Behind the Moon (5 page)

‘Tien,’ she said. ‘This is Linh. Your mother.’

The woman stood up and looked at her. ‘I have to punish you, Tien,’ she said. ‘The first time I see you in eight years, I have to punish you. Do you understand?’

Tien simply stood there and stared at the carpet. This was the woman who had given up a place in the refugee boat even though it meant giving up her daughter. She would not look at this stranger who claimed to be her mother.

Tien was grounded. She had to come straight home after school, do her homework by herself and help Auntie Ai-Van with the housework. Auntie Ai-Van had never talked much to her, but now she seemed embarrassed and uneasy. Every time she spoke to Tien, she cast a quick glance over her shoulder towards the living room where the woman Linh was sleeping in a corner. Linh slept a lot at first. Then, eventually, she roused herself and tried to talk to Tien. She poked and pried into Tien’s life. Tien answered her politely but briefly, and she took care to avoid the woman’s gaze.

After a month, Tien was allowed to resume her visits to Gibbo’s house. One Saturday morning, she helped Gibbo and Bob rake up the leaves in the garden, then they washed Bob’s car. After that, she and Gibbo went inside the house and poured themselves a drink. Gillian was ironing a pair of trousers. Tien said to Gillian, ‘Mrs Gibson, is there anything I can help you with now?’

Gillian finished the trouser leg, then rested the iron precisely on its stand. She looked at Tien and said, ‘It’s very nice of you to come around and help us, Tien, but I think you’d better go home now. Your mother just rang to ask if you were still here. In fact, you should probably spend more time at home. Your mother might need some help too.’

The words were innocuous but the implied rejection was swift and stunning, a lightning-quick punch to the solar plexus. Tien looked at Gillian and told herself she did not care. Her lips thinned and twisted into a cynical smile. She shrugged and said carelessly, ‘Yeah, you’re probably right, Mrs Gibson.’

By the time she got home, she had magnified the tiny incident in her mind. She smashed her mental idol of Gillian and dragged it through the mire of her bitter thoughts. There was something in her which shored up pain and exulted in hurt. She lashed herself into a frenzy of self-pity and wanted to feel sorrier still. That night, while Stephanie-Tiffany-Melanie were out with their Vietnamese friends, she shut herself into her bedroom and cried in the dark. She wept for a mother, any mother. For the first time, she wanted the woman Linh to scratch on the door and push into the bedroom. She wanted her mother to sit on her bed and enfold her in a hug. She wanted Linh to ferret out what was wrong with her.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Something’s the matter. Why are you crying?’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Tell me.’

‘No.’

‘I love you. I won’t go away until you tell me what’s wrong.’

‘All right then. Only if you really want to know.’

She raised the volume of her sobs so that Linh might hear her through the closed door. She waited and waited, but Linh never came, and neither did Auntie Ai-Van.

The next day, she took the pink bag of sanitary pads Gillian had given her, tore open the pack and slowly began to shred the fat pads one by one. When it proved slow going, she took a knife from the kitchen and locked herself in the bathroom while she slashed the pads to pieces. Then she stuffed the scraps back into the bag and dumped it in the communal rubbish bins behind the apartment block.

An Ignorance of Hieu Thao

‘A home where love and concord reign,’ Kieu said, ‘whose heart won’t yearn for it?’

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

Ho Ly-Linh was not a woman given to self-ref lection, but if she thought about her life at all, the thing that amazed her most was not that she had survived, but how quickly and easily she could forget.

In her days of listlessness, prostrated on the sofa in her brother Duong’s living room, she watched daytime television and forgot herself in other people’s pain. There were those on television talk shows who revelled in remembered traumas; who believed that by recovering the past and reliving pain, they could conjure up the meaning of their lives. They told and retold their autobiographies in the hope that, this time, the end result would be something different from the disappointment life generally turned out to be. This time there would be healing. There would be wholeness. They would at last achieve normality.

Linh wanted nothing to do with this process. In the dark humidity of hot summer nights in western Sydney, when the desk-fan rattled and wheezed in its steel cage beside her mattress and the apartment exhaled the stale breath of fish sauce and fried garlic from the night’s dinner, she sometimes tossed in restless sleep and was chased by nightmares of long hours spent hacking fruitlessly at a feral jungle, nothing to fill her stomach at the end of the day but a fistful of boiled bamboo.

