Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

  Soon she became one of the top salespeople in Springvale, and there was nothing she could not sell. She did better than us with our English and youth and white-ghost ways. “I sold three microwaves and a fridge today,” she would tell us after work, and we would wahhhh, wishing we too could sell three microwaves and a fridge in one day. Sometimes she would work in Footscray too, or I would go to Springvale, and there was a certain kind of affinity one felt when working alongside one’s parents.

  My father never wore a suit to work – he always wore his maroon jumper, with the little Retravision logo stitched to one side. Over that he wore his tattered brown leather jacket. The customers felt sorry for him, this skinny man in the brown jacket with the perseverance of Gandhi, trying his best to sell a fridge twice his size.

  My father had built all this up from scratch, and it never ceased to amaze him. He was never meant to be a franchise-holder with this company. When he set up business selling watches and singing Christmas cards, there was already a Retravision in Footscray, but still he made his submission to the Board of Directors. They refused him again and again until he finally convinced them to give him the franchise licence because he could corner the new Asian-immigrant market. My father made his business success in the same way he made toys for us. In a world of finite time and resources, my father still found time to make toys when we were small, and you could break those toys ten thousand times and yet they would remain unbroken because there was always another egg roly-poly to make, another wax dripping earring to cast. “You can make a better one,” he would urge us.

  Before he started his electronics business, my father ate three sandwiches a day while working at the Alcan factory by day and studying goldsmithing at RMIT by night. He would sit outside the lawns of the State Library with his last sandwich, watching the darkness, and think of glories to come.

  On my birthday, my mother brought a cake into the store. She took it to the front counter, and lit the candles, while all the sales staff sang happy birthday to me. Customers joined in, and we served the cake around. I felt a flush of mortification and joy, and the strangest ineffable feeling of pride and place, even though the place was just a spot in behind the mobile-phone counter. For now I was just a salesgirl in a blue sales shirt and red lipstick, but I was special. The cake proved it. It blared out this message, accompanied by the backing vocals of a special durian scent, so that no one within a fifteen-metre radius could miss it.

  University would soon begin, but this here and now was my life, my Garden of Eden littered with loud bangs and hilarious street signs pointing to places with a possibility of salmonella. This was where it all happened for me, where my life was lived. Here there were people who appreciated my skills and who brought me three-course lunches and cakes for my birthday, strangers who would clap for me and women who would confide to me all their home problems. Lonely old men from the Barkly Hotel across the road with brown-paper bags and marriage proposals. Here were the blind, the lame, the wordless, the mindless, the mute, all briefly passing in through the doors for their cameo appearances, and then leaving again. Here I was just nobody, really; nobody distinctive, nobody important. But here I was somebody loved for being precisely that. Life was finally beginning to feel stable.

  PART V

  “AH BuKien wants to discuss Agheare for her son,” my mother announced to my father over breakfast one morning. They spoke as if I wasn’t there, but they expected me to eavesdrop. This woman, a family friend of my parents, had been intent on seeing me marry her son ever since she had laid eyes on me that morning as a shapeless pre-pubescent in my mother’s hand-me-downs. Ha, the absurdity of it. “That crazy antiquated relic thinks she’s still living in Confucian times,” my father scoffed. “She doesn’t realise that in this modern era parents don’t arrange their children’s hearts for them.”

  Oh, I remembered the woman well. Once, she had come over to our house to comment on my nose. Another time, we went to her double-storey house in the centre of Footscray – the house she built from selling rice noodles. Every time my parents drove past that colossal mansion sitting smug between the dilapidated Victorian dwellings, they would point out the window and say, “Look, there’s BuKien’s rice-noodle house.” The day my parents decided to visit, I knew that it wasn’t because they were particularly fond of her. They only wanted to see her house. Ah BuKien had no problem with that arrangement – it was as well established a tradition as the rule that Asian youth never called their parents on the phone just to chat. Any departure from these tacit protocols would arouse deep suspicion.

