by Alice Pung
We didn’t think that the same rule applied to our parents, particularly not my mum, in this country filled with people who spoke Mandarin. She spoke three different forms of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Khmer. Five languages in all – so when we stood outside the Forbidden City, we thought she would naturally be able to lead us in.
‘What does the sign say, Mum?’ we asked. ‘How much does it cost to get in?’
She remained silent. She was concentrating.
I glanced up and saw that the ticket prices were in English as well as Chinese. It took a couple of seconds for me to figure out how much it would cost for two adults and a student. I waited for my mother, who was reading the Chinese sign. It had no numbers on it, and I noticed her eyes stopping at each word, squinting. It was then that it hit me – that reading Chinese ached her eyeballs as much as looking at English, which for her was entirely indecipherable.
‘I think it’s forty kuai for all of us to get in,’ I said, and lined up to buy the tickets. I didn’t think she heard me. She was still standing there, looking at the sign.
I came back with the tickets, and Mum looked a bit bewildered. The world was just too difficult to read, and you had to rely on people all the time.
We went in.
We were inside the Forbidden City, the world’s largest surviving palace compound, made of precious Phoebe zhennan wood sourced from the jungles of south-western China, and large blocks of marble sourced from quarries near Beijing, and paved with polished ‘golden bricks’ from Suzhou. The only non-castrated male in the place for hundreds of years had been the Emperor. Five hundred concubines to service one royal prick, and hundreds more eunuchs to wait on these ladies of leisure. Eunuchs swapped their reproductive organs for a hope of exclusive access to the Emperor, who made some into rich and influential politicians. Their bao treasure, their severed genitals, were kept pickled in a jar so they could be buried as complete men.
I looked into one of the Emperor’s bedchambers. A place once lavished with swishy embroidered silk sheets, the bed made of wood that glowed. I had read that the Emperor would choose a concubine on the advice of astronomers. Four eunuchs would then deliver her to his bedchambers, rolled in a blanket like a gift waiting to be unwrapped. To make sure she concealed no weapons, she would be buck naked beneath.
‘Don’t look in there,’ said Mum, ‘it’s dark and dirty.’
Suddenly, after Mum’s words, I saw the immediacy of the moment: it was dark and dirty, poorly-lit and -ventilated, and felt as preserved as dried eunuch balls tied with string. History seemed only for the literates. Those who find it hard to look at words see an old building blocked off from public access with dust gathering in the corners of the darkened rooms.
I decided to take Mum and Alison to the Hall of Clocks, the pièce de résistance of the whole tour. You didn’t need signs to tell you how ineffable these feats of engineering were. But Mum, who was a fifty-year-old, was behaving simultaneously like someone seven and someone seventy. She had no tolerance for walking long distances, she said; but the other day we had spent half a day trawling through bright malls. I had to coax her to keep going.
About fifty metres before the Hall of Clocks, she suddenly stopped and yelled, ‘I am not going any further! You are going to kill me!’ She was so loud and abrupt that some people stopped to look.
Mum went over to a bench and sat down.
‘Would you like some food?’ I asked her.
She did not reply.
‘Are you tired? Would you like to go home?’
‘Aiyoh, taking me to these places to kill me!’ she yelled.
‘Let’s go back and have a rest then. I will get a taxi.’
‘Wasting money again!’
I didn’t know what to do.
Most nights while Mum and Alison were in Beijing, I lay awake, riddled with bullet holes of anxiety. Never in my adult life had I spent so much uninterrupted time in the company of my mother – two whole weeks, living in my small apartment at Peking University. Growing up, we had been in the same house together, and Mum and I had even worked in the same room, but we barely spent any time together because that was something people who weren’t constantly working did. A few years ago I had taken her to Adelaide, when I was there for a few days for a writing festival. We spent a lot of time riding the free bus around and around the city, and Mum just talked to me. That was the first time I realised the meaning of quality time, and how proud my mother was of me.
But this time was different.
This time Mum felt old and lost, which made her angry. ‘I will never go on holidays with any of you again!’ she yelled.
We all sat on the bench, quiet and miserable, without knowing fully why. I’m not sure Mum knew either.
Suddenly, in front of us stood a man in a yellow cap.
‘How are you, young ladies?’ he asked in Mandarin. ‘Would you like to go on a trip to visit four different Beijing landmarks in one day?’
He was an illegal spruiker who was standing around promising day trips on the bus to four different places for under fifty kuai. I thought Mum would tell him to go away, because it was obvious that he shouldn’t have been there. But her head shot up and she looked interested. ‘What are the places?’
‘The Ming Tombs. The Sacred Way. Then the Birds Nest and the Water Cube. On the way back we might drive around past the CCTV tower too.’
There was no way that this tour could cover all those places unless they stayed on the tour bus the whole time, I thought.
But perhaps that was the point.
Mum said yes to the tour. She was going to go with Alison, while I had some work to do in my flat.
The next day, as promised, the tourist bus arrived at 6 am to collect them from the university. I got a call on my mobile, and passed it on to Mum. Because it was winter, the sky was still dark outside.
