Unpolished Gem (21 page)

I couldn’t imagine working at Retravision anymore. All the staff and all the customers would find out. Here is the Manager’s daughter, the one who couldn’t get into university. All that money, all that waste. “Don’t tell people how you are, don’t show your aunties how you are at the moment,” my parents commanded me.

I sat in my room wiping my eyes and nose with tissues, because I didn’t even have the energy or courage to read. Reading alarmed me, it confused me even more. I was frightened every time I came across a sentence that I was meant to understand but couldn’t. Eventually, this became every sentence I read. I would invariably compare my life to the words and feel deep in my belly that I was doing it all wrong. Nothing I read assured me that anything I did was right. People became blurs. The walls became my only constant companion, so white and pristine, and solid, but I knew they were just plasterboard, and that one heavy blow would reveal the hollowness inside, and the wooden skeleton of the house. I sat and slept in the same place, I spent days and weeks in the same spot. I no longer slept in my bed, but spread my blankets on the little space of floor between the bed and the wall, like a gap between cliffs into which I had fallen.

One day Alina came in.

“Hello little one,” I said. “Come here. Come here to me.” She was in the green tracksuit of her school uniform, with the bowl haircut that I had given her. She came and sat in my lap. I put my arms around her, comforted by her familiar and strange musty smell of digging up insects during recess and relocating them to different parts of the turf.

“You are a champ,” I told her.

We sat in silence for a while. Then I heard her sniffling.

I could not believe it.

All my sadness was rubbing off onto her. It was contagious, this disease. I didn’t know what to do.

I decided there had to be an end to this. The next day I decided to do something useful. I decided to clean out the cutlery drawer.
It doesn’t mean anything
, the crowd in my head told me,
Nothing means anything. Why are you even doing this?

Shut up, I said inside my brain, shut up. At least I am doing something.

But it means nothing.

Even if it means nothing, I am at least doing something.

Nothing means anything.

Shut up, I can’t hear you. La la la.

It’s all a waste of time.

I am picking up a fork now. The fork goes in this plastic compartment with the other forks. I knew it was all drivel, but I had to keep talking to myself to stifle the voices. Now I have a spoon in my hands. Where do you go, spoon? With all the other spoons over here …
You’re going to live out the rest of your life doing things that don’t
mean anything.

And now five chopsticks. Where is the sixth? Oh, there you are.

And then you’re going to die.

But I was still here when Judgment Day arrived. The results were to be released on Monday by post, but friends were calling up the hotline to find out their results early. Ninety-three, ninety-four, ninety-five. Incredible-sounding numbers, a thousand doors opening up to them. Just like the ancient imperial civil service examinations in China, which any poor villager could sit and so become eminent. With a
1200
-year history of examinations behind us, who could blame us for being obsessed with tests? My grandmother had tried to tell me all these things, but my Chinese ears were not Chinese enough to pick up the sounds and meanings of her words. I had grown too old for Granny’s “in the past” stories. But I needed them now. Oh Granny, what did they do in the past when they failed exams? In the past, women couldn’t even take exams. I should consider myself lucky.

My parents wanted me to call up the hotline too. They told me that it would put an end to my torment, but I think they meant “our” torment – our collective torment. So I dialled the number and listened for the automatic voice prompts. After I punched in my student number, I waited to hear my final marks.

I hung up immediately.

I must have heard wrong. I gave a loud yowl. What a terrible joke. Someone up there really had it in for me.

My parents ran into the room, worried that I had leapt out of the upstairs window. All they saw was me with the cordless phone in my hand, looking at it.

I told them what I had heard over the phone.

I told them I must have heard wrong.

My father told me to dial again. I did.

I had not heard wrong the first time.

“You got your results now, you don’t need to be anxious anymore,” my mother told me.

