by Alice Pung
Words are there to convey action, not an endless quagmire of feelings, and whatever you are feeling is transformed into action. And that is why, for the life of you, you can’t understand why the girl will not go out with you and all she wants to do is to write these bloody letters to you and wants you to write these bloody letters back to her. The surest way to get to know a person is to meet them, and take them out in your car with your recently attained Ps, God you are proud of these plates, and ask her questions but not too many, and do something fun like going to a movie or something.
But this girl, she’s a strange girl. You wonder whether you should pursue her, whether this stupid poem will persuade her to actually go out with you. Grant you that date so you can be with someone for once and not have to say a word and just forget about things and have fun. But this girl, this girl looks like she can’t have fun. Something about the look in her eyes, as if she is a little scared of what she sees in the world around her. Like she spends a lot of time thinking about why it is all so terrifying, and keeping quiet about her answers. You have no time for enigmas, you want to get out there and get some action, although not necessarily from this girl, because she is a good girl. You are sick to death of sitting still, of doing nothing.
You pick up the phone again and dial the number of the girl. ‘Hello?’ Ah, the familiar voice, you can imagine her now, sitting at her desk, which is where you imagine her to be, if you are not imagining her in other more pleasant places that suit your fancy but probably not her reality. You have called to chat to get your mind off things, but she does not want to chat, this girl. She wants to talk, goddam it why is it that the stereotype is true, why do women always want to talk about feelings and shit as if these feelings will change anything?
Ding-dong. That’s the bell. The father is home, the mother must be lying in bed, wide awake. You swear you can almost hear the bedsprings creak as she gets up. Creak creak. You can certainly hear the footsteps, the creak creak snap snap of the tendons of her feet and ankles as she shuffles to the door. You wonder whether the little brother is asleep, and whether he is going to wake up this evening. You wait to hear the inevitable question. ‘Where have you been?’ Even though your mother knows the answer she asks it anyway.
She can see the chinkchinkchink in his eyes, see the bags beneath. Dark bags beneath carrying phantasmagoric gold coins. He blinks once or twice, and the illusion is gone. He is tired. So tired. The bags hang down to his cheekbones, they become bags of bones, he is a bag of bones. ‘How much did you use?’ your mother demands. ‘How much did you lose?’ The terms are interchangeable, and it doesn’t matter which one comes out.
‘I’m hungry, woman, haven’t had dinner yet,’ the sad man in the old brown leather jacket with the elastic at the bottom grumbles.
‘If you came home earlier, you wouldn’t have to eat leftovers,’ grumbles the mother, as she shuffles to the kitchen, but she brings out the beef from the stove, the beef she would not let you eat too much of because she was saving it for him.
AGAINST CALAMITOUS ODDS
I first came across the work of Ruth Park in primary school. There was something viscerally real about the olden-day world of Playing Beatie Bow. I couldn’t properly understand it – but, looking back now, I realise that the power of ‘Sydney’s Dickens’ lay in her ability to write about love, sex and death with an innocence unmarred by adult stigmas.
Swords and Crowns and Rings was published in 1977, not long before Playing Beatie Bow, and it won the Miles Franklin Award. The saga takes place in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and like Park’s much-loved novels of the late 1940s, Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange, it’s about the stoic poor. Yet there is a shift from the deep-rooted sense of community in her earlier books, set in the slums of inner-city Sydney, to Jackie Hanna and Cushie Moy’s quest for individual self-realisation. While Park does not inch from portraying stark privation, this novel marks the beginning of a new, transcendental consciousness in her characters.
Propelled by their Tolkien-like search for a kingdom of dwarves who make ‘swords and crowns and rings’, Jackie and Cushie share an enchanted childhood. They are completely unselfconscious, and so are complete – ‘they had always been two sides of the same coin: she, in her physical perfection and defencelessness, like a beautiful gentle bird, he so small and grotesque, and yet hardy, full of purpose.’
