Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

  “Don’t cry,” said my mother, as she took the drawer to the sink. “That’s what you get for keeping things for too long, you see. Look at the mess I have to clean out now!”

  “What are you doing?” my grandmother admonished me, as she opened up my fingers one by one and removed the melted mess from my hand. “It’s no good now, you can’t save it. Listen to me, we’ll buy you new ones.”

  “But I don’t want new ones,” I replied firmly.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Don’t be difficult.”

  But I wasn’t being difficult. I wiped my hands on my green pants handed down from Cousin Andrew. New ones would just not be the same. I would never go to the same trouble again. “It doesn’t matter anyway.”

  My mother and my grandmother did not say anything, but my grandmother came to help my mother dig the remnants of the gift from the bottom of the drawer, and they did not yell at me for making such a mess of things.

  EPILOGUE

  “What are you doing, Alice?”

  My sister Alina’s face peered down at me, with her eyelashes that pointed down towards her cheeks, just like my grandmother’s.

  “I’m looking at the sky.” The sky was as clear and blue as a child’s new crayon, as it had been the first time we visited this park, the second time, and every other time.

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Lying on the grass is going to make you itchy, Alice.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Just the sky.”

  “I’m gonna look too.”

  “Okay. Lie down on your back.”

  “Okay.”

  A few moments later: “Hey Alice, what am I supposed to be looking at?”

  “Up.”

  “But what?”

  “Just up.” I thought she should discover the pictures in the clouds herself.

  Soon, three other little cousins trotted over and wanted to lie on their backs too. They blinked at the sky for a while.

  “I’m bored.”

  “There are no good clouds.”

  “Why are we doing this?”

  “’Cause Alice is.”

  The clouds moved, and I imagined a mirror in the sky, reflecting the world back in reaffirming white whorls.

  “Ay!”

  I heard a piercing yell from behind me.

  “Agheare, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” My mother.

  I turned my head to one side, towards the direction of the sound.

  “My holy sacred Buddha, look at her, nineteen and lying flat on her back on the grass like that! With no shame. And look what’s happening, now all the little ones are following her!”

  I looked back up at the sky. I could hear her telling my father what I had been doing. I knew he would just look at us and laugh. I turned my head towards the party assembled in front of the only pink and orange grave among the black granite ones in Lilydale Memorial Park.

  Aunt Que set down her vat of mixed bean soup on top of the grave. Aunt Samso set down her fried noodles. Aunt Anna set down her Continental pasta bake. And Aunt Jasmine set down her huge pot of chicken curry, grinning at Uncle Frank because even though they were well into their sixties, they were still in love.

  The rest of the food was laid out on the polished pink and orange marble – as fine as any marble you would find on any table at any one of our mock-Georgian houses. “Eight thousand dollars,” grinned Uncle Frank, knocking his knuckles on the shiny surface. “I helped pick it out. Beautiful hah?” Aunt Jasmine beamed up at him.

  I sat up as Aunt Anna handed me five bunches of plastic flowers to arrange. Shoving the stems of fake flora into a real china vase, I tried in vain to match the opal blue poppies with the magenta gerberas. No flowers were ever that blue in real life, nor did they have black plastic stamens that stuck out like big-headed nails. Since trying to achieve realism with these specimens was as likely as painting a Renoir with half a dozen textas, I opted for a striking Ikea-catalogue effect instead.

  “Wah!” cried Aunt Que, “what a miserly effort! They’re all going to blow away with the wind!” And before I knew it, she had shoved in at least three more bouquets, including a dozen neon-green and white roses with glue-dew-drops. She plugged in every possible breathing space at the neck of the vase, and it choked out a few leaves before becoming completely still. The breath of afternoon breeze couldn’t even stir a petal, they were jammed so close. “Now it’s much better. Look at all the colours!”

  I looked. The flower arrangement was at least five times larger than the vase itself.

  “That’s enough with the flowers. Now let’s light the incense,” said Uncle Frank. We all lined up to collect our stick of incense, and to bow down in front of the HUYEN THAI embossed into the granite in gold letters.

  “Buddha bless our mother,” mumbled my parents, aunties and uncles.

  “Buddha bless our grandmother,” mumbled my siblings, cousins and I.

  The incense was slowly burning down, swirls of smoke drifting up like silk kite tails towards the sky. I sat on the grass and watched. In the centre of the tombstone was our surname PUNG written in gold with the sweeping strokes of Chinese calligraphy. On the right-hand side was my grandmother’s picture with the dates 1911–2002 underneath, and on the left was my grandfather’s picture – 1907–1975. The rest of the Chinese I could not read.

  “Is Grandpa also buried in there?” asked Alison, peering at the headstone.

  “No.”

  “Then why is his picture there?”

  “So that we remember him.”

  I knew that the grave was housing a mere empty shell, that my real grandmother had left before her burial. Probably off to find my grandfather and resume that argument they were having a quarter-century ago before Pol Pot separated them.

