House of Kwa

by Mimi Kwa

  I don’t know when I will see you again because sometimes Father and Mother come to visit me on my school break. Dad’s snoring travels down the aisle, filling the cabin; I have to concentrate. But next time I’m coming back to Hong Kong, your Aunty Theresa said she will try to arrange for you to visit too. This is for you to store something special in until then. Your friend, Rukin. He has drawn a smiley face above the R.

  I fold the note and put it back in the Lego box. I slip Aunty’s scarf from around my neck and try to perform the triangulated fold I have watched her do a hundred times. ‘It’s a Japanese way,’ Aunty told me. ‘Very neat, very calm, very polite people.’ I place my scarf ball over Lukin’s letter and smooth it on top, the way Aunty would do.

  GRAVEL AND SAUSAGE

  MELA’S WHITE VW BEETLE COMES TO A CORNER AT THE crest of a steep hill in Bicton, less than five hundred metres from the riverside home she shares with her parents. She applies the brake at a stop sign, but the car goes straight through. At any other moment, on any other day, this would be of no consequence on the quiet suburban street – any other day, Mela would coast through, doing a gradual handbrake stop at the bottom of the hill. But not today.

  An eighteen-wheeled truck comes down the hill at the precise moment Mela turns the corner, the bigger vehicle far too heavy and fast to stop in time. When they collide, Mela hears the splintering sound of her head smashing through the driver’s side window. Her face is embedded with glass. The car rolls. Her ribs crack, and her nose and right eye socket break, as chunks of gravel collect in her open wounds.

  My grandparents say that my father is a scrooge for providing Mela with the battered old car that led to her accident. They have forever been offering her financial help, but she has forever refused to take it and insists on relying on Francis for a car. Mum and Dad have been to the Family Court, and Dad has to provide the transport for me between households, which most likely means he should drive me. But Dad’s interpretation is that he is to ‘provide the vehicle’, and Mela must do the driving. When he donated the beaten-up car to Mum, she accepted it against her parents’ better judgement.

  Giving over the car was better than giving over his time to ferry me back and forth – besides, he has four VWs, so he can afford to spare one. He tinkers with them in his front yard, exchanging parts for other parts, then stands back and observes his work, beaming with pleasure as engines roar and fanbelts spin.

  Paw Paw holds my six-year-old hand reassuringly as we walk down the wide, long hospital corridor into the light. Mum has been released from intensive care. I’m desperate to see her every day, although I find her appearance very frightening: the right side of her face is deformed with fifty coarse black stitches, knotted at the end of each wound, poking from her swollen red cheeks. The other side of her face still looks like Mum, so I position myself carefully on her left, and she now knows not to turn her head.

  When I first saw her after the accident, I ran screaming and crying from the room. So from then on, every time she’s read to me in the hospital from my favourite Golden Books, I’ve tried not to look at her. Of course I can read them myself by now, but it’s nicer to be read to, and it gives us a chance to act as though nothing has happened. Our family is really good at that: pretending. It’s easier than facing the truth, after all, so Mum and I behave as though it’s normal to sit together like this on a hospital bed, reading. She can’t put an arm around me, though; her broken ribs make that too painful.

  Today’s long walk down the corridor happens in slow motion. At first I don’t know it’s her up ahead. She is running, hurtling herself forward – barefoot, racing out of the light towards me and Paw Paw, terror on her face. She seems possessed and looks right past me, almost through me, the stitches that frighten me so much making her appear even more crazed. Her hospital gown flies behind her.

  ‘Mummy!’ I scream. ‘Muuuuuuummy!’

  Paw Paw and I turn to see Mela run out through the hospital’s glass entrance.

  I watch as my mother throws herself in front of a moving car. The driver slams on the brakes, but it’s too late. Mum rolls across the bonnet, her body hitting the windscreen in a tangle of arms and legs.

  Paw Paw screams and pushes my face into the front of her dress. I wriggle free enough to peer out and watch hospital staff run to save the injured woman on the car.

  Slow motion ends, sound comes back and real time resumes. I sob into Paw Paw’s soft, warm body, and she is crying too.

  Paw Paw protects me as best she can from the reality of not only her daughter’s illness, but also the harsh truths of living between two homes and never really belonging in either.

