Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

  “At this age, you must not get into relationships, you must study hard, your future is so important,” my father told me. My father had grand images of me freshly processed from the tertiary production line and packed into a sterile office somewhere in Springvale, doing Very Important Work. It was all well and good to scream and cry for pretty dresses and plastic bonbons in the hair as a child, but when you reached adolescence, yearning for those very same things could spell doom. No longer is the little flaunter smiled upon, for to be a flaunter is the worst thing a girl can be. Button up your coat and don’t think about such things. Boxed into your blue blazer, you sit at your desk and study, and that will settle you down. Back in the old country, the good girls stayed at home and the bad girls went out with baskets of oranges and apples late at night and made their money selling all sorts of fruit in the park.

  Here it was different. The difference between our sweet apple-smelling schoolgirl in Melbourne Central Station and our sweet apple-selling streetgirl in Central Market Phnom Penh was that one believed in free love, and the other did not. Australian democracy seemed to be available to all by the mere shedding of your clothes. Perhaps clothes did not even have to be discarded, because in broad daylight we would see the schoolgirls and boys in their school uniforms, full blazers and ties and kilts and long socks, lying atop each other in the park. There was no other place to go to lose themselves because their parents must not know, because their parents knew nothing about being free to love. Parents just didn’t get it. Life was not to be spent at the mercy of sunken-faced migrants, bringing from the old country a million scruples that made no sense. Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free, not held tight in the clutches of the village gossip or the narrow-eyed matchmaker.

  I was the cover-up girl for my friends, the one who watched and lived vicariously and answered the phone to let the parents know that Melissa was at my house even though I knew she was probably clambering in the window of Tung’s room, dressed like a soft brown sausage poured into a tube of black vinyl, eyes lined with kohl. I was the one friends begged for evidentiary aid when the age-old excuses were all used up: “We have to go to the library.” “We have to use the school’s computer labs.” “We have to meet up with friends for a group project.”

  Names were changed, new identities forged. “Oh, hello, Brianna,” I would say into the phone when it was actually Bryan, and if the boy was too dumb to catch on, I hung up and called the real Brianna to lament.

  “Who was that boy who rang before?” my mother demanded. She knew it was a boy because she had picked up and answered. “’Allo? ’Allo? You want Asunder?” She handed the phone to my twelve-year-old brother.

  “Hello?” Alexander paused. He looked at me. Uh-oh. I glared at him and willed him to hang up.

  “Errr, yes. She’s here.” Then, without thinking, he handed the phone over to me. “Here, it’s for you.”

  “Hello?” I asked into the receiver, my voice squeaking. “Who is this?” “Just Alexander’s friend,” I lied after I hung up, wondering why I had to lie.

  “How do you know him? He sounds too old to be your brother’s friend.” The questions were hurled at me like the pits of sour plums. “Why does he have our number?” “What did he want?” “Oh, so you spoke for that long about homework hah?”

  How could I explain to my mother that we were just chatting, let alone what we were chatting about, when I did not have that many Teochew words in my head, and when the meaning of “chat” did not register in her mind? Boys did not talk to girls for no reason. “Boys should not talk too much,” she said to me slowly. “Boys who have too many words are no good.” She took a long look at me and I knew that the news was going straight to my father. Why did the words matter so much, anyway? “People talk,” said my mother. “Boys talk to you, you talk to boys, and people talk.”

  Who were these people, and what did they talk about? How was it that they could see me but I could not see them? “They are walking together,” people said. “I saw your daughter walking with a boy. I wonder who the boy is hah?” Even if the boy was walking two metres behind, even if he were a platonic friend, even if he were the loser from the Ha Thinh grocery store who followed me back to Retravision every afternoon after school, I would feel as though I was doing something wrong, and feel the inevitable guilt. Then he would feel the guilt, and we would both wonder what was going on, and whether it was true that he did like me in that way or whether I did like him in that way even though I was completely sure that I didn’t, but perhaps my actions meant otherwise? Once I started acting awkward around somebody, they probably thought that I liked them, and once both people started acting awkward, it meant that the parents could come and stand over us and call us “Ah Di” and “Ah Mui”, Little Brother and Little Sister, and make sure we’d never want to be within a seven-kilometre radius of each other again.

