Miss Ex-Yugoslavia
Page 15
With our boundless enthusiasm, our description of its roominess, the gorgeous yard, and the bargain price, we managed to convince Dad, and that afternoon, my parents contacted the real estate agent and put in their offer for the house. A few days later, the paperwork was done, and our family had a house and a mortgage. The stars had aligned, and the dream sketches in my diary became a reality. We had a proper house and a dog. And even more exciting, the house was just within the McKinnon High School zone, which meant that in a few months, I’d be going there with my friend Alicia, who was also in the zone. For once I wouldn’t be friendless at a new school.
• • •
In my excitement about high school, the world news eventually became something I could tune out. The war, it seemed, would go on forever; for all the protesting my parents’ friends were doing back in Belgrade, and for all the debates and discussions that kept going, it would never stop. The radio switching on in the morning became like a distracting soundtrack in the background, a niggling in the back of my mind, the words going in one ear and out the other on purpose. I repressed the war, and in some ways it worked. This was just another thing my parents were into—like playing cards, or going to the hardware store—that didn’t concern me, I told myself. I was about to enter a new phase of my life: being a suburban teenager. I couldn’t think of anything more wonderfully normal. And it was, until it became a nightmare.
6
The Tempest
When I was twelve, a week before I was to start high school, we came home from buying my school supplies to discover that Dante (now a fully grown but still very small dog) had pulled down the new living room curtains and shredded them into ribbons, in protest for being left alone. Dad chased him down and kicked him, and in unison with our little dog, my mother, sister, and I yelped. Dad’s anger wasn’t a surprise—both my parents had tempers—but it was usually confined to yelling (at each other, and less frequently, at us). So my heart started beating rapidly as we watched Dante run behind the couch because Dad had booted him, as my mother shouted, “You could have broken his ribs!” While we crowded around Dante, Dad shouted about the price of the curtains, how we weren’t rich, how this dog was ruining his home, and as he shouted, he stalked up and down the room. As this scene was unfolding, I kept thinking about more pleasant ones instead, like how Dad would pick Dante up and lift him into the air saying, “Look, it’s Laika, the first dog in space!” And undaunted by the great height, Dante would wag his shoelace-thin tail.
When we looked back on it later, we realized that kicking our little dog in the ribs wasn’t the first out-of-character thing we had witnessed Dad do. He had been rude to our family friend Lina at her own birthday party a week before. She’d made a dumb comment, and Dad had called her a moron. My parents called people morons all the time, so the sentiment wasn’t unusual, but they did it behind people’s backs, and this was said point-blank with venom. My mother apologized to the hosts, saying that Dad had had too much to drink (though actually, he’d only had one beer), while Dad, Natalija, and I waited in the car. Something was up with Dad, but I didn’t think much of it at the time.
• • •
On the first day of high school, Alicia and I stood around the front entrance in our ugly new uniforms, big blue dresses that belonged not to 1995 but to the olden days, when women wore belted frocks, long socks, and shiny black shoes. That first morning, we tried to contain our excitement, looking furtively at the other students entering the school grounds, the older kids with their navy school sweaters stretched painfully into a grunge aesthetic, some of them sticking their thumbs through a hole they’d poked in the cuff. Watching those cool students, I thought of when Grandma Xenia and I once walked past a guy wearing a massive nineties sweater, the sleeves of which hung past his hands, and she said without a trace of irony, “Look at that poor young man, he’s lost his hands. Maybe he was a soldier.”
Alicia and I stared at certain girls who exuded style despite having the exact same uniforms as we did, and breathlessly muttered “he’s hot” as we ogled teenaged boys in gray shorts and white shirts and tried to keep our hormones in check. Alicia was still slight, athletic, period-less, a better match than I was for the boys who hadn’t had their growth spurts yet, and every now and then they looked over in her direction. She shrugged like she didn’t care but still got me to check her braces for any stray bits of food.
I overheard some kids making fun of a boy called Al Chan because he shared a bedroom with his grandma and the floors in his house were falling apart. “Your family is so povo,” a boy said, and I thought about what my dad (who hated it when people said “seeya” instead of “see you”) would think of that butchering of the English language. I imagined him correcting the bullies: “You should say, ‘Your family is so impoverished.’ ”
What would these high school kids think of my place? My mother loved contemporary art, and some of the paintings on our walls were disturbing, like the one of headless naked corpses flying through the air, their legs akimbo and assholes and penises on display, or that topless portrait of my aunt a Belgrade artist had done when she was in college. Also, my mother continued to smoke inside, despite the fact that I’d recently been bombarding her with literature on lung cancer. But while in primary school I was embarrassed my mother didn’t watch morning television shows like other kids’ moms, I was now proud that both my parents worked. In Belgrade, my friends’ moms had jobs, and I started saying things like, “Why do so many women in Australia stay home, and men get to work?” to my Australian friends.
There were parts of my culture that I was proud of, thanks to my parents. In response to people talking to them like they were children because they had accents, my parents would say later, “These dumb Aussies don’t even speak any other languages,” or “What a pathetic schooling system, you don’t even read the classics! Back in Yugoslavia, War and Peace was required reading for students aged fourteen!” So, whenever I felt small at an all-Aussie gathering, I secretly repeated the things my parents said, to make myself feel big again. I kept War and Peace on my shelf, ready to read it as soon as I turned fourteen, so I could feel privately better than Aussies. Despite all this, on the first day of school, I didn’t want to be lumped in with Al Chan for having a “weird” house, and be labeled a freak like a boy called Gary (who didn’t get his McKinnon uniform in time and showed up in a purple sweat suit, destined to be called Grimace, after the McDonald’s character, forever more).
I wished our house was tidy, and that we had “shopping days” like my friends did, when the whole family went to the supermarket for the week’s groceries, instead of running to get stuff at the last minute. I wanted our family to have a “pizza night” or “Chinese night” or designate one night a week when Natalija and I would commandeer the kitchen and make some adorable meal that our parents would lovingly eat, even though it was a bit gross. I wanted to be like a kid on television shows, and I resented my parents for not wanting the same. Basically, I wanted a G-rated home life, while in reality—with the coarse language, adult themes, and the violent war content my parents were obsessed with—it was more likely rated R.
“Why does your mom just honk when she comes to pick you up, instead of coming in and talking to my mom? It’s rude,” my friend Cara once said in primary school. When I repeated this to my mother, she said, “I work all day, I don’t have time. And even if I did, I don’t give a fuck about talking to Cara’s boring mother.” I considered translating and passing this on to Cara (minus the cursing which sounded worse in English than it did in Serbian) and then decided against it. Though I was slightly thrilled by my mother’s audacity, I was also embarrassed by her attitude.
High school was my chance to reinvent myself. I knew I had a foreign name and that I was never going to pass as an Aussie kid. But I was determined to do well in school so I could become something—a writer or a director, or an actor. Never again would I be that foreign girl who cried endlessly in class. I was re
ading Lord of the Flies, which was the prescribed text for year ten students, even though I was only in year seven. Like my dad, I wrote little notes in the margin in faint pencil. I was excited to form my own small opinions, feeling my confidence rise, as I annotated the book with my observations.
When we were assigned classes, I was separated from Alicia. Alicia had always been able to gather crowds around her through primary school, where she was the boss of games like “Goblins and Girls,” and the orchestrator of themed parties that the whole school talked about for months. Now she would walk right into a new classroom and command it, and my plan to ride in the slipstream of her cool was thwarted. Fighting panic, I went to my new class and sat down next to a girl with silky hair and dark eyeliner, hoping she might take me under her wing. She introduced herself:
“My name’s Toto, and if you make fun of my name, I’ll bash the shit out of you.”
