Close to Home

by Alice Pung

  The only modern marvels they had seen were the stick of a gun, the iron bird in the sky and the green disc on the ground. But what was a stick of gum? A block of paper fastened at one end? What was a globe of the world? A balloon? What was a cinema? A grandfather clock inside a house? If you didn’t know anything, how did you know it was not a new sun that crawled up over the fields every day? How did you know that the earth was not flat? They didn’t, but they were assigned the task of taking over the only world our father had ever known. And during their reign, they had assigned our father the task of burying the dead on higher ground when the floodwaters came.

  During peacetime, the yearly floods would wash over the vegetation, leaving behind rich level soil. But during the reign of slavery the floods that came completely washed away the sweet potato leaves, wild weeds and grasses that the people had come to depend upon for food. People would just collapse in the fields and their bodies would be there days later, next to the workers, beside them, beneath them, as they worked. In the village next to our father’s, the whole collective of more than three thousand people – except their four Khmer Rouge soldiers – had perished.

  In his own collective, half-living people were assigned to carry off the dead to elevated ground and bury them. Our father was assigned the task with another man. With a blanket between the two of them, they would hoist the body out of the floodwaters and onto the blanket. He and his companion would then each take an end of the blanket and heave it onto their shoulder. A walking hammock. One last free ride for the dead. Except it wasn’t a very stable ride. They were so malnourished and weak that they kept slipping and falling into the water. Each time they fell, the blanket would become more waterlogged and heavy.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ our father’s friend told him, ‘just look forward to the day when others will be carrying you off wrapped up nicely in a blanket and getting more attention than the living ever did.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll be the one giving you the special treatment,’ our father replied.

  ‘What do you mean? Sweet Bodhisattva, I hope you’re not going to be this heavy when it’s my turn to heave you out of the floodwaters!’

  A few weeks later, our father was assigned with another man. They were both silent on their first journey, carrying the blanket containing his nameless friend whom this new companion had replaced. They walked uphill, dug a shallow grave, placed the body in carefully, and then scooped a light mound of dirt over it.

  *

  Now, thirty-one years later, we were heading back to the field where our father had buried all the dead. We came in a convoy of SUVs and Mercedes-Benz, all owned by our Uncle Kheav. Uncle Kheav was our father’s older brother. He had also survived the killing fields and was now an immensely successful bank CEO and property developer. Former soldiers who were now my uncle’s personal bodyguards surrounded us wherever we went, because our uncle did not want any of us to be kidnapped for ransom. The cars stopped in front of an empty white field and we all got out: our father, sister, Uncle Kheav and our auntie.

  My senses stretched, working their hardest to take in the world. At first there was the field. And the heat, when the sky breathed its fever breath over the field. Then back to the field and its unyielding dust. Nothing grew on it. Yet once death here had hot halitosis that withered away the bodies much faster, and the field was used to plant crops during each following season. ‘The best fertiliser in the world,’ our father told us. ‘When I was digging up the ground to plant the next season of rice, I unearthed the small wooden marker of your auntie’s mother’s burial spot.’

  ‘Did you stow it away and keep it?’ I asked.

  ‘No, of course not. If you even picked up a handful of dirt from the ground, you were stealing from the revolution.’

  ‘People dug the graves up, over and over again, after the liberation,’ Uncle Kheav told me. They were looking for rings and gems looped around finger bones and wrists.

  ‘There was nothing,’ our father said. ‘When I buried those bodies, they didn’t even have proper clothes.’

  Now there were not even any bones left. None of those people seemed to have existed, and yet the SUV played a slow Cambodian dirge, and our auntie was kneeling on the floor in front of an incense urn she had placed on the soil, with three sticks of incense clutched in her hand. When she rose up after her third bow and turned around, her shoulders were shaking with the memory of her mother.

  It hit me at last: Dad buried bodies here, I realised, bodies in each handful of dust. Bodies of strangers, and people he had worked with, known as family, and loved. Bodies that needed to be held, that needed to move and exhale and blink, just as we were doing. Bodies no one will ever remember, not like the skulls in stupas that Westerners always wanted to visit. By now our father was looking elsewhere, away from our auntie, who was weeping over her dead mother. He pointed to the trees. There weren’t many, and they were skinny coconut or sugar palms huddled by the edges of the yellow field, as if afraid to step into the soil of a million souls.

  ‘Look at those bamboo ladders attached to the trees,’ he said. ‘They’re used for climbing to the very top, to collect coconuts or the juice of sugar palms.’ I grabbed on to the ladder and started up.

  ‘Only the first few rungs,’ he said, ‘or you could fall and die.’

  I let go, and didn’t bother to try.

  I felt that the country was something precious – brutal, split open like a pomegranate, with a million hidden red and buried eyes. It was a visceral land, a land that gave me strange dreams at night: dreams of Job sitting in the middle of his burnt-out house, his children dead, scraping at his skin with bits of broken pottery, set in a prelapsarian paradise. It was a land of earth and water where the living people lived; and a land of wind and fire where the dead were cremated and malingered over hot fields.

