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If the poem feels like it has sifted and arranged received ideas, then it will fail. The person has to feel, I think, as if there’s a real person struggling with real experiences that will not yield some handy lesson, but nevertheless is not entirely without meaning. The voice that convinces will always be the voice of an individual, not as a spokesperson for this or that idea.
So this is not a story culminating in grand triumph over adversity – if anything, it is about very ordinary things beneath which lie the true character tales: a father who does not believe in post-traumatic stress yet files the tips of every knife in the house to a blunt nub, and a daughter who goes to an inner-city dating agency because her parents are setting her up before she is ‘on the shelf’ at twenty-five. I wanted to combine the everyday, Anne Tyler–type events of my father’s current life in suburban Australia with the blinding flashes of unimaginable apocalyptic hell, to create a new kind of art that says quietly but clearly – this is how survivors live and love: slowly, patiently and doggedly.
To write a grandiose heroic tale about my dad would be true but annoying, as most people think their fathers are heroes: how could any of them compare to a man who survived genocide? Yet to write a book that is more true, I had to write about the parts of my dad in which a reader would find every dad. You don’t need to survive trauma to fear for your kid’s safety. You don’t have to be cut off from modern civilisation to be in childlike awe over emerging new technologies. And you don’t have to be a hero to be able to love wholeheartedly.
AT SCHOOL
AND ON THE PAGE
KATHARINE’S PLACE
I am in Greenmount, Western Australia. The sign outside the house says ‘Katharine’s Place’, but I didn’t realise that her husband was still here, until Mardi told me. When she told me, I was staring at a bird in the gutter, at how the colours of death made it look so alive. Its wing and tail feathers were spread out in blue and yellow Crayola tones. The feathers on its neck looked like the fur of a bonsai rabbit. Bright red organs puffed out from the middle of its chest, like an external heart too large for its body. This was no factory chicken that had never seen the light of day, no endless writhing of suffering hung upside down by its legs to meet its end in spinning blades. This was some tropical glory of creation, smashed by a vehicle in a car park in suburban Perth.
‘Are you afraid of ghosts?’ Mardi asked.
It depended on what kind of ghosts they were.
‘Sometimes you can hear the footsteps of Hugo Throssel walking through the house.’ He was Katharine Susannah Prichard’s husband, and Mardi told me that when she stayed at Katharine’s Place, she had heard his footsteps. ‘But don’t worry,’ she said. ‘He’s a benign ghost.’ Throssell was a celebrated war veteran: he fought in Gallipoli and won the Victoria Cross during World War I. He had taken his own life at this house during the Great Depression, while his wife was overseas promoting her books.
I am staying at Katharine’s Place for a writer’s residency. Mardi May, a local author and editor, picked me up from the airport and took me to the market so I could buy a week’s supply of groceries, because I will be quite secluded in the house. I arrive to a house full of friendly helpers, the committee members who kept Katharine’s Place alive, co-ordinated by Lynn Gumb, chair of the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre. ‘We’re fixing your house for you,’ Lynn tells me. Old wooden furniture is being moved back in after the floorboards have been shined, including the piano David Helfgott used to play when he visited. I help unpack a box of gifts that were given to Katharine: books, paintings, a boomerang and a wooden spear. Some of the things are very old, because she lived here for most of her life, from 1919 to 1969. Through three generations, my family has not even lived in one country for that long, and we do not own anything made before 1980.
This is the house in which Katharine Susannah Prichard, born in 1883 with ‘ink in her veins’, worked to become one of Australia’s first internationally acclaimed authors. She wrote in her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane, that ‘the happiest years of my life were spent in our home at Greenmount in the West. My best literary work was done there.’ She had spent the first ten years of her married life in this home, and as newlyweds she and her husband used to disport themselves ‘like Adam and Eve in the garden’ overlooking the Perth hilltops.
