by Alice Pung
‘Riley acted up on the bus again today, so he got kicked out this week. Now he has to go to school by taxi again,’ wrote Mike.
One day Bianca told Ally that Mike had amassed a $600 mobile phone bill calling her up. She said that Mike had telephoned her so often only because he loved her and wanted to hear her voice, even when she was at work. She took it as a sign of love, and sent money over through PayPal.
Slowly, however, signs were emerging that didn’t sound all that flash. Bianca tallied them up:
He was unemployed.
He still lived with his parents.
He used to rob houses.
He had full-time responsibility for his son, Riley, who had behavioural problems and learning disorders.
But she did not tell Ally.
The lack of sleep began to create irritations for both she and Mike. They were real lovers, in that they could not switch off from each other. No longer was it a matter of turning off a screen – the person behind it had become real. One problem with this newfound realness was that now everyone else online seemed equally real too. ‘It hurts me when you flirt with the other men on camera,’ Mike confessed, ‘like when they ask you if you will get it on with them and you say, yeah okay, come on.’
‘It’s a joke,’ protested Bianca, ‘they know that you and I are together. Come on, it says very clearly on my MySpace profile that I am with you.’
They had been together for nine months. But it was time to get real, because contentment rested on the concrete things. She sent him a maths textbook because he was studying for a test. He had enrolled in a course to be an electrician, but he told her how hard it was to learn from a book: ‘For me I have to have it explained to me. Then I can just stare at the lips of the person talking and keep focused that way.’ He claimed to have attention deficit disorder but with her this disability seemed to drop away.
Bianca had influenced Mike in ways that made him better too. It was like she had given him a boot up the arse to make him realise that he could not rest so easy. That he had to fight for things in life, just as she had. He found a job. He was becoming focused. After twenty-seven years, he was becoming a man. But that also meant that he could not spend all waking hours in front of the camera: ‘I need to work this weekend because this union job is going to cost money to start. I just want you to stand behind me on it.’
But she could not get used to him not being around. ‘We hardly get to have fun together anymore,’ she wrote to him. ‘You’re now always too tired.’ She would cry and he would design Photoshop drawings to say sorry. After a few days, things would be better again. This went on for a few more months, until Bianca decided that where there was a will, there would be a way.
Bianca had never been overseas before, but she decided that sometime in March she would go to America. Or they could meet in the middle, in Hawaii. She looked up hotels where she could stay. She checked out the plane fares. To make it official, they would tell all their online friends. ‘Imagine,’ said Bianca, ‘when we finally meet up, we could set our screens together and everyone online will see us together in the same place.’
Bianca said that now things were in gear, it would work. This rough patch in the quilt of their relationship did not need to snare. It was just one little square out of hundreds of possible permutations of colours and possibilities. ‘And just how are we going to make it work?’ he wrote back. ‘When you visit I’ll be working days and going to classes at night.’
The final bad sign, the one Ally knew meant doom for Bianca, was this: when Bianca had already ordered her passport, he decided that he did not want to meet her.
‘If you want to break up with me then that’s okay,’ Bianca hammered into the keyboard, ‘but I want to see your face. This isn’t a conversation of seeing walls or feet, etc.’ The glyphs of their typing started to look like sharp teeth. He shifted the camera higher so she could see his face. And then he said: ‘This really isn’t going to work.’
He wasn’t looking at her face. He was looking straight into a camera.
Afterwards, Bianca felt like she had swallowed boiled eggs too fast.
It was the same feeling she had when she was eight and ate all those Mars bars. For her eighth birthday, Bianca’s father had bought her forty-eight of them. He’d got them for her from the NQR store. This was the time before the invention of the Fun Size nuggets, sealed in plastic – though how anything that small could be called fun was beyond Bianca. Bianca’s forty-eight birthday Mars bars were the full size. Her father gave them to her in one go, and she ate them all within a week because she was an eight-year-old child. Now Bianca could never touch a Mars bar ever again.
