by Alice Pung
Contents
1 Lost and Found
2 The Long-lost Cousins
3 The Arrival
4 Homecoming
5 An Extended Family
6 Jackie and Jermaine
7 Marly’s Bowl Haircut
8 First Day Back
9 My Little Pony
10 Tuyet the Genius
11 Bad Names
12 Bored with Barbies
13 Primrose
14 Marly’s Change of Heart
MARLY was on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor, pretending to play Twister on a shower curtain patterned all over with big red and orange dots.
‘Get off, Marlin!’ shouted her father, who was also crouched on the floor, trying to stick together the three plastic shower curtains with duct tape. Marly had got to pick the designs on the curtains when they went to K-Mart yesterday. She’d wanted to choose the see-through ones with tumbling coloured umbrellas, but her dad said that the curtains had to be dark. So she’d chosen navy ones printed with massive coloured dots. The silver duct tape made the curtains look like an enormous calculator – or even an Atari computer game, thought Marly.
‘Beep beep,’ she giggled as she pressed the buttons.
‘Stop mucking around and help me hold one end of this,’ said Marly’s dad.
They carried the three stuck-together shower curtains into the living room. There was a double bed at one end of the room, which her father had bought earlier that week from the St Vincent De Paul store.
Marly started to bounce up and down on it until her mother slapped her lightly over the ankles with a cloth measuring tape. ‘Ay, get off there,’ she scolded, ‘or they’ll arrive to a saggy bed. The kids will sink to the middle of it and disappear.’ Her mother winked at her.
‘Don’t say such things!’ said Marly’s dad. ‘You will bring them bad luck! They’re not even here yet and already you are talking about disappearances. Aiyoh, this is very bad.’
Marly’s Uncle Beng had been lost for more than seven years, but a year ago they had received a letter from him. He’d written that not only was he alive, but he had a wife and two children. They lived in a place called Hong Kong, and they wanted to come and live with Marly’s family in Australia. Now it was only one week until they arrived.
Marly watched as her dad strung up a piece of rope from one end of the living room to the other, dividing the room down the middle. Then he hung up the taped shower curtains so that they made a wall separating the bed from the living area.
‘When your uncle’s family arrive,’ he told Marly, ‘you are not to go past this wall. Understand?’
‘It’s not a very good wall, Dad,’ Marly said. ‘If you bounce high enough on the sofa, you can see right over it.’ She showed him.
He shook his finger at her. ‘This space behind the curtain belongs to your uncle and his family. You have to respect their privacy.’
Marly looked over at the small bed island that was going to be her uncle’s new home. Her two new cousins, Tuyet and DaWei, would be here this time next week, living behind that curtain. She knew nothing about them except that Tuyet was a twelve-year-old girl and DaWei was a seven-year-old boy.
‘Those poor little kids,’ her mother sighed, ‘living in that refugee camp most of their lives, locked up behind a wire fence.’
Marly was quite worried. She knew that only bad people were locked up. She imagined her cousins in white pyjama-like outfits patterned with arrows, like the ones she’d seen in a book about Australian convicts. She wondered if she would have to hide her toys from them. Also, she felt a little resentful that her cousins were getting the best part of the living room where the window was. Marly had always wanted her own room, but this would never happen now. Their house would be getting smaller.
‘Your cousins will arrive with not very much,’ Marly’s mother explained to her that evening when they were snuggled up in their double bed. ‘Just as we did. So you’ll have to be a good cousin to them. You have to try and share.’
‘No!’ Marly cried. ‘They’ll wreck my things! You told me to let Beanshoot Baby hold my connector pen and he dribbled on it, and now the pink, green and yellow don’t work!’
Beanshoot Baby was the baby that Marly sometimes had to look after while the mothers worked on their sewing in the back shed.
