by Alice Pung
‘So what is he doing now?’ my mother asked.
‘Working at the factory.’
‘What! You mean your rice noodle factory?’
‘Yes.’
There was another silence. Then my mother responded quickly, ‘Oh, it’s good that he is already able to help you earn money! My daughter is a great woe to us, she has five years of law to go!’
‘Well,’ Ah Bukien finally said, ‘she may not be earning you money now, but wait until she graduates!’
*
‘Ah Bukien and I were just talking,’ I heard my mother say to my father a little later. ‘Her boy is already helping her earn money at the factory.’
‘Oh, what a useful young man he is turning out to be!’ smiled my father. I was incredulous at how skilled my parents were at this pretence. I knew they saw that there was no redemption for the boy. Suddenly, I felt very sorry for him. His mother had truly moulded him into the consummate rice-noodle boy. Yet she had firmly built him up to believe that the quiet, dark-eyed salesgirl at Retravision was his birthright, while my mother was bent on convincing me that, by disposition, girls were quivering martyrs. The deep sad irony of this finally sunk in. If I believed that I was so ungainly and undesirable, there would be no need for me to be forever careful. I could go out at three o’clock in the morning and loiter around that suburb with the name that sounded like a coarse podiatric disease and nothing would happen to me. Ever. No news headline would read ‘Young seventeen-year-old rebel violated and killed in Footscray’. I would be free.
LITTLE DUMPLINGS
On the island of Sitka, Alaska, the ships came into the port only once a week to replenish the food supply. With its white mist and black mountains, this land looked like the surface of a planet on a far-flung galaxy – Dante’s Inferno frozen over, or Vesuvius after the rain of ash. I was here to conduct some writing workshops one winter, living in a house kindly loaned by some professors who were away. My front yard was a forest and my backyard was the edge of the bay that seeped into the Pacific Ocean. At night if I stood outside with my eyes wide open, the world looked exactly as if I had them closed. I wondered how I would get to food without a car. Above all, I began to worry about being too much alone.
One day Joan appeared at my front doorstep with a jar of home-made apple sauce. Her eyes, magnified behind concave glasses, were the colour of the Florida seascape. Joan was in her early sixties and my neighbour. She offered to drop me off every week at the local supermarket while she went to church. I had been living in the States for a few months now, and what I could not find in supermarkets in Iowa City or Florida or Poughkeepsie, I found in the mini-supermarket of Sitka: imported rice paper, fish sauce, sesame oil. I later discovered that people in this town cooked almost everything from scratch. Their kitchens were fully stocked with every herb and spice imaginable.
That afternoon, I made dumplings for Joan. Dumplings were my consummate comfort food. A few years back when I was living in China and feeling like a foreigner, I would go to the Peking University dumpling canteen and present my meal card for a plate of boiled dumplings. Eating them reminded me of sitting at the kitchen table at home with Mum, wrapping meat in pre-made skins from the Tatsing grocery store. At this time, the northern mainland Chinese and Uighurs had started to open dumpling houses across the road from the Footscray Market. Their fare was nothing as fancy as Hong Kong dim sum, and nowhere as complicated as Shanghai xiao long bao – little buns filled with broth inside. But these northern Chinese dumplings were shaped like ancient gold ingots, which was perhaps why they were traditionally served at Chinese New Year. The Chinese are obsessed with wealth. But they are also obsessed with humility, and this is personified by the dumpling – a modest white dough covering the good stuff: prawns, ginger, pork and scallions. A food that is more meat than flour and water.
When I first arrived in the States, I lived in the university town of Iowa City. After a couple of months of buffalo wings and fried mozzarella sticks, I craved dumplings so much that I began making them for my international friends. Vafo from Uzbekistan told me that they had a very similar food, and Millicent showed us how to make Jamaican bwoil dumplin. In Poughkeepsie Professor Ronald Sharp and his wife, Inese, also made dumplings with me. Professor Sharp folded his so that each dough ball seemed to have an enchanting edge of pleats like Victorian chair-leg skirts; while Inese made Latvian piragi that developed perfect tans in the oven. In Providence I made dumplings for Professor Smulyan because she had a cold and it seemed the equivalent of Jewish matzo soup.
