Her Father's Daughter (17 page)

FATHER—

After his daughter returned from her first trip to China, pallid-faced and sunken-cheeked, she kept asking him questions. Tactful ones, because of course she’d probably read up on books about post-traumatic stress disorder or whatever rubbish Western psychologists had made up to stop a person from moving on in life, to extract exorbitant sums by sitting them down and making them talk. Talk led to nothing and nowhere. It was action that got a man places, that pulled him up and out of the quagmire and into a new country, out of the factories and into the glory of self-sufficiency in his own business. Minding your own business – that’s what he had done all his life. That was how he had survived those years under Pol Pot, and minding his own business was how he’d made a living in Australia.

But his eldest children, Alice and Alexander, were unable to mind their own business. Their bookshelves were filled with spines that cracked with the weight of the history inside:
Year Zero. The Bloody Revolution. The Gate. First They Killed My Father. Stay Alive, My Son.

When his eldest daughter was nineteen, his brother Kiv had visited Melbourne and offered to take her back to Cambodia; she could stay with his family for a week. Kiv – Kiv who had his glasses taken away by the Black Bandits, who had kept three small children alive, whose wife concealed rice for her family but was spared execution – was now the director of one of the country’s largest banks. In the early 1990s he had gone back to Cambodia over the protestations of his wife and children. Why did he want to return to that bad country, they lamented. But instead of landmines, he saw goldmines. Instead of bad memories, he saw a country filled with children who would grow up to staff his offices.

Finally her chance had come, Kuan thought. His daughter would be so pleased about this invitation. He waited for her to get home from university, hoping that she would not have her boyfriend Michael with her in case he wanted to accompany her to Cambodia. How bad would that look? He just didn’t want to deal with explaining to Michael that unmarried girls didn’t go on holidays with their boyfriends.

‘Are you coming too, Dad?’ she asked.

‘No, it’s getting close to Christmas sales. I have to be at the shop.’

But he had gone back once, with Kien, a couple of years ago. They stayed in Kiv’s villa and were treated like royalty, with a bevy of servants cooking their meals and bodyguards following them everywhere. They visited the Angkor Wat for the first time. He and Kien took a short trip to Ho Chi Minh City too, to visit the marketplace where they had reunited. He was secretly glad none of his children were with him. This was the history he shared only with Kien, before any of the four of them were born.

‘Lucky I held on, ay?’ Kien had remarked. ‘Otherwise Alice would have been born in the Thai camp. She wouldn’t be an Australian girl then. She’d be a refugee kid.’

Good god, he thought, if he took his daughter back to Cambodia there would be no end to her slack-jawed awe. She’d even think it was a proud thing to have come from such a bloody history. She’d probably cry for days on end, wasting energy on emotions that were vicarious.

But now they were going back together. She was an adult; she would know better. Admittedly, he hadn’t been this excited for a while.

When they arrived at Pochentong airport and stepped out into the sunlight, Kiv’s cars were waiting for them just as he knew they would be, and Kiv’s bodyguards came out to escort them. He could see his eldest daughter trying hard not to look too astonished. They climbed inside the black Mercedes-Benz with bulletproof windows and set off. A black four-wheel drive trailed behind them for protection.

They drove through the streets of Phnom Penh and then the entire convoy turned into a gated residency near the Thai Embassy, into the driveway of an air-conditioned double-storey brick-veneer house very much like their Melbourne home. This one was also in a quiet cul-de-sac, and each street was named after a different letter, in alphabetical order.

‘Just wait until you see your uncle’s banks, theme park and five-star hotel,’ Kuan told his daughters.

DAUGHTER—

After they dropped off their bags at the villa where they would be staying, they were driven to Uncle Kiv’s office. In the car, she wound down the window and felt the sunlight on her face.

‘Put on your sunglasses!’ warned her father. ‘You don’t want to get wrinkles around your eyes!’ After seeing advertisements for Oil of Olay on television, he had bought his daughters bottles of moisturiser from the moment they reached adolescence. He stocked up on anti-aging creams for them in the same way a homemaker would stock up on toilet paper or toothpaste.