‘Bad things come in threes,’ she told Ally as they sat on Bianca’s bed. ‘First my rat dies, and now Mike breaks up with me. I bet I will lose my job next.’ Bianca had the computer on her lap and glared into it, checking every possible chat room and message board and site where Mike could be. Looking for the final sign. She did this for about a week. One day, sure enough, it came. It was as if the corners of her universe had contracted, imploded, folded in on themselves.
Mike had turned his MySpace profile to single again.
24/7
My friend Bianca promised to drive me to the 24-hour Kmart in East Burwood, because I wanted to see what people need to buy at three in the morning. Bianca goes for long drives alone, late at night, when she cannot get to sleep. On these drives, she discovers such places.
She was named after Mick Jagger’s first wife, because her parents liked the name and they liked the Rolling Stones. We’d grown up around the block from each other, in Braybrook, a suburb filled with factories and steel-framed skeletons of stripped-away buildings. When I was a child my parents kept me carefully reined, between four walls; Bianca was free to wander the streets, carefully, but at will. Her driving habits are similar.
At 11.15 pm, Bianca turns off the Burwood Highway, and suddenly we have arrived. It is a massive building rising out of the dark, and the blue and red sign is like sky-graffiti, with the ‘K’ kicking through the night. The letters spell out a landmark loiterer’s paradise in the middle of dark suburbia.
Burwood is the site where Australia’s first Kmart opened, in 1969. The store’s slogan is ‘Where good times start’, and when it debuted, this flagship American import was flooded with ladies in pillbox hats and twin-sets. The car park was jammed with HD Holdens and Valiants, and people lined up for the promise of good times. But the good times could only stretch for so long before they snapped back, like gum chewed too long, and became tasteless.
Tonight, this place filled with polymer and polyester goods no longer promises excitement for its temporary inhabitants. It has become an alleviator of our boredom. Tonight, the store is so shiny spick-and-span that we forget we are standing inside a piece of Australian history. At 11.30, when we walk through the automatic doors, it is as if it is still daytime. The first inanimate object of consumer desire we see perpetuates this delusion: out the front, in the foyer, is a Professional Titanium barbeque displayed for the special price of $599. I wonder if anyone has ever thought of the Great Australian Outdoor Eating Dream at two in the morning, and decided to buy one.
There are whole families inside the store: wide-eyed kids staring at shelves in the toy section, a small boy on a yellow scooter. Dads examining gardening tools and mums loading their trolleys with discounted tissue boxes. People looking at the most ordinary and useful things in life: small clock radios, car fresheners, tween underwear, fishing equipment, adhesive rolls of book covering, eggtimers. Here, time is suspended, and such scrutiny takes on an extra dimension. I realise how deeply complex shopping complexes are.
The Dalai Lama once confided that if he were not mindful, he could become dangerously attached to visiting supermarkets: ‘Everywhere I look, I see so many beautiful things.’ Inside this store, everywhere I look is the work of a million different people from all around the globe. Bianca and I marvel at all the things a perso
n could own, produced en masse by people we will never meet. This is everything we ever wanted when we were young, our giant playground, except that now we are cashed-up, sort of. We spend hours trawling through every aisle, trying on clothes we aren’t going to buy because they aren’t on sale yet. We can get our photos developed at three in the morning, if we so desire. In the confectionery section Bianca gets false teeth and a pair of lips, while I choose a packet of muffin mix.
Now there are no pillbox hats, but pillboxes on discount for 50 cents, and twin-sets come in enormous plastic-wrapped bundles from the factory floors of China. Now, people come to Kmart in their pyjama bottoms, like the Chinese students we see ahead of us: two young men and a young woman with fashionably dyed hair. The boy is dressed in flannelette bottoms and has black-rimmed glasses. The girl is wearing a dressing gown. Sleepy-faced, they swim half-dazed through the bright lights to find their distractions. They walk through the store with the familiarity of someone rummaging through their fridge at night.
