Close to Home

by Alice Pung

  If Dad and his mates stick up for one another when they feel vilified or intimidated, will they be regarded as ‘sticking up for their own’, considering that their neighbourhood is often written up in the media as an ‘ethnic’ enclave?

  While you were studying law and politics as a young man, Pol Pot’s bigotry led directly to the deaths of half our extended family in Cambodia. Imagine if you had been assigned the task of burying the bodies of your starved loved ones in a mass grave – as my dad had to do – and you might want to reconsider whether it is wise to give those with the loudest media voices the right and liberty to be ‘bigots’.

  It is 12.40 and lunch is ending. ‘Of course we’re reasonable,’ my father concludes, and the lunchroom supports him. These folk have more faith and trust in Australian democracy and the media than any flag-waving patriot. ‘Of course they’re going to judge it by the ordinary individual, and not the terrorist extremist or the sort that has their head stuck in books.’

  MUM IN THE

  FORBIDDEN CITY

  THE WINTER AFTER THE OLYMPICS

  Beijing after the Olympics was one long exhale of cooling winter air. I had deliberately come to this city after the festivities, because I wanted to feel the heartbeat of the country when it was working and resting, not decked out and dancing. As the days grew shorter, I stayed indoors for greater stretches of time. I was living in a flat in Peking University as the 2008 Asialink writer-in-residence, and to alleviate my bouts of loneliness I would often go on long walks and watch people.

  Romance did not seem to be openly slathered about in salacious glory on the streets. I barely saw any public kissing or embracing, but I watched old men and women linked arm-in-arm hobbling down the roads, their green and brown padded army coats blending in with the tattered winter trees. Although they needed to lean on each other for support, they seemed as firmly grounded as their ancient avenues.

  One evening, I unexpectedly came upon the scene of a large crowd of old people dancing in a public square in the Hou Hai district, to the sound of loudspeakers. Hou Hai means ‘the Back of the Sea’. It used to be an area filled with unassuming geriatric living, before the bars crammed themselves in the streets like contesting cancan dancers. The bars now line the area, leaving a space of concrete square for the old people to conduct their public lives. While the young rammed themselves inside expensive wine establishments and claustrophobic nightclubs, these old people did it all outside for free. The first time I saw it I was so moved I became teary, for a reason I didn’t understand.

  When I watched them closely, I realised the reason they danced like awkward schoolchildren was that their bones could not bend all that far. These were people who had toiled together through the decades, through the Cultural Revolution, through austere times. This bright Beijing of shining steel was beyond some of their wildest imaginings, but they had stayed together through all the unglamorous, severe years and could still come out and dance at night.

  I arrived in this city on Bare Branches Day, called this because the date 11/11 resembles bare branches, the Chinese term for singles. I read a China Daily newspaper article which told me that by 2020 there would be a surplus of 30 million men of marriageable age in China. However, Beijing is the Chinese city with the most single women per capita. A sociologist in the paper was quoted as saying that ‘while women look for better educated men with higher pay and social status, men prefer their partners to be young and pretty’. I didn’t need a sociologist to tell me this, as I glanced at the people walking towards the clubs, digital cameras swinging at their wrists.

  I looked back to my old dancers – these people didn’t bring cameras. These were people who had probably never worn make-up in their lives, but on their faces were the lines of experience and love. They were one another’s mirrors. And I wondered why we were so obsessed with our own faces when we didn’t see them most of the time anyway – we see the faces of others. I watched the young people just down the road buy expensive sweet-nothings for each other – t-shirts that flashed with battery-operated lights, pink mink earmuffs and dangling doodads for their mobile phones. Hao wanr seemed to be the catchphrase of the modern youth – how fun! It was advertised on television everywhere, alongside creams for whitening one’s skin. At every pause, there must be a photograph taken on a digital camera to capture the moment. Desire runs rampant on designer shoes, and an entire generation is rendered invisible by the new youth who need to see themselves to know that they exist.

