Growing Up Asian in Australia

by Alice Pung

  The chooks were dying. They’d grown tough enough to be manhandled from cage to cage, shoved two abreast into tiny wire prisons, growing callouses where feathers and skin had rubbed off, but they couldn’t cope with the formidable heat.

  I could barely move myself. The humidity sapped my strength and made my head pound as if someone was hitting my skull with a mallet. But there was no respite on this day. My brothers, stripped down to stubbies and old sandshoes, were up on the tin roof hosing the shed with precious tank-water in an effort to cool things down. My job was to revive the hens that were fading. I saved a few, but many were too far gone. I’d dribble cool water over their heads, try to make them drink, or let them roam free on the ground for the only time in their short lives. But they’d stumble about pathetically in the dust, wings splayed, gasping for life, too weak even to dream of escape. That’s when I had the grisly task of wringing their necks to put them out of their misery, and carrying them to where my parents had set up a makeshift abattoir.

  Even a heatwave couldn’t stop them. They’d managed to set up the old copper boiler, filled it with water, stoked a fire underneath and had the thing steaming away like a Turkish bathhouse. My limp little casualties were dunked in the water to make the de-feathering easier. I’d help a bit, cleaning off some feathers, sticking my small hands into the still-warm cavities to pull out the gizzards. But mostly it was my task to walk the rows of cages like a paramedic, trying to save as many hens as I could. Often I got there way too late. Rigor mortis set in, and all I could do was pile up the carcasses away from the full glare of the sun.

  Clarence, my cousin, dropped in at one point with a mate from Hong Kong, hoping to give him a taste of my mother’s usual Chinese-Australian Christmas feast – roast turkey or chicken swollen with stuffing made from stale bread and fresh mint, served with rice and a soy-sauce gravy. The whole hot, heavy deal would be washed down with an ice-cold Fourex or a once-a-year shandy for me and Mum. Not this time. Clarence and his friend, chubby faces frozen in shock, glumly watched my parents expertly plucking and gutting, not missing a beat even when they wished each other a Merry Christmas. ‘There’ll be no Christmas lunch this year. Got to save as many of the chooks as possible – get them dressed and into the deep freeze as quickly as we can. There isn’t a minute to spare. Can’t let them go to waste.’

  Clarence and friend mutely nodded their understanding and waved a greeting up to my brothers, who were still hosing down the roof, glistening from the occasional watering-down they gave each other to keep themselves amused. Quietly, discreetly, Clarence and his companion slipped away. He may have missed out on Christmas dinner, but I reckon Clarence received a gift. If he hadn’t brought his friend with him, he’d have been roped in to do some plucking and gutting too.

  Anyway, social niceties over, it was back to trudging up and down the rows of chooks, looking for the ailing ones. I remembered stories about the Black Plague. ‘Bring out your dead!’ I yelled. The chooks weren’t listening. As usual they were clucking away, 3000 of them making quite a racket. I used to practise being a rock star when we collected eggs. I could do Janis Joplin at the top of my voice and no one heard but the chooks. Sometimes I’d swear they were singing along with me. Every now and then something would spook one of them, and like magic the whole lot would go quiet. Three thousand bird-brains communicating as one – not a peep. I could do Janis Ian at that stage and you’d hear it. Spookily they would collude in silence for about a minute, then one would screech loudly, ‘bu-GAIR, bu-GAIR,’ then another would chime in, then a third, then a fourth. Soon the whole bloody lot would be making an even bigger din than before, to scare off the imagined threat, I suppose. You could bring an entire rock band in for rehearsal at this point and it would be drowned out.

  Anyway, the chooks were too busy staying alive this day to be spooked by anything, and my pile of stiff feathered carcasses grew, one by one, to about chest-height. When the sun finally dropped, and things cooled marginally, my brothers climbed back down to earth, and my parents finally tired of the boiling copper and the stench of wet plucked feathers. Actually, I think they only stopped because they couldn’t cram any more into the freezer, the fridge or the Esky.