When their united sense of self is shattered by forced separation, they endure almost a decade apart from each other. Like the Buddhist symbol of the lotus, whose roots grip the bottom of the muddy swamp but whose head rises cleanly above the water, though, Park’s protagonists accept life’s vicissitudes. They suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but their most profound journey is to maintain their integrity against calamitous odds.
This allegorical journey of emerging adulthood came out of a period of great social and political change. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Australia saw the passage of the first equal-opportunity legislation in 1975. Diversity was no longer quashed by assimilationist policies – it was becoming the nation’s new narrative. The character of Jackie could be nuanced and human without needing to represent difference.
Park had by this time abandoned the Catholic faith of her youth and become interested in Zen Buddhism. She had also seen some of the world beyond the antipodes since the publication of her last major novel, in 1957. Swords and Crowns and Rings was her return to publishing for adults after spending the previous two decades predominantly writing children’s books and radio plays. When Park sat down to write about Jackie and Cushie, she was no longer dealing with fixed absolutes but with fluid, more radical identities.
The prostitutes and derelicts, the homeless men and indigent immigrant farming women who epitomise Park’s gritty realism still populate this book; but there is also a pair of affectionate quarrelsome women lovers, Claudie and Iris, and a victim of violence and incest, who becomes one of the strongest figures in the novel. Most strikingly, the protagonist, whose presence would cause discomfort and antagonism in a time of ignorance and poverty, is always rendered with dignity. Jackie is not a quirk of a man but manhood at its best. His identity is forged through unemployment, physical violence and the Depression.
The gentle irony in this expansive novel is that garrulousness is seen as a flaw, and the deepest characters are those who do not speak much: the Nun, Lufa, the magisterial ailing German grandfather. These are solitary men whose lives run slowly, on self-sustaining cogs, and their actions render them substantial. ‘Probably I am a writer because I had a singular childhood,’ Park once wrote. ‘My first seven years I spent all alone in the forest, like a possum or bear cub.’ She did not grow up in a household full of books, instead learning to be an astute eavesdropper and an observer of the human condition. The characters that fascinated her most were those with eccentricities, their faces lined with the calligraphic marks of experience.
Park set much of Swords and Crowns and Rings in rural Australia, a reticent place where folk have no need to vocalise every thought that passes through their minds. ‘I saw a little of this vast, magnificent land, and was captured forever by its noble indifference to humankind,’ she observed. ‘I felt that one day this continent would give a shrug and shake all the humans off into the sea. But it would still be its own self. That’s what I call identity.’
The characters’ external surrounds mirror their internal universes: Jackie’s strength and resilience are as immutable as the inviolate land from which he comes, while Cushie is as soft and beautiful as her artificial environment, where the family wealth perches on a precipice, liable at any time to fall. Cushie, ostensibly so lamblike, is essential to Jackie’s developing sense of manhood. Unsure about the parameters of her existence, uncertain where the world ends and she begins, Cushie is constantly bumping up against sharp corners. Jackie is not so troubled: he has a role model of noble, good-humoured masculinity, the Nun; and the love
of a strong woman, his mother. Cushie’s glacial mother, Isobel, and her inwardly cowering father impose silence in the house – silence born not of dignity but fear. A young woman of infinite faith and utter dependency, Cushie has femininity imposed upon her; she is trapped by it, despite her attempts to gain control.
Maida, on the other hand, is Jelka Sepic in John Steinbeck’s story ‘The Murder’ rendered three-dimensional, with agency and a voice. Stronger and more courageous than Cushie, she suffers vicious cruelty but remains tender and kind. She did not grow up in refinement, yet maintains a sense of quiet self-respect, as Jackie notices: ‘he became aware that Maida had a little bag of herbs around her neck on a string, and he was touched at this fastidiousness in one whose life was so isolated and austere.’ Maida is egoless, never having had the chance to choose, to develop her own identity. A cornered creature on the cruel family farm, she can only make small gestures of kindness without considering the consequences.