Even in Sitka, there were no supermarket dumpling skins available, so I had to roll them from flour and water. I remembered a line from a Maxine Hong Kingston story, where the father would not eat dumplings because he claimed it was like eating the dirt from beneath women’s fingernails. I chopped up spring onions and ginger, and used turkey meat because there seemed to be no such thing as minced pork in American supermarkets, it was all pre-seasoned sausage meat. Dumping them in a pot of boiling water, I watched the ingots float to the top like lifebuoys.
Standing on Joan’s front doorstep with my plate, I was unsure whether a lady who made canned preserves would like this sort of stuff. I also worried whether she would trust a stranger’s sense of personal hygiene. ‘Come in! Come in!’ she ushered. Joan was delighted. ‘How wonderful! I will fry these up in butter.’ She made a salad of beans and almonds. We served the dumplings with her home-made apple sauce. That strange and lovely fusion meal marked the beginning of our friendship, which grew into a rare amity where we would spend almost every day cooking and quilting and visiting craft shows bundled up in puffy coats, looking very much like the food that brought us together.
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
A duct-tape dummy sounds like a device for sadomasochistic adult babies, but is actually an ingenious DIY invention you find online for creating a replica of your own torso. All you need is a coathanger, an old small t-shirt, polyester padding and three rolls of duct tape. You put on the t-shirt, your sister Alina wraps the tape around you and Nick cuts an opening down the back. Your silver casing peels off like the skin of a mummified Venus de Milo. Hanging it on the coathanger, you stuff it with the guts of an old pillow and seal up the back, armholes and bottom with more duct tape. You know it doesn’t look like a Lincraft haberdashery mannequin, but you are getting married in less than two months, and you’re not going to sweat the small details.
‘Writing is a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it,’ says John Green. This story is not one of love at first sight, or second sight, foresight or even hindsight. You first meet the man who will become your husband at college. He is eighteen and comes from a valley six hours’ drive away. He can’t get used to how easily everyone can talk about ideas, and how fast they think. You want to tell him that some of these students don’t even do their own laundry – they take it to their parents’ home on weekends. One day Nick takes his blender into the city for repair. You thought that everyone knew small appliances had a built-in obsolescence; but back in his rural hometown, things were built to last, like the Snowy Mountains hydro scheme.
Nick is allocated the smallest room but doesn’t mind because he’d always shared a room with his brothers. You’d also shared not only a room but also a big double bed, first with your grandma, then with your younger brother and finally with your sisters. So you become intoxicated by your newfound independence.
Life is too interesting to be interrupted by romance, too filled with things to do and a feral vitality to write, to be hindered and trapped and monopolised by the thoughts and feelings of another human being. That’s how you saw marriage and children then, because this was how it was experienced in your family: your father was the pioneer but your mother was locked out of the world by her lack of language and four kids.
Nick is a quiet man. You have no idea what colour his eyes are because he always looks at his hands when he speak
s to anyone. You don’t find out until six years later, when you are giving a talk at Box Hill library. You see a familiar young face amid a sea of kindly geriatric faces. He’d recently returned from his travels around the world working on farms, and had come along with his grandparents. You arrange to meet up, which eventually leads to an evening dinner of roast and Yorkshire pudding at his grandparents’ house, where they also show you the oyster mushrooms he is growing in their garage.
You had dated people who wanted to talk all the time, to the point where you found yourself quietly holding your breath, thinking about Gibran’s lines:
You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart
you live in your lips,
and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
With Nick, you feel peace instead of excitement, calm instead of anxiety. A friend wrote to you saying that that kind of feeling was not falling in love, it was ‘falling in relief’. But at thirty, you can hear your own thoughts again.
