by Alice Pung
So my father, my Uncle Suong and two friends from the Alcan factory decided to form a partnership. The first store that they bought was on Barkly Street, a tiny four-by-five shop with no toilet. Every time my pa needed to relieve himself, he would have to stick the hand-written “BAcK In TeN MInUTEs” sign across the glass door, lock up and pop over to the restaurant across the road.
There weren’t many electrical appliances – mainly watches, batteries, little radios and musical Christmas cards. Theft was common, and so was badgering by gangs who came to torment small shop-owners, asking for money – and they wouldn’t leave until they got it. “Just like in Cambodia,” my father would mutter. “Except now it’s not the government officials bugging us, it’s these gangs!”
One shop-to-shop supplier would sell adaptor plugs at a very cheap price. Every time he visited he wore a black leather jacket, and his face was like a potato – dotted with pockmarks. Carrying his goods in cardboard boxes under his arm, he would sit the boxes on the counter for my father and Uncle Suong to sift through. “Great plugs, eh, so much cheaper than buying them from the wholesalers!” exclaimed my Uncle Suong.
Later my father realised that they were too cheap and decided not to buy any more. Next time Jacket Potato came, my father said to him, “Sorry brother, we don’t need any more of these plugs.” He had to start out polite, because he was scared that Jacket Potato would come later with his gang and trash the store.
“Hah?”
“We don’t need any more plugs at the moment, brother.”
“Nonsense. Everybody needs these plugs. How do you expect people who buy their rice cookers from Vietnam to connect them to the Australian sockets, eh?”
“Tell me something,” began my father with studied naivety, “hmm, how do you make a profit hah, with your prices so cheap?”
“What do you mean, my prices are too cheap?” demanded Jacket Potato. “Prices are meant to be cheap, brother. I pride myself on not ripping off the small shop-owner.”
“But, your prices are too cheap, if you know what I am saying,” my father said very slowly, casting a look at my uncle, who nodded. Jacket Potato decided it was no use feigning no-know. “Heh heh,” he said, “heh heh brother. I know what you are thinking. And let me tell you, brother, I came from Vietnam two years ago. Back in Vietnam my parents had a little table at the market-place where they sold this and thats to make money, heh. So I assure you, brother, that I only take from the very big stores, you know.”
“Big stores?” My father looked at the box of goods in front of him.
“Heh, come on, you know the big stores, brother. Like Kmart. I support small business, brother, I don’t do the small stores, you understand. I know what it is like for the small store-owners with the gangs roaming around giving you trouble.”
“But … how do you do it?”
“Heh heh, a master never reveals his tricks. But since we are good business partners, let me show you. Let me show you how this master does his tricks, heh?”
“Err, no, it’s alright, you don’t have to.” My uncle looked a little uneasy. My father looked even more uneasy.
“No, no, let me show you how I do it. You are my good brothers, and I will reveal to you what I reveal to no one. Just to show you that I don’t do the small stores, even though it is so easy for me to. You can trust me, brothers, eh?”
My father’s curiosity got the better of him. “Alright.”
So Jacket Potato idly roamed around the tiny four-metre-by-four store, while from the counter my father and my uncle watched his every move. At last when the guy came back, my father said, “But you didn’t take anything! Is this a trick?”
“Heh heh, but I did. Man, the master is good.” Beneath his jacket he revealed a small clock radio from one of the shelves on the wall. My father and my uncle were slack-jawed.
“How did you manage to do that? We never noticed! We didn’t even realise anything was missing!”
“Heh heh,” said the man happily. “I told you, brothers, the master is good.”
“Wah, how clever you are,” said my father with a mix of admiration and trepidation. But from then on, he made sure that we ordered all our plugs legitimately, and half a year later he told Jacket Potato we could no longer order from door-to-door suppliers because we were now a Retravision franchise.
