by Benjamin Law
And there, in the far south, shining yellow as butter and golden as sunshine, floating over the horizon, was a pagoda.
I screamed with excitement when I saw it, pointing and bouncing in the back seat of my uncle’s car. Sài Gòn is a very French city, with huge broad avenues and boulevards connecting roundabouts and civic buildings and monuments, all webbed with wild tangled thickets of side streets, so I enjoyed a clear view on the drive to my aunt and uncle’s villa. My bedroom was on the fourth floor and I spent the whole time at the dusty window, squinting through the smog and smoke at the gleaming temple-tower in the distance, thrilled to my heart and blood and soul with the joy of knowing that I was capable of seeing visions too, that there was a magic circle that included me after all.
I told everyone I met, from my cousins who got tired of hearing me talk about it to the policeman we met when my grandmother took us to the zoo, that I could see a pagoda on the horizon. They smiled and nodded indulgently, and gave my parents faintly incredulous looks when they thought I wasn’t looking, the same sort of looks they gave when I opened my mouth and Australian-accented Vietnamese came out – glances and furrowed brows that suggested there was something wrong.
‘Why can’t he see the rest of the palace?’ my grandmother asked my mother, in a tone that implied the deficit was my parents’ fault. She didn’t think I could hear her, or maybe that I didn’t understand. There’s always been an assumption in my family that I’m a little slower than everyone else, so it’s okay to talk over my head.
‘It’s just the way he is,’ my mother replied good-naturedly. ‘He’s just strange, that’s all. In Australia we have a white city, and he can’t see that properly either.’
‘He’s a little slow,’ my father said to my uncles in the awkward, grinning way that he reserved for when he was making excuses for something. ‘He probably doesn’t know what to look for.’
Well, that showed how much they knew. I wasn’t slow, or strange, or ignorant. I just couldn’t see what they could. But here, in Vietnam, the land of my people, where the food smelt of coriander and tamarind, I could see a golden pagoda. Maybe it wasn’t the palace that everyone else in Vietnam could see, but it was something. It was a balm to know that I wasn’t defective after all: I wasn’t stupid or blind or not trying hard enough – I was just different, just not like the rest of them. And I knew as well as anyone that being different was good. Being different meant I was the main character: Look, there she goes; the girl is strange but special – a most peculiar mademoiselle . . .
I couldn’t see it when we flew back to Australia. I fought my sister for the window seat on the plane, and watched as the shining pagoda dissolved into clouds and sunlight and blurred into the horizon and away.
Strangely enough, once we got back to Melbourne, I sometimes thought I could see something on the northern horizon. Not a golden temple, nor a white city, but something like a dome of sapphire, the exact shade of the sky at noon of high summer, visible only by the sunlight gleaming on its polished edges and vertices. It floated over what I would one day learn was the direction of magical kingdoms with names like Brunswick, Collingwood, Fitzroy and Northcote, remote and lovely as a mountain peak. I wondered if it had always been there, just waiting for me to realise that I could see cities on the horizon after all, and to stop straining to see something in the west and turn my eyes northward.
Nobody else seemed to notice that it was there, so I didn’t bring it up. Even at six years old, I knew I didn’t need the aggravation of trying to explain something that would sound like nonsense to the people who could see the white city. I turned my face east and west and south, to the city I knew and all its streets and gardens and spaces where I lived my life, but all the while I felt the heat of the north pushing on my mind, like I was living with my back to a bonfire.
My favourite show, I decided at eight years old, was the Japanese shōjo anime series Sailor Moon. I don’t think my parents knew what I was drinking in every morning, this show about a silly blonde girl with a talking cat and magical powers. Sitting directly below the television, I learnt about friendships that would last to the ends of the solar system and back, about finding your family, about courage and the power of unconditional love. I learnt that when I grew up I wanted to be a princess in a long, rippling white gown, a moon on my forehead and a light in my hand that held back the darkness.
