Close to Home

by Alice Pung

  We put signs up declaring the holiday season, but in our world, there were only three seasons: pre-sale, sale and stocktake. It was a Saturday afternoon in the middle of a Melbourne summer, and while our Australian customers were backpacking around China, I was busy unpacking boxes of cassette tapes made in China. Our less worldly friends spent their school breaks home-bound with their rear-projection TVs and icemaker fridges, their safe white-bread sandwiches. But there were dangers, our parents believed, for those poor kids alone in those massive suburban mansions. They would want to use the stove without adult supervision, and their pikelet dreams would turn into inextinguishable house-fire nightmares. There was nothing like the safety of the store.

  During 30-degree days, my father set up his own demonstration outside the store to sell ice-shavers. We filled polystyrene cups with shaved ice, added a dash of cordial, and the dehydrated world hurrying past stopped to smile at us. This was like a lemonade stand, but better – we weren’t kids fundraising for new rollerskates, we were workers helping with serious business. As we grew older, we became sales assistants with our own name tags, our personalities pared down to one pithy, perked-up line: ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  I looked up from the half-sliced box of cassettes and saw a small Asian woman with a smile like a slice of watermelon. ‘Microwave broken.’

  All customers around this neighbourhood communicated with an essential efficiency – almost no words and all action.

  The lady pointed to a receipt in her hand. ‘I want buy new microwave.’ She pointed to the model number on her receipt. ‘Same that one.’

  ‘But your microwave’s still under warranty,’ I told her. ‘We can fix it – for free.’

  ‘No good have anything broken for the New Year,’ she told me. ‘Bring bad luck.’

  During the time before Chinese and Vietnamese New Year in late February, customers often bought new water urns, kettles and rice cookers, even if their old ones were still under warranty. My mother told me that back in Cambodia, during New Year, the whole community stopped working to visit each other. They were the happiest times of her life, she said, because she would get a new set of clothes every year. But when your family owns an electrical appliance store that operates seven days a week, the only way you notice the arrival of Chinese New Year is in the increase of white-goods purchases.

  You know Christmas has come when the Sunbeam Corporation sends a gigantic white bear in a beanie and scarf, to be raffled off to customers. And you can tell summer has arrived not from the vision of heat outside, but by the box of bright Hawaiian shirts sent by Retravision head office for our summer promotional uniform.

  Working hours were not kind to cultural celebrations, particularly when we were competing with the hi-fi megastore down the road. But at least we still got new clothes, even if the shipment didn’t always arrive in time and Tony Tran had to improvise with his own glossy attire.

  During the school holidays, our family spent quality time working together, surrounded by an eccentric everyday cast of hundreds. There was a man with a watering can who went around watering the money trees near the front doors of the stores so that the businesses would thrive. We always gave him a tip. There was also a carpet-cleaner salesman who scrubbed his detergents on shop carpets in strategic places. If the store owners didn’t buy the cleaning liquids, they’d be left bewildered at the huge smiley face scrubbed into their carpets, showing up the years of grime.

  Unlike a conventional electrical-goods franchise, we also sold appliances that distinctively appealed to the Asian diaspora: Tiger rice cookers, deluxe ‘Rolls Royce’ automated toilets and electronic English–Vietnamese dictionaries. In fact, there were so many little things to buy in this town that, as children, we rarely even thought of wanting bigger things. After school, instead of coming back to watch one TV, we’d watch twenty in a row, and sometimes be joined by the children of customers, who’d squeal when they were dragged away by one arm from Captain Planet.

  ‘Everybody has a summer holiday, doing things they always wanted to!’

  Tony Tran was in such a good mood because that morning we’d been visited by the Chinese New Year Dragon. Puppeteered by four young men from the local dance troupe, its arrival through the shopping strip was heralded by drums, cymbals and firecrackers. Most of the migrant inhabitants of this neighbourhood had escaped from some war or another, so you might think they’d hide with hands over their ears when they heard the racket. But no, they wanted small business to be blessed with prosperity by a creature whose arrival was hailed by a series of machine-gun sounds. The exploding noise of the firecrackers would scare away evil spirits, and the staff sought out the mouth of the dragon to slip in lucky red envelopes of money: an innocuous bribe against the sway of the superstores.

  ‘No, sorry mate, unfortunately the karaoke DVDs are not included,’ Tony Tran said, as he carried the DVD player he’d sold to the register. His customer asked him something else. ‘No, sorry mate, I can’t burn you a copy here either. How about I give you a New Year’s present? How about this t-shirt?’

  The customer seemed quite pleased with his Electronic Soya-Milk Maker t-shirt.

  Once a year, right in the middle of summer, when other Australians were at the beach getting tanned, the carnival materialised right in front of our shop. Whole streets were blocked off in the Footscray central business district and Luna Park came to us, complete with the upside-down machines and spinning teacups. Retailers would set up small tents to advertise their stores or sell Vietnamese CDs; street vendors would grind sugarcane to sell as drinks, or roast pork balls and corn.

  My father promoted mobile phone deals in a little hired tent down the street, my aunties and I staffed the shop, and an assortment of small cousins and siblings would loiter about waiting for us to finish work and take them to the revelry.