She ignored her father and continued to look outside, watching women ride side-saddle in tuk-tuks in their best pink or red flannelette pyjamas. There was no distinction between sleep clothes and day clothes. The town went to sleep for the hour just after lunch. Shops closed their shutters, women and men hushed children beneath mosquito nets, students walked home from school, their feet ready to melt into the road. In the streets folks lay down like sun-soaked sponges and let their stomachs do the work of digesting. People slept anywhere and everywhere, their chins resting between their collarbones, their heads dropped downwards as a traditional greeting, a sign of respect or else a winking symbol of soporific defiance.

The foyer of Kiv’s building looked like the entrance of a five-star hotel. They went up in an elevator to the guest lounge, where they sat on a white sofa suite that looked as if the plastic had been pulled off it moments before, in a room that looked as if it had been built yesterday. A bucket of charcoal was in a corner to absorb the smell of new paint.

She and Alison sat in silence while her father talked to his brother and sister-in-law. Children should be seen and not heard, girls in particular. She and her sister were both over twenty and yet they would always be children in this world where you accorded respect to experience. The quiet was a familiar quiet.

Uncle Kiv looked like a healthier version of their father. His cheeks were rubicund; he had more hair and a restless energy. Auntie Suhong had a calm, worldly presence. After a time the adults turned to her and asked how she had enjoyed Beijing, and she told them she had enjoyed it very much the second time around, when she was not so much alone and understood more about the culture. Returning to the city was like meeting a familiar foreign friend. The summer palace sparkled in the daytime, and she met up with all the Chinese friends she had made, and even her dear professors. In Hong Kong she took a ferry to visit her aunt and uncle in Macau. She slept in the same bed overlooking the bay, and realised that only a year ago she was in the same spot, lying awake, wishing she could let go and live a different life with her newfound lover instead of having so many hang-ups and anxieties. Yet all that seemed an eternity away. That evening, the last before she flew out to Cambodia, she had slept well.

And now, sitting in her uncle’s air-conditioned lounge room, she didn’t feel like she was anywhere far from home at all. Her father and uncle had made their family homes compellingly alike, with bay windows, muted drapery, tiled floors and white walls. And everything was new. Everything.

‘This is your first time in Cambodia,’ her uncle mused. ‘One of my staff has planned a tour. But is there anything in particular you’d like to see?’

‘I’d like to maybe find out more about recent Cambodian history,’ she confessed hesitantly.

‘Ah, there is nothing to say about those bad times,’ her auntie sighed. ‘Thinking about them only makes you feel sad all over again.’

‘I will take you to my office,’ her uncle told her, ‘and you can interview some of my younger staff. In them, you will see the future of this country. They are very ambitious and …’ He searched for the English word and could not find it, so inserted the French instead: ‘…
agressif
.’ It was a positive thing to be
agressif
in this country.

It was then and there that she realised the difference between her father and his brother: her Uncle Kiv had gone back to Cambodia; instead of fearing it, he had planted his feet firmly on the ground and decided to rebuild. Her father had stayed in Australia and had started his own business, but he had inculcated in his children the need to tread lightly.

They tiptoed through Uncle Kiv’s headquarters and downstairs to his offices. The managers were handsome men and women who looked barely twenty.

Inside his office, her uncle had architectural plans and models of his latest investment projects. They spread across his table, across his desks, and some even rested on boxes. It was like an empire expanding to fill all the empty spaces of the room. Uncle Kiv crouched down behind his desk and opened a safe. He emerged with two blocks of newly minted banknotes, each the thickness of a novel and bound with white paper strips. He handed one to her sister and one to her.

‘We can’t take this much money, Uncle,’ she protested. She wasn’t being polite. She and her sister really could not take it.

‘Take it, take it!’ he insisted. ‘Just for a bit of fun. I’m going to make you both instant millionaires.’

It was a million Cambodian riels, the equivalent of US$250.

‘We really don’t want this, Uncle.’

‘Nonsense. What kind of children don’t want money? Put it in your handbags now, before you lose it all.’