*
Because my father owned a business, in school forms I could fill in “Manager” on the line that said “Father’s Occupation”. In different times and places, that line could have read factory overseer, wartime acupuncturist and barefoot doctor, Midway Migrant Hostel translator, fruit picker, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology gold and silver-smithing student, or welder at the Alcan factory.
In the line that read “Mother’s Occupation”, my father filled in “House Duties”, since “Outworker” did not sound too good and might get the authorities coming over to check on us.
The sparks from her kiln in the darkness of the candlelit garage flew like fireworks when my mother worked late into the night, the noise was like thunder and a thousand muffled cymbals. When my father abandoned his plan to open a jewellery store, my mother had already taken over his goldsmithing work. She learnt from watching my father connecting the little links of chains together, firing up the kiln and filing down rings. Many mornings I would wake up to the smell of wax – the wax came from a machine that squirted it into rubber jewellery moulds. These rubber moulds were hand-cast by my parents. My father would sandwich a real ring or pendant between sticky pieces of special rubber that were cut to fit snugly into little metal frames. Then he would put the frame into the kiln. When it was taken out, the adhesive rubber sheets melted into a rubbery mould. Using a razor blade, my father would slowly and carefully cut the ring from the mould and remove it.
My mother would then fill the rubber cast with pastel-coloured wax shot out through a little nozzle in the wax-melting machine in her bedroom. She stuck the wax rings branching out in all different directions on wax stalks. These miniature trees took hours, since you had to try many times to get the wax rings and pendants perfect – no missing grooves or air bubbles. The trees were then enclosed in a cylinder, and plaster would be poured into this cylinder and put in the kiln to set while the wax melted away, creating a mould for the rings. Gold would be poured into these plaster moulds and left to harden. When the plaster was washed away, what emerged were real little gold-ring trees. My mother would cut off the rings from the trunk one by one, as if she were pruning a bonsai tree.
These rings would be filed down, leaving no trace of where they had been connected to the trunk. Afterwards, the jewellery pieces would be hand-polished with a piece of jade. Clients mostly ordered 24-carat gold creations. Why anyone would want to wear pale metal mixtures was beyond the understanding of her Asian customers. The brighter, the better. Besides the usual orders for Buddha pendants, there were also huge pendants of Jesus with beads of pure gold blood dripping down his tormented face, BMW pendants and Mercedes Benz logos.
My mother would deliver her wares wrapped up in face-washers and dishcloths. She visited shops in Footscray, Richmond, Springvale and St Albans. She carried all her merchandise in her handbag, and that handbag was always close to her side. Sometimes customers would not pay up, or owe her gold and not give it back. She relied only on their promises, which were written on scraps of old paper or scrawled in her notebook in numerical form. There was no legal redress if she was gypped or cheated, since all she had to rely on was the good faith of her buyers. And the waiting! The waiting at the jewellery shops was the worst. Some of them were so small they did not have any chairs. Whenever a customer came in, the jewellery shop owner would serve that customer first, pushing aside the handful of gold nestled in crumpled paper napkins; ignoring the mother with the handful of kids breathing on the glass cabinets.
I could never wear gold myself. All those trays, all those hours of work, all those hours of leaving me to look after the babies when all I want
ed to do was my own thing, until I no longer knew what my own thing was. My mother didn’t wear gold either. “Some people walk around dripping with gold,” she said, “showing how much they own, while their husbands are working in factories. Hmmph. I don’t know why some men are so stupid. Anyway, if you are already beautiful, you don’t need jewellery. And if you aren’t, then there is not much a pair of dangly gold earrings can do, is there?”
My mother walked down the streets of Footscray as if she were a much larger, heavier person; with her legs apart in large thumping steps, the bones of her ankles creaking. She walked as if she were completely oblivious to her diminutive size. A person of such petite proportions was meant to be delicate, breakable, breathless. Yet my mother defied every law of her own physiology. Biologically she was destined to be delicate, to age into a thin, tiny woman. Yet the decades of work filled out her frame, widened her shoulders, gave her hands like cracked coal and the pounding walk like thunder.
