Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

  “What happened?” my mother yelled, rushing into the room.

  “Alison kicked herself off the bed!”

  She grabbed the baby from the floor and yelled, “I told you to look after your sister and I turn my back just one minute and there she is on the floor howling! Wretched woe, who knows what may happen to her now! Haven’t I always warned you that babies have very soft thin skulls? They are born with a hole in their heads before their skulls close up and if they fall they become retarded! Did she fall on her head? How did she fall? HOW DID SHE FALL?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know! You don’t know! You don’t know because you weren’t looking after her, were you? I don’t know what use you are, with nothing better to do with your time! You can’t even look after your sister for just one second without her falling off the bed to her death. If she is brain-damaged, then you are doomed! Woe, aiyyooo, I’m going to call your father right now, so he can take her to the hospital to have her head examined. Such is the woe of my life to have a child who is always bumming around doing no good! You wait, you just wait.”

  So I waited. I waited with my hands tearing little anxious holes in my pockets while my mother rushed off to light some incense. She handed me a stick and then knelt on the floor, frantically shaking the stick back and forth. “Buddha, bless little Alison and keep her safe even though her sister wasn’t looking after her properly and she fell off the bed. Buddha, bless the safety of our little one and keep her safe from harm and evil.” At this point my mother gave me a long hard look.

  I wondered whether anyone Up There would be convinced by my newfound piety, but I tried anyway. If my sister was okay, I prayed, I would do all my jobs without complaining. I would commit my soul to servitude forever and ever. I would be as uncomplaining as an automaton, I would not whinge whenever I heard “half an hour more”, I would learn to be just a speck and do things for the greater good of the family.

  Then I realised that if Buddha did exist, if God did exist, if any deity Up There did exist, then why the hell was He tormenting me so with my sister falling off the bed right at the very moment when I was merely getting a new book to read? Probably just as I suspected, His plan for me was not to learn at all, but to be forever in a state of staying at home and looking after babies and cleaning up crap and not being able to rid myself of the smell and the dirt. It was time for me to learn some acceptance.

  Dear Lord, I will not defy this fate you have for me if you make my sister alright. I will not even question Your plan. Just let my sister be alright and You can even turn me into a worm in my next life.

  While I was renouncing all my doubts to The One Up There, my father came home. “What happened?” he demanded.

  “She fell off the bed,” I repeated, wondering if adults were really such amnesiacs, because only twenty minutes ago I had heard my mother on the phone yelling, “Wretched woe, aiya-aaahhhh, Agheare wasn’t looking and Alison was kicking and she kicked herself off the bed! Come quick, come quick!”

  “Can’t even be responsible for anything, not even looking after your own sister for a little while,” my father tut-tutted with his tongue. It was not the time to tell him that the “little while” had been hours and hours.

  Ma and Pa bundled my screaming sister into the car and drove off, leaving me standing in the doorway wiping my nose with my sleeve. If my sister was brain-damaged it would be my fault – after today all the cuteness would be erased from herface and she would be a drooling drone. And everywhere I went people would point and say, “Ah, look, there’s that girl who made her sister retarded because when she was nine she couldn’t even mind her for a few moments!”

  I decided that if my sister came back from the hospital brain-damaged, my life was indeed doomed. I then decided quite rationally that since there was nothing to live for, I might as well doom myself before my parents came home and did the job themselves. Yet how to doom oneself painlessly?

  In the Chinese serials my grandmother loved to watch, whenever some noble warrior wanted to end it all, he drew out his sword and impaled himself. Then he would lie there, spluttering all sorts of regrets while his beloved comrades cradled his head and wailed. A slow, neat rivulet of blood would trickle from his mouth.

  I hated blood. Too often had I seen my mother accidentally stab her hand with the scalpel she used to cut open the wax moulds, or chop her finger with our butcher’s cleaver, to think that the traditional Chinese death by a thousand cuts was something noble.