  I watched as my uncle’s bodyguard carefully dug a hole in the ground and lit a fire in there, so that my auntie could burn heaven banknotes for her mother. My auntie wanted to make sure her mother, stripped of everything in life, had enough in the afterlife.

  ‘You must remember your ancestors,’ said the ex-soldier who was now my uncle’s bodyguard, ‘and honour them.’

  THE BUS

  It was when she was sick that she first realised her father would do anything for her. She must have been about five. She woke up in the middle of the night, and he made her jam on toast. Then, when she had heavy asthma at eleven and was housebound for two weeks, he bought her ice-cream, the expensive kind, with real strawberries in it. But when she was really little, about four, she had the flu and had some idea about death. She whimpered on the couch and said, ‘Dad, I don’t want to die.’

  ‘Be quiet and drink this Milo,’ he told her, rubbing Vicks Vaporub on her chest.

  Her father, she noticed as she grew older, never used the words death or die, unlike her mum and grandmother and aunties. If they dropped something, it was ‘Si oh!’ Go die. If they made a mistake. If they heard some bad news, such as their child getting less than 90 per cent in an exam. But her father never uttered it.

  There were some things they would never mention again, like the box-cutter boy. And other things that he didn’t mind her finding out. ‘If you want to know about the time of Pol Pot, I will introduce you to people,’ her father told her a year after the box-cutting incident, ‘and they will talk to you and tell you about their lives.’

  He took her to visit his friends in suburban houses with neat front yards in Footscray and Springvale, and they would tell her tales of survival. She remembered these moments, how at some pivotal point these older folk began to speak to her as if they no longer saw her as a child but as someone who would store these stories, and who might one day convey them to their own progeny, who were too preoccupied with building houses and bringing up babies to sit and listen.

  There they both were, she and her father, sitting on a couch in a strange man’s house. The man, a friend of her father, was a furniture-maker. He
had made the couch himself. She looked at him, and then looked back down at the couch. How could a man as thin as that make a thing of wood and leather as robust as the sofa set they were all sitting on? She realised her father and she sat in the exact same way. They perched on their tailbones at the very edge of the seat, as if to sink back and get comfortable would be to indulge themselves.

  Perhaps this story was not meant to begin on a bus in China at all.

  Perhaps it was meant to begin on another bus, in another place, during another time.

  The bus, the man said. It loaded us on, and then took us to the top of a mountain and dumped us there. The mountain was dotted with landmines. At the top there was no food or water, so we went down and exploded and died.

  But the man was sitting in front of them, telling this story, so obviously he had not died. Neither had his wife, who was serving them cups of tea. Chinese cups were very small, she realised. You could not hug them in your hands and lean back on a couch, ready for a yarn. The size of a cup was probably the measure of a society’s loquaciousness. You couldn’t tell a long-winded story about a visit to the supermarket while holding a Chinese cup with two fingers. Its contents were two gulps. The end. So your story needed significance, but not the kind of tall-poppy significance that would upstage your friend. One thing those who came from Cambodia were good at doing was keeping quiet and listening. Another thing was telling a story using the most direct route, like that bus carrying those people she would never meet. Depositing them like a dumpster at the precipice of a very high tip. Who was the first at the top of the mountain to start worrying, she wondered, and the first to make their way down?

  She may never know what happened, but perhaps it was time for her to take a stab in the dark.

  WRITING ABOUT MY FATHER

  Anaïs Nin wrote, ‘If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.’

  Writing my second book took a lot out of me. In 2008, I went to Beijing as part of an Asialink residency, to try and write about my cultural roots. Roots of a culture begin with the ground, and so I was hoping for an epiphany of sorts, hoping that when I reached my grandmother’s Chinese ancestral town of Jie Yang, Chaozhou, that I would be able to see the earth as sacred and feel a connection. But when I arrived I saw that a modern developed city – complete with its own McDonald’s – had grown out of the foreign country that my grandmother had described to me in my childhood. L.P. Hartley wrote that ‘the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. It felt impossible to write about a place in which I had no immediate connection, and so I returned to Beijing. Even though I tried to write ‘cultural’ stories during my stay, they became amusing anecdotes with no substance, like a qipao without a body. One or two of the stories ended up being at the very beginning of Her Father’s Daughter ; my editors liked them even though I was embarrassed by them. In retrospect, they needed to be there to mark my development. They are there to show that progress requires letting go of this idea of perfection. Ironically, they are also the pieces I worked on the longest – I was polishing something that did not have much mettle.

  The real heartbeat of the story emerged when I called my father up in the evenings from my small flat in Peking University. He wanted to know that I was warm and safe, and he also wanted to tell me about the bushfires that were raging through Victoria at that time. Even though we lived nowhere near Kinglake, and even though my father had never been there, he was deeply affected by the government allowing residents to ‘stay and defend’ their houses. ‘How can property matter more than people?’ he lamented. That evening when I got off the phone, I thought about my father preparing for bed, and how he would lock every door of the house and close every window. He would make sure all the knives were in their proper place in the drawers. And every knife would have had its tip deliberately filed to a blunt nub. This is when I realised that instead of trying to set my story in an ‘exotic’ location (which rendered all descriptions two-dimensional and florid), the tale was meant to take place in Melbourne, my place of birth and home. And I also realised that the story was going to be completely character-based, about my relationship with my father.