  We finally let ourselves sit for a while before my mother and I had to stoke the combustion stove to cook dinner. My brothers and I guzzled cold soft-drinks. My mother sipped warm water. My father, shirt limp with sweat, grimly walked up to survey the pile of dead chooks. For a moment, I thought I was going to get into terrible trouble for letting so many die. Instead, he did what he always does at important moments. He started to count.

  We lost about ten percent of our stock. We couldn’t afford it, but that’s farm life for you. Tomorrow or the next day we’d get out the pickaxe and chisel out a deep hole in the red clay for the grisly job of burying them.

  No one would get into trouble. It was Christmas.

  Take Me Away, Please

  Lily Chan

  It was four o’clock. I sighed. Every day, six days a week, I dreaded this moment, and hoped the hands on the clock would miraculously spin forward a couple of hours. For 4 p.m. signified that it was time to start work.

  Every quintessential Australian town had a local Chinese takeaway shop, and my parents were the proud owners of one such establishment in Mareeba, a largely agricultural township in Far North Queensland. Rather than adopting a traditional and fortuitous sounding name such as Golden Dragon Restaurant or Happy Fortune Inn, my father preferred a simpler approach. Peter Chan’s Chinese Take-Away resided on the quieter end of the town’s main street, nestled between a video store and a chiropractor’s practice. This was where I grew up, and where my family lived and worked from 1983 until my parents’ retirement in the late 1990s.

  The shop officially opened at 4.30 p.m., but we needed to prepare half an hour beforehand. I changed out of my blue school dress and roused Mum and Dad from their daily twenty-minute siesta. Getting to work wasn’t an issue, but getting away was, as our small living quarters were attached to the shop. The quarters consisted of two rooms separated by a sliding wooden door. One room served as a combined family living area and was also where my parents slept. The other room, a small storage-area-turned-bedroom, I shared with my sister. The shop’s restroom also served as our family bathroom, and was located outside the main premises.

  Mum and Dad started organising the kitchen, taking out a vast array of ingredients from the cold room, all of which they had meticulously chopped, sliced and marinated only hours earlier. Dad lit the gas rings under each of the woks, including the big wok containing the vegetable oil reserved for deep frying.

  My sister and I were responsible for the front of house. Our chores consisted of switching on the lights and turning the ‘open’ sign that was hung on the front sliding door. As the elder child, I had the added responsibility of managing the cash float. Instead of a cash register, we used several plastic take-away containers to separate the various notes and coins. This was how I was able to develop my arithmetic skills early on. I learned quickly, for non-reconciliation of cash to the total orders at the evening’s end would earn a stern word from Mum.

  After opening up shop, I took my usual place behind the counter and scrounged in my school bag for the day’s homework. One of the few benefits of working after school every day was that I became very diligent at homework. It gave me something to do to pass the time. That, and the fact that I wanted to get out of this town very badly.

  If not doing homework, I could either talk with my sister or watch television. More often than not, my sister preferred to play outside when she wasn’t on duty, so I usually resorted to switching between the two free-to-air channels to see what was most palatable. I became a big fan of shows like Get Smart and The Goodies, and the theme song to Come and Get It, Peter Russell-Clarke’s five-minute cooking show, became forever ingrained in my memory.

  Having finished my algebra questions, I again looked at my watch. It was now 5.30 p.m. Any momen
t now, the bodybuilder from across the road would ring up and place his usual Tuesday order: a steak omelette and four steamed dim sims. Bodybuilder Man was the classic ‘same time, same dish’ kind of customer. We had a lot of those, which was good because they were our bread and butter. If one didn’t turn up when he or she was supposed to, then the person was either on holidays or had passed on from this earth. To call them reliable was an understatement.

  The most popular dishes included special fried rice, chicken with almonds, and sweet and sour pork. Those who were indecisive could order the shandy special, which was basically a combination of the three dishes in one meal. Our more adventurous clientele would choose from the specials board, which included exotic-sounding dishes such as Mongolian lamb and Singapore noodles.

  Mum and Dad were already busy in the kitchen, standing over the five smoking woks. A customer from Cooktown had called the previous evening to place a large order of twenty dishes. Every three months, this customer would make the 200-kilometre journey to do her shopping and, of course, pick up her supply of Chinese food. I could hear the faint sizzling of the wok in the background as Dad tossed the ingredients around with his steel spade-like cooking implements. Mum was writing the name of each dish on plastic container lids with a thick blue felt pen so the customer could identify them easily.