  We finally closed shop and stepped outside. A different world emerged, populated by brown and yellow faces in wide-brimmed hats to ensure that no tan would reach South-East Asian skin. (For the older women, the anaemic aristocrat look was always the fashion.) Our mayor made the usual speech about multiculturalism that no one under the age of twenty-five listened to because they were too excited waiting to see the local South-East Asian version of the Backstreet Boys.

  These boys were good, and what was even better was that they often crooned Carpenters hits. They dressed in matching polyester shirts and sang about being on top of the world. We passed Tony Tran in the audience, getting ready to groove, with a skewer of barbequed octopus in one hand.

  People gave him a wide berth.

  We passed my father in his tent, packing up brochures. He handed us a roll of tickets to the rides.

  ‘Use all these up tonight,’ he instructed. The rides had come into our town from the Springvale festival, and next weekend the New Year’s celebrations would move to Richmond. As I sat with my sisters on the ferris wheel over Footscray, I looked down to my world peopled with colour and realised there was no need to paint this neighbourhood red. Firecrackers in the morning, a dragon through the store in the afternoon and a carnival in the evening – you could live your whole life in a town, but your world would still be filled with small wonders.

  VISITS

  CAVEAT EMPTOR

  There are two important things your Chinese parents will teach you in life. First, don’t owe any debts; and second, own your own property. Unlike their other attempts at edification, these two lessons are non-gender-specific. A year or so after you have started full-time work, after you’ve paid off your university loan in one lump sum, your parents will begin to bug you about buying a house. Your mother and father will insist that you get the property in your own name, in case you marry a man who might want to leave you, gamble or steal your assets – or, worse, a white ghost who does not want to share. In twenty-five years of marriage, your father has given every cent he has earned to your mother.

  Your father will spend a day each weeke
nd with you – a day where he could be working at his store – looking at houses. In the car, driving from property to property, you will have conversations about many things. Your father will tell you about the importance of owning an investment property, explain the concept of negative gearing, and discuss family trusts and tax offsets. But most importantly he will teach you, indirectly, about security and the importance of saving.

  When your mother was younger, she worked in a factory and saved all her earnings in a jar stashed underneath her pillow. When your great-grandmother died, the family couldn’t afford a funeral because they had spent all their savings on her week in hospital. Fortunately, your mother had that jar beneath her pillow.

  In Pol Pot’s Cambodia, your father once took the belt from his waist and buried it where no one would find it. He then watched as the people around him died of starvation. He was responsible for burying their bodies on higher ground when the floods came, so that their corpses would not contaminate the Mekong River. One day, when he felt as if soon he too might be one of those bodies, he dug up the belt, cut it into small strips and boiled it for hours in secret. Then he called his mother and sister over, and they ate it. In this way, they stayed alive.

  Your father will tell you that you don’t want to live a life of in-the-moment hedonism like a lot of Australians, always spending what they have and often what they don’t have. But you know he’s not talking about credit-card debt or mortgages. This is what you have inherited: this knowledge that to save your family you have to save things. And that is why the idea of the investment property looms so large in the migrant version of the Great Australian Dream. It secures your existence.

  The areas your father targets are the western suburbs of Melbourne, from which you came: the properties in front of the carpet factory in Braybrook; the weatherboard homes in Footscray, Sunshine and Maidstone. You plan your day according to open-house times, and park the car five minutes before the agent arrives. Already there is a line forming outside. At every house you inspect there are at least five other Asian couples or families. You can’t tell which are planning to buy investment properties and which are wanting to break the rental cycle, as you are all dressed in shabby Saturday clothes that you have owned for decades or made yourselves.

  When you enter, you are hit by a familiar scent, an icky mix of nostalgia and stuffy nausea. In these small homes the smells of sleep, cooking and daily life permeate every crevice. You see the sewing machine next to the baby’s cot in the back room, the Laminex and cork tables, the curtains nearly falling off their hinges but always drawn so outsiders can’t look inside and see the Asians engaging in tax-evasive work. You see the children’s rooms, with none of the pink-and-blue-and-laden-with-toys look of Target ads, but packed with boxes filled with miscellany from import businesses, or stacks of cut fabric pieces. You look down and see the grouting of the tiles clotted with blackness. You look up and see the plastic prints of fluorescent deities on the wall – Buddha or Jesus looking down on you, condemning your condescension. You go outside to backyards filled with weeds and broken clotheslines.

  Your father does not seem to be affected by all this. ‘How many square metres is it? What is the rental in the area like?’ he asks the agent, and takes down notes.

  ‘Of course you’re not going to live in it,’ your father says when you voice your dismay at how certain properties are falling apart, how the wooden beams have been eaten away by rot, how windowsills are cracking. They are investment properties to him, but walking around inside you see that they are real residences inhabited by people leading temporary, rented lives – waiting, waiting to make it, all the while working in the grot and gritty stickiness.

  One time, you and your father venture to Carlton, to see an old terrace house that has been advertised for a steal. You think about this house, and about what it would be like to own and live in your own home so close to the city. When you walk through it you know that you would not just be investing in an asset but in cultural capital, the chance for a very different life.

