Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

  The swings, perhaps? But I refused to move. I pointed indoors. I went indoors and stayed in there for the rest of my photographs. I stayed there for the rest of the day, doing the only thing possible for me to do standing up.

  When the photos were developed, my parents proudly proclaimed, “Ah, look! We have an artist in the family!” My kindergarten album was filled with pictures of me standing next to the easel in a Raggedy-Ann smock, smiling at my own ingeniousness.

  That night, in my grandmother’s queen-sized bed, she quietly asked me, “Do you know how to tell the teacher you need to go to the toilet?”

  I nodded. I did.

  “Then why didn’t you tell the teacher?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. But I did know. Fear.

  There was silence. I thought my grandmother was asleep. I stared at the gold ring on her hand that was around my shoulder. Then, just as I was about to drift off to sleep too, she suddenly asked, “Have you gone to the potty yet?” My grandmother kept a little tin pot in the corner of the room for both of us to use.

  “I don’t need to go.”

  She made me go anyway.

  When I came back, she waited until I had snuggled into my characteristic cocoon-shape before she spoke.

  “In the past in the Golden Towers,” my grandmother began, and I knew she was going to tell me about the other country where everybody lived a life before me. All her stories began with things in the past, in Long Mountain, China, or Cambodia, the Golden Towers. “In the past,” she said, “when your father was small, we had a mattress, one and a half metres wide, two metres long. Your First Uncle, your Second Uncle, your Third Uncle, your Fourth Uncle and your father – all very small then – all crammed onto the mattress with me. In the middle of the night one by one they would go shhhhhhhhhhhhhh” – she paused for the cocoon to giggle – “and I would wake up with my clothes dripping wet. The mattress would be soaked too, with that slightly minty smell of urine.” So that was how she could detect piss from metres away. She told me that she was glad I didn’t have a night-time bladder. But she made me promise to learn that dreaded foreign sentence so that I would be able to make some friends. Before I drifted off to sleep, I wondered doubtfully whether my “escoose mi plis I nid to go to da toylit” outburst would persuade the other kids to share their Play-Doh with me.

  It was not the last time I would refuse to speak, and my pants were filled on a number of later occasions. After the first time, I knew not to tell. My grandmother always found out anyway. It was not the end of the Mao suit, either. In Grade Two, when we studied Australian History, the teachers decided to have a colonial dress-up parade. That morning I rummaged through our wardrobe for a dress long enough to reach my ankles. The wardrobe had been kindly donated by the good St Laurence. My parents had vowed to pay alms to His Brotherhood one day, when they had enough money. But I knew that as kind as the Christians were, there was no chance that this cupboard would contain an ankle-length dress for me. My mother stood behind me watching the futile search. The Mao suit came out.

  *

  “Why are you wearing your pyjamas, Alice?” toffee-scented, doe-eyed, dimple-faced Kylie asked me. Loud enough for the other girls lining up in swirly floor-length dresses to hear.

  Miss Higgins was cutting out crepe-paper aprons for all the girls. I had lined up too. I was the only girl in the line wearing pants. When it was my turn, Miss Higgins looked me up and down. Then came the inevitable words: “No, Alice, I don’t think you need one.”

  The parade was due to begin in half an hour. I would be the only girl without a dress, without an apron! I needed that apron. I needed it to cover my pyjama bottoms. What would I do without it? I had no choice. Miss Higgins was getting impatient, the girls behind were getting impatient because I would not get out of the way. I had to ask. But what if she refused me again, as she refused the apron? Yet I knew I had to ask, and there was no getting out of it.

  “Excuse me, Miss Higgins.” My voice sounded small and ridiculous, like a cannon firing rubber squeaky toys. Yet I had promised my grandmother again and again that I would do it. And I had failed her every time. Instead of bringing home friends, I brought home soiled washing. Now was my chance to make her proud.

  Miss Higgins looked expectantly at me.

  “Please, Miss Higgins, I need to go to the toilet.”

  “QUICK, it’s getting away!” My eyes followed the moving speck. My forefinger pressed down. The enemy was wounded, then pulverised.