  I bet they were looking forward to finishing up tonight. They had invited the town’s only other Chinese family over to dinner. The Laus were, in fact, our competitors; they owned the Hong Kong Restaurant down the road. However, they were also our friends, simply because in this small, prejudiced town, all we had was each other.

  We got together every now and then, especially to celebrate events on the Chinese calendar. However, the reason for tonight’s gathering was that Mum had cooked her special salted pork and century-egg congee. This was complemented by several plates of you zha gwei, Chinese savoury dough-sticks, which we had ordered from a Brisbane bakery the previous week and which had only arrived by freight today.

  Our families shared many things, including Chinese magazines, newspapers and videos, as well as gifts of various delicacies from overseas visitors. But the adults’ favourite thing to exchange was gossip, particularly concerning other Chinese in the Tablelands and Cairns region. This provided endless hours of speculation, analysis and discussion, which they would enjoy while sipping Chinese tea and munching on Sao biscuits.

  The phone rang. Ah, Bodybuilder Man, on time as usual. I jumped up, pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Peter Chan’s Chinese Take-Away. Can I help you?’

  Mates

  ...........................

  Wei-Lei and Me

  Aditi Gouvernel

  Barry West was a rude little boy with a pug nose. He had the red stained face of Australian summers.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ he screamed.

  All the kids were playing tag and I was ‘it.’ I was running through the playground, my pony-tail slapping my back as my feet hit the ground. My heartbeat pulsed in my head. I grazed Barry’s left shoulder with the palm of my hand. He stopped, turned around and faced me.

  Anger stretched across his face and he screamed, ‘I’ll have to wash this shirt now – you wipe your butt with your hands.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ I screamed back, startled and confused.

  ‘Yes you do … You’re Indian and I’ve got your Indian shit on me.’ He ripped off his shirt and threw it on the ground. The other kids gathered around us, watching and listening.

  *

  I was six. It was the early eighties and my parents had moved our family from the aristocratic world of Delhi, a city filled with palaces, temples, gardens and tombs. They moved me from my playground under the tower of the Qutab Minar to Canberra. The only thing the two places had in common was they were both national capitals. Our new suburb, Melba, spread its backside up Mount Rogers, a lofty title for what was really a hill. Each night my father and I would climb the hill and watch the sunset turn Lake Ginninderra a bright pink. ‘This is our chance,’ he would say, as Belconnen became a small cluster of lights. ‘This is a place we can make ours.’

  Delhi, with its eons of history, was not a place that could be ‘added to.’ Australia, on the other hand, large, spacious and full of gaps, would be a place where we could create a new identity.

  We became Australian in 1982. I recall very little of this ceremony, which took place in a small room in the cinder-block building of the Department of Immigration. My parents held up their palms while a man read an oath from a piece of paper. People clapped, some whistled and small flags were waved. The citizenship papers given to my parents were locked in a bank vault with my mother’s jewellery.

  My parents met Australia when they started work and I met Australia in the school playground.

  *

  The playground consisted of a large expanse of grass, at the centre of which stood a dark wooden structure rising out of a pit of tanbark. Some days it would be a fort, and we would defend ourselves from an imaginary attack. Other days it would be a ship, and we would be pirates and sailors. The days our child fantasy minds were tired it would just be the playground and we would hang from the monkey bars, or jump off the platforms. It was fun until the day Barry told the world I wiped my butt with my hands.

  That lunchtime as I climbed the fort, Barry screamed, ‘She’s infected. Don’t touch the fort! You’ll get her germs.’ I watched as the kids around me jumped off it like a crew abandoning a sinking ship.

  Over the next couple of days the kids stopped talking to me, as though my words, like my body, carried an infection their immune systems couldn’t fight. On the rare occasions they did pay attention to me they would combine their hatred in a human circle around me.

  ‘She even looks like shit,’ said Amy Pulawski.

  ‘That’s so gross,’ added Cris Kovacic.

  ‘No I don’t,’ I screamed again and again at them. Once I was forced to pull my top up and bare my chest to prove I had nipples when Barry had the idea Indian girls ‘have no tits.’