‘Why have you come so early?’ she asked. ‘You said that you would come at eight.’ I couldn’t hear what was being said on the other end of the line.
Mum turned to me. ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Should we go or not?’
‘Why did they come so early?’ I asked.
‘They said that they have other people to pick up along the way.’
‘Two hours to pick up other people?’ It seemed a bit suss to me.
‘I don’t want to go,’ said Alison, who just wanted to go back to bed and sleep until daylight appeared.
Mum decided that it was too dangerous to go, and they stayed inside instead.
Mum met my professors in Beijing. Professor Hu invited us to lunch at a Shanghai restaurant, and Alison and I sat there in silence while Mum and the professor chatted. I realised something that I had not known before, listening to her speak – I realised that my mother was funny and endearing in her honesty.
‘We were about to board a bus, Professor, to go on one of these tours. Because it was advertised at fifty kuai a person, to see about six places in one day. Wah! What a bargain! I thought. Then they called my mobile phone at six in the morning and said they were waiting at the front of the university for us. The sky was still dark! I was thinking, wah! What if they drove us off and then dumped us halfway, demanding more money?’
She had a quality of earnestness about her, and of direct confiding truth. She had not had the requisite experience with these sorts of educated eminents to realise appropriate situational anxiety, so she carried none. ‘Aiyoh, I am so worried, Professor. My daughter is going to be thirty soon and still unattached.’ She asked the professor to find a suitable student for me. Professor Hu looked at me and chuckled. He then told Mum a story about how he had set up two of his students. He concluded by saying, ‘But these two students – I had known them for years, so I knew their temperaments and their interests. But these days, I think young people like to choose for themselves. They don’t want an old grandpa making the most important relationship in their life for them.’
‘But Professor, she is getting old. I don�
�t mean to set them up – but if you know anyone …’
I realised that ten years ago I would have been furious with this. But I just looked at Alison with a jovial glint in my eye, and she gave me a half smile. Mum was funny. And this realisation was followed by a sudden stab of sadness. Our mother was growing old, but so were we. Back then, the world had seemed so small and confined – from her tin work shed to the house, from the house to Dad’s shop. Two decades and four children later, she was in China with us. We had wanted her to see the world at large and marvel over it as we had in the Hall of Clocks, to taste real Peking duck, to stand on the Great Wall and take in the stretch ahead with a slow and long exhale. But she seemed happy enough not to exercise her peripheral vision. Perhaps she knew she wouldn’t have been able to recognise any symbols and signs of this sweeping, baffling culture if they’d suddenly appeared; and anyway, it was only us, her children, that she wanted within her line of sight.
SEARCHING FOR AI HUA IN AMERICA
In a far-flung corner of the world, I had been asked to search for my mother’s childhood friend. And she was still unmarried, my mother added in an eye-widening, voice-quietening manner, as if she were saying that her friend had leprosy or cancer. ‘That girl was always too stupidly generous,’ my mother sighed, ‘she always kept giving things away, and paying for things for other people. Her father died when she was young.’ My mother paused. ‘She had a suitor once, who wanted to take her abroad. But the mother didn’t want her daughter to leave her all alone in her old age.’
This was the first time I’d heard of the ones who’d chosen to stay behind. My mother’s best friend, back then, would have probably been in her mid-twenties, knowing that if she couldn’t set sail with her lover, then she would miss both her boats. But she stayed in Saigon after the war.
For my mother, friends were memories from childhood and young adulthood. Once in Australia, she no longer had any more friends. Friends were to while away idle time with, and my mother had no more idle time. All she seemed to do was sequester herself in the garage, working at her jewellery trade, chipping away at the decades with her peeling tools and peeled hands. After a while, work became more fulfilling than the strain of watching people’s moods. As much as she tried to lock them into her mind as fixed personalities so they would not come up with unpleasant character surprises, and as much as she tried to set them with her words – ‘always like that, so clumsy’, ‘always so reckless’, ‘always telling the same story’ – people would always shift and change.
So the friends of her childhood were the only ones that had aligned themselves completely with my mother’s visions. Even when their lives branched out in strange permutations and bore stranger fruit, she would try to find a way to link their narratives to the fixed seedlings in her head. Her childhood best friend, Ai Hua, was working at a Chinese restaurant because she had always been placid and family-orientated. Ai Hua was in her early fifties, and now an illegal immigrant in the United States, living in her boss’s back room between the laundry and the toilet. She’d made it out of Vietnam in her mid-forties and had been living this illegal limbo life for seven years. During this time she had written letters to my mother. One of the letters attached a photograph of a smiling woman with her hair parted in the middle like the open pages of a book. She was standing in front of roses in a public park, far removed from what I imagined to be her usual sink space in a cramped back-corner kitchen.
