My First Lesson: Stories Inspired by Laurinda

by Alice Pung

  Ours was the only blue house in Stanley, and I don’t mean a pale blue washed out with a lot of white. I mean blue the colour of that bubblegum-flavoured ice-cream all kids love until they get older and find out how many chemicals are in every scoop. Now I feel the same way about our home. But when I was younger, I loved how it stood out; it was the kind of house a kid would draw, a rectangle in blue and a triangle in red.

  To our left were the Donaldsons, a lovely older couple who owned a Dalmatian that barked at all hours of the day. They’d come over once a year, two days after Christmas, to give us cake and handfuls of chocolates that tasted like brown crayons. A few months later, at Chinese New Year, Mum would ask me to walk over with coconut sweets or spring rolls, and sometimes I’d bring mooncakes from the Lunar Festival. “Aren’t you a sweetie,” they’d say.

  The Donaldsons’ house was white, and its cement-rendered front was not pimpled with mould. They had a carefully maintained garden of bougainvilleas, cacti and fuchsias, and an upright letterbox – no small feat in a place like Stanley, where teenage hoons would drive by with cricket bats, in cars that they’d buy for $200 and spend $2000 kitting out. Most of the letterboxes in Stanley leaned to one side, as if wincing from their blows.

  The most enchanting thing about the Donaldsons’ house was this: around their front yard were seven little gnomes and a toadstool, each partly hiding behind a flowerpot or shrub. The hoons who loved to smash everything that was standing never touched the Donaldsons’ peekaboo gnomes.

  That’s what I see, Linh, but I also remember that our closeness to the Donaldsons didn’t stop the hoons from knocking over our letterbox. Once they even chucked a rock through our front window. I suggested to my father that it was because our blue house was such an irresistible target, but no way was he going to repaint it. When we first moved in, my father took great care to water the plum tree at the front and the apricot tree at the back. Eventually he got too busy and said it was a waste of water. “Let the rain take care of it,” he said, but the rain was as half-arsed in its dripping as everything else around here, and eventually the apricot tree dried up. The plum tree survived but bore sour pellets.

  Mum spent most of her days indoors, only going out to shop and collect the mail from our letterbox, or to attend church. She’d always wanted me to go to a Catholic school, which was how I ended up at Christ Our Saviour College. My father, who didn’t really believe in God – not since most of his family went missing, presumed dead, in Vietnam – wanted me to win a scholarship to somewhere else.

  He also wanted me to stop wasting time doing things for the neighbours and to start hunkering down. “Why do you always interfere with her homework?” he asked my mother. “Where were you when your god was handing out the brains? Holding the door for everyone?”

  He wanted me to get out of Stanley. He wanted me out of there for my own good. Where we lived was not a place where good stories began, but a place where bad stories retreated, like small mongrel dogs bitten by much larger, thoroughbred ones.

  Reading back through this first letter to you, I can see I knew even then that where I was going, you were not coming along, and that I would have to leave you and all of this behind. But I did not understand then, as I do now, how difficult it would be to create a thoroughbred from mongrel stock.

  When my dad dropped us off at the front gate, the first things I saw were the rose garden spreading out on either side of the main driveway and the enormous sign in iron cursive letters spelling out LAURINDA. No “Ladies College” after it, of course; the name was meant to speak for itself. Then there was the main building: four sections of sandstone brick and the giant cream tower in the centre. This place is giving us the finger! you squawked when you first saw it, Linh.

  I thought to myself that in a black and white photograph, it could be mistaken for the main house of a plantation in the deep south of America. I could imagine young ladies in white gloves with lace slingshots, lying in wait to kill a mockingbird or two. It was beautiful, but as it was guarded by a gate and set against the enormous lawn, the beauty snuck up on you, like a femme fatale with a rock.