FATHER—

Damn it, his daughters were so foreign. They shook hands with all the bank staff, and smiled at the wrong people. ‘There’s no need to thank the drivers or shake hands with employees. You’re in a different country now, with different rules to follow.’ But they didn’t understand hierarchy, he realised, and this was due to their soft upbringing in Australia. They’d also seen too much of the good stuff in life, so much so that they weren’t even particularly impressed by Kiv’s mansions and hotels. Or if they were, it was a fleeting, token interest. They seemed more interested in seeing old crumbling things, the museums and relics, the stupas and temples.

And they had even refused to take money! The thought of being instant millionaires did not move them. In fact, they had seemed aghast, and at the earliest opportunity had wanted to give the notes away in the street. What was wrong with these girls, he wondered. On the second day they sat around the air-conditioned house in the afternoon complaining of boredom.

‘Dad, there’s nothing to do. We can’t even step out the front door without the bodyguards.’

‘You can go for a swim in the pool out the back. You can watch the flat screen television in the lounge room.’

But they didn’t want to swim in the backyard. They didn’t want to watch the television. They wanted to go outside.

Didn’t they feel safe? Didn’t they feel lucky? These kids didn’t know anything. He remembered one evening when his son was in Cambodia a few years back. Kiv had called him up in Australia to laughingly relate the day’s events: ‘Your son and his cousin tried to run away in Angkor Wat. My bodyguard called me in a panic and told me he had lost them in Siem Reap. Luckily, twenty minutes later he found them sitting in a coffee shop snickering away.’ Kuan had been horrified. What idiots would do such a thing? Anything could have happened to them. And he could just imagine the panic of the poor man whose foreign charges had disappeared.

When their driver drove him to his old street, he could barely remember it. ‘This street used to be so clean and beautiful,’ he told his daughters. ‘People would sweep out front of their shops every morning, and in the evenings pull up chairs and sit outside to chat.’ They thought that it was just their father being nostalgic about his former home, which looked like four squares stacked one on top of the other, but he knew that he was not mis-remembering.

‘Imagine! We even brought along the bunch of keys from the factory with us when the Black Bandits came!’

He did not recognise the house on stilts where his brother claimed that he had lived during the time of Year Zero, or the river.

‘Why is the water so dirty in the stream?’ he asked his sister-in-law.

‘It was always that colour.’

‘I remember it was clear. We used to collect it for boiling and drinking. It was clear.’

But Kiv told him he was mis-remembering.

Oh, it was so good to be around Kiv again, Kiv who always knew what to do, Kiv who could make the hard decisions, and Kiv who could laugh about things too. Kiv was the innovator, the inventor, the let’s-take-action man. It was Kiv who got them to Vietnam, Kiv who hid the gold in the handlebars of his bike, Kiv who came back to Cambodia much to the chagrin of his fearful loved ones. In Kiv’s presence he felt like a kid again, under the protection of his older brother. It was so comforting that he didn’t care what his daughters thought.

Perhaps there were two decades when he was not so fearful – in his thirties and forties, when life seemed to spread out in a vast expanse of possibility. Anything could happen in Australia, it seemed, but only good things, and he was young and ready to make them happen, working seven-day weeks, ten-hour days. But then, compared to Kiv’s success here, his own seemed small.

So what if they worked until they stopped noticing that their homes were falling into disrepair, if it led up to this? Success of such dizzying magnitude, security to such an extent that it took your breath away? If Kiv wanted to build a medical clinic, it would be done. The same with roads and temples and schools. Everyone treated Kiv with such respect and fear, while back in his shop in Footscray he still sometimes got crazy customers who would scream at him. Once, one even threw a telephone at him. He was still quelling the apoplectic rages of people who brought in twenty-dollar hairdryers six months out of warranty, still selling toasters to pensioners who pulled coin purses out of their vinyl handbags.

‘Why didn’t you go back to Cambodia too?’ his eldest daughter had asked him out of the blue one day when she caught him gazing at Kiv’s calendar. The calendar featured a picture of one of Kiv’s buildings on each month’s page. He knew his daughter scoffed at his ambitions, his love of franchises, his admiration of Colonel Sanders who had started Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was in his seventies, and his awe at Sir Richard Branson.

‘You kids were still too young, and there were four of you,’ he replied.