  “Look, here’s another one!” Outside Ma yelled. “Quick, press it! Press it till it pops!” Her fingertip transferred the tiny dot from the wooden comb onto the Target clothing ad. It crawled across the remains of old allies – casualties of the war raging in the dense jungle on my head.

  Crushed, it left a skid mark on the page like the flicker of a red biro, in the exact spot where the Model Child with the marble-eyes and $12.99 frock had her nostrils upturned. “Look, Ma, I’ve given her a blood nose!”

  “That’s disgusting, stop mucking around.” Outside Ma ran the fine-toothed comb through my hair, twenty strands at a time. “Keep your head still.”

  I was at Outside Ma’s house because no other relative would have me over because of my nits. Outside Ma was my mother’s mother. Outside Ma did not ask me whether the kids at school were still playing with me. She did not ask whether I was being teased. Outside Ma’s questions mostly revolved around bodily functions – “Is your stomach full yet?” “Are your hands and feet cold?” “Is your head itchy?” “Is your nose blocked?” Then she would set about relieving our ailments. Food for the tummy, socks for the feet, gloves for the hands, a fine-toothed nit comb for the hair, and mouth for the nose. I always avoided the last remedy. When my brother Alexander was a baby and had congested nasal passages, I watched Outside Ma suck the snot from his nose with her mouth and spit it into the sink. “That’s disgusting!”

  “He’s only a little baby,” Outside Ma muttered. “How do you expect a little baby to blow his nose? He hasn’t learned to yet, so I do it for him.”

  “Aaarghhh! That’s sick!” I cried, fleeing from her.

  *

  When the immigration papers were finally processed, my other set of grandparents had arrived at Melbourne airport in their homemade cotton Mao suits of dark blue and earth-brown. My Outside Grandparents.

  My mother recognised them immediately as they came out of the airport terminal. “Ay, ay! It’s Ma!” she cried. “It’s Pa!” She stood there, face to face with her parents. She touched her father on the sleeve. “New travelling clothes!”

  “Your mother made them just before we left,” my outside grandfather said, grinning his toothless grin.

  “You should see the clothes that you will get here!”

  “YiMui,” my outside grandmother said to her second daughter, “you’ve grown fatter.” My mother was a couple of months pregnant with my brother Alexander, and still only forty-seven kilos.

  “I’m having a baby, remember?”

  “Where is our first baby grandchild?” demanded my outside grandmother. Then they saw me.

  “Wah! That’s not a baby!” exclaimed my outside grandfather.

  “How old is she now?”

  “Almost three.”

  “So big!”

  I was just festively plump.

  “This is your Outside Grandmother,” my mother instructed me. Outside because my mother had married into my dad’s family.

  “How are you, Outside Ma?”

  “Wah, how clever!”

  Funny how adults found certain things clever. Carefully peeling gum from the bottom of the plastic airport-lounge chairs and popping it in my mouth wasn’t clever, but repeating four stupid words was.

  That day, all my grandparents could do was look – wah, lights at the airport in the daytime were so bright, how did they get them to be so bright? Amazing. And faces were so fat! They had never seen a bunch of more beautiful people in their lives. They took it a
ll in with their wide-open eyes, and ignored the white ghosts floating in their peripheral vision. These people in front of them were the people who mattered, these faces were the faces of the family.

  My mother could not stop her hands from moving. She pointed, she jabbed, she spoke at a hundred miles an hour. How happy they all were, and how happy my mother was to see her parents. Everything was so bright and big to my outside grandparents, how much she would have to teach them. Supermarkets. Moving stairs in glass buildings taller than anything imaginable. Hospitals where it was all white inside and like those hotels for Westerners back in the old country. She would show them how they would get a house here even bigger than any of the houses in which they had ever lived in Vietnam or Cambodia. How the government would give them money. “Every Thursday,” my grandpa would later hoot almost with tears in his eyes because of bewilderment at the generous whims of the government. “The government gives me money and not only that, when I am standing at the counter, they say ‘thank you’ to me, a useless old man!”