  We could make fun of it because we knew we’d never enter the school itself, only the gym, a massive windowless box that looked like a giant’s shipping container. There was an A4 sign stuck to the door: YEAR TEN SCHOLARSHIP EXAMS THIS WAY. Rows of plastic chairs and tables had been set up, with numbers sticky-taped down the side. It was morgue-cold in there, as though we were going to be strapped into those seats and have our minds dissected in some awful autopsy.

  There were over three hundred students in the room but only two of us would make it through this elimination round: a boy for Auburn Academy and a girl for Laurinda. This was the first time Laurinda and Auburn had offered “Equal Access” scholarships, which were supposed to go to kids with parents the school considered povvo.

  That morning, all the parents were begging the deities, white-knuckled with want, for their kid to be the one who made it through. There were two types, I noticed: the ear-pullers, who drove off immediately after giving their kids a serious stare and a punishing pointed finger, and the bum-wipers, who stayed as long as they could, until they were kicked out because the exam was about to begin.

  It was good to see some familiar faces from Christ Our Saviour. Tully was there, and Yvonne and Ivy. They were trying out because they hadn’t made it into Hoadley Girls State Selective School and their parents were giving them a rough time at home. And you, of course, Linh.

  I felt sorry for Tully. The way her mother was dragging her to the gym by the elbow, it was as if she was heading for the firing squad. “Your cousin Stephanie got into Hoadley seven years ago,” we overheard Mrs Cho muttering, “and there is no way that you could be dumber than Stephanie.”

  Now Stephanie was an accountant who sat on her bum churning through numbers all day instead of standing in a factory pulling out chicken gizzards. My parents had taken me to visit her when I was seven. I stared and stared at the badges on her red woollen jacket and her chequered skirt with a big metal pin through it. “She had to take a test to get into the school,” my father told me as he drove us home that evening. “She has a good future ahead of her.”

  As a kid, I wasn’t forced to think about The Future much, but I knew I wanted to be dressed like Stephanie in a royal outfit that magically seemed to make adults take you seriously and ask you quiet and sincere questions and listen to your answers. None of that “Wah, what a pretty girl you are!” which seemed to be the only way adult strangers behaved towards me back then.

  As I walked to my place in the gym, I saw Tully hunched over the desk ahead of me, her back a hard cashew curve and her fingers at her temples. I thought of all those afternoons when she couldn’t hang out or even do homework with us because she was being whisked away to some tutoring program or other.

  When the exam began, the gym fell so quiet that I could hear myself blink. It must have been like this all the time for Tully, I mused, her whole life one exam after another in white-walled tutoring centres run by dour former maths teachers or engineers whose qualifications were not recognised here. She would be used to this silence.

  When it was over, we walked with Tully, Ivy and Yvonne to catch the bus home. Ivy and Yvonne had been such close friends since Year Seven that they had identical haircuts. They commiserated with each other when their parents made them find after-school work at the local Kumon tutoring centre and Kmart, and they planned to run away together when they turned twenty, before their parents could send them back to Vietnam/Malta to get cheap eyelid surgery/nose jobs and/or husbands.

  As we walked, we wah’ed over houses with roofs like red bonnets on top of white faces with unblinking bay-window eyes, fanned by decades-old London plane trees. Ivy and Yvonne skipped down the sidewalk, playing the old game of avoiding the cracks in case we broke our mothers’ backs. Tully had her fingertips in her jeans pockets; occasionally she would pull out a soggy tissue and wipe her nose. Th
e girl was practically viral.

  I could hear Ivy bellowing down the quiet street that Yvonne had stepped on a crack.

  “I did not, bitch!” Yvonne screeched back. I noticed the airy curtains of a house ripple.

  “Be quiet, youse!” you said. “People are watching us.”

  “Let them watch!” yelled Ivy in glee.

  “We probably interrupted their eleven o’clock croissant.”

  We caught up with Yvonne and Ivy.

  “What did you write about for the final essay?” It was the first time Tully had opened her mouth since the exam. For fifteen minutes, it had been set in a straight line, with a small hook on each end, as if latched to her chin and dragging her head down.

