Growing Up Asian in Australia

by Alice Pung

  I am always the original source of the germs.

  Finally, to escape being the human turd, I lock myself in the school toilets for three hours. When a teacher comes to find me, I tell her I’ve been vomiting. Half an hour later my mother pulls up outside school and drives me back to our apartment. She cooks me chicken soup with noodles and wraps the bed sheets around me so tight I feel like I am in an envelope, about to be posted somewhere exotic. I love the garlic and chilli smell of her hands. She takes my temperature and smoothes my forehead and continually asks if I am all right.

  I suffer another week through the germ game until I lock myself in the toilet again. This time, Yee Mah picks me up from school.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she demands.

  ‘I threw up in the toilet.’

  ‘You don’t smell like vomit,’ she says suspiciously.

  ‘It was only a little bit.’

  She looks at me slyly from the corner of her eye.

  ‘Do you know why your mother is poor?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Because of you. She has to pay your school feels, very expensive. You see how tired she is? You must pay her back with good marks. Otherwise you will make her shamed.’

  The emotional terrorism continues until we get to her house. There is no chicken soup or tucking into bed. I have to sit on the couch with Bobo, her mother-in-law, for six hours, watching daytime television until my sister and Patrick come home.

  *

  ‘Mum,’ I tug on my mother’s arm during Saturday yum cha as she chews on a prawn dumpling, part of yet another meal she can’t pay for. She looks down at me absentmindedly. ‘Mum!’

  ‘Yes, sweetheart?’

  ‘Can you buy me that fish?’

  ‘What?’

  There are over fifty bream stuffed in the tank of the yum cha restaurant. They are squashed so tight together they can hardly move. In the middle there is a beautiful golden one, with scales that shimmer in the light of the crystal chandeliers. I want my mother to buy it so I can take it to Bondi Beach in a plastic bag and set it free in the ocean.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ my mother says. ‘They are for eating.’

  The eating habits of my sister and I are yet another source of embarrassment. We are very wasteful. We don’t eat chicken’s feet. We don’t suck the jelly out of fish eyeballs and we refuse to eat the creamy filling inside prawn heads.

  ‘Just that one. Pleeeeeeease.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We can’t afford it,’ she hisses.

  I let go of her hand and catch up with my sister and Patrick, who are playing in the elevators. We like to go into the elevators and push all the buttons. Go all the way up. Go all the way down. Occasionally, we get out on a floor we aren’t supposed to be on and run up and down the corridors.

  It doesn’t bother me that we are poor. I’ve found a way to combat it – I steal from other children. When I get kicked out of class for misbehaving, which is often, I rifle through the school bags of all the other kids and steal their lunch money, as well as anything else I like.

  When I finally get caught, I’m terrified Yee Mah will burn off my tongue like she’s always threatening. Instead, my mother sits me down at the dining-room table. She is very quiet. She puts her hand on my hand and says, ‘What do other children have that you don’t?’

  If I were smarter, I would hear her heart breaking.

  ‘Erasers with Snow White on them,’ I say without hesitating.

  ‘All right,’ says my mother. ‘Go to your room.’

  As I leave, I see her bow her head, as if she’s carrying a great burden. It’s shame. And she’s not ashamed of me, she’s ashamed of herself. For failing to teach me the difference between right and wrong. For failing to make me feel like I am warm and safe and don’t need to steal from other kids to make up for everything I don’t have.

  The next day, the Snow White erasers are on the dining-room table. I don’t even want them.

  *

  When I finally ring my mother to tell her my HSC score, she sounds delighted.

  ‘You got 88.8? Very lucky number. You will be rich for sure.’

  There is an odd note in her voice, one of momentary regret. That this isn’t the moment when I exceed all her expectations.

  ‘Very rich,’ she says again, as if to comfort herself with an ancient Confucian wisdom: Just think how it could have been worse.

  As for me, I’ve given up hoping she will tell me she is proud. I no longer begrudge my friends their mothers who overflow with constant affirmation and nurturing encouragement. When she criticises me with all the sensitivity of a Japanese scientist harpooning a whale, and I feel the slow-burning resentment building to rage, I bite my slippery tongue.