  I thought about hanging, which wasn’t such a bad idea if I wasn’t so small and therefore unable to reach anything high enough to be a beam. Then I recalled that the monkey bars at Tottenham North Primary School were pretty high because when I swung from them, my feet were a long way from the ground.

  I could bring a scarf.

  But then I thought of my body dangling there overnight, and how the Totty Tech boys might arrive in the morning and think it hilarious to pull down my pants.

  Suddenly I remembered reading something about plants in the Reader’s Digest Household Hints and Handy Tips, a thick black volume which my father had bought for me one summer. I remembered reading about the Oleander bush, which we had in our backyard, with its bright pink flowers that looked like tissue paper. “Those flowers are poisonous,” my father would tell us. “Always wash your hands if you have accidentally touched them.” I read case studies of children who had eaten the flowers and died. Flowers were a good way to end it all, I thought. I looked out of our kitchen window to make sure that the bush was in bloom. It was, in all its pink-tissue-paper glory. I decided to go to bed and wait for my parents to call and give me the sign as to whether I should go outside and meet my Maker through the Oleander plant portal.

  I closed my eyes. Sudden snatches of imagined conversation – “funny-shaped head now, like a potato, and what is wrong with her eyes?”; remembered precepts – “take care of her”; coiled-up whimpers and anticipated cries of fury all ricocheted about my mind. My stomach seemed to be hollow. I curled up in foetal position, I spread myself flat in corpse pose, I squelched my face on the pillow as if struck from the back. No rest for the wicked, I thought. I fell into an exhausted black sleep.

  “You are lucky,” said my mother, when she returned.

  My father nodded. “You are very lucky there is nothing wrong with her.”

  The little bundle was in my hands again and I was squeezing the tiny snot-nosed sook so tightly and feeling such a sense of love and relief that I forgot I was also meant to be exuberant that I did not need to doom myself.

  “YOU must be an example to your younger siblings,” my parents told me. “You see, Agheare,” my father explained, “a family is like a snake. If the head of the snake is set straight, then the rest of the body follows straight. However, if the head is crooked, then the body gets as bent as ginseng and it is doomed.” How to keep my head on, let alone straight? I wished that I was born meek and good, instead of dissatisfied and resentful. How could I fill my time usefully instead of always bumming around reading books?

  There was one form of work that alleviated some of the guilt – sewing. I made berets from the fleecy factory scraps that my Third Auntie Samso brought home for our family to use as floor wipes. I created stuffed animals, dogs with floppy ears and button eyes. I learned embroidery from library books, fabricated patchwork cushions and designed clothes for my sisters Alison and Alina. People always assumed that the digital dexterity of Asians was a genetic trait, some God-given talent. But that was not entirely true. While other kids were glueing icy-pole sticks onto paper plates, Asian kids were attaching eye-hooks to designer skirts because their parents’ eyesight was failing.

  Neither of my parents could sew, but before I started high school they saved and saved to present me with my first love. His name was Janome. He had a beautiful cream-coloured complexion, and all the pieces of my life began to fit together after I met him. He worked wonders with me. We functioned as a unit,
so completely in synch with each other’s movements that it was magical. Sewing was essentially like driving a car. You pushed your foot on the pedal, and guided by the light of the machine, you made the lines swerve and twist and turn towards some distant point far from home.

  I started off with children’s clothes. The comparative shapelessness of their little bodies meant that fitting was easy – no complicated tucks and darts. I bought patterns and taught myself how to piece them together. I made myself a party frock in blue taffeta, complete with hundreds of hand-sewn sequins and an invisible zip. Clothes that were bought on sale didn’t necessarily match with other items bought on sale. Sometimes they didn’t fit properly, but we were left to grow into them. I doubted that our arms would grow down past our calves, or our shoulders to our elbows. But now with my beloved Janome, I worked miracles.

