by Joey Bui
She was wearing an orange parka and a Pandora bracelet on the wrist holding the phone. Her short blonde hair was soft and frizzy.
‘Oh my god, fifth. I can’t hear with all these kids around, these fucking rude kids,’ she continued.
A woman wearing a suit and glasses, standing next to her, spoke up.
‘Hey, that’s my son.’
‘What a polite boy, what a polite boy. He sees all these people standing up and he can’t get out of his seat. Real polite boy you’ve got there.’
‘Don’t touch my son.’
A guy in his late twenties, cropped blond hair and a broad face, standing beside me, chimed in.
‘There are gonna be plenty of seats when we get to the next station, okay? Then you can get a seat,’ he said. There was a tremor in his voice.
‘I’m getting off at Hughesdale,’ the woman said quickly, mercifully no longer shouting. The next stop. She glanced at him, then at me, and broke into a grin.
‘Ha! Look, he’s too lazy to jerk off, he’s only got a gook! Can’t even get a regular girlfriend!’ She laughed, looking around to see who would join her. I heard several groans.
‘So sad, he’s gotta get a gook! Ha!’
I felt all the eyes in the carriage turn to me. A woman sitting nearby glanced at me and looked away when our eyes met.
‘What are you talking about?’ I snapped. ‘What—’
‘Wha yo tah king,’ she said, delightedly. ‘Wah yooo, wah chao ba yo, do do do do.’
She stretched her eyes wide at the corners with her fingers as she jabbered.
‘Honestly, shut the hell up,’ said the guy next to me.
‘Wah chao, wah nice boy, wah nice boy,’ she mocked. ‘Ha! Go back China ho ho ho. We go back China.’
‘Don’t—’ I began, but I had no words.
‘Why don’t you go back to Hong Kong? Why did you come to this country? This is our country,’ she said.
‘Fuck off!’ said the guy next to me.
‘Can’t you get an Aussie girlfriend? You had to get a gook, you poor pathetic man,’ she said. ‘How small is it that you can’t even get a regular girlfriend? You sad man.’
He started laughing, affecting an incredulous tone.
‘You’re fucking scum!’ someone yelled from the end of the carriage.
When I saw Hughesdale platform through the windows, I let out a sigh.
The woman stopped laughing as the train stopped.
I pressed myself against the railing as she shoved past, elbowing the guy next to me on the way out. As the door closed and the train started up, he caught my eye.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked, frowning.
‘Yeah,’ I said shrilly. Then I realised the rest of the carriage, all silent, were expecting a more satisfying answer. ‘Can’t let people like that get you down.’
He smiled. ‘That’s right, that’s right. Let’s put it behind us.’
I got off at the next stop, even though it wasn’t mine. I sat on a bench on the platform, where no one had witnessed what had just happened. It struck me that I would have missed that train if I had stopped at the ASEAN stand to say hello to Kieu. I unlocked my phone and thought of calling her, even though it wasn’t really an option. She wouldn’t understand why I had called. What’s wrong with you? I could hear her say. I hadn’t called her since I’d left Springvale High and gone to an all-girls private school. I’d called her from the bathroom during my first week at the new school.
‘Hey, do you miss me yet?’ I asked.
‘Are you in a bathroom?’ she said incredulously.
‘What? No.’
‘Yeah you are, I can tell, it’s all echoey.’
‘Well, I don’t know why. I’m not.’
‘What’s wrong with you? Don’t you have any friends?’ She started laughing.
We had always pretended to be mean to each other, but I couldn’t take it then.
We talked less and less after that, and then, many months later, we agreed to meet for lunch. It was strange because it was so formal and deliberate; it wasn’t like walking to the same bus stop or leaving food in each other’s lockers over the weekend so it’d go bad. I didn’t feel like I could say she was ugly or anything like that. She had never been serious with me before. In fact, she was perhaps the only person who didn’t take me seriously. After the lunch, Kieu insisted on paying, and I didn’t know why, but it felt cold.
