Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

  I couldn’t have cared less about numbers. Cipher was not a number. But my mother and father nodded in agreement – number ones, number eighty-eights, number fours. They understood. Four sounded like the word for “dead” in Chinese, so if you were Cantonese you could never use that word. Sei lah! Sei Sei Sei! Dead dead dead dead. My grandmother never let us use the word because she was scared of dead, and death, and the dead. But if we were all going to die anyhow, why not live life, why not even wag school?

  Soon there were more meetings, this time with the school administration, and I found myself sitting in the vice-principal’s office with my anxious fingers tearing holes in my blazer pockets and a smile fixed on a face that was no longer mine. This time the staff did not tell me, as they had before, “You should apply for university scholarships, Alice, you’ll surely get them.”

  But the smile still stayed in place.

  The vice-principal looked into my eyes. She had clearly seen this many times before, and could probably count herself to sleep by listing the nervous breakdowns she had dealt with in her office.

  “What pills have the doctors prescribed for you, Alice?”

  There were little pink pills to help me focus, big white ones to help me settle, tiny white ones to help me sleep. And not only were there pills, there were natural therapies. Horlicks and bananas. Incense and charms. And the depths of my pa’s medicine pot always contained boiled black monstrosities which came in white paper packages from the Barkly Street apothecary.

  Before I went to sleep each evening, my father came in with his electronic acupuncture machine. He attached the pods of his acupuncture device to my tummy, to my calves. “Got this in Singapore,” he told me, “Lucky hah? It doesn’t hurt like the needles do.” Pim pim pim pim pim went the little electric pin-pricks.

  He massaged my neck, my shoulders, my feet. When he tickled me on the soles of my feet, I did not move. I had stopped feeling ticklish ever since this shadow began stalking me. It was scary being stalked. What could this dark shadow do to a person? It had already made my feet feel black and gangrenous. They looked like my grandmother’s wasted toes, with her crusty toenails like dirty broken brown shells dropping off on the sheets.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, don’t know where you come up with this crazy stuff,” scolded my mother. “Your feet look fine.”

  She looked down and saw long, evenly coloured toes. Skin the colour of washed sand against my father’s gnarled old tree-twig fingers. She did not see the gangrene. She did not see the leprosy, she could not tell that I was wasting away. Or perhaps she did not want to see it. “You are fine,” they all told me. My body was still working, my brain cells were still intact, I was not going mad mad mad.

  “Pa, go to sleep. I’ll be okay,” I said.

  Pa did not believe me.

  “Did you take your pills?”

  “Yes.” My hand wrapped around the soggy solid spots in my pocket.

  “Even the pink ones?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t lie,” said my mother, standing over me. “We haven’t even given you those yet.” I lay there, blinking up at the ceiling.

  “Why don’t you take it?”

  Smaller than a Smartie, it nestled under my tongue. I hoped it was not getting comfortable and ready to multiply. I swallowed.

  “Did you take it?”

  I opened my mouth, poked out my tongue.

  “Good.”

  No, it was not good. It was awful. It felt like crushed cyanide powder beneath my tongue. Specks floated on top, to the area where you taste bitterness. Now I feel like an authentic Chinese woman, I thought. Yippee, adolescence is over! I’m all better now.

  “Now go to bed.”

  I got up from the bed, went to one of our four toilets, closed the door and spat it into the bowl. Bye bye, bitter pill. Parting is such sweet sorrow. Down it swirled. Bye bye, clouds of clarity. I would rather be blocked than have this false sense of calm. Back to the room I went, back to bed. Between the sheets I slipped, and no longer did I write in my journal. There weren’t even any anxious etchings anymore. I had no words left.

  “Go to bed,” said my mother, “go to sleep.”

  Can’t, I wanted to tell her, there’s a hole in my solar plexus. I think I can put my hand through it, and if I reach deep enough and high enough, I can also feel my chest cavity – black, miasmic and sick. I’m leaking to death, and if I should die before I wake, I pray my organs the donor registry to take.