  When your father walks inside and sees the renovations, he thinks about the exorbitant rental prices in Carlton. He is thrilled for you. He tells you to check the contract of sale on the table while he inspects the new extensions – extensions that are not approved by the building council, as you soon discover in the vendor’s statement. Approval for a permit is conditional on ‘restoring the house back to its natural fittings and rooms to their original use’: the extended rumpus room has to be knocked down, the original positioning of windows reinstated. The kitchen that has been turned into a washing room has to be turned back into a kitchen. The real-estate agent standing outside never murmurs a word about this to anyone. He is under no obligation to, because in this area of law it’s caveat emptor.

  The white couples walking though the house talk excitedly about attending the auction next week. Many of them don’t even bother to look at the contract, so taken in are they by the low asking price.

  You motion your dad over and explain what you have discovered. You’re both flabbergasted: there are around two pages of unauthorised renovations. Alarmed, you both decide to leave. As you walk down the steps of the porch, your father unexpectedly meets a Chinese friend.

  ‘Ay, boss,’ your father warns, ‘be very careful about this house.’

  ‘Hah? Why?’

  ‘Do you know why it’s so cheap?’

  ‘Because it’s half-finished,’ says the friend, ‘but no worries. I can fix the rest of it myself. It’s a good investment, eh?’

  Your father explains about the unauthorised extensions and the building permit. You watch the realisation dawn on the man’s face. ‘Thank you for telling me this, boss,’ he tells your father. ‘I can’t read the contract, so I would have come to the auction and bid.’

  ‘No worries, mate,’ says your father. ‘My daughter’s a lawyer, so lucky for us she can spot these things.’

  The next stop is an auction in Footscray. The street is packed with lines of cars and people, almost as if for a school fête. Bidding has started, and already you see Asian people walking away from the property. ‘Forget it, boss,’ says a man in Vietnamese as he moves off slowly in his four-wheel drive, ‘it’s already over $410,000.’

  But you both stay for the auction, and by the end of it you both can’t believe that a dilapidated little house in Macpherson Street could go for almost half a million dollars. It is the very house that your parents first rented when they got here, the house you were brought home to from the hospital. But this is Footscray, after all, a suburb not immune to gentrification. It appears that you might never be able to afford your first home in this area, but sometimes it is good to move on.

  OPPORTUNITY

  There is a severed bear’s head in the hall, and it has been there for more than a week. Its red tongue pokes out from its mouth, which is caught in a bewildered beam. The bear’s body lies elsewhere, in another room. It does not smell, although foamy polyester threads poke out of its neck like petrified silkworms. Its eyes are glassy and scratched. Next to the head is a blue dress with its arms cut off. Some plastic beads lie there, the type that would be hazardous if inhaled up a baby’s nostril.

  When the students have a dress-up party, they take the tram up Sydney Road, Brunswick, to a second-hand megastore called Savers. They come back with bridesmaids’ dresses, handmade by someone’s aunt, and hack them short for an ’80s party. The blue frock is for a retro night. The head is ripped off the enormous soft teddy to use as a mask in an outfit for a superheroes party. The red shirt is for a Rubik’s Cube party, where each person dresses in colours and swaps items of clothing through the evening, until they meander home at 2 am, exultant in borrowed monochrome. Graham Greene wrote a short story, ‘The Destructors’, about boys who dismantle an old man’s house bit by bit. But this is not careful destruction; this seems like tearing out the foundations. Holes are gouged into stockings from another era. Cameo pins are pricked into an old man’s
softly brushed waistcoat.

  ‘You look awesome!’

  ‘You also look great!’

  High-fives all round as the students roll out the door.

  In another suburb, a man without words tries on a pair of trousers, a lined jacket and a similar waistcoat. He sees that the latter was tailor-made in Italy, with craftsmanship rarely seen these days. It is a good fit, but he stands still, too embarrassed to approach the woman behind the counter.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ she asks, smiling. The man knows she has seen him, that now he must step forward. He looks down at the glass counter, beneath which lies the more expensive jewellery items and hand-painted plates.

  ‘You have come on a lucky day,’ she tells him as she takes the three-piece suit. ‘Today is half-price day.’ With the discount, the clothes come to a total of $5.40. The man counts out his coins. He stays silent because they do not speak the same language. The woman notices that the man is 30 cents short, but does not say anything. She gives him back his 50-cent coin in change. He too does not say anything, but slides it back towards her. She insists: ‘Half-price day!’ She is confusing him, so he takes the money.

  In America they are called thrift stores, which makes them sound like places for stingy hoarders; but here they are op-shops, real places of opportunity, so much so that two artists and Victoria University lecturers, Sue Dodd and Enza Gandolfo, decided to write a book called Inventory and create an art exhibition using only donated items from op-shops. At the launch I meet 84-year-old Elsie Seidel-Davis, who has been volunteering at the West Footscray Uniting Church’s op-shop for sixteen years. Without the op-shop, she says, she wouldn’t know what to do with herself. Her friends agree. They tell me that people working in such places are never just sales assistants; they become counsellors, social workers, administrators.