  Everywhere I go, I am different, even at home – especially at home. There are rules at my grandparents’ house like ‘Keep your shoes on,’ and ‘You must eat three big meals a day,’ and ‘Don’t leave any food on your plate,’ but at Dad’s the rules are the complete opposite: ‘Take off your shoes at the door.’ ‘Eat when you feel like it.’ ‘Put leftovers in a stew.’

  At one end I’m mollycoddled and at the other it’s ‘fend for yourself’. At Bicton I’m tucked in at night and told stories like a proper little girl, with lights out at seven-thirty. At Dad’s I go to bed when I like and will stay up watching a tiny black-and-white TV in the corner of my room until the test pattern comes on.

  Paw Paw tells me stories about the Flat People, who live in a big apartment block. There’s a ‘cleany-clean tribe’ and a ‘smelly foot tribe’. I’m not sure whether it’s a coincidence or she’s having a go at Dad, but the cleany-clean tribe sound an awful lot like my Bicton family and the smelly foots a lot like him.

  ‘Sausage, I love you.’ Paw Paw gives me a bearhug and tucks me in.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’ I ask as she turns on my nightlight.

  ‘She’s okay. You’ll see her tomorrow.’

  I lie in bed listening to Mum’s screams. The sliding door down the corridor, separating my wing from hers, is closed. Low voices, now. Then nothing. I keep listening, afraid something terrible will happen if I go to sleep.

  ‘Come and watch me,’ I call out to Paw Paw the next day. I am up to my sixty-seventh jump on my pogo stick; my record is a hundred and seventeen.

  Paw Paw comes out through the laundry to the back step, wiping her hands on a red apron. ‘Do you want to do some baking? I have a surprise for you if you do.’ She ties up my apron, then, ‘Ta-da!’ On my head she places a chef’s hat that she has sewn for me in secret.

  I love it. I wrap my arms around her. She smells like jam toast and hairspray.

  ‘You know, when your mother was your age she loved to bake too. And sew. Just like you.’ She squeezes me a little tighter. ‘You know your mother would die for you, don’t you?’

  I look up from my rolling pin, my face and sleeves covered in flour that’s somehow missed my apron. Yes, I think, of course I know that, you tell me all the time, but I don’t say anything.

  Paw Paw gazes wistfully out the window at boats rocking gently on the water. She has tears in her eyes. ‘Well then.’ She forces a smile then brings out an array of sugar baubles and cake toppings. ‘What are we going to use as decoration? Let’s really jazz it up this time.’

  PICNIC AND PONYTAIL

  I MUST SPEND HALF THE WEEK WITH DAD AND THE OTHER half with Mum – but only under my grandparents’ strict supervision; Dad is very specific about that. Another of Dad’s rules is that I have to attend Sunday school on Mum’s time, so technically I have only three days a week with her.

  Switching houses twice a week has its perks: I have two of everything. And its challenges: ‘This is an English custom.’ ‘This is a Chinese custom.’ I try to see the bright side – I’m the only child I know from a broken home, let alone a multicultural one. What a trailblazer. Things are now complicated by the fact that Dad has a new girlfriend. Twenty-six years younger than Dad, Angela is a nurse from New Zealand who is now part of the eccentric life of Francis Kwa.

  Mum’s bone
s have healed since her car accident a year ago but she has terrible scarring on her face. She refuses additonal plastic surgery and instead religiously massages vitamin E cream into her right cheek, chin and forehead twice a day in an attempt to reduce the unsightliness. Today Mum brings me to Dad’s place at the usual time, right after compulsory Sunday school. She has packed a picnic of white bread, cheese and Vegemite sandwiches, and she lays out a rug in Dad’s backyard on the dry patchy grass between the kitchen and his shed. It was her backyard not so long ago, and although this is a deviation from Dad’s rule to leave me at the front door, it seems like a harmless idea. I’m pleased to spend an extra half-hour with Mum.

  Then Dad’s girlfriend, Angela, flings open the back flyscreen door, and Mum and I look up from our sandwiches. Angela is furious. ‘Get lost!’ Angela yells.

  Mum suddenly seems terrified and hurriedly gathers up her picnic blanket and sandwich container. She opens her car door and flings her things onto the passenger seat. She has that look again where she sees right through me, and drives off without saying goodbye.