  But who would want this sick mind? How I would have loved to reach in there, twiddle with a few wires, tweak a few neurons and electrons, and bring me back to life.

  FOR my valedictory dinner, my mother bought me a white dress, because she thought it would make me happier. I wondered whether she could see that it would also be like dressing a body for a polished pine box. At my house, my friend Nina took one look at the scalloped lace and told me she would lend me one of her frocks. She insisted that I come to her house after school the next day, so I did. Volition had disappeared altogether from me. If someone had told me to lie in the pine box in the white gown with the neat lace shells tumbling down my arms and knees, I would have obliged. If they had closed the lid, I would have gone to sleep. I was in that semi-asleep state when Nina told me to turn around so she could see the sleeveless cheongsam she had put on me. It fitted like a black skin with a rash of orange and green blossoms. “You look good in that,” she said, adjusting the collar.

  When Nina and her mother came by on the afternoon of the dinner to take me to the hairdresser, my mother was in bed staring at something – her hands, the light, the wall. Something. Beneath my coat, I wore the borrowed black dress. I preferred its fermenting scent of perfumed secondhand sweat to the cold sterility of a forced innocence. “I am leaving now,” I called out to my mother in her room.

  “What are you wearing?” she yelled downstairs, without getting up from the bed.

  Defeated, I could not lie.

  As I finally got into my friend’s car, I was as clumsy as a doll dressed by a child four decades old. I was a wind-up obedience toy, or a coathanger for good intentions gone awry. I was almost eighteen.

  “Look at her shoes.” Nina pointed them out to her mother as we waited at the hairdresser.

  “My goodness, look at your shoes.” Nina’s mother shook her head with a sad smile. On my feet were shiny plastic middle-aged-woman pumps, yellowy-silver off-white. “These white shoes match the dress,” my mother had said.

  “Don’t worry, you can come back to my house and borrow a pair of mine,” Nina reassured me. Again I was back at her house, and this time I sat on the edge of the spa bath and looked down at a pair of white stilettos, with lots of thin white straps at the ankles. Nina had made my feet look like party feet, like feet that danced to synthesised tunes and rubbed against young men. I was grateful to Nina. She had taken me to her parent’s ensuite bathroom and put her mother’s expensive perfume on my wrists. She had prodded and poked me into perfection. She was even diplomatic enough not to have said anything in the car as I handed back the black dress in a plastic bag.

  “You should pluck your eyebrows,” she told me. I didn’t want to. I liked my eyebrows, black and thick like the Indian ink I used when I was eight and took Chinese brush painting lessons. She got out the tweezers for me, and I yanked out a few hairs to make her happy. I sat on the edge of Nina’s spa-tub, watching her smear herself all over with a cream the colour of caramel, looked down at my party feet and waited for our parents to pick us up.

  “Look at you. So lovely.” The comments meant nothing to me that evening. I was carrying an empty shell around that did not belong to me, positioning it in different unobtrusive places in the grand function room, the girl with the rubber mask of a face.

  We were on the only fully “ethnically-enhanced” table: Neylan’s mother in her jilbab, Natalia’s generous gregarious Russian parents, and Nina’s glamorous Vietnamese parents. Natalia’s aside, these were the par
ents who did not know much English, who drove taxis and sewed collars and buttons by the boxful so that they could send their children to a school such as this and watch them mingling with the upper echelons of society – the children of lawyers and doctors and professionals.

  That night our parents realised something that probably shook them from their sleeping dream, the semi-dazed dream they entered when they rested from too many taxi-shifts, or when they closed their eyes from the fatigue of opening too many stitched buttonholes. They realised that their children were Watchers, just as they were. We watched everyone else, as tonight we watched our classmates in their smart suits and sophisticated frocks climb onto the stage to pose for photographs.

