by Alice Pung
‘Aww, not the icebox.’
We hated carrying the icebox and the two-litre bottle of Coke and the plastic cups. We also hated washing the ice so that it was no longer pork-flavoured. My parents packed their Lo Han Guo drink – half-tea, half-medicine, and commonly known as ‘Chinese Coke’ – in a stainless-steel Tiger flask.
My father also packed our Akubra hats. He had bought genuine Akubras for all of us, so we’d look like quality Australians and not stand out in a crowd. But my mother preferred her ‘SONY – the One and Only’ cap that came with our television, and my siblings preferred not to look like the Chinese Crocodile Dundee delegates. So my father was usually left holding all the hats; once he wore three, piled on top of one another, because he didn’t want to carry them. He became a walking advertisement for Paul Ho Gan.
Piling into our Toyota LandCruiser that had never seen the bush, off we drove. Fifteen minutes later the car pulled to a halt in the Footscray Primary School car park, where we waited outside the playground with all the other Teochew families for our tour bus to arrive. The Teochew Chinese Friendship Association consisted mostly of old folk who liked to sit in buses and look out the windows, plus a smattering of families with children. The adults were responsible for hiring the bus, while the elderly were responsible for the entertainment – namely, singing and clapping and carrying a tune down ten different paths that rarely converged. Sometimes my uncle liked to bring his mandolin, to lend a twanging unity to the Sino Sunrise Singers. That was the name I gave our choir, because their music could wake anybody up.
‘Did you know,’ my father asked as we passed a farm with a ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ sign out the front, ‘that if you enter someone else’s farm property they can shoot you?’ He was sitting next to me with his face pressed against the window, absorbing the largeness of the Victorian landscape.
I wondered whether he knew the difference between the words ‘prosecuted’ and ‘persecuted’. It probably made no difference in his mind, having come from a country where people gave way to cars, and landmines gave way to no one.
‘Look at the Australian country kids,’ my mother marvelled as we passed a group of tweens at a rural bus stop, dressed in Target couture. ‘So sophisticated.’ She was comparing them to the country kids she knew in Cambodia who, as labourers on the land, were a different breed from the city folk. When they first arrived at the Melbourne Midway Migrant Hostel, these country Cambodians, including my parents, were scared of escalators and cars, the latter for good reason – in Cambodia, cars were random curses that ran down families. But they liked elevators. Without words to discriminate between experiences, a ride in an elevator with a window was just as good as a ride at Luna Park. For my parents it was actually better, because it was free.
When our bus arrived at the strawberry farm, some of the oldies decided to stay on board and sleep. We younger ones lined up and paid our $6 entry fee to the young woman standing at the gate, her brown ponytail pulled so tight we were surprised her ears didn’t meet at the back of her head when she turned around. My father looked bewildered as a white two-litre ice-cream container was placed in his hands. ‘You carry the fruit in these,’ advised the woman, ‘and I will now take you to the picking fields. Please stay within the first two fields. Do not venture off into the other fields.’
‘At the cherry farm we got buckets,’ my mother muttered in Teochew. We were led past fields filled with lush red fruits dripping with gorgeousness. The Teochew crew ‘wahhhed’ over each strawberry we passed, pointing here, there and everywhere.
Finally the brown-haired woman stopped. ‘These are the picking fields,’ she said, then left. We stood there, searching for strawberries, and realised that the ground had been so picked over there was barely any fruit to be seen. I wondered if everyone else felt gypped too.
‘Did you know that my first job in the Aussie countryside was fruit picking?’ my father mentioned as we searched for stray strawberries. ‘All the migrants of the Midway Migrant Hostel left on a bus very early in the morning, and we came back late in the evening.’
As the field gradually filled with more people, we realised that all the other visitors, in their Colorado jeans and their Billabong bumbags, had not been led to the picking area. They had just walked here. And they had buckets. Big yellow buckets swung from their hands. Even the children had them. I pretended I hadn’t noticed, but my little sister Alina piped up, ‘Hey, Alice, how come they got buckets?’ I glanced at my father and saw that he had noticed too. I watched him watch the old Teochew men and women, clutching each other and their little ice-cream containers, spluttering with mirth at the fact they were now paying to do labour they had been paid to do when they first arrived in Australia.
