Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

  “Got to go to Mao-Bin U library today,” I declared to my mother on the days I was not supposed to be at university. There were no questions asked, because I was trading on my reputation as a studious daughter. University was a foreign country to my parents. Never having set foot inside one, they saw universities as little scaled-down cities populated with the best and finest minds. “My daughter is studying at Mao-Bin U,” my mother declared to her friends, especially ones who also had sons studying there. Their pronunciation made the place sound like a shonky university in China for discarded communists, but our proud Southeast Asian mothers spoke the name with such reverence that it hardly mattered.

  “Don’t come home too late.” By too late my mother meant anytime past 6 p.m.

  “I won’t.”

  *

  “Have you ever hopped on a random train and got off at a place you have never been before?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  I often looked at the signs on stations while travelling past on trains and tried to imagine what those places might be like.

  I pictured Balaclava as a place full of thugs and Box Hill as full of packing crates. Sometimes I hopped off at arbitrary places and had a wander around, pretending I was an overseas student by speaking slowly to strangers. I always wanted to get off at another destination, to escape the familiarity of home and be anonymous, an adventurer. So there we were on our first date, sitting on the bright green grass in the middle of an empty equestrian park in Caulfield.

  We were both unfamiliar with the suburbs of Melbourne, because he had come from the countryside and I had spent most of my life locked in two neighbourhoods. “Your neighbourhood is fascinating,” he told me, lying on the grass, hands behind his head, staring up at the sky. “Even without English, the people there seem to understand each other so well that they could get to work on the Tower of Babel again with no problems.”

  I sat cross-legged, back straight. I realised that no matter how tired or how hot, I could never be so laid-back, even if no one else was around. Would I ever see the sky as completely and as clearly as he could? I was always on guard, always ready to leap to my feet and deny everything. Boy? What boy? I’m not with any boy! I’m a good girl, saving myself up for some whitegoods connoisseur who will treat me like a brand-spanking-new fridge. Then I heard my mother’s voice in my head – those Aussie boys, they just park themselves anywhere, and sprawl their limbs in every direction, you had better watch out.

  But I was acting less and less like a top-notch Frigidaire model the more we spoke. I became less fidgety. I stopped pulling blades of grass from the ground and realised that I had cleared quite a large patch. A few more outdoor dates, I thought, and Jim’s Mowing would be out of business.

  “Speaking of bible stories,” I said, “I was brought up to believe that the fall of man was Adam’s fault entirely.”

  “Really? Even though I’ve never met your mother, somehow I don’t imagine her as a raving feminist.”

  “Not my mother. My father. He used to tell me stories when I was small. His version of the Fall-from-Paradise story went something like this: Adam stands in the garden of Eden and reaches out for the apple on the tree. ‘Don’t pick it!’ Eve cries out to him, but Adam takes a big bite out of the apple, offering it to Eve, who, of course, refuses. Suddenly a huge voice roars from the sky, ‘Hey, what the HELL do you think you’re doing, Adam?’ Adam is so startled that he chokes on his piece of apple and it gets stuck in his throat. The Lord then decides that that’s pretty funny, and it should be stuck there permanently as evidence of Adam’s guilt. So that’s my father’s explanation of why men have Adam’s apples.” I looked down at him, because here in this unknown area I could look him straight in the face without having to avert my eyes or be demure. “Hey, that’s strange, because you don’t appear to have an Adam’s apple.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Nah, I don’t think so. I think without the obvious mark of Deity disobedience you are destined to be a celibate of sorts.

  Which means you shouldn’t even be here with me.”

  “No, it’s here. Feel here.”

  Suddenly he had taken my hand and placed it at his throat and my fingers were so stunned that they became still and stuck.

  Move, hand! I commanded, move move move stupid fingers!

  No.

  What do you mean no?!

  Actually, we like it here.

  What are you saying?

  We’re going on strike, piped up the pinkie.

  Yeah that’s right, said the pointer, a digital revolution, you could call it.

  Because my fingers were so immobile, all the little nerve endings shot to the surface, sensitive that this was someone else’s skin. My mind went completely blank. All the feeling I had became concentrated in this one hand, these four entranced digits and this non-opposing thumb.

  Searching for remnants of primeval fruit lodged in the throat of a loved one was not the most conventionally romantic or titillating experience an eighteen-year-old girl could dream up, but this was the first time I had made physical contact with a member of the opposite sex who was past the potty-training stage. Growing up, I was never the type of girl to give a boy a little playful push on the shoulder or a shove towards the sprinklers. But here I was, with my hands at his throat, and I could feel his pulse beneath my fingertips. This is wonderful! I thought. Boys weren’t scary at all, I realised, there really was nothing to fear – in fact, if I pressed a bit harder I was sure that I could make his eyeballs pop out of his head! But I was afraid that I might hurt him, or that my hands were too cold; and hoping that the ecstatic surprise was not too evident on my face.

  “What a very nice neck you have,” I blurted out. What an idiot you are, I said to myself, he’s going to think you’re some sort of neck-ophiliac now. And besides, boys are meant to make comments about women’s throats, not the other way around. Quick, quick, balance it out with some comment about his nice eyes, his nice smile, his nice earlobes! Help, what do I say next? I wondered, Help! I don’t know the rules!

