Unpolished Gem (10 page)

“Let me see Little Brother!” my grandmother screamed, and this time my grandfather did not tell her, “How many times have I told you to stop calling the child that?” He and the servant would not let her see her own child. Her own blood and flesh! She screamed and screamed, she screamed until the other little brother in the other room woke up, she screamed until there was nothing my grandpa or the servant could do but step aside and let her hold her baby with the matted hair like a little hat.

W
HEN I was nine, I made a whole clan of forty-two tiny dolls, boys included, with hand-stitched woollen hair. I even embroidered each of their faces. I made twins and triplets, a community of mermaids and some villains. I brought them to school in a white plastic bag, and Beatrice and I played with them during our lunchtimes. The dolls made us forget about the stigmas of our physical selves – the nits and grotty fingernails, my capital P Perm and Beatrice’s nest of red hair. Beatrice was an infinitely better person than I, she forgave easily. We made the dolls into the people we would have liked to be, killed the ones we deemed unfit to live, and made up elaborate tales of love and deceit to rival those of the screenwriters of
Neighbours
. We reigned in our world, and I felt supreme. I was the creator. “Did you make any more?” Beatrice would ask me each morning, and I would show her.

At home I would put the little dolls away and pick up the howling baby.

“
Wheeen
are you going to be done?” I whinged.

“Half an hour, just half an hour,” coaxed my mother. Or, “Forty minutes, just forty minutes.” The kiln was fired up, she was ready to do work. The whole garage was whirring and throbbing and there was no stopping her. “But that’s what you always say and then you go for hours and hours,” I whined, and I could already feel my arms aching. I learned to prepare baby formula, to squirt the bottle onto my wrist to test whether it was too hot. I learned to feed my baby sister Alison who would suck for six seconds and then push the bottle out of her mouth with her tongue. I would then have to distract her, so that she would forget that she didn’t want to drink.

Half an hour became one hour, one hour became two, and my mother would be done and pick up the baby for a little while, and then say that she had to head off to do deliveries. I was to look after the sister well or else – if anything should happen, by God, I would be doomed. I had no time left to do anything. Then when I had time to do anything I would sit around fuming over how long it took for there to be time to do anything, and there would be nothing much for me to do because you never knew when the baby was going to start howling again. And I fumed because Ma never told me what a good sister I was and how much I loved the baby, just kept warning me not to do evil to her, not to take my eyes off her, not to let her roll off the bed, because “You know how babies roll themselves off the bed, even ones that can’t crawl yet.”

And then one day she did.

There was a loud bang from the bedroom where I had left her on the bed, lying on her tummy with her head sticking up. When I ran back into the room again my sister was on the floor, howling and flailing her arms and legs in the air like a red beetle turned on its back.

“What happened?” my mother yelled, rushing into the room.

“Alison kicked herself off the bed!”

She grabbed the baby from the floor and yelled, “I told you to look after your sister and I turn my back just one minute and there she is on the floor howling! Wretched woe, who knows what may happen to her now! Haven’t I always warned you that babies have very soft thin skulls? They are born with a hole in their heads before their skulls close up and if they fall they become retarded! Did she fall on her head? How did she fall? HOW DID SHE FALL?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know! You don’t know! You don’t know because you weren’t looking after her, were you? I don’t know what use you are, with nothing better to do with your time! You can’t even look after your sister for just one second without her falling off the bed to her death. If she is brain-damaged, then you are doomed! Woe, aiyyooo, I’m going to call your father right now, so he can take her to the hospital to have her head examined. Such is the woe of my life to have a child who is always bumming around doing no good! You wait, you just wait.”

So I waited. I waited with my hands tearing little anxious holes in my pockets while my mother rushed off to light some incense. She handed me a stick and then knelt on the floor, frantically shaking the stick back and forth. “Buddha, bless little Alison and keep her safe even though her sister wasn’t looking after her properly and she fell off the bed. Buddha, bless the safety of our little one and keep her safe from harm and evil.” At this point my mother gave me a long hard look.

I wondered whether anyone Up There would be convinced by my newfound piety, but I tried anyway. If my sister was okay, I prayed, I would do all my jobs without complaining. I would commit my soul to servitude forever and ever. I would be as uncomplaining as an automaton, I would not whinge whenever I heard “half an hour more”, I would learn to be just a speck and do things for the greater good of the family.

Then I realised that if Buddha did exist, if God did exist, if any deity Up There did exist, then why the hell was He tormenting me so with my sister falling off the bed right at the very moment when I was merely getting a new book to read? Probably just as I suspected, His plan for me was not to learn at all, but to be forever in a state of staying at home and looking after babies and cleaning up crap and not being able to rid myself of the smell and the dirt. It was time for me to learn some acceptance.