If anyone gave her shit, she continued, her older brother and his Italian friends would also bash the shit out of them. I was magnetized by her attitude, the relaxed way she threw around threats and curses, and I was suddenly eager to introduce “shit” into my vocabulary though I had avoided it until now because it was against school rules. What a baby I had been, following school rules! Why did I think cursing was only acceptable in Serbian and that English was too pristine? Yes, I decided, “shit” will be replacing my current repertoire of “shivers” and “fudge.” Of course, I would also have to learn to apply makeup, pronto, if I wanted to ooze Toto’s level of cool.
On that first day, our English teacher, Mrs. Reynolds, made us introduce ourselves with our name and an alliterative descriptor—“Awesome Adam,” “Truthful Tien,” “Radical Regina,” and so on. In all my excitement, and thrilled by Toto, the only adjectives I could think of that started with “S” were “Sexy,” and “Shit-hot,” words that would have put me squarely in creep territory. Lucky for me, I was given a bit more time to think because a boy with a rat’s tail haircut had somehow missed the rules of the game (even after half the class had done it) and introduced himself, in a breaking voice as, “um . . . I dunno, Funny Alex.” The classroom burst into hysterics, and I laughed the loudest. Exchanging elated looks with my new classmates, I dreamed about the jokes we’d share in the years to come. When it was my turn, I slipped in a cool “Scintillating Sofija,” to which Mrs. Reynolds said “good word,” and I shrugged modestly.
Mrs. Reynolds asked us to take out our assigned reading materials. As I privately rejoiced that we were getting into books already, Toto muttered “boring” under her breath. Just as I was glancing around the room to pick out who was going to be my best friend—probably the beautiful Asian girl whose copy of Goodnight Mister Tom was already well thumbed and full of notes—there was a knock at the door and an elderly teacher with a silver bob walked in. “I’m here to pick up the English as a second language students. John? Irena? Sofija?” John and Irena stood up. In shock, I sat there for a few seconds, then I stood up too, dazed.
Before I knew it, I was trudging along behind Mrs. Anderson next to Nigerian John and Russian Irena, feeling nauseous. At the end of last year I’d been told that I’d placed out of ESL. To my delight, they said I was the best English student in the regular English class. One of the reasons I’d studied English so fiercely was precisely so I didn’t have to stand dumbly, like some kid fresh from overseas, crying like the baby I used to be. And today especially, I had planned to dazzle Mrs. Reynolds, casually mentioning I’d been reading Lord of the Flies. I was going to stake my claim fast, establish my position as top student, and become the queen of English. How could I accomplish any of that from a stupid ESL class?
In Mrs. Anderson’s classroom, we took our seats among other ethnic kids who had been plucked from regular English classes. She asked us a question and then said slowly, “If you understand, please put your hand in the air.” Everyone raised a hand, except for Anastasia, a newly arrived Russian whose perfume enveloped us all. Irena whispered to her, and Anastasia put her hand in the air, giggling.
I kept my hand up.
“I will have you know,” I said, formally, intending to wow Mrs. Anderson with my articulate English, to give a speech that would put her back in her place, get an apology out of her for dragging me to this class. Then I felt tears rise to my eyes. “I will have you know that I have been reading Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, which is a year ten text!” I squawked, trying to steady my voice, blink away the tears. “I shouldn’t be here!” I said, and then the sobs burst forth, the tears, all the exposure I thought I’d left behind in primary school. The whole class was looking at me.
Mrs. Anderson suggested I might like to go to the bathroom, and miserably, I complied, remembering the other time I’d run to the restroom distraught, back in French kindergarten, just before my heart was broken for the first time. Now, I watched my puffy, snotty, heaving face in the mirror, gasping “why” dramatically in Serbian to myself like I was a young child again, as my already large nose became larger, my small eyes ever smaller. When I returned to class feeling defeated, looking like an ESL Elephant Man, all the students were writing quietly in their notebooks, under the title “About Me,” except for one boy, who I noticed was drawing a large, detailed penis, complete with pubic hair and elaborate shading.