  After that, Mela refuses to come onto the property – into the house designed and built for her – ever again. Instead, every Sunday she drops me at the top of the driveway. Sometimes Dad and Angela are home, sometimes not.

  One day after Mum has dropped me off, I’m mucking around on an old skateboard that Dad picked up from roadside rubbish, trying hard to balance – I’m getting better the more I practise – when I’m shoved in the back. The skateboard shoots out from under me and I fly, headfirst, into the brick wall near our front door. My scalp starts bleeding. It hurts, and I can hear kids laughing as they run away. ‘Smackhead,’ one shouts and he’s not referring to heroin – the inference is that my Asian features make me look as though I have been smacked in the head. ‘Hahaha. Dishpan!’ Apparently, with a dishpan. These are common racist insults in Scarborough. Towards me at least. I didn’t think anyone was home – no one answered when I called out earlier – but now Angela appears and wraps an arm around me. I sob while she bandages my head, enjoying this rare tenderness from her. I often feel like a ghost in my own home so I soak up the attention.

  One Sunday when Mum drops me home, I find wedding photos strewn across the kitchen table. They are Dad and Angela’s. I examine them one by one in puzzlement and disbelief, recognising many of the guests, and noticing most of all that I wasn’t there and – missing out on every little girl’s dream – wasn’t asked to be a flower girl. I didn’t even know they were engaged, and suddenly I have a stepmother.

  By the time I am eight I have been to Hong Kong every year of my life, sometimes twice. I used to go with my dad and mum, then for a while it was just Dad and me, but the last couple of times it’s been Dad and Angela, and me.

  This trip we’re catching up with an ‘old friend’ of Dad’s at our hotel. Her name is Evelyn, and she instantly beguiles me with a dazzling smile. From beneath a plush fur coat, she reveals a hand shimmering with diamonds and holding a large plastic doll with blonde pigtails, dressed in a white skirt, collared shirt and classic Mary-Janes. ‘For you, Miss Mimi.’

  The doll is just what I’ve been wishing for, and wishing to be. ‘Thank you, Evelyn.’

  She grins wider and pats me on the head. ‘Oh, darling, please call me Aunty Evelyn.’

  We all go to yum cha – Evelyn, Dad and Angela, and me. Afterwards, at Evelyn’s insistence, I browse shops alone with her while Dad and Angela go back to the hotel.

  ‘I want to marry your father,’ Evelyn tells me in a matter-of-fact way, as if this is the most normal conversation to have with an eight-year-old. ‘And you can help me.’

  Once Evelyn releases me from her clutches, I return to the hotel, loyally keen to alert Dad and Angela to her plan. ‘Evelyn says she wants to marry Dad,’ I blurt.

  ‘You’re lying,’ Angela says. My stepmother glares at me then looks to Dad for a response.

  I remind myself again that it’s safer to keep to myself: quiet on the outside, a tiger’s roar within.

  ‘Charm and disarm,’ Aunty Theresa coaches me a few days later in her apartment. ‘Just smile sweetly!’

  I’m still incensed. ‘But, Aunty, she is so, so, sooooooo mean to me.’

  Aunty thinks for a moment. ‘Well then, don’t let her bother you. If she does not know how to behave, you can show her how to behave. If someone has bad manners, you do not have to have bad manners too.’ We’re sitting side by side on Aunty’s chaise longue, facing the view from her sunroom windows. ‘Now, sit properly.’ She illustrates this by straightening her posture. ‘Lift your head up, Mimi.’ She raises her chin slightly. ‘You are Kwa.’

  A number of Hong Kong visits go by, all with similar amounts of family drama and a heavy dose of Aunty Theresa’s patience and calm, until one trip coincides with a visit from Aunty Clara, who is still living in England, and my grown-up cousins Steven and David. They are all often here – sometimes with Clara’s daughter Josephine as well – but our time rarely overlaps. Theresa insists Clara and I must both stay with her, that way my cousins can have a hotel room to themselves. We can share her room, and she will sleep on the fold-out bed in her study. Dad and Angela are at a hotel, the usual routine since the Evelyn incident.

  Aunty Theresa is like a maypole at the centre of us all. We are connected by ribbons that we weave in and out.

  ‘Clara is divorced,’ Theresa tells me quietly, ‘and she’s still a “little” upset about it.’