How did it happen, I wondered. I was so drugged on the day of my English exam that I didn’t know what I was writing. I almost missed my Literature exam because I had drifted into on-off sleep on the couch. As for the other subjects, well, I didn’t even want to go there. Maybe there were parts of my brain that retained all the information, even though I thought I had lost it all like a virus-ridden computer that had crashed.

“You got into law at Melbourne University!”

“You got a scholarship from Monash University!”

“You got an award from the Minister of Education!”

I got out. I had got out. I was no longer stuck. Time to rub the circulation back into the ankles, time to get those forms in quickly, to make sure I was enrolled so that I could introduce myself at parties as “Alice, Arts/Law, hey how about you?” All was well, all stereotypes were fulfilled and everything was in its proper place. Onwards towards the Great Australian Dream.

You can pass go. You can collect $
2000
. You will be going to university.

The crowd in my head did not give me any applause, they just eventually scattered. But they scattered slowly, painfully slowly, like an irascible old person leaving a good seat at the theatre. It took months for all of the scattered thoughts to disappear. They were like vampires, needing my blood and energy to sustain them for that just one more day, that one more hour. But I would move on, move away, move up. They would
die
, and I would live.

T
HAT
summer, before university started, I worked as a salesgirl at the shop and was put in charge of the mobile-phone counter. I realised that I always retreated to this place after something traumatic had happened. Who needs a mental hospital in which to recover when you have a landmark store smack-bang in the middle of Footscray? Post-nervous breakdown or feeling like a wreck? Nothing that a few extremely aggro hagglers won’t fix up. They’ll jolt you out of your torpor: “Whaddya mean this is two years outa warranty eh? I want me money back. Youse power points are shifty!”

To connect a mobile phone took at least half an hour. There were forms to fill and covers to choose. Then there was the call to Telstra for the credit check and connection. I could sense customers becoming impatient, particularly when it was their first time and they didn’t realise how long it would take. To keep them from going across the road, I would sit them down, make them instant Nescafé. I thought that mastering the art of small talk was difficult enough, but then there was also the Big Talk. I was not prepared for the Big Talk, or the desperate need for it, the sheer human necessity for a witness to a life of loneliness and misery. I met Mrs Christian, a beautiful but bleary-eyed Filipino woman in her early forties, who needed me to connect her to a mobile phone because her husband kept beating her up and bringing his mates home to “do” her. When the Telstra woman told me over the phone that Mrs Christian would not be connected because she lacked a permanent address and credit history, I didn’t know what to tell her. “Dey not going to connect me, I know.” She knew already, like all those used to an unbroken history of bad news. She knew the price you paid for wanting to leave your family to go to a country where you lost all your connections, so that there was no older brother to beat up your abusive husband.

Old women would pat my hand – “Don’t be so anxious dear, I’m not in a hurry” – and tell me that they weren’t even allowed to see their grandkids, let alone buy them DVD players for Christmas. “Your culture, dear, now you’ve got it right, you look after your elders.”

And then there was Miss Beauty Queen Emilia, who frequently visited but rarely bought anything. She wore rubber gloves soiled with garden dirt, tracksuit pants and a glittery blazer. “Can’t buy anything today,” she would say, “only have fifteen cents.” And she would open up her coin purse to show me. Whenever she did buy something, she would get me to type her name on the receipt as “Miss Beauty Queen Emilia”, because that was what she claimed she had been back in Cambodia. And there was the blind Vietnamese man in the blue
Wedding-Singer
-like blazer, who, like Miss Beauty Queen Emilia, would also not buy anything but would want a female salesperson to walk him through the entire store. He clutched our arms so tightly that we were afraid we’d be amputees by the end of the round, but we humoured him for many months, until my uncle decided to be the escort one day. After that, the blind man was not too sure about his tours anymore, and would want to hear our voices as well. Or there was the man in the motorised wheelchair who dressed in a leopard-print cloak like a sedentary Tarzan, who bought speaker-wire every fortnight for some obscure purpose, and the director of the funeral parlour down the road, who bought an inexplicable number of blank video-tapes every week.

