by Alice Pung
*
‘Let’s play nurses,’ the girl over the road said behind the chook-pen. ‘I’m the nurse, you’re the patient. You have to drop your knickers.’
‘You’re different,’ she concluded. ‘Darker, and what are those things? They look like something’s bitten you on the bum.’
‘They’re from needles I had when I was a baby so I didn’t get the disease.’
‘Which disease?’
‘I forget its name.’
‘Dad says you’re Asian.’
‘Is that a disease?’
Up until then, I’d almost succeeded in forgetting where I came from.
*
Around the time the White Australia Policy was officially abolished by Gough Whitlam in the 1970s, we met newer immigrants with faces a bit like ours, mowing lawns and learning how to barbecue sausages in streets near ours.
‘We come to Australia, we must learn to be Australian,’ I heard a group of recent immigrants from Singapore agree at one of these barbecues.
But they weren’t as adrift from their pasts as we’d been when we’d arrived in Perth in 1965. By the early seventies, Asian grocers and restaurants began appearing in shopping centres. At last! Nasi lemak and salted plums! Ginger tea and kuey teow! Although we were still sometimes insulted in the streets of our suburb, even spat upon, young Australian men and old ladies stopped my sister and me in the shopping centre and told us that we were beautiful. My schoolteacher, captain of a Western Australian Football League team, declared me prefect with a rosette-shaped badge, and a man in a suit at the bus stop declared mine the face of the future in the same week that our local Chinese restaurant won a Gold Plate Award. At last! Rewarded for being Asian! Twelve years old, on the brink of trainer bras from China, official multiculturalism and adolescent vanity, I thought we’d never look back.
*
Towards the end of my adolescence, my father divorced my wheat-belt mother and remarried, the only one in generations of his family to do so.
‘It’s an Australian illness,’ his younger sister Mary told me when she visited us during a package tour of Australia some time between his divorce and his second wedding.
*
‘The disease is probably not genetic in your father’s case,’ the doctor at the nursing home tells me. ‘We suspect he suffers from the type caused by childhood malnutrition.’
‘The war,’ I say. ‘When he was a boy, his father was imprisoned and the rest of the family were sent by the Japanese to fend for themselves in the Malayan jungle.’
But this is an Asian history, not an Australian one, and the doctor is already moving on to the next patient.
*
The slurring disease has doubled my father’s foreignness for people who don’t know him well. Suffering from advanced symptoms, he sometimes struggles to make himself understood to hospital and nursing-home staff.
‘Can he understand English?’ two relief nurses ask me after glancing at his dark skin and failing to comprehend his speech.
‘He’s spoken English since he was an infant,’ I tell them. ‘The British and the BBC were big in Singapore and Malaya when he was a child.’
‘But he sounds so … foreign,’ one of them replied.
‘It’s the disease, not a foreign language. You have to listen carefully.’
‘But he looks foreign, too. You’re his daughter? But you’re so … pale.’
‘My mother …’ I begin. But the story is too long.
*
If Dad’s lucky, a Malay nurse, Jamilah, is rostered to look after him at the nursing home. Like my father, she is slender and looks younger than she is. She’s sixty years old, but she looks about forty.
‘It’s the Asian blood in us,’ she says.
Jamilah migrated to Australia a few years after the White Australia Policy had been lifted, but she understands the bruise of being dark-skinned in Australia.
‘When we first came, we were the first Asians in my street. Next to all the white fences and people, I felt blacker than I’d ever felt. And none of the Australian neighbours dropped in to eat with us, even when we invited them.’
‘I’ve … been … up … against … the great … w-w-white wall … too,’ my dad nods, slowly but adamantly.
‘But after all these years, we know we’re great, don’t we, Manny?’ Jess says, breaking the nursing-home rules and giving him a home-made curry puff.
‘We’ll … rule … the world … one … day,’ my father concurs in his trembling drawl.