Instead, I messaged Michaela:
woow Colby just added me
he’s trying so hard to get your attention
I saw speech bubbles as she typed and felt heartened that she was answering me straightaway.
What a loser she messaged back.
Then I accepted Colby’s friend-request and boarded the next train.
A few days later, Michaela had a fight with her mum. She was crying on the phone to me and asked if she could crash at my place. When I picked her up in Camberwell, she was sitting on the front step of her house, her hair mussed and her eyes leaking eyeliner. Her tattered clothes and old boots looked out of place against the neat, landscaped front garden.
‘She’s such an anal bitch,’ Michaela said in the car.
‘What happened?’
‘I’m fucking twenty-one years old and I still have to tell my mum where I’m going and when I’ll be home, and she goes ape-shit whenever I’m late.’
‘Well…’
‘You have no idea how controlling she is. She has no idea who I am, only what she wants me to be.’
‘Mm–hm.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not going to say anything bad about your mum.’
‘Oh my God.’ She put her legs up on the dashboard and closed her eyes.
She brightened up once we arrived at my house. It was the first time she’d been there. I felt uncomfortable when she opened the flyscreen with the Chinese character for luck strung through the mesh. The smell of mum’s cooking hit me, fishier than I remembered. I was suddenly anxious she had made bún mắm, shrimp noodle soup, and left it to simmer on the stove while she went for acupuncture.
I led Michaela to the kitchen, the largest open space in the house and eyed the pear-patterned tarpaulin on our table, the almanac of girls modelling the traditional áo dài, and the altar in the corner with three portraits of our ancestors and a statuette of the deity phật bà.
Michaela ran her hand through her hair and leaned back in her seat.
‘Your place is really, really cool. It’s so real.’
She got up and studied the altar, stroking the fake jade of the phật bà.
‘Don’t.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t touch that.’ I took a breath, then exhaled loudly.
‘Come on, you can put your stuff in my room.’
Michaela insisted on waiting for Mum to come home to have the shrimp noodle soup together, but by then Mum was too tired to eat. I didn’t know what good the acupuncture was doing, if it meant she got home late and dazed every night. She barely registered Michaela’s presence at first.
‘What’s the matter? Let her eat. Serve her,’ Mum said to me in Vietnamese. I had followed Mum to her bedroom, where she was methodically taking off her uniform: thick, bright safety clothing. I winced when I saw the red bruises on her back from her cupping therapy.
‘But she wants to eat with you, she’s been waiting for you,’ I said.
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know, to get to know you.’
She held out a strip of white medical tape. ‘Here, put the Salonpas on my back. What am I going to say to her?’
‘Anything, it doesn’t matter.’
Mum came back out to the kitchen with me, in an old fleece tracksuit, and served the soup for me and Michaela. She filled a mug with hot water for herself and sat down.
‘Have you had before?’ Mum asked Michaela, pointing at the soup.
‘No, but it smells delicious!’
She sipped from her spoon un
certainly. It was an especially pungent soup, which even I found too strong.
‘How was acupuncture, Mrs Ho?’ Michaela asked. ‘I’m really interested, I’m thinking about trying it myself.’
‘You want acupuncture?’ Mum asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s supposed to be really good for relaxation, skin health, maybe even weight loss,’ Michaela said.
Mum looked at me, confused; Michaela had spoken too quickly. I translated it back to her.
‘Oh, I don’t know that,’ Mum said to Michaela.
‘She gets it for her back pain,’ I explained.
‘My knee too, from work. I stand all day. My fingers stiff,’ Mum said, massaging her knuckles. ‘I ask Vi to goggle doctor for me. He said I need three times a week.’
‘Goggle doctor? What’s a—’
‘She meant Google,’ I explained.
‘Oh, Google!’ Michaela burst out laughing. ‘I was trying to imagine what a goggle-doctor was! Some sort of new Eastern medicine.’
‘Nó cười Mẹ hả?’ Mum asked me. Is she laughing at me?
‘No, she thinks you said something else,’ I said, as Michaela kept giggling.