My mother brought my father and me homemade three-course meals for lunch – roast pork, rice noodles, bitter gourd soup, banana-tapioca pudding. She spent the remainder of her time driving my sisters to school and picking them up, and in between she sat with us in the lunch-room during our lunch-breaks. The lunch-room was the place where all the idle scuttle-butting went on, about difficult customers we’d had that day and customers who were building new houses in Caroline Springs or Sydenham. My aunties and mother would have yelling sessions about how they saw this or that woman and how they were now aging like a dried longan, and call it a good conversation. Meanwhile, the non-Chinese employees would huddle over the
Herald Sun
, quietly scoff down their pizza or take-away fried rice and get the hell out of there as fast as possible, since they had no idea whether our yelling was about them or not.

*

Those innocent aunts who had started off living in the housing commission flats were now married and also working in the family business, and Aunt Sim was due to have her first baby. I remembered when Aunt Sim first arrived from Vietnam – she was fifteen and she clutched a new boxed doll in her hand, probably the only doll she had ever owned, but she willingly, smilingly handed it to me, an already spoilt-rotten Australian kid with too many toys. Aunt Sim did the work of four people at our other shop in Springvale. Not only was she a salesperson, she also did the accounts, office administration and stock orders and she did it all in such a gentle and efficient manner that after a while it was easy to forget the miracle of how she managed so much. When she went on maternity leave, my father did not know what to do.

Then a surprising thing happened. Over dinner, my mother announced, “I’m going to go and help out in the store.” She looked at my father. “You know, just to keep a lookout and watch to see that there are no shoplifters.”

We were stunned.

“What a good idea.”

“Mind you, just while my sister goes off and has her baby.”

“Yes, you would be of so much help since we are so short of staff.”

“Might as well go help out the family business,” she said.

So that was how my mother decided to go back out into the world again.

She did not buy new clothes for work. She wore her old clothes and no make-up, and she used the same tactics to sell as she used to bargain at the market in Footscray. She had suddenly caught on to the way the market-place operated, and realised that she did not need to know the technical specifications of a widescreen plasma television to sell one. All that mattered was that the price was right. And she was a master at haggling. The same skills she had used with the Kims she now brought to our franchise. Springvale had the biggest Chinese-Cambodian community in Victoria, and my mother seemed to know the art of selling better than we who had been educated here, we who were sent to expensive corporate training workshops in the Head Office.

She was not relying on us so much to translate the English. She was picking it up, very slowly. I wrote out step-by-step pictorial instructions, on a little sheet for her to keep in her pocket, on how to type up a receipt. And we discovered an extraordinary thing: that customers tended to trust this forty-something housewife more than a trained salesperson. My mother was bent on not letting customers walk out of the store. “Ay! Ay!” she would call from halfway across the store, “Sir! Ma’am! Come back! Come back and I will do better one for you, I promise.” Sometimes she even
dragged
the Asian customers back into the shop. To ordinary Australians that would be harassment, but to Southeast Asians it was a convincing sale, it meant that the seller wanted your business so much they were willing to chase you down the street to give you a good deal.

My mother could identify with the new migrants, even those from far-off countries like Sudan and Ethiopia. She knew what kind of products they would ask for, and she knew they would be comfortable bargaining.
She
knew how to say the numbers in English,
they
knew how to say the numbers in English, and so a deal was struck. She knew that they had to carry their goods home on the train or bus, so she secured them extra tightly with pink twine.

Soon she became one of the top salespeople in Springvale, and there was nothing she could not sell. She did better than us with our English and youth and white-ghost ways. “I sold three microwaves and a fridge today,” she would tell us after work, and we would wahhhh, wishing we too could sell three microwaves and a fridge in one day. Sometimes she would work in Footscray too, or I would go to Springvale, and there was a certain kind of affinity one felt when working alongside one’s parents.