  Ah BuKien was more than happy to give us her sedulously self-critical tour. “See this,” she said, pointing a finger at a breathtakingly beautiful Chinese wooden table. “My husband insisted that we buy it. I said to him, ‘Oh, you stupid man with your tragic countryside tastes, this looks like a godforsaken coffin I wouldn’t even put our ancestral relics’ toenail clippings in!’ But the peasant insisted that we buy it and do you know how much it cost? Do you? Have a guess. Guess.”

  And so the tour of the house continued, with Ah BuKien lamenting the cost of every item her husband had insisted they purchase, but first making us guess the price. My parents made sure their “guesses” were low enough, but not too low.

  After Ah BuKien hurled out the real price, we all courteously feigned cardiac arrest and my mother would exclaim, “Wah!”

  “Wah indeed!” cried Ah BuKien.

  Later, in the car driving home, my mother chattered endlessly about Ah BuKien’s abysmal sense of style and how shamelessly she showed everything off. “And what about that carved coffin-table?” my father agreed. “Such peasant tastes.”

  “I thought it was quite beautiful,” I said all of a sudden.

  “You just watch it,” my mother warned me, “you’re beginning to acquire peculiar peasant tastes too.” My parents abhorred anything that reminded them we would grow up yellow and there was nothing they could do to save us.

  I had never met Ah BuKien’s son. The day we visited her house, he was away being tutored. He had tutors for every subject. Ah BuKien showed off her boy in the same way she showed off her assets. “Woe, the school system here is not that good,” she told my mother one day.

  “But sister,” my mother exclaimed, “I thought you sent your son to a private school.”

  “I did.” But the boy didn’t make it into medicine. She was incensed that she couldn’t pay his way into the course. “Only a percentile of 92.4! The boy is a retard!”

  Indeed, I wanted to add, and this is the imbecile you expect me to marry? I didn’t even know his name. I only knew him as “Ah BuKien’s son.” Her rice-noodle boy – quivery, white and malleable, made exactly like her pasta. I was resolute in hating him. Even if he was Adonis Incarnate I would feel the same contempt for him.

  All his sporting trophies were lined up behind glass in that heavy house of his. And his report card was mediocre for everything except physical education. It too was displayed behind the cabinet. I hated him even more – this was the type of boy who never gave me a second glance in high school, except when he needed work from me. I suspected that he hated me too. If, that is, he knew of his mother’s intention. With all the pressure he was under, I wouldn’t be surprised if her precious son was one of those boys who smoked pot behind the gymnasium in his blazer, going through life tormented by Oriental Oedipal agonies.

  When we were about to leave her house, Ah BuKien said to my parents, “It is a pity you couldn’t meet my son today.” Then she squeezed my cheeks until I could feel the blood vessels erupting. The Cambodian Chinese liked their young girls to have cheeks as red as monkeys’ bottoms. Already, she was endeavouring to mould me. Soon she even progressed to pinching me while I was at work.

  At Footscray Retravision, there was a propensity for some mainland Chinese to refuse to buy items made in China. Whenever they said haughtily, “O, zhongguo zuo de wo bu yao” – I don’t want anything made in China – I couldn’t he
lp myself. I would ask with salesgirl innocence, “But sir, aren’t you made in China?” Of course, I always had to feign that little giggle that sounded like two brightly coloured balloons rubbing rapidly up against each other. Unlike my younger sisters, who grew up in tastefully bland pastel dresses, I had spent my childhood with a grandmother who packaged me into padded Mao suits and made me aware that I had to defend myself against all the other blandly dressed banana-children – children who were yellow on the outside but believed they could be completely white inside. My grandmother had warned me that those children grew up to become sour, crumple-faced lemons. I now believed her.

  One day, I was explaining the functions of a Walkman to a customer when I felt someone twist the bare flesh of my upper arm. It hurt like hell. I turned around and there was that face – fierce eyes tattooed with permanent black liner, lashes sharpened with mascara. Each time she blinked, her eyes looked like two stygian insects in their death throes. “Agheare!” she said in a too-loud voice, “are you working here for the holidays?”

