Growing Up Asian in Australia

by Alice Pung

  *

  I was brought up in the belief that any good Vietnamese family was a self-sustaining one. We kept animals for meat and maintained an abundant herb and vegetable garden. My mother’s herbs were sought after; her friends would come over and take away armfuls of the aromatic plants for their own kitchens. Throughout my childhood in Geraldton, Western Australia, a basket of herbs was a permanent fixture on the dining table. Each plant had a health benefit. For example, my mother ate a pennywort leaf a day: ‘Good for arthritis,’ she’d say. She has a flair for natural medicine, which is handy, as she comes from a long line of hypochondriacs. We always kept poultry, including chickens, ducks, geese and bush pigeons (the pigeons were killed by holding their legs while whacking their heads against the cast-iron stove) – all for the table. Sometimes we had other animals. For a while there were goats and because we didn’t ever trim them, their hooves would grow long and curl around upon themselves like elves’ shoes. But this story isn’t about herbal medicine or any of the animals mentioned so far, although they play a part; it involves that miraculous, repugnant beast: The Pig.

  Our nameless pigs lived with the chickens, ducks and geese in their corrugated-iron houses in the animal enclosure. We kept no more than four at any one time, and they were greedy, bullying animals that pushed the poultry away from the troughs until they had eaten their fill. Each day after school, it was the job of my brother Tam and I to feed the animals, a thankless task that was handed down to each brother as the older ones left home. We had a wheelbarrow that we’d load up with half-rotten tomatoes and we’d have to take a run-up to get it up the slope to the animal enclosure nestled in amongst the Banksia trees. We’d negotiate carefully through the minefield of droppings to the centre of the yard and up-end the contents of the wheelbarrow into a mound. Then we’d pour the slops bucket from the kitchen into the trough. The ducks would come waggling up, yakking away, and gleefully bury their heads in the rotten matter like they were blowing raspberries on the bellies of babies. The chickens pecked amidst the kitchen scraps, flinging up bits of lettuce, noodle and eggshell. The pigs would lumber over, grunting noisily, and shoulder their way into prime position. I have never trusted pigs: something about them always made me nervous, and I would hurry out of the enclosure while the feeding frenzy took place.

  Now, on one occasion when I went out to feed the animals, I saw something truly extraordinary. It was a Saturday and I was feeding them around lunchtime. We mustn’t have given them enough food the night before because the birds came running up hungrily as soon as they saw me approaching with the wheelbarrow. The ducks, always the noisiest of the bunch, were off their heads with excitement. In the corner of my eye I saw a large sow coming across the yard, but she wasn’t after the pile of tomatoes. She crept up behind a duck that was oblivious to anything other than gorging itself and before the duck knew what was happening, the pig had bitten its arse off. The duck stood up straight, looking around wildly like it had heard an explosion. It started to waddle off, its guts trailing behind it. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I’d always thought pigs were vegetarians, but this confirmed my suspicions. A pig is like the ocean: don’t ever turn your back on it. Perhaps she didn’t like the taste of the duck: the sow was already neck-deep in tomatoes.

  I went inside to wash my hands and told my grandmother about the incident.

  Her eyes lit up. ‘Where’s the duck now?’ she asked.

  ‘Still walking around, I guess,’ I said.

  My grandmother’s hypochondria meant that the only reason she’d leave the house was to sun herself by standing in the driveway and turning herself slowly like a rotisserie chicken. She’d complain about her phlegm rising, which to Vietnamese people is symptomatic of oncoming sickness, but hers was always rising. She had a plastic bag hanging from a bedknob; she’d hawk up and spit the phlegm into it between decades of the rosary. Upon hearing this news of the duck, my grandmother grabbed a pot from the kitchen and bolted out the door, up towards the animal enclosure. I went outside and saw her banging what was left of the poor creature on the ground, finishing it off once and for all. Then she de-feathered it and made congee out of it.

  ‘Do you want some?’ she asked.

  ‘No thanks, Grandma.’

  Right there was the divide between the old world and the new.