  “Why don’t you get on stage too?” my parents asked me. As if I could just jump on stage with people I had never spoken three words to all year and insert myself gracefully into their picture. And suddenly the reality must have sunk in for my parents, for all the parents on our table, that their children were not more popular, that we did not talk to the beautiful people. It must have hit them hard – that we were still sticking by each other, sticking with each other, and not getting out, not fitting in. They had thought of this new life in simple cause-and-effect terms: that if they worked their backs off to send their children to the grammar school, then we would automatically mingle with the brightest and fairest of the state.

  But to the beautiful ones, we were the non-party people, the ones with frightening parents and skirts down to our ankles. To the intellectual ones, we were the ones who never had enough time to join in debating, the boring compliant people who just studied and studied. If only they knew our lives did not revolve around study as much as theirs did – but they would never know. We may have been the dull people with no time, privacy or glamour, but we had our fierce pride.

  With my camera, I migrated to my older teachers, the sanest people in the whole royal red and gold room full of colour like a watermelon turned inside out, soft and pastel and pink in some places and yet sharp and blood-red in others. The future people would get their photographs developed from this evening and see the yesterday girl, the small one standing next to them, the one wearing the funny twelve-year-old bridesmaid’s dress, and five years down the track they would not remember her name.

  I had nothing to lose. So I walked up to Edmund Chan-Johnson, tall awkward Edmund with the serious brown eyes who had no idea that he had been loved all year by the silent girl sitting two seats behind him in Literature class.

  “Edmund.”

  He saw me. He said the words I had him rehearse in my mind a million times so that when it really happened I would be gracious and generous. But I had heard it from and told it to so many others so many times this evening that they didn’t mean anything. Don’t lie, Edmund, I thought, my lipstick is too dark, my shoes are too high and I look like Lolita going to confirmation. I don’t look like the real me, I have never looked like me and you have never ever looked at me. But instead I muttered, “You look good too.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can I have a picture with you?”

  “Umm, sure.”

  After Nina took the photo, I ran away with my camera flailing at my side.

  She caught up with me and we returned to our table, to take the real photographs, photographs of the people who mattered most to us – our parents and friends.

  And then it was all over, and I was back home in the bathroom pulling the black bobby pins from my hair and wiping the make-up from my face with cotton balls, pulling off the white dress and getting into mismatched pyjamas, lying in bed waiting for the long sleep to come.

  *

  By the time my exams arrived, I was so far gone that even reading the newspaper was difficult. Suddenly, all writing confounded me. Sentences suffocated me, they seemed strung together like code. “It’s only some stupid exams,” my parents told me. “Just aim to pass. A pass is all you need.” They were not even convincing themselves. They knew that in my condition I would not be able to live a normal life, let alone sit exams.

  At school I was sent to a little office I had never known existed. There Mrs Trengrove taught me how to breathe. How many other people visited this office, I wondered. How many of our smiley-faced classmates came every Wednesday, every Tuesday to learn how to breathe? “You’re not going to fail,” the counsellors all told me.

  You don’t understand, I wanted to say. If I fail, I am condemned to a life sentence of dirty dishes and rubber-faced, blank-wall staring, and I will go mad. If I fail, everything my whole life was meant to lead up to will be gone. “Study hard and go to university,” my grandmother had always told me, my grandmother who now lay staring at the ceiling in a dark and musty room. “Study hard and be a scholar.” Failure was annihilation. I was never the spunky valedictorian girl declaring her smartness to the world with a defiantly upturned chin, I was the one slinking into shadows with my eyes glued to my books hoping only to fulfil the set criteria. I was a blank just like the walls with the posters removed. How easily they came off – they were only stuck on with blu-tack, like my personality.

