by Mimi Kwa
Francis and Anne are smitten with one another. Anne is, Francis writes to Theresa, my first true love.
Anne leaves Geelong to further her studies in Melbourne, and Francis follows her to find a job as an apprentice electrical engineer. He joins a choir in the gentrified, leafy south-eastern suburb of Malvern, where he rents a house with a student and a young architect. ‘Only one number away from Toorak,’ he says, referring to the postcode being a digit off the most sought-after suburb in the state.
With her airline career in full swing, Theresa is looking for a permanent helper. She takes on a girl called Brigit to be her maid. Brigit is fifteen and – like many tens of thousands of Filipina girls – is in desperate need of work. She has three sisters, two brothers and a mother back home to support, and she is farmed out by an agency that hawks human labour between countries, this one specialising in placing girls from the Philippines with wealthy Chinese families in Hong Kong and across South-East Asia. Filipina maids go to the Middle East as well, but nowhere is the throng of them so obvious than in this British colony.
Every Sunday the square outside St Joseph’s Cathedral in Central heaves with domestic helpers. Filipina maids live with their employers and are expected to be of service twenty-four hours a day, but the Hong Kong government has ruled that domestic workers must be given twelve consecutive hours off per week. On Sundays the maids of Hong Kong can just be girls, women and friends – free for a little while, they giggle over idle gossip, compare lives, show off trinkets, and talk about how their masters treat and pay them. With all their money going home to loved ones, they cannot afford to visit the pictures or restaurants on their one day off, so they congregate to feel less alone and have fun together. They exchange romance novels, play cards and laugh. They cannot afford picnic blankets or even straw mats, so they usually lay out old newspapers to sit on.
These young women are used to a basic existence and are often forced to sleep in corridors, kitchens and broom cupboards. The lucky ones, like Brigit, have their own room with a television. Brigit considers herself incredibly privileged to have found herself a job in the house of Theresa Kwa.
From the beginning, Theresa takes on Brigit like a guardian would her charge; Brigit is almost like a dutiful daughter to Theresa – a loyal, enduring servant. At its core their relationship is transactional; in many ways Brigit is part of the family but she is acutely aware of her place. Theresa grooms her as an invaluable asset. In this era in Hong Kong, a successful Filipina maid never questions and doesn’t argue, but she usually has a ripe sense of humour and a likeable personality beneath her obsequious exterior. Brigit has both, and she’s smart too, able to master the boundaries and perfectly understand the extent to which she can question or tease Theresa in a well-meaning way.
In her spare time, Theresa is an avid painter. Illustrious artists offer her tuition, and she works hard to hone her talent and compose an impressive series of Chinese brush paintings. She is trained by the pre-eminent master Qi Baishi, and international newspapers report on her first overseas exhibition:
Jul. 1959 – Chinese Air Hostess Holds Exhibition Of Her Painting In London. An exhibition of paintings by B.O.A.C. air hostess Miss Theresa Wai Ching Kwa from Hong Kong opened this morning at the Commonwealth Institute, South Kensington.
Theresa takes her work to Leningrad, Vienna, Lisbon, Paris and Rome, the proceeds of sales going directly into her dream to educate the children of House of Kwa.
Mary is still single and finally of an age perfect for BOAC recruitment, so Theresa helps her find a position with the airline.
In airports around the world, the sisters exchange knowing glances as they pass one other with their respective crews. When the two stunning women travel the same leg, they are a sight to behold. Their way with people is enchanting. Passengers are enraptured, especially Tony, a judge, who falls head over heels for Mary. Her laughter lights up a room. She and Tony are an item but don’t marry, as she doesn’t want to lose her job, flying the BOAC flag for House of Kwa alongside her sister. Mary makes headlines herself, exhibiting her paintings at David Jones World Fair in Sydney, Australia. She wins hearts as she’s photographed smiling broadly despite discovering the shattered glass on her framed pictures upon unpacking them, as the papers report.
Four years later, Francis steps out onto his own stage at twenty-eight, making his solo singing debut at the Malvern Town Hall. He is accompanied by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. The piano comes in, introducing violins, with brass and woodwind instruments soon to follow. He sings ‘Moon River’ along with ‘Autumn Leaves’ and a few other favourites, which he records onto a vinyl LP with a photo of a serious and debonair Francis on its sleeve. He sings his heart out, relishing the privilege and honour. It is his heyday.