  *

  “Your parents think you went out with Vincent on Sunday.” Cousin Andrew had called me on the phone to tell me what I already knew. I thought, this is all his mother’s doing, this is all my mother’s doing. “You know I didn’t, and that’s none of your business anyway,” I sighed.

  “It is when your parents come over to my house and start asking me questions!”

  My parents had come over to his house to interrogate him!

  “So what happened?” Andrew asked.

  “Nothing. He called me and my mother answered and made a few crazy connections in her mind. And now I am stuck here all holidays. Can’t go anywhere in case they think I’m going out with boys and getting corrupted.”

  “This is stupid. Why don’t you tell them that nothing has happened?”

  “I did. I can’t.”

  After two weeks of house arrest I was going crazy, with a barricade of books around my bed and the bedroom door closed from prying parents. But I had no need to fear for my inalienable right to privacy, because they knew I was not going anywhere, not going out with the Lee and Lah loiterers in any case. This was my mother’s term for the boys who squatted on the benches in the park, wasting time.

  What was most damning were not the things that were said, but the things left unsaid. And since there were so many things that I could not say, I exercised my right to remain silent until my silence was construed as guilt, and the guilt ensured my house arrest.

  Nothing I said could protect me because it was automatically assumed that I could not protect myself. “But I didn’t go out with anyone!” I would cry, and that cry would be taken as a sign of the frailty of youth, hypersensitive, hysterical – how could the elders ever think of trusting such a baby to her own devices if she got emotional over such little things so easily? Teary denials were the first sign of wrongdoing. “The worst thing that can happen to a girl is if she is tricked,” my mother warned me. “There is no redemption for one who is tricked.”

  The most reasonable thing to do was to do the unreasonable, give people real cause to talk. The easiest solution would be to just call up the boy, ask him out even if I didn’t like him in that way, and board a bus out of Braybrook. After all, it was only a five-minute walk to the bus stop. But I was paralysed. At the rate things were going, I thought, dating would be conducted under house arrest too, if the elders had anything to do with it. Watching from afar and making up complicated stories about uncomplicated young people was bad enough. Worse still would be to bring a potential partner home to be watched. I could just imagine it. We would be sitting opposite each other at the table doing homework while my mother cut up spring onions on the kitchen bench. The best we could do would be to pass notes to each other like schoolchildren watched over by the headmistress.

  “You know, good young men are not sneaky and they respect parents,” my father told me, standing in the doorway of my bedroom. But fifteen-year-olds were boys, not young men; there were many things they did not know. My brother did not know. Vincent did not know. Cousin Andrew did not know. Then how was it that I knew perfectly we
ll the guilt and the agony and anticipated it in advance? From where did I learn this guilt-laden look over the shoulder?

  During my two weeks of torment, I doubted the boy had any idea about the effect of his careless phone call, that it would annihilate all the days of my term break and leave me skulking in my room. “Your father can’t even take you out to work at the shop,” complained my mother “what with that expression on your face looking as if you were freshly dug out of the morgue!”

  To raise a girl, I realised, you’d need gallons of Social Conditioner with added Spirit Deflator. Rub onto every limb until limp, put the child into a chair and wait until she sets. When appendages harden, you know you have a perfect young woman – so still and silent and sedate that you could wrap your precious one up in cotton wool and put her in a cabinet. Ah, look at the darling geisha behind glass.

  *

  “Love sensibly,” was my grandmother’s advice to me before she died.

  Yet she of all people would have realised that passion cannot be experienced sensibly – and it was her impassioned fight for peasant rights that had landed her in trouble in China when she was young. Her impoverished family had sent their daughter to get an education at Chaozhou Women Teacher’s College, and after learning about Marx and the revolution of the masses she wrote articles for newspapers about land rights and landlord abuses. She really was the princess of the proletariat, and because they had no money, her currency was words, the exchange rate measured in truth.