  No, I’m just loitering about trying to pinch something for my dope addiction. I’m intending to sell some to your tormented boy too.My pimp will be here any moment now.

  “Yes, Auntie,” I replied, “can I help you with anything?” I wondered what product she was enquiring about. Whatever question she was going to ask, I would direct her to another sales assistant. My Walkman customer was getting impatient. I looked at Ah BuKien expectantly.

  “What was your Year Twelve result?” she asked me.

  I realised that the product she was after was me. She was assessing my desirability for her son – it was a sick kind of transferred lasciviousness. Returning to my customer, I simulated indifference to her scrutiny, but secretly I relished the thought that if she was searching for my child-bearing hips, she wouldn’t find any.

  Back at home, I told my parents about The Pinch. “She’s just fond of you!” they laughed. Hell, if that was her way of showing affection, I wondered what she would do on my wedding night if she had her way. Probably hand her son a whip.

  And if her plans were realised, she would make sure everyone attended the lavish banquet. I would be dressed in the same style as the Footscray wedding cake, crammed into a dress with too many frills, too much embroidery. No tasteful marzipan icing for Ah BuKien. No, I would be artificial cream fashioned into inedible roses. I would at least match their house. And of course, true to established custom, I would have to move into Ah BuKien’s household. Ideal daughters-in-law were meant to suffer stoically, but I refused to be the moribund butterfly.

  I suspected that my mother might have even been colluding with Ah BuKien, both of them plotting my descent into docility. When I was only a few months old, my mother had cut off my eyelashes, believing they would grow back thicker and longer. She must have done it while I was asleep with a pair of nail scissors. As a baby, there was already fault with me.

  I felt that there were generations of stupid women conspiring against my liberty, and there seemed to be no escape. My mother was forever telling me to be careful. “Careful” translated literally in Chinese means to have a “small heart”. I refused to have a small heart. “Be careful?” I wanted to retort. “Mother, you risked gouging out my eyeballs when I was a baby just so I could blink at boys! And now you’re telling me that if I don’t be careful I am going to turn into a slut?” The Cambodians have a saying: “A girl is like white cotton wool – once dirtied, it can never be clean again. A boy is like a gem – the more you polish it, the brighter it shines.”

  Their plan was already working. Whenever I was with a boy I could not stop the guilty look over the shoulder. It became a reflex. I was already turning into the timid ingénue devoid of all personality that Asian women considered the consummate ideal. My head-swivelling compulsion unsettled most boys. What could I tell them? “Nothing, Benjamin, just checking to see if my parents are charging up to attack you from behind with a cleaver” or “Don’t worry, Phong, I usually convulse from the neck up when I am in love”?

  I was expected to keep my eyes tightly shut until I was filed down to fine femininity. It seemed that anything I did of my own volition would shake up seven generations of dead ancestors and irrevocably damage the souls of the following seven. I couldn’t care less about these stupid ancestors who were so resolute in crushing me. I dreamt of doing something that would make them turn in their graves and squish a decomposing eyeball.

  Ah BuKien persisted with her insidious bartering. My parents ignored her completely. Every time we drove past that big white house in Footscray, I looked the other way. One day there came a second pinch at work.

  “Oh Auntie,” I said dully. “What would you like?” But my mother also spotted Ah BuKien. They went to greet each other. I waited, pretending to dust electrical appliances so I could edge nearer to listen in on their conversation.

  What does she have to say? I wondered. That her husband bought her son and me a king-sized coffin of a bed?

  “Oh, how are you, sister?” my mother asked. “How is your husband? How is your house? How are your children? How are their studies going?”

  Ah BuKien seemed to have lost her verbal facility for once.

  She didn’t want to answer. Finally, she sighed. “My son doesn’t go to school anymore.” I was stunned. In the ensuing silence, I pretended I was dusting a toaster.