  After working out that the story had to be from the perspective of a sixty-year-old man, I knew that a first-person narrator with my father’s ‘voice’ would not work. First, because I am a 31-year-old female, it would be presumptuous to think that I could write in the voice of someone with sixty years of life experience. Second, because my father thinks in a different language than I do, I would have had to translate his thoughts, and I could find no way to do this that would not make him sound like he was speaking ‘broken’ or incomplete English in first person. I also discovered that the more I wrote in third person, the freer I felt as the narrator. A first-person narrator is not going to be noticing how the streaks of sunset looked like a claw across the sky when they are ploughing the fields as a slave labourer with an AK-47–toting soldier standing next to them. All of a sudden the world of 1975 Cambodia emerged in its technicolour horror because I could use a wider lens.

  Since my father’s voice was in the third person, and this book is a ‘conversation’ between a father and a daughter, I could then not put myself, the ‘daughter narrator’, in the story in first person. To write about myself in first person while leaving my father in third is to try and own a significantly larger portion of the story than I was due: a reader would probably then read the book as me telling a story about my father, from my perspective. I wanted both voices to have equal weight and gravitas. Interestingly, Doris Lessing observed that it is actually the first-person narrator that alienates, because the capital ‘I’ is specific, whereas the third-person voice is general – the reader could be ‘she’. I wanted the reader to feel like this could be any daughter, and any father, if trapped in the particular set of circumstances of this specific father–daughter relationship.

  Many people have assumed that I wrote about the character of myself in the third person as a distancing technique, but this is not true. I saw much more of myself and my flaws in third person than I ever did in first. Unhindered by my voice in my first book, which was the voice of a twenty-something armed to the teeth with caustic wit and black humour, I learned to lay down these weapons and be more vulnerable to the reader. As a result, I have not read back over, or even looked at, the ‘daughter’ parts of the book since it has been published. To me it is almost like reading back on a private diary I thought I had shredded years ago.

  Lastly, the most confronting chapters of the book, the chapters that have given writers like Alex Miller nightmares and disturbed reviewers no matter how kind the review, seem so jarring to a reader because I did not follow a conventional chronological structure. Year Zero in Democratic Kampuchea (17 April 1975, a date etched forever in my parents’ memories) does not happen at the start of the book but two-thirds of the way in. In fact, this is the inverse migrant success story: it begins with the fulfilment of the Great Australian Dream, about a man who is so comfortable in life that he lives in a mansion on top of a hill in one of the safest suburbs in Melbourne and runs a thriving electronics business. His children can travel the world and he can Skype them. Yet everything he does is permeated by inordinate levels of anxiety.

  This story is about a paring back to the bare bones of the narratives that shape a man’s life. You find out that he lived for four years without modern technology, running water, medicine and, often, food. Yes, it is a story about privation, but the privation chapters could not come first. This is because no writing ever exists in isolation of the social and political context in which it was written. I do not set out to write ‘refugee’ stories, mainly because a refugee is ‘one who seeks refuge’ from both a Buddhist perspective and an international law perspective (‘owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted’, Article 1, United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees). When a
person stops fleeing and finds sanctuary, they are no longer a refugee.

  Yet the ‘refugee success’ narrative works because it garners people’s sympathy and affection, particularly when humour is used to enhance the poignancy of the narrative. I know how to tell this story – I have been doing it for over seven years in my talks to rural groups and inner-city book clubs and schools. When I do tell it I am entirely sincere, but I am also aware of my audience: I know that tacitly certain audiences do not want to hear tales of hardship. In fact, my father’s concern and his only comment about the book, upon reading all the chapters I emailed him, was, ‘Do you think there is too much suffering in this part? White people don’t want to hear about too much suffering. It depresses them.’

  Yet I had to take risks with this book. I wanted to counter the narrative that the only migrant or refugee story worth telling is one that leads to worldly ‘success’ and assimilation at the end. Chaim Potok wrote beautiful, intensely deep stories about the Hasidic Jewish community in the United States who were distinctly ‘un-assimilated’, yet his books opened our worlds to a richly developed and nuanced culture. It is deeply disappointing to me that we are a nation of immigrants and yet we need to keep our complex and multifaceted true selves apart, in order to be a part of this national narrative.

  If I placed the more shocking ‘killing fields’ chapters of the book first, the book would inevitably and simply follow the migrant trajectory of ‘success’, but my father would always be seen as an eternal ‘refugee’ because our current mainstream discourse about ‘those who’ve come across the seas’ is polarising and unsophisticated. And I am well aware that no one will take literary non-fiction seriously in this political climate if it is about a contentious political issue. One of my favourite poets, Robert Cording, says this very useful passage about writing poetry, which I believe to be equally applicable to writing creative non-fiction: