by Alice Pung
“But you, Lucy,” she concluded, “you’re just such a hardworking, self-contained little hive of industry. You never let things get you down.”
I knew Mrs. Leslie was itching to remind me how proud my parents must be and what a great contribution to this country we refugees made. I felt awkward because she did not know the real us; I wondered how she’d feel about Ivy’s brother Ming, with his prison time. Her naïveté was a beautiful thing, I decided, because it meant she would always see the best in us. Although Ming’s parents would probably never be able to excuse his vices and habits, there would always be someone like Mrs. Leslie, far away from our lives, who would.
Luckily, we had arrived at our destination. Their house was really something, Linh. The first thing I noticed was the wooden floors. “Wooden floors are what villagers have,” my father had said when we ripped up our dark and grimy carpets five years ago and discovered the old floorboards. “Let’s tile over them.” And so he and cousin Claude had spent a week and a half mixing cement and grouting, aligning the little plastic plus symbols to keep the corners of the white tiles even, and cutting ceramics to shape.
Not only was Amber’s house uncarpeted, but the floorboards were bare. They were so shiny that you could almost see your reflection, your face lost in swirls of wood-grain waves in the timber ocean.
There was a polished wooden sculpture in one corner of the living room that was like a tree branch kissing the floor with its wider end, an invisible tap pouring a puddle of wood onto the ground. I was afraid to ask what it was in case it was phallic, but Mrs. Leslie caught me looking at it.
“Oh, that’s a didgeridoo,” she said, almost as if we were back in remedial class.
I told her I’d never seen a didgeridoo like that before.
“It’s a pared-down one.” Mrs. Leslie laughed in an embarrassed way, though I didn’t understand why she felt embarrassed. Somehow I knew that there was another, more complicated name for it, or for that style of art. There was no way Mrs. Leslie would buy a random “pared-down” hollow tree branch.
“Where does it come from?” I asked.
“An art gallery in the city,” she replied.
“What’s the gallery called?”
“Oh, Lucy, it’s just a little art gallery in the city,” she said with a small laugh, and I felt ashamed to have sounded so pushy, although really I was only thinking that if I passed it one day I could go in and have a look. But I suspected the art would be heart-stoppingly expensive.
“Would you like a cup of tea, Lucy? We have oolong or jasmine.”
“Black tea is fine with me, Mrs. Leslie.”
She went into the kitchen and, not knowing what else to do, I followed. Her kitchen looked like something from a magazine, all granite and pure white cupboards and stainless steel. I noticed small things, like the soft paper towels that they wasted wiping spills—the sort of thing, if we had them, we would use to wipe the Lamb’s face after a meal instead of pilfered McDonald’s napkins or plain old toilet paper.
There was a cabinet where all the nice plates and bowls were on display, some on special stands so that the pictures on the plates faced you like paintings. What awed me most about her house was that Mrs. Leslie had all this expensive stuff lying around. My mum and dad always told me to hide our valuables if any visitors came by.
On the kitchen bench, next to a phone, I suddenly spotted a familiar object—a blue notebook. No, I thought, that can’t be the same Mercury Stool–signed article. Because this one had pages torn out and phone messages scrawled all over it.
—
“What’s she doing here?” Amber asked when she arrived home at five-thirty and saw me sitting at the Leslies’ dining table, drinking tea from a cup on a saucer. A little plate next to me was filled with Oreos.
“I beg your pardon?” For a moment Mrs. Leslie sounded scarily like a teacher.
“Sorry. Lucy, what are you doing here?” she asked me.
I didn’t know what to say. This was embarrassing, but I wasn’t sure why. All I knew was that, somehow, my presence was annoying to Amber.
“Lucy and I are having a little catch-up,” said Mrs. Leslie. “Would you like to join us?”
“Oh, I see,” said Amber. “Well, she’s not going to disappear, because she’s in my English class now.”
“Yes, I know,” replied Mrs. Leslie.