  In this fast world, I also felt unsophisticated, particularly in my waterproof parka and bush tracker boots. But just as long as my basic needs were met, I could take myself back and quietly observe. Despite years of attending Chinese school in Australia, I discovered how little Mandarin I could speak, and, accordingly how little ‘personality’ I had. All my moods and thoughts were reduced to the simplest of expressions – happy, sad, excited, tired, full. There were nuances of temporary feeling, of course – anxious, wistful, pleasantly surprised – but I felt no particular need to share them or solidify them. There was no desire to assert my sense of capital ‘I’ identity in this country that had the good grace of assuming I was one of its own by virtue of the way I looked.

  Both sets of my grandparents were born in Guangdong state, China. But famine early last century forced them to take a boat to Cambodia, where my parents were born. When the dictator Pol Pot took over Cambodia, my father’s job during the four years of that genocidal regime was to make fertiliser and bury dead bodies. When he arrived in Australia as a refugee, he never looked back.

  I took a trip to Jie Yang and Puling, the birthplaces of my grandparents. The first of three generations to go back to our ancestral homeland, I rode an overnight train to Guangzhou, and then my friend Peina took me to Jie Yang on a bus. When I stepped off the bus onto the soil of Jie Yang, there was a Mcdonald’s at one end of the city, and loudspeakers blaring out the Black Eyed Peas in front of franchise clothing stores at the other. A rickshaw driver pulled up in front of us and asked if we wanted a tour of the town. ‘The surrounding areas,’ Peina said, aware that I was a foreigner who would want to see the temples and far-flung places.

  Over the decades my grandmother had told me the story of her small village in China, and when I arrived in the beautiful sprawling metropolis of Jie Yang, I realised that home was not a place but a people, and once the people were gone, then your sense of identifying with the land was also gone. An older person was my connection to history. It was as simple as that. And once that person was no longer around, no longer alive, they could not bring the world back for me. I felt no more pride that my distant, distant ancestors built the temple of Heaven than I did that the French created the Louvre. These things were the pinnacle of human achievement, but they did not belong to a particular lineage. Art was never intended to be exclusive. It seemed to be the very reason why the Forbidden City was opened up for the people. I could not claim this city as mine. I would never be the sort of tourist who could say ‘I did China’ or ‘I did Cambodia’, because these places are so much of my heritage that it would sound neo-colonial.

  As the rickshaw driver drove us out of the city and into tiny village streets, I noticed the children. Some of them were in school uniforms – practical tracksuits in primary colours – while others were in pyjamas. They loitered around their parents’ shop fronts, they chased chickens, and they pulled smaller siblings and cousins around in wooden barrows.

  Suddenly I understood the moiling mentality of my parents, the race of small-shop-owners who took boats out of the south of China to South-East Asian countries – Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia. The overseas Chinese, the Huaqiao, the class of small industrious merchants that made their livelihoods from trade. Looking at this life in a village halfway across the world and beyond three generations, I realised that these values formed a large part of my heritage in Australia. The staying at home looking after younger siblings in a suburb filled with factories. The hanging aroun
d my father’s electronics shop after school every day and helping to sell toasters, heaters and blenders. These small communities that were accused of ‘forming ghettos and not assimilating’ were just replicating life as they knew it two generations ago.

  When I headed back to Beijing, with its skyscrapers and factories and chimneys like upright cigarettes against the sky, I realised how different it was from the south of China. Beijing was the sophisticated capital. If she were a woman, she’d be tall, cultured and decked out in winter furs. I went back to sitting in local parks in my parka and bush tracker boots, and watching the retired older people amble past.

  In every park I saw what looked like children’s play equipment. But then I noticed that unlike the children of Jie Yang, who just hung loose in the smaller villages like scattered marbles, the city children all seemed to play indoors. The colourful bits of metal were actually outdoor exercise equipment for the elderly, to keep their bodies healthy.