Mum excused herself; nine was her usual bedtime anyway. She had to get up at five in the morning. I poured the rest of the soup into plastic containers and threw out most of Michaela’s bowl. She had barely touched it.
We stayed at the kitchen table doing some uni work. Dad came back around eleven-thirty, smelling of cigarettes, his face red. He headed straight for the fridge to grab a box of leftover fried noodles, ignoring us.
‘Hi, Mr Ho,’ Michaela said.
He turned, glared at her and left the room.
‘He’s been drinking. Don’t worry about it,’ I said. She raised her eyebrows, amused.
When I went to brush my teeth, things about the bathroom that I hadn’t noticed before bothered me: the bathtub was cracked, with yellow stains. The shower curtain was slick in places; I couldn’t recall if we’d ever washed it. There was some sort of dark gunk in the corners of the bathroom tiles.
Michaela’s floral Ted Baker toiletry bag stood out against the brown and beige of our bathroom. I made sure the door was closed and nudged the bag open—she had left it unzipped. I noticed an expensive bottle of moisturiser and considered using it, but then realised she might recognise the smell on my skin.
That night, as I lay in bed, Michaela on a mattress on the floor beside me, she started speaking into the dark.
‘I think I’d like growing up poor.’
What could I respond? Why would you? Or, Why are you bringing that up in my house? I stayed silent.
‘You could really get to know the basics of life,’ said Michaela. ‘Basic happiness.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s like, when you don’t have money, and you don’t have the trappings of wealth, the superficiality, the materialism, you’re really free. I find that poor people have so much more love and loyalty.’
She leaned up on my bed, crushing my right arm.
‘You know, you’ve got to let go of chasing conventional success. Why don’t you define success for yourself?’
I looked at her, hovering over my bed, her hair brushing my bare shoulder. I couldn’t believe that we were friends, that she needed me when she had family problems, that she wanted to sleep at my house. Although I had been hanging out with her for a long time, her face was still new to me. In the shadows, her blonde hair floated like half a halo next to her face. She was so beautiful. It seemed incredible to be so close to her, and yet I couldn’t tell, even then, what exactly it was that she wanted.
My arm had gone numb. When I moved it out from under her, I felt a sudden surge of energy and realised what I had to say to her: that growing up poor has nothing to do with freedom, that I grew up in the back of a milk bar, that Mum put up dividers in the living room, where we slept, and rented out the rest of the rooms to three individual tenants, that she cried when I wanted to go to Grade Six camp, that Dad smashed everything in the kitchen when she reminded him to go to Centrelink. That when I went with Mum to Target to buy new sets of plates the next day, she started crying and then went to wait in the car while I picked out white plates with an orange daisy pattern, that we were surrounded all the time by things that needed to be fixed, that waiting for things to be fixed made us tired and sour, that I had to work hard and do the right thing, bend and mould myself into scholarship applications, act interesting yet obedient, ethnic but assimilated, and that if I was too quiet, didn’t speak up, didn’t fight back, it was because I was trying to rise up, and had to get beaten down first.
If I didn’t feel jealous of Michaela, it was because I never thought that I could be her equal. But I didn’t say anything, I wasn’t ready yet, and before I knew it, the beautiful bow lips came bearing down on me.
During the summer, Linh squatted in the kitchen of Hòa Trân Café and pressed her bare back to the stone sink. Customers stopped coming in and even the ice melted in the tubs of sweet drinks in the fridge. By the end of the day, the cubes of grass jelly had shrivelled, layers of wrinkled film on their sides, and Linh had to throw it all into the bushes behind the café.
The vegetation was dying. Something new and thick was growing from the glucose and gelatine dumped into the bushes. In the open courtyard, where Linh had to wipe down the sweating tables, she could think of nothing but old skin and she wanted to cry from the heat.
The sun favoured Ngày Mới province that year and it was bad for business. Families slept on the floor with the fans on. Boys went to drink beer under trees by the river bank and woke up weeping from hangovers and peeling skin. The Văns’ youngest son fell down an old war tunnel and was only discovered hours later, hot and dead.