I was about to take my seat among the other foreigners when Mrs. Anderson said: “You can go back to regular English class.” Even though it had been not through an eloquent speech but an infantile breakdown, I had gotten what I wanted. I slipped back into class next to Toto, muttering, “That teacher just made a shitty mistake taking me to the wrong class, and then I had a hay fever attack!”
• • •
Though I’d managed to extricate myself from the ESL crowd at school, there were lots of new ex-Yugo kids popping into my social life (which, at thirteen, still involved trudging along to family friends’ places with my parents) as the diaspora continued to grow. Most of these ex-Yugo kids lived even farther from the city than us: in the outer suburbs, hanging around Dandenong Market, or smoking cigarettes in the parking lot behind the Serbian church in St. Albans. The new ex-Yugos didn’t come here on professional visas, like my family had, but on refugee visas from Bosnia, escaping conflict. Some of them had spent time in refugee camps, had temporarily lived in Austria or Germany before making their way here. I was glad these kids weren’t at my school, where I’d have to babysit them. I didn’t want to be the translator, the “local” showing new arrivals around. I felt I finally had the things I wanted: a house, a dog, and the academic, social, and romantic possibilities of high school life. I wanted for once to be an insider, and, though I’d never say it out loud, I didn’t want some refugee kids with facial tics ruining that for me.
I was, of course, still not going to be mistaken for a straight-up Aussie. Even among us immigrants at school, it seemed there were a bunch of different ways to “be ethnic.” Some kids in my school were what I considered “extreme” ethnics: like Irena and Anastasia, the Russian kids who had recently emigrated, and spoke Russian to each other all day. They had their own fashion sensibility. While the rest of us were embracing the ripped jeans and big sweaters of grunge when we were out of school uniform, they would wear tight pants and grow their nails really long, manicure them beautifully, and then pierce them with a diamond stud that dangled off the fingernail. They listened to music from Russia, and they had Russian boyfriends who didn’t go to our school.
Then there were the kids who formed “Aussie-ethnic” cliques, like “the Greeks,” for example. These were kids who were born here, to immigrant parents, and had formed a whole new cultural group specific to their idiosyncratic circumstances. Some of these kids had never been back to the “mother country,” but they still identified with their roots, or at least identified with others who were second-generation immigrants with the same backgrounds. They spoke their own versions of English, with their own slang, and their own peculiar accents. They knew no other h
ome apart from Australia, but within Australia, they were part of a proud minority. A local gang would tag “3166 wogs” on the train stations, combining the postal code of their neighborhood with the derogatory term they’d reclaimed—they called themselves the Oakleigh Wogs.
“Wogs rule, Skips pull” they would write inside the train carriages. “Skip” or “Skippy” was an attempt at a disparaging term for white Anglo Aussies, appropriated from the long-running TV show Skippy the Kangaroo, while “pull” was a reference to masturbation. To me, the Oakleigh Wogs seemed a bit like Robin Hood, or the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, who went against the establishment, who wore their underdog status proudly. I liked that they were saying “fuck you” to the powers that be, and I imagined incensed Aussie train employees scrubbing the graffiti, while the wogs on the train, me included, smiled just a little to ourselves.
Of course, I identified with immigrants more than I did with Aussies. Privately, my heart went out to the ESL kids—because I was really one of them. They’d never mentioned my tearful outburst, even though it had been predicated on the disgust I felt at being slotted into an inferior class (in both senses of the term) with them, and I felt embarrassed. But still, I wanted to cut ties with my blood; I wanted to shed my national identity and live the unencumbered life of a “Kylie” or a “Samantha” who didn’t have to subject herself to all sorts of associations she had no control over every time she introduced herself. I didn’t enjoy having to link myself to Serbia every time I made a new acquaintance and I thought, All my friends in Serbia don’t have to talk about being Serbian every day, they’re not “the Serbian girl in class 7F,” they’re just normal.