by Alice Pung
‘I’d get no one!’ she said to him.
A while back, she had naively gone to a dating agency because she wanted all of this to stop. She worked at the law office during the day and came home in the evenings to teach at the college, a pattern of unchanging contentment that was only ruffled when she returned to her parents’ house and their incessant worrying.
So she had ventured into the least tacky agency she could find, close to the Chanel store in the city. Two slippery grey pillars stood to attention at the front, topped by Art Deco reliefs of Atlas holding up the world. The foyer looked like Marie-Antoinette’s marbled ballroom. The floor immediately below housed one of the top international law firms. She saw its name on the office listings in the glass cabinet. When the elevator stopped at her level, she thought she might be in the wrong place. Perhaps she had ended up in the entrance of the law firm after all. There were three young receptionists with pencil skirts and pencilled eyebrows. One of them asked if she could help.
‘I’m looking for the Elite Encounters Agency.’
‘Oh yes, please take a seat. Caroline will be with you shortly.’
She sat on a red couch and waited. She was glad that she had worn her work suit. This looked like serious business.
Caroline came out, brown hair pulled back and arranged in a loose bun like a Cadbury milk twirl. She was led into an office with nothing on the walls and nothing on the desk except a laptop. Caroline sat down opposite and explained how the agency worked.
‘There are seven main areas that couples are most likely to fight and separate over,’ she was told. That was why the agency had a special personality-compatibility test for her to take. The results would be matched up with those of other candidates, and pairings would be made. First, though, Caroline asked her some questions.
‘What are your hobbies?’
‘What would you consider your greatest achievement?’
‘What are the personal habits you can’t stand?’
‘What is your star sign?’
She had no idea how a couple of rocks millions of light years away could determine potential conjugal bliss, but she answered anyway, out of curiosity. She wanted to see where this was heading.
‘Do you belong to any professional networks?’
It was beginning to sound very much like a job interview, though she could see that Caroline wasn’t as interested in taking down the answers as she was in getting to the next part, showing her the lifestyle packages. The Silver Service, the Gold Package, the Platinum Ultimate Lifestyle Enhancer. The first came with a selection of potential dates which would be emailed to her once a month, the second with a life coach, and the third with a personal stylist to offer make-up advice and a voucher for a haircut.
‘Some people just don’t know how to appear confident, or even how to groom themselves,’ Caroline advised her. ‘You’d be surprised by the number of professionals who are successful in their careers but have such trouble finding partners.’
‘Really?’
‘That’s why one of the questions on our test is how often a candidate showers.’
‘What are the options?’
‘Twice a day, once every day, once every two days, once a week.’ Caroline knew she was digressing, and pulled the conversation back to the packages. ‘So,’ Caroline continued, ‘once a month you’ll get emailed profiles like these.’ Turning her computer screen around, she showed her a picture of a middle-aged man named Tom who, according to his profile, was a self-employed entrepreneur.
‘How often does Tom shower?’ she joked, but Caroline wasn’t biting.
‘That’s personal information I can’t divulge.’
She didn’t know whether a computer and a five-minute interview was enough to find her someone she could tolerate for the rest of her life. Could you choose a life partner the way you might a car, she wondered. Where was the human element in that? Was this any better or worse than what her parents were trying to do?
‘I will have a think about it,’ she told Caroline, but when the elevator deposited her in the marbled foyer she almost tripped over in her hurry to get out of there. What on earth had she been thinking?
She was still in her mid-twenties, for crying out loud.
THE SURFACE OF THINGS
FATHER—
She had been gone for two years, three years, and in her fourth year his daughter wanted to look for a house. She now wanted to leave the beautiful flat, which had been renovated over the years so it had new carpeting, new kitchen, new paint on the walls, a new light-filled bathroom. All this great newness and she wanted to leave! There was no precedent for it: what to do about unwed daughters leaving home before they were married? Who would look out for them? She had seemed so happy at Janet Clarke Hall. The staff were supportive. The students had really taken to her. And the college had safely cloistered her: a visitor had to get through a locked gate, two layers of doors and a flight of steps before they could even approach her flat.
He started thinking. If she moved to Footscray, he and Kien could check up on her every couple of days. Bring her home-cooked food. Make sure she was not sick. He’d found her one day with the flu, curled up on the floor of her flat with a half-eaten tin of lychees.
So he helped her do what she wanted, which was to look at homes for sale every Saturday. They would set off mid-morning, with the real-estate sections of the newspaper on her lap in the car, and they would go house hunting. These trips made him realise that his daughter only looked at the surface of things. She couldn’t care less about house foundations or building materials. She deliberated over rooms that he knew at a glance would never be worth investing in. The space was too small, the house too old, the walls made of flimsy plasterboard that had been painted to disguise its poor quality.
Yet she would rail at the sight of a house in Braybrook that was bright blue or bright green, as if paint could not be repainted, as if such ugliness had to be permanent, as if she had never considered that it could be knocked down to rubble.
