Her Father's Daughter (7 page)

FATHER—

What was wrong with these kids, he wondered. They seemed to have no future plans, and yet they also resented it when he and Kien stepped in and tried to help. Like they didn’t need help at all, as if they were completely independent beings.

He remembered when he first arrived in this country. The sweet bread-and-butter faces of the Australians and their tenderness like pudding. They didn’t see human debris when they first looked at him. They saw a man and his very pregnant young wife, his 28-year-old sister and his 72-year-old mother.

He remembered when he first saw Melbourne, too. The geometrical wonder of the city rose from the horizon, each skyscraper a glorious robot rooted to the ground by the strength of its individual personality. Across the metal and cement marvel that was the West Gate Bridge, he looked out of a car window at the factories below. How wonderful to live in a world where everything was paved over, each tree only there because of human thought, and each leaf of grass grew only because a person allowed it to. Even the sun gave a clean warmth.

On the corner of Flinders and Elizabeth streets he had watched a flock of obese grey-white birds that didn’t fly away until you came really close. Then he realised why the seagulls were so complacent. No one ate them. Human beings provided bread without expecting a pound of flesh in return. Once, his family were taken to see the fairy penguins on Phillip Island, and he watched the birds waddle up to the edge of the beach, marvelling at how such small flightless creatures could stray so close to human feet.

So many things that he could not take for granted then. Electricity. Tap water and a bed that was not a rattan mat. Also, his
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
. It was one of the first books he bought. Some words that the Australians had told him about were not in there, like ‘spork’, a cross between a spoon and a fork.

He bought an exercise book from Sims Tuckerbag supermarket for twelve cents and started to make lists. He vowed to learn three new words a day.

Aglow

Abode

Amen

He picked words that he liked the sound of, in no particular order. He wrote down the lists in the evening.

Spores

Spoons

Sparks

Yet this new country: there were no words in his Longman dictionary to describe the surprises she brought into his life. He learnt that a tender submission was a business document. Manslaughter – made of two wonderful words, man’s laughter – was the act of killing someone. And sweet relish was a jar of mashed pickles.

Because he could speak English and French, he worked at the Midway Migrant Hostel where his family were staying, as an interpreter for the new arrivals. Some people sat on the edge of their beds most of the day and did not speak, while others pleaded with him to beseech Father Government on their behalf. That’s what they all took to calling the Australian government, like it was their new King Sihanouk, except more epic in its generosity, more mythical in its magnitude. At the camp, he realised, they had existed day to day like children sustained by the story of Father Christmas, and their arrival in Australia was akin to finding out that Santa Claus was real. There was a miracle in all of this, which was why some men and women expected the near impossible and demanded the un-doable. ‘Beg the kind white people to help me bring my family over! Tell Father Government my wife is still back in Cambodia.’ Suddenly they thought that
all
their wishes could be fulfilled.

The staff at the Midway Migrant Hostel wanted them to concentrate on more immediate things. ‘Ask him how he is settling in,’ they would instruct, as he sat next to a new arrival.

At first he didn’t understand what this meant. He translated, and would get a blank look. He suggested in Teochew or Khmer, ‘Tell them you will look for work to support your family and start to pay rent on a house.’

That was not what the staff meant by settling in, he soon found out. It was not about whether the new refugees would settle down and do useful work. The migrant hostel staff wanted to know how the new refugees were
adjusting
.

Some of the men would cry.

Be quiet, he wanted to say, stop it. Be grateful that you are here. Stop begging and make yourself useful. But it was easy for him to think that. He had not lost his wife to marauding soldiers. His children had never stepped on landmines. The only people he had buried were dead. He had been a young and relatively fit man, and now he could begin a new life.

He was a lucky, lucky man.

In his new life, he counted his blessings.

Do you want to go to sleep here, a Black Bandit had once asked him, sickle to the side of his temple. To sleep meant to be put to death.