Following them down the aisles, I pause and become smitten with cheap nylon yarn that comes in the colours of lollies and the texture of feathers. Lost in a revelry of future scarves, I realise after a while that I have lost my three Chinese students. I glance around and see that Bianca has disappeared, too. Looking at my watch, I realise that it is already 12.26. I wander over to a sales assistant, a pretty teenager whose face is deliberately aged by Maybelline. She is attaching stickers to boxes of DVDs.
‘What do people buy at three in the morning?’ I ask.
‘Oh, you’d be surprised. The big-ticket items they don’t usually buy during the day. PlayStations. Bedding and manchester. Sometimes bicycles.’
‘What about barbeques?’
‘Yes …’ She pauses. ‘But not often, because they need to be delivered, and people at night like things they can drive home with in the back of their car.’
I ask her about her shift, and she tells me that she began only half an hour ago, and works until 8 am. She says that she enjoys this shift because it is more relaxed.
A middle-aged Vietnamese couple passes us. They are decent-looking people dressed in Kmart tracksuit pants, mildly marauding the aisles searching for household goods: pillows, chairs, mirrors, tumblers ($3 for twelve long glasses). Two Indian men have sacks of beanbag stuffing in their trolley and are wheeling it to the register. Along the way, there is a shatter: they have accidentally knocked over a tray of tumblers with the trolley. The security guard near the front register approaches them, probably to tell them to pay for the damage.
At around 1 am, there is a fifteen-minute reconciliation. This is the only time that the registers are put on hold and customers cannot make purchases. We are warned far in advance of these fifteen minutes by the in-store PA system, which interrupts the in-store radio broadcast. A soundtrack of music, news updates and promotional segments is the backdrop to this buyers’ heaven.
Bianca drove us here partly because she wanted a blender to make smoothies. She gets one with a glass cup for $35. We don’t feel like consumers, because we can muck around here until daybreak if we want. We line up at the cashier at 3.14, and I tally up what I have brought: a striped jumper for my sister, a red cardigan for me, a tin of blush for Bianca, a lamington tray, my packet of muffin mix, a scrubbing brush with a holder shaped like a blue frog, a pencil-case for my brother and a toilet block that smells like lavender. I had only meant to accompany Bianca on her trip, and write about the strange things people brought at strange times. But somehow, surreptitiously, in the slow dreaming hours, Kmart has seduced me into becoming her shopping accomplice. Bianca and I emerge into the sharp navy night and head towards the car, feeling strangely excited and fulfilled. We cannot wait to open our white plastic bags.
SPIRIT CHIMES
Back during a time when music did not have many layers but only a few austere notes, a time when the white noise of life was the noise of industry, the ancient Chinese turned their grain scoop upside down. This transformed a practical object into a musical instrument with a double purpose. Bells were hung in the corners of large pagodas to scare away birds and evil spirits. During the Han dynasty, morning bells and dusk drums sounded every day to help the Chinese keep regularity over their lives and work. Old Beijing was made up of narrow alleyways shaped in a grid. Inside each grid was a microcosm of a small community made up of courtyard houses. High walls covered everything so you could not see what your neighbour was up to. Overlooking this ancient city was the Drum and Bell Tower, China’s largest and highest timekeeper.
According to legend, an official named Deng was commissioned to cast the bell of the tower, but each new casting came out wrong. The bell would not reverberate. Almost a year had elapsed and the emperor was getting impatient, so one evening Deng’s daughter threw herself into the molten bronze as a sacrifice to the gods. Her father could only salvage one of her embroidered slippers before she disappeared into the furnace. The next day, the casting was a success. The emperor named her Goddess of the Golden Furnace and built a temple in her honour. Now when the bell rings, the holler of its echo sounds like the Chinese word for shoe, xie. Mothers tell small children that the goddess is searching for her missing slipper.