But I know that he also sometimes hallucinates that he’s being arrested by police for not having a passport, or that he’s being locked up to freeze to death in cold storage, or being taken to court because he is stateless. In these delusions, he’s never sure whether he’s in Singapore or Australia.
‘The hallucinations are another symptom of the advanced stages of the disease,’ the doctor says, but I make other interpretations.
Sometimes, my father tells me, he is nursed by a large Australian woman with permed hair and gaze who refuses to speak to him, except to mutter that his slurred speech and occasional incontinence are symptoms of his Asianness. She withholds smiles and his cups of ginger tea, and pushes bland mush into his mouth, cursing as he chokes on it. I haven’t met this nurse yet, the nursing-home staff deny that she exists when I question them about her, and I have to conclude that she is at least partly a product of my father’s hallucinations. He tells me she’s ham-faced, and that she speaks in a frosty wheat-belt accent. I wonder if hers is the face of the policemen in 1968, or if she speaks in my maternal grandmother’s disapproving voice.
As he tells me this story about the nurse, Dad dribbles slightly and looks almost unbearably forlorn and lost. One thing’s for sure: my father’s up against the white wall again. For him, this Australian who wishes him ill is still real, a nightmare from our first years in Perth that never quite disappeared.
‘Please … bring me … some Jeyes’ Disinfectant … next time, he begs me. ‘The … disease is … everywhere.’
*
On my most recent visit, my father was almost unable to speak or walk at all. The medications he takes to control the disease have almost no effect.
‘He may have a few days left, he may have a few months,’ the doctor told me in the corridor outside my father’s room.
When I waved my father goodbye last time, he held out both his hands towards me. I could hear the ticking of his watch. I could see the crescent-shaped scar on his palm, the inoculation marks on his upper arm, the question mark on his cheek; I could see the tremor in his fingers, the symptom of his disease.
Emanuel Joseph Nazario. His trembling outstretched hands might have been giving me his blessing. They might have been begging me to take him with me. They might have been bidding me farewell for the last time.
*
At home afterwards, I soak in the bath a long time, as if the water from the hills reservoir my father helped design in his first years in Perth might wash away any lingering bad spirits.
I see my father’s fine outstretched Eurasian hands blessing, begging, farewelling me; trembling with all the diseases he’s endured – Asian, Australian, and everything in between.
When I dry myself, I notice the inoculation marks I received in infancy on my left buttock. Like Dad’s marks but smaller, they’re shaped like medals or like sores, depending on how you look at them. They are still with us nearly fifty years later, after living through the final years of the White Australia Policy, several years of assimilation, a couple of decades of multiculturalism.
Is it my pulse I can hear, or my father’s battered old wristwatch counting down again?
If I ever meet the large Australian ham-faced nurse with the frosted voice and hair, I will point to his scars and ask her the question: ‘A punishment, or a reward?’
It’s getting closer, I know it is.
Crackers
Rudi Soman
It was after we moved to t
he new house that the cracks grew into fissures and then a mighty black crevasse.
One night Acha set three cheese-baited mousetraps on the floor at the back of the walk-in pantry. Later that night Amma opened the pantry door and quietly laid down a saucer containing a couple of broken Ritz crackers.
‘We should give him a chance,’ she said to me in a low voice, taking a tea towel and wiping a coffee mug.
The next morning the crackers were gone. Only a crumb remained. Amma removed the saucer and rinsed it under hot water in the sink. In the pantry the little wooden traps were still tightly coiled. They looked ominous despite the cheerful cubes of Coon.
‘This is a crafty mouse,’ Acha said when inspecting the traps after his morning prayers. ‘Still, we will see how long he can resist the temptation.’ He disappeared into the corridor to get ready for work.
That night Acha baited the traps with fresh Coon. After he went to bed I heard Amma moving around in the kitchen. I went in to take a look. This time she was breaking a Sao biscuit into tiny pieces.
‘He’s not hurting anyone,’ she said as she placed the saucer in the pantry.
‘What about the poo? It could be unhygienic.’
‘He doesn’t poo here.’
‘He or she must poo somewhere.’
