Her Father's Daughter (16 page)

When he saw his future wife Kien in Saigon, he remembered the child in her and that is what he loved. Knowing that she had spent the four years selling cloth in this new city, while he was in hell. Life had gone on here, while for him it had stopped. When he first entered the marketplace, it was so teeming with life that tears filled his eyes. These people had lived through a war, but they had not fallen off the edge of the world as he had.

‘Old Aunt! Old Aunt!’ He heard a voice calling his mother by her former title, when she was head of the factory. Two beautiful young Vietnamese women were heading towards them.

As they came closer, he realised their faces were very familiar. One was taller than the other and she was more outspoken. ‘Old Aunt, remember us? We used to work in your plastic-bag factory! You gave us our first job.’

He remembered now. They weren’t Vietnamese girls at all, they were girls from back home. The taller of the two was Ly, and the shorter girl, her sister Kien. But how they’d grown up! What a difference the intervening years had made. What luxury lay in a beautiful woman who had not been through what he had, the wonder in liquid eyes and the throbbing of life that was watchful and not half-wasted. He couldn’t stop looking at Kien.

The next day, he fell so ill that his brother and sister had to take him to hospital. ‘Malaria,’ the Vietnamese doctors declared, because slave-camp survivors didn’t succumb so soon to madnesses of the heart. He was in hospital for a week. It was a proper state hospital that gave free healthcare to refugees. He spent a week gazing up at the ceiling, alternating between feeling as though he were submerged in freezing water and being broiled in an oven, while his inflamed brain seemed to have a separate heartbeat.

During that time, Kien came to visit him. She brought some rice cakes and handed them to him, embarrassed. She was so serious, so quiet, a girl just a few years into her twenties. While Sokim’s silences had reminded him of all that was lost, Kien’s rectitude reminded him of what could be regained.

When he recovered, he spent the next few months courting her like crazy. He picked her up on the back of his fourth-hand bicycle and took her through the streets of Saigon. He bought her strips of dried squid to snack on, and cola the colour of fish sauce that had been made in a communist collective.

He took her to the zoo. They stood side by side, looking at the animals. There weren’t many left. Some half-bald birds, stoop-shouldered primates and a handful of deer with dusty antlers.

‘I can count all the ribs on that tiger,’ Kien finally said, as they gazed through the iron bars at the cowering creature. ‘How very sad to trap an animal like that.’

Looking at her in her unassuming yellow dress, feeling sorry for a scrappy sad tiger, he felt an indescribable tenderness well up inside. He could not believe that this was the child who had worked at his factory when she was thirteen. She had a scar on her leg from an accident with the plastic-bag cutter, which he pretended not to look at when they were together, but it was things like that little mark that melted him inside.

‘Better that it’s in this zoo and not roaming around in the jungle,’ he said, ‘because we don’t want to run into such animals when we leave.’

By then, he’d won her over. She was going to leave with him. Of course there was a life after death. If there was anything he now believed in, it was this.

*

Already rumours were circulating like sugarflies about a new refugee camp run by the United Nations at the Thai border that would allow Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees to get into Western democratic countries. But to get to the camp, they would have to go back through Cambodia. What on earth made him want to go back into the country he had vowed never to see again? It was the only way out to the other side. Life in Saigon was becoming more perilous. In the evenings the Vietnamese authorities would come around to arrest and resettle the new arrivals. They would be sent into the countryside and given a plot of land on which they had to build a house. Rice would be distributed to them. But this way of life seemed suspiciously similar to Year Zero all over again, and there was no way he was regressing to that.

So, to evade the authorities, every evening his family left their rented house and stayed over with Kien’s family, who had been in Vietnam longer and were not in immediate danger of forced resettlement. He and his mother and sister slept on the floor of Kien’s tiny family home, in tight lines like salted fish.

They hired a guide to take them to the refugee camp – he, his mother, his sister and his new wife. Kiv and his family had already left. On the morning of their departure, they woke up and packed only a change of clothes so as not to arouse any suspicions. Kien sewed pieces of flattened gold behind the buttons of his shirt, and bid farewell to her family. Their guide arrived in the afternoon with two cyclos. He and Kien sat in one, his mother and his sister in the other.