Soon everyone leaves, and I am alone in the house to get on with my business. My parents would be alarmed if they knew about the nature of the place – ‘Taking annual leave to spend it in a house with ghosts!’ – so when I call home in the evening, I don’t tell them about the noises. The first night, when I hear the creaks, I turn on the radio and sleep with it through to morning. But then I hear footsteps during the day, too. I start to listen closely. Up and down the wooden floorboards. Small animals do not walk upside down beneath floorboards.
Sometimes there seems to be more than one person walking, probably because Katharine also died here, in her old age. The locals called her the Red Witch of Greenmount, and when there were government raids she used to hide her communist propaganda in the now-heritage-protected plumbago bushes outside the house. She had truly believed in communism:
it was the answer to what I had been seeking: a satisfactory explanation of the wealth and power which control our lives – their origin, development, and how, in the processes of social evolution, they could be directed towards the well-being of a majority of the people, so that poverty, disease, prostitution, superstition and war would be eliminated; peoples of the world live in peace, and grow towards perfecting their existence on this earth.
My grandmother was a communist too, back in China. Her parents sent her to the Chaozhou teachers’ college, where she learnt to read and write, and soon she decided to write about landlords abusing the rights of the peasants. Her writing sent her into exile, to Cambodia; she came to Australia when in her seventies. She taught me Buddhist sutras to chant in the dark. She knew the Heart Sutra off by heart and could even sound it out phonetically in Pali.
When my grandmother died, I hoped that she would walk our house, but she had never stayed a night in our new home. She was very sick before she died; she lay in bed for six years, blinking at the ceiling. Some things she saw there made her very sad, and on rare occasions some things made her laugh. After a while, I realised she wasn’t seeing things in the ceiling, but in her mind.
There was a writer at Katharine’s Place in the early ’90s who needed to bring in an exorcist – but Grandmother wasn’t scared of benign ghosts, so neither am I. Benign ghosts were white people, the ones who took such good care of my family when they came to Australia. My grandmother would have liked Katharine Susannah Prichard, a beautiful woman whose photographs grace the walls of the house, her face smiling beatifically at her first Asian author-in-residence. When Katharine was alive, society still considered people like me to be the Yellow Peril.
At the end of my residency, I ask Mardi again about the ghosts. ‘Oh, who knows?’ she says reassuringly. ‘Sometimes the wind makes noises. And it’s an old house. It creaks.’ But I did hear footsteps, I tell Mardi. A quiet and steady amble, and sometimes small scuffling sounds. My grandmother also had a shuffling walk: her feet were afraid to be far from the ground, in case she fell over.
‘I can’t believe you were told about the ghosts on your first day,’ Aminah, a songwriter and the caretaker of the writers’ centre, says. ‘You weren’t meant to know that until the end of your trip.’ But I am glad Mardi told me. Perhaps there is no ghost, but I would be disappointed if that were the case. We all see what we want in our heads.
SCHOOL DAYS
‘Ladies’ is such a salacious word when slurred by young men, but when enunciated by a carefully coiffured middle-aged lady to a mass of Year 10 girls it is a severe admonition not to move. I wondered how long it would take to set the limbs of adolescent restlessness.
‘Settle down, young lay-dees.’
Less than a minute. Impressive.
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nbsp; I stood on the auditorium stage, being told off in front of 350 fifteen-year-olds in blue ties and heavy shoulder pads. This had never happened to me before, and it wasn’t even my school.
The head of English wanted to make a speech before introducing me: ‘Alice Pung has arrived ten minutes late, and she apologises for coming late, lay-dees.’ I apologised and offered to make up the lost time. No longer feeling like a lawyer approaching thirty, or the visiting author the school had invited to inspire its students, I had the sensation that my stomach was dropping to the floor. I had forgotten schools could have this kind of effect.
During my adolescence, I changed high school five times. I traversed the whole Victorian education system: public state schools, private religious (Catholic) schools, private grammar schools and public selective state schools. And now, every year during Book Week, I talk to secondary students around the country. Book Week was set up in 1945 as a time to spend celebrating Australian authors and illustrators. But some schools can afford to spend more than others, as I soon found out.
