Her Father's Daughter (9 page)

DAUGHTER—

Slowly, signs started to emerge which made her suspect, in a dreadful deep-seated way, that her parents were not like other parents, and had never been like the parents of her cousins raised in Hong Kong or Singapore. These aunts and uncles were polite and calm and let their kitchen utensils be, without feeling the need to modify them for a household full of adult children. They didn’t order the Australian Legal Will Kit two-for-one offer by phone as soon as their eldest daughter turned eighteen, so that she could fill in the blanks and write their wills for them. Before they went on ‘holiday’ to Tasmania (to look for more ramshackle investment properties), they would not have drawn maps for her in pocket spiral notebooks showing where they had buried the gold in the backyard. These aunts and uncles would not have gone on ‘holidays’ to look for ramshackle properties in the first place.

*

When she was nine, the son of a family friend, Tiptoe, had come over with his parents for a visit. Tiptoe had got his name because as a toddler he liked walking around on his toes. On the day he came over he had a little orange booklet with him, because he planned on doing the World Vision forty-hour famine. Tiptoe asked her dad for sponsorship.

‘What’s this about?’

‘You have to not eat for forty hours.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked her father, mouth agape.

‘Well, we can eat some things. Like, we can have water and barley sugar.’

‘So you are going to suck on barley sugar and drink water for forty hours?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’ll tell you what. I will sponsor you if you eat,’ her father negotiated. ‘I will pay you to eat. I’ll pay you fifty dollars.’

‘But that’s cheating.’

‘How is it cheating? I’m giving you fifty bucks, which is a lot more than you’ll get from your other sponsors.’

‘No.’

‘One hundred dollars.’

Tiptoe would not accept the offer. He said that it was against the rules. ‘It would be lying,’ Tiptoe told her father. ‘You have to not eat for forty hours, to see what it’s like for the kids who are starving around the world.’

‘Think of the poor starving kids you could be
saving
with the money,’ her father retorted.

Tiptoe would not take the money without starving. Her father would not give him the money if he starved himself for two days. Tiptoe starved.

‘What does that prove to you, huh,’ demanded her father afterwards, ‘going around for two days starving – sucking on barley sugar and drinking water? You could have damaged your stomach!’

*

Another time, her family went to visit Tiptoe. His house was filled with family, so she and Tiptoe sequestered themselves inside his room. They closed the door to play a game of Monopoly without babies sprawling across the board. Tiptoe didn’t want them tearing up his banknotes. They had the game board unfolded and just as she was choosing whether to use the top hat or the dog token, suddenly there came a loud banging on the door.

‘Why is this door closed?’

Tiptoe gave her a baffled look.
What the hell is happening? Why is your dad yelling like that? Is the house on fire?
He opened the door and her father demanded to know what they were doing. It was obvious – the game board was on the floor, the tokens were out, and Tiptoe had a bunch of coloured banknotes in his hand.

‘Why do you feel the need to close the door?’

‘We don’t want the babies mucking up our game.’

Her father dragged her out. ‘We’re going home,’ he said, mouth set in a low grim line.

She had no idea what was going on and neither did Tiptoe. They were nine and ten. To them, the birds and the bees were creatures that flew in the air, and the only things they had on their minds in the moment before her father burst into the room was who would get to be the banker.

He could be crazy sometimes, her father. He saw depravity in places where other people wouldn’t even bother to look. His world was peopled with paedophiles and perverts. He trusted no man or boy to be alone with his daughters – not even friends or relatives. In fact, both her parents were crazy this way. They operated like a joint haywire motion detector that went off when it sensed nothing but the rain.

She came from a family where the girls weren’t supposed to venture very far, and every movement they made after school was tracked through their mobile phones. Once her father had bought her brother some dumbbells, and when he saw her lifting them one evening he told her to stop it. ‘Do you want muscles like Madonna?’ Yes, as a matter of fact, she had wanted muscles. Funny how innocent they were trained to be, these Southeast Asian girls, the ones who were meant to be good and supposed to stay at home. Trained to be tender morsels.

*

When she was seventeen, she sometimes came to her father’s workplace to photocopy or print out assignments. The photocopier was in the little office out the back. It could fit two people at the most. The new employee at her father’s store came from Indonesia and he was all gangly bones, but she saw him lifting heavy boxes for customers. He wore a loose white T-shirt donated by Tiger Rice Cookers. He was probably in his late twenties. He knew how to work hard, and he did this by skin and sinew.

He smiled at her, an upturned crescent moon that took up half of his face. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked her in Cantonese, because his English was a collection of poorly syllabled phrases with the stresses in the wrong places. He happened to be in the back office that day, folding up cardboard boxes.