But his love affair with Anne peters out, and his musical aspirations give way to a travel bug. He plans to see more of Australia, and sets out in an old Ford.
Francis discovers a more vast landscape than he could ever have imagined – infinitely bigger than Hong Kong and immeasurably sparser.
Francis takes his fascination with mechanics, structures and architecture on his bushwalks, marvelling at lofty gum trees and stooping in awe at wildflowers. He admires the cantilever of branches and the mathematical precision of a sprig of yellow bloom. God must have created with rulers and angles on a drawing board. Francis wonders how koalas calculate what weight a bough will take, and as he watches ants build their hills, he imagines Egyptian slaves constructing the pyramids. At the Great Australian Bight, he estimates the voltage of lightning strikes as they hit the horizon. Whenever he can, he thinks of the mathematics behind natural phenomena. This is how Francis Kwa makes sense of the world, and how he feels in control.
The tyres on Francis’s Ford turn over the dirt road, leaving clouds of dust in their wake that will settle until the next car passes over the Nullarbor Plain. He visits the Blowholes of Albany and dines in a roadhouse full of rough-looking men. When they call out, ‘Go home, ya chink,’ he realises he should have gone to dinner with the two friendlier fellows he met at the hostel. The bartender tells the patrons to leave Francis alone; it’s more of a well-humoured suggestion than an order, but they shut up and drink their beer. Francis gratefully leaves once he has finished his meal, then runs all the way back to his hostel.
After a few weeks, he arrives in Perth.
NEW KWA
外柔内刚
Mouse on the outside, tiger within
– Chinese idiom
BUSH AND SWAMP
MELA BRYCE IS NINETEEN AND PREGNANT. SHE IS WELL educated with an honours degree, but she ‘hears voices’ and is sometimes paralysed with paranoia. She is an undiagnosed chronic and severe schizophrenic. I sit in her womb, growing cell upon cell, unaware of anything to come or why I chose her.
My parents met bushwalking. This is the official story: Mela and Francis are walking separately under a blue sky interrupted only by a canopy of eucalyptus leaves. As Francis marvels at cockatoos and kookaburras, he trips over a log. Mela is also in wonder at nature’s creation when she sees that a man has stumbled. Oh dear, she thinks, that poor fellow is scrambling under the weight of his backpack. She helps him up.
The bush rescue leads to a six-week courtship. In the beginning Mela’s parents, Thelma and Roger Bryce, are civil to Francis, distantly polite. But then, all too quickly, Mela becomes determined to marry this young Chinese man. It turns out he is thirty-eight – not so young after all.
He drives Thelma and Roger through the suburbs of Perth, showing off his properties to emphasise his eligibility. Technically they aren’t really Francis’s properties – Theresa has made investments in Perth to ‘assist’ Francis’s independence and to give her an excuse to fly in and check on her younger brother: a block of flats, an apartment here and there. She has also bought a catamaran that is docked on the Swan River. Of all the places in the world she could have made these investments, she chose Perth – a beautiful, rough backw
ater – because family is family and Kwa is Kwa.
‘Look, look.’ He gestures excitedly, with one hand on the steering wheel. ‘Look, I’m a very rich man!’ He breaks into laughter and waves his hand again in the direction of Theresa’s block of flats.
Mela sits silently in the back seat, Thelma next to her, and Roger is in the front.
Thelma and Roger feel sick with worry. Mela has broken the news she is pregnant to this man they’ve just met, a man almost twenty years her senior, and that she plans to marry him. Her parents are heartbroken. She attended an exclusive girls’ school and is enrolled at university. This is not the life Thelma and Roger imagined for their daughter. And there is something else: they don’t know what to tell Francis about his fiancée’s mental state. They themselves don’t understand it, and doctors are uncertain about Mela’s symptoms and behaviour. For the past four years, Roger and Thelma have simply hoped for the best.
In the car, Thelma looks at her eldest daughter, who is about to wed and have a baby when she seems like only a baby herself, still at university and barely an adult. Mela looks straight ahead, and Francis turns up the radio to fill the awkward silence.