  And self-made miracles were exactly what sustained me through my adolescent years, when other girls were getting into trendy clothing labels and boys. Pretending that I had nothing more to worry about than which new Sportsgirl summer dress I should purchase was already too much trouble – especially when I had to hand-embroider the accursed Sports-girl logo, with all its curves and flourishes, onto my self-designed creations. Who needed to smoke ciggies or get petted by boys or drink booze when I was already a rebel of the most exciting kind? I was a veritable pirate.

  Because I seemed to have nothing better to do with my time than practise for an outworking career, relatives would leave their children with me when they went out, or whenever they had “other things to do”. “Ah, Agheare is so good, she is so responsible,” they would say. “We can always trust her with our children and they won’t get hurt.”

  “Why don’t they make Alexander do it?” I would complain to my mother.

  “He doesn’t know how to look after babies. He’s a boy. Besides you are more responsible and mature than he is.”

  I was not won over by their sedulous flattery. Girls only matured faster because they had to do more. I hated housework, and I often let my mother know it in no uncertain terms. “I am so busy, and you do this to me!” my mother would scream, almost in tears, “working till I am so tired, and none of you ever help out, and your father is always saying, wah, don’t let them work, they have to study, while I have to do everything and still you are so bad and do this to me! Aiiyyyaaaahhh, why do you do this to me?!” And then I would feel infinitely guilty. What to do, I thought, when one was responsible for the torment of the family and in grave danger of becoming a lady?

  A lady was the most abhorred thing you could become, because ladies were lazy bums who sat around wasting their husband’s money and walked down the street with perfectly made-up mien visiting the jewellery stores to which my mother delivered her wares. My mother was certainly not a lady. She worked and worked and worked, and when she wasn’t working she was cleaning, and when she wasn’t cleaning or working she was sick. You could always tell who was a lady by what they complained about, the length of their nails and whether they put milk or butter into their coffee.

  Instant coffee was my panacea in these years. I put International Roast powder into everything, even our milder forms of Chinese herbal medicine like Lou Han Guo and Chrysanthemum Tea. I would drink cupful after cupful mixed with sweetened condensed milk. It gave me the shakes, but I didn’t care. Sometimes the milk would run out, and I would have to improvise by using coconut milk. Sometimes we would not have any sugar left, and I would use jam. I would also throw in a few spoonfuls of Milo.

  “Consider yourself lucky,” my mother scolded me. “When I was young, we couldn’t just walk to the kitchen whenever we felt the fancy to have a drink, and make ourselves a cup of coffee with Sweet and Condensed Milk. We had to work; we never had a mother at home to take care of us. We had one doll, shared among the eight of us, and I went out to earn my own way when I was thirteen.”

  For me there was housework, and then there was homework to alleviate the boredom of the housework. And then there were books. When I was thirteen, I devoured Dolly fiction the way stuck-at-home housewives devoured Fabio romances. The only Asian girls in those romances were named Momoko or Ginny and came from educated middle-class families. How I hated the clean-cut beauty of these characters, who were having a grand old time without worrying about their poor mothers working their fingers to the bone; without feeling guilty because there wouldn’t be anyone to watch over the screaming sibling, or wipe the floors or clean the house or hang out nappies.

  Coming of Age was explained to me in books, and in the books Judy Blume characters waited with delirious anticipation for their period. I didn’t see what the big deal was when it happened to me. So what? It just meant I could make babies if I felt the urge, and of course that was the last thing on my mind. So I wrote the date in my diary, and dreary life continued on as usual. Coming of Age for boys was infinitely more interesting, I thought, when I watched Stand by Me and Dead Poets Society. Boys formed friendships by discovering cadavers. They walked on railway tracks, started secret clubs, cried over their own cowardice and occasionally shot themselves in the head when pushed too far. It didn’t matter if girls were cowards, there was no opportunity or reason for us to test our bravery. All that mattered was that we could make a good pot of rice, had a pretty face and were fertile.