‘Photocopying this for school.’

‘What is it?’

He stood close to her and pressed up against her a few times, pretending he needed to pass to the other side to get to the box cutter and the space was too small. His hands also wandered up to her chest. The feeling was fast and scuttling. Like tarantulas or something.

Later, she worried a bit about this incident. But not too much. She wondered whether she should tell. It probably wasn’t a big deal. More visceral things had happened to her in this small office. When she was small, she got a staple through a finger. Someone brushing up against her was not that big a deal. A cheap feel across the front of her uniform dress was not a big thing for girls who went to underage clubs and who knew their place in the world, feisty girls who would let out with a ‘What the …?!’ and jab their cigarette into the stranger’s straying hand.

But she wasn’t one of those. Once, as children, when she and her brother were watching the rows of televisions after school, there was an annoying boy who kept changing the channels. They kept changing them back. ‘This isn’t your store!’ the kid said. As a matter of fact, it was. But they didn’t say a word. They just let the boy keep changing the channels. Surrender seemed to be their default mode.

Yet her parents noticed her sitting slumped in the back of the car when they drove her to school every day, and she knew things would be awkward if she needed to use the photocopier at work again. So she mentioned it to them one evening, the incident in the little office. She was hoping that he’d get a telling off. Or she thought that her parents would tell her to go back and slap his face like she should have done the first time around.

She had no idea what was to come: how her father would lie awake tormented for a week, thinking of ways to get back at the young box-cutter. Twisting his insides over how this terrible thing could have happened. Her father finally decided that the best way to get rid of him was to catch him in the act. So she was meant to go back to the shop in her school uniform after school and try baiting for a repeat of the scenario. Meanwhile, her dad and uncle would be protectors and spies.

When she arrived at the store, she had no idea what she was supposed to do, so she stood there photocopying pages from her biology textbook like she had last time. This time if he came she was meant to yell and the parents would call the cops and they would take him away. But he was in the back, cutting up boxes. He was never a real threat, she was never a seductress. They were two awkward young people who happened to have an awkward moment. He said hello to her when he saw her, and she said hello back, and then she stood in the office and waited for something to happen. Nothing happened. What a waste of time. She was in her final year of school.

‘What happens now?’ she asked her parents as they drove her home.

‘We just wait,’ they told her.

‘Why don’t we just forget it?’ she asked.

‘Are you kidding?’ roared Dad. ‘I can’t sleep at night.’

‘But nothing happened that was all that bad.’

‘Do you want him to do it again?’

‘No.’

‘If we don’t do something about it, he will brag about it to all the other employees.’

She didn’t think that the boy would, but she kept her mouth shut while her father rearranged his plans in his head.

Finally, it was decided. There was to be a meeting at the shop, a confrontation, and she would have to be there.

There was no getting out of it. Her parents drove her to the store that afternoon, and her mum went away to do her grocery shopping in Little Saigon market. Her father told her to go upstairs and wait. Upstairs was the warehouse where they stored their boxed domesticity – the smaller appliances such as irons and toasters, the sandwich makers and rice cookers. In one corner was the tiny lunch space, which consisted of a bench, a sink, a microwave and three stools. She waited, reading through the tabloid newspaper twice.

Then she heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Her father appeared with the young man. The young man said hello to her; she nodded at him. They sat down on the remaining stools in complete silence, waiting.

For what, she wondered.

But then, more footsteps, and suddenly she realised that a few other long-term employees like Ah Ung had also been summoned. Witnesses, said her father. Witnesses to what, she wondered. They weren’t there when the awkward act happened. Perhaps they were there to hear the sheepish apology that her father was supposed to extract from the guy. Well, she thought, this was embarrassing, but it could be funny in retrospect.

Except that it wasn’t.

She thought her father had gone mad. Here he was yelling in the upstairs kitchen at this boy who packed boxes, scaring the crap out of him.

‘How dare you! How dare you! I gave you a job!’

‘Stop!’ she said. ‘Stop, Dad, don’t!’

‘This will teach you to mess with my daughter!’ His limbs were flailing, and he was getting ready to whack the young man, getting ready to kick him, but his employees held him back. She’d never seen her father so apoplectic with rage. Here was a man of about forty-five kilos, looking ready to kill another man of a similar size. The boy looked terrified.

Her father would sometimes mention his dreams in the morning at the breakfast table, just in passing, almost as if he were recounting a vivid and intriguing scene in a film he had recently watched. ‘Last night I dreamt that I was working in the fields. The children’s army were heading back, and suddenly I saw one of the Black Bandits pulling a little girl away from the group. I smashed the back of his head with the back of my axe. It was terrible.’