  But too much truth can land one in deep trouble, especially if those in power only like the idea of the starving peasants. The idea was good political ammunition, but the reality was something else altogether. These peasants were the disenfranchised and disempowered in China, wrote my grandmother, the valuable but suffering real people. Help us, she wrote. Help. Us.

  Get lost, they told her, get lost or we will get you.

  So I imagine my grandmother Huyen Thai as a young woman arriving in Cambodia with her brother. It is a familiar story – the revolutionary fleeing a homeland that is now hunting her down. She would never see her beloved Long Mountain again. She would never again see her home village, her parents or the women teachers’ college for which they sacrificed so much to send her to. What she saw now was the heat, the colour and the crowd of a strange city with a stranger name. The revolution, it appeared, was only just beginning and now she was so far away from it all, she could not participate in it, she could not see it, she could not even write about it. So she found herself a job as a schoolteacher at the DongHua Chinese school. It was there that she met my grandfather.

  Who would have thought that the old teacher and the young girl fresh off the boat from Long Mountain would become such kindred spirits? Who would have thought that they would share a mindset? But they did. My grandfather must have thought that there was something extraordinary about the young woman who drew chalk circles on the concrete and made children stand in them instead of using the ruler for discipline like everyone else. And my grandmother must have seen something in my grandfather, the unsmiling solemn man with a Mao Ze Dong mole on his chin. She must have been assailed by some strange disease, some affliction that women of my family continued to speak about behind her back, even after her death. When they spoke of it, it was always in hushed, incredulous tones – that someone who had made rational decisions all her life would go a bit ding-dong and decide to pursue a man more than ten years her senior who already had a wife and children. It was a revelation that brought secret consolation to legions of suffering daughters-in-law. “Did you know that your grandmother had to carry tea to your grandfather’s first wife?”

  Diseased with love, they called it, those who watched like hawks to note any departure from sense. They said things like, “Woe and wah, she is diseased with him very deeply,” as if the two people were rotted by love, and already melding into one contagious sticky miasma. It was a terminal illness.

  *

  Deep in my emotional quagmire, I was sitting hunched over my desk. I had been like this for more than a week, a listless sad-sack, feet tucked under the chair and head whammy on the tabletop, quivering like agar-agar. I heard the doorbell ring, but I refused to move. I could hear my mother’s thumping footsteps at the front door, and the squeal of the hinges of the iron-lace security door. “Aiyah! Sister! How good to see you!” she exclaimed, and I knew it was not one of her own sisters come to visit. “Come in! Come in! Sit down! Sit down!” Fragments of conversation drifted in to me, but I was too tired to notice. I would be glad when all this was over, I thought, when I could get back to school again and immerse myself in homework. I would be glad when I did not need to think about whether the next phone call would induce a new round of interrogation. Dressed in old tracksuit pants and a holey brown jumper, my socks pulled over my pants up to my knees, I was too embarrassed to go out to face anybody.

  Suddenly, a rotund woman appeared in the doorway of our room. I wanted to acknowledge her only by blinking. Any other movement took too much energy. Funny, but people looked small sideways. In fact, I could make her disappear entirely by squeezing my eyes into smaller and smaller slits. My mother was standing behind her. “This is my daughter,” she said to the woman. Then she turned to me. “Agheare,” she said, “this is Auntie Ah BuKien.”

  “Wah! So grown-up now!” the woman exclaimed. I managed to lift my head up off the table, pretending that too much study had made my brain heavy.

  “Do you remember me?” I hadn’t the faintest clue who she was, and didn’t know whether to lie or tell the truth, so I smiled, because I knew that a smile was always the right answer for a girl.

  “I knew you when you were little, and look at you now!” she exclaimed.