The cyclos went as far as they could go, to the edge of the jungle. Then they had to set out on foot to cross the border between Vietnam and Cambodia. Although it was dark, they were not frightened – lines and lines of other people were also crossing, mostly traders. They walked all day and were exhausted, collapsing in an empty house. He slept at the feet of his mother, wife and sister, as their sentry. Throughout the journey the guide would take them to the houses of his relatives and friends, where his charges would be fed and have a place to sleep.

At one point they were smuggled into Battambang in cargo trucks covered with tarpaulin. Refugee women in one truck and men in the other. It was dark and suffocating. Kien later told him that her pregnant friend in the truck vomited on her.

Another leg of the journey involved sitting in the back of a cattle truck with other refugees, where he got the hairy eyeball look from a middle-aged Khmer woman because Kien was leaning her head on his shoulder. Khmer couples never showed such affection in public, but he and Kien were now on their first adventure together and they didn’t care. It was exhilarating.

Sometimes they had to sleep in the open fields, on rattan mats with mosquito nets hanging from the trees for a covering. After they arrived in Battambang, a boat took them across the Tonle Sap Lake. The last stretch of their journey was traversed by bicycle, and then by foot. How many months had this taken? He had lost count of time. To him, it had just been one continuous honeymoon with his new wife.

When they reached the border, they saw thousands upon thousands of people in a flat field, with mosquito nets hitched up. This was Kao I Dang refugee camp. They lay down on their mats and waited for sleep to come. The next morning, a black-clad soldier came and took a long lascivious look at Kien, and at that moment it seemed that during the night the moon had seeped all its shade into her face. ‘Pale,’ the soldier muttered, ‘not like a Khmer.’

Kuan got up and ran to the Red Cross tent. He was not taking any chances. He stammered in French to the white woman there: ‘
Un soldat demande mon épouse!
’ Immediately she told him to bring his family over. That was how he got his family into the tent. It was staffed by kind white people, just like the future world into which he had delivered his family – his mother, his sister, his wife.

What an exaggerator he had been. At first he had made it sound like such an adventure. Yet she had not imagined sleeping on forest floors, the mosquito bites, and nursing him through his malaria. The fear of landmines. Stepping accidentally on the swollen black arms and legs of cadavers when she least expected it. He barely noticed the dead bodies. ‘Bandits got to them, people say,’ he told her, and walked on like everyone else.

And maggots! At night the forest seemed to have teeth and she felt as if she was being swallowed whole. And then more walking through the jungle in pitch black, hearing the rustle of other footsteps, not knowing if they were benign or Black Bandits.

She finally encountered them for the first time one evening.

They were two slightly older boys who seemed to appear out of the leaves, their guns held like horizontal tree branches to block the path of her sister-in-law Kieu.

‘Where are you all going?’ one of the boys demanded.

Kieu stammered, ‘We’re a family. P-p-please let us pass.’

The soldiers hesitated, but then, miraculously, let them pass.

She, meanwhile, had hidden behind Kieu like a cowering rabbit. What was she doing with this clan of crazy half-starved people whose eyes burned with the desire of those who had nothing more to lose, who were now her new family?

She wanted to cry, but she didn’t want her new mother and sister-in-law to think she was a weak, un-courageous thing. She had swapped everything in her life for something else and yet this something else was just a man’s word. Perhaps the feeling of being singled out among her sisters by a man nine years her senior was what churned her heart. Because his family had given her and her sister their first jobs, she had trusted Kuan. She had found a man who could speak both English and French, who wanted to take her out of her suspended life in Vietnam. She was only twenty-two, and she followed him because he told her that this was their honeymoon, an exciting prelude to unimaginable glories. He had even bought her a new sarong so that she wouldn’t be mistaken for a Chinese girl or, more dangerously, a Vietnamese girl. He had made her trek through jungles for months, back through Battambang and Siem Reap in the country that still gave him nightmares.

*

Because he could not stand up, she would crawl through grief with him, not realising until too late that grief was a narrow tunnel, barely able to fit one person. The dirt that he dug out from the tunnel, he threw behind him, into her face.

One night in the jungle his hands splashed across her sleeping brow like cold water and woke her up.

What was wrong? Who was there?

Nothing, no one.

There was just something in his ear. An ant. An ant in the ear distressed the inner hairs so deeply that it was like having spiders teeming in the brain. Tears came into the eyes. He had no control. None at all. It walked all over him. Every scratch of its six feet was a scrape of gravel, rocks rolling down on Sisyphus. He lay on one side, and he waited to die.