‘Hey, Alice,’ whined Alina, who always wanted answers to questions, ‘why did we get ice-cream containers?’ A dozen other little eyes also looked at me, laden with expectation. I stared at my container for a while and then explained to our little siblings and cousins that it was purely for aesthetic reasons that the yellow people were given white ice-cream cartons, while the white people were given yellow buckets. Although we couldn’t swing our ice-cream cartons like buckets, I demonstrated how they made good helmets for our heads.
My mother and my auntie came bounding up. ‘Look what we have!’ They thrust their containers in our faces.
I couldn’t believe what I saw. ‘Where did you get those?’
‘They’re huge!’ breathed my sister Alison.
‘Over there,’ pointed my mother.
The unauthorised field. They had been picking in the unauthorised field. My mother hadn’t understood the English admonitions at the start, and she was miffed at the small ice-cream containers we had been given. During the Pol Pot years they had become used to going into one another’s abandoned houses. It was a free-for-all then, and she had probably chosen to believe that it still was.
We brought this on ourselves, really, my father was probably thinking as he looked at his container filled with its small tokens of compliance. He didn’t kick up a fuss or demand to know why we were given containers one-third the size of the others’, because we didn’t want to hear from them what we already knew. It seemed that the other visitors didn’t have kiasu bad habits like we did: the kind of habit that made you cling to fear like there was no tomorrow.
The others would never pick the forbidden fruit. They didn’t pull strawberries like madcap machines and then stand in a corner chucking the slightly bruised ones to the ground. We were not known for casually strolling and picking and enjoying the scenery. We pounced on each berry like overexcited labradors, and we picked like labourers.
‘Look at this one shaped like a house,’ announced my sister Alison.
‘Stop wasting time,’ said my mother, ‘and find some good ones.’ Her carton was filled with even more big red stunners, and she had stayed within the boundaries this time. She wouldn’t eat the strawberries, or let us eat them, until they had been washed. ‘Aiyah, you don’t want to die!’
My auntie was ecstatic when she found a tap. ‘Ay, come here! Wash them here!’ she called as she held the container under the torrential tap.
‘Please don’t use the rainwater to wash the berries,’ the farm’s owner said as he walked past.
‘But those ghosts were doing it,’ my aunt muttered to my father. True, but the Anglo-Australians weren’t turning on the taps full-throttle. My auntie had not realised that there were water restrictions now; she still believed that the water Down Under, like everything else in this wondrous world, would never run out.
When the berries were washed, we unpacked our picnic. ‘Where is the stale bread?’ asked my uncle. ‘There are birds here to feed.’
When my family first arrived in Malcolm Fraser’s Australia, the sign of a great democracy was being able to feed stale bread to the seagulls, and they had been doing it ever since.
The pork roll was cut, the fresh bread retrieved, and the Lo Han Guo passed arou
nd and around in its never-ending flask. It was a good day of labour, and 10,000 photographs were taken just in case anyone ever needed a flick-animation book of the event. We were tired and sticky, and clambered back on the bus with our berries in plastic bags. Some of the children were so tired they even managed to sleep through my uncle strumming Chinese lullabies and communist folk songs on his mandolin.
My mother scrabbled around in our picnic box, trying to find a space for the strawberries. She pulled out a box of chocolates she had been saving for a family trip. It was slightly past its use-by date because she had kept it for so long. ‘Hah!’ she cried. ‘Look at this!’ She held a sweet up to the sinking sunlight. She told us that each strawberry we picked had cost as much as a Ferrero Rocher chocolate, and that next time we should just go to Big W to buy lollies instead. It would save time and petrol and effort. But I could tell she did not regret this day, that it was a fulfilling one of good and meaningful work, because the chocolates were shared around and eaten, while the strawberries were still saved in the picnic box, to be taken home.