  On these days, I would go home with tears in my eyes and wonder why we couldn’t move back to Delhi. I would beg my mother not to send me back to school. ‘You have to face the world,’ she would say. If this was the world, I wanted nothing to do with it. I pretended to have various illnesses – flu, malaria. Once I claimed I had gout. My mother ignored all my attempts to miss school. Each day she would send me out the door with a brown paper bag and a piece of fruit and each day I hoped things would change. They did, the day Wei-Li arrived.

  *

  It was a cold autumn day. I ran into the classroom and warmed my hands against the metal gas heater bordering the walls. My teacher walked in, a halo of curly red hair, her arm attached to a honey-coloured boy with a smile of excitement on his face.

  She wrote his name on the blackboard, ‘WEI-LI,’ in white chalk. The boy stood in front of the class and in a sing-song voice introduced himself.

  ‘My name is Wee Lee.’ He smiled.

  Titters ran through the classroom. It took the class exactly thirty seconds to shorten his name to Wee. By morning recess he was called Piss. He lost his smile at lunchtime when, to my relief, he became the object of their attention. The kids mauled Wei-Li the way a cat would maul a toy. They pawed and prodded him and the circles that used to form around me formed around him. He was hit, spanked and kicked. He was spat on and forced to pull down his pants and show his penis when Barry had the idea Chinese boys ‘have no dicks.’

  Wei-Li’s shoulders started to stoop and after a week he would walk outside and avoid talking to anyone.

  *

  I watched everything from an aluminium bench. It was far enough away from the kids to avoid their attention but close enough to watch their activities.

  Today the bench was freezing. I was folding my legs underneath myself in a sort of lotus position when Wei-Li walked into the playground. I saw Barry walk straig
ht towards him, his arm held behind him and his hand in a fist. As Wei-Li faced the playground, Barry made a full arc with his arm and punched Wei-Li in the head. Wei-Li fell to the ground. Barry jumped on Wei-Li, his butt on his chest and both his hands pulling at Wei-Li’s school tie. Wei-Li’s face turned red and a strange sound escaped his mouth.

  ‘Think you can tell on me?’ Barry threatened.

  Wei-Li shook his head.

  Anger rose inside me. I wanted to help him. When the abuse had been directed at me, I had always wanted one of the other kids to hit Barry. I wanted someone to make it all stop, and for the first time I realised the ‘someone’ could be me.

  To the left of the bench was a rock the size of my foot. I picked it up and walked up behind Barry, the rock firmly in my hands. I could see Wei-Li’s tongue poking out between his lips. I threw my arms over my head and brought the rock down as hard as I could. It made a loud crack when it connected with Barry’s head. He fell forward, lying on top of Wei-Li, who had regained his breath and was wiggling out from under him. When Barry started moving, Wei-Li and I ran in opposite directions. I could hear Barry screaming, ‘You’re both dead.’

  The afternoon passed like a death sentence. Barry stared menacingly at me from his desk. As soon as the bell rang I leapt out of my seat and ran out of the class. I started running up Le Gallienne Street and as I was about to reach the first cross street, I saw Wei-Li standing there. He grabbed my hand. ‘C’mon,’ he said. I followed him up the narrow side-street and onto a footpath. On one side was a row of houses and on the other side a nature reserve. ‘Lets go this way. It’s longer – but we’ll be alone,’ he said.

  *

  In Tamil, my father’s native tongue, there is a word, jalrah, that means shadow. From that day on, Wei-Li became my jalrah.

  That Saturday, Wei-Li stood on my doorstep and rang the bell twice. My mother was cooking and the house smelt of mixed spices. Cumin, chilli powder and garam masala floated through the air like a scented rainbow. My mother opened the door and called out my name with a smile on her face. I saw Wei-Li standing there. A second later, as he entered my house, I saw everything Indian come to the foreground as if lit by a spotlight: the wooden statue of Ganesh, the fabric birds hanging on a string, my father lounging around in a dhoti. Everything Wei-Li saw could be used as evidence for my difference. But Wei-Li didn’t notice anything, or if he did he never mentioned it.