Her Father's Daughter

by Alice Pung

  Just like the time his daughter decided to go to Sydney for a debating tournament when she was eighteen. She made the excursion sound like such an official university event, but when she returned with her album filled with photographs, he could see that there were no lecturers or tutors present. What had he expected? That eighteen-year-olds in Australia would be chaperoned? Well, why yes, he had. That was what he had expected. And uniforms or gowns of some sort, even, to show that they were a team. But no, in her photographs it was a hotchpotch of jeans and dresses in different colours and lengths, river cruises, a boy standing on a dustbin doing an impersonation of the prime minister, a red-headed girl kissing another boy with a head of hair like spiral pasta, and his daughter, standing there in the middle of it all, smiling her head off like she was part of this amateur thespian production, a cameo role caught in the spotlight. Surrounded by those Australians, she looked like she was twelve.

  ‘Why do you have to live at the college?’ he asked. ‘Can’t you just teach there and then come home in the evenings?’

  ‘Because it’s part of the job description. They won’t hire me if I don’t live there. It’s only a twenty-minute drive from home.’

  His wife was against it, of course. How could he even consider allowing their eldest daughter to move out? People would think she was a runaway, that there was immeasurable misery or wantonness in the family that had caused an unwed daughter to leave home. Those Australians, his wife told him, think that childrearing ends when the kids reach eighteen. Then they tell them to get out of home and make their way into the world without so much as helping them buy a car with airbags! Perhaps that’s why so many of them didn’t finish university. They had to fend for themselves: eighteen-year-olds with rented houses preparing their cheap meals of macaroni mixed with melted squares of Kraft cheese!

  He could not understand his daughter’s strange need for space, and to be alone. After all, hadn’t the family stuck together during the years of the Black Bandits? He had lived with his mother all of his life, and his sister, and later his wife. He had never been separated from the women in his life and he hated the thought that his loved ones would be far away from him.

  ‘Just have a look at the brochures, Dad,’ she had pleaded with him, and left them on the table. He glanced down and saw the picture on the cover of one of them – a stately red building that looked like the fairytale castles in the books he had read when he was young.

  The college was at the back of the university where he had dropped his daughter off so many times, watching her disappear through one of its gates, which weren’t actually gates but wide pavements surrounded by trees. He liked the look of this place – he thought it looked exactly the way a university should look. University: such a strangely perfect word. It had the word ‘universe’ in it. Somehow, it seemed appropriate; each time one of his children entered this place they were like little planets flung into far distant galaxies. He was reminded of one year not too long ago, on Christmas Eve, when his daughter had herded them all to the science museum. She woke up early, looked in the street directory, and then the whole family drove out to Spotswood. He realised, in a bewildering yet not unpleasant way, that lately the kids had been taking the parents on little excursions.

  Kien had fallen asleep in the planetarium because it was dark. There were stars in the domed sky, but it seemed too close, the ceiling was too close and it pressed down, reminding him of all those nights they had been running away from the Black Bandits, and how they had slept beneath the sky – he and Kien and his mother and his sister. The skies were clear then too, and the stars winked like unforgiving blades.

  *

  In the end, he decided to let his daughter go.

  ‘You start with this one now,’ said his wife, ‘and they will all want to leave.’

  ‘She’ll be home on the weekends, she said.’

  ‘She won’t! She’ll soon decide she wants to go out to parties all the time with the Australians.’

  No, his daughter had never been any good at maths. Even when she wrote down the calculations carefully, she would make one silly mistake and mess up the whole equation. She would arrive at an answer, and it would not match the one in the textbook and she would ponder why and run through their steps again, overlooking the same mistake in the middle, even though it was obvious what she had left out. But she would plod along, believing that the sum would work out in the end. And when it didn’t, she would just start working on a new question. This new world was an infinity of possibilities.

  He finally decided that it was safe enough for one of his flock to fly. He didn’t understand the magnitude of what he had done until the second week, the third week. For the first few days it felt as though she were on extended school camp. But then she was no longer around.

  INVISIBLE

  DAUGHTER—

  In that first year of moving out, she also got her first office job that had nothing to do with the family business. She was an articled clerk for a law firm, and every day she sat in a cubicle in front of a computer screen. She was responsible for about two hundred and fifty company files in pink and blue folders. She had to make sure the companies were registered, that they were not on the edge of insolvency, and that they would not fall foul of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

  Her boss was an Italian man who was in the office by six in the morning and on weekends too. Since the dissolution of his professional partnership, he was working himself sick. When the firm split, he could have started afresh at a new firm with a new set of staff like the other partner did, but he took on the old and the fledglings, the employees who had worked with him. His wife came into the office like Rosie the Riveter, ready to begin secretarial duties.

  ‘Italians are just like us,’ her father would tell her. ‘They understand family business, loyalty and hard work.’