And then there was Tuxedo Mask, the dashing, immaculately tailored love interest with his top hat and white tie. I hadn’t known that I liked tallness, dark hair and a mocking smile, but sitting at that television every weekday taught me all that and more. It took me a while to articulate it, but eventually I realised that when I grew up, I wanted to marry Tuxedo Mask. And, from that moment on, the shining blue dome that I saw floating in the north was joined by a slender cluster of minarets, the sun radiating through their translucent pink quartz walls like a rose-coloured fire.
Over the years, the strange thing in the north grew. When I kissed Rob, trembling, in Year 8, I saw a red-gated Japanese honden appear, brighter than passion, hot as my blood when his hands quivered on my waist. Its vermilion columns and carved screens enshrined that kiss, soft and shy and a little too wet, with a dozen candles flaming eternally before it in worship, a bell rope that would turn pale and threadbare with thousands of rung prayers, and stone steps that would one day become worn-smooth with the weight of ten thousand prostrations.
When I was banished to the margins of the schoolyard, a palace sprang up in my visions. Schools are savage ecosystems where the brightly coloured things get pecked and slashed and torn apart by their duller peers. Flinching from soccer balls and not knowing how to join hateful, envious conversations about women made me an obvious target for stones and arrows. Exiled from the adolescent war council in which teenage boys used profane slang to plot their strategies for conquering the strange and savage territory of girls’ bodies, I gazed at the palace that rose over the north, half-listening in revulsion as I watched the sun blaze on the limestone facades, its domes and spires capped with brilliant brass.
When I got called a faggot for the first time, a city wall appeared in gleaming green jasper, its polished stone shimmering dark and flecked with red like blood. I would learn to hate that word, and ten thousand guard towers grew up in the green wall, one for each time it was used against me. I had no idea it was possible to hate something as much as I hated the sound of that word, all ugly guttural Anglo-Saxon noise and spittle, like the sound of someone coughing up phlegm, each utterance of it carving out crenels and arrow slits, raising the shining wall to sheer and dreadful heights.
When I discovered that the internet had uses other than homework research – when I found fanfiction and erotica, pornography and fitness models, the glossy, eternally gasping, always-thin and invariably white beauties of certain websites; when I felt the low, dark thrill of reading something I knew I shouldn’t, poorly punctuated stories that initiated me into the arcane rites of lube and fingering, that answered questions about anal sex and hygiene that I would never have dared ask the science teacher who taught Sex Education at my Catholic boys’ school – gardens appeared on the jasper wall’s terraces, overflowing with flowers and fruit trees in pools of dazzling colour. I spent hours staring north from my upstairs bedroom window, breathless from the pleasure of looking at them. Daisies and violets and scarlet poppies nodded their heads by the thousand, and chrysanthemums shone pale and perfect as full moons, and marigolds bloomed so bright I could almost taste mango and lemon curd and orange blossom honey at the sight of them. Vines put forth grapes like clusters of amethysts, apples winked scarlet from under the dappled shade of their trees, and when the wind was in the north the perfume that floated across the world made me dizzy with delight.
As I learnt to fear walking too close to other boys, or getting caught staring, the gardens grew roses. When I realised that scorn and humiliation were the likely result of another boy sensing I wanted to kiss him, briars twined
their way through the garden, unfurling flowers as full and red as hearts and thorns like curses, crowning the curtain wall with wreaths of wicked spikes. When I learnt how many people like me had been beaten dead, thrown from bridges and strangled under motel beds, the thorns quivered with rage and dripped something slow, black and poisonous.
One day at Flagstaff Station, I saw two teenage boys kiss. They were older than me, and scarcely seemed human in the ease with which they moved, the carefree grace of the way they slid together, mouth to mouth, breath to breath. I’d never seen two boys kiss like that before, not on television, not in real life. Porn didn’t count in the same way – its kisses stirred my flesh and blood, but this kiss hit my heart and lodged there, glimmering like a jewelled dart. Those beautiful strangers on the train platform blazed like dreams, and I knew somewhere in my soul I would one day be kissed like that, the way people in movies kissed when the music swelled.