Next on the Kwa portfolio tour is a property by the beach, in Scarborough’s Snake Pit, which in the 1950s was a gathering ground for bodgies and widgies to meet over rock ’n’ roll. Now, in the 1970s, it is a place for hoons and bikies to meet over burnouts and hard liquor. Roger and Thelma appear alarmed by this location.
Francis pulls over to the kerb, and Mela, Roger and Thelma follow him onto a vast vacant lot of land overgrown with weeds. There’s a large fenced-off council swamp with a stormwater drain jutting out into algae-covered water, with a couple of ducks, who seem to have lost their way, paddling on top. Apart from these signs of life, it is a barren wasteland.
‘This,’ says Francis triumphantly, ‘is where we will live.’
Francis and Mela tie the knot. The wedding ceremony takes place at Mela’s parents’ home in the affluent riverside suburb of Bicton. Despite Roger and Thelma’s devastation at their daughter’s decision to marry this stranger, they grit their teeth, and they invite only their closest of friends for moral support. They will never fully accept Francis into their family, but they are certainly not about to allow their first grandchild to enter the world illegitimately.
Awkward photos take place against timber-panelled walls, in a home reception atmosphere that is forced and tense, perfectly befitting the shotgun nuptials. Thelma and Roger pose alongside the bride and groom. It is unfashionable to smile, and they don’t feel like it anyway.
A photographer ushers the group onto a balcony, where Thelma casts her eyes out at the boats on the Swan River, rocking gently on glass-like water. She glances at her nineteen-year-old daughter then back down to the beach where Mela used to play for hours with her brother, Roger, and sister, Zora. A typical Perth girl living an atypical privileged life. Mela would dress up and roller-skate up and down Blackwall Reach Parade at a time of little traffic and unlocked flyscreen doors. Girls’ annuals populated her bookshelves, and theatre and ballet attendances punctuated her calendar. But then puberty struck, and day by day the voices became louder, persistent.
Now Mela is studying for her Diploma of Education – post honours – and is pregnant and married.
Tears well in Thelma’s eyes. Maybe the baby will save her, she thinks.
Having travelled Western Australia extensively while staying in backpacker accommodation and YMCAs, Francis dreams of owning a travellers’ retreat. He decides that his arid Scarborough property is the perfect place for one.
After the wedding he and Mela move in together, and he begins building his compound for travellers, right next to the swamp. Inside my mother, my cells form and assemble like construction blocks, while Francis lays the first bricks of his empire. Very quickly his buildings begin to sprawl: one house then another attached, creating a duplex that he can rent out immediately; a huge brick barbecue area – perfect for frog and snail racing when I get there; a shed with a ladder to a roof that connects to a tree, leading down to the swamp – excellent tadpole breeding grounds; another house, this time of weatherboard and asbestos; another shed with a mezzanine floor to double its storage capacity; a flat roof on the original house where he can later build a shed.
‘You can never have too much storage.’ Francis surveys his growing kingdom. ‘It’s good metal. It’s good wood. It’s good things. You never know when we will need it.’
Mela has never lived away from her parents until now. Each night she continues to seek solace with Thelma, if not in person then over the phone. Mela’s ‘voices’ inhabit teachers, fellow students, people in the street. ‘Everyone is out to get me, Mama,’ she cries. ‘They want to kill me!’
Since she was fifteen, Mela has gone through significant mental ‘episodes’. Thelma’s lack of vitamin D during gestation in bleak London is one reason doctors give for these symptoms.
At sixteen, Mela was diagnosed with manic depression. When she was seventeen, doctors prescribed an electric-shock treatment called ECT: electroconvulsive therapy.
The doctors at Perth’s Graylands Psychiatric Hospital insisted Mela must be separated from her parents while she underwent the ‘necessary’ treatment. She struggled against the grip of two large orderlies, trying to follow her parents out, but the orderlies were strong, and Thelma and Roger left them to it, reassuring each other that this was the right thing to do. Being strapped to a hospital bed then having her brain charged with four hundred volts for six seconds was a terrifying and immobilising experience for Mela. She was still just a girl, and ECT – normally prescribed for depression and schizophrenia – seemed an extreme approach to manic depression. She suffered side effects including nausea, memory loss, headaches, jaw pain and muscle aches.