No, no, no, his eyes had bulged.
I want to stay awake!
How could he go to sleep when the sun was so high in the sky, when every sense was suddenly on full alert? He felt the heat behind his eyeballs, the powdered earth beneath his feet, wetness beneath his armpits, smelt the promise of the fish and clutched at his banging heart.

When the Black Bandit left, the fish was still in his hands, his birthday gift for his mother.

DAUGHTER—

Her parents were so interfering, with their small-minded anxieties:
Have you called him yet? Has he replied to your email? Why not? Maybe you sent him something really offensive. Maybe you were just not trying hard enough. When you are in Adelaide for your writers’ festival, call his parents and meet up with him.

They led tightly coiled lives, in tiny communities, and sometimes it wasn’t even a community, sometimes it was just the little yellow nuclear family ensconced inside the large white house, like an egg inside an eggshell. The bigger the house, the more they believed these padded boxes would protect the people inside from bruises and shake-ups. After setting up their children on awkward yum cha dates, they would go over and inspect each other’s boxes to make sure that their beloved daughters were going to be in safe neighbourhoods, money trees out the front and all manner of appliances lined up inside like a modern army to fight against germ warfare.

For her mother, friends were memories from childhood and young adulthood. Once in Australia, she no longer had them. Friends were to while away time with, and her mother had no more idle time. All she seemed to do was closet herself in the garage, working, chipping away at the decades with her peeling tools and peeled hands, making her jewellery. Her work as a goldsmith was more fulfilling than the strain of gauging people’s moods. As much as she tried to lock them into her mind as fixed characters, as much as she tried to set them with her words – ‘always like that, giving things away’, ‘always so clumsy’, ‘always so reckless’, ‘always telling the same story’ – people would shift and change.

Her mother’s childhood friends were the only ones who did not change. They were easy to control in her head, and they aligned themselves completely with her visions. Even when their lives branched out in strange ways and bore stranger fruit, she would try to find a way to link their narratives to the fixed seedlings in her head. According to her mother, Ai Hua, her mother’s best friend from childhood, had always been placid and family-orientated.

‘That girl was always too stupidly generous,’ her mother told her. ‘She kept giving things away, and paying for things for other people. When we were kids, she always treated us when we went out. Her father had died when she was young.’ Her mother paused. ‘She had a suitor once, who wanted to take her abroad; but her mother didn’t want the daughter to leave her all alone in her old age.’

She could imagine the old woman digging desperate fingernails into her daughter’s arm, crying and cursing her: ‘Don’t you leave me now! You dare and you die!’ And the daughter would have probably been in her mid-twenties, knowing that if she couldn’t set sail in the water with her lover, then she would miss both her boats.

Now Ai Hua was in her mid-fifties, an illegal immigrant working at a Chinese restaurant in the United States, sending most of her earnings back home to her mother. She’d been living this illegal limbo life for seven years, sleeping at the back of some stranger’s house.

‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t important anyhow,’ said her mother when one of her aunts went to the States on holiday and was unable to locate Ai Hua. ‘It’s just as well. She might ask for money.’ Her mother was afraid, not that her friend would claim her favours back like coupons, but that she would expect the same kind of unconditional friendship as before. Her parents were so afraid of what other people thought, all the possible ways you could offend a person with gifts and acts and random notions. People could take you the wrong way, so don’t even try. Their main priority in life was to be left alone. ‘Why do you spend so much time with your friends? Why don’t you mind your own business?’ Worse still were their threats of withdrawal of love, made on behalf of other people. ‘You’ll see. You might think you have so many girl friends now, but when they get married they will abandon you.’

Yet she was a bridesmaid to her best friend Hanh, who had arrived as a refugee when she was twelve. They shared the same bed on Hanh’s last evening as a single girl, in the house Hanh shared with her parents and many sisters. She and Hanh lay on the queen-sized mattress that had once been shared with childhood siblings, looking up at the ceiling. They did not wonder about what a wedding night would be like, or talk about the future. They did not speak of the past either, at least not their own. They were content to lie there, like sisters. ‘My mother got married at nineteen,’ Hanh told her. ‘She said that soon afterwards, her mother-in-law made her feed the pigs back in Vietnam.’ They both marvelled at how different life would be for them. At Hanh’s Vietnamese wedding, Hanh’s Jewish friends got them all up and dancing Jewish dances to a karaoke machine.

