by Alice Pung
My father wrestled alone with the weight and the depth of his suffering. He knew that no matter how far he travelled or how high he soared, the tragedy of his people was embedded in him. He tried to do what he could for his surviving younger brother when he was released from a re-education camp. But by then they had been cut off from each other for more than ten years. I don’t know what they talked about then but they corresponded regularly for the next thirty years. Perhaps they only wrote about the things that could easily be discussed, while living separately, each to himself.
As Chinese New Year approached, I had an irrational wish to alter what must be. I went about sprucing up the garden and putting up auspicious signs to welcome in the Year of the Rooster. I gathered up all the symbolic ingredients for the big family meal. Moss hair for good fortune, red dates for progeny, gingko nuts for long life.
I placed a quaint porcelain rooster figurine near where my father sat one afternoon.
‘It will give you luck,’ I explained.
He smiled at my antics. ‘You little fool,’ his eyes said.
But he played along and listened to my explanations of the hidden commentaries of the zodiac. When I had finished, he insisted on getting his hair cut to welcome in the new year.
‘That would be too much for you.’
‘Rubbish!’ he snapped, and sweated and gasped for air as he put one foot in front of the other.
It was no use my protesting. He simply had to go there. The whole exercise of getting out of the house to the hairdresser’s took a great deal out of him. When he came back, moisture was glistening all over his brows but his eyes were gleaming. He had retained his dignity.
Then came the slurred speech a few days later. My father said the strangest things, as if he was losing his reason. He alternated between being very talkative and being gloomy. One day he started watching cartoons. At first I thought I was imagining things. But no, he was reverting to his early childhood. My brother, with his medical knowledge, suspected a stroke.
‘Daddy, you have to go to hospital,’ he said very gently. But my father’s face remained blank, unsurprised.
We remained standing around him, full of suspense. I could see it was on his mind as his eyes stayed glued to the television set. After a pause, we heard: ‘Can’t I go tomorrow?’
*
I put the cutting of a branch of red bougainvillea in a glass of water.
‘From the vine you gave me,’ I said
‘How beautiful …’
He closed his eyes. I sat by the bed and watched him sleep. His eyelids kept fluttering open, as if they couldn’t shut properly, and his eyes rolled in all directions. His pain conveyed itself to me. The beam of light that came through the split in the curtain induced me to brood. I was hardly aware when the nurse came in and hooked an oxygen tube around his ears. She told me he was having trouble eating. Towards the end of breakfast he had mistaken the spoon for a straw.
Death was pulling him away.
Suddenly he woke. His mind was full of wandering. He whispered to me, ‘Those two need to be bathed.’ He was referring to my sister’s children. Then he said he needed someone to help put his things away. He thought of other unfinished business. Day and night were getting crushed together. The next day a fever descended on him. It escalated then mercifully subsided. When he had recovered his lucidity, he couldn’t stop crying.
‘I’m bedridden. I can’t walk, bathe or feed myself …’
I didn’t know what to say but felt defiant. ‘You’ll get home,’ I said. ‘We’ll make sure you get home.’ But I knew my father would never return to his Chinese village.
That afternoon he wanted to get a grip on himself, to make use of his hands again. He asked for his shaver. Propped up against two pillows, he carefully went over his cheeks, his chin and his throat. When I handed him the mirror, he began to sob.
He was in two minds; he didn’t see any point in staying, but he didn’t want to go just yet. He told me his brother in China had written to him.
‘He wants to see me,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think it’s necessary.’ Then in the same breath he asked me for pen and paper.
I watched him write his last letter. Knotted frown, shaking hand, all strain and obstinance. His Chinese characters, usually so splendid, were now small and scrawled, as if wrung dry.
He was in a great deal of pain. They gave him morphine. He slept. His hands shook and rattled. Suddenly he opened his eyes.
‘What are you all doing here?’ he said, lowering the air piece around his nose. ‘I’m all right.’
He closed his eyes again, mumbling all the time. We sat on either side of the bed, grasping his hands and feeling his body temperature rising. We put on his favourite music as a last little pleasure. His breathing was heavy but steady. The whole night he roared like a lion. The nurse on duty was drawn to look in.
‘What a strong heart,’ she said, incredulous.
But I saw all the signs. His gums were rotting. Banishing thoughts of decay, I held his hand more tightly. I was hardly aware when the last breaths came – slower, softer, more imperceptible, more delayed.
Then came a pause so long I was unable to bear the weight of the emotion. Suddenly I was terrified. No. Not now! But the screams in my head were drowned out by a howl so beseeching I almost lost my footing. He slouched forward. Then all plunged into silence.
Such tears came to me I could not control myself. I cried like any daughter deeply distressed. But it was more than that. It was the cry of despair that I would no longer be whole again. It was grief, pain and emptiness all rolled into one overwhelming entanglement. Bending over my father’s face I wanted to tell him how much I loved him and how much I needed to do with my life. But nothing was utterable. Nothing at all.