I never did see the white city in the west, but as I learnt to navigate the world – as I began to want and hate and kiss and fear and touch myself – I came to see a city in the north shining every colour under heaven like sunlight blazing through stained glass, with its sapphire pleasure dome alight with jade lanterns at night, and gardens that bloomed all through winter, and a lotus-choked river flowing through it as brown as skin, and diamond-coloured streamers, and a rainbow of banners that proclaimed the virtue and everlasting splendour of its inhabitants.
I didn’t tell anyone about it, of course; I knew what would follow: Oh, he’s different, he’s silly, he’s always making mistakes, he’s not like us, he can’t even see the white city, look at him thinking he can see something in the north. I didn’t need the drama. The world didn’t deserve the strength and courage it would take me to tell them about what I saw. I bared my teeth and drew myself up to my full, unimpressive height, and the jasper walls gleamed as hard and impenetrable as my resolve.
And that would have been the end of it, if not for something that happened in my twentieth year that overthrew and toppled me with the violence of a sea that hates the shore. I fell in love, not wisely, but deeply and well.
I looked into a pair of grey-blue eyes, shining in the light of the fireworks that exploded pink and purple and blue over us from the MCG as we sat on a hill in Birrarung Marr, hand in hand. My heart fluttered like a harp string as we kissed. The fires in the sky faded, leaving behind a faint illumination that gilded his pale features – a light, I suddenly realised, that shone from the north, from a sapphire dome and fiery beacons in tall watchtowers made of green jasper, reflecting off minarets and cupolas of polished brass.
‘Kim,’ I said a little unsteadily, my heart in my mouth. ‘Can you . . . see that? The city?’ I pointed wildly to where it glimmered beyond Federation Square.
I would learn later that he could in fact see the white city in the west as well, that he had grown up with its light on his face and known from his earliest days that here was a place for him. But, at that moment, all I knew was that his answer delivered me from a shadow I hadn’t even realised lay over my heart; it soothed fifteen years of fear and reassured me that I wasn’t alone after all, that there was a tribe for me, a nation of people that could see the many-coloured beauty in the north.
Trust Me (Tips for My Teenage Self)
Thomas Wilson-White
•You are right about Anthony Callea.
•Christian school sex education will leave a lot to be desired. Save yourself the grief and google ‘douching’ immediately.
•Kissing guys is always going to be great, so keep doing it. Also, porn is fine in doses – more experimental searches won’t trigger horrifying sleeper urges, as you fear they will. Except for that one that does.
•On that note, sex doesn’t have to look like porn. You will feel pressure to have it all the time because you are a gay man and that’s apparently what gay men do. This is a lie the creators of Queer as Folk invented because they couldn’t think of better storylines.
•You’re going to spend years writing from a heterosexual perspective, mostly because every aspect of life on Earth – and everyone – says you should. Your work will only start to get noticed when you stop doing that, so stop doing that. Trust me.
•Loving Tina Arena doesn’t make you gay, it makes you a decent human being. (So stop turning down the music in your headphones in case people can hear it.)
•Some of your friendships – even your favourite ones – will fall apart. And because of your deep-rooted belief that you are inherently flawed, you will take 100 per cent of the blame. Don’t.
•Your dad is going to break your heart into pieces and you’ll quickly turn the pain into a joke to survive. He’ll never reach the potential he had to be there for you, but you will have a good relationship with him, and in the end that will be enough. There will be times when you will hate the parts of yourself that are like him. But you wouldn’t curse the moon for causing oceans to ebb and flow, so don’t curse him either.
•Your mum would say comparing him to the moon is overly generous, but she is wrong because this makes her the sun.
•You will get really good at being broken up with, and you’ll think it will always be this way. It won’t; you’re fine. Try to care less. It works.
•That full-time babe on the school bus, whose eyes are like dark pools of Coca-Cola, who you swear made you gay with private school voodoo or some shit – you know, the one you’ll paint in the stars each night, who’ll never know the beauty of the constellations you crafted for him or the time it took to find the gumption to speak a hello – well, I promise there is more to that story, and it’s worth the wait. I can’t say exactly what I mean by ‘worth the wait’, but I’m raising a very suggestive eyebrow, so you do the maths, kid.