  My Auntie Ly visited Cambodia and came back with stories about our impoverished, skinny cousins – all in their late forties, all unmarried. “Please, Ly,” they begged her, “please set us up with men in Australia so we can get out.” They had waited too long to marry, they had waited for men who could take them abroad. They did not want to settle for a local, because they did not want to settle for a life in Cambodia. My auntie promised that she would do her best to help them look, but said, “I don’t know many men, the ones I know are divorced or wife-bashers.” “I don’t care, I don’t care!” the cousins insisted. They just wanted to get out.

  I understood them, these poor cousins. I understood how terribly they must have ached to get out. My role now, after final exams and the end of high school, was to wait for my hair to grow and then attach my tentacles to an emotionally un-bruised boy with a doctor’s bag. It wouldn’t be too hard to do – I was in high demand with demanding mothers-in-law, and eventually one of them was bound to have a son doing medicine. Then I would be his little attachment, and I would not have to say a word. There would be a courtship by half-smiles and lowered lashes, crossed legs and charming blunders. She can cook a good bowl of rice. She is parsimonious, it is guaranteed by her mother. A lifetime warranty. At least I could marry well.

  I felt great contempt for anyone who was interested in me at this time. I thought they were sick, to want something so sick. The horror of it all was that they liked me as I was. How could they love this me, sapped of all essence? They loved a shell, they were content with a shell. This was what my future held – I was a void to be filled by others.

  I had done everything right, and I had turned out so wrong. I turned out empty. I turned out faulty. I felt like my grandmother, lying in bed staring up at the ceiling, waiting for it all to end, yet so afraid of the end that she always slept with a light on. “Agheare,” she cried, “take me to a place with no darkness.” Oh Grandmother, if we could both go to a place with no darkness, I would get us first-class tickets edged with gold. You can chant your Amitabhas and I’ll have red ribbons in my hair, and my little hand will fit in yours as perfectly as it did when I was small, and I will not demand that you buy me anything along the way, and you can wear your pink lipstick because you would never go out without your lipstick. Oh Grandma, wherever we go and whomever you meet along the way, you will tell them, “This is my granddaughter, she is so clever, she is so smart. She knows everything, for someone so young. Aiia, she can also make anything and do everything.”

  “HEY Alice, Granny died.” “When?” I put down my bags. It was the last thing I expected to hear from my little sister Alison.

  “Last night.”

  My grandmother had caught a cold, my father explained, her immune system was down. It happened in the middle of the night, he told me, it happened so quickly that by the time he drove to Aunt Que’s house my grandmother w
as gone. That was all my parents would tell me. They probably wanted to spare me the details. I had been away for a few days on a camp, and they could not bring themselves to break the news to me in the car driving home.

  “Oh no,” was all I could say. My grandmother was not meant to die. She was meant to be with me forever. Even in her illness she was the one person who was always happy to see me, and she did not care that my store of Teochew words was diminishing. She knew we were both going the way of the ghosts, except my ghosts were white living ones and hers were unknown. “The Buddhas will protect us,” she told me, “just pray to them in times of darkness, and there will be light.”

  My grandmother’s funeral lasted for three days and three evenings, with people from the Bright Moon Buddhist Association chanting prayers around the clock. Granny who used to set me on the table, was now laid out on a table herself, dressed in imperial yellow with a little yellow cap. During the last stage of her illness her white hair had started to grow back black, as if miraculously there was renewed life, as if her body were regenerating, a reincarnation without death. But now all this regrowth was covered by the cap, and when I looked at her I knew that something vital had slipped out, so all that was left was the shell of a person.

  My grandmother was meant to be a part of me forever, so that I would always know that there was a life before me, and a life after me. My grandmother and her stories. What would I do without them? She asserted my existence before I knew I had one – before I was conscious I had a life beyond the present – and she told me my childhood. “Agheare, when you were small you could recite long Teochew songs and poems.” “Agheare, when you were small you could speak in Cantonese.” It seemed as if I could do anything when I was small. We slept in the same bed, and it was always warm. Now there would be no one left to remind me of my roots, no one to tell me to be proud to be part of a thousand-year-old culture, no one to tell me that I was gold not yellow.