Growing Up Asian in Australia

by Alice Pung

  But he seemed to love hanging out at my house. He would sit with my mother and talk about school. He helped her to make snacks, dipping doughy mixtures into Indian spices and passing them to her. He spoke of how all his family ate were rissoles, steak and baked potatoes. I looked at him with envy, wishing my mother could cook such things. She treated him like her long-lost Aussie son, hand feeding him and stroking him across his blond flat-top.

  ‘You are a very nice boy, Darrel,’ she would say while patting him on the head. ‘Not like my son, who never eats his vegetable curry.’

  I never felt jealous. I knew my mother was just being nice, because she lamented how poorly Daryl performed in his studies. She would encourage us to do homework together, but the chances of that happening were slim. I can’t say I was ever disappointed. It was embarrassing to be good at studies and I tried to hide my scholastic abilities as much as possible. I even failed a couple of exams on purpose. The teachers freaked and thought about sending me to counselling. That was enough motivation to make me top the class again.

  But in the afternoons, once Lynchy had chowed down on his samosas, it was time to ride to the creek.

  That was all our suburb really had. Toongabbie it was called, home to the highest concentration of drug addicts, single mothers and ex-cons in all of Sydney. I’m not sure there were census figures to prove it, but everybody seemed sure about it. I would later attend a posh private school in the city and be known as Tanny from Toony. It even flooded when the creek overflowed. Some people thought we lived there because the poverty and flooding resembled Bangladesh.

  During one of the very last days of primary school, Lynchy asked me to come over. I was shocked. It felt like some kind of goodbye before we headed off to high school. For all our talk of maintaining our friendship, I thought his invite was some kind of admission that this would be futile.

  ‘We’ll still see each other, man,’ I said, genuinely believing it. ‘I’ll still live in Toony.’

  Lynchy reassured me that the invitation had nothing to do with this. It was his mother’s idea as a kind of repayment for all the food my mother had fed him. I nodded with approval. I longed to taste the mouth-watering promise of his family’s rissole, the delicate balance of mince, breadcrumbs and egg. I had asked at the local milkbar, but they said they didn’t cook rissoles anymore. At last, my dream was to come true.

  I didn’t even bother going home, but walked straight to Lynchy’s weatherboard house near the train station. There was a front patio where his father used to sit and read car magazines, but it had been empty for months. I had often walked past and seen his mother watering the garden, which consisted of a handful of azaleas in a zigzag. She would smile, but she always looked like she had bigger worries in her life.

  Lynchy’s elder sister Stacey never paid much attention to me, aside from once telling me that I was too short for any girls to like me. I had become a loyal cadre of Lynchy’s Stacey Complaints Commission: ‘Eww, Stacey’s face is a zit factory,’ or ‘Stacey is meeting her boyfriend at the parole office.’

  That afternoon Stacey was at work. Only Lynchy’s mother was home. Lynchy’s father no longer lived there. Daryl had told me recently and I was confused and asked dumb questions. He had told me about his parents’ divorce a few months ago, while we sat by the creek and gave each other horse bites, slapping each other on the leg. It might have been a rare tender moment between two boys entering manhood, except I had no idea what divorce was. He said his parents fought a lot and his mum thought it was better they lived apart. I didn’t get it because as far as I could see, my parents had nothing in common and barely had any relationship to speak of. My father just worked in the garden and told me to go and study while my mother did the housework and made my little sister and me eat all the time. My parents fought a lot too, but they seemed to have no problems staying together.

  But I worked out that it wasn’t a topic to dwell upon. At Lynchy’s house, we sat at a breakfast table and were served green cordial. His mother asked me to call her Bridget. She had weathered, reptilian skin like many older Australians who had spent too much time in the sun. Her droopy eyes and furrowed forehead gave her a melancholy air. She patted me on the head like my mother did to Lynchy. I liked it. She told me I must have been really smart and wished me well at my new school. My parents never told me I was smart. I was thrilled.