‘Don’t go and visit her at her place,’ my mother warned me when I was about to travel to America for a writing residency, ‘because if the police catch her, you don’t want to be involved.’ My mother told me that I could meet Ai Hua in a public place, or ask her to visit me. Of course, my mother didn’t know about the geography of a country with fifty states – Iowa was nowhere near New York City. My mother gave me a sheet of paper with a phone number on it. ‘Give her a call,’ she directed me, ‘because I haven’t heard from her for about two years. The last time she called she said that her mother had taken a fall in Vietnam. She told me that when she heard this, she cried all night until the morning.’
So I ventured off to the American Midwest, and I kept the phone number in the zipper pocket of my backpack, along with my passport. The first month was all about settling in, about eating as many foods made of corn starch and corn syrup and corn enzymes as I could, marvelling over the endless monotony of corn and soybean fields, and making friends with the other writers. I had deliberately delayed taking out the phone number and giving Ai Hua a call, out of a growing sense of unease that if I did it this early on in my residency, I would keep the woman waiting and waiting and hoping for my visit.
But a month later, I felt it was time, so I called the number in New York City.
‘Allo?’ It was a Chinese accent that answered.
‘Could I please ask whether Auntie Ai Hua is there?’ I asked in my inept Teochew.
‘Who are you looking for?’ a man demanded in Mandarin.
‘Auntie Ai Hua,’ I replied in infirm Mandarin.
‘Who?’
I repeated the name. I was sure there was a slight pause of comprehension – even recognition – before the answer.
‘Sorry, there is no one named that here.’
‘Oh.’ I paused. Should I ask again? No. He had made it clear that even if there was someone named that there, he was not going to tell me. ‘Sorry. Thank you,’ I muttered before I hung up.
‘A man answered,’ I told my mother the next time I called home. ‘He spoke Mandarin, but he didn’t know her.’
‘It could be that her employer doesn’t want her to have friends,’ my mother replied matter-of-factly. Their men were their key to the outside world, but this key sometimes locked them housebound in strange foreign countries during the daylight hours.
‘I could try again next week,’ I suggested disingenuously, because we both knew that no matter how many times I called, I wouldn’t find my mother’s childhood friend on that number.
‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t important anyhow,’ my mother sighed. ‘It’s just as well. She might ask for money. And once they start asking, they will never stop.’
To my parents, ‘friend’ was not a Facebook verb. To be a friend attached an endless multitude of verbs – to love, to care, to provide, to help in time of need. So you either gave them your everything, or you didn’t. Every true friendship they had had been tested through the treacheries of war and dragged through the killing fields, so that what remained was the heart of all that mattered. And what had remained was often not very much. So you had to be careful on whom you chose to spend this quota of affection. And like every migrant, my mother had chosen to spend it on her family.
Some people say I look exactly like my mother when I was her age. I don’t really know because there are barely any photographs of her, and when she had children in her early twenties she set her hair permanently into a premature middle-aged perm. My mother never did hear from her best friend again, but perhaps she had been secretly hoping Ai Hua would be found, and that I, her daughter, would find her. Perhaps she yearned for this unlined image of herself to walk into the restaurant, a version that had not gone through war or displacement; and maybe she wanted to imagine the bafflement, the surprise, the ineffable and indelible joy on her friend’s face: ‘Kien! You haven’t changed at all. Since we last saw each other in Vietnam, you really haven’t changed at all!’
THE FIELD MARKER
EXECUTING HISTORY
T.S. Eliot wrote, ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’ If you were to pick up a handful of dust, knowing that there was a high possibility that you were holding on to the literal remains of half your family, the half you will never meet – all the cousins and aunts and uncles and the grandfather that would have peopled your world but for the blunt-force trauma of the Pol Pot regime – what does that mean? And if your father, standing there right next to you, tells you that this is where he carried and buried them a few years before your birth, w
hen the floods came, when they starved to death, when they closed their eyes with nothing but the scraps of black-dyed pyjamas covering their backs minus the buttons, would you bend to touch this earth? And how do you react when your father tells you quietly and matter-of-factly, ‘The next year we planted crops in the same field. The rice grew twice as much, and twice as high.’ What does it mean to write about fall and recovery? How do we look at history and make it matter when the past is dead, and to start all over again sometimes means to leave it buried?
These were the questions that preoccupied my mind for the past year, stemming from the trip I took with my father to Cambodia for the first time. A year later, I was standing in a different burial ground, still thinking about the same questions, but at the site of a different civil war that happened 150 years ago. Gettysburg is a town gently yet persistently preserved in its history. The pre–Civil War university, Gettysburg College (formerly known as Pennsylvania College), still stands today. The same building that was used as a war hospital on campus looks almost as it did 150 years ago on the outside. The battlefields are all still there, left flat and verdant as they were during the battle. The copse of trees from which the Confederates aimed at the Union base is still planted in the exact same position. The wooden fences have been recreated to look as they did one and a half centuries ago. Everything is still, because it’s not tourist season yet; and everything is quiet.
This had been one of the bloodiest battle sites of the Civil War, a war in which more American soldiers were killed in the course of battle than in the Vietnam and Iraq wars combined. A loss on the same scale today, according to the sources at the Civil War Museum, would equal six million casualties.