Two weeks later when the Bryces collected their daughter, they were met by a broken child, worse than when she’d arrived, frightened and desperate. In low and measured tones, doctors spoke of improvements, but her parents saw none and promised never to return Mela to this type of medical care. From now on, they decided, her condition, still undiagnosed, would be contained and managed at home, brushed beneath the carpet.
They don’t tell Francis how bad it can get; he will find out in his own time.
I don’t want to come out of my mother. Perhaps I know what I’m about to land in.
Mela walks the length of Scarborough Beach, all the way to the Trigg rocks and back, pushing her bare feet into the sand. The autumn breeze skims off the ocean, cooling her face. It’s a mild day, but Mela is beginning to sweat. I am a week late. My mother cannot stand it anymore and tries to run, a heavy footed plod through the coarse granules, her enormous belly rising and falling.
Finally Mela is induced, and at 1 am on 23 May 1974 at King Edward Memorial Hospital, Subiaco, Western Australia, a new Kwa is born.
MOUNTAINS AND VOICES
THERESA HADN’T MADE IT TO MY PARENTS’ WEDDING; SHE wasn’t told about it until afterwards. Her brother may have forgotten to tell her, but it’s more likely he wanted to prevent her from trying to talk him out of it.
The minute she found out, she booked a flight to Perth. When she arrived and saw Mela’s very apparent pregnancy – which Francis had neglected to mention – the rushed ceremony suddenly made sense. Theresa then met Thelma and Roger, with whom she had far more in common than the girl her brother had just wed – Mela being twenty-five years Theresa’s junior, after all, and the Bryces much closer to her own generation. For her brother’s sake, though, Theresa made a concerted effort to bond with his wife.
Theresa no longer works for BOAC. She resigned after falling in love with a man called Tony, who coincidentally shares the same first name as Mary’s boyfriend. Tony had opened the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Hong Kong Island, and Theresa took over the registration of the old family business name, which had closed in 1964, to open her own shop – Swatow Lace – in Tony’s hotel. She also designed the br
idal suites near the top floor, but she never had the opportunity to use one. Tony died before they could make things official – for all the many marriage proposals she had attracted over the years, Tony’s was the only one she would ever accept. Clara is single too now, she and her husband Donald having divorced, but she is staying in England for their children Josephine, Steven and David’s education. And yet not a week goes by without the three Kwa sisters staying in touch.
Now I’ve arrived, Theresa visits Perth every now and then, always keeping at a respectful distance and staying with friends rather than the newlyweds. Respecting our privacy is a convenient excuse because she’d really prefer not to be woken by a crying baby in the night. Even in Perth, she has her own social circles and stays in the west wing of a sprawling house in one of the city’s richest suburbs, Dalkeith. The owners are usually at their beach house in Margaret River, and they give her full run of their place. Private drivers and cooks aren’t common in Perth, but Theresa’s friends have one of each, so a chauffeur ferries her between our place in delinquent Scarborough and her ritzy riverside accommodation.
Francis decides to take his wife and baby daughter on a trip to Hong Kong to visit his sister. This will be Mela’s first time travelling into Asia. I am almost twelve months old, and Francis is overjoyed that I am still eligible for complimentary travel: ‘Free-free-free, she travels free!’
The past eighteen months have been a baptism of fire for Francis. When his wife, studying and pregnant, wasn’t throwing up in the bathroom from morning sickness, she could be found sobbing in her room for no apparent reason. When he asked her what was wrong, she said the neighbours had been awful to her again. Then the new baby came and the throwing up was replaced by leaking breasts, but the sobbing didn’t stop.
Francis wants to introduce us to the place he grew up, and he’s keen for us to experience Theresa’s hospitality. He talks at great length about his sister, who is very ‘upper class’ and has ‘a driver’ and ‘a maid’. He proudly shares these facts with lots of people in Perth, anticipating their high regard. But Mela is sceptical about her sister-in-law’s conduct – having drivers and maids at your beck and call smacks of an inequality she struggles to abide. ‘It sounds like Theresa doesn’t lift a finger,’ she says.