Marly’s mum sewed clothes for a living with two other women. Every two weeks, a man in a white van would deliver stacks of fabric pieces shaped like sleeves, shirt backs, skirt triangles and pant legs to each of their homes. Each woman would sew as much as she could of her pile, and then they would all meet up together at Marly’s house to help each other do the finishing touches – putting spare buttons in little plastic bags to be stapled to the shirts, or opening buttonholes with a special tool. Often the other women would bring their children who were too small for school, and if it happened to be during Marly’s school holidays, Marly would have to look after them while the mothers worked.
‘Beanshoot Baby is smaller than you,’ said Marly’s mum, ‘so you’ve got to be the bigger girl if he breaks things. You don’t have to share everything, but your cousins don’t have very much. Maybe you could pick out a few toys that you wouldn’t mind them having. That way, you can save all your good toys and keep them hidden in our room.’
Marly still did not like the sound of this. Most of the time, she didn’t think too much about how different she was from her friends at school, but things like this made Marly aware that her family was very different. Kylie and Jessica never had to give away their toys. Sure, they would lend them to Marly to play with, but they’d never let Marly have their stuff. Marly hated how unfair her parents were being. Her stuff should be hers to keep, she thought.
‘Ma, why were they locked up?’ Marly asked. ‘What did they do wrong?’ She hoped that this would remind her mother that her cousins were not to be trusted and would probably wreck her things.
‘Marly!’ Her mother looked shocked and then sad. ‘They didn’t do anything wrong. Back in Vietnam, where we all lived once, the country was divided into two sides – the North and the South. There was a war, and when the war ended the North won, but the South was still richer than the North. So the government from the North decided to take things away from the people of the South.’
‘Oh, you mean like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor?’ Marly asked. ‘That’s not such a bad thing.’
‘Your uncle was from a rich family.’
‘Oh.’
‘He had his own printing business. He worked very hard to make it successful. They took it away from him and locked him up for years. When he finally got out last year, he had no money, no house, no business. He found his family and ran away to Hong Kong with them. Then they all got locked up because the Hong Kong government didn’t want any more refugees in their country.’
‘What’s a refugee?’ asked Marly.
‘People like us. People like your uncle and his family. People who have had to leave their homes and come to a new place.’
Marly wasn’t so sure she counted as a refugee. She had been here since she was two, and she could barely remember anything about her life back in Vietnam or the boat journey to Australia. Marly once had a friend at school, Hai, who hadn’t spoken much English when he’d come to Sunshine Primary School. She’d had to explain everything to him in Cantonese: how you couldn’t just walk home during lunchtime, how boys and girls toilets were separate, and how you couldn’t wear flannelette pyjamas to school. He hadn’t even known what ‘play equipment’ was, so Marly had had to show him how to go down the slide.
After a week, though, they were both hurtling down the slide head-first, balancing across the high wooden beams behind the school timber benches, and racing
each other around the yard.
Marly had never been happier at lunchtime, though class time was a different matter. Other kids called Hai a ‘chink’ when the teacher couldn’t hear. They told Marly after school that he was ‘fresh off the boat’, and that girls shouldn’t be hanging around with boys. But Marly didn’t care – he had become her best friend, and they shared a secret language. Two years later, Hai’s family moved house and Marly never saw him again. She’d spent months sitting by herself at lunch, until Jessica and Kylie came along. Even though Marly wasn’t sure she even liked hanging out with them, it sure beat being alone.
Marly didn’t know what cousin Tuyet would be like, but cousin DaWei would be the same age as Hai was when she met him. The thought made her feel happy. The next morning, Marly generously picked out an assortment of things she no longer played with – her old Rubik’s cube with all the stickers peeled off and stuck back on so that each side matched but looked a bit ragged, her Sindy doll, some bouncy balls she’d got from a twenty-cent vending machine, an old truck her father’s friend had given her thinking she was a boy because of her haircut, and her broken Duracell bunny.
She would be the bigger girl, just like her mother wanted her to be.
It was Marly’s first time at an airport. There were lots of loud people holding signs and waving madly at their families. Marly watched an old man emerge from a lift in a wheelchair that was pushed by a lady in a blue uniform. She saw bunches of flowers bigger than a person’s head and stuffed koalas in cork hats holding little Australian flags.