  But Grandpa proved to be far from useless. When he and my grandma moved to their own house in Springvale, Grandpa turned his whole suburban back lawn into a ploughed field of brown parallel lines. He dug deep complicated irrigation channels and collected rainwater in big barrels. And in his field he planted Chinese vegetables, flying dragon plants, four types of hot basil, turnips, melons, potatoes, chives, cumquat, plum and lemon trees. At eighty-four he got up at six every morning to water his plants and plough his field, with the bottoms of his homemade polyester-blue pyjama pants rolled up. Meanwhile, Outside Ma continued to sew her Mao suits, right down to the cloth-covered buttons. She even made underwear, with a little pocket on the back just like jeans. They did not trust banks to stay solvent, even during peacetime, so they buried their money in Nescafé jars all over the backyard.

  *

  I was glad that Outside Ma did not ask me why I had chosen to come to her house that day. I was glad she did not ask why we didn’t come over to her house more often. I was glad that she did not ask any of these questions, because then I might have had to tell her the ugly truth: that Alexander and I were there only because no one else wanted us.

  *

  “We’re going to William and Joanne’s house!” my five-year-old brother squealed, excited to the point of near-incontinence. After much begging and pleading we had finally been allowed to spend the afternoon at Aunt Meili’s. Aunt Meili was my parents’ family friend and she lived in a big birthday-cake of a house in Keilor, with an unused dishwasher (“to save water”), plastic coverings on the dining table (“to save table”) and a gold lion statue in the hallway near the front door (“to save money”).

  My mother stalled our Toyota in the street, noticing that Aunt Meili’s silver Volvo with the numberplate “WANG88” (the eighty-eight for good luck) was not in the driveway. “Aunt Meili is not home,” she said slowly. “I’ll take you to your Outside Ma’s.”

  “Just because the Wang Car is not home doesn’t mean that William and Joanne aren’t home!” pleaded Alexander. “Let’s ring the doorbell and see!”

  Thirteen-year-old Joanne opened the door. “Oh,” she said.

  “I am just leaving them here to play,” said my mother. “You know how they plead and clamour!”

  “Oh,” said Joanne, “oh. Okay.” She let us in but, strangely, turned and walked away down the hall, back into her room. We heard her door slam. We stood there like sticks. We did not know what to do. Finally, Alexander and I walked into the lounge room and sat on the sofa. We waited for William. We waited. And waited. And waited. Joanne peered in through the sliding glass door. “Where’s William?” I summoned up the courage to ask.

  “He’s in his room,” Joanne told us. It was clear that he did not intend to come out. I felt heavy. I slunk back. “Hey, don’t lean on the sofa!” Joanne scowled. I forced myself to sit up straighter so that my back didn’t touch the leather, and so did Alexander.

  Suddenly and unexpectedly, William emerged. Woohoo, I thought, saved! I wanted to clap. William would relieve the boredom! He came towards us. I was just about ready to offer him a standing ovation when he reached past me to grab his transformer toy from the sofa. “Hey, get the clothes off the sofa too!” commanded Joanne. William pushed the half-folded fresh laundry on the sofa into a basket, disappeared into his mother’s bedroom with the basket, and then went back into his own room with the transformer, the door slamming behind him. Satisfied, Joanne retreated to her room.

  Suddenly I knew. It was the nits. Somehow they had found out that we had nits. Occasionally a head emerged from the white blanks of their doorways to check up on us, accompanied by an order – “Don’t lie your head on the armrest!” or “Don’t sit like that!”

  Defeated, Alexander and I knew there was no way to remain on the sofa and not offend our precocious prison wardens, so we slid ourselves onto the floor. There was nothing for us to do. I ran my fingers through the dark pink carpet with the patterned rivulets running through it like scars and wondered what Joanne and William were doing in the lolly-coloured depths of their rooms. The Venetian blinds were drawn, and the entire lounge room was haunted by pinky-purple shadows.