You could put a vase of flowers on a tablecloth in a bomb shelter and his daughter would be sucked in. Look at this, she would say, a sign of life – when all the people with their hands over their ears would be the clearest sign of life to him. Gestures like the vase were such time-wasters. It was like playing a violin to a buffalo, as that Burmese expression goes. Come to think of it, who would play a violin to a buffalo when the fields needed ploughing?
Dignity in poverty, she would have called it, seeing all the little gewgaws – a plastic vine with washed-out yellow fabric leaves wrapped around an iron railing, cheap porcelain cats, curtains hanging from the kitchen window. It seemed the older the house, the more it mattered to her. That was the trouble, he thought, the accursed poverty of these people, these new Australians. They found a place, their first place, and decked it out with flecks and flickers of their cash flow, treating the flow like a tub of freshly opened Dulux paint. Oh, we’ll just use a little to fix up the curtains. Get a glass cabinet for the living room. A larger television. Maybe even a home-entertainment system. It won’t empty the pot. But he knew that once the lid of the tub was open, the paint would dry out quicker. And that’s how they became stuck. These people were not long-term thinkers. They were always thinking of immediate comforts, to make it a bit easier here or there. Whereas he and Kien – well, they worked and worked until they could build their new house away from the carpet factories.
So when his daughter was away in Adelaide for work one weekend, he and Kien decided to look at some blocks that they had driven past on their way back from work – new parcels of land near the Maribyrnong River. How best to tell their daughter who was so quick to react to things? They decided they would not tell her until she got back from Adelaide. It would only make her anxious.
A PLOT OF LAND
DAUGHTER—
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p; ‘Do you want to hear some good news?’ her mother asked her one evening. It had been two weeks since she had been home to see them.
‘Did you buy something new?’ she asked. ‘Something on sale, perhaps?’ It was a longstanding joke in the family. Her mother really could buy things for a steal: shoes for five dollars marked down from eighty, suitcases for four dollars, once a new fully-lined coat for three dollars because it had been tagged incorrectly at Kmart.
‘No. You bought something.’
‘What did I buy?’
‘You now own a block of land!’
‘What?’
‘Your dad and I went to the new-release-of-land sale early Saturday morning. We had to line up – you should have seen how many people were there so early! We had our eyes on that block for you – the big one in front of the fence. Near the golf course.’
‘The golf course I was telling you about last year,’ her father added. ‘The one where Bill Clinton played.’
Her parents had bought the block while she was interstate, and signed as her nominees. She knew well enough to resign herself to such surprises. They never threw surprise birthday parties – bad for the heart – but unexpected acts to secure the children’s future seemed to be the done thing.
‘Don’t worry, your mortgage will be cheaper than the others,’ Dad told her. ‘We got a real bargain.’
‘Why?’ she asked. Uh-oh. ‘Aren’t they all the same?’
‘Well, your block is actually close to something that you probably won’t notice when the houses are built, because they will all be building double-storey houses anyway to block it off.’
‘What?’ All she could ask of them was ‘what’ and ‘why’. She was a living perplexed eternal query.
‘There is a mobile-phone tower behind it,’ said Mum. ‘A Telstra one. Don’t worry, Telstra was state-owned, so it should be safe.’ She didn’t understand the correlation between a phone company that was owned by the government over a decade ago and the safety of its towers, and what any of this had to do with the block of land.
‘I don’t think it’s cancerous,’ Dad said. Then she understood – they were worried about radiation from mobile-phone reception towers!
‘When you get the Vendor’s Statement, you can check out the Environmental Report to see if the tower is poisonous – but I am sure it won’t be. And what’s more, you have a cooling-off period.’
‘Solicitors don’t have any cooling-off period,’ she told her father.
Her mother and father glanced at each other. They had woken up early and lined up like teenagers to get the best concert tickets – except they had got her a mortgage instead. They had been telling her to put her money into real estate since she was twenty-one, but being the practical people they were, they knew that they had better act for her because if they didn’t, all her earnings would evaporate.
‘Damien across the road from us has already bought his block,’ her mother said. Damien was twenty-five, married and visiting display homes every Saturday. Her parents talked about her future neighbours: ‘The Vietnamese family who lined up to get the block next to yours seemed very nice and decent. And if any of your friends want to buy a block, I think there are a few left.’
Her father showed her the plans on the contract, including the AV Jennings fold-out at the back, with four suggested architectural designs. If they were faces they would all have looked the same, but for the eyebrows.
Who knows, it could be fun, she thought, building a new house. And perhaps she did want to live a short walk away from Highpoint Shopping Centre and the Bill Clinton golf course. She tried to get excited at the idea of the block. But the truth was, she had wanted a house.