She dreamed of lying atop hessian sacks of manure in a cargo hold, less than half a foot of rank air between her body and the splintered underside of the boat deck, knees drawn up to her chest for hours on end, cramping in pain until numbness set in and she could no longer straighten her limbs to climb up for air, even if there had been room for one more in the crush of bodies above deck. She had squeezed her eyes shut, pinched her nose closed, and inhaled through gritted teeth, but still she tasted shit in her mouth. She told herself over and over that survival was a matter of one slow breath after another.

Snared in sleep, she dreamed of the shuddering collision of wooden boats, heard the heavy splash of bodies hitting the South China Sea and the shrieks of women overhead. She felt her heart jump into her mouth as she was dragged off the manure heap and she whimpered into sudden wakefulness. She slid her trembling hand between her thighs and cupped her crotch to reassure herself that her nightmares had not violated her body. She rolled off her mattress and waited in silence to see whether she had woken anyone up. Then she levered herself off the carpet and staggered to the bathroom to boil herself clean under the shower.

Who wanted to relive such things? Who wanted to remember the bloated bodies of the dead gently bumping the boat, or eyes like lychees which stared up blindly into a glazed ceramic sky? She believed that her best chance of becoming normal lay in forgetting the past.

One day, she woke up and felt inexplicably energised. She donned a pair of black and white checked trousers, pulled a pink sweatshirt over her head, crammed a white lawn-bowls hat over her untidy hair and let herself out of the apartment. She strode briskly past brick and weatherboard houses with their lolling tongues of parched lawn and the bare antlers of thorny rose bushes. She headed for the local shops and bought a sackful of groceries so that she could prepare dinner for Duong’s family that night. Then she stopped in front of a hairdressing salon. After slight hesitation, she stepped inside and immediately felt comforted by the clean smell of hair chemicals and the warm gusts of air from the huffing dryers. She had her hair cut to a shoulder-length bob and a henna rinse put through it. When she stared at her reflection in the long mirrors that lined the salon she fancied that, apart from her eyes, she looked Korean or Japanese rather than Vietnamese. It made her smile self-consciously. She had her nails manicured and, when she caught sight of her scarlet toenails peeping through her strappy sandals, she felt that she was ready to take on the world.

Two months later, she got herself a job at Lidcombe hospital, then she rented an apartment in Flemington and moved in there with Tien, despite her daughter’s protests.

‘Why do you complain?’ Linh demanded. As usual, Tien winced at the sound of her mother’s voice. Unlike Auntie Ai-Van and Auntie Phi-Phuong, Linh did not often speak Vietnamese to her family. Instead, she spoke rather formal English tainted with a faint American accent— evidence, Stephanie-Tiffany-Melanie claimed gleefully, of all those American GIs.

‘Stephanie said you do not like sharing the bedroom with them. You will have more space now.’

‘I want to live with Auntie Ai-Van and Uncle Duong,’ Tien muttered.

‘Well, you cannot do that. You have to live with me,’ Linh said, and she was compelled to remind Tien, ‘I
am
your mother, Tien. Where is your respect?’

You haven’t earned it, Tien decided, but the thought did not sit comfortably with her because a large part of her was still Vietnamese, however much she might flail against it. She felt guilty, for she could not deny the ties of blood and the claims of family. Only in the West did respect need to be earned; to her mother, it ought to be automatically given. She was miserable in her confusion. She watched
The Wizard of Oz
again and read
Anne of Green Gables
. Sometimes she wished she was still an orphan.

Linh tried to be a good mother. She went to Cabramatta and bought material to sew dresses that Tien refused to wear. She got up early in the morning to cook
pho
for Tien’s breakfast, but Tien went out to the corner store and returned with Coco Pops and a carton of milk. She made Tien come straight home from school instead of going over to the Gibsons’, and when she was not on nightshift at the hospital, she sat at the kitchen table opposite Tien and watched her daughter doing her homework. Sometimes she wanted to reach out and touch her daughter’s face; to trace her fingers over those jutting cheekbones and that wide mouth. But she kept her hands to herself and drove her daughter hard. There was nothing to be gained by softness and leniency; she had survived a tough world and she would bring her daughter up to do the same.