She remembered her friend Angela’s hen’s night – the prematurely balding stripper singing ‘I’ll make love to you’ with a rose between his teeth and a cherry wedged in his bellybutton, and how Angela’s Italian aunts and mother, women who had had a number of children, were squealing and blushing more than the younger women. At Angela’s wedding, Angela’s father danced with his daughter one last time, and at the end of the dance she had to pat him gently twice on the back before he would let her go, red-eyed.

Her friends were beginning to get married now. She had read somewhere that marriage was not a passion-fest, that it was more like a small partnership formed to run a tiny, quite mundane and often not-for-profit business. This was never so true as it was for the ‘good’ children of the Southeast Asian refugees, who were just too damn practical. With every transaction accounted for, they knew where they were heading, with houses and mortgages maximising their first-home-owner’s grant. They planned at what age they would have children and the schools they would send them to. Book them in as soon as the ultrasound is done, to Scotch College or Methodist Ladies College. Or, if they didn’t have the money, they made sure they trained them up to take the scholarship exams so that their kids could get free tuition for at least three years.

And lie low, she had always been taught. If you do make it, don’t ever make a fuss. Shine quietly but don’t be outstanding. To be outstanding was to stand out, and make yourself an easy target. ‘Keep quiet,’ her mother would say when the refugee boats were rolling in at the beginning of the new century. Figuratively, and sometimes even literally, they were all from the same boat. Their parents had stayed in the same sort of camps, grabbing for clothes during hand-outs. They had seen things that had made them want to tear their eyes out but for the hope of a better place in this life, not the hereafter. And now their kids were getting married.

How could her parents begrudge her friends such happiness? She would show them pictures of weddings on her camera. Her father would always zoom in on the brides and grooms. She knew what he was doing, and she wanted to snatch the camera from him. She knew what he was looking for, and even if it was not there, she knew that he would find it. ‘Your friend’s wife has a crooked tooth,’ he would say about her friend Matthew’s lovely new bride. Such mean-spiritedness. When had her parents turned so hard, she wondered.

Yet to her parents, being interested in friends post-marriage was the same as being nosy. Love was a verb with a certain amount of energy attached to it – a daily quota – and you had to choose on whom you wanted to spend this energy. That was love. That was why people had to pray for it. If it were not finite, no one would pine for love in their lives – they would just wait to receive or learn to give. But Buddhist love, she knew, was meant to be non-discriminating, like the wind. The wind passed through a rubbish bin as well as the leaves of a tree.

‘That’s rubbish,’ said her father. ‘You can’t love everyone equally. Sooner or later you have to choose.’

FATHER—

From the moment he arrived in this country with one empty suitcase, he was bent on filling it up, like Mary Poppins’ infinity bag. That was a movie his kids used to watch all the time. He didn’t like it; he found it nonsensical and silly. He preferred the other one with the children running away from the Nazis, singing
Do Re Mi
. It instilled a good lesson, he thought, about surmounting adversity. ‘If you work hard enough, you will get somewhere,’ was the other lesson he tried to instil in his kids. It was a simple lesson – if you did not drink or smoke, you could save up your money and start a business.

That’s what he had done – he saved up the money from his factory job and started his electrical appliances store. It began as a small shopfront selling the electrical equivalent of smallgoods: batteries, watches, radios, musical Christmas cards and alarm clocks. Within a month of opening, thieves broke in one night and took off with ten-thousand dollars’ worth of stock. The store expanded five years later, when he moved further up the street into two shopfronts. There, the thieves became more brazen. One evening he received a call from Chubb Security to let him know that the alarms had been activated. When he arrived, he saw that someone had rammed a truck into the roller shutters and loaded it up with all the televisions and video cameras and walkmans they could grab.

