by Alice Pung
“Nine dollars then.”
“Come on, you have got to be joking. Move with the times.”
“My craftsmanship is better.”
“Yeah? Look at this.” The Kim held out a ring for her to take a look. It was polished with no strokes of the jade polisher, all even and shining. It was good craftsmanship, but more importantly the new man from Vietnam had superior technology. He had a machine.
“Okay. Eight dollars-fifty then. Eight-fifty is my final offer.”
“Come on, you don’t need the money. Your husband owns the two Hi-Fi stores.”
That was the excuse they now all used. You don’t need the money. Your husband owns two Hi-Fi stores.
In fact, you don’t need to work at all.
This was their power over her, which they thought they were only using to undercut her. After all, business was business. They did not realise that they were also stripping away her sense of purpose. She calculated that she still had twenty-five years of working life left. If she had no work, what would she do with those years?
An outsider looking in would see myriad options. Why doesn’t she go to school and learn English? We had enough money now that she didn’t need to work. Why didn’t she start a small business? Most ridiculous of all, why didn’t she take it easy and live a life of luxury?
MY mother was not a talker, she was a shouter. The worst shouting was in the car with my auntie. Scared of not being heard, she would hurl out her sentences, punctuating them with exclamation marks. Each sentence was loud and grating, and when she got to talking about people she did not like, oh God, you would need earplugs if you were in the car, or a very loud Walkman, and you would have to conceal the wires of the headphones underneath your scarf, cover your ears with your hair. Nod nicely and look intensely as if you were listening. She would start off talking normally, and then get louder and louder, until the whole conversation turned into a screaming match without an argument, just statements about where were the cheapest Flying Dragon vegetables and instant Indo Mie noodles. Cursed be the soul who tried to contradict her. The less she had to say, the louder she got. “Three ninety-nine! I have been shopping for twenty years, I would know a cheap ten-pack of toilet paper if I saw it! None can buy as cheaply as me!”
“But for four-fifty …” her sister would begin.
“Four-fifty!” scoffed my mother, “four-fifty is stupid, four-fifty is fifty cents more!” My mother’s motto was never to pay full price for anything, and bargain-hunting for us did not mean going to the half-price sales, it meant rummaging through the shop-soiled and cast-off trolley at Target.
But you could not buy an education for half-price. “How is a $115 wool jacket supposed to help one study better hah?” my mother demanded as I clambered into the back of the car after school. I had no idea about the correlation between wearing a blazer and academic brilliance either, but she wasn’t talking to me, she was talking to my Aunt Bek, who was in the passenger seat.
“Not every family can send their kids to such a school, you know,” my mother said pointedly to her oldest sister. “Especially not the girls.”
“No, of course not,” my Auntie Bek agreed. Especially not if your husband worked at the Arnotts biscuit factory.
“When we were growing up, we didn’t have such opportunities. We went to work when our school closed down. Do you remember when they closed down our Chinese school?”
“Young people these days, so fortunate hah,” said my auntie. “They know so much. Soon they will be smarter than we are!”
“No!” retorted my mother. “They spend their whole lives at school and instead of making them brighter, it makes them limp and lazy. She’s always got her face stuck in some book. And you’d think with all that education, they would at least know the simplest things, but they don’t. I tell her to look at the bank statements and explain them to me, but she can’t.”
I sat slumped in the back seat of the car. It was true, I couldn’t. It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand the English, it was that I didn’t have the Chinese terms in me to be able to explain. I was running out of words.
When our car pulled into the driveway, I slouched into the room, feeling incongruous and imperial in my fancy uniform and royal-blue hair ribbons, hands with calluses only from writing, not from hard manual work. At the new school, I never said a word in class unless the teacher picked on me. One wrong word could mean being found out for the philistine that I was. The quieter I became at school, the louder my mother became at home. She was loud because she could not read or speak the secret talk we knew. She could not read because she had been housebound for two decades. And now, over the dinner table, she would watch as my father and his children littered their language with English terms, until every second word was in the foreign tongue. We hardly noticed the food which she had prepared for us, so engrossed were we in our babble. She sat there staring at us, trying to make sense of these aliens at her table.
“Migrants don’t assimilate,” I was told by classmates in politics class. “They all come here and stick together, and don’t bother to learn the language.” But I remembered when my mother bundled all four of us into the car after school. “Agheare,” she told me, “look up the map. Find this place for me. Your father gave me the address. I am going to learn the English. I am going to learn it now, no matter what.” We did not even change out of our uniforms, there was no time. My mother decided that if she knew the English, all her problems would be solved, she would be able to do anything in this new country. Most of all, she would be able to enter the world of her children’s minds. We pulled up in front of a community centre and were met by a kind woman with a lilting British accent, hair like a soft grey felt hat on her head, grey flannel scarf and kind grey eyes. She looked like an old wise possum and she invited us all into the centre for coffee before our discussion. My mother’s heart melted. We all sat down around a table strewn with newspapers and books.
“So it says here that your mother is forty?” said the woman incredulously.