I had never thought much about bells until I visited the land of my ancestors. Seeing bells everywhere, I realised how historically integral they were to Chinese culture. During the day the Beijing Bell Tower stood majestically, but at night it was mesmerising in a different manner. Under the faint orange glow of nearby street lamps, the tower rose from the streets, an unimaginably big black block, a frightening dark place of panic. It seemed to fill up half the sky. I crossed the street to avoid looking at it.
During times of war, bell metal – the hard bronze alloy used for making bells – was melted down to make cannons. ‘Hear the loud alarm bells – brazen bells! What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!’ wrote Edgar Allan Poe in his frenetic poem.
In ancient times, bells were also used to warn about wars. In 1384, the bell tower of Xi’an marked the geographical centre of the city, the old capital of China. It was built by Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang as a way to dominate the surrounding countryside and provide early warning of attack by rival rulers. This is one of the reasons why for centuries, Xi’an was known by the name Cheng’an, the Land of Perpetual Peace. During times of peace, cannons were melted down to make bells. The area where the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan now stands had once been the busiest downtown district before the atomic bombing. After the bomb, all that was left of the site was a big open field. This empty grey vacuum became the location for the Memorial Park.
The domed belfry of the Park’s Peace Bell represents the universe, and its surface is engraved with a map of the world with no boundaries. When the Greek Embassy donated the bell in 1964, they chose a quote from Socrates to be inscribed on it. The quote was only two words: ‘Know thyself.’
According to the inscription on the Hiroshima Peace Bell, it is difficult enough to know oneself and one’s own motivations, let alone control the actions of others. I found this out the hard way when I went on retreat to the Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist Chan (Zen) Meditation Centre in Templestowe. At 4.30 am, the morning bell would ring. Wordlessly, we would get out of bed, go outside when the sky was still dark, and do yoga exercises to prepare our sleepy muscles for sitting. And then we would head inside the Meditation Hall, and sit with our faces towards the wall.
The bell would ring again to signal the beginning of meditation. Crossed-legged in full-lotus position so our feet were locked, we could not move. We faced the blank wall, prepared to slowly and painfully learn patience. It was there that I realised how we could simultaneously love and loathe the only sound during our retreat, the sound of the bell. It was loathed when it depleted us of sleep, of agency, and when it interfered with our ego. When the sound of singing metal told us that our hour was up, reassured us that we could untangle our legs and ease out of physical pain and mental discomfort
, it was loved. How could we feel so strongly ambivalent about an object with no independent personality or even life? Were we going mad? The Bangalore poet Tagore wrote that ‘we read the world wrong, and say that it deceives us’. We weren’t going mad, we were just realising how most suffering and joy is often self-created, and testing the limits of our tolerance for the world beyond our control.
When the world spiralled beyond her control, Sylvia Plath wrote her semi-autobiographical book about feeling like she was trapped beneath an instrument designed so that no sound could emerge from the airless environment. The Bell Jar is an apt metaphor for the way patients with mental illness were handled during the early days of mental health treatment in America. Asylums commonly shackled people suffering from mental illness with iron cuffs around their ankles, and chains attached to their wrists. Eventually, with better understanding, this practice stopped – although lobotomies and electric-shock treatments were still performed regularly during Plath’s short lifetime. In 1953, the National Mental Health Association made a call out to all the asylums to donate their discarded chains and shackles. These were melted down and recast into the Mental Health Bell, a signal of hope, made from the same bindings that once imprisoned patients.
Poe, who seemed to have suffered a number of undiagnosed mental illnesses in his lifetime, referenced bells continually in his work, as if the instrument of clashing alloy was driving him to distraction. After reading The Bells, I also started to notice the modern incarnations of the bell in my day-to-day life in Melbourne: the electronic ringing of the alarm clock in the morning when I was trying to sleep. The cry of bicycle bells to cars backing out of driveways. The dinging of railway crossings. The annoying ringtones of mobile phones on the tram while I was trying to read a book. And of course, the common sounds of school bells, church bells and prayer bells, all summoning people to assembly or action in the most inconspicuous manner possible. The bell, I realised, was the most overlooked object of popular control in modern society.