HOLIDAY AT SLACKS CREEK
I liked the sound of Slacks Creek. It sounded like a place where people wore badly fitting trousers and loitered about doing sweet bugger-all. But as soon as I saw Mum pack the frypan, the pot, the icebox and the Pine-O Cleen into our suitcase, I knew there was no chance of us doing that on our first Australian family holiday.
‘Expect the houses to look like the ones in Braybrook, but on stilts,’ warned my mum when we were on the plane. We had grown up in Braybrook, Victoria, a town filled with the noxious fumes of carpet factories. Once, Dad and I had seen a picture of our former prime minister’s childhood home in a newspaper. It looked just like ours – white and square – and we had suddenly felt an affinity with our leader. Now we were going to holiday in a Paul Keating–childhood commission home on legs. My father was as excited as a pioneer about this Queensland trip. ‘The real estate agent connected up the electricity and water for us, so everything is all set to go!’
My parents had bought this house, inspired by our Aunt May. My aunt had secured herself a whole string of Queensland properties, and spent summer holidays fixing them up. My uncle and aunt would drive their family of young kids up from Melbourne with a carload of crockery and dried Asian food, and sometimes even a second-hand television. They stayed in their unrentable ramshackle houses, and my very handy uncle would change the carpets, fix the lights and paint the walls until the property was in top shape again. Then they’d rent it out and move on to do the next one.
They were resourceful and hard-working and good-humoured, but of course we could never ask them to have a look at our investment property in Slacks Creek. It was like a phlegmy sick relative with rotting teeth no one wanted to go near. Every time a new injury was discovered – faulty stove, dodgy cupboards that would not close, a slightly shifty wall – the real estate agent would call us up in Melbourne. A while after the last tenants left, and I asked my dad what we should do, because the house had already not been rented out for five weeks.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s about time we took a family holiday. Then we’ll get it fixed up.’
But when we arrived in Queensland, I realised that people did not take their holidays in Slacks Creek. I realised this when I saw the house next to ours. It had four and a half cars parked out the front, with grass growing between some of the wheels. A father and his scruffy-haired child came out and watched Dad back the car into our driveway. I watched the bewilderment on our new neighbour’s face when he noticed the Europcar sticker on the windscreen. What the fig? What kind of neighbour hires a silver Tarago?
We got out, and looked up at the three-bedroom, unrenovated Queenslander that had been rejected by three tenants. ‘The houses in the Cambodian countryside were built like this,’ my father told us, ‘and they kept buffaloes below.’ We had never seen a Queenslander before. We marvelled at the wooden beams beneath the house, while my mother beamed because she had four kids and did not need to pay for a hotel. This would be our home for the next ten days. This was awesome. As we helped Mum unload supplies from the car, my brother and I secretly felt like refugees for the first time in our lives.
We drove to Woolworths and bought a week’s worth of food, a mop and spider-killer spray. When we returned we tied Chux wipes to our feet and skidded along the floorboards in the living room. My sister Alina crawled around like a labrador, with cleaning cloths on her hands and knees. My brother, Alexander, wiped the windows with Windex. He looked out. ‘The neighbours are still watching us.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said my dad. ‘We just look like a hard-working migrant family.’
He had said a similar thing when someone once chucked a stone through our front window in Braybrook. It left a large crack and we didn’t get it repaired until we sold the house. ‘Don’t worry. We’re just living humbly,’ he would say. We never opened that window again, and kept the blinds drawn. Bit by bit, the house of my childhood grew darker as the trees grew larger outside with no one to prune them. ‘Don’t worry. We’re just living privately,’ said my dad.
But before we were completely closed in by all this private humility, and to get away from the carpet factory fumes, we moved. My parents had worked for two decades to buy our booming birthday-cake of a mansion on the hill. After we moved, we lost our asthma and gained a greater appreciation for the genteel lifestyle of our new prime minister in Kirribilli House. My mother also discovered White King, the household bleach that could disinfect anything.
