Growing Up Asian in Australia

by Alice Pung

  5.

  You walk through one of the blue doors and are greeted by the familiar aroma of freshly ground coffee. There are men and women dressed up in black business suits. Your mother said she would buy a suit for you after the … or maybe she would put you in the suit you wore to your high school graduation dinner. Remember the speech you made when you won the citizenship award for tutoring kids at the homework centre?

  You were popular in high school. You won a scholarship to a Catholic school. It was a general academic scholarship but you wanted to be an artist. For some reason everyone gravitated towards you. It wasn’t just the Vietnamese kids, even though there were quite a few of them at this school. Maybe Catholics were nicer people because they believed in Jesus and Jesus told them they had to love one another and treat others the way they wanted to be treated. Maybe they were nice to you because you were a foreigner and Jesus was a foreigner too.

  Throughout high school you believed that there were better times ahead. When you were three, a Chinese fortune-teller, your mother’s co-worker at the factory, told you that you were born on the emperor’s right hand and were destined for great things if you made it past your mid-twenties. At the time you had every reason to believe that you would live to at least your seventies. With hindsight, your seventeenth year was the best year of your life. That year you had all the potential in the world. You were on your way to becoming the super Asian that everyone thought you would be and your mother had left the Chinaman stepfather who had spent every cent that either of them made. That year, you met Lita Liu.

  Even now, here in this place, you think about her.

  Lita was spunky. You knew it from the moment you met her in chemistry class. It wasn’t just because she had blonde hair, wore purple contact lenses, listened to the Stone Temple Pilots, smoked pot and headed the drama club. The first thing you said to her was ‘Are you from Singapore?’ and she stopped talking to you for a week. She forgave you and you became friends. You found out she was something crazy like fifth-generation Australian-Chinese. Her ancestors came to the country before they put in laws to stop Chinese people from entering. She said that there must have been some serious in-breeding in her family because after five generations she was still a ‘full blood’ Chinese.

  Lita sat next to you in English and chemistry. She wasn’t at school half the time so you let her copy your notes and helped her catch up with assignments. You didn’t have much to do with her outside the classroom because she was always with the drama kids in the arts centre and you were always goofing around in the common room with Ronald and the boys. You asked her to the school ball but she already had a boyfriend by then. She did however ask you to dance with her at the graduation dinner. She rested her head on your shoulder and you swayed with her for two minutes.

  Lita. It was always about Lita. You were such a fool to believe that she wanted you.

  What would a girl like Lita do with a guy like you?

  6.

  Just when you feel that you are invisible, an overfed child stands in front of you. He reminds you of a Shar Pei dog.

  ‘I would pick the strawberry marshmallow one,’ he says and giggles maniacally as he points to the vending machine behind you.

  There are so many questions you want to ask him because children are purveyors of truth.

  ‘Why are you here, little brother?’

  He throws his head back and continues laughing.

  ‘Do you want me to buy one for you? Do you know the way out of here?’

  The child walks up to the machine and points to the chocolate bar. He tells you to eat it. You sink your teeth into the sweet sponge-like marshmallow and the overfed child continues laughing at you. You expect to grow taller, smaller or fade away, but nothing happens. You reassure yourself that life is, or was, nothing but a series of random events. You follow the child as he toddles away from you, because it’s what people do when they find themselves in this situation. The child predictably disappears into the darkness. Your feet begin to hurt and that feeling returns to your chest. A set of wooden stairs appears before you. It gets easier after the first step.

  7.

  The stairs lead to the kitchen of Happy Emperor Garden. This is where you got your first and last job as a waiter and barman. It’s the busy lunchtime hour but no one is eating. You search for the manager Coco and her boyfriend Jet. You do not recognise anyone in this place, but you are convinced that it is the Happy Emperor because the towel-warmer is in the far left-hand corner of the main dining room and the two goldfish are in the round bowl next to the lobster tank.

  Coco is the daughter of the business migrant who owns this restaurant. Jet is a refugee, just like you. Jet was already twelve years old when he came to Australia, but his mother told the authorities he was only eight. Just like you, Jet was eight years old when he first spoke English. But unlike you, he still sounded like he was from somewhere else and he hated high school because he was bullied mercilessly. You said it happened to you too. It happens to anyone who is different. He said he did not mind being called a ‘gook,’ because he was one, or a ‘Ching Chong China-man,’ because his father was one, but he hated it when the kids called him ‘nigger’ because of his dark skin.

  Later on Jet would join a gang that went out on weekends looking for black people to beat up. He said that if he hadn’t beaten them up, they would have beaten him up. In his neck of the woods, the ‘blacks’ hated the ‘gooks’, the ‘whites’ hated both the ‘blacks’ and the ‘gooks’ and everyone just wanted to be white; except they couldn’t be, so they sometimes ganged up with the ‘blacks’ to beat up the white kids. It was too complex a Venn diagram for you, but then again you played footy.