  ‘Walk, don’t run,’ her boss told her, ‘work smarter, not harder.’ From anyone else, it would have sounded like Anthony Robbins fist-punching-the-air bull; but coming from him, with his economy with words, it made a lot of sense, especially when she had to go into the city. ‘Make friends with people in the lower places and life will be much easier.’ He meant the clerks at the prothonotary’s office, the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, all the places she had to visit to make deliveries or do searches or collect documents.

  *

  She had had interviews – quite a few – at the larger law firms. She had waited in foyers and receptions, sitting in chairs that resembled frozen lettuce leaves. ‘We’re ready to see you now,’ the receptionist would tell her, and lead her to the human-resource manager and two partners seated at a table, eyes already fogged from seeing a stream of too many young sycophants. Her resume would be in front of them, and they would go through it – finally pausing at her seven years working in an electronics business. They took one look at her and thought she spent her time working for a mum-and-dad shop in the dodgiest of neighbourhoods. No better than a hairdresser, really.

  I’ll be completely honest with you, someone had told her in law school, I have only seen them hire people like you for the receptionist jobs. So her friend Fiona spent an hour giving her interview tips, making sure she got things right, and another friend, Clara, offered to lend her an Oroton bag to carry to interviews.

  Then came the interview at her boss’s office. ‘You represented your father at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal last year?’ The moment she realised that he thought something of this was the moment she stopped going to interviews.

  *

  Her boss explained to her the finer aspects of asset protection. ‘When you know this well enough, you can even help your dad with the protection of his business,’ he explained. She worked with Kathryn, who had eyes with starburst irises and who taught her, slowly and carefully, the ropes of the legal profession. She worked with Maria, w
ho knew more about conveyancing than the lawyers because she had been doing it for more than two decades. And here, working alongside these two generous and competent women, she felt a sense of camaraderie, that they were allies in the face of adversity: angry clients, cases that dragged out for years, the daily round of tasks.

  On Saturdays, though, she still put on her blue Retravision shirt and sat in the back office of her father’s store. There were no windows in the office, and it also served as a storeroom. Sales staff would burst in to collect repaired goods or pull radio alarm clocks and Discmans from the stacks on the shelves above her desk. She would help her father with his property investments, dealing with estate agents and repairers. She hated doing this job. He owned so many properties now that it was hard to keep tabs on them all.

  She didn’t know how her parents and their friends found these properties, since they didn’t trawl through the ads in the newspapers. One of them would let the others know that there were cheap houses somewhere, and her parents would go and check them out for themselves. Sometimes this involved a weekend interstate trip, to Brisbane or Launceston. It was all about the location, except that her mother and father were not so much looking for the right locations as the wrong ones: urban poor areas in Tasmania, or Slacks Creek and Woodridge in Queensland. They were especially enamoured of the Queenslander architectural style, timber houses on stilts with sprawling verandahs, since it reminded them of the houses back in Cambodia. It didn’t matter if the property had peeling paint (that could be easily fixed) or overgrown grass (all it needed was a mower) or that the neighbours looked a bit suspicious (after all, they weren’t going to be living there themselves). If there was a noisy train track at the back of the house, even better: it meant the property would sell for much less. These houses would then be let out, and her role at the back office was to deal with the leasing and constant stream of repairs that needed landlord approval.

  She wore the Retravision uniform in case there was a staff shortage at the front of the store. There was no such thing as doing just one job. Anna from accounts would go out to the shop floor to connect just-purchased mobile phones if there were not enough salespeople. When there were no customers, the salespeople would dust the shelves and replace the tagging and study up on the latest model fridges.

  Once she was called out to connect up some mobile phones for a pimp. She wanted to be back inside the office working on a statement of adjustments for a property because it was taking her an awfully long time to get the numbers to line up. Instead, without realising at first what kind of set-up this was, she was connecting the pimp to his girl with a two-for-one mobile-phone deal. It was summer, and the girl, Diep, wore a long white smocked dress. She looked like a Murakami heroine – there was an anaemic delicacy to her face and a butterfly clip in her hair. She called the man who was with her ‘uncle’ in third person but ‘Daddy’ in second. The man had a scar running from his lip almost to his left ear, as if someone had tried to give him a permanent sneer. She noticed how the pimp gave his business card to the white salesman in the store, but not to any of the other employees. Diep sat there looking at her. ‘You have a good smile. You don’t have to sell phones, you know.’

  *

  The four walls of her flat became her sanctuary, and the suburb of Parkville her private retreat. The outside world could seep in slowly, one trickle at a time, but she did not want a deluge. One day she might see a friend, the next she might walk through darkened streets and look through yellow windows, and the day after that she might read two books in one sitting without feeling guilty that there was work to be done – floors to wipe, dishes to wash. This was what it was like to be free, to live for yourself. You could set your own priorities and it didn’t always have to be work first. You could choose to focus on other things. It was then she realised the relativity of tasks: that reading could mean as much as toiling, or that sitting in the sun looking at her hands would not result in a boot-stamp of guilt in the face. Perhaps she was freeing herself from the moiling mentality of her parents, free now to be a let-us-all-rejoice Australian.