  I watched an old woman bending her knees on a nifty metal contraption consisting of two steps powered by arm levers. I saw a girl holding her mother’s handbag as her mother had a go on the outdoor back-massager. And then I saw him, an old man flipping himself around and around a bar raised from the ground – more agile than a twenty-year-old – and I knew I was witnessing China’s soaring rise, her verve for life embodied in this unassuming seventy-year-old acrobat swinging in the air, and yet so grounded in the moment.

  MUM IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY

  Mum arrived in China decked out in gold. She had gold in little bags in her big bag. She even wore the gold Citizen watch we bought her three years ago for her birthday. It didn’t matter that the watch was no longer ticking. She wore all the jewellery she never wore in the normal daily life of lifting boxes and selling washing machines and toasters at the electrical appliance store where she was a saleswoman. We had never seen Mum wear so much jewellery.

  When I was sixteen, Mum decked me out in gold too. She filled my pockets with it, but warned me never to flash it around. Every couple of weeks, Mum would need me to do deliveries in the city. She had dozens of rings with tiny, grasping claws, and she needed the Lebanese man in the city to drill cubic zirconias and sometimes diamonds into them. Mum asked me to go because it was more convenient; my school was a tram ride away from Swanston Street.

  Century Building was one of those hidden multi-storeyed old office buildings that had once been someplace quite swish, because the floor of the foyer was still tiled with careful regal-looking mosaics in heritage reds and whites. On level five there was a little gold-smithing business owned by two young Lebanese brothers or cousins. I would press the buzzer outside their door, because they had installed a buzzer after a recent shoot-out in the building.

  ‘Who is it?’ one of them would ask.

  ‘I have a delivery from my mother.’

  I would hear the buzzer sound like an insect in its death throes, and then I would be let in.

  I would hand over the small bag of twenty-four-carat rings and pendants to one of the brothers-cousins. ‘Come back next week,’ they would tell me. A week or two later, I would go back to collect the goods and pay for the services. Mum told me to count the rings and pendants carefully before I handed over any money, so I did a careful count. But I barely glanced at the rings except to see that the stones were in place. I did not feel twenty-four carat. I still wore socks from Forges and a primary-school boy’s shirt beneath my blazer at school, and didn’t care. I also did not tell any friends at school. What could I say? ‘My inner blazer pocket is filled with a thousand bucks worth of twenty-four-carat gold’? Diamonds were not my best friend, especially when I had to go through the whole school day scared shitless about losing them. Sometimes I would also go to Century Building to buy goat’s hair brushes for Mum – she used them to polish off the gold – or a kilo of silver when silver was having a good price on the stock market. And jewellery boxes, because Mum would give away some of her creations as gifts at Chinese weddings, to the bride and groom.

  In return for my gold-smuggling at school all those years ago, Mum helped me smuggle seven copies of my book into China in her suitcases, so I could give them to friends and professors. A box had been sent by my publishers, but they’d never seemed to reach their destination. In Mum’s suitcase were also thirty boxes of chocolate seashells, to give to people who had been kind to me over the past three months. And Dad’s small deliveries of love – Cadbury chocolate blocks doubly-wrapped over with Glad Wrap. Oil of Olay.

  My sister Alison brought along a near-empty suitcase, because I told her we would need to buy a lot of winter coats. They were cheap here, and we should stock up on them like we stocked up on toilet paper. I also needed her to help me bring some inappropriate clothes home from China. Before I arrived in Beijing I was told it was cold. So while I was living in Wagga Wagga, I had bought a ski jacket and ski pants. I thought I would wear them in public. I ended up wearing them for days on end when I was sequestered alone in my flat, inadvertently detoxing on complimentary Peking University jasmine tea and writing about people who froze to death during winter.

  Mum woke up at seven every morning while Alison and I slept in. We were just lazy. Mum pottered around, and ate breakfast (two-minute noodles). She would not go out alone, or explore or ask for things, even though she could speak the language better than the two of us combined. She needed us as her clutch. She had no independence because she’d had no friends for two and a half decades. But then she would also blurt things out like, ‘I will never go on holidays with any of you again!’ At first taken aback by the abruptness of these declarations and the frequency at which they came, I quickly remembered that this was just Mum’s manner of speaking.