He remembered the honeyed face of the fourteen-year-old girl who had taken sugar palm from the storage hut. She was caught. Hands tied behind her back, they smeared what she had so wanted across her eyes, on her cheeks, down her chin and at her temples. They tied her to a tree, to wait for the ants. Throat swollen, eyes swollen, a head made for hurt. In the end she could not blink, her eyes were sealed shut.

You’re not going to die, his wife told him, stop making a big deal out of something so small. We’ll get some water and pour it in your ear, and you’ll be all right. You’re not going to die.

Instead of falling in love, she now had to rise to it, rise like a river. All sorts of sordid debris could float around inside her, but she still had to go on. This was the way it was going to be for now. This was how it was going to be forever, Kien thought, because she was so young and could foresee no future where the tide would ebb and lower her, cool her down. She was so angry with him sometimes. Sometimes, she could not help but feel cheated. But he was so thin and faded and so sad, and he had been so kind to her when she worked at the factory.

In the dark, with a man’s face cupped in your hands, you can forgive him anything, she thought.

DAUGHTER—

There should be a word for a memory that you had deliberately forgotten to remember: a Dismemory. This is what her father had. Dismemory sounded like a foreign country filled with heaps of miscellaneous cast-offs. And people in clusters, picking up the pieces, also called Dismemories. People wearing their Dismemories like armour, or perhaps sewn into a strangely coloured suit with small lapels. But maybe a person grew until their Dismemories became too tight and the seams could not help but tear. Had she ever walked around with an enormous hole in the middle of her back that she did not know was there because she could not see it? Or maybe another time her knee had been exposed, right in the area where doctors tested your reflexes with a small hammer, to make sure you still felt the feelings that kept you alive. Her Dismemories were small, but her father’s were enormous.

What if it gets worse, she wondered, but never asked him.

What if what gets worse, he would have wanted to know.

Your dismembered memories. Your Dismemories.

No such thing.

But of course there was. There was Dismemory in his trying to cut off the sharp tip of a knife with another knife, and Dismemory in the way he wrapped an unpeeled banana in cling wrap so it would not be contaminated in his children’s school bags. Dismemory in the way he surrounded himself with a kaleidoscope of ever-evolving electronics. There was Dismemory when he took walks near the Maribyrnong River and feared drowning, and Dismemory in the way he plotted that she would either move back home or stay inside the college. Dismemory in the secret glee he felt that his daughter could find a job where she sat in one warm safe room for eight hours a day. Dismemory in the way he loved innocence.

During her childhood, she found that the most difficult thing was to argue with her father. She could never win, because you could never argue with anyone who wanted so much for you, whose very arguments were motivated by this love. As the years progressed, nothing seemed to have changed.

‘Why can’t I stay out past eight p.m. in summer?’

‘Why do you whinge so much? Why don’t we just let you wander the streets? See how far that gets you.’ Even in her second year of university they still imposed that ridiculous curfew on her.

He made her so furious sometimes. But you could never question the paranoias attached to this love, because to him it would mean questioning the love, which was unconditional. And what kind of ungrateful troublemaker would ask questions about a gift many families lacked?

So instead she asked him about those he had loved before. ‘What was Chicken Daddy like?’

‘He was a very hard-working man,’ her father would reply.

‘How did Chicken Sister look?’ she’d inquire, and he’d give her a blurry description of what colonised Indochinese considered beautiful.

‘She was very pretty, big eyes and pale skin. So perhaps you’d better not write that her brothers called her Spider when she was young or no one will have any sympathy for her.’

She understood how he thought people would respond: sympathy for beautiful and perfect characters only. But she couldn’t make any of it perfect. Perfection did not bring them back to life. She gave her father her writing to read, and he corrected only the factual errors.

‘Thanks, Dad, but do you have any other suggestions?’

‘No. I don’t know much about writing.’

‘Come on, Dad, just tell me whatever comes to mind.’

‘Do you think there’s too much suffering in the Cambodian part? Maybe white people don’t want to read about too much suffering. It depresses them.’

She didn’t know what to say about that. She knew exactly what he meant, though. Her first book had been filled with the sort of sardonic wit that came easily to a person whose sole purpose in life was to finish university and find her first graduate position, knowing full well that she was on her way to becoming comfortably middle-class. She had refused, just as her father did, to look beyond the here and now. If you looked at darkness through rose-coloured glasses, all you got was a congealed blood colour. A colour that should have a specific name, like
blug
, a clotty mixture of mucus and blood. A word that was not in her father’s dictionary. It was best not to look at all.