And that’s when you know.
Here is a man who can mix concrete, pour foundations, cut logs, kill spiders and mice, drive tractors, grow things, keep bees and work cattle. He is a doer and not a talker, and he doesn’t ridicule your duct-tape dummy. He also doesn’t bat an eyelid when you lug home a Salvation Army bag and tell him, ‘I’ve finally found it.’
The bag contains a $60 massive meringue 1980s frock covered in hand-beaded lace: the very same stuff you saw in a boutique fabric store for hundreds of dollars a metre.
It seemed too easy to go into a shop to buy a gown. Maybe that’s why they made it so hard for you – an appointment weeks in advance, a container to stand on, two women pinning down folds of fabric behind you so you look like a battle-weary Barbie out of her box. You see a grown woman on another box cry. Who cries over a dress when all they’ve had to do was hand over the credit card? They didn’t have to make a stitch of the damn thing, prick their fingers embroidering fake pearls, worry about their toddler inhaling glass beads or getting asthma from being in the garage for too long while they sewed.
You are out of there in twenty minutes.
Nick’s mother tells you that her mother made her wedding gown. Your mother never had a ‘big day’, or a dress. You have a sneaking suspicion that the term ‘classy’ was invented by people with no sartorial imagination, and these same people invented ‘tacky’ to make fun of the loveliest things poor people could afford. Both mothers are not vain women. They wear flat shoes and barely any make-up. Nick’s father fixes farming equipment, your father repaired watches. Nick’s mother grows vegetables and knits blankets, your mother preserves pickles and hems her own sheets.
But a big difference between the two mums is that your mum is fanatically superstitious. If she finds out you’d bought a second-hand wedding gown and are intending to cut it up, she’d probably go off the rails. ‘Sharp objects bring terrible luck! And how do you know this dress doesn’t come with a terrible history?’ But that’s exactly how your talented beautician aunty lost her livelihood – no Asian bride wanted to get their face made up by her after her divorce. You also know that your family comes with its own terrible history, as all refugees do; yet that doesn’t stop Nick from wanting to be part of your life.
Also, your family don’t own anything old. The killing fields made sure of that. There are no family heirlooms, only family stories. You don’t want to tell your kids that their dad handed over a little square of plastic for a coveted material thing. You want them to understand how to work with, and transform, real material. You want to tell them that for four weeks, you and their dad sat together every evening while he read and you stitched, and you both talked. You want to tell your children that their father is still full of surprise and mystery. But for now, you drape the oversized, second-hand dress on the duct-tape dummy, and think with wonder and joy about the shape of things to come.
TWO CULTURES AND A BABY
‘What are you doing?’ my hospital roommate asks. I’m standing by the door of our shared bathroom, towel in hand, waiting for the nurse to return with a shower cap. In antenatal classes I was told a warm shower is comforting when going into labour, but I don’t want to give birth with wet hair dripping down my back.
‘No, no, no,’ my roommate insists, ‘you must wash your hair now!’ I’d only met the woman a few moments ago, through the curtained partition separating our beds, when I walked over to the bathroom as my contractions began. ‘Didn’t your mum teach you? You can’t wash your hair for thirty days after you have a baby, so you must do it now. This is your last time!’ I smile and thank her for her advice, then slink back to my side of the room. She has a Thai accent, and I know exactly what she is talking about, but pretend not to. I also know that she will sequester herself in her heated house for at least thirty days after giving birth, refrain from washing her hair, maybe not even shower, and live on a diet of special soups and tonics.
Every pregnant woman, and new parent, receives their fair dose of unsolicited advice from well-intentioned family members and strangers. Most of it is mildly annoying, but some of it can be anxiety-inducing, particularly if you feel you have to pretend to follow that advice to alleviate the concerns of loved ones whose fears you don’t share yourself. The Chinese and South-East Asian practice of zuo yue zi, which literally means ‘sitting the month’, goes back thousands of years and is even mentioned in the I Ching. Hospitals in Australia make allowance for this practice, which they refer to as ‘cultural confinement’, by sending nurses to visit the postpartum mother, who is not allowed outside the house. There are other things a new mother is not supposed to do: drink cold drinks, squat, eat certain vegetables and fruit, stand by an open window, turn on air-conditioning or cry.