  “It’s so deep!” my sister Alison had exclaimed when she tossed her handful of rice and grains into the open grave at my grandmother’s burial three years before. “I can’t even see the bottom.” I wondered now whether things were growing with the grains we tossed in, like the life that grew above my great-grandmother, all that rice and abundance on top of the killing fields. All that growth that grew all that produce that created all that life that made all that food on top of my grandmother’s grave. The food in steaming pots. Two little bowls of rice and two little bowls of tea arranged on either side of the incense pot with perfect symmetry – even when the souls have sighed out of their bodies, you still must accord your parents equal respect. Suddenly, my eyes caught something unexpected, something quirkily out of place amid all the plastic tofu-containers and steam-breathing mounds of food. Behind all the pots and plates, the grapes and geraniums, there were four shining gold Easter bunnies. Where had they come from?

  “My sister bought them,” Cousin Tammy told me, “for the little ones.”

  I remembered how, at my grandmother’s burial, before the earth was levelled on top of her plot, lucky red candies had been handed out to everybody, the same ones that Little Brother had yearned for all that time ago. Some things never change. We had unwrapped our brown and pink caramels and watched the bulldozers slowly come in. When we walked away from the grave, we were told that under no circumstances were we to turn and look back. We were to keep walking forward, sucking on our lollies.

  We still believed in silly superstitions and sweet endings after all.

  *

  When I was seven, Granny was living with us, in our old house, along with kind Uncle Wilson, Auntie Anna and cousins Andrew and Angela fresh from the Fragrant Harbour. They had a partitioned portion of our living room separated by a curtain my father made out of bedsheets. One day Granny came back from Coles supermarket with a white plastic bag, and from her wrinkled hands emerged wonders never before seen by my seven-year-old eyes. Four little solid eggs, two medium-sized eggs and one small Easter bunny for each of us. “Don’t eat them all at once,” she told us.<
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  My four-year-old brother set to work at once, unwrapping his first little egg. I set to work with my paper and stapler, making a box in which to put my little polished gems. Cousin Andrew lasted two days, and then he couldn’t help himself.

  “They’re empty!” he cried, after he bit off a part of his bunny’s ear and could see through the hole.

  “Yeah? So?”

  “Back in Hong Kong bunnies are filled. All of it’s chocolate.” He felt gypped but I didn’t care, I expected the hollowness. While everyone else’s sources of joy were rapidly depleting, the remnants adhering to their sticky faces, I still had my six eggs and a bunny. They were hand-boxed, wrapped in a grey plastic bag and hidden in my bottom drawer where no prying family members could ever find them.

  I wanted mine to last as long as I could, I wanted a collection. After four days, I did not even think about eating them. The besetting temptation was no longer there, or if it was, I muffled it. Eat me! Eat me! the Bunny pleaded with its crayon-blue eyes and Red Tulip lips. I glared at it. Be quiet. Then I wiped away its tears – for an edge of the foil had mysteriously ripped – with my sleeve, and put it back in the box, back in the bag, back in the bottom of the drawer.

  Every day, my brother and cousin would ask whether I had eaten any, and every day I would smile and give them the same reply. After two weeks, they stopped asking. After three weeks, I stopped the daily check on my hoard, my nest eggs. I knew they were still there. I knew I had self-control, and I knew soon I would be the richest girl in the whole of Bliss St, Braybrook. Dedication, preservation, reward – I had it down pat.

  Then, four weeks later, I decided that one of the little ones had to go. It was time. I imagined they were quivering in their cotton-wool padded prison, I was so excited. But when the drawer was opened – horror of all horrors, worse than finding my fortunes furtively stolen – ants spilled out and the bunny had melted and the goo that gushed from the eggs had wrecked my box. I didn’t care about the ants that would crawl up my arms, I pulled the whole drawer out of the cupboard and dug my hands in deep. While Alexander and Andrew watched, I started pulling out each egg one by one – or what was left of them – trying in desperation to find one that was not insect-infested, trying to sort through the foil and frustration, not wanting to believe that these squished tragedies were once my pride and joy, the things I had looked forward to most in the world for more than four weeks.

  “Don’t cry,” said my grandmother, kneeling down to have a look herself. “I will buy you new ones, don’t cry.” But I wasn’t even going to cry, crying was the last thing on my mind. I was beyond tears, I could not believe that one little tear in a bunny’s ear could lead to this devastation.

  “Don’t cry,” said my mother, as she took the drawer to the sink. “That’s what you get for keeping things for too long, you see. Look at the mess I have to clean out now!”

  “What are you doing?” my grandmother admonished me, as she opened up my fingers one by one and removed the melted mess from my hand. “It’s no good now, you can’t save it. Listen to me, we’ll buy you new ones.”

  “But I don’t want new ones,” I replied firmly.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Don’t be difficult.”

  But I wasn’t being difficult. I wiped my hands on my green pants handed down from Cousin Andrew. New ones would just not be the same. I would never go to the same trouble again. “It doesn’t matter anyway.”

  My mother and my grandmother did not say anything, but my grandmother came to help my mother dig the remnants of the gift from the bottom of the drawer, and they did not yell at me for making such a mess of things.