One ladies college invited me to speak at their school assembly for ten minutes, and told me proudly that I was their 120th guest speaker for the year. Two beautiful girls greeted me. With their blazer lapels so heavily impaled with merit pins – debating, swimming, drama – they looked like young lieutenants in the army, and like they had just stepped out of a Nordic Colours hair-dye commercial. They escorted me to the stage for assembly, where I peered down at hundreds of pretty, passive faces. Two words ballooned inside my head: polite boredom. The discipline it takes for these girls to sit still with their hands in their laps is extraordinary. I mustered all my energy, wishing to do justice to the inordinate fee I was being paid, but as I spoke I felt like the 120th courtesan in line.
When I’d finished speaking, I braced myself for another telling off. ‘That was very interesting,’ came the response from the head of English. It is easy to tell when a teacher has not really understood what I have been talking about. Even after I show slides of Cambodia in the time when my family fled from there – of the killing fields, dismembered bodies, bloodied faces – the same adjective pops up, like a twisting of that old Chinese adage: may you live in interesting times.
Afterwards, the principal invited me to a lunch of white-bread sandwiches cut into tiny triangles, with a small smear of salmon paste on them, or cucumber, or lettuce and tomato – vegetables low in calories because they are mostly water. The young ladies folded napkins neatly on their laps and picked out a triangle each. At the coaxing of their principal, some asked me about university and entrance scores. Most of these girls were headed for university in the next couple of years. Their futures stretched before them like a string of numbers, and I wondered how much they were allowed to focus on the immediate, to be allowed to concentrate on living in the moment, rather than seeing everything as a means to the end of adolescence. They reminded me of hothouse strawberries: lushly beautiful but easily bruised.
In every school there are teachers who are the most caring of people, but it is the collective culture of a school that is the first thing an outsider notices. It has a lot to do with how much natural laughter is allowed before students are deemed to be behaving in a manner ill becoming young ladies and gentlemen.
‘Miss, can I give you a hug?’ asked a skinny fourteen-year-old Asian girl before I left the Catholic college in Springvale, where I had told stories to the students for an hour. She reminded me of my little sister. In fact, the whole year level reminded me of my siblings, and I wanted to hug them all. The teacher gave an indulgent smile, and suddenly I was surrounded by en-masse embracing. Being treated nicely is not the same as being blessed with kindness, and there are some schools that are really, really kind – you feel it as soon as you walk in the door.
Most of my secondary schooling was spent in single-sex schools, but I had never visited an all-girls boarding house until I arrived at Walford, in Adelaide. I came at 10.30 in the evening, ready to spend the next day conducting writing workshops. Seona, the teacher on duty, took me upstairs to my bedroom. The boarding house was not a year old, and this room was meant for mothers staying over with their daughters: it was feminine, tidy and the colour of lollies. A sherbet-coloured bedspread covered each of the twin single beds, and in the bathroom were clean cocoa-brown towels. The place looked good enough to eat. I realised I had not yet had dinner, so one of the teachers brought me up a plate of roast pork and vegetables.
The next morning, the school librarian took me to the students. ‘A real-life author!’ Alison told Grade Six. I felt like a giant, with them seated on the floor while I stood and told my stories. The older girls, who were studying my book, did not ply me for answers to essay questions. Instead of polite attentiveness, there seemed to be genuine interest – in storytelling, writing, books. The day was suffused with laughter.
That evening I met the girl boarders: from rural Australia, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Korea. I was happy to see that they ate like healthy girls. I sat with them in the common room while Amara, from the Northern Territory, gave me a new hairstyle. Jenny, from Taiwan, showed me a photograph of her three-month-old brother. These girls – even the ones in Year 11 – still needed a pass to cross the road to the shops. But almost all were interested in the world outside their heads.