  I had been to very few houses where non-Bangladeshis lived. My other friends were also from overseas from countries like Turkey and the Philippines. Aussies were definitely different, I thought to myself. Lynchy’s house had pets and smelt a bit like the dog, a big German shepherd that intermittently sniffed my shoes. They had an air conditioner and a soda-stream machine. I was amazed. My parents would never buy such a wonderful thing. Bridget sensed my awe and offered me a fizzy orange drink from the machine. She dropped two ice cubes into a glass before I was allowed to taste a piece of liquid heaven.

  She spoke of her garden and how hard it was to keep her azaleas alive in the heat. I was riveted. Daryl sat beside me quietly, looking as embarrassed as I felt when he was friendly with my mother. He rubbed his fingers through his hair and gloated about being checked for head lice at school but coming out clean. Bridget patted him on his head before asking me questions.

  ‘Have you been back to Bangladesh, Tanny?’ she asked. Daryl had told her of my origins, after lengthy lessons at my place showing him where the country was on the map and how it had been formed after repeated wars with India and Pakistan.

  I told her yes, and described how I’d had diarrhoea all the time, but still enjoyed village life more than the crowded, dirty cities. Bridget laughed and said she wished she had travelled more. I looked at her cropped hair with interest. My mother always kept her hair long.

  ‘Daryl’s father never had any interest in the world beyond, only his tools.’

  Lynchy bowed his head and a frown appeared. I felt embarrassed and sad for him as the jovial mood turned sour for an instant. Bridget patted him across his crew cut again and motioned to some food on a plate.

  ‘I put some rissoles in sandwiches for you two. Dig in.’

  Lynchy motioned towards me, a smile replacing his momentary sadness. He grabbed two and handed me one. We bit into them while sipping our soda-stream soft drinks. A rush came over me as I tasted the spice-free rissole bursting across my taste buds. It was worth the wait.

  I saw Daryl a few more times that year, but we became more distant as our worlds grew apart. At the end of the year, his mother decided to sell their house and move to the North Coast. I never saw him again.

  After gentle urging on my part, my mother taught herself how to cook rissoles, although she would mix pieces of chilli and turmeric paste into them.

  The Folks

  .............................

  Perfect Chinese Children

  Vanessa Woods

  If there was ever anyone I wanted to stab in the heart with a chopstick, it was my cousin David.

  ‘What happened to the four per cent?’ my mother says, looking at my maths exam.

  ‘I got ninety-six. What else do you want?’

  ‘Don’t talk back,’ my mother snaps. ‘Ninety-six isn’t 100. If you want to do well you have to try harder. David just got 99.9 on his HSC.’

  I dig my nails into my chair and wait for the punchline.

  ‘He asked me to ring up the school board and contest the score. Ha! Imagine that. The lady on the phone laughed.’

  My mother shakes her head in wonder, as though David is the god of a new religion she’s following.

  ‘It really was 100,’ she says confidentially. ‘They had to scale it down for the school.’

  Usually Chinese parents don’t have bragging rights over other people’s children, but my mother tutored David through high school, so his HSC score is her crowning victory.

  My maths exam, with the scrawled red ‘96’ that I was so proud of, begins to look ratty. Untidy figures rush across the
page as if they’re about to make a run for it. David’s handwriting is famous for looking like it came out of a typewriter.

  ‘He’s going to medical school,’ she sighs. ‘He’s going to be a heart surgeon, just like Victor Chang.’

  The reason my mother harps on about David so much is probably that her own two children don’t warrant much praising over the mahjong table. My sister Bronnie has been expelled from piano lessons twice, and me, well, I am trouble on all fronts. I’m the child who talks back and gives viperous looks to her elders. In all my life I’ve only learnt two Cantonese phrases: Kung Hei Fat Choi, Happy New Year (saying this at the right time earned you lycee, red envelopes stuffed with cash), and gno sat neyko say yun tow, a phrase I hear often from my Aunty Yee Mah that roughly translates to ‘I will chop off your dead man’s head.’

  ‘Jasmine just bought her mother a $600,000 apartment in Hong Kong,’ mother says wistfully before going for the touchdown. ‘In cash.’