  Instead, I fossick through my memory for one of my earliest recollections.

  My mother is in the kitchen. Steam rises from the wok and oil spatters over her hands. There is a delicious smell of soy sauce, garlic and chicken. She tips the contents of the wok into a dish, then spoons out chicken wings onto beds of rice. Chicken wings are the cheapest part of a chicken. She has bought all her salary can afford.

  On my sister’s plate there are two. On mine there are two. On hers, there is only one.

  And in her sacrifice, I see love.

  The Asian Disease

  Simone Lazaroo

  It’s getting closer, I know it is.

  I can feel it at my back, a cold, static darkness that makes the hairs along my spine stand on end. I’m almost certain it’s my father’s death, drawing nearer. His family has a saying: You haven’t grown up until you’ve faced your parents’ death. And I haven’t, not yet. I’m still trying to make sense of his disease.

  I’m not sure if his disease is Asian or Australian in origin. It makes his body and speech shake, or sometimes freeze for minutes at a time. Over the years, the medications have lost their effectiveness in combating these symptoms.

  ‘I’m … not … sure … how mmmuch … lllonger … I can … go … on,’ my father says each time I visit him in the nursing home in Perth’s new blond-brick outer suburbs. I hear the long slow tremor of death in his voice, see it moving through his body. ‘Sssorry … the … bbrroadcast’s … a bit… sslurred today,’ he apologises. ‘Like … the BBC in … Sssingapore when … I was a child.’

  One day soon, I warn myself, this disease will freeze him forever.

  It already demands all his willpower and concentration to swallow. He refuses the liquefied food the nurses offer him. As it times his days, the gold Swiss wrist-watch given to him by Singapore’s government fifty years ago for his services to the island’s post-war plumbing is smeared with rejected puree and soup.

  ‘Tasteless … mmush,’ he complains to me. ‘I … will … vvomit … or die ffaster … if… they mmmake me … eat … that again. Ssspeech … mmovement … now even… my ffood … is ssslurred.’

  How much longer will my father be able to endure such loss of control? Despite so much slurring, his watch still keeps perfect time.

  ‘Do you have anything tastier?’ I ask the matron.

  ‘We don’t cater for foreign appetites here,’ she tells me. ‘And there’s duty of care, Miss Nazario. Your father’s disease might make him choke on solid food, and that would be distressing for the other residents.’

  But I take the risk and buy him take-away curry, kuey teow and ginger tea, so that he might taste memories of his mother and Singapore. Anything to delay the final freeze. I feed him in his room, to avoid distressing the other residents.

  ‘Thank … you,’ he says. Two slow tears run down his face. ‘Aunty … Mercedes … visited me … today.’

  I don’t have the heart to remind him that his sister Mercedes died five years ago in Singapore, and never made it across the Indian Ocean to visit him. His memory, too, has been slurred by the disease. Only a few episodes from his more distant past are clear.

  *

  Coveri
ng his thinness and uncertainty with his recently deceased father’s suit jacket and his almost-BBC English pronunciation, twenty-year-old Eurasian civil servant Emanuel Nazario stood in the dirt amongst the chickens and goats and briefed the residents of several Singaporean kampongs about a new pipeline planned to service them. It was the late 1950s, and the government had recently unfurled blueprints for an intricate system of plumbing and housing. Emanuel held the crisp plans high in the air so the goats couldn’t eat them, and assured the kampong dwellers that the new pipelines would deliver them unprecedented convenience and release them from centuries of filth, disease and bad spirits.

  Emanuel’s parents had recently died, their bodies prematurely aged by starvation during the war almost fifteen years earlier. His own body was still skinny from his malnourished childhood. He did push-ups three times a day in front of his poster of Charles Atlas, and he fortified himself with Milo and Dutch Maid powdered milk after double helpings of nasi lemak and kuey teow from Singapore’s street hawkers. Cold storage had recently come to Singapore, and he bought himself a small serve of their expensive ice-cream once a week as a treat. He tried not to think too often about his mother’s piquant gaze and curries. Within a few weeks, he’d be journeying to the university in Perth on a Colombo Plan scholarship to study water supply and sewerage disposal, and he was worried that insufficient nourishment and unchecked grief would diminish his ability to apply modern Western plumbing methods to Singapore’s future.