She had brought the White King to Slacks Creek. She rolled up her trousers and scrubbed the bathtub, because it would also become our laundry basin for the holiday. There were no beds but we had enough sleeping bags and blankets to spread out on the floor of the living room. We all lay on the floorboards that first night, happy and exhausted. The warmth of the Queensland evening felt good.
‘Haven’t been this way for ages,’ said Dad.
‘What way?’ asked Mum.
‘The sleeping-on-the-floor way.’
My parents had walked across Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand before they were accepted to come to Australia. They had slept on many floors. ‘It’s nice to get back to one’s refugee roots,’ sighed Dad.
‘Make sure those roots don’t get head lice,’ warned my mother.
‘Mum, we haven’t had head lice for years,’ I protested. ‘Those sleeping bags are clean.’
‘When we were in the Thai refugee camp,’ Dad continued, ‘we slept on a straw mat about this size.’ He indicated an area the size of one of our sleeping bags. ‘That was a very good and productive mat,’ he said. ‘You were manufactured on that mat. Manufactured in Thailand, but assembled in Australia.’
‘Ewww!’ I said, but my father liked telling that story about how I came to be.
‘Ewww!’ my brother said.
*
The next morning, we woke up early to begin our drive to the first theme park: Movie World. Mum was already up. She had washed and hung out our clothes from yesterday’s cleaning spree and was now rummaging through our supplies of food in the icebox. ‘Cockroaches!’ she screamed.
‘Just whack it with your shoe,’ said Dad. We hadn’t seen one of those for years, because of Mum’s White King. ‘Where did we put the bacon we bought last night for breakfast?’
Coming from years of war and starvation, my family were parsimonious with everything except food: we ate lychees and abalone, prawns and mangoes in our house. My siblings and I couldn’t say ‘we’re starving’ to parents who knew what it was like to starve. We couldn’t say ‘I’m dying of boredom’ to parents who knew what death in decomposing multitudes was like. So we could never really be hungry or bored on holidays.
Every day Dad would drive us out to do the usual things holidaying families did in Queensland. We visited the Big Pineapple and the Sunshine Coast. My brother bought my sister a furry white toy seal at Sea World, and we had our pictures taken at Wet’n’Wil
d, howling down a waterslide on a floaty round raft. But we’d return to the house in Slacks Creek every evening, where local children walked barefoot to the Woolworths with a fistful of coins and bought icy poles. We’d sit on the verandah after Mum had made dinner and spray on the Aerogard.
We were lucky that we were not refugees and that this was all a game, a game paid for by our parents. Dad did not gather us round, wave his arm over our property in Slacks Creek and say: ‘Someday, this mortgage will all be yours,’ but we knew. One evening Mum said: ‘Someday you will all have families and you will take them on holidays like this one.’ But I also knew that we would probably never take our families on such trips. We were not really brave like our parents. We would just book hotels, because we would never be as resourceful and self-sacrificial to the next generation. Dad and Mum had arrived in Australia with one suitcase, and there was nothing in it. This probably explained why they packed so much on holidays.
On the last day, Dad called the real estate agent to arrange for repairs to the house. Mum told me to pop over to the neighbours and give them our remaining theme park tickets. As we loaded our frypans and cleaning supplies into the back of the rented silver Tarago, the neighbour and his daughter stood outside watching us, the Sea World tickets still in their hands. We must have been the weirdest tenants they’d ever met.
We waved to them as we drove off, and they waved back.
CHINESE NEW YEAR DRAGON
‘We’re all going on a summer holiday!’ Tony Tran was singing again, with a chorus of bikini-clad girls swinging in the background. There were about 120 of these girls, because he was standing in front of thirty TV sets at my family’s Retravision store in Footscray, and all the tellies were linked up to the same budget beach-scenes karaoke DVD. Tony’s sweeping arm actions brought out the best in his bling microfibre shirt. He often wore these shirts in substitute for our standard blue sales uniform. ‘No more working for a week or two,’ he crooned. Customers stopped to watch and applaud him. Salesmen stopped to watch the girls on the telly. And I stopped to adjust a store sign that was peeling from the heat.