Marly’s family had brought along no such gifts or surprises, but when her dad first spotted his brother and family, he yelled and waved them over, not caring who turned their heads to see what all the commotion was about.
‘Ay, Beng!’ hollered Marly’s dad. ‘Beng! Aiyoh, Beng, you old fatso! We’re over here!’
‘Duong! Wah, look at you, you toothpick!’ yelled Marly’s new uncle when he spotted them.
Her uncle was the opposite of fat, Marly thought. In fact, his white shirt and blue trousers were too big for him. It seemed that the only thing keeping him from disappearing into his clothes was the big brown leather belt he wore around his waist. Marly’s father, on the other hand, had developed a little bit of a belly. She wondered why they were calling each other these bizarre names.
As her uncle and dad whacked each other on the shoulders, Marly suddenly noticed her aunty standing behind them, looking embarrassed. ‘Stop behaving like peasants!’ she heard her whisper. Aunty Tam was slender and wore a pleated sleeveless dress. Her hair surrounded her face like wispy black feathers, and she had very large brown eyes. She was so elegant! And so young! Marly had expected someone more like her mother, who had a Maggi-noodle perm and was wearing a blue Adidas tracksuit.
She gazed at her cousins.
Cousin Tuyet’s long black hair was parted down the middle like a set of curtains framing blinking bewildered eyes and a massive mouth. She wore a pair of purple pants and a knitted jumper with a snowflake on the front. She even had a scarf around her neck with pom-poms hanging from the end of it. Marly noticed that her cousin’s fingernails and toenails were painted hot pink. She had little gold rings in her ears.
‘Say hello to your new cousin,’ Aunty Tam commanded.
‘Allo!’ grinned Tuyet, giving a little wave of her hand.
Marly was too surprised to wave back. How grown-up Tuyet looked. In fact, she didn’t even look poor at all. Instantly, Marly did not like her new cousin. She got the feeling that Tuyet was probably one of those girls who liked hanging around adults and acted snooty towards younger kids. One of those girls who tried too hard.
Marly’s mother nudged her from behind. ‘Say hello to your cousin Tuyet.’
‘Aren’t you hot?’ asked Marly.
‘Wah, she sounds just like an Australian!’ laughed Uncle Beng. ‘Direct and to the point.’
‘Marly!’ scolded her mother, but it was a fake scold, because Marly knew she had said what her mother was thinking.
Aunty Tam said, ‘Oh dear. Oh my. We thought Australia would be cold, because it’s beneath Hong Kong. Is it very warm outside?’
‘Are you kidding me?’ exclaimed Marly’s dad. ‘Hah! It’s thirty-two degrees!’
Her other cousin, DaWei, was very small, shorter than Marly by at least half a head. He hid behind his mother, peering from behind her with the same large puppy-like eyes as Tuyet. He wore a tan tracksuit with an enormous dog’s face on the front, and green running shoes.
‘Come meet your new cousin MyLinh,’ coaxed Aunty Tam. ‘Come on, don’t be shy.’ It had been ages since anyone had called Marly by her Chinese name. She hoped that it would not become a habit.
DaWei came out from behind his mother and looked at Marly.
‘We flew here on a plane,’ said DaWei. ‘Have you ever been on a plane?’
‘No.’
‘Of course she hasn’t, silly,’ his sister told him. ‘They came here on a boat before us.’
Marly’s dad had to take the kids home first and then come back for Uncle Beng and Aunty Tam, because there was not enough room in the Datsun for all of them. Marly’s mum stayed behind to keep their new relatives company as Marly and her new cousins climbed into the car.
Marly’s cousins stared out the car window at their new country.
‘The cars here go so fast!’ exclaimed DaWei.
‘It’s the freeway,’ Marly told them. ‘We’re going to Sunshine.’ She was starting to feel good about her new role. This was how she had felt when explaining things for the first time to her friend Hai. She’d watch as he stared at her with his mouth wide open and then burst out laughing. ‘You’re joking, right? People sit on toilet seats instead of squatting on them? Come on, Marly, don’t lie!’ he’d laugh. She missed him.