‘Don’t think about it anymore,’ her mother would reply.

‘How can I not?’ her father sadly answered. ‘He just wouldn’t die.’

Despite being held back, despite his employees entreating him to calm down, her father could not be contained. It was as if this madness had to run its course. ‘I have my witnesses here!’ her father yelled, ‘witnesses to see what happens when you try and fuck with my family!’

It was terrible what happened to that young man, she thought. He lost his job. No wonder the witnesses had been summoned. He’d only been there for a few weeks.

He was crying when he left.

Her father’s defence mechanism, she realised, was a piece of precision engineering, but it was also an archaic machine, one that was not well oiled, one that was no longer used for the purpose for which it had been built.

FATHER—

Once he caught his kids mucking around with plastic bags. How were they to know what it was like to live your last breath inside a plastic bag, with both hands tied behind your back? That was how they killed people at the meetings. Behind the bags their eyes would blur. Some people would seal the bag to the front of their face with each inhale, like cling wrap.

His kids had no idea how easy it was to die. If you went outside and crossed the road, you could die. If you stepped outside your house, you could die. If you played with a bag or a stick, you could die. So many different ways to die.

Yet they grew up, and nothing so bad happened to them, no bones snapped, no long-term illnesses, perhaps because he took the proper preventative measures: a glass of milk every day and a boiled egg for breakfast, fizzy orange vitamins. Every evening, in turn, each of his small children would sit in his lap and they would open their mouths and he would brush their tiny white kernels with a Colgate toothbrush. Sometimes, his kids would come home from school with badge-shaped stickers declaring ‘Fluoride at Work: wait ½ hour before food or drink!’ and ‘Watch Me: My Teeth and Gums are Numb!’ on their Kmart-fleeced chests, and he would have evidence of yet another gift from the government. When they opened their mouths and he saw the metallic daubs nestled in the craters of their back teeth, it would fill him with wonder. Under the reign of the Black Bandits he hadn’t brushed his teeth for four years. They hadn’t seen soap for that long either.

When his daughters were old enough, each one of their burgeoning adult teeth was carefully shifted through an awful wire and metal contraption that cost him a fortune. Yet he still worried that the steel wire which joined their teeth together was unsafe. What if they were playing sports at school and a ball hit them in the mouth? Would their teeth be ripped out in a row, like an industrial zipper coming bloodily undone?

*

One day he couldn’t find his eldest daughter at the university. He remembered yelling at her that evening when she came home. She wasn’t picking up her mobile phone. He shouted at his daughter and saw surprise register on her face. She was trying to be reasonable. ‘But it was only six p.m. and it’s summer!’ she protested. Then she started to cry. He didn’t have the words to explain to this daughter of his why he needed to know. If you don’t know where your children are, anything could happen to them, even in daylight. The newspapers told him everything that could happen. Because if it wasn’t true, why would they report it?

Her first boyfriend, Michael, had been a tall, kind, mild-mannered ghost of a boy who wore second-hand clothes. The first time he had met Michael, he had insisted on driving him back to his college because he could not leave a clean-shaven middle-class student stranded on the platform of Footscray Station, even at eight-thirty at night.

It had been years since she had broken up with Michael and she still didn’t have a boyfriend. This sometimes worried him. His daughter had flung herself into her first relationship but she had no idea what she was doing. In fact, they’d all jumped into that relationship without any practice – his daughter, Michael, himself and his wife.

He knew they should not have interfered so much – after all, it was between his daughter and her boyfriend. So what if she made a few mistakes along the way? The Australians would say that it was all part of growing up. And of course, he would never beat her for making a mistake or disown her or do the crazy things they did back in the old country. He hoped that she would understand that she shouldn’t let men shout at her, and if they did, that she shouldn’t take it.

But he could not forget the way she had stared at him in the Retravision lunchroom when she was seventeen, when he wanted to show her what he would do to anyone who tried to mess with his own flesh and blood.

The things he’d seen.

He’d seen a smile like a curve of a sickle.

If not on this face, then on another like it.

If not in this decade, then in the ones before.

Boys were not just boys.

And the things he had heard.

The young women who learned to move as quietly as prey through the night when they were summoned, but the whole collective heard about it the next day in the fields as the Black Bandits bragged.

The things he’d known, even before Year Zero.

The poor Vietnamese girls with their messed hair and cut faces, and their families leaving Cambodia carrying all their possessions.

The things he never wanted his children to know. He loved this new society where crying came so easily, and the young people were soft and beautiful like hothouse strawberries, so easily bruised.

Yet there was his daughter that afternoon in the shop, looking at him like
he
was the monster.