  Apart from Clara’s charming disposition, the first thing I notice is that she pinches Brigit hard on the arm as soon as Theresa turns her back. Clara obviously thinks that her sister and I aren’t looking. I blink to check my eyesight is okay, but I’m sure I saw it. Brigit just leaves the room, and I don’t go after her.

  Later we all go to the mall, and without provocation or warning Clara tugs sharply on Brigit’s ponytail. Her head is yanked backwards. There it is again – so I’m not crazy. The assault is over quickly, and Brigit keeps walking with her head bowed just a little lower than usual, otherwise acting as though nothing has happened.

  Clara realises I’ve noticed and tries to distract me from Brigit’s distress. ‘Look, look, Niece Mimi, wouldn’t that coat in the shop window look lovely on me?’

  Brigit gestures for me to follow Clara, and I catch her wiping away tears as my aunt and I disappear into the store.

  ‘Brigit,’ I whisper later on, ‘you mustn’t let her do that to you. I’m going to tell Aunty Theresa.’

  Brigit puts on her best confused look. ‘Do what, Mimi? Oh, Mimiiiii. You must not do the worrying, Mimi. I will be in the very big trouble if you are doing the worrying.’

  That night, Aunty Clara keeps me awake with a scary story. It’s about a man who feels guilty because he stole from his brother, so he spends hours hitting his stomach against the edge of a desk until he dies. Clara does the actions against Theresa’s desk to illustrate the brutal suicide. ‘And there, that is the lesson,’ she says triumphantly.

  I’m not quite sure what the lesson is, other than to never share a room with Aunty Clara again.

  I lie awake all night staring at the ceiling. Is that how her father died? I wonder. My grandfather. Maybe it wasn’t poison after all – maybe Grandfather stole from his brother during the Japanese occupation, then couldn’t live with the guilt. I have no idea.

  The next day Clara’s two adult sons visit Theresa’s apartment. David and Steven are twenty-three and nineteen. They tower over me, so I have to stand on a chair to be in a photo with them.

  ‘Hold still,’ chirps Theresa as she takes the Polaroid. She claps her hands joyfully, happy we’re all there with her, together.

  ‘Mother,’ says David, turning to Clara, ‘what time is convenient for you for me and Steven to meet friends for dinner?’

  Clara swings around with the frightening precision of a martial artist and, to my great surprise, slaps him hard across the cheek. ‘You must ALWAYS call me MUMMY.’

/>   A red mark appears on David’s face, made worse as he turns crimson with embarrassment. ‘Yes, Mummy,’ he says, bowing his head.

  Brigit, who is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, lowers her eyes too.

  ‘Come, come now,’ says Theresa, putting an arm around David, ‘none of this. Clara, I have a necklace for you. Come to my dressing-room.’

  The four of us can hear the sisters shouting at each other, and we awkwardly make small talk. Theresa emerges composed and calm, but Clara looks angry. She cuffs David around the ear and ushers her sons to the door, then turns to hold my ten-year-old face in her hands. ‘Pretty, so pretty. Ho lang, ho lang. You must be careful and smart too. You are so pretty.’ She pauses. ‘And little bit fat. So be careful your waistline too. Ooooh, so chubby fat. Fat. Fat. Fat.’ She squeezes my cheeks and laughs at her own joke, moving towards the door again before stopping with an expression that suggests she’s forgotten something important. ‘Ah, but Brigit, you are the one who is the fattest. Must be the happiest then, huh?’ She looks at Brigit, who is in the corner, clearly trying hard not to meet her eye. ‘Jolly and fat, haha.’

  Brigit rushes over and gives Clara’s black patent leather Chanel loafers a quick polish with the shoe kit kept religiously at the door for just such an occasion, before bending over to help Clara put them on.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Bryan, thank you for coming to visit us,’ she says earnestly, honouring Clara’s decision to retain her married name since her divorce fourteen years ago.

  ‘Ugh.’ Clara treads on the sleeve of Brigit’s cardigan and holds her foot there just a fraction too long for it to be accidental, then walks out the door.

  David and Steven pull Brigit to her feet. Each young man gives her a warm, apologetic hug as they leave. Clara, halfway to the elevator, doesn’t see David shoot me a wink – my favourite cousin is telling me not to worry, it’s all okay.