  In the last part of the exam, we had to write an essay based on a badly photocopied picture of a person sitting behind a desk in the dark, a candle burning. It was done in the style of the drawings in the Good News Bible – with swirly lines and no features, so you couldn’t see the facial expression.

  “I wrote about feeling trapped in an exam that will decide whether my father will disown me,” Yvonne joked. “This is my second go! Sixty bucks down the drain again, just because my dad won’t accept that I’m not a genius like you, Tully. What did you write about?”

  “I wrote about Peter Benenson, who founded Amnesty International,” said Tully. “I figured they wanted us to show that we knew about world issues, and they might give bonus credit if we knew about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

  “Waahh,” breathed Ivy, and whacked Yvonne on the shoulder. “We’re stuffed, my friend. I wrote about how when my brother Ming went to prison, he missed Asian food so much that in the exercise yard he watched the pigeons and wanted to kill and roast one, like quail.”

  I saw the upside-down hook on Tully’s face turn itself the other way.

  “What the hell, Ivy?” Yvonne said, laughing. Then she turned to Tully. “Man, Tully, that is what they call a sophisticated essay. You’ve got the scholarship in the bag.”

  “Hear me out!” declared Ivy. “I thought that if I wrote about true life in – what did Mr Galloway call it? – an ‘evocative and poignant’ way, those examiners would be amazed by my ability to portray real life and feel sorry for me. Two birds with one stone, my friends. Two birds, one massive stone.”

  Suddenly, Tully turned towards you. “What did you write about, Linh?”

  You just laughed. “Something stupid.”

  I noticed that Tully’s eyes were two small, desperate fires, but I didn’t say anything. I stayed quiet. Tully, who had more A’s than a wholesale box of batteries, had been sitting in front of me for the whole three hours, distracting me with her rocking backwards and forwards. Fifty minutes into the exam she had put her hand up for another blank writing booklet. Throughout the test, she was practically coughing up her lungs in the near-silent room.

  I knew she would get the scholarship. She was like an Olympic gymnast who had been training for this moment her entire life. Nothing else was allowed to matter. She was not allowed to do sports or drama, or take an interest in anything frivolous. She could read about the end of apartheid in South Africa, but she couldn’t read the arts pages of the newspaper if her parents were home. That’s how crazy they were. She could talk about the Geneva Convention but she wouldn’t know how to boil an egg. She certainly wouldn’t know that sleep was something people did to feel rested and more awake.

  I felt sorry for Tully. Her parents didn’t let her catch the bus by herself, even though she was six months older than the rest of us. But some hidden part of me also did not like her very much. I didn’t know what to say to her on the days when we finished school late and I walked her to the train station. Afterwards, I would tramp over to my bus stop; by the time I got home, the house and sewing work would have piled up and my mother would be angry.

  Before I’d left that morning for the exam, I had gone into the garage. Mum was sitting there at her table, beneath a fluorescent bulb that glowed like an illuminated mushroom. The dust motes rained down on her head like furry spores. “Two hundred before Wednesday,” she told me, slowly turning over a collar-shaped piece of iron-on interfacing in her hands like a manuscript. This was a woman who had never picked up a book in her life; the only literature she looked at was the BI-LO and Safeway ads that arrived in our letterbox every Tuesday. Yet her fingertips could read that piece of polyester fibre like a blind person read Braille.

  For some reason, the picture in the exam paper had reminded me of my mother, so I’d written about her. If the other girls had asked, I would have told them. But somehow I did not want to share this with Tully.

  “What took you so long?”

  My mother was in the kitchen, putting some water on the stove to boil and opening up a packet of Indomie Goreng, when I arrived home. She lived off these dehydrated noodles, a pack every afternoon.

  “I had to wait for the bus and then catch a train.”

  She wanted to know if the $60 we’d paid for me to take the scholarship exam would be refunded if I didn’t get in.

  “No, Mum. Where’s the Lamb?” I asked.

  “Lamb’s in his box. Eat first.”