Dear Lord, I will not defy this fate you have for me if you make
my sister alright. I will not even question Your plan. Just let my
sister be alright and You can even turn me into a worm in my next
life.

While I was renouncing all my doubts to The One Up There, my father came home. “What happened?” he demanded.

“She fell off the bed,” I repeated, wondering if adults were really such amnesiacs, because only twenty minutes ago I had heard my mother on the phone yelling, “Wretched woe, aiya-aaahhhh, Agheare wasn’t looking and Alison was kicking and she kicked herself off the bed! Come quick, come quick!”

“Can’t even be responsible for anything, not even looking after your own sister for a little while,” my father tut-tutted with his tongue. It was not the time to tell him that the “little while” had been hours and hours.

Ma and Pa bundled my screaming sister into the car and drove off, leaving me standing in the doorway wiping my nose with my sleeve. If my sister was brain-damaged it would be my fault – after today all the cuteness would be erased from her face and she would be a drooling drone. And everywhere I went people would point and say, “Ah, look, there’s that girl who made her sister retarded because when she was nine she couldn’t even mind her for a few moments!”

I decided that if my sister came back from the hospital brain-damaged, my life was indeed doomed. I then decided quite rationally that since there was nothing to live for, I might as well doom myself before my parents came home and did the job themselves. Yet how to doom oneself painlessly?

In the Chinese serials my grandmother loved to watch, whenever some noble warrior wanted to end it all, he drew out his sword and impaled himself. Then he would lie there, spluttering all sorts of regrets while his beloved comrades cradled his head and wailed. A slow, neat rivulet of blood would trickle from his mouth.

I hated blood. Too often had I seen my mother accidentally stab her hand with the scalpel she used to cut open the wax moulds, or chop her finger with our butcher’s cleaver, to think that the traditional Chinese death by a thousand cuts was something noble.

I thought about hanging, which wasn’t such a bad idea if I wasn’t so small and therefore unable to reach anything high enough to be a beam. Then I recalled that the monkey bars at Tottenham North Primary School were pretty high because when I swung from them, my feet were a long way from the ground.

I could bring a scarf.

But then I thought of my body dangling there overnight, and how the Totty Tech boys might arrive in the morning and think it hilarious to pull down my pants.

Suddenly I remembered reading something about plants in the
Reader’s Digest Household Hints and Handy Tips
, a thick black volume which my father had bought for me one summer. I remembered reading about the Oleander bush, which we had in our backyard, with its bright pink flowers that looked like tissue paper. “Those flowers are poisonous,” my father would tell us. “Always wash your hands if you have accidentally touched them.” I read case studies of children who had eaten the flowers and died. Flowers were a good way to end it all, I thought. I looked out of our kitchen window to make sure that the bush was in bloom. It was, in all its pink-tissue-paper glory. I decided to go to bed and wait for my parents to call and give me the sign as to whether I should go outside and meet my Maker through the Oleander plant portal.

I closed my eyes. Sudden snatches of imagined conversation – “funny-shaped head now, like a potato, and what is wrong with her
eyes
?”; remembered precepts – “take care of her”; coiled-up whimpers and anticipated cries of fury all ricocheted about my mind. My stomach seemed to be hollow. I curled up in foetal position, I spread myself flat in corpse pose, I squelched my face on the pillow as if struck from the back. No rest for the wicked, I thought. I fell into an exhausted black sleep.

“You are lucky,” said my mother, when she returned.

My father nodded. “You are very lucky there is nothing wrong with her.”

The little bundle was in my hands again and I was squeezing the tiny snot-nosed sook so tightly and feeling such a sense of love and relief that I forgot I was also meant to be exuberant that I did not need to doom myself.

“Y
OU must be an example to your younger siblings,” my parents told me. “You see, Agheare,” my father explained, “a family is like a snake. If the head of the snake is set straight, then the rest of the body follows straight. However, if the head is crooked, then the body gets as bent as ginseng and it is doomed.” How to keep my head on, let alone straight? I wished that I was born meek and good, instead of dissatisfied and resentful. How could I fill my time usefully instead of always bumming around reading books?

There was one form of work that alleviated some of the guilt – sewing. I made berets from the fleecy factory scraps that my Third Auntie Samso brought home for our family to use as floor wipes. I created stuffed animals, dogs with floppy ears and button eyes. I learned embroidery from library books, fabricated patchwork cushions and designed