“So she’s not like Zi Wei or June Moon.” Amber turned toward me. “Two Asian girls that came here on exchange a few years ago. They went back home to China and Korea, back to their rich mums and dads, but my mum here—you should have seen her carry on. It was as if the girls were going back to kneeling on broken glass or something.”
“That’s enough, young lady.”
“You’re not supposed to have favorites anyhow.”
“Enough!”
Amber ignored her mother and busied herself making a snack. I noticed how she used half a dozen utensils to make a sandwich.
“Hey, Amber, you have an interesting-looking jotter,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“Next to your phone.”
“Oh,” she said, barely glancing at it, “that piece of crap. I think Gina gave it to me.”
“Amber Leslie, watch your language!” fired Mrs. Leslie.
—
My father came to collect me half an hour later. Amber opened the door, and Mrs. Leslie came to tell him how much she had enjoyed having me over.
“Wah, look at the size of that place,” my father exclaimed after he’d pulled out of the driveway. “What does her father do?”
“I don’t know, Dad. Some sort of engineer.”
“Your friend looks like a movie star.”
I could see how pleased my father was that I was friends with Amber, whose mother worked at the school and who lived in such a fairy-tale house. “I’m glad you are making good friends.”
My father was happy on the drive back from Amber’s house, because he thought that I had made progress. But I felt the opposite. I was regressing as a person. Those two hours with Mrs. Leslie and Amber had drained me, Linh. It was exhausting to be the sort of person they expected me to be.
When I was six years old, Dad bought a cheap one-pound bag of mixed candy from Tien, who worked at the Allens’ factory. He made me stand outside the front of my elementary school and hand them out to the neighborhood kids walking home. He hung back behind me. It had been a hot day, the bag was heavy and I was not interested in either the candy or the other kids. I just wanted to get home and watch Fat Cat and Friends.
Nor were the other kids interested in me. They would come up, grab a handful of candy and walk off. Some parents made their kids say, “Thank you.” Other parents said it on their kids’ behalf and smiled warmly at me. One mum pulled her little boy away from my bag when she saw my dad hovering behind me, even though he was smiling broadly at them. In fact, that probably creeped them out even more.
When my father walked me home that afternoon, he said, “Well, Lucy, now that you’ve had a chance to get to know the kids at the school, some of the older ones will look after you.”
Maybe you could pull a trick like that in Hanoi, because people were so broke, and older kids knew to look after younger ones, but here in Stanley my poor father had no idea of the difference between exploitation and friendship.
So when he proposed that I invite some Laurinda girls over for a movie night, I had to quash the idea.
“This is the first time it will be on television!” he said. “It is a huge event, and it would be nice for you to share our culture with your friends.”
“No, Dad, I really don’t think the girls will want to watch Hope in Hanoi.”
My father had been waiting for this movie, which was set during the Vietnam War, to come on TV for years. All movies ended up on the television eventually, he reasoned, which was why we never, ever went to the cinema. Someone at the factory had told Dad that the movie was going to screen that Friday night.
“We could have a little party, order some takeout food.”
“No.”
“I can’t believe I have a daughter who is ashamed of her culture. So ashamed she won’t even have her friends over to see a movie about it.”
My father made me livid with rage. If Dad thought that the war represented the sum of our culture, I couldn’t be bothered arguing with him. “We’ll see,” I said, to shut him up. But he seemed to sense something else I was thinking.
“Do you think that a lovely girl like Amber will care what our house looks like?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I retorted. “Amber would care. But Mrs. Leslie wouldn’t—she’d just feel sorry for us.”
“And what is wrong with that?”
At that moment, I could not stand my father.
“What is wrong with living humbly?” he continued, determined to make his point—a point that he knew was wrong, which was why he had to twist words and call it “humble” instead of what it was. Even his voice made me want to snap a chopstick in half. “They would see how hard we work, and feel admiration for how hard you try at school.”