  *

  The pigs my parents kept were for slaughtering. They used to do it themselves. On special occasions, like New Year or the Tet festival, Dad would get his mates around and have a day of pig killing, gutting and shaving. Mum and her friends would be in the garden, picking herbs and leafy greens. After which, the women would spend the rest of the day turning the pig into numerous dishes as the men sat around drinking beer with ice in their stein glasses. Usually the slaughtering was done in the morning. One time, though, it happened in the dark of night.

  I would have been about thirteen or fourteen. It was a quiet weeknight; I was doing my homework when several vehicles turned into our driveway. It must have been around 10 p.m. Some of my parents’ friends had an interstate visitor; they were having a party and needed a whole pig right away. My father shouted from the courtyard for Tam and me to come out and help. Our job was to hold the torches. It was eerie, walking through the Banksia trees to the animal enclosure at night-time. It was windy, and loose sheets of corrugated iron f lapped about, making unpleasant metallic screeching noises. We led the party with our beams of light, and found the pig we were going to slaughter sleeping innocently below the roosting chickens in their coop. We gathered around it, about six men and Tam and I. Some of the men had bailing twine. Then all of a sudden my dad gave the signal and they all jumped on it. The pig woke up in fright.

  ‘Keep the torch on the pig!’ Dad shouted at me.

  A couple of the men held its hind legs, some others held its front legs, my dad jumped on top of it to keep it from struggling. One of his mates, a man we kids called Cookie, plunged a carving knife deep into the pig’s throat.

  It let out a scream that I will never forget.

  Blood gushed over Cookie’s hand; it spurted over his arm. The pig struggled and kicked as the men held on to it tightly. My brother and I stood there transfixed. After a few moments the screaming grew fainter as the pig laboured for breath and died. I thought about our neighbours, the girls who caught the school bus with us, and wondered if they’d heard the commotion.

  Then the men bailed it up and carried the pig to the shed, where they strung it up, gutted it and shaved it, and Dad’s mates took it away to their party.

  *

  The last pig we had was killed by a snake. It was the middle of summer and the pig turned grey and putrefied. Dad found its stinking carcass in the chicken coop, next to the drums in which we kept wheat for the chickens and pigeons. Dad dug a pit and he, Tam and I, with our T-shirts tied around our faces, carried the animal out of the enclosure. While the poultry gawked at us solemnly, we dropped the pig unceremoniously into the hole.

  My parents don’t keep pigs any more. They don’t need to. They have a friend now named Reg, a pig farmer out in Northern Gully, who practically throws pork at them whenever he visits.

  *

  While a pig is being strung up, Mum will put some salt into an ice-cream container. She’ll then fill it with blood as it drains out of the pig and the salt will stop the blood from congealing too quickly. She’ll take the container into the kitchen and add onion, pepper and water. About five minutes later, depending on the salt content, it congeals. Once that has set, she carefully lifts cubes of the fragile jelly out of the container and cooks it in boiling water until it hardens. She adds slices of the hardened blood to noodle soups or congee.

  Now I live on the other side of the country, in Footscray, where alongside the traditional beef noodle soup, pho, there is a spicy noodle soup called bun bo hue that is also very popular. I have it with pig’s blood and it reminds me of home.

  Spiderbait

  Annette Shun Wah />
  You don’t have to go back to medieval times to find the worst jobs in history. Not if you grow up on a poultry farm run by Chinese parents with a cleanliness obsession.

  I was eight years old when my father bought his little piece of Australian bush – seven acres in the Pine Rivers District, the first shire north of Brisbane. These days it’s filled with shopping centres and project homes, but in the late sixties it was mostly empty stretches of bush punctuated with fibro shacks, rusted-out tractors, car wrecks and the occasional farm. While the properties around us tended to be sparse and run down, the road that linked them was wide and impressive, probably built by American soldiers during the war, my father proudly surmised. He’d been an ardent fan of all things American since the Second World War, when he’d served as an interpreter with US Marines in China. The Yanks not only rescued the Chinese from invading Japanese forces, but also gave my dad a job and respectability.