She negotiated. She supplied, she marketed, she chased up creditors. She did all that without being able to speak English. Fortunately the small-business owners she dealt with rarely spoke English either. They probably asked their primary-school-aged kids to help them fill in their business registration forms. Yet my mother never saw herself as a businesswoman. Businesspeople were the representatives from Sony and Sharp who came to see my father at work to negotiate the supply of a new range of televisions. Not housewives with a handbag filled with gold wrapped in McDonald’s napkins.
“WHY is she having so many children when she can’t even look after her first two?” my grandmother would tut-tut with her tongue. “Look at them, skinny and brown as beef jerky and dressed like beggars, those kids.” Aunt Que had decided that while my mother was ill, it would be a better arrangement for everyone if my grandmother moved in to live with her. Every time my grandmother came back to visit or to collect more of her belongings, she would comment on the shambles.
With my grandma gone, I started looking dishevelled. No red ribbons in my hair, no egg for breakfast every morning. No potty beside the bed. No one beside me at night to tell me stories, except my little brother, Alexander, who snored like a motorbike. But I had finally worked out how to turn myself on and off like a tap, regardless of any anxiety or agitation, so no more smelling like weed fertiliser.
Still, relatives would shake their heads in dismay. Even my friend’s parents would see me with another sibling on my hip, and exclaim, “What? Another one?” They would look at me as if I were responsible.
My mother’s pregnancies were the worst times for all of us. My sister Alison was a heavy heaving pregnancy that made Ma’s belly and ankles swell up and nothing she swallowed would stay down. Morning sickness, afternoon sickness, evening sickness. Our bare feet sticky, we would run with buckets, usually too late. She would throw up all over the tiled floors of our living room, our bathroom, our kitchen. “Get the mop, Agheare,” she would gag at me. When the mess was cleaned up, she would continue to work in the garage, well into the early hours of the morning while we were sleeping.
The heavy brown curtains in our living room were always drawn, but we never had any visitors anyway. That was the year when I learned to be alone, the year I realised how solitary we were. I rarely ventured outside anymore, not even into the backyard. Instead, I explored every nook and cranny of the house. Once, in the small cupboard under my grandmother’s brown Buddha shrine, I found a plastic bag filled with what seemed like black fur. When I opened the bag to see what was inside, I was shocked to discover hair. Human hair. One very long braid, and two long ponytails. Warm and firm as live creatures, the hair was the brown-black-orange colour you can only get when the sun fades away the ebony. It was tied together with rubber bands that crumbled away when I tried to pull them higher up. I was fascinated. How old was this hair? Whose hair was it? Why had my grandmother kept this hair? I straightened out the strands and found new rubber bands to tie up the ponytails. I took the plait and put it at the nape of my neck, hanging the end over my shoulder. The things I could do with hair this long! I was thinking of the ways I could explain to my friends how my hair had grown overnight, when my brother came into the room looking for his grey matchbox truck.
“Hey Alexander, look at this.”
“How’d you get that hair?” he asked, steering away from me.
“I found it. In here.” I pointed to the cupboard.
“Whose is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“It might be some dead person’s!”
“Don’t be stupid. Why would Granny want to keep the hair of some dead person?”
But I put the hair away, retied the plastic bag and placed it back in the cupboard.
A few weeks later, my grandmother came back to collect the rest of her belongings from our house. As she knelt down by her Buddha shrine, I told her, “Ah Ma, there is hair in there.” I didn’t want to sound as alarmed as I felt.
“Where?” asked my grandmother.
“In there.” I crawled in the cupboard and brought out the plastic bag. “Here.”
My grandmother didn’t tell me off for going through her personal things.
“Ah,” she said, holding the hair in her hands, stroking it as I did, looking at it as I did. How strange, I thought, Granny is too old to want two ponytails dangling from the sides of her head, isn’t she? But then again, she always wore lipstick when she went out, so there was no telling what new beauty trend might take her fancy.