Jackie knows a handful of people through his life, Cushie’s world is conned to her family, Maida’s is even smaller; yet these are people for whom love is not a mere feeling but a verb, and for this reason they are unforgettable. In the end, innocence, identity and integrity all lead back to the same thing, expressed by Cushie Moy as a child: ‘Deep and true in her soul she knew only that she believed in loving, and all denial of this was dishonour.’
DARK FICTION
When Little Saigon Market in Footscray burned down, thousands of high-school textbooks burned as well. The books were donated to Les Twentyman’s Back to School Program for disadvantaged students, and kept in an upstairs storeroom that sometimes sheltered homeless women.
Before that, they were housed in the same place as a methadone dispensary for recovering heroin addicts: a single room with couches and a little shrine my friend Richard, a social worker, had lovingly set up, adorned with photos of young people who’d died either from drug overdoses or gang violence, all of whom he knew by name. Teenagers who needed school books would walk up the flight of concrete steps and find their Kafka or S.E. Hinton on the shelves.
This was my neighbourhood, and my dad’s electrical appliance shop was right next door. My parents never ‘policed’ the books I read – my mother couldn’t read or write, and my father was just pleased to see us reading books. In Year 9, we studied So Much to Tell You, John Marsden’s book about a selectively mute, traumatised Australian whose face had been disfigured by her father. Marina was honest, not chipper; often depressed, painfully self-conscious and slow to react. This book was narrated by a fourteen-year-old girl, and we were fourteen when we read it. Our teacher, Ms Bonnie Clarke, imbued us with confidence, humour and a conviction to keep our own diaries.
When Marsden’s Tomorrow When the War Began series came out, even kids who were proud non-readers devoured these books. Only as an adult and author did I realise, with surprise, what some teachers thought of the series: too much gratuitous violence and sex, filled with ‘weak’ adult characters and ‘too-simplistic’ prose. As a teenage child of refugees, I’d grown up with friends who’d actually survived real wars, and with parents who’d suffered from the same PTSD that Marsden wrote about with great insight and clarity. The weak or absent adult characters – which Marsden also balanced with kind and courageous adults – were just part of a humanity we understood. Some of my mates came to Australia as unaccompanied minors, and many of us had already suffered the indignation of adult racism at some point in our lives.
Often, stories about children and young adults are an ‘adults-only’ fantasy of childhood. They are usually written by adults, revealing more about the writer and their projections than the truth of their subjects. Whenever the debate about ‘darkness’ in books for children and young adults re-emerges, we get the same wearying responses about the malleability of children’s minds, or how dark books may be redeemed by the inclusion of supervisory ‘good’ adult characters (such as in Harry Potter), and/or a ‘good’ message at the end (racism defeated; empathy for refugees resurrected).
This is because those most often asked to participate in this debate come from a very select group. Usually writers themselves, they are accustomed to giving their opinions, and have very specific ideas of what childhood or adulthood should be. They also generally come from literate, middle-income households with children who are physically safe, which is why the debate sounds frustratingly repetitive throughout the decades. It’s all ideological, and ideology – no matter how benign or aspirational – can be damaging if it is far removed from the lived experiences of actual, real teenagers.
A few years ago, when I was asked at a girls school to talk about the killing fields, I received a gentle reminder not to go into too much gory detail lest I distress the Year 9s who were ‘not ready for that kind of thing’. What kind of thing? I wondered. The kids a couple of suburbs down in the commission flats? The scholarship girl from Sudan sitting two seats away from them?
The publishing industry, schools and libraries are filled with benign and progressive people who care about inculcating children with the ‘right’ values, and instilling love, hope and kindness. As these people are also the ultimate decision-makers regarding what kids read – or what they don’t – they often unwittingly convey to poorer students their class values of what constitutes ‘good literature’ and ‘bad morals’. There’s a difference between rubbing a child’s nose in Game of Thrones gore and violence and teaching them imaginative empathy about how different teenagers live, speak and experience the world – teenagers their own kids could easily know and befriend if they were allowed to catch the train two stops down.