‘Can you see any poo?’
Amma was right. There was no sign of mouse poo. But we had all seen the mouse at one time or another in the last two weeks.
The next morning I was first up, closely followed by Amma. Once again the traps were untouched while Amma’s nibbles were, we presumed, completely devoured.
That afternoon when I arrived home from football practice I threw my school bag down and hurried to the kitchen. I was looking forward to a snack of heavily buttered white bread sprinkled with granulated garlic and then toasted under the griller. In the kitchen, Acha, in his suit trousers and a white singlet, was backing out of the pantry with the Dustbuster. He revered his Dustbuster in the way that other suburban fathers loved their power drills. This explained the absence of mouse shit in the pantry. Acha turned to face me. He held the device with the nozzle pointing up, as a soldier would handle a combat rifle amongst civilians.
‘As cunning as an outhouse rat,’ he said. I had recently noticed the Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms on Acha’s desk in the study-cum-prayer-room. I imagined him methodically consulting the index under ‘M’ for mouse and then ‘R’ for rat. I had heard this expression before the arrival of the dictionary. I suspected Acha had sanitised the phrase by replacing shithouse with outhouse, and not just for my benefit. He was a pious man after all.
‘This time he has been nibbling the edges but not taking the whole cheese. Not exerting enough pressure to set off the trap,’ he said.
‘Maybe the Coon isn’t tasty enough,’ I mumbled. ‘Maybe try Cracker Barrel.’
‘Don’t say stupid things.’ He pronounced stupid as if it was spelt with two Os and a T at the end. ‘Coon is very tasty.’
Acha opened the back of the Dustbuster and emptied its contents into the kitchen bin. The specks of dung made soft, almost inaudible tapping sounds as they hit the puffy sides of the bin liner. It sounded as if he had let fall half-a-dozen grains of basmati rice.
‘Cheh!’ he spat out in disgust. He went back to the study-cum-prayer-room, where I heard him hang his Dustbuster on the special wall fixture between the altar and his desk.
*
That night Acha decided to modify his tactics.
‘The aroma of celery is very strong. Together with Coon it is bound to attract a mouse,’ he announced.
Using toothpicks he pierced together cubes of cheese with cross-sectional slices of celery. With great concentration he fas tened the new improved baits to the traps and set them. Each device now looked like a menacing bionic canapé.
Acha summarised the plan. ‘The toothpick will hold the foodstuffs firmly together with the trap so that when the bait is interfered with, the trap must spring. The rodent now has only a Buckley’s chance of survival and none other.’ Looking solemn, he retired to his study-cum-prayer-room. I heard the sound of matches being lit. Soon the smell of incense wafted down the hall together with muffled intonations of the Gayatri mantra.
Later, before going to bed, I went back to the kitchen to get a glass of water. I found Amma with a jar of peanut paste in her hands. The open packet of Sao crackers was on the counter.
‘I asked my Year 12 class today which foods a mouse would like. Many of the children said their parents would use bacon to catch a mouse. Some said peanut paste. We do not have any bacon so I will use peanut paste. Crunchy. He will find it a delicious diversion. The celery and cheese cannot compete. Don’t tell Acha.’
This was quite logical for my mother, compared with her past behaviour with animals and food. Nearly twelve months earlier, on our first day at the house on Ormsby Street, I had acquired a new pet. While sullenly exploring the backyard, mentally cursing my father, there in front of me on the garden path had been a tortoise. Its shell was dull green and the size of a cereal bowl. It carried some illegible paint markings, like old, faded graffiti. The tortoise’s neck was fully extended in five or six centimetres of friendly greeting. It was winking at me, slowly and steadily.
I winked back. I bent down and softly touched its leathery head but it did not shrink away.
I named him Bronchi. In biology we had just studied the human respiratory system. The name given to the air tubes leading from the trachea to the lungs had reminded me of a dinosaur but it seemed ideal for a tortoise too. Over the following weeks I would find Bronchi in various corners and niches of the large sloping yard. He soon became my pet and a redeeming feature of the new house.