  *

  Wearing pleat-fronted chino trousers and a large, spotlessly white shirt to disguise his slenderness, Emanuel Nazario met Maureen Jones on his first morning at the student boarding house in Perth. It was 1959, and the boarding house hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and milk, with not even the faintest whiff of spice. Maureen’s room was just across the hall from Emanuel’s. Despite this proximity, it seemed at first that they were latitudes apart, at least on the surface.

  Think of it, the sinewy golden-brownness of the civil engineering student from the teeming South-East Asian island city; the voluptuous paleness of the young education and English literature student from a small Western Australian wheat-belt town. But imagine too their loneliness so many miles away from home; their youthful fascination with one another’s skin and history. The only spice for miles around, it seemed.

  *

  ‘Jolly Asians bring nothing but disease. Your life will be a disaster if you marry one of them,’ her mother with the frosted hair and gaze warned the lovelorn Maureen when she returned to her little wheat-belt town for the summer vacation.

  *

  Emanuel returned to Singapore qualified as a water-supply and waste-disposal engineer. There, he was handed a spade, a pair of rubber boots, a plan of the proposed sewage-disposal system for a cramped kampong near the CBD, and a white cotton handkerchief to tie over his nose and mouth as he dug.

  His new job called for single-minded heroism. The soil around the kampong was clayey, and people still emptied their waste into open drains on the street. He had no maps to help him locate these outpourings of human bodies. He ducked a bucketful here, an ammoniac-smelling puddle there. One morning he surfaced from a newly dug tunnel into a tiny room full of ten Chinese labourers sleeping the day shift on straw mats. The closest man woke afraid and hit the young engineer, causing his palm to slip against the spade handle.

  ‘The government sent me,’ Emanuel said to the rudely woken labourer, ‘I’m laying pipes against disease.’ But neither of them spoke one another’s language. Emanuel retreated through the tunnel he’d just dug. The cut on his dirt-stained palm was shaped like the white crescent on Malaya’s recently unfurled flag, symbolising a new moon and nation, but the crescent on his hand was the blood red of mortality. Had a disease already entered his body? Afraid of contracting tetanus, cholera, hepatitis and diseases beyond diagnosis, he doused the crescent in Jeye’s Disinfectant and went to the government clinic for every available inoculation, but a longing for permanent escape from disease entered his bloodstream with each needle jab. That night he dreamed of Perth, where Maureen Jones and an efficient sewage-disposal system were already in place, and tropical diseases were almost unheard of. He wrote a letter to Maureen the next day, lightly smeared with blood from his wound.

  When Maureen flew to Singapore to visit him two months later, he proposed to her. He did this under a gnarled old angsana tree at the new reservoir, one of the sites in her tour of the infrastructure he was helping to build. He didn’t tell Maureen that the tree was more often used for suicides than proposals.

  *

  ‘Ah-yah! Why not a nice Eurasian girl?’ Emanuel’s oldest sister Mercedes muttered when he announced his engagement.

  ‘You never know what could happen if you marry one of them,’ Maureen’s mother warned her through the white noise of the long-distance phone call to Western Australia.

  Despite the consternation of their families, Maureen and Emanuel married within a few weeks at his old school chapel, under the sorrowful gazes of a mildewed plaster Christ and the two Nazario sisters. When Maureen ran her fingers gently over his immunisation scars that night, Emanuel understood how wounds could be transformed into rewards.

  *

  When we three children were born in Kadang Kerbau, the Pregnant Cow maternity hospital, in the years leading up to Singapore’s independence, Emanuel was sure to have us immunised for everything going. Our buttocks were dimpled not only by our mother’s milk, but by immunisation scars that puckered our tender skin into tiny rosettes.