Perhaps that’s why some teachers who have no problem with teaching Shakespeare (murder, suicide, anti-Semitism, madness) baulk at touching anything by Sonya Hartnett or John Marsden. Perhaps there’s the erroneous belief that young-adult writing is ‘low-class’, not the highbrow stuff of literary analysis.
Or maybe the teenagers in those books are too real, too visceral. Perhaps a book about an acid attack on a teenage girl would be worthy and teachable if set in India or Cambodia, where the focus could be on misogyny in different cultures; but for Marsden to have set his seminal work at an Australian girls school was a huge risk. It paid off, because enlightened teachers like Ms Clarke taught it, and in doing so taught us that a teenage girl can be funny, sardonic and insightful without having to mimic middle-aged Henry James or Edith Wharton.
I can think of no better environment to read The Hunger Games or the Tomorrow series than in a school, guided by a teacher who can lead discussions about morality, courage and violence. After all, if fifteen-year-olds are studying Heart of Darkness, why draw the line at stories that might involve them as protagonists who might have to face difficult decisions earlier than adults anticipate or imagine?
Teenagers nudging past heroin-dependent adults to get to their books are not a reality we want to face, but this isn’t the work of Dickensian fiction either. To say that stories about their gritty lived realities don’t matter, are exaggerated or unworthy of careful consideration is to do these young adults a great disservice. To say that such stories might corrupt the more ‘pure’ minds of their more fortunate peers is patronising.
Gayle Forman, the popular American young-adult author, wrote: ‘A novel won’t turn a bookish drama geek into a promiscuous drug abuser any more than it will turn a promiscuous drug abuser into a bookish drama geek, unless the seeds of those transformations were already planted.’ But it might help a young person recognise their life, and understand that their experiences are not invisible, that they matter.
CLOSE TO HOME
THE FLASHING GREEN MAN
I began my story in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, in a market swarming with fat pigs and thin people. The fat pigs are hanging from hooks, waiting to be hacked into segments, and the thin people are waiting to buy these segments wrapped in newspaper over a glass counter. When they haggle over the price of trotters, there is much gesticulating
and furrowing of brow because the parties do not spick da Ingish velly good. ‘Like a chicken trying to talk to a duck,’ my mother calls these conversations. But she is not here today to quack over quality pigs’ paws, because she is lying in a white hospital room waiting for me to arrive.
So it’s just my father, standing smack-bang in the middle of this market, and his shoes are getting wet because of the blood diluted in the water that comes from the huge hoses used to wash away the mess at the end of the day. He looks down at the grates and thinks about pig’s blood jelly and whether he’ll ever buy it again. He likes the taste, but Ah Ung told him that he worked in the abattoir when he first came here and the carcasses were hung from hooks with buckets beneath to collect the pigs’ blood. Because they were not washed properly, they would sometimes leak with piss and other filthy drips. My father does not think back to Phnom Penh, where he would be eating brains in broth made by street vendors stationed across the road from the homeless leper coughing out half a lung in the doorway of some derelict shopfront, but looks up and points at the pink and red appendages behind the glass. With his other hand, he holds up two fingers.
This is the suburb where words like ‘and’, ‘at’ and ‘of’ are redundant, where full sentences are not necessary. ‘Two kilo dis. Give me seven dat.’ If you were to ask politely, ‘Would you please be so kind as to give me a half-kilo of the lady fingers?’ the shop owner might not understand you. ‘You wanna dis one? Dis banana? How many you want hah?’ To communicate, my father realises, does not merely mean the strumming and humming of vocal cords, but much movement of hands and contortion of face. The loudest pokers always win, and the loudest pokers are usually women. My father’s moment is lost when a middle-aged woman with Maggi-noodle curls points at the man behind the counter with a flailing forefinger and almost jabs out an eye as she accuses the other Non-English-Speaking Person of selling her furry trotters. ‘Why yu gib me dis one? Dis one no good! Hairy here, here and dere! Hairy everywhere! Dat nother one over dere better. Who you save da nother one for hah?’ Bang on the counter goes the bag of bloodied body parts, and my father knows that now is the time to scoot away to the stall opposite if he wants hairless ham.