  Jet told you that when he was sixteen years old, he witnessed a car full of Asian students rear-end a truck. It wasn’t even his problem, but when he saw the truck driver walk up to the students and go on about ‘Fucking Asian drivers’ Jet got out of his car, pulled his knife out and stabbed one of the guys in the stomach. The other guy was too shocked to retaliate. Jet said it sounded like the air was being let out of the guy. Jet had many more stories like this one and you were his adoring audience.

  He treated you like a brother and got you as many shifts as you wanted at the restaurant. You got into the finance and law degree that you were aiming for, but halfway through the finance component you realised there were not enough hours in the day for both work and study. So you cut down on both and picked up an elective from the art department. You were in no rush to be a corporate lawyer or sell bonds on Wall Street.

  One day, in the year after the year you should have graduated from your first degree, your mother told you that Mrs Huynh’s son, not the doctor but the dental surgeon, had purchased his first house. He was still living at home, rent free, so he was able to accumulate rental income until he got married. Your mother said that she wanted Sam to study medicine because there are always sick people in the world to heal. Sam said she would probably end up studying medicine, not because she wanted to but because she could and also, she was sick of living in a small apartment where you could smell the cigarette smoke from the next apartment.

  You told Jet about wanting to be an artist but needing a real job so that you can move everyone away from the small apartment with paper-thin walls. Jet encouraged you to finish your degree and said that you had all the time in the world to draw pictures later on. You asked him for more shifts and he said that he could get you some work from his other boss – tax-free of course.

  So your pay cheque at the restaurant increased even though you were working fewer shifts. Jet started taking you out to meet his friends. He called you his little brother and you called him big brother. Soon his friends were calling you little brother as well. You played cards with them, went fishing with them and you helped them get their ‘goods’ out into the community. You continued with your studies and you were able to give your mother half your pay cheque every week. She asked you once where you got the money
from and you told her that you had sold one of your paintings.

  That was then. This is now. It’s time to move on. You cannot wallow in these memories forever.

  Lita.

  She came into the restaurant one lunchtime with a friend of hers. You recognised her straight away even though it had been years since you left school. Both she and her friend were dressed in black suits. Her friend looked like a librarian but Lita looked as if she had stepped off the catwalk.

  ‘It’s been too long,’ she said when you showed her to her table.

  You had no idea you were so close. ‘The deep fried dishes are just a gimmick to get white people into the restaurants. No Chinese person who knows anything about food would eat the fried stuff,’ she pointed out to her friend.

  She returned to the restaurant the next day, and the one after and the one after that.

  On the fifth visit, you offered her complimentary tea.

  On the sixth, you asked her where she worked.

  On the seventh, you summoned up to courage to ask her for her number.

  Jet teased you mercilessly.

  ‘Fine wine, oysters and a dozen red roses,’ he said, ‘That’s how I won Coco over.’

  You knew that Lita was nothing like Coco. Coco was someone who thought the Stone Temple Pilots were a Buddhist cult. Coco had chemically bonded hair.

  You did not tell Jet that you had never asked anyone out before.

  You must have caught up with Lita half-a-dozen times over a month or two. You were not sure whether or not you were dating, seeing each other or just friends catching up. You found out that she was interested in your life, or rather the life you barely remembered, back in Vietnam. She was doing Asian studies at university and had already finished an accounting degree. She took on the second degree to learn an Asian language. She started with Indonesian, moved onto Chinese and was now in her second year of a Japanese course. She said she enjoyed exploring her cultural roots.

  You asked her if she enjoyed her field. She said she enjoyed the pay.

  You said you were supposed to be in finance or something related to that, but you wanted to be a painter after you finished university.

  She was impressed and asked if you had a girlfriend.

  You still had not bought her any flowers.

  Jet kept reminding you to keep it cool because there was nothing more appealing to a girl than an aloof and disinterested man. He had even worked out an exponential equation for this phenomenon.

  But you couldn’t play it cool.

  When you found out that she had been saving up to buy the Shisheido lipgloss range if it was ever released in Australia, you immediately ordered it for her on the company’s Japanese website. You gave her your new mobile phone, when you saw that hers was the size of a brick. On a walk through the CBD, she pointed to the second balcony of an office building and professed her love of the pink roses that hung from the wrought-iron balustrade. That night, you climbed up there and clipped all the rose buds for her.

  How could Lita not have known you were in love with her?

  8.

  The tramp finds you standing by the empty fish-tank.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks, as if you knew where you were supposed to be.

  You look at your now limp cigarette.

  ‘There’s not much time left,’ he says, ‘I was told to keep an eye on you but you ran off.

  We have to get back.’

  He ushers you out onto the bustling street.

  ‘Back where?’ you ask.

  The people here walk with a purpose and everyone is where they should be.

  The tramp, now dressed in a crisp pale blue shirt and beige trousers, hails you a cab.

  ‘You were supposed to wait in that room until I got the go-ahead to show you,’ he says.