  Then I thought, Bugger the rules. I always get them wrong anyway.

  So I removed my fingers from his neck with feigned indifference and told him about growing up in Braybrook and working under the supervision of madcap relatives with laser-beam eyes. I couldn’t seem to stop talking. Almost everything I said sounded fascinating to friends at university, but sometimes I felt as if I was some sort of permanent exchange student, as if they were only interested in me for what little idiosyncrasy I could offer them. This time I decided not to offer any idiosyncrasies. I decided to tell it as it was.

  “Your life sounds amazing,” he said.

  “Not as amazing as yours – travelling around all of Australia, and being able to go anywhere in the world that takes your fancy. You’ve really … lived.”

  “No, you’ve really lived.”

  We had both lived very different lives. How did we end up here, together, in this park in the middle of nowhere? I felt life open up for me – all the different directions I could go. The suffocating prospect of being stuck in a tiny two-person legal practice up above a shop in suburbia ten years from now shattered, and all the pieces fell down like fake snow from a smashed glass paperweight. The water splashed on my face, it seemed to wake me from the deep sleeping sickness. I felt exhilarated. I could be anywhere, and I could do anything. I could be anybody I wanted. My small windowed world exploded in colour and light and little pieces of broken glass. So what if I get a few cuts, I thought, a few cuts are nothing compared to feeling like a dead weight.

  “Did you always want to be a law student?” he asked me.

  “No,” I admitted, “when I was very young I wanted to be an artist. Later I wanted to be a teacher. I never thought that it was possible for me to get into law. But now that I am in, I think it is the best thing that could have happened to me. People come to me with letters they can’t read, contracts they can’t understand, and they put the
ir complete trust in an eighteen-year-old. I feel so … useful. Because they’ve never been there themselves, the older generation think that everything we learn at university is sacred and practical.” I laughed. “They have no idea we spend six months doing Derrida. And to tell the truth, I don’t even understand Derrida! One day I’m going to wake up and realise that this French fogey held all the answers to solving the legal tenure of my cousin’s bakery in St Albans, and then I will regret being such a philistine.”

  He laughed.

  I turned to him. “What about you? Why did you study law?”

  “Do you want the honest truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Back in Year Ten, I watched Gandhi.”

  We stayed in companionable silence for a long time, until he sat back up and looked at the sky. “It’s going to get dark soon. You’d better leave before your tracking device goes off.” I had always to leave my mobile phone on so that my father could call me at any time. “Don’t you feel frustrated sometimes? You’re eighteen and you have to be home before the sun sets. That’s six o’clock in winter and eight o’clock in summer!”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. Of course I felt frustrated at times. Of course I felt the unfairness of it all. I knew better than my parents, who saw me as prey for predatory men.

  Lock up your daughters or lose them! seemed to be their motto.

  You must encourage your daughter to become a top-notch barrister, a community leader, the future Lord Mayor of Melbourne even. You must teach her that in her abilities, she is just as talented and able as the young men in this country. But whatever you do, you must make sure she is not exposed to any of them. Better yet, you must make sure that she doesn’t have to make any choices about men in her life. She can’t handle it, she’ll just make big mistakes.

  But I also knew that no one was going to have any confidence in a future leader who walked around in small circles being scared of the dark. The potential barrister would only ever end up a meek clerk who clocked off at 5.30. The potential mayor would end up a secretary, and the potential independent young woman would end up being seen by outsiders as a sad case of cultural oppression. That was not who I was at all! How dare he feel sorry for me!

  “I’m not afraid of the dark, you know.”

  “Of course you’re not. But we’d better get you home in time before your father blows it.”

  I glared at him with a blazing intensity which I did not know I was even capable of, and spoke slowly and quietly, trying to control myself. “Listen, I don’t mind if you ask me to think about how irritating it is to be treated like an eleven-year-old princess and being locked up after 6 p.m. I don’t even mind if you suggest that I follow or defy the rules. But don’t – ever – give me that patronising ‘poor you’ look!”

  “But … I wasn’t.”

  I looked at him long and hard. Then I realised that he was telling the truth.

  “I just want to get you home in time so your parents don’t put you under house arrest and I can’t see you again.”

  “Oh.” Now I really felt like an eleven-year-old princess who had thrown an embarrassing tantrum. Why was I acting this way? I felt such anger, but I couldn’t direct it towards anyone.

  Both this boy and my father were so well intentioned. But something was still wrong. I couldn’t figure out what it could be. Perhaps it was me.

  “You make me feel so happy,” he told me as he took me to the station.

  It must be me, I determined.

  “WH EN do you think I should meet your parents?”

  It was time for me to sober up. I knew it was too good to last, these four weeks of rapture.

  “Soon,” I replied.

  “Have you told them?”

  “No.”

  “Have you lied to them?”

  “Lie to my parents? Could I bring myself to do such a thing?”

  “You’re lying by omission,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Well, my parents haven’t asked me anything yet, so I’m not lying.”

