all the space in her house back. Wasn’t that what she’d always wanted?
She went back inside and kneeled on the floor to help her mother peel the duct tape from the shower curtains. ‘What will you do with these now, Mum?’ she asked.
‘We’ll fold them carefully and put them in the garage,’ her mother told her. ‘In case we need them again.’
Marly smiled – her mother could never throw anything away.
‘You know,’ Marly suggested, ‘you could always put these curtains back to good use.’
‘Oh?’ asked her mum. ‘And how would I do that?’
‘Well, I have a good idea. You could make me my own room.’
Her mother stopped peeling the duct tape. ‘Maybe that is a good idea,’ she said. ‘You’ve had to share so much for so long. We’ll wait until your father gets home and see if he can help me re-hang the curtain rod. In the meantime, where’s the tape? We’d better stick it together again.’
This time, Marly did not muck about. She did not jump on the bed or pretend that the curtains were an oversized calculator or Atari game. She got right down to work.
My parents were born in Cambodia. My mum worked in a plastic bag factory when she was only 13 years old, and my dad’s family owned that factory. That’s how my parents met!
In 1975 there was a war in Cambodia and my parents were separated. Four years later they met again in Vietnam, and romance blossomed. In December 1980, my parents came as refugees by boat to Australia. I was born a month later. Dad named me Alice, because he thought Australia was a Wonderland. I was their first Australian Girl. Like Marly, I grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne, behind a carpet factory. Braybrook was a very multicultural neighbourhood and I had friends from all over the world.
My husband Nick is from countryside Corryong. We have travelled all over the world, but when we think of home we always think of Australia.