  ‘Show me what?’

  ‘You’re not supposed to be by yourself at this time. There’s too much here for anyone to process alone. The laundry woman has been here as long as I have but she hasn’t quite figured out what’s happened. The old man who was sitting next to you in the waiting room thinks he’s back at the hospital even though his children showed him his coffin ten minutes before he arrived here.’

  He bundles you into the taxi.

  ‘We need to hurry. The flight is at 8:52, terminal two. You’ll need some money for the rooftop swimming pool.’

  ‘I was here wasn’t I?’ you ask. ‘These are the last …’

  He pushes you into the taxi before jumping in himself.

  You know the rest of your story.

  From the taxi you see ordinary people walking, talking, shopping. You see traffic lights, department stores, corner stores, monorails and small patches of grass. There is life on every square inch of this concrete jungle.

  ‘They can’t see us, you know,’ he says. ‘This was before and there’s nothing you can change about it.’

  9.

  The idea to leave the country was Jet’s. He saw how miserable you were after it happened. You didn’t tell him the whole story, but Jet understood. ‘You can’t trust the banana girls,’ he said.

  He was right. Did you misread the signs?

  After all she was the one who asked you out that night to see a movie at the outdoor cinema, an Italian film about a group of twenty-something misfits. She was the one who leant against your shoulder and reached for your hand. Afterwards, she suggested a moonlight walk on the beach and it was there that you told her you had been in love with her since high school.

  She kissed you and you kissed back.

  In that moment you believed that you had reached an epiphany, a turning point, enlightenment, nirvana. You wondered how many other lips she had kissed.

  She dropped you back home. You said you would call her and you did. You called her first thing in the morning and left a sheepish message about how much you had enjoyed yourself last night. Maybe you could do it again soon. No you didn’t mean do it. You called again to apologise for leaving such a clumsy message. You said you were busy with other things anyway so you had no time to meet up this week, but your phone was on 24/7 only because you were waiting for another call. You texted, just in case she ran out of calling credit, but she did not respond. You emailed her. She did not reply.

  Jet knew what was happening. It happened to him once before except it was a Dutch girl. She wasn’t really Dutch but her grandparents were born there. You told him it wasn’t like that. Lita was just a friend and one thing lead to another. Anyway, Lita was Asian.

  Jet didn’t want to break the news to you, but he knew the type. Lita was the sort of girl who felt she was too good for her own kind.

  You didn’t believe him the first week, or the second. But he was right. She finally replied to one of your emails and apologised for her behaviour. She said that she loved you – but only as a brother and had confused these feelings with love. It was so obvious, really, because you looked exactly like her cousin. She added, by the way, she had started seeing someone from work and perhaps you could all meet up. He was a corporate lawyer, but like you had an interest in art.

  You cried, you slept and your body started aching. You started sleeping in until lunchtime. You were a fool to think that a refugee boy like you could have had a girl like Lita.

  You would have slept forever if it were not for Jet. He was sick of seeing you walking around like an empty shell.

  Nothing Jet said made you feel any better. He said that girls were all the same. They rip your heart out and feed it to the dogs. He had his heart broken when he was your age and vowed never to love again. Jet knew how you were feeling, but you were no good to him at the restaurant and the brothers were getting a bit sick of your self-indulgence.

  Then he offered you an escape. He had some overseas business to attend to but was too busy with the restaurant. He wanted to spend more time with Coco because he wasn’t getting any younger. He said it was a safe job and that the brothers would take care of all expenses. You could even chec
k into one of the expensive hotels near the four floors of whores. It was the perfect chance for you to forget about Lita. The world was full of girls who looked like Lita. All you had to do was pick up a little parcel from the rooftop swimming pool at the airport on your return trip.

  You spent your first day in a cinema complex as you tried to escape the damp heat that slowed your brain. You ordered room-service breakfast but ate lunch and dinner at the hawker stalls. You tried to order something different every day because you were not sure when you’d eat such good food again. You discovered that you had a penchant for dhosas, hot chicken porridge and green coconut juice. You thought about Lita and even sent her a postcard.

  Your last moments of freedom are a blur to you now. You called Sam before you went to meet the man on the rooftop pool. The man was wearing lime-green shorts as Jet said he would be. He discreetly left you the key to his locker, where you found a package that you quickly shoved into your backpack. You wanted to swim but there was so little time, so you smoked an extra-long duty-free cigarette by the pool before an attendant told you to go to the viewing deck. You were on that deck for so long that you had to run to catch your plane. As you rushed through the gates, the alarms went off. They searched your body only to find an imitation Rolex. Then they insisted they search all your bags. It must have been the Cheshire cat. When they found Jet’s special package, you banged your head against the wall in hope that your skull would split open and your brain splatter across the interview room. You knew that there would be no second chances. There was nothing special about you. You were so unremarkable.

  Sam was going to pick you up at the airport, but the next time you would see her was behind Perspex glass. You never held her hand again.