At one private boys school, I spoke at the Literature Club dinner. Like the girls in their sister school, a ladies college, these were well-behaved and highly intelligent students. But when they spoke, I got a strange jolt – I was hearing one thing and seeing another. The fourteen-year-old boys, many of whom were Asian and Indian, had the assurance, cadences and vocabulary of sophisticated middle-aged Englishmen (but, fortunately, not their teeth). Standing by the mantelpiece, awaiting their turn at the lectern, they seemed peculiarly colonial. They presented reports replete with phrases such as ‘remarkable narrative’, ‘meandering plot’, ‘conscious effort to disconcert the reader’.
The boys with whom I grew up were mostly boys without words, boys capable of inordinate bouts of rage and tenderness, boys with the dangerous physical mix of itchy knuckles and firm deltoids. They were likely to beat the crap out of young men who used words such as ‘remarkable’. Fortunately, in my experience, the two worlds rarely met. While one group was studying S.E. Hinton’s tale of class divides and power struggles among rival gangs, the other was studying a story told in iambic pentameter of two rival gangs ‘alike in dignity’.
During my high-school years, I was a participant in both of those groups, at schools on the opposite sides of the spectrum. In Year 8, at a girls Catholic college mostly filled with migrant children, we studied John Marsden’s So Much to Tell You, about Marina, a deeply scarred girl who did not speak but wrote in her diary. Ms Clarke never used the words ‘text’ or ‘analyse’. She got us to perform role-plays: ‘You have to be any character other than Marina,’ she advised. At home I wrote a script on tissues using a typewriter. I got up in front of the class as Marina’s hysterical mother, spending ten minutes ‘crying’ into my notes. The class laughed, but in a good way. Ms Clarke had a rare knack for taking us outside ourselves, and of bringing out the painfully shy students.
At my grammar school, we studied John Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Our literature teacher told us it was about the artistic muse using the poet and leaving him drained. Stephen said it was just about a guy’s sexual obsession with a chick. ‘Look at this, miss! She found him roots of relish sweet!’
‘Aw, come on – if you can read sex into that, you can read it into every line,’ said our teacher.
So we did. We read sex into every line. ‘I set her on my pacing stead. Come on, he sets her on his pacing stead!’
‘Why doesn’t he just say he set her on his blue-veined throbbing love pump, then?’ That was the teacher. She treated us like the emerging adults we were. She knew we could appreciate a prurient joke without taking it to extremes. I loved those classes, where there was such trust.
The ‘deep psychological’ stuff was what I took to be a simple analogy: a computer being overloaded and breaking down. And then it dawned on me that this student did not have an inordinate fear of failure. Quite a few of these boys did not understand what I knew the girls in their sister school felt, the deep-rooted terror at the pit of the stomach at the prospect of not doing well. Their questions were mostly practical: ‘How did you get published, and what was it like?’ And: ‘How long did it take you to write your book?’ ‘This club was started by boys who loved reading,’ one of them said, ‘so what you see here are students who really want to be here.’
‘Miz,’ a boy yelled out in the middle of another presentation. ‘Miz. What happened to your boyfriend in the book, miz?’ The boys at Taylors Lakes Secondary College wanted to be here too, but only after twenty minutes, when they realised I wasn’t going to theorise about issues of belonging and cross-cultural chasms. Watergardens is an area of Melbourne full of houses that seem to rise out of the ground like those in Edward Scissorhands, each of them trim and neat and seemingly under ten years old, like the high school. These kids wanted action. They wanted to know what happens next. ‘Miz, what do you do now, miz?’
At a high school in regional Albury, I explained the Chinese-Cambodian saying from which my book title was derived: ‘A girl is like cotton wool: once she’s dirtied, she can never be clean again. A boy is like a gem: the more you polish it, the brighter it shines.’ ‘Hey, Kayla, would you like to polish my gem?’ I heard a boy snickering after class.