But now that she was older, she saw that in his quest for modernity and upward mobility, her father had given his children a completely different history, drilled into them that they were part of a Chinese culture that spanned centuries, which was true; made sure they were also aware they were bonafide born-in-Australia kids. But in doing so, he had wiped out the most significant part of their identity.

How could she forget the men and women who came to their house in Braybrook when she was young, who had no idea of privacy? They would poke and prod their heads into any room and ‘wahhh’ when she and her toddler brother were getting changed. Whenever they were expecting visitors her parents would hide the valuables, but they never failed to offer food, and as much as anyone wanted. ‘We’re having dinner! Join us! Join us!’ And before the person could refuse, a bowl heaped with rice would be thrust into their hands and a chair pulled out. Her mother would cook Vietnamese food because that was what she was taught in Saigon:
Bánh hói, Bánh canh,
fish soup and rice-paper rolls with hot Thai basil and mint. Their fridge was filled with jars of homemade fish sauce; their bedrooms were guarded by glassy-eyed porcelain Buddhas. The Goddess of Mercy floating on her lotus had watched them grow up from her place on the mantlepiece, but gradually they ignored her as they dismantled their filthy former habits.

When one of her uncles first arrived in Australia, he kept a wastepaper basket beside his loo. He thought that flushing used toilet paper would block the pipes. Some migrants washed their hair with dishwashing detergent because they couldn’t read the labels, but the pictures of lemons gave them a feeling of zesty succour. Others dried meat on flat pieces of newspaper in the living room, or pickled onions in empty Nescafé jars. They were always afraid of scarcity because they were not Mainlander Chinese but Diaspora Chinese, driven from place to place, destined never to feel a sense of belonging; knowing they would never be a part unless they kept themselves apart and hid what was most important of their heritage inside the home. In Cambodia they were the walnut-faced grandmothers selling boiled eggs in the marketplace, or the goldsmiths making jewellery for weddings. In Australia they were the model minority only once they were no longer scrambling in the factories and picking fruit on the farms, and once their kids could speak English.

And when she and her brother came home from school speaking English, her father knew it was time. He wanted to whitewash their history so they could begin anew. No prying ways, no crap on scraps of paper lying around the house. Her father had named her Alice because he believed this new country to be a Wonderland, where anything was possible if only she went along with his unfailing belief. His patriotism rang truer and more annoying than any bogan supremacist’s. ‘Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free.’ This to him was the most beautiful national anthem in the world. There
was
golden soil and wealth for toil. Who wanted to be anywhere else? In other countries, where their anthems were all about rinsing the land in blood of the brothers?

He would never let her go to Cambodia. ‘You can travel anywhere in the world except there,’ he told her generously, but still she would not relent.

When she reached adulthood, she kept at it. ‘But Alexander went when he was nineteen!’

‘That’s different. Your brother is a boy.’

The boys were allowed to go back on holidays, and after the age of thirty if they were still single, they were sent back to find themselves wives.

‘If you want to go back to Cambodia, you must stay with Uncle Kiv,’ her father had told her. ‘He’ll look after you.’ Uncle Kiv was her father’s hero. Her father would show every visitor to their house brochures of Uncle Kiv’s banks in Cambodia, shiny full-colour booklets designed to entice investors. These brochures clearly were not literature, but inside their pages her father found a story of success that he could not resist bringing out whenever any of her friends’ parents came to pick them up.

‘But I want to go with you, Dad,’ she kept insisting.

‘It’s too dangerous still,’ he’d reply. Finally, ten years later, he relented. He and her younger sister Alison were going to go with her. She was to return to Beijing for one week for a writers’ festival. Afterwards, she would meet them in Hong Kong and they would fly to Cambodia together.

‘I’ll bring the best Panasonic camcorder that’s on display at the shop,’ her father told her, ‘so you can remember the details of the place exactly as it is.’ These weren’t fields of golden wheat or barley they were going to see. They were the killing fields her father was going to show her, the daughter he wouldn’t even let out to see movies at Highpoint mall in her early teens.

When she left her parents’ house, her father was waiting outside on the porch in his woolly old argyle jumper, black buildings behind him against the quiet sky, still dark but ripening for the day. He was watching her taxi drive away, no doubt memorising the numberplate in case the driver didn’t take her to the airport.