  I watched her open the sachet of desiccated onions and MSG and pour it into the noodles, then plonk a fried egg on top. My Chinese mother had a profile that I imagined photographers in National Geographic would consider noble: born in Hanoi, she had somehow ended up with darker skin and the bone structure of a Montagnard woman, those highland-dwellers with strong jaws and long eyes.

  We always called my baby brother the Lamb because of our surname, Lam. His real name is Aidan, because Mum wanted a word that our grandmother in Hanoi could pronounce, even though he had never met her. Mum kept saying she wanted to go back, but in thirteen years she had been there only once, and that was to bury Grandpa. “Life gets in the way,” she sighed whenever I asked, and then she would stare into the distance like a blind person remembering sight. Because I was so young when we left, I don’t remember much about my grandmother except that she smelled like aniseed rings and incense.

  The Lamb slept in my parents’ bedroom, but during the day spent most of his time in the garage with Mum. There were babies with faces like apples and bodies like small blimps, and then there was the Lamb, who looked more like a dried tamarind. Brown and skinny, he even sat in an enormous fruit box waiting to be picked up. The Lamb was never the sort of baby who’d make it into a Target catalogue – he’d more likely be the poster child for Compassion Australia – but he was a healthy and cheerful little pup. His box had cushions and toys, and it was very cosy. We didn’t have air conditioning in our house, but we had a unit in the garage because that was where Mum spent most of the day, and sometimes a big part of the evening too. Sometimes my father helped out, because along with a sewing machine, there was a second-hand overlocker for denim and polar fleece.

  “Hello there, Lamby.”

  Looking at the piles of orange tracksuit pants, I wondered who would ever buy such ugly attire. Then I looked down at the Lamb: with the leftover fabric remnants, Mum had sewn him an orange polar-fleece tracksuit, complete with hood. He looked like a miniature pimp in the making.

  “Lamby, we’re going to have some noodles now.”

  The Lamb looked up with his round, unblinking eyes. He bunched his hand into a small fist with one finger sticking out, and as I leaned down to pick him up, he stuck that finger in my eye.

  “Owww!”

  The Lamb was beginning to explore the world through his hands. For months it had been his mouth. He put everything he found in it to test it out, including the plastic backs of Roll-Up fruit sheets and a powdery dead moth, whose re-emergence caused my mother grave alarm.

  As I washed my eye out at the sink, the Lamb crawled into the kitchen and rubbed his own eye. Lately he had learned to stand. He was standing now, with one hand splayed on the wall for balance, the index finger of his left hand pointing straight up towards the ceiling and the
other fingers balled into a little fist, as if having a eureka moment.

  “Come here, Lambface.” I hoisted him onto my lap.

  “He’s been in the garage all day,” Mum told me. “After you finish your noodles, take him outside for a walk. But don’t be too long, because I need you to help me iron a box of shirt sleeves.”

  The largest box from each new shipment Uncle Sokkha brought over became the Lamb’s new playpen, which was just as well because by then he would have decorated the last one with scribbles. Mum only thought to buy him a packet of washable textas when one day he made his open-ended circles with a red permanent marker across a pair of beige shorts she had just sewn.

  Uncle Sokkha wasn’t our real uncle. He had a moustache and a Cambodian afro – a Cambofro. I’d never seen one on an Asian man before. He liked patterned shirts and gold chains, and looked like he should be selling Sunkist soft-drink on television, except for three things:

  1. He didn’t speak English;

  2. He had a scar running from the left corner of his mouth to the edge of his nose, which puckered his lip up a bit at the end so that it looked as if he was constantly snarling at some sick joke; and

  3. He didn’t have the sort of chilled personality required of a soft-drink promoter.

  Besides his shonky lip-curl, which I didn’t think he could help, I’d never seen him smile. Whenever he delivered a new batch of clothes to my mother, he always stressed that it was urgent, like a Triad master directing a hitman. Then he’d drive away in his white panel van, only to reappear two weeks later with a new batch.