He wanted us to act like stoic refugees when it worked to our advantage. According to my father, it was an easy role to play—all I had to do was keep my head down, keep quiet and work hard, and then everyone would like me. There was no such thing as having trouble fitting in if you presented the right image to your audience.
“You have to be sociable at the new school,” he advised. “It’s not like Christ Our Savior, where girls just stuck with each other because they were Asian or Spanish or Greek or whatever.”
That Friday evening, Dad came home with three big bags of McDonald’s. Enough food for a family three times our size.
“Wah, what’s with all this food, old man?” my mother asked.
My father looked at me as if I’d poured one of the plastic cups of Coke over his head. It was a wordless look of exorbitant disappointment. “I thought you were bringing some friends home.”
I didn’t want to make the situation worse, so I didn’t tell him that the types of girls I now hung around with didn’t consider McDonald’s the epitome of modern, hygienic, healthy food. They considered it the food of poor, fat rednecks.
My father’s adoration of McDonald’s was completely without irony. “The Australian government would never allow advertisements to lie on television,” he once told me. I knew the Laurinda girls would not share his love of the perfect golden fry, or marvel over the milky nutritional glory of the ninety-nine-cent cone.
“Let’s have a look at what’s inside, Lamb,” I said, shame preventing me from looking at my dad. I opened up one of the Happy Meal boxes and rummaged for the surprise toy.
“Who is going to eat all this, I ask you?” my mother scolded.
“Our daughter said that she would bring some friends.”
“You should have asked her how many people were coming.”
“I didn’t say anyone was coming!” I protested.
There was silence. The Lamb found the toy and started to bite away the plastic packaging with his four front teeth. “Lamby,” I said to him, “let me open that for you.”
“Indeed,” my father lamented, “who is going to eat all this food?”
I sighed. “I will. I love this stuff. I will eat both the Big Macs—one for dinner and one for breakfast.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said my father. “Do you want to turn into a fat pig like the white girls here in Stanley with their bums hanging out of their pants?”
At this point in an American sitcom, there would be canned laughter. Then the teenage protagonist would run to her room and slam the door. The American mum would hold her hand up to her mouth and exclaim, “Rich, you can’t say things like that!”
But this was our cement house, we never locked our parents out and we could never make a comedy about the people who let us live in their suburb and their country and put up with our ethnic ways.
We just looked at the television, all three of us, and didn’t say another word, because the movie was about to begin. I had the Lamb on my lap, and I inserted fries into his mouth at regular intervals.
Nothing much excited my parents these days, but movies like this one did. It began in a small Vietnamese village and told the life story of one woman. It was also about a white war veteran who had always wanted an Asian wife. He took the village woman to the United States and she adapted there, but he couldn’t go back to his old life so he shot himself in the head. It was one of those movies you would call intense and epic.
But these times—sitting with my family and watching Vietnam War movies filled with limbs being blown off, rapes and women digging their own graves—were the happiest of my childhood. I was glad that people kept making these films, which were bonding Asian families together all over Australia.
Ivy called me up afterward to talk. She was excited because her family had made a night of it too. And then I talked to you about it, Linh.
I think my dad is pissed off at me, I said.
Why does he want your new friends to come over so badly? you wondered. It’s not like he ever wanted Yvonne or Ivy to come over when you were still at Christ Our Savior.
Yeah, I mused. In fact, he asked me if I was still hanging around those “gangsta girls,” and told me to watch out because it would be my ruin.
My father had once marveled at Ivy’s big, fat birthday cake of a house in Sunray, with its Italian pillars at the front and granite tabletops inside. But now that he had seen a different type of wealth, he didn’t want me hanging around with her. Ivy’s family might have money, but they weren’t that different from us. In their double garage, Ivy’s mother had set up not one but five sewing machines, and various cousins and aunties came over regularly to earn some money. Ivy’s parents’ wealth was a wealth without power, my dad believed, a hot, stressed and determined wealth that was insular and left them unable to fully enjoy its rewards.