  And look she did. In fact, she was really watching me. She didn’t see the ugliness, she didn’t see the lack of energy, she didn’t see the deflated spirit, and of course she refused to see that I had been stuck at home for two weeks sedated by a handful of Reader’s Digests and dreary Dolly fiction. What she saw was a quiet little seated saint.

  “Agheare is so good, she stays at home and studies,” said Ah BuKien, “and wah, she has such a pretty little nose.”

  MY mother and father still call each other “old man” and “old woman”. My mother got her title first. When she was thirteen, one day she was waiting at the corner of the street in Phnom Penh with all the other little factory girls for the rain to stop so they could walk home. My father felt sorry for them and picked them all up in his factory van. As she got in the van, my mother almost slipped on the first step because of her wet shoe soles. “Watch your step eh, old lady,” my father said, steadying her.

  “I never thought I would end up with your father,” my mother told me. “I can still remember the day of his engagement, because that day I was working at the factory. I don’t think he remembered me much, because I was just a little kid.” She was only thirteen then, and working at my grandmother’s plastic-bag factory. He was in his twenties and would sometimes come in to check up on the workers.

  One day, however, barely anyone came down to check because my father was getting engaged to a woman named Sokem. The marriage had been arranged by my grandfather. It was also a happy day for my mother, because after work my grandmother summoned her upstairs, where she was given an entire container of roast pork to take home to her family.

  The previous year, when all the Chinese schools were closed down, my mother had loitered with a gang of twelve-year-olds who haunted wealthier districts and let the air out of car tyres. She also went into an alleyway to try her first and last drag of a cigarette, and later, when her brother bought a motorbike, she “borrowed” it for rides when he was out.

  My father had a distinctly different childhood – he studied French and classical guitar, went to the countryside to catch pet puppies, slid down the wooden banisters of the stairs in his triple-storey factory-house, swam in the river, climbed palm trees four times his height and practised acupuncture on volunteer
patients after a two-week course in China.

  But then Pol Pot’s army swarmed into Phnom Penh like angry black ants and cleared the stage. My mother and her family escaped to Vietnam, while my father and his family were sent to the Killing Fields.

  When they met again, it was more than half a decade later. She was selling material in the market-place in Saigon. She would wake up at four in the morning to go on that long, long walk to the village to buy fabric. When she arrived at the market, she would set up her stall and lay the pieces of material on the table. She learned slowly how to count in Vietnamese: how to discern whether a customer was going to buy a piece of material, and how to bargain a buyer down.

  During the war the women worked, while the men seemed to fade into insignificance. Women were in the market-place selling things and buying things. Women cooked at home, set up stalls and smacked their kids. Their husbands might have rode their bicycles to pick them up after work, or sat by their wives at the stall counting the money, but they seemed the tack-on helpers. My Outside Ma sold rice-cakes. My mother and Aunt Ly sold cloth. Aunt Bek worked cleaning houses, and my eldest uncle sold movie tickets. Anyone who could work in the family worked, and they pooled their money to live from day to day.

  “Four years in Cambodia under Pol Pot,” my mother told me, “and your father emerged looking like a brown skeleton.” At first, my mother didn’t recognise him at all. She and my Aunt Ly had sold their material and were sitting around eating noodles. Ly suddenly pointed past my mother’s ear and exclaimed, “Oy, isn’t that Little Aunt?”

  Even though they had left the plastic-bag factory a long time ago, the respectful name Little Aunt still stuck when they talked about my Aunt Que. But the skinny girl Ly was directing her finger at was so thin and scruffy! How could it possibly be Que with the hair once so shiny that it had matched her school shoes?

  “Ay, Little Aunt!” Ly called.

  The young woman turned around and saw my mother and her younger sister. She looked at them both for a very long while, as if trying to match childhood faces to unfamiliar new grown-up figures. “Ah Ly!” she mouthed in astonishment, “Ah Kien! Wah, so you are in Vietnam! What about the rest of your family?” After Ah Pot’s revolution, people from the Land of the Golden Tower no longer greeted each other with “Have you eaten yet?” No, now it was “Who is left in your family?”