One afternoon, her boss, Bác Phong, found Linh by the sink and offered to give her the rest of the day off.
‘No, please don’t make me go home,’ said Linh.
‘Don’t worry, you’ll still get your pay.’
‘Please, no. My mother will kill me. Let me stay. I’ll clean the tables again.’
‘Your mother will have a problem with it?’
‘I’ll get in trouble for being lazy. Please…’
Linh stood up into the sun and felt it sear her face.
‘How about I close up for the day?’ said Bác Phong. ‘What will Nga say to that?’
‘Can I please use the sink to wash my face before I go?’
‘Of course.’
Linh bent over the sink and lowered her hands to cup the water left over from when she had washed bean sprouts earlier.
‘Heavens, you can use the tap.’
He turned on the tap and Linh craned her neck to catch the water. Bác Phong looked away as she stuck out her tongue to lap at it.
When Linh first came to apply for a job at Hòa Trân Café three years ago, she was wearing her mother’s blouse, the button-down one Nga saved for special occasions. It had pointed, conical structures for breasts. Linh couldn’t fill it out like Nga did; even though they had similar small bodies, Linh’s was flatter and more angular.
‘You are Nga’s daughter?’ Bác Phong had asked the girl in the oddly fitting blouse.
When he touched the rim of his glasses, Linh had followed the glint of light that leapt across his face into the tree canopy. He spoke slowly and emphatically, without the slack-lipped Ngày Mới accent. His stance was the same, shoulders even and arms out front, as though he were waiting to catch something. Linh replied, ‘Yes, that’s me.’ She was taken aback by how loud her voice sounded. She always thought of herself as quiet, not much to say in class and awkward with the other girls, so they never really listened to her. Not that the girls were cruel, but Linh demanded so little attention that they did not focus, looking past her, as if she were heat haze on the highway.
‘I can cook,’ she continued tentatively. ‘I can clean. I help my mother at home.’
; Linh soon knew that she would be a waitress her whole life. Her forearms were wide and strong, just right for carrying trays. The yellow-and-white-striped dish cloth moved smoothly about her body: tucked under her armpit, slung over her shoulder, balled up in her fist, or pressed between her chin and her chest.
When Linh came home, Nga was still sitting at the sewing machine. She swung an arm back and jabbed Linh in the stomach.
‘What are you doing home early? What did you do to disgrace me?’
‘Bác Phong closed the café because there were no customers.’
‘So you’re going to sit around like an idiot?’
‘No.’
‘Then go and cut the grass.’
Behind the taro field, they grew grass for the cows. Linh bent over to grasp a fistful of tall grass, then hooked her scythe around the roots. The grass blades, almost as thick as coconut branches, crunched and split into fine hairs. Linh had forgotten to wear gloves and soon her hands were soaked in sap. She sang a made-up tune as she worked: disgrace-me, disgrace-me, disgrace-me, she chanted. Disgrace-me, disgrace-me, disgrace… Linh slumped into the grass as the familiar rhythm rocked her to sleep. She could not tell how much time had passed when she faded back in, gaping at the sun, and began scything again.
The next day, Bác Phong announced that they would hold live music nights in the café. A keyboardist and a traditional singer arrived that evening. The singer, a woman, wore a tight áo dài dress and white powder on her face.
‘Please welcome our musicians.’
Bác Phong introduced them as old friends from his childhood in Sài Gòn before the war ended in 1975. With the heat of the night, the powder on the singer’s right cheek clumped and slid down to her chin, where it formed a crust. Twenty customers came and went.
Afterwards, Linh stayed back to sweep up the peanut shells, rice-paper spice packets and cigarette butts strewn across the courtyard. Bác Phong was strumming his guitar in the corner. When she finished sweeping, Linh stood in front of him, staring.
‘Ever seen a guitar before?’ Bác Phong said, picking a chord.
‘No.’
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’