Until then, I didn’t even know my mother’s age. I asked her, and she nodded.
“Unbelievable! She looks twenty!”
I repeated this to my mother.
“Wow, forty and four kids,” breathed the woman, looking around at each of us, “incredible.” I didn’t need to explain this to my mother. She signed up for the class straightaway. After all, it was only ten dollars a term – a bargain, she thought, and such a kind teacher too.
*
My mother asked us to speak to her in English. I did so, slowly and carefully. I asked her questions: “How are you? How was your day?” But because these were questions Chinese children never asked their parents, even if she had enough words to answer me, she would not have known how. “Stop asking me crazy pointless questions,” she said, “and let me learn something useful!”
“Alright, Ma. What do you want to learn? What do you want to talk about?”
“You tell me! You’re the teacher now!” She looked at me as if I had all the answers and was keeping them from her from some perverse whim, as if I had them hidden in the inside pocket of my blazer.
The migrants in her class were all at different levels, and my mother could not understand the worksheets with the fill-in-the-blanks about Ned Kelly. “So sick of sitting down with none of this making any sense!” she cried. “Who gives a crap about the man with the tin can over his head? Stupid idiot. As if that is going to help me understand how to speak useful things better!” She dumped all her notebooks and worksheets on the floor of her room. Never put your books on the floor, my grandmother warned me, or you won’t do well in school, but I did not repeat this to my mother.
“Well, this stuff might be too hard,” I said, discreetly shoving the piles of paper under her bed. “Why don’t you start from the very beginning?” I picked up my five-year-old sister’s school reader. “Pat is … a … Cat,” my mother read. “He is a black and white cat.” Her fingers, gnarled as just-dug-
up ginseng, pointed at each word. She could read the whole book through not once, not twice, but three times.
She sighed a big sigh. “Ah, it’s no use. No use! It is all useless! I don’t understand a thing.”
“But Ma, you just read the whole book through three times!”
“No, I didn’t!”
“Yes, you did!”
She turned to the middle pages and pointed. “I don’t know what it says. I can’t sound out the words. I just memorised the whole thing when you first read it out to me. Don’t teach me any more. Go off and study. I’m getting old, going blind, my working life is over, I can’t even see well enough to be able to link these chains of the little gold bracelets together, I keep cutting myself. I am old, and I am going to be relying on you in the future. Go off and study.”
Yet the more I studied at school, the more mute I became. I lost so many words that there seemed no possibility of ever recovering them. Although I ticked “English as a second language” on all official forms, I was beginning to think in English. It was true, too, that the more I studied, the dumber I got. I could not even answer the simplest questions my mother posed of me. At least I was losing my word-spreading status, I thought – soon my mother might even forget that I had once told tales. Now there weren’t even enough words to say how I was feeling, and all feeling was reduced to the simplest of three emotions: “I am happy”, “I am sad” or “I am angry.” My mother’s moods alternated between the last two. She made the most of the words she still had by delivering them at ten million decibels in the car. “Woe and great suffering,” she yelled. “You are all going to leave me. I am getting old and you are all going to leave me because I don’t know the English!” Knowing the English became her obsession. She would ask us what certain words meant whenever she heard snatches from television. “Agheare, what is ‘Spotlight’? Agheare, what are they saying in the movie?” She grew frustrated when she could not understand, when we could not translate, when we were too busy with a book in front of our face to bother telling her what stupid things like “Big M” meant. “Why is it called that?” “What meaning does it have?” “Why do the Australians call their milk that?” My mother’s questions became more difficult to answer than the literature we had to study in class.
*
One day when I did not have school, I spent the day with my mother. She drove to my Aunt Bek’s house. As we approached the front of the mock-Georgian house, she said, “Watch to see if the husband is home! Is that his car at the front? If he is home, we’d better drive off quick!” My mother was on one of her “rescue raids” again. I later found out that she conducted these raids often, after she had dropped us off to school. She would drive to my auntie’s house and take her around to our house to talk and help her do housework, or she would help my aunt do her own housework. I checked to see if the red Corolla was in the driveway. “No, Ma,” I replied, “the uncle is not at home.” The uncle was Aunt Bek’s husband. My aunt opened the door and let us in. The house was still and silent, with both her twin sons at school. It was as quiet as our house.
I realised then that it was the same everywhere. Inside these double-storey brick-veneer houses, countless silent women were sitting at their dining tables. They were living the dream lives of the rich and idle in Phnom Penh, and yet their imposed idleness made them inarticulate and loud. They didn’t know how to live this life of luxury and loneliness. Used to working for others all their lives, they did not know how to be idle without guilt, and they could not stop working.
“How fortunate you are!” my mother said to my aunt. “Much luckier than I am. I suffer so much. My husband is always working and never drives me anywhere. On weekends all he wants to do is sweep the floor and sit around resting.” But my auntie would have none of it. “I suffer much more than you do!” she cried. “At least your husband does the housework. At least you can drive. My husband won’t let me drive anymore since I smashed into the tree-trunk of the telephone pole!” And on and on it went, a litany of lamentations about who had the worse state of affairs, culminating in the topic of Disappointing Children.