  Wish I had my book, I thought. During our epoch on the floor, my brother and I did not speak to each other. “Let’s lie on the floor and spread our army over their perfect carpet!” I wanted to tell him. “Come on, come on, I command you to do it!” I imagined a whole army emerging from the guerrilla turf of our black heads, spreading across the veins of the carpet like little white ants, to conquer this new territory. Two by two, ten by ten, three thousand by three thousand they would march, invigorated by the generous sustenance bequeathed them by my personal Blood Bank, and they would spread to every terrain in this Brave New World where everything was pale-pink.

  Eons passed with each eye-blink, and we weren’t killing time – the time was killing us. When we finally heard the sound of the doorbell, we were off the floor in a split-second. We bolted towards the door with the cooties on our heads clinging for dear life.

  *

  In the car going home, Alexander and I didn’t howl, let alone speak to each other. My mother looked at us and said, “You two look exhausted. I told you not to play too hard! Now you won’t have any appetite for dinner!”

  She was right. We didn’t. I turned to Alexander. His hand went up absentmindedly to scratch his head. That did it. “Don’t play with Richard anymore, okay?” Richard was my best friend Beatrice’s kid brother. It was the only order I could issue to my five-year-old brother. He nodded. I looked at him and knew he was already intent on avoiding Richard. We were in this together, I realised. I knew that at school on Monday my brother and I would be together at recess and lunch. Just the two of us. And I knew that Beatrice would have to go back to hanging around with her kid brother too. I sank back in my seat with a despair deeper than tears.

  “Ay!” came my mother’s voice from the front of the car, “don’t do that! Do you want the car to be swarming with nits?”

  *

  “This will kill them all off,” said my mother, but it was a lie.

  When my mother had finished applying the treatment to my hair, it reeked of fetid alcohol. It was to be left in for another twelve hours, which meant that I had to go to school smelling like cat-piss. “Everybody will know!” I protested, even though I knew that they already knew anyway. “Nonsense,” said my father. “Look at how nice and shiny your hair is. People will just think you freshly shampooed it.”

  But the bottle treatment didn’t work.

  *

  “Ta ku le,” said the hairdresser to my mother in Mandarin when my parents came to pick me up. She has been sooking.

  “No other kid gets twenty-five dollars spent on their hair!” scolded my mother as she led me from the garage salon of the hairdresser to our car. “You don’t know how lucky you are. And if the heat from the rollers has not burnt them all dead, then I don’t know what will!” She
examined the tight poufy little half-loops on my head. “This is much nicer than the scraggly few strands you were growing and brushing. I don’t know why you are sooking, honestly. Now don’t show that dug-out-of-a-coffin-face when you arrive at Outside Ma’s house or else you’ll be dead!”

  In the car, I despaired. I was Chinese Ronald McDonald, minus the Happy Times. “So curly, so cute,” said my father. They were not curls, I decided. I had a perm. No other kid at school had a perm – they had waves, or crimps, or even curls. But not a perm.

  When our car arrived at Outside Ma’s house, I sat firmly where I was. I did not want Outside Ma to see that our crusade with the comb was in vain. “What do you think you’re doing in the car?” cried my mother. “Fermenting? Get out now!”

  When I stepped inside Outside Ma’s house, I threw a tantrum. I howled on the carpet of Outside Ma’s lounge room, my head on the ground and my skinny arms and legs flailing like matchsticks trying to self-ignite on the floor. I howled with my mouth stretched into the gaping sign of infinity. I howled for the loss of my hair. I howled for the lost afternoon spent on the floor of Aunt Meili’s house. And finally, I howled for the loss of Beatrice, the best friend I ever had. Outside Ma did not care whether my head was on her carpet, whether my hands were shredding the wool, whether my feet were kicking her sofa. She looked at my mother. “Why is she crying? Is she hungry?”

  “AN electrical appliance store? What are you – crazy?” my grandmother cried. “What do people here in Footscray want from a little electrical appliance store? What they really need is another Asian Mixed-Goods store.”

  “Every Lee and Lah are opening bloody grocery stores!” retorted my father. “You just watch – there will be a grocery store on every corner five years from now. And who wants to go around selling soy sauce and force-fried meat forever?”