•People will sometimes be dismissive of you or condescending, and you will spend years thinking it’s because you’re gay. This is entirely incorrect. It’s because you are young with perfect skin and they are old and broken.
•Anything mustard-coloured makes you look pale and underfed, like a vegan art student. Do me a favour and just skip that whole mustard phase. Also vests. Take it off. Now.
•The only girl allowed to ask you for fashion advice is your big sister; the rest are stereotyping you and deserve nothing (unless they actually look amazing – then it’s your duty to tell them so as loudly and extravagantly as possible).
•You won’t have a single positive role model for a long time, and your path will often feel directionless and doomed. To make matters worse, the world will tell you what you are, and you will even play along with that for a while to please it, but that will get uncomfortable.
•You will never be good at vogueing, but your hips don’t lie and lots of girls in clubs will want to be your friend. One day a girl will buy you a drink and say, ‘I was so sad when I found out you were gay,’ and because you are naturally accommodating you will apologise. Let’s work on ‘sorry’ not being the first thing out of your mouth in these sorts of situations. Are you sorry for having brown hair? For having blue eyes? No, of course not, so don’t be sorry for being gay. Ever.
•Your siblings will hurt you sometimes, but they will save you more often. Be really good to them, because they get rich before you do.
•You won’t listen to me, but try not to get drunk so much. It will never suit you, and parties will always give you anxiety.
•On that note, when that awful thing happens to you in the bathroom stall of a gay bar when you are twenty-one, please believe me when I say it didn’t happen because you were drunk. And you didn’t ask for it. And it wasn’t your fault. People do bad things to other people. You’ll spend years bound by silence and regret and it will deform your early twenties. For what it’s worth, if I could I would reach into your future and push you out of the way, back out onto the dancefloor, away from the darkness that found you that horrible night, so that you could keep dancing in that gormless and innocent way, unaware and careless and wonderful.
But I can’t, so your consolation prize is the strength you’ll find in the aftermath. And I’ll say it again: it wasn’t your fault. And you didn’t ask for it. And no one can take your good heart away from you; that’s not how it works. Use it to forgive yourself.
•There will be a heartbreak, the biggest and hardest of your young life. Oh baby, it’s a big one. You will have sworn he was going to be the one: a dark-haired dreamboat sailing the seven seas of life. But he won’t have an anchor, and you’ll be too sweet to taste the salt water filling your lungs. It will turn your heart into a foreign country, where they speak a different language, where the food has unpronounceable names and you can’t afford the return airfare. You’ll cry from night until day until night again, and as the sun rises on the second day you’ll promise to never let another person hurt you this way. The country inside you will enter a long winter, and years will pass. Another man will come along and build a house in this wintry landscape, but like most settlers he will be opportunistic and blind, unable to recognise the history and lore etched into the land where he’s found his city, and it will crumble. Yes, the winter will pass like winter does, but this new heart will remain. Eventually you’ll download Duolingo and learn the language of this place. You’ll learn the names of its foods and you’ll even enjoy them. It will be hard to be as bright and open as you once were, but one day you will realise you are grateful for this more cultured heart. There may be no greater lesson.
•And often you will find yourself wondering where it’s all going and what it all means. There won’t be a stretch of ocean on the entire east coast that you don’t search for answers, nor a pillowcase dry from the heavy tears you’ll shed, and in those times I urge you to wrap your arms around yourself and breathe into the chaos of it all. Because time will pass no matter how much you wish for it to remain static, and the ones you love will grow old, and they will leave you on this wretched earth without their light and their loving pokes and prods; and when you’re stuck to the ceiling, bone-chilled from the injustice of being human, wishing you could find a place to scream and scream until your throat resigns, just remember that the sun rises every morning, and it will warm your skin, and – I say this to make sure someone has said it to you – it will always get better. You will be okay. And when you finally see those you loved so deeply, whose best and worst you took to proudly build yourself, whose love defined this huge life of yours, in whatever way it happens, you’ll have such an almighty story to tell them. Trust me.