  Jasmine is David’s perfect sibling. She is a stockbroker in New York, married to an investment banker. The photographer at her Sydney wedding cost $12,000.

  ‘Jasmine only got 80 per cent on her HSC.’ My mother looks hopeful, as though retards like me might have a chance after all. Then she shakes herself out of it. ‘But no one paid any attention to her until she started making money.’

  My mother looks around our tiny two-bedroom apartment. The kitchen is fine if you’re a troll and enjoy dim, cramped spaces. The carpet is grey and curling around the edges. The furnishings are the type you pick up by the side of the road. There are occasional glimpses of the life we had before. A Ming vase. A black lacquered screen with flourishes of gold. But the priceless antiques give the apartment the ambience of a refugee camp, as though we managed to save a few precious things before catastrophe threw us into squalor.

  When I visit my cousins in their two-storey palaces, their kitchens as big as our apartment and their lucky trees with life-sized peaches of jade in the foyer, my secret pleasure is to creep upstairs and press my face into the pale, plush carpet.

  *

  We are poor because my mother’s financial history has been overshadowed by unlucky four – sie, which sounds uncomfortably close to sei, death. She was the fourth child born in the fourth decade of the century. Her father gave all his money to Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese leader of the Nationalist Party who lost China to the Communists in 1949. My mother’s brothers and sister were also left destitute, but they all married suitable Chinese spouses who helped them earn back the family fortune.

  My mother, with her silken black hair and face like a doll, could have done better than anyone. But instead, she married my father, a gweilo, a ghost person, a white man. In our world, interracial marriages are unheard of. We don’t know any other Chinese who married Australians.

  ‘Barbarians,’ Yee Mah would say. ‘Chinese were using chopsticks while gweilos were eating with their hands.’

  My father was a charming but troubled Vietnam vet, prone to occasional psychotic episodes and heavy drinking. When he brought my mother home to meet his family, my grandfather’s first words to her were, ‘Jesus Christ – a chongalewy-chow Sheila!’

  My mother did everything required of a dutiful Chinese wife. She spent three hours baking dun tahts, the pastry as flaky around the warm egg custard as those served for the Kangxi Emperor at the Manchu imperial feast. She did the ritualistic two-day preparation for Peking duck and gave herself RSI from rolling perfectly circular Mandarin pancakes. She served orgasmic banquets to my father’s friends and unwittingly to his mistresses.

  It wasn’t a surprise to anyone except my mother when my father divorced her and left her for a white barbarian when I was five and my sister was two.

  My mother almost slit her wrists in shame. We didn’t know anyone who was divorced. Chinese spouses had affairs, slept in separate rooms and barely spoke to each other, but no one divorced. It was a matter of saving face.

  Her own life in shreds and two dollars in her pocket, we became her only hope. We would be brilliant at school, earn accolades and awards until the day when we were educated, rich and could lavish her with the money and attention she deserved.

  Unfortunately, it isn’t quite working out that way. As a result of the impure blood of my father, my sister and I don’t even look Chinese. We both have Chinese hair, dead straight and completely resistant to the crimping tools crucial to the ‘80s, but my sister’s hair is blonde and mine is the colour of burnt toast.

  As time goes by, it becomes clear to her that we are going the way of Australian children. The ones who don’t work as hard, are loud and uncouth and, worst of all, talk back to their parents and hold chopsticks near the pointed ends, like peasants.

  Until the divorce, we had barely seen my Chinese relatives. Suddenly, from our big, comfortable house in Turramurra, we were living in a troll cave in Kingsford near Vietnamese boat people. Instead of a mother who stayed home all day cooking delicious and exotic meals, I had a mother who worked as a secretary for fourteen hours a day. And every day after school, my sister and I get dumped with my Aunty Yee Mah and my three cousins.