‘I don’t see why I have to do this on a Friday night,’ Tien whined. She pushed petulantly at her textbooks and felt pleased when they tilted off the table and slapped onto the tiled kitchen floor.

‘You have exams coming up.’

‘In eight weeks.’

‘You have to make sacrifices and work hard if you want to get anywhere in this country. Life is difficult and you won’t survive unless you study.’

‘You’re the only one making my life difficult,’ Tien grumbled. ‘I never get to hang out with Gibbo anymore.’

‘Why don’t you have any female friends?’ Her mother’s tone was almost accusing.

Tien shook her head incredulously. It was the hypocrisy which galled her. This was the woman who had worked as a bar-girl and hung out with American soldiers, who got knocked up by a Bill Cosby look-alike (perhaps). She was in no position to criticise. Still, there were many things a Vietnamese daughter could not say.

‘I don’t like girls. They don’t like me. Anyway, Gibbo was my first friend. I had him when I didn’t have anyone else.’

Linh looked at her daughter and was filled with feelings of guilt and inadequacy. She had not been there for her daughter. She said, ‘You can hang out with Gibbo if you bring him here.’

‘No way. There’s nothing to do here.’

‘I want to meet him,’ her mother insisted. ‘If you’re going to hang around with a boy, I want to know who he is.’

The first time Tien brought Gibbo to meet her mother, Linh was kneeling beside a vegetable bed in the common garden of the apartment block. He couldn’t really see what she looked like. Linh was wearing a navy-blue baseball cap with NY emblazoned in white. The lower half of her face was hidden by a pink bandanna with blue teddy bears on it, folded diagonally and secured across her nose and cheekbones so that her eyes were the only part of her face that peeked out from under the bill of the cap. She wore a long-sleeved blue gingham shirt and hot pink dishwashing gloves that reached halfway up her forearms. She clutched a trowel in one hand and the straggly roots of Vietnamese mint in the other.

Tien stopped short and rolled her eyes at the sight of her mother. Embarrassment was fast becoming a reflex where her mother was concerned.

‘Mum, this is Gibbo,’ Tien muttered.

‘
Chao co
,’ he uttered carefully. He’d been pestering Tien for Vietnamese phrases all the way from Flemington station where she’d met his train. ‘It’s great to meet you, Mrs—’ He flushed as he suddenly realised he didn’t know what to call her. He knew that she had not been married to Tien’s father.

‘You can call me Miss Ho.’

Gibbo liked her immediately. Her voice was soft and her eyes were friendly. They crinkled up in a smile as she shook Gibbo’s hand.

‘All right,’ he said obligingly. ‘Hey, you’ve got Tien’s eyes, you know that?’ He nudged Tien and grinned at her. ‘Isn’t that great?’

‘Yeah, well, her eyes are all you can see,’ Tien said acidly. ‘Mum, what do you think you’re doing? Take off your gloves. You look ridiculous.’

‘I protect my skin from sunburn,’ Linh explained. ‘I do not want my skin to get dark from the sun. You must cover up too, Tien. Look at your skin!’

Tien had always been sensitive about the swarthiness of her complexion. She glared at Linh and snorted rudely. She thought of Bob Gibson and channelled him into her speech. ‘Fair dinkum? You look bloody ridiculous. You’re not in Vietnam anymore, you know.’

Her mother’s eyes hardened. ‘But I am still Vietnamese and you cannot speak to me like that. Do you not understand
hieu thao
?’

‘No, because I don’t speak Vietnamese,’ Tien said defiantly. ‘I’m Australian.’

‘Hey, c’mon, Tien,’ Gibbo said uncomfortably. He shuffled his feet and could not think of anything to say that would diffuse the tension in the air. He said tritely, ‘Tien has told me a lot about you, Miss Ho.’

‘Is that so?’ Linh said. She gave her daughter a quick, measured glance. ‘That is difficult for me to believe. What have you told him, Tien?’

