The Family Law (22 page)

‘Okay!' the nurse said brightly. ‘David and I just wanted to say hello!' David continued screaming as she wheeled him off.

‘
Well
,' our art teacher said to us. ‘Don't be rude. Say hello back.'

We all waved from a safe distance as David thrashed against his wheelchair.

‘Hello,' we all said quietly.

 

*

 

When I was an adult, my mother and I visited my maternal grandmother – my
Poh-Poh
– in various nursing facilities throughout Hong Kong. Although she was shuffled around a lot over the years, I was always struck by how cramped the facilities were. Hong Kong is renowned for its lack of space, but this was something else. All the nursing homes were designed as if to accommodate shrunken orphan amputees, with tiny beds pushed alongside one another, each with a stowaway cabinet underneath, big enough to store thimbles and buttons, not all the earthly possessions you'd acquired over eighty years. Walking into these places, I suddenly understood what it must be like to be a claustrophobe.

On one of our visits, Mum and Poh-Poh started to cry together quietly on Poh-Poh's bed. I knew what they were discussing: Poh-Poh felt trapped and rejected by her six surviving children; Mum wanted to bring her back to Australia with us. But we all knew it was impossible. My grandmother had already been deported once from Australia. In any case, it would have been regarded as shameful for her to live with one of her daughters rather than a son. I hovered nearby until I couldn't stand it any longer and wandered off to give them some privacy.

Walking down the hall, past the kitchen with its vats of congee and soup, I noticed another old woman sitting by herself on her bed, doing nothing, just staring at me. She was no larger than a toddler and her features were shrunken and wrinkled, like plastic melted in an oven. She looked at me with the saddest eyes; they made me think of an animal that knows it is about to be euthanased. When she smiled weakly, I smiled back. ‘How are you?' I asked her in Cantonese.

It seemed like the polite thing to do.

It was a mistake.

‘What's the use of me living at all?' she wailed in Cantonese. ‘What's the
point
? I was born, gave birth to children, then they dumped me here to rot and
die.
I may as well be in the
ground
right now, except Hong Kong doesn't even have enough ground to bury me in. So they'll
burn
me instead. They'll burn my
bones
.'

As she spoke, she clutched my hand and squeezed down on it like a clamp. She had a surprisingly strong grip.

‘I'm just taking up space,' she continued. ‘I'm useless. Useless. I'm so goddamned
useless
. I've been dumped here to die.
Why
won't God let me die?
' She looked as though she was about to cry, but her face was incapable of yielding moisture, so she winced instead. It looked painful.

I had no idea what to say back, and my vocabulary in her language was limited. Instead, I patted her on the back, as I might a baby lamb in a mobile petting zoo.
Pet, pet
. It felt useless, but I didn't know what else to do. As I patted her, nurses wearing safety masks attended to their patients, and old men around us farted in their sleep. Sitting next to this shrunken, dehydrated woman, smelling the gas from the bowels of old Chinese men, listening to the muffled weeping of my mother and my grandmother from across the corridor, I prayed no one else I knew would end up in a place like this.

 

*

 

After Poh-Poh died, my mother and I flew back to Hong Kong two more times: once for her funeral, and another time to collect her ashes. When we returned home the second time, deflated and traumatised, I heard that Ma-Ma – Dad's mother and my last living grandparent – might be moving to a retirement home. Dad insisted this place would be different. Only a forty-minute drive from the centre of Brisbane, The Gardens were advertised as a pioneering experiment: the only retirement village in Australia catering specifically for the Asian elderly. It was new and modern, clean and spacious, and built to Asian sensibilities. Instead of pools (the Chinese elderly aren't big on swimming), there would be karaoke rooms; organic vegetable patches instead of rose gardens; mah-jong tables instead of chess boards. Instead of being perched by the ocean, like a Florida resort community, The Gardens' centrepiece would be a man-made lake, complete with stone bridges, ducks and a bright red Chinese pergola. It was the type of place my mother and I had fantasised about Poh-Poh living in, if only we'd been able to bring her over.