  Mum had blood pressure tablets in her bag. I discovered them on the first evening she arrived, because she asked me for a cup of water.

  ‘Why are you taking these tablets, Ma?’ I asked.

  ‘Why does it look like?’ Her blood pressure was ridiculously high, Alison told me. Alison would know, because Alison had become a medical student. It was strange – how this little sister who’d once dressed up as a white puppy for a book parade in Grade Four had suddenly materialised into a medical student who could take my blood pressure and tell me about all the bones in the human hand.

  All Mum seemed to want to buy was underwear and socks in China, from the Chinese equivalent of our two-dollar stores, except in the ones in China all the goods were coated with a light talcum of pollution-dust. Then I realised that I had been doing the same for the past two and a half months – I would go to these places to get rolls of sticky-tape, coloured paper, yellowy envelopes that could not be licked unless you believed in voluntary euthanasia.

  Mum looked at the Beijing women in the city and realised they were dressed so well that we looked like peasants. So she took us to the Zoo Market and pointed out clothes we could get. Funnily enough, even though Mum was a dag herself, she could pick out the really trendy-looking clothes for us. When I first started working as a lawyer, I went to Footscray to buy two serious-looking austere suits. The rest of my wardrobe materialised over the course of two years – Mum would go to the sales at Myer and pick out the best silk shirts, the most sophisticated jackets with their tucks and pleats, the colours so subtle and elegant it was as if she knew the colour coordinates of the Myer catalogues inside out.

  Every few months or so when I went home, Mum would tell me, ‘Ay, I was in the Myer sales and I found a good work shirt for you.’

  ‘You really shouldn’t have, I have too many clothes already.’

  ‘You can’t just keep wearing the two daggy suits forever!’

  One thing I learnt to appreciate about my mother was her frankness in her thoughts. Perhaps only educated white people got political correctness; they were the ones who made the whole concept up. I noticed this with my aunty from Hong Kong, when we went to the Lantau Buddha. There was a black father with his little girl. ‘Wah!’ exclaimed my auntie. ‘Look at
that little girl’s hair in all those plaits. How pretty. She must be about twelve? What a big bum she has. Black children have nice round booty.’

  Mum was the same. When she first saw me, she exclaimed over the phone back home to Dad about me: ‘Lucky she still has teeth, otherwise her face would cave in and she would look like a grandma!’ True, I was not glowing like roses, and the pollution sickness was taking its toll after three months, but my face was not an inverted Mount Vesuvius either.

  My mum met my friends in Beijing – all of them were girls about four or five years younger than me, from different regional provinces. Their names were an assortment of repeated syllables: Ying Ying, Lily, Wawa, Ping Ping and Pan Pan, which meant ‘Fatty’. They wore Converse sneakers that were exact copies of the originals but a quarter of the price, and their shoes were still white or pastel pink after three years because they cleaned them carefully with old toothbrushes.

  Suddenly, our class elevation became evident – the Lancôme creams, the leather handbags from Italy that Dad bought home from his trips but Mum never used. Clothes bought on sale from Myer, and shoes bought on sale from Target. She was proud of their Australianness, and our friends were awed by our element of the overseas. If only they knew that our ordinary lives were made up of so many Made in China products.

  I had done things here within my three months. I had exchanged money, opened a bank account, quickly worked my way around the public transport system and the subways. It was strange to sign a contract opening a bank account without being able to read the terms and conditions. ‘Now you know what a torment it is not to be able to read,’ Mum told me.

  Before Mum had arrived, I had just let things languish. I didn’t dare ask for too much. Funny how refugees demanded so much of their world, but as a hotel guest, with every accompanying status and privilege, I felt I could not inconvenience others. Meals were reduced to the lowest common denominator. I did not know there was a microwave just a few metres down the hall, a kitchen with boiling water, a cooktop. I had been there almost three months. I never ventured down the dark corridor, never knew who my neighbours were. I would go to the cafeteria with my meal card and point at the food I could see. I could understand what people said to me, but it was easy to get by without speaking many words.