  It is well known among all my new relatives under the age of sixteen that you do not fuck with Yee Mah. Yee Mah isn’t fat but there is a heaviness to her. The back of her hand feels like a ton of bricks. She once broke a bed just by sitting on it. Besides the famous ‘I will chop off your dead man’s head,’ she sometimes pulls out a box of matches, holds one out close to our mouths and hisses, ‘If you are lying to me I will burn out your tongue.’ In a way that convinces you she absolutely is not joking.

  Her daughter Erica is seventeen and the high-achieving darling. Robert is number one son and therefore immune to any criticism or punishment. However, her other son, Patrick, my sister Bronnie and I, we are all under ten and therefore under her complete jurisdiction.

  So every day after school, Bronnie, Patrick and I get up to mischief and then try to stop Yee Mah finding out. On the weekends there are more cousins, aunties and uncles to visit, most of whom aren’t even related to us. The hope is that some of their Chineseness will rub off on us and Bronnie and I will become bright, smart vessels and alleviate some of my mother’s disgrace.

  Bronnie and I never quite blend in, but our new playmates are always too polite to mention it until one day, Erica storms out of the playground.

  ‘Australians are retarded,’ she says churlishly. Erica is seven years older than me and I worship her. She is everything a good girl should be: smart, respectful, and her boyfriends buy her large stuffed animals that I secretly covet.

  There’s a rhyme going around the playground. The kids pull up the corners of their eyes, then pull them down, chanting: ‘Chinese, Japanese, hope your kids turn Pickanese.’ On ‘Pickanese,’ they lift one eye up and one eye down, giving the clear impression of mental retardation. Like all bad jokes that come into fashion, this one is going around like wildfire, and Erica has apparently been socked with it 150 times during lunch.

  As we wait outside school for Yee Mah, I catch Erica giving me a sideways look, as though she is seeing me for the first time, realising that I look more like one of them than like her.

  ‘Yeah,’ I quickly say. ‘Australians are dog shit. Their babies will all eat dog shit and die.’

  I have to be liberal with the faeces because the week before, my cousin Victor was bashed at the 7Eleven in Maroubra. A local gang was targeting Asians, and a couple of them beat up Victor and stole his bike. I saw him staggering down the road, bleeding from his nose with scrapes along his arms. The cheekbone beneath his eye was swollen and red, like a ripe fruit about to burst.

  There is also a rumour going around that Asian-haters have been stabbing Asians with syringes full of AIDS blood in the cinemas on George Street. As a result, we don’t go to the cinema for at least a year.

  Yee Mah’s car pulls up and we all climb in. Erica doesn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. Without knowing why, I am ashamed
.

  *

  Every Saturday, about twenty of our ‘inner circle’ go to yum cha. The children are fed cha siu bao pork buns to fill us up so we don’t eat any of the expensive stuff, while the grown-ups brag about themselves by bragging about their children.

  ‘Patrick just passed his Grade Seven piano exam,’ says Yee Mah. ‘And Erica is top of her class. Again.’

  Aunty Helen talks about Jasmine’s new office in the World Trade Centre and David’s internship.

  And my poor mother sits with nothing to say. No awards we have won. No praise from our teachers. No marks high enough for medical or law school. It is the ultimate aspiration for any Chinese mother to have a child who is a lawyer or a doctor. The best-case scenario would be a lawyer who defends doctors in court.

  ‘You would make such a good barrister,’ my mother sometimes tells me. ‘You and that slippery tongue of yours.’

  Such two-faced compliments are the staple of my existence. ‘Ho liang,’ my relatives say. ‘How pretty.’ But I always sense another implication: at least I am pretty, because there isn’t much else going for me.

  Even worse, Bronnie wants to be an actress and I want to be a writer. My mother can’t think of anything less likely to lead to one of us buying her an apartment.

  ‘You’ll end up penniless in an attic,’ she tells my sister. As for me, she clips out cuttings from the newspaper to prove that most writers end up dead of starvation in the gutter.

  *

  To twist the chopstick even deeper, I am developing an aversion to school. In class, I am miserable, churlish and awkward. I don’t have any friends, and a boy called Owen throws rocks at me after class. There is another charming game going around the playground in which you pinch someone and say, ‘Tip, you’ve got the germs.’