Not every mother will follow all of these rules, and they vary in different regions of Asia. Other cultures also practise postpartum confinement – South Americans, Indians and traditional Greeks, for instance – but the distinct practices of my heritage spread from the north of China to the warmer climes of South-East Asia. My family are ethnic Chinese, born in Cambodia, and I think a lot of the theory behind the customs must have got lost in translation. Much of it seems like superstitious claptrap, especially when I remember my grandmother prohibiting my pregnant aunt from watching cartoons with us because she didn’t want the unborn baby to come out ‘deformed’ like Alvin the Chipmunk. Whenever nurses ask whether I will practise cultural confinement, I tell them definitely not.
Nonetheless, during my pregnancy I developed a heightened awareness of the fragility of life. I was grateful when friends gave me bags of baby clothes from their own children, but I could not sort through them or look at them. Just in case. I couldn’t digest the idea of a baby shower. Just in case. Because I was so nauseous for the first three months, I was filled with feelings of catastrophic expectancy. Conceived in a refugee camp and naturally underweight all my life, I wasn’t confident that I could grow a healthy and robust baby. I kept my fears to myself, yet with every doctor and midwife visit, I also realised how seriously the medical profession took the possibility of pre- and postnatal depression. My sister, who is a doctor, told me that some suffering mothers at the hospital wouldn’t pick up their babies or feed them.
Ever since I was twenty, one motherhood image has inadvertently and continually flashed through my mind: a photograph of a mother holding her baby in a strange way. The photo was from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Meticulous in their documentation of death, the Khmer Rouge took photos of every prisoner before they executed them. The mother holds her prostrate newborn low, almost near her waist. She stares straight at the camera, the ultimate face of detachment.
At the hospital, I collected the beyondblue booklet A Guide to Emotional Health and Wellbeing During Pregnancy and Early Parenthood, but I also wondered whether there was o
ne for new grandparents. All the terrible things that could happen, my parents expected to happen, with the only insurance being that I stay home all the time, only venturing to and from work. ‘Don’t go to Little Saigon Market in Footscray,’ Mum warned me. ‘You’ll slip over fruit scraps on the ground, fall and miscarry.’
My parents cannot accept pain as part of my life. It seems to make them suffer more than it actually makes me suffer. They worry all the time, and in their old age it seems to have gotten worse. Their anxiety is physical and palpable: it scatters their thoughts and makes my mother break out with a nasty rash all over her limbs. From time to time, she also suffers from debilitating depression. My father still weighs around 45 kilograms. During the Khmer Rouge years, they lost everything – first their families, and then their possessions; understandably, their world has narrowed to a few concentric circles, the pivotal one in the centre being their children, the second their electrical appliance business. They have always been overprotective of us to a pathological degree. As author Helen Motro explains through her studies of Holocaust survivors:
Not all of our fathers beat their sons … Not all of our mothers froze us out as teenagers because they themselves survived by abandoning their own mothers at 15 in the camps. No, most of us had parents who loved too much, who smothered us with their care, their solicitude, their ever-present, all-enveloping anxiety.
There’s a specific brand of anxiety, called ‘transgenerational trauma’, that affects those with genocide-affected parents. Studies have even shown that children of Jewish Holocaust survivors have altered levels of circulating stress hormones compared to other adults of the same age. They simultaneously feel overprotected by their parents and overprotective of their parents. All grandchildren are joys to their grandparents, but this first grandchild means something more to my father, who has seen the death of so many children he knew and loved. Although he never directly mentions this feeling of loss, my father has always spoken with yearning of having ‘four generations under one roof’, the ultimate Chinese idea of a blessed family.