  Our road had the mighty name of Samsonvale Road. A long smooth strip of bitumen, it lured the area’s speed freaks, seventeen-year-old boys newly licensed to drive, a few Fourexes under their belts and heavy right feet. I don’t know how you lose control on such a straight road, but people did – often right where a solid tree trunk or telegraph pole has no business being.

  In this neck of the woods my father decided to build his poultry farm. Sick of slaughtering chooks for a living in his previous business, he thought he’d have a go at raising them. True to form, he tried to do much of it himself – which is to say the whole family had to pitch in. Why would you pay good money for something you could handle yourself? Those gweilos would only try to rip you off, so better to save yourself the angst.

  He did make an exception for the man with a bobcat to clear and level the building site, although I have cloudy memories of family members wielding pickaxes at tree stumps. Even my stepmother, a 148-centimetre-short former seamstress from Hong Kong, was pretty handy with a pickaxe. I think it belied her true origins in some Chinese rural village.

  Once our land was levelled the real work began. What my father had in mind was BIG. I can’t tell you how big, because to an eight-year-old just about everything is big. Stage One was an enclosed shed that would become the main area for cleaning and packing eggs and would house the chicks through the early stages of life. When it was complete, we received our first batch of fluffy yellow day-old chicks, the cutest things I’d ever seen. Even Dad couldn’t restrain a smile as we carefully lifted them – handfuls at a time – out of the cardboard delivery boxes, into the special heated cages we’d assembled days before. As the chicks grew, they’d be moved to bigger and bigger enclosures (Stage Two), until finally, they’d be ready for the laying cages – the Final Stage.

  That first batch of fragile chicks set the construction schedule. As they lost their down, sprouted feathers and grew, so did the laying shed. Eventually it would accommodate over 3000 cluckers. The wooden pegs and bits of string that plotted out its foundations seemed to go for miles. It wasn’t just one expanse of concrete, but long parallel rows, with a concrete strip at each end. I had an instant lesson in construction. For weeks, my father, brothers Tom and Doug, and occasionally our two Hong Kong cousins Clarence and Clifford – who’d come to Australia to study, not to toil as builders’ labourers for free – set about feeding shovelfuls of sand and cement into a cantankerous petrol-powered concrete mixer. One section at a time the concrete was poured, smoothed with trowels, levelled with lengths of wood pushed back and forth between two people, then trowelled again. Sturdy metal girders were set in place to hold up the corrugated-iron roof. No doubt my father would have attempted to cast these himself if he’d had a smelter on hand. But he satisfied his DIY bent by nailing in the hundreds of wooden slats that enclosed the shed on three sides.

  The concrete rows would become walkways and in the gaps between we assembled the cages, elevated on stands above the bare earth. That’s where the chook poo would drop and mound up over years and years, until it nearly reached the cages. Then big trucks would come in to clear the lot. The whole neighbourhood would know about it for days. Good thing then that there weren’t many neighbours, and we didn’t talk to any of them long enough for them to complain. Anyway, the man who owned the local pig farm smelt almost as bad all on his own.

  The wooden slatted walls were good for ventilation, but they also multiplied the possibilities for the freeloaders who sheltered in the shed. Between each slat, between the slats and the girders, between the girders and the roof, grew clouds of cobwebs. They’d look particularly messy when lots of insects had been snaffled, and while you may think the spiders were doing us a service, my mother had another way of looking at things. Ai-ya! Woo-joo! Filthy, filthy, filthy. So every few months, she’d recruit me for spider patrol.

  It wasn’t enough to sweep the cobwebs away with a broom. We swept everything else in the joint – the paths, the cages and the food troughs. But when it came to the spiders Mum was looking for a more satisfying solution. It took a few experiments, but finally she succeeded. Armed with a gas-jet burner, a box of matches and a stepladder, she’d turn those webs to cinders. Quickly, efficiently, cleansingly, the gas flame would disappear those silken threads like magic. The spider’s prey, shrouded in silk, would sizzle and dissolve into fine ash. The only problem was the pesky spiders. They’d make a quick sidestep, squirt out a lifeline and descend to safety, ready to re-colonise at the first opportunity.