“Her parents work all the time in the garage, so she goes tramping about at the shopping center with her designer clothes and her airy attitude, and when it’s time to hunker down and do some real work, she turns to you,” my father reprimanded. So that had been the end of Ivy’s visits.
As for Yvonne—forget about it, she was with that gangsta Viet boyfriend now. “A beautiful white girl like that, hanging around with that hooligan!” was how my father put it.
In fact, besides a couple of times when you visited me, visits that my father bore grudgingly, none of my Christ Our Savior friends came over to study anymore. My father didn’t want them “using” me.
The second time Mrs. Leslie picked me up, Amber was there too, because she didn’t have band practice that evening. Mrs. Leslie turned to face us before she started the car. “Girls, I just have to run a few errands. They won’t take long—do you mind?”
I was in her car, she was the driver—what else could I say? I would have jumped at the chance to exchange my errands for hers any day, because I was sure that hers would not be as tedious as mine: read out letters from the phone and gas companies, mop the floors, interpret at the clinic when the Lamb got his vaccinations…
I was right: Mrs. Leslie’s errands were in another league. The first thing she did was park near a café and treat us to an afternoon snack. “This is one of our favorite cafés, isn’t it, Amber?” I imagined the two of them sitting there on a Saturday morning on the quaint wrought iron chairs, talking about what dress to get for Valedictory Dinner. But then Amber deliberately looked the other way, forcing me to modify the image in my mind: now the two of them were sitting there with Amber not speaking while Mrs. Leslie complained, “Why can’t you be more like Lucy Lam, that paragon of brilliance?”
“I think you’ll like this place too, Lucy,” Mrs. Leslie said. “Now, what would you like?” She handed me the menu, a sheet of parchment paper attached to a wooden clipboard.
But I couldn’t understand a single thing written there. I could read t
he individual words, but they made no sense. Even the coffees sounded like fancy desserts. “Wow. ‘Cinnamon-infused sourdough loaf with sun-ripened vine fruit,’ ” I read.
Amber sighed. “That’s just raisin toast.” She then turned her bored face toward the window, so as not to hear her mother telling her off.
Mrs. Leslie laughed. “Oh, Lucy, they do have some pretentious names here, but some excellent breads. What would you like?”
“The raisin toast?”
“Sultana bread it is for you, then!”
Amber rolled her eyes.
When the waitress came, Mrs. Leslie and I ordered something to eat, but Amber just wanted a pineapple juice.
The waitress returned, setting a pastry called a chocolate brioche in front of Mrs. Leslie. “Oh, dear me,” she sighed after she took the first bite, “this is very wicked.”
I thought of how my parents would never refer to food as wicked. Food was the gift of the gods—it was the stuff they had hoarded and saved on the boat, and something they would never, ever be stingy with when they had guests over.
Mrs. Leslie patted her stomach and smiled at me, as if we were sharing some private joke or she had got herself knocked up. “It’s going straight here!”
After our meal, Mrs. Leslie bought two long rolls for home, and we walked farther down the strip of shops to a place called Lennie’s (“Purveyors of Fine Foods”), where she bought a small block of cheese. The guy behind the counter spoke about the cheeses in such a way that you’d imagine he went home every evening and retreated to his room with a copy of Food & Wine instead of Playboy.
“This cheese is one of my favorites, fresh from Tasmania and infused with hand-picked wasabi leaves. You’ll find it has a full-bodied kick to it.”
“I’d like to give him a full-bodied kick,” muttered Amber as we walked out of the store, and for the first time that afternoon I thought she wasn’t so bad.
We walked farther down the strip, which was packed with girls from all the elementary schools and their mothers, and I tried to block out thoughts of how I would just have bought some meat from Tully’s mum, and vegetables from the Sunray market, before heading home on the bus. My father had told Mum that I was receiving special tutoring from Mrs. Leslie. That’s what he thought we were doing.