Over the years he kept his eye out for different properties in Barkly Street, Footscray, to see which ones were shifting owners, moving locations, leasing. When the enormous old hardware store across the road from the Barkly Hotel was being auctioned, he brought along his sister Kieu, and they made the winning bid.

All of his family were part of his business now – Kien, Kieu and her husband David, his eldest sister, his wife’s sisters, his brother from Guangzhou. He employed sales staff and office workers until he had a team of forty – loyal Lambchops in deliveries, hardworking Hanji, indefatigable Anna and Sim, hi-fi fanatic Joe, Karaoke King Ben and Jim, the Macedonian George Clooney.

In his store he had a whole shelf, a shrine, dedicated to food. Not the provisions themselves, but the machines that made them. Machines that spun fairy floss. Electronic capsules that popped corn. Things that cut and pulverised food to a mash, machines to extract juice from fruit, machines that made waffles, machines that made bread, machines that toasted bread. With these machines back in Cambodia, someone could make themselves a small fortune by selling snacks on the street. But these were machines designed so that there would be no street food in this new country, because of hygiene. They had names like Sunbeam and Kenwood, Tiffany and Tiger. Black & Decker were, to him, a pair of stalwart brothers, or two faithful Doberman dogs. This was his small-appliances family.

He also housed the progeny of the forefathers who turned electricity from a mysterious abstract force into something to be generated and shared – dishwashers from George Westinghouse and General Electric. Kelvinator was like a fridge combining the strength of the Terminator and the flexibility of those Transformer toys his son played with.

And the fans – he had a whole fan club waving at him every time he stood at the front counter. Small brown squat ones with heads that rotated in your direction every five seconds. Big straight-backed ones. He had heaters and electric blankets. He created warmth in winter. He made sure people
slept wonderfully well
with Linda, as the slogan on the pink box said, like a comforting sign in a boudoir. He had Brown Goods and he had White Goods – and he looked at his store and saw that it was all good.

He would bring each machine home over the course of the year for a trial. When they were small, his children watched the corn kernels pop. When they were teenagers, they clamped down batter in heart-shaped metal to make waffles. But when they were older, they had had enough.

‘Dad,’ they said, ‘stop bringing home the machines. We don’t want homemade focaccias. We don’t want a plug-in machine with a heated wire that can cut cling-wrap.’

His wife was tired of cleaning the gear every time she had to squeeze a lemon or grind some peanuts. Her arsenal of cooking tools – wok, pot, cleaver, chopsticks, sometimes a mortar and pestle for grains and nuts – was enough. Back in the old city, no one needed this stuff. They would have a National rice cooker if they had electricity in the village, but that was it. Kien used her wok so much that after twenty years she had burned a hole right through it. For two years she wouldn’t even use the dishwasher, until the goading from the kids became too much.

In many places in Cambodia they still didn’t have electricity. He imagined the villagers checking out a mobile phone, hearing the voice of a distant relative from Phnom Penh. A reincarnation without death! Instead of feeling the exuberance that the first listeners to Edison’s phonograph experienced, would these people be flailing their limbs about, terrified? Three decades ago the villagers would have looked up as the bombers whooshed above them and wondered about the iron birds. And now he sold ironing boards that came with two-hundred-dollar irons in a land where all the people in the countryside had electricity.

‘Let’s make waffles,’ he would declare on Saturdays. ‘Let’s pop some corn.’ But his kids were no longer interested, and over the years he stopped bringing home the machines.

*

One day his sister Kieu set up a new gadget in the back office, getting ready to take it for a test run. ‘These are murderously expensive,’ she declared as she opened a cardboard box. ‘Each one of these plastic pockets costs a dollar.’ She pulled one out. Then she slid a few cardboard price tags between the sleeves of the plastic sheet and put it in the slit of the machine. Out it came on the other side, with a new wipeable surface. ‘Wah! Who else would like to test this out?’