Still, the place was a hard sell. Elderly Asian people had a fundamental aversion to the idea of retirement villages. Their idea of a nursing home was the cramped kind you find in Hong Kong or Beijing, or the culturally mismatched Australian ones filled with white people playing bingo. Shipping old folks off to these places was the ultimate shame for Asians, a last kick in the guts before your children unceremoniously rolled you, still breathing, into a shallow grave. Chinese culture dictated that an elderly mother lived with her eldest son until she died, or until the son couldn't stand it any longer and murdered her, whichever came first.

But the Gardens made everyone reconsider their prejudices, including me. On the open day, we watched adult sons and daughters shove prospectuses and price lists under the noses of their parents. ‘See, Poh-Poh?' they said. ‘Look, Goong-Goong! This place is different. The nurses speak the language! They serve rice every day! No one does aqua-aerobics here! You'll never have to wear a bathing suit again!' I was won over by the fact that nothing smelt like human waste, and at no stage did I see a mattress pushed up against the wall.

Dad spared no expense and moved Ma-Ma into one of the deluxe homes. Nestled in a private, quiet bend of road, these self-contained houses faced away from the main respite centre. Residents could convince themselves that they didn't live in a retirement village at all, but just happened to find themselves in a cul-de-sac alongside like-minded, elderly Asian people. A few weeks after her arrival, we knew Ma-Ma was finally at home when she'd planted vegetables, herbs and a bush of
chow sie gau
, a fragrant plant used in soups. Its name translates literally as ‘reeking shit dog,' and the stuff smells like a cross between marijuana and an animal corpse. For Ma-Ma, it was the smell of home.

Still, it was a lonely existence. We all tried to visit regularly, synching our schedules, catching buses, car-pooling. On the nights we came for dinner, she'd serve herb soups – watery broths that took hours to stew – and cook massive meals no one could finish. We'd share food, laugh at stupid jokes and read magazines, until we ran out of things to say and the conversation reverted to English.

Most of the time, she was content to see us go at the end of the evening. But sometimes she'd protest. ‘Why don't any of you sleep over?' she'd ask, pointing to the untouched spare room. ‘I've got that bed just sitting here doing nothing. There's enough room for three of you in that thing.' At this, we'd look at each other uncomfortably and mumble our way to the car.

It always made me sad, driving away and watching her wave us off, before we headed off to our own homes. Although we were a family of eight – five kids, two parents and a grandmother – we'd splintered apart, each of us retreating into private places built for one. Some of us lived with friends or partners, but none of us lived with each other anymore. There were eight homes between us. If we wanted, we could hole up in our separate flats and houses without seeing one another for weeks – which, for my family, was a strange new experience.

 

*

 

Eventually, I decided to live with Ma-Ma for a week. Tammy had done it for a month before going overseas, and I admired her tenacity. She had survived life without an internet connection, completely surrounded by old people who clutched at her youth and cornered her for conversation. If she'd managed a month, surely I could handle seven days.

On the morning I arrived, Ma-Ma was on the phone, and the conversation looked sombre. I waved hello and hauled in box upon box of VHS tapes from the car, Hong Kong television serials I'd picked up from the local Vietnamese grocer on the way over, which had weighed down the car like a dead body. When I put down the final box of tapes, Ma-Ma hung up the phone and looked away. ‘Who was on the phone?' I asked.

Ma-Ma sighed and started talking in Cantonese. ‘Last week,' she said, ‘[—] had a fall and then she [———]. Her family is so [——]. But the [—] was too [——], and now she's [—]. Which is [——]. So very, very [——]. It just makes me want to [——]. Anyway, [————]. Don't you think? It's happening tomorrow, so I'll be [——], if that's okay with you.'

I was nodding on the outside, but inside I was alarmed. Every second word she said was a blank. I'd always prided myself on being able to understand what my grandmother said to me, but now I realised there'd usually been translators between us: my father, my mother, one of my siblings. It dawned on me that this was the first time we'd ever been alone, just the two of us, and that maybe this idea hadn't been properly thought through.

Later, my mother rang to see how we were getting along. She spoke to my grandmother first, before passing the phone to me.

‘Isn't it sad how Ma-Ma's friend died?' Mum said.

‘
What
? She
died
?'