  She took to waking up when the sun rose and walking the empty streets before the stores opened. At such hours, the world belonged to her and her alone, she thought, whereas the night belonged to so many other people – insomniacs and students and factory workers and people who were beautifully painted.

  She also walked the streets alone just as darkness was beginning to fall. For company she sought out the houses where the lights were on. Her forays into other people’s lives did not bring up much except people watching television in their front room facing the street. She wondered why some people didn’t draw the curtains. She could see in, but they could not see out. It was all darkness, and she watched the faces of the television watchers to see the skim of real human emotions they were experiencing from an electronic box.

  She didn’t have a television; she even quit having a radio. There were more interesting things to watch, like the way her own thoughts developed like Polaroids and the way some of the images would not show up as anything but a grey blur, while others were so vivid that it hurt to look at them with the naked eye. No one was watching her and she was invisible.

  AGENCY

  DAUGHTER—

  ‘Your mother and I can’t understand what your problem is,’ her father told her late one evening when she was at the family home. ‘We are introducing you to people, new people you would not have a chance to meet because you’re too busy with work.’

  ‘I can meet my own people.’

  ‘Obviously not,’ he replied, ‘because why else would you have felt the need to go to that dating agency? We’re your parents. We know you better than any dating agency.’

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed. Oh no, they were still going on about the dating agency. ‘But the dating-agency manager did not sit next to me and the other party on our first date. That’s the difference!’

  ‘When I was courting your mother,’ her father replied, ‘I went and visited her all the time at her house when her parents were around.’

  ‘That’s not the same thing. You scooted her off on the back of your bike ten minutes into each visit. How would you like it if you saw her for the first time across a yum cha table, wedged in between her parents, and you between grandma and grandpa, not being able to speak to each other properly?’

  But she knew his first engagement was probably arranged in just this way. He had been set up to marry a nice Chinese-Cambodian woman back before the Black Bandits took over the country and they lost each other.

  ‘You don’t have to speak that much to each other on the first meeting,’ her father explained. ‘The first meeting is just for looking.’

  ‘So I’m just meant to sit there, to be looked at?’ Her father was impossible! She couldn’t understand why he thought it acceptable to arrange and intrude on the first dates of his grown-up offspring. It had happened more than once. Invariably, someone would turn up at Retravision with photographs of their son or nephew, or mention their child who was a lawyer or doctor. Numbers would be exchanged, a lunch arranged on a Sunday afternoon with the boy and his family – and his grandmother too if she wanted to tag along.

  ‘Why can’t you just give the guy my phone number and ask him to call me?’

  ‘What if he’s too shy to call?’

  ‘But getting your parents to do all the work for you?’ Come on, couldn’t he see how pathetic this was? Why was he so stubborn, so paternalistic?

  Her father was wearing his Smiling Monkey pyjamas. A fifty-something man in boy’s flannelette pyjamas. It was the same when her mother wore her Western Bulldogs beanie and her puffy red polyester vest. It was difficult to be angry at your parents when they were dressed like sleep-befuddled children from a 1981 Target ad.

  Yet she had lost the affability that came naturally to her younger siblings. It was a battle, and she often felt
that she had to be the one who fought tooth and nail to prevent meetings like these. Young adult automatons, glaring at each other across a table while their parents raved on about how good and obedient they were, which is why they could not find life partners. Because they studied so hard. Because they worked so much. Because they saved up for a mortgage. Because they were good and never went out to nightclubs.

  Her father was tired. He had stayed up for an hour to have this conversation with her.

  ‘So what you are saying is that you don’t want your mother and me to introduce you to anymore people?’ he asked, irritated.

  ‘Don’t set me up on anymore dates!’ How could they not see that every time they tried, the results were disastrous? The most recent candidate had been Rick, who came from China and was working at Retravision; the only sentence she could extract from him was that he liked Van Damme films. Her mother had brought Rick home on one of her father’s birthdays, and there was no way to get out of it. Because she had been polite to Rick, her father worried that she might be interested in him – and then became irritated because he didn’t want her to be. Anything other than open hostility was to be construed as interest.

  ‘Why haven’t you met anyone?’ her father wondered. ‘You must meet heaps of people in your work. Maybe your mum is right and the reason you are still single is because you live out of home.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Perhaps because you are living by yourself, all the players come, the ones who are not so serious. If you were living at home, then you’d just get the suitors who were serious about you.’

  Where on earth had he picked up a term like ‘players’, she wondered.