Anna from accounts opened her wallet and took out a photo of her fiancé and herself. Lien from small claims pulled out a picture of her husband. Sokha from sales pulled a photo of his daughters from his back pocket. Kieu found herself surrounded by staff wanting to encase their loved ones in plastic. She put the five small photographs into one A4 plastic pocket, started up the machine and slid the plastic through the slot. It went through very easily.

‘Aaargghh!’ cried Lien when she saw the hardened plastic come out the other end. They hadn’t realised that the machine had four settings and the factory default was the highest. Faces became Edvard Munch terrors, candle-wax blurs, couples congealed together like spat-out toffee.

‘I’ve had that photo in my wallet for five years!’ Lien wailed. The staff huddled together, passing the stiff sheet of their scorched loved ones around. What was meant to protect their faces had effaced them.

‘Oh hell,’ he said as he walked past. ‘Oh dear.’ Then, under his breath, ‘They’re only photographs.’

*

His daughter’s Certificate of Admission to legal practice was framed on the wall of his office. He remembered the day she had received it at the Supreme Court of Victoria, barristers in black robes with heads of woolly-sheep hair rising in unison to move the admission of their charges. He also recalled her law-school graduation. After that ceremony, everyone had gone to an enormous high-ceilinged hall, where they ate from paper plates and drank wine with the parents of the other graduates. He observed that wealthy white people preferred clothes of many textures, while poor yellow and brown people liked clothes of too many colours. The university served up food that tasted like various solidifications of vomit – blue-veined cheese and runny Camembert. There was vinegar poured over salads, splashed onto the raw green plants like scrappy jungle food, like a dog pissing on a garden patch. And stuff they called Dijon mustard that, when squeezed out of the plastic bottle, had the colour and consistency of diarrhoea. He had learnt, very early on at the Midway Migrant Hostel, that this sort of thing was the white people’s
good
food.

At the hostel the elements were the same, only in different dilutions. Baby salad greens became lettuce, mustard became tomato sauce. Human-bud steak dripped with a sponge of red blood in the middle. Back then Kien couldn’t eat any of it, and she was about to burst with the baby who would grow up to be their eldest daughter. So he would secretly feed his wife two-minute noodles in their room because they didn’t want to offend the kindly white people, who of course would never understand that to his wife food that smelt and tasted of vomit and shit and blood was terrifying.

His employee at work, Ah Ung, understood. Each day Ah Ung opened the lid of his lunch container, which was a washed and reused tofu box. ‘I can only have my fish fried or steamed now,’ Ah Ung told him. ‘I can never eat prahok again.’ Prahok was a pickled kind of fish that he used to love too, until he realised that a decomposing human body gave off the same odour.

‘What was worse than smelling all those dead bodies,’ declared Ah Ung, ‘was seeing all those cattle trucks stacked with bodies to be dumped. One of them drove by when I was working in the fields once, and after the truck had stopped, I could see some arms and legs still moving through the metal grates.’ Ah Ung shuddered, and then shook his head and shoulders as if shaking off an unexpected deluge of dirty rainwater.

He looked at his own lunch. Kien had packed him three plastic boxes that morning. Leftovers sometimes tasted better the next day, particularly when she made ginger-soy prawns, because all the sauce would seep into the Cs of the crustaceans’ bodies. They were now eating prawns and durians, dragonfruit and Lindt chocolates.

But of late, sometimes he couldn’t even taste his food. Only a short-term guest, perhaps on a funded trip, would remember to feel grateful for every single day of their stay. Some days, he forgot. Quite often, he was forgetting. Stress at work was the same as going through a minor car accident every day, he had recently read in the newspaper’s lifestyle magazine. He didn’t even know that such a word existed –
lifestyle
– that a person could style their life like their hair. Some of the Australians seemed to think that if you had a near-death experience, or if you experienced great fear for your life, then it put everything else in perspective. True, but only for a little while. After a while, missing the bus to work, not understanding the growl of countryside Australians when spending a day picking fruit, waiting for your child after school – those were just as stressful. You began to sweat the small stuff again. Minor collisions happened in your head every day, and these entirely avoidable mishaps inevitably raised your fear premium.