‘Nothing. He’s just being a dag,’ Tien said. She turned away and tugged Gibbo’s arm. ‘C’mon, Gibbo. Let’s walk down to the shops. I feel like some
goi cuon
.’

‘Tien, I cannot allow you to go anywhere until you apologise,’ Linh said. She added, ‘You know I don’t want to punish you, but when you are disrespectful . . .’

‘Jeez, all right, all right. Sorry. Didn’t mean to be disrespectful, blah, blah. Now can I go?’

‘You know, I can make some
goi cuon
for you and Gibbo, if you like,’ Linh said. Holding out her olive branch.

Tien felt a pinprick of remorse. She tried to soften her tone. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I feel like a walk anyway. We’ll drop in at Uncle Duc’s restaurant and get something to eat.’

She grabbed Gibbo’s arm and dragged him away. They walked down The Crescent towards the shops and he said, ‘What’s wrong with you? You didn’t even give me a chance to talk or say goodbye to your mum properly.’

Tien knew she had behaved badly in front of Gibbo but she felt angry with him for commenting on it. She said shortly, ‘Nothing’s wrong. I’m just hungry, that’s all.’

‘Yeah, right. Anyway, I don’t reckon you ought to talk that way to your mum, even if you’ve got a beef with her.’

Something cracked inside Tien’s head. She stopped and flung off Gibbo’s arm. ‘What would you know about it? Just because you haven’t the guts to stand up to your old man doesn’t mean I’m the same. And where the fuck do you get off telling me how to act and what to do?’

Gibbo hated raised voices and hostile confrontations. She knew that. His face was hot and his eyes watered a little. He turned away and sniffed. She felt a small nudge of shame but shook it off.

‘Go ahead and cry like a baby then,’ she said unkindly. ‘You’re such a wuss.’

‘I’m going home,’ he said.

‘Go on, then. I’m not stopping you.’

She watched as he shuffled down The Crescent, past the shops, towards Homebush. He was a hundred metres away when she started sprinting after him.

‘Gibbo! I’m sorry. Wait up!’

He stopped immediately and waited until she caught up with him. That was Gibbo all over. He could never hold a grudge and he didn’t have it in him to make her earn his forgiveness.

She flung her arms around him and said, ‘I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that.’

They were near Airey Park now so they cut across the grass and sat down on the swings. She shut her eyes and twisted her seat round and round, then lifted her legs off the ground, spinning rhythmically as the swing unwound.

‘You all right?’ he asked. He put a diffident hand on her shoulder, wanting to comfort, afraid of being thrust away.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me these days,’ she confessed, scuffing the dirt to stop the motion of the swing. She bent over and buried her face in her hands. ‘It’s scary, what I feel. She’s my mum. I’m supposed to love her, but mostly I hate her and I don’t even know why. I wish she’d never come back. Sometimes I wish she’d just stayed dead.’

Then she sat up, fished in her backpack for a tissue and blew her nose.

‘Damn. I really hate crying. My eyes get puffed up and I look like a freak. Or more of one than usual.’ She turned to Gibbo and said, ‘I really am sorry, you know. Don’t hate me, okay? You’re my best friend. I didn’t mean to take it out on you like that.’

‘ ’s all right,’ he said. He rubbed her shoulder. ‘Want to tell me about it?’

‘Nah. Doesn’t help. It’s just Vietnamese mother– daughter shit, you know? Anyway, I don’t want to talk about her anymore, all right?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

She swiped the tissue under her nose again and said, ‘I just wish I could have a normal family like yours, you know.’

He looked away and kept silent.

Later that afternoon, Tien went home and tried to make it up to Linh. She unpegged the clothes from the communal clothes lines, folded underwear and ironed shirts. She vacuumed the carpet in the living room and bedrooms, cleaned the bathroom and scrubbed the shower cubicle free of mould. She checked the fridge and saw that the little glass jar of
nuoc cham
was nearly empty, so she made more of the dipping sauce. She washed and shredded the mint leaves that her mother had gathered that morning and prepared
rau thom
, arranging it neatly on two plates. She cooked
bun
thit bo xao
and, as she waited for her mother to return from the hospital, she felt satisfied with her act of atonement.