“Terrible, aiyoh, just terrible!” My auntie is telling a story. Her eyes widen and her mouth twists to prove a point about my twin cousins. “Can you believe sons like that? Useless! ‘Hey Pa,’ they say, ‘you can let us off here. Don’t drive in front of the school, I will walk from here!’ After how Ah Buong worked to get them in that school, and in the first week they are ashamed of the car their father drives!”
“Aiyoh, they don’t speak to me anymore!” continues my auntie. “When they come home from school, they just rush to their rooms and go on their com-pu-tahs. They can sit still for hours in front of the machines, and I don’t know whether they are playing games or not!”
“Aiyohh, yours don’t speak to you anymore? Well, I have it worse. Mine can’t speak to me anymore!” lamented my mother as she raised one eyebrow towards me. “See that one there? She can’t even string a proper sentence together!”
“At least you have a girl! A girl can keep you company when you are old.” My auntie watched me at the wok, trying to fry up some taro cakes for lunch.
“Yes, but she’s gone with the ghosts already. She’s going to marry one, and then it will be the end of us. At least you have sons who can marry good Chinese girls, give you daughters-in-law who will listen to you, as daughters never do.”
“We’re doomed, we who do not know the English!” lamented my aunt, “doomed!”
Both my mother and my aunt sat at the dining-room table, submerged in their doom and gloom. “What woe it is not to know the English and to be depending on your useless children!”
“And when we grow old, they’ll do what they do in this country and cart us off to old people’s homes! And we’ll be stuck with the old white ghosts. Eating their food, their cheeses and other vomity things.”
“How terrible!” This vision of nursing-home nausea so overwhelmed my mother and my auntie that they both turned their heads towards me.
“You won’t let that happen to us, will you?” asked my aunt.
“Kids these days have no loyalty,” sighed my mother. “When they get husbands, they are going to move far far away from us. It’s no use digging up promises from them now. Just wait till they get older, they will follow their husbands. And we’ll be like mutes! Wordless!” My mother’s voice was rising.
“All women are mute and wordless when they have husbands,” sighed my auntie.
“No, they get mute and wordless when they have mothers-in-law like mine!”
Both women looked at me, making sure I learned this important lesson.
“Agheare, you have to be fierce,” my mother told me. “Not like us, always working for other people.”
“But you can’t be lazy either,” my auntie told me. “Being lazy is the worst thing a woman can be.”
“Aiyah, what’s the use of teaching her these things when she is going to leave me anyhow? She is filled with foreign thoughts and she thinks these foreigners have all the answers!”
*
When I burned the taro cakes while frying them in the wok, I realised I knew nothing, that I could do nothing. That all this learning inside my head was of no use in life. “Aiyah, you don’t squish them like that!” cried my mother, “Look. Watch. Just pour lots of oil in and swirl it around. Like this.” She grabbed the metal stirrer from me and with a few deft flicks turned the cakes over. I watched in admiration.
“Ma, you need to teach me how to cook.”
“You don’t need to learn how to cook. When you get married, you’re going to be making ghost food,” she said, “for your ghost husband.” She imagined future dinners for me, with boiled broccoli and mashed potatoes and slabs of meat, all seasoned with salt and pepper. She had given up on me! “What is the use of teaching you when you are going to leave me anyway?” she said. “You never listen to what I say.”
If I listened to what she said, I would be one of those girls w
ho could cook proper food, and would marry a nice Teochew boy and be sweet and obedient. If I listened to what she said, I would not be this woeful daughter with a head crammed full of foreign thoughts, only using Chinese to ask questions or get things: “What are we having for dinner?” “Did you get the money back that was owed you by Ah Kim Heng?”
Yet these questions were of no consequence. What were important were the big questions, the big questions we never asked each other, for lack of words. I watched my mother and her sister as they sipped tea while simultaneously wiping the kitchen table. I put the taro cakes in a plate and placed them on the table. As I watched them quietly eating the squashed and slightly burnt squares, with no words for my incompetence anymore, I wanted to cry.
Late in the afternoon, my mother drove Aunt Bek back in the car, getting back before her husband arrived home. “I saved her from spending the day sleeping in bed,” my mother told me as we headed back home. “I saved her from being alone. And we got the floors wiped.”
I remembered something. “Ma, didn’t you have English lessons this morning?”
“What? Oh, English lessons. Stopped going.”
“Why?”
“Who would I speak the English to, I ask you?”
I was silent in the back seat.
“IT’S drip-drip-dripping,” said my mother. “The light is dripping with water-spirits.” At least, that was what I heard her say. I looked up. The chandelier did droop with crystals. There must have been close to a hundred of them. I switched it on to see the full effect.
“Turn it off!” cried my mother. “What are you doing? Stupid, turning it on and off like that, wasting energy!” The chandelier was supposed to be saved for visitors. Just like the sitting room, with its cream leather sofas that were never used, and the glass dining table that had never seen a dinner on its surface.