  A few years later, my Auntie Bek, my mother’s eldest sister, asked me, “Eh, Agheare, did your mother have a big celebration for you when your time came?”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, with lots of food, and a new set of clothes in red, and lots of rejoicing?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you celebrate Agheare’s coming of age?” my auntie asked my mother.

  “Hah?” said my mother, “don’t be ridiculous, no one does that anymore.”

  Girls came of age so easily, all they had to do was start bleeding and they were certified women, which meant that they had to be kept mostly at home because of all the rapists out there. “You never know,” my father would say shaking his head, “what kind of people are out there.”

  “You never know,” said my mother, “how dirty-minded men are.”

  My parents painted a picture of a world in which every man under the age of twenty was a precocious pervert and every man over twenty a potential paedophile.

  But the boys in the Dolly romances I read were never the phantom types that walked around with permanent bulges looking for nubile Lolitas. They were always sweet lads named Laurie or Jesse or Bradley. They smiled a lot and said things like, “Oh Linn, I never realised what nice almond eyes you have,” and they let their girl rest her head on their shoulder without fear of catching lice.

  Yet I knew no Laurie or Jesse or Bradley would tell me, “Hey Alice you are lovely,” because I wasn’t, or “Hey Alice you’re sweet,” because I probably smelt like Johnson’s baby piss, or “Hey Alice, will you be mine?” because I belonged to the house and the babies and they would never discover me inside the concrete walls of Number 3, Bliss Street, Braybrook. I imagined myself wasting away like a princess in a tower, or rather a caffeine addict in a shack behind the Invicta carpet factory.

  None of the boys in my neighbourhood would qualify as Bradley or Laurie, because Bradley or Laurie did not smash empty glass bottles on the road for fun and terrorise the local senior citizens. Bradley and Laurie were usually blue-eyed, blonde-haired, they were never ever blue-haired, blonde-eyed. No, I was sure Brad did not laugh hysterically, screaming F-ing this and that.

  I turned up the radio to drown out the boys outside, who were obsessed with fornicating perdition because they were yelling it at the top of their lungs. Then Mariah Carey came on the radio and sang “Dream Lover, come rescue me,” so I turned off the radio. If by some miracle Dream Lover wanted to bother with that scrawny girl in the concrete house behind the Invicta carpet factory, Dream Lover would have to overcome several obstacles, including surviving the carpet fumes, getting past the broken glass on the road and avoiding getti
ng a bottle pushed in his face. He would then have to find the house number, because my grandmother had written PUSH on the letterbox instead of Number 3, because my father had written PUSH on the garage door and she thought that was the name of our house.

  And if Dream Lover wasn’t a complete idiot standing there PUSHing the letterbox off its hinges, he would walk to the front door and ring the doorbell and pose himself in all manner of chivalry, and the door would open to reveal the darling exploited Proletarian Princess carrying the third-world gene.

  “Who is that? Is that Brianna?” the ma of the Proletarian Princess is heard yelling from inside the house. “Tell her she can’t come over, why is she always coming over?”

  “No Ma, it’s not Brianna,” the Proletarian Princess mutters, staring through the iron-lace grating of the security door.

  “Then who is it?”

  “It’s a … another friend.”

  “Tell them to go away, tell them you have work to do! Shut the door! You’re letting the factory fumes in. Get back inside! You haven’t even wiped the floors properly! If I slip carrying this baby in my stomach, by God you are doomed. Always half-finishing things off, like a cat with a head and no tail.” And so the door closes, and the Proletarian Princess walks sadly back into the house, realising that there are no Proletarian Princesses anyway and how could she possibly have been so thick as to imagine that Dream Lover would come rescue her from here in the first place?

  ALL you want at fifteen is to have a boyfriend, not to choose the future father of your children. All a fifteen-year-old boy wants is to receive affirmation from a girl, and perhaps something more if he is lucky – not to choose the future daughter-in-law for his mother. All we wanted was someone to go to the movies with, to talk to when tormented by adolescent angst, and to show off to our friends.