  That’s where I came in. My job was to stand below my mother as she perched on her stepladder and squash the spiders as they dropped. Don’t worry, I didn’t wear my usual rubber thongs for this job. I’d slide my feet into sturdy rubber boots and make like Fred Astaire. The problem was, the spiders would land on my head or fall inside my shirt, or down the back of my pants. My mother would roll her eyes at my shrieks of horror as I jumped up and down, trying to dislodge whatever was crawling up my bum.

  The next time we faced this job, I dressed for the occasion in one of my father’s cast-off long-sleeved shirts buttoned right up, long pants tucked into the wellies, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Plop, plop plop. Big black and brown spiders, with stomachs bloated like ball bearings, bounced off the hat onto the floor, ready for my tap dance. We just had to hope there weren’t any with the telltale red markings on their backs. There were hundreds, thousands of the critters abseiling down like US commandos. How’s that for a swell job?

  The shed had doors every few metres, which opened outwards to let in the breeze, and guess whose duty it was to open and close these according to climatic conditions. It wasn’t too tough a task except when summer storms broke in the middle of the night. Of course the doors had been left open to give the poor fowls some respite in the custard-thick humidity of the day, but the last thing you wanted was the delicate things to get wet and catch cold. They do catch cold, as well as flu. We’d find ourselves feeding slivers of garlic to sick chooks – or perhaps that was that for hiccups. My parents would probably have had me blowing the hens’ noses if they’d thought of it … and if hens had blowable noses. So in the interests of sanity, and dry fowls, I’d have to race up to the laying shed in the pitch dark to close the doors, clutching a clapped-out cheap umbrella in one hand and a big torch in the other, with our dog Mickey (as in Mouse) my only security.

  The umbrella was pretty well useless in conditions that had the rain coming in sideways, but it balanced out the torch, which spotlighted the very strange sight of the gravel road ahead of me seeming to come alive. The thing was heaving, bits were bouncing up and down – too solid for raindrops and too big for gravel. The rain was making my feet slide in my rubber thongs, and I slowed down to avoid stepping on the dark shapes that landed with soft splats around me. The joint was jumpin’ all right – with cane toads! The dog’s four skinny paws were having no trouble sidestepping them, although one or two of the ugly critters slammed into the side of him as they leapt. I found myself tiptoeing the rest of the way, trying not to imagine the sensation of st
epping on one, bare foot sliding out of my thong onto the rough skin, the squelch of it exploding under my weight, spraying black sticky goo everywhere, warts up my legs for all eternity. YUCK!

  But there are worse jobs. Who’d want to be a battery hen in the height of a Queensland summer? Two years in a row, severe heatwaves hit right on Baby Jesus’ birthday. My father was always careful to answer ‘Church of England’ whenever an official form enquired after our religion, but the only time I remember seeing him in an actual church was when I was baptised at the age of six. I had no idea what was going on, or why the man in a frock was allowed to lift me up, tuck me under one arm like a roll of newspaper, and threaten to dunk me like an Anzac biscuit in a hand basin. I tried to squirm out of his vice-like grip before he splashed my pretty best dress. Why on earth were my parents tolerating this behaviour in a complete stranger?

  That one occasion didn’t qualify us as churchgoers, but there was one day on the Christian calendar we observed: Christmas. Perhaps it made up for the Chinese festivals we no longer celebrated. Estranged from family thanks to a long-running feud that dated back to the Second World War, and being the only Asian family in the entire district, it was pointless carrying on a ritual no one else understood. Our parents had enough trouble making us speak Chinese, let alone believe in Chinese ghosts and ancestor worship. If we ever went along with it, it was only to get the money in little red packets they were supposed to give us at the beginning of each new year, but money was so scarce even a few cents couldn’t be spared. So my parents gave up the old traditions and all we had was Christmas. It was the only day of the year when we were allowed to beg off the daily duties of collecting, cleaning, weighing and packing eggs. But on these two Christmases, when temperatures soared above century Fahrenheit, the eggs were the least of our worries.