  “So what is he doing now?” my mother asked.

  “Working at the factory.”

  “What! You mean your rice-noodle factory?”

  “Yes.”

  There was another silence. Then my mother responded quickly. “Oh, it’s good that he is already able to help you earn money! My daughter is a great woe to us, she has five years of law to go!”

  “Well,” Ah BuKien finally said, “she may not be earning you money now, but wait until she graduates!”

  “Ah BuKien and I were just talking,” I heard my mother say to my father a little later. “Her boy is already helping her earn money at the factory.”

  “Oh, what a useful young man he is turning out to be!” smiled my father.

  I was amazed at how skilled my parents were at acting out this pretence. I knew they believed that there was no redemption for Ah BuKien’s son. Suddenly I felt very sorry for him. His mother had truly moulded him into the consummate Rice-Noodle Boy. But I knew that her moulding days for me were now over, because before she left, she did not flatter me with a final pinch.

  “WOW,” he breathed as we emerged from the station onto the street. The sky was slowly turning the colour of a three-day-old bruise, and the streets were wet.

  I stopped walking and turned to face him.

  “Come on, please get back on the train and go home.”

  “Go home?” he cried in mock mortification, complete with hands-to-the-face demonstration. “Oh! I’m doing the chivalrous thing by escorting you back through these brutal streets and you tell me to nick off!”

  “Well, I’ve managed for eighteen years by myself, I think I should be fine for one more day.”

  “Go home?” he cried. “You have no idea! I can’t possibly go home.”

  “Yes, you can. You have a Daily Metcard which expires at 2 a.m.”

  “Ohhh, please don’t make me go back! I can’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have journeyed perilously by train to get here, wedged between disease-carrying passengers and surviving only by clinging to a hand-rail with three fingers! Please don’t send me back! Oh, such suffering I have endured to get here!”

  As moved as I was by his miserable odyssey, I had to tell him that we weren’t parading our suffering by moaning about landmines and leaking boats.

  “But that’s because you’re brave and strong. I’m just a poor orphan whose parents have not too recently died a slow and agonising death.”

  “Oh yeah? From what?”

  “Complacency! Their bodies are decomposing in front of the television as we speak.” />
  “Oh, how heartbreaking.”

  “Come on, if I told you to go home …”

  “If you told me to go home you’d be standing here naked and shoeless and sick. Remember, it’s people like us who sew your jeans, make your runners and end up becoming your doctors. Besides, I am home.”

  “Want to hear a poem?”

  “No.”

  “I made it up just for you.”

  “Err … no thanks.”

  We walked past blurred aerosol graffiti written on the roller-shutters of the One Hour Photo Shop. The rain had painted the ground a dirty anthracite colour, and the sidewalk proudly displayed its shining black circles of ancient gum on the hard grey pages and pages of concrete.

  The only other white boys around could hardly string a sentence together, let alone plead for temporary asylum. Empty-eyed, they loitered, wearing diarrhoea-coloured cargo pants and swearing loudly at every opportunity. Now they were staring at us.

  I looked at my escort. It was bizarre how the scruffy college look that was so grungy at uni looked really derro here. In fact, he could fit right in if he tried to look drowsier and kept his mouth shut. When he opened his mouth, he killed off any chance of establishing lifelong friendships with the watchers across the road. And now they were beckoning us over – or, more accurately, beckoning him over.

  “See what you’ve done?” I whispered. “Now they really think you’re chasing, and they also probably think that I’m your girlfriend, so you’re putting my life at risk every time I walk down these streets now.”

  I wasn’t really scared, of course. In this suburb, I was more scared of interloping Indochinese “aunts” than the local drug-dealers, because the latter generally left me alone.

  “Ummm … they want me to go over.” He looked at me anxiously.

  “Sure. Go over. They’re going to invite you to their cocktail party. Remember to pop into Forges to buy a tie before you cross the road.”