I wasn’t sure if Bronchi was a long-time resident of 3 Ormsby Street. I couldn’t believe that the previous occupants would have left such a cute pet behind. I assumed he subsisted on the fat of the land – maybe a diet of leaves, bugs, grasshoppers and whatever else it was that tortoises ate. I soon discovered that Amma had taken a liking to Bronchi too. One day I arrived home from school to find, on the same section of concrete path where I had first encountered him, a brown plastic two-litre ice-cream container. It was laden with leftover Keralan chicken curry and rice. The steep-sided receptacle also contained a small amount of sambar complemented by a crushed pappadam. Even with his neck fully extended and standing upright Bronchi would have needed a small crane to get anywhere near the curries and the stale, broken accompaniment.
I asked Amma about it when she got home from school.
‘What?’ she said. ‘He will eat it when he is hungry.’
‘Yes, but how, Amma, how? How is a tortoise supposed to get into an ice-cream container?’
‘Don’t worry. He will eat if he is hungry,’ she said, squinting through her glasses at a pile of test papers. ‘Look at this nonsense. Au is the symbol for gold. There is no such element as Australium!’ She continued crossing and ticking. Then without looking up she added, ‘He is already a good-looking tortoise. How could somebody paint on his shell like that?’
*
A few days later Amma had called me outside to show me the ice-cream container. ‘See?’ she said, pointing down the verandah towards the path. ‘Half eaten. Poor thing was starving.’
Indeed, it looked as if some of the food had been consumed. A drumstick lay on the path, some savage looking gashes exposing grey bone. There were a few salient depressions in the thick bed of rice and curry.
‘Amma, that was probably the neighbour’s dog, or a stray cat. Could have even been a possum.’
‘I told you he would eat if he was hungry.’ She went back into the house. ‘Tonight I can give him yesterday’s chapattis and some vada.’
A few months later Bronchi disappeared. Not having seen my tortoise for a week I searched every inch of the yard, in vain. I also searched the garage though I knew that not even a curry and rice diet would have enabled a tortoise to open a roller door. I tried the yar
d again and discovered a small gap under the back fence. I came to the unwelcome conclusion that Bronchi had moved on. I remember how sadly I trudged to the back door, carefully stepping over the ice-cream container. That day it was half-filled with dhosa, coconut chutney and two intact Arnott’s Yo-Yos. Presumably, Amma had deemed Bronchi’s appetite hearty enough to warrant dessert. I looked for signs of tortoise-sized teeth marks in the savoury pancakes but the dhosas looked as pristine as when Amma had flipped them off the ghee-oiled griddle two nights before.
So, in light of her menu for Bronchi a year ago, it seemed remarkable that today Amma had undertaken research into the most effective way to attract, or rather distract, a mouse. She was spreading the lumpy peanut paste thickly and evenly, right to the corners of the cracker. This was a quality that I admired even if I had tossed ninety percent of my school lunches over fences or into bins. My mother was thorough.
‘If we can divert the mouse for long enough with these nice foods then your father will eventually become interested in some other project. Then everything will return to normal.’ Using the butter knife she carefully broke the cracker into pieces and placed the saucer in its spot near the traps on the pantry floor.
I wasn’t so sure that Acha would forget about the mouse. And what if there were two mice, and they were of opposite sex, and compatible, and they decided to breed? What then? We would live in a house overrun with vermin. I was ashamed enough of my parents and this ugly house in this depressing suburb, without having to cope with that.
That night I lay in bed listening intently for any sound coming from the kitchen. As much as I sympathised with Amma’s cause I hoped for the sound of a snapping mousetrap so that this episode might quickly come to an end.
No snapping came and I soon fell asleep.
*
I woke to the sound of shouting. It was coming from the kitchen. I looked around my room. The blinds were framed with light. The shouting stopped but I could hear Amma and Acha talking. Not looking forward to the gory scene that might await in the pantry I threw off the blankets and stumbled out of my room.