“This hair is your Auntie Que’s,” my grandmother explained. “When she was little, she would grow her hair long. I would always braid it for her before school. And whenever she had her hair cut, I thought wah! Such a waste of beautiful hair. So I tied it up and kept it.”
“When your Auntie Hy Que was born,” my grandmother told me, “I was so happy. At last, a girl. Your grandfather could not understand why I was so happy. But of course he couldn’t, he was the one who had howled and bellowed at me for wanting to swap my son for a girl. I called her Hy – happiness, and I kept her long hair every time I gave her a haircut.”
*
She could never forget the two who had died back in Cambodia. Her first babies. Two girls who would be forever toddlers, neither of them living long enough even to make it into family photographs.
When she was giving birth to the first, my grandpa took a chair and sat outside the room. When he heard the wahwahwah sound of the child crying, his foot stopped tapping on the floor and he stood up. The midwife came out and told him it was a girl. A girl! He sat back down. He was inconsolable.
“Ah sister, what are you going to name this beautiful baby girl?” the midwife asked. My grandmother was exhausted, and yes – how stupid of her, yet how was she supposed to know that a decade later she would yearn and ache for a girl-child? – she was disappointed. “Ask my husband,” she said to the midwife. She didn’t even have a name ready, such was her hope and expectation that she would give her husband what his first wife couldn’t. She lay there, waiting to see what her husband would name this girl. Finally, the midwife came back. “I know a pretty name,” she told her. “How about Ah Bo?” Precious treasure.
It was then that she knew my grandfather couldn’t even be bothered choosing a name for his daughter. He left the job to some lowly uneducated midwife, and she couldn’t even come up with a very original name. But Treasure was such a wonder to my grandmother – her first baby. She found it hard to believe that such a tiny thing could grow and become a person. When she held the baby in her arms, she knew that it did not matter that she was not a boy. She would be educated, and my grandmother would love her so much. Ah, she was so much prettier than the children of my grandpa’s first wife.
When a baby turns a month old, we say that they are a year old because we count the time they spend inside the mother’s stomach. But because she was not a boy, when my grandmother’s beautiful Treasure was one month old there was no huge celebration with oranges and cakes and people bea
ring gifts of gold.
And then three months after she was born, she became sick. And before she could even say Mahmah she turned all tense and hard. It happened in less than a day and a night – and she was gone too soon. “Such a beautiful baby,” sighed my grandmother. And those natural curls, little curls on a Chinese baby! That was unheard of! Only Westerners had those natural curls. So before she was laid in the ground, my grandmother took out her scissors and cut off one of the little curls.
“When someone dies, you don’t say they died, like you do here,” my grandmother told me. “You say things like that so easily here – he’s dead, she’s dead, they die. We say, they are passing through their bodies. Or their bodies have passed through. The body doesn’t matter, it is the soul that is important. And Ah Bo had a beautiful soul, so clean, so bright. Now she was going to a place where there is no more darkness.”
Less than a year later, my grandmother knew she was going to have another baby. So soon, people said to her, so soon, sister! She thought that Buddha was kind to her to send her another one. My grandpa thought that she was cursed just like his first wife. Two girls. She wondered whether this one looked like Ah Bo. She tried to search for Ah Bo in her face, but this child was so different. And again my grandfather sat outside, and again the midwife asked for a name. Again he did not give one. So the midwife made up a name for the baby: MeiHuay she was called, beautiful flower. Every second girl is named beautiful this-or-that plant or other. These uneducated Chinese Cambodian midwives were really not very inventive with names. But my grandmother didn’t care. She had another girl.
And anyway, her baby’s common name didn’t matter because no one called her a beautiful flower. No, when she was born, she was quite large. She had such a round face, and so much hair. “Ay sister,” Ah YuKeng would joke, “your baby was born with a hat on top of her head! Look at all that hair! Did you eat a lot of noodles when you were carrying the baby?”