They had spent weekends searching and searching, she and her father. The areas they had targeted were in the western suburbs of Melbourne: the properties in front of the carpet factory in Braybrook, the weatherboard homes in Footscray, Sunshine and Maidstone. They planned their day according to open-house times, and parked the car five minutes before the arrival of the agents. At every house they inspected, she noticed at least five other Asian couples or families. She had no idea which ones were planning to buy investment properties and which were wanting to break out of the rental cycle, since they were all dressed alike in shabby Saturday clothes that they had owned for decades or made themselves.
Entering each house, she was hit by the smells of sleep, cooking and the familiar stuffy stench of daily life conducted in such close quarters. She saw the sewing machine next to the baby’s cot in the back room, the Laminex table and cork chairs. The curtains nearly falling off their rods but always drawn so that outsiders could not look inside. The children’s rooms packed with boxes of miscellany from import businesses, or stacks of cut fabric. She looked down and saw the grouting of the tiles clotted with blackness. She looked up and saw the plastic prints of fluorescent deities on the wall – Buddha or Jesus looking down at her, condemning her condescension.
She saw backyards filled with weeds and sad broken clotheslines, some of which were just strings tied to the side of the house.
Her father did not seem to be affected by all this. ‘How many square metres is it? What is the rental in the area like?’ he asked the agent, taking notes.
‘Of course you’re not going to live in it,’ he told her when he noticed her dismay at how windowsills were cracking, and windows were coated with grime.
But she had seen people’s long johns hanging on clothes horses, five Indian families to one Footscray dwelling, freshly renovated Victorian houses with the interior painted the colour of pig’s liver. Those were people’s homes, and they were where lives were lived. Molecules of former existence floated through every wall and partition. A house was substantial. A block of land was just a block of land.
‘How am I going to pay all this off, as well as build a house on it within two years?’ she asked, looking at the contract.
‘Well then, you have two years to find yourself a partner who will marry you and help you pay off the mortgage and build the house.’
Poor bugger, she thought, coming into this predetermined life. Then she realised that perhaps there were a few lazy men who would think this was an excellent arrangement, coming into a wife and home like a Lego-set.
‘Mum says she will help you out,’ her father told her, and began to scrawl on the back of an envelope lying on the table. He reassured her that he and her mother had worked out an arrangement whereby they would lend her a sum of money, interest-free, and she could pay them back slowly as well as pay the mortgage. Drawing diagrams and writing down figures, her father pointed and enthused, ‘See how soon you can pay off this mortgage with this plan!’
That did seem very soon, she thought. Suspiciously soon. How exactly did it work?
‘Oh, simple,’ said Dad, ‘you will just move back home.’
‘Move back home …?’
‘And you’ll continue to work at the law office, but if you need extra money we can help you – you can work at the shop too.’
She should have seen this coming. It was like when she was eighteen and her parents wanted her to work every spare moment during university breaks at their shop and put all her earnings into paying off her university loan.
‘You will be able to pay the mortgage off in less than ten years!’ her mother advised. Life was filled with figures for them, figures to be crossed off.
Ten years! she thought. She would be thirty-six. She would be stuck at home with her parents still setting a 10.30 curfew for her. She would have worked for ten miserable years of her life just to pay off a piece of property.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I will just pay off the mortgage slowly.’
‘But it’s thirty years!’
She could cross off figures too, but she definitely wasn’t going to move back home.
ARRIVING
FATHER—
What was wrong with these kids, he wondered. They seemed to have no future plans, and yet they also resented it when he and Kien stepped in and tried to help. Like they didn’t need help at all, as if they were completely independent beings.
He remembered when he first arrived in this country. The sweet bread-and-butter faces of the Australians and their tenderness like pudding. They didn’t see human debris when they first looked at him. They saw a man and his very pregnant young wife, his 28-year-old sister and his 72-year-old mother.
He remembered when he first saw Melbourne, too. The geometrical wonder of the city rose from the horizon, each skyscraper a glorious robot rooted to the ground by the strength of its individual personality. Across the metal and cement marvel that was the West Gate Bridge, he looked out of a car window at the factories below. How wonderful to live in a world where everything was paved over, each tree only there because of human thought, and each leaf of grass grew only because a person allowed it to. Even the sun gave a clean warmth.
On the corner of Flinders and Elizabeth streets he had watched a flock of obese grey-white birds that didn’t fly away until you came really close. Then he realised why the seagulls were so complacent. No one ate them. Human beings provided bread without expecting a pound of flesh in return. Once, his family were taken to see the fairy penguins on Phillip Island, and he watched the birds waddle up to the edge of the beach, marvelling at how such small flightless creatures could stray so close to human feet.
So many things that he could not take for granted then. Electricity. Tap water and a bed that was not a rattan mat. Also, his Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. It was one of the first books he bought. Some words that the Australians had told him about were not in there, like ‘spork’, a cross between a spoon and a fork.
He bought an exercise book from Sims Tuckerbag supermarket for twelve cents and started to make lists. He vowed to learn three new words a day.