Mum let out a little noise of confusion. ‘Ma-Ma said she told you all about it. She had a fall, and now she's dead. Gone. At least she's with her husband now. Poor things.'

After I'd hung up the phone, I looked at my grandmother. I knew the words for when someone had died, and didn't understand how I'd missed this.

‘Ma-Ma?' I said in basic Cantonese. ‘I didn't know she was
dead
.'

Ma-Ma's spine stiffened a little, and I immediately realised my mistake. She had side-stepped the word
dead
, talking in euphemisms to soften the blow. In English, people
pass away
. They
go to a better place.
In Cantonese, when people die, they clearly [——] and [——]. I felt rude. No one talks about death directly – especially not in places like retirement homes. Why talk about it when you're surrounded by it? My grandmother told me I shouldn't go to the funeral. I didn't know the woman that well. Plus, my grandmother added, I really needed a haircut.

We took the next few days easy. She played mah-jong with the other residents. We went for walks when the sun went down and kicked the cane toads that terrorised the place at night. We spent our evenings watching the Hong Kong drama
Hoong Wong
Sae Choong Tai
, or
Maiden's Vow
. The narrative was confusing and disorientating, with cuts between the
1900
s,
1950
s and today.

‘Is that her sister?' I asked, pointing at the screen.

‘No,' Ma-Ma said. ‘She works for her.'

‘And who's
he
? Is that her father?'

‘No, that's the matchmaker.'

Maiden's Vow
was an ambitious, multi-linear drama, following a single family across the centuries, from feudal China to contemporary Hong Kong. Narrative-wise, it was a mess, and I got sleepy trying to keep up with it. Eventually, I fished out a different DVD, something I'd stolen from my boyfriend's collection. It was
In the Mood for Love
, the one Hong Kong movie we owned. Every time I'd tried to watch it before, I had fallen asleep. My sister Candy, too, had found the slow-burning romance tedious.

‘All they did was
stare
at each other,' she said. ‘You wanted to scream at them, “Just take your clothes off and
fuck
already. You're wasting time with all this slow-motion walking and staring!”' Still, I told my grandmother it was one of the few Chinese movies white people liked.

‘White people watch Chinese films?' She was sceptical.

But as we watched the movie together, we both laughed in the right places. Neither of us could take our eyes off Maggie Cheung, and when she wept, we almost cried too. Her life was dramatic and tragic, and made all the more poignant by her smoking-hot beauty. I wanted to look like Tony Leung, or dress like Tony Leung, or graft Tony Leung's cheekbones into my face. For the first time, I didn't fall asleep watching it. In fact, I adored it.

‘That,' Ma-Ma said when it was over, ‘was an excellent movie.'

The next day, as Ma-Ma taught me how to make
sui-jai gou
– a steamed rice-flour pancake packed with artery-clogging cured meat – I turned on my laptop speakers so we could listen to the movie's soundtrack while we cooked. As Ma-Ma fried massive salmon heads in a pan, she began to sing along to the Chinese songs. I realised I'd never heard her sing in the whole time I'd known her. Hearing this eighty-something woman sing was bizarre and beautiful, like overhearing the mournful song of a mythological creature like a bunyip or a sasquatch.

Later that evening, I packed the car with my bags, humming the same odd Chinese tune my grandma had been singing. On the way out, I accidentally brushed my arm on her bush of
chow
sie gau
, the dog-shit plant. I knew the stench would linger on me for the rest of the night. As I started the engine and watched her disappear in my rear-view mirror, I realised I'd enjoyed myself at the Gardens. Nothing about the place had depressed me at all.

There were no sad people, no sad smells. As I drove past the other retirement homes, glimpsing the people inside going about their evenings, I realised the only thing that stank about the place was me, this guy with a weird smell on his fingers, reeking of youth.

So, You Are a Homo

M
ATHS
Despite being Asian, you have never been good at maths. In fact, no one in your family is good at maths, which is weird considering there are seven of you. But at night, lying in bed, you start doing sums in your head that keep you awake. These are terrible sums, unhealthy equations, and are designed to calculate the odds of you dying alone – which is something, you feel, more twelve-year-olds should think about seriously.