  He looked at me, expectant.

  “I will tell my parents. This week in fact,” I decided. “Are you scared?” I asked him.

  “Petrified.”

  “Don’t be smart.”

  “I’m not.”

  I looked at him and saw he was serious. His eyebrows were knotted, and he went all quiet. I recognised that composure from somewhere before, it seemed so familiar. Then I realised that I had seen it in myself. At that moment I realised how much I adored him.

  I tried to be reassuring. “It’ll be okay.”

  “It’ll be just okay?” He looked disappointed. “Not ‘Immortal Beloved, they will love you and offer you a house, a large dowry and a place at the head of the table’?”

  “Immortal Beloved, they will love you and offer to castrate you if you ever do anything untoward, and what’s more, the young man’s side of the family are meant to be the ones who give the dowry.”

  “Can’t believe this. I’m scared of your parents and I haven’t met them yet! And they’re probably going to be a metre shorter than me and half my weight.”

  I thought, if I were a young man I would be scared of my parents too. Perhaps not my father so much, because he was able to sit down and reason things out. But my mother – there was no way she would be able to understand an alien, let alone an alien her own daughter had chosen. My mother saw the differences as insurmountable – she was only comfortable with the familiar, yet she still believed that Princess Diana was the most dazzling creature ever to grace the earth, and that white women were more beautiful than we could ever be.

  She would often watch television and point in astonishment at any display of affection between parents and their grown children. “Wah,” she would exclaim, “even though the parents chuck their kids out of home after they leave school, and even though the kids chuck the parents in nursing homes after they leave work, they still seem to display some sort of love toward each other. Amazing.” Or she would see an ad for soft drinks and cry, “Incredible, those white ghosts! Look, that one has her bellybutton showing and she’s even got an earring in there! How depraved can you get?!” Or watching a Werther’s toffee ad: “That little boy gave his grandpa a toffee! And look, now the grandpa is smiling with a full set of white teeth and taking the toffee! Oh, now the grandpa is eating the toffee and they both look really happy.” Her comments were like those of a scientist observing slides under the microscope: “Wah, these little amoeba are fascinating, some of them have a nucleus of gold.”

  *

  There was a simplicity about my mother’s face, a stillness about her stretched-straight mouth and eyes. If you were to film it, nothing much would happen. You’d have to place the camera on a tripod, sit and wait. Bang around a few pots, make sound effects. Perhaps your camera would catch a few blinks, a blank look, a bewildered “ay, turn that thing off” and a jab of finger zooming towards the lens, but nothing more. You watch the home videos your father made, and as sure as day it always happens. “Ay, what do you think you are doing? Turn it off!” she says.

  But there is only so much the camera can catch. It does not capture the times when she laughs, her head flung back, nostrils flared, like a happy hippopotamus with squinched-closed eyes and blunt teeth, a few of them missing. When her teeth were falling out, she warned me not to invite any friends over until she had false ones fitted. She had one of those faces that hid nothing. When she was angry, her face would literally darken. It was terrifying. Just one expression, one look could make you feel like there was nothing between your backbone and the skin of your stomach.

  Firstly, you knew that she was angry by her look, features set as if carved in anthracite stone. “So, you think you can just take a day off from work whenever you feel like it?” There was no use protesting that you had worked every day for the past two weeks. No one needed a day off, and there was no way that you could be tired, because she never was. She might get exhausted, but never
weary. “Rest? Who needs rest? Tiredness doesn’t matter.” She pushed herself to the limit and had been doing so for two decades now; she knew no other way to live. And there was no use telling her that you wanted to spend a day alone with your boyfriend. “Alone? Why do you need time alone with him? What are you going to get up to?”

  Secondly came the suspicion. “What do you do alone anyway?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then you don’t need to spend any time alone!”

  You knew she was only lonely, and frightened, scared of a potential son-in-law who spoke a language she couldn’t understand. The two of you could be conspirators, in fact, the whole entire family could be – everyone seemed to understand one another except her. Perhaps she thought that she was not clever enough, not fast enough in her mind for this new world.

  But in her work, she was the fastest person I knew. Always doing three things at once, she would have dinner ready in fifteen minutes flat – three dishes and a soup, and the dishes never repeated themselves the following day.

  “Does he like our food?” she asked, meaning, did he at least eat the fluorescent lemon chicken in the touristy part of Chinatown? The trouble started on their first meeting, when I told her that he was a vegetarian. It was her birthday, and I had asked him to come to meet the entire family for the first time at the Dragon Boat Restaurant.

  “No meat at all?” she asked. “Buddhist? Taoist? Why doesn’t he eat meat?”

  I paused. “Because he feels sorry for the animals.” I was repeating his exact words, but echoed to my mother, they no longer sounded endearingly compassionate. They sounded stupid.

  “Never heard such nonsense in my life. Back in Cambodia people are scrambling for food scraps on the floor!” I knew what she was thinking. How spoilt. How like one of those people who live inside their head. “Put some proper food on his plate,” she ordered me. “He’s skin and bones!”

  I dutifully shovelled vegetables on top of his rice.