We were busy for the next five days preparing for the funeral. My mind did not have time to wander. There were hundreds of mourners. People had to stand. I shook hands with everyone. Many faces I had almost forgotten. Everyone looked older. I inhaled the smell of flowers and wondered what I would have given to see my father for a moment. People came up to the front to place a carnation on the coffin while my nephew played a piece on his violin. ‘A beautiful service,’ I heard again and again, when the mourners began filing out of the chapel.
We had refreshments of dainty sandwiches back at the house. The place was packed. The pair of silkies wandered around the garden. I was asked questions and I answered each carefully. Everyone was sympathetic. Gentleness itself. When they began leaving, I stole into the toilet to be alone.
We had a private cremation a few days later. I drove early to the house to help out with last-minute things. Dressed in black, my mother was silence itself. Her eyes were swollen from crying.
‘One of the chickens died,’ she said at last, looking up.
‘Died! What happened?’
Apparently it had been weakening over the past few days and my mother had been giving it tablets to fight the infection.
‘When I checked last night it looked so much stronger …’ She stopped to bite back the tears.
The silky was cremated along with my father.
Are You Different?
Mia Francis
My son didn’t come to me in the ‘normal’ way. I collected him fully clothed, toilet-trained and with a blue and white plastic guitar strung around his neck. The orphanage staff had dressed him in his going away ‘trousseau’ – a pair of shorts printed with the familiar face of Bart Simpson, a red and white T-shirt, sneakers and a baseball cap. His face was dusted with some type of white cream or powder. Ricky had lived his first three years and three months of life in a Philippine orphanage and he weighed just under eleven kilos. I picked him from the steps of the grey stone building and carried him like a baby – he was my baby.
We stayed for a short time in a luxurious hotel in metro Manila while we waiting for the official papers to be signed. The staff, who I suspect were not very well paid for the work they did, were curio
us about what was happening to Ricky. A young bell-boy asked where I was taking him. When I told him that we were taking him home to Australia I might just as well have told him that we were taking Ricky on a one-way trip to paradise. ‘Oh, Ricky … Australia … Australia,’ the young man crooned longingly.
When we were preparing to leave the country at Manila airport, my husband and I were quite tense. We were on our own now and we had to get Ricky through all the custom officials and red tape without the support of the Filipino social workers. Finally we did, and it was time to make our way to the plane. That was when Ricky began his goodbyes. My husband was carrying Ricky in his arms and to every Filipino man we passed on the long walk to the plane Ricky called out, using a Filipino term of respect for an elder: ‘Bye, kuya, goodbye … Bye, kuya, goodbye …’ It was like a mantra. At three years of age, he knew what was happening to him, perhaps not entirely at a conscious level but certainly at a spiritual level. Ricky was leaving his country for a long time.
What a relief it was finally to be on board the plane and heading home to Australia. While we were waiting for the plane to take off, a turbaned Indian gentleman walked past my seat. He stopped for a second, stared at me, pointed and said, ‘You … you keep your promise!’ Flashing me a broad toothy smile, he walked on to the back of the plane and I never saw him again.
*
Did I keep my promise?
Ricky is eighteen now and a very fine young person he has grown to be. I have raised him as my own son, my own flesh and blood, but I have raised him as an Australian. That’s not because I didn’t want to honour his Asian heritage, but because if I had tried to raise him in his own culture it would have been a falsehood. It would have been an Australian version of Filipino culture, a little like the Australian version of chop suey. (Anybody raised in the seventies would surely remember their mothers and aunties making this exotic modern dish. It contained a lot of cabbage and mince, but the most important ingredient of all was Maggi spring vegetable dried soup mix. Authentic Chinese cuisine?) To know a culture you have to live it, and we didn’t live in the Philippines – we lived in suburban Adelaide.
Of course, I did tell him about Filipino ways and traditions, took him to Filipino cultural events, and tried to connect with other adoptive families in Australia. But the older Ricky got, the less ‘cool’ cultural events became. I remember one particular Filipino Christmas party where I knew quite a few of the women and greeted them by name. Towards the end of the evening Ricky, who was about twelve at the time, gave me a quizzical look and said, ‘Mum, how do know all their names? How can you tell them apart? I can’t tell one from the other!’
That same evening there was a Filipino family sitting opposite us. One of the older sons had obviously been ordered to attend. He began the evening looking bored, but by the end of the night he was prostrate, his head in his hands, his tie loosened and his suit jacket spread in desperation across the table. He had obviously seen one bamboo dance too many! He was ready for clubbing, not culture.
*
Unfortunately, the world is full of people eager to judge and express what a terrible thing it is to take a child from their culture and country. But tell me, what culture is there in desperate poverty, hunger, sickness and child labour? Ricky’s birth mother made the ultimate sacrifice. She showed the greatest act of love that any mother can show her child. By giving him up for overseas adoption, she knew that he would not die of sickness and hunger and that he would have some kind of chance at life. Once, an acquaintance asked me, ‘When you were adopting, did you not think of all the children in Australia who need homes?’ What narrow lives some people live.
That is not to say that my husband and I did any great heroic act in bringing Ricky to Australia. No, we did not. We wanted a child of our own – nothing more, nothing less. It was March when we arrived home, a beautiful autumn. I had taken Ricky to the park to play and he came to me crying, holding his head, frightened: ‘Untog, untog! [I bumped my head!]’ He had never felt leaves falling on his head before. He was frightened of so many things in those early days: the vacuum cleaner, the dog, the shower, so many things that he had not been exposed to in the orphanage. I remember taking him outside one evening and showing him the moon. I’m sure it was the first time he had ever seen it.
Those early days passed very quickly and for much of that time I would carry Ricky around like a baby. It suited us both that way. My need was as great as his. Before I knew it, it was time for Ricky to go to school. I think that first day was one of the saddest days of my life. I missed him so much. We had only had him for eighteen months and already it was time for him to go out into the world. When Ricky had been at school for about a week he asked me a question I have never forgotten. He was playing outside at the end of the day, riding his bike, when he stopped, looked up at me and said, very quietly, ‘Mum … are you different?’ I looked down at his shiny black head – he seemed to be looking somewhere far into the distance. I don’t remember what I said.
Perhaps further down the track he came to realise that we were both different. We came to live in regional Victoria in a town which at that stage was almost completely mono-cultural. We stood out – fair-haired, light-skinned parents with a dark-skinned Asian child. The school-yard taunts of ‘flat-nose,’ ‘ching-chong Chinaman’ and ‘dirty black nigger’ came and went throughout primary school and I wish I could say that that was where they ended. Ricky never lashed out and usually just said something like ‘whatever’ and walked away. That was until the wrong person said something, on the wrong day, in the wrong way. A person can be called a ‘slit-eye’ or a ‘Japanese fucker’ one too many times. Everyone has a breaking point. So when the year co-ordinator rang to tell me that Ricky had punched a boy and thrown him into a rubbish bin, my first question was, ‘Were there any racist taunts involved?’
Ricky was suspended because the boy had to be taken to hospital, but – funny thing – ever since that day he has not had any more problems of that kind. Ricky has lots of good friends at school. They affectionately call each other ‘nigger’ and ‘bro.’ His best friend is a gentle blond-haired boy called Daniel whom Ricky and other members of ‘the gang’ have given the status of ‘honorary Asian.’
Now it is nearly time for us to make the return journey to Manila. Ricky wants to find his people; he needs to know his roots. Try as I might, I can’t convince Ricky that his family won’t be living in a modern house, wearing Nike sneakers, drinking Coke and watching a plasma colour TV. But I will be a fellow searcher with him on his journey for as long he wants me to be.
The fourteen-and-three-quarter years that Ricky has been with us have passed like a blink of an eye. It seems like yesterday that he came crying to me when the autumn leaves fell on his head. Thank-you, Ricky, for all you have given us, for all you have taught us, and above all, thank-you for being our beautiful son.
The Clan
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Tourism
Benjamin Law
My family isn’t exactly the outdoors type. Despite being raised right on the coastline, Mum detested the beach (all the sand it brought into the house), while Dad actively disapproved of wearing thongs (‘It splits the toes’). We never camped. All those things involved in camping – pitching a tent; cooking on open fires; the insects; shitting in the woods; sleeping on rocks; getting murdered and raped in the middle of nowhere – they never appealed to us. ‘We were never camping people,’ Mum explains now. ‘See, Asians – we’re scared of dying. White people, they like to “live life to the full” and “die happy.’’’ She pauses, before adding, ‘Asians, we’re the opposite.’
We preferred theme parks. For parents raising five children, theme parks made so much sense. They were clean. They were safe. There were clear designated activities, and auditory and visual stimu li that transcended barriers of race, language and age. Also: you could buy heaps of useless shit. This seems to be an exercise in which Asians of all nationalities, ages a
nd socioeconomic backgrounds naturally excel: buying shit. Venture into my childhood home, and in amongst the epic piles of suburban debris, you’ll still find a plush blue whale wearing a Sea world cap, T-shirts emblazoned with Kenny and Belinda – the now defunct Dreamworld mascots – and a pox of hideous fridge magnets. Oh my god, the fridge magnets.
It was family tradition that once a year, our family of seven (eight, including my Ma-Ma) would cram ourselves into my grandmother’s 1990 grey five-seat automatic Honda. Five seats. We’d travel like this – faces smashed against the glass; no leg room; the two smallest children illegally wedged between various legs – for a good three hours before we reached the Gold Coast. By the time we got to the theme park, our limbs were numb, our nerve endings destroyed. On the ride home, exhausted and drained like dead batteries, we’d fall asleep in extreme angles, our spines contorted and twisted. We’d wake up, our shirts covered with drool we weren’t even sure was ours.
On the day of the trip, we’d wake before sunrise to get there by opening time. Despite having endured three hours of vivid pain, we’d feel an overwhelming sense of awe as the Thunderbolt, Dreamworld’s fire-branded rollercoaster, emerged from behind the trees that bordered the highway. It would appear so suddenly, like some strange apparition, or a mirage. Our necks would crane back trying to take in the sheer majesty of it all. For a non-religious family like ours, the experience was borderline spiritual.