‘Sunshine?’ asked Tuyet in English. ‘Like, on a warm day?’
‘That’s the name of our suburb.’
Instead of being grateful that Marly was being so helpful, Cousin Tuyet simply asked another question: ‘What’s a suburb?’
Before Marly had a chance to explain, the car was passing Highpoint Shopping Centre. ‘Look at that!’ exclaimed DaWei. ‘It’s enormous!’
‘It’s a shopping centre,’ explained Marly. ‘You can buy anything you want from there.’
‘Wah!’ exclaimed DaWei. ‘Can we go here one day, Uncle? Can we?’
‘Of course, my boy.’
Marly thought it was very rude to ask adults for things, and she could just imagine her dad taking DaWei to Highpoint – he would be the type of kid to point at things and tug on her father’s sleeve until he drove him crazy.
Soon they were in Marly’s neighbourhood with its concrete houses in white and pastel colours and loud dogs behind steel mesh fences with peeling paint on the posts.
‘Are you rich, Uncle?’ asked DaWei.
Marly thought it was another very rude question to ask, but Marly’s father only laughed loudly, as if it were the funniest thing he’d ever heard. ‘No, son. Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘Some of these houses have two or three cars parked out the front!’
‘Hah! They probably don’t work,’ explained Marly’s father. ‘Look over there – that house has at least four rusting car engines on the lawn.’
‘But the houses are so big!’
‘Compared to Hong Kong they are,’ agreed Marly’s dad.
‘Well, here we are.’ He parked the car and unlocked the house. Her cousins stood at the doorway, hesitating, wide-eyed, until her father guided them through and carried their bags inside.
‘You kids must be tired,’ he said. ‘Marly, why don’t you give your cousins a snack. Show them around.’
Marly felt proud that she was given this responsibility. She felt as if she was trusted with showing her cousins a new world. But first she had to feed them. She went into the kitchen and her cousins followed.
‘Wah, sister, it’s massive!’ exclaimed DaWei.
Marly went to the cupboard and brought out the box of Coco Pops. She filled two bowls and then, to be fancy and keep up the impression that they were very sophisticated, brought out two glasses and filled them with milk. ‘Sit down and eat,’ she said. She was going to show them how to pour the milk into the cereal, a little bit at a time so the rice puffs would not get soggy, but DaWei and Tuyet had already dug in.
‘Mmm,’ DaWei said, ‘tiny chocolate cookies.’ They were eating their Coco Pops dry from the bowl, only stopping occasionally to take a sip of milk from the glass. Marly decided not to tell them they were meant to put milk in. She kind of liked dry Coco Pops too.
When they had finished, Marly showed them their side of the living room. ‘This is where you will sleep,’ she said, guessing that they would be as pleased as she was with the arrangement.
DaWei loved the shower-curtain wall that revealed the double bed and small single bed wedged at the bottom end of it. He jumped from one to the other. He also loved looking out the window.
‘This place is massive!’ he cried.
Marly grinned.
‘Wah,’ said Tuyet. ‘Feel this bed. It’s very soft.’ She sat on the edge of the mattress and patted it in awe, as if she were sitting on a cloud. ‘It looks like a bed you would see on television.’
Marly had never been one of those kids at school who had the latest clothes or games, but today she felt seriously rich. There were so many things she had that her cousins wanted and loved. She wasn’t used to it. ‘Come on, it’s just a boring bed. You’re acting like you’ve never seen a bed before,’ Marly said.
Tuyet just looked at her, and suddenly Marly realised that perhaps this was the first bed her cousin had ever sat on. She pointed towards DaWei’s Cathay Pacific bag. ‘What do you have in there?’ she asked.
‘We got these bags on the plane,’ explained DaWei. ‘Books and toys and things. Do you want to see?’
Suddenly, Marly found Tuyet’s Cathay Pacific backpack on her lap. ‘You can keep three things out of there,’ said Tuyet.