  After his youngest child was born, he was presented with the gold Swiss watch. To Emanuel Nazario from the Government of Singapore, for helping to lay the groundwork against disease, the inscription on the back read.

  *

  Emanuel Nazario knew that the most serious diseases were best avoided by putting as much distance as possible between us and the tropics. He hoped to migrate with his young family to Australia, but he had dark skin and the White Australia Policy was still in force. We three Singaporean-born children had ‘come out various shades in the wash,’ as my father’s expatriate English boss put it. The Australian embassy officers in Singapore were perplexed when the white mother, brown father and three colour-gradated children presented themselves at the desk to apply for migration.

  ‘We don’t get many families like yours applying,’ the Australian man in the striped blue, red and white tie said. ‘We’re not sure how you’ll measure up against policy.’ Years later in Perth, my maternal grandfather, a public servant, would tell me that the White Australia Policy had screened us out, and that we were only permitted to migrate to Australia after he’d pulled some strings. This grandfather died before I found out what the strings were attached to.

  It was 1965 when the strings released us to fly to Perth. Down at the local supermarket in the State Housing Commission suburb where we first lived, the walls were a cool, sparkling white. There were pink sausages, white bread, milk and more flavours of ice-cream than Dad had ever seen. There were a few Aboriginal people, conspicuous against all that paleness and fluorescent light, but no Asian faces or food. Milo and Jeye’s Disinfectant were avail able, though. Dad stockpiled them, as if fortifying himself against new diseases.

  My father took his job at the Water Board seriously. On the weekends, we went on picnics to the new dams and pipelines he’d helped design. He checked water levels and dam walls while we picnicked on sausages wrapped in white bread and smothered in tomato sauce. Deprived of meat and dairy foods during his wartime childhood, my father finished up every sausage, every scoop of ice-cream, every pat of butter, as if his life depended on it.

  *

  The evening my father picked up his gleaming new white 1968 Valiant Safari station wagon, he drove it down to the local postbox to send Christmas cards to his sisters back in Singapore. Withdrawing his hand from the slot, he was salivating slightly as he thought wistfully of the achar pickles and curried devil they’d be preparing for Christmas lunch o
ver there, when he was blinded by two beams of light and slammed face-first against the supermarket wall by two hard hands at his back. He felt his glasses cut into his left cheek. He closed his eyes against the glare of the car headlights upon the bare white wall as the saliva dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Keep yer hands up!’ the two policemen shouted together in their harsh Australian accents when my father moved to wipe his saliva away. He did as he was told, saliva running from the corner of his mouth, palms flat against the white supermarket wall, unsure of his crime.

  ‘You’re the boong who robbed the deli,’ the first policeman said, frisking him. My father had been in Australia just long enough to be familiar with this insulting term for Aboriginals.

  ‘I am not Aboriginal,’ he murmured.

  ‘Nah, you’re a boong.’

  ‘I am Eurasian,’ he said.

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘I am an Australian citizen, too,’ my father concluded.

  ‘You’re a dribbling blackie,’ the second policeman sneered.

  When he arrived home, the only thing my father could remember about the policemen’s appearance was their plump ham-coloured faces, a kind of boiled greyish pink. A cut like a question mark bled on his left cheek. Only when he cleaned himself up in the bathroom did he start crying, just a little. He was crying, he said, for Aboriginal people, and anyone else in Australia with dark skin.

  ‘Unwhiteness is a notifiable crime in Perth,’ he warned us. ‘They only let me go because of the new car and my BBC accent.’

  He sat down and shovelled two platefuls of sausages and potatoes into his mouth.

  ‘One day, Asians will be rewarded for what they bring to this country,’ my mother said. In the silence, I could hear his reward from the Singaporean government counting down on his wrist.

  ‘It’s getting closer, Dad, I know it is,’ I agreed.

  But he just kept eating, as if he were fortifying himself against future disaster. That night I dreamed of running with my father from the Australian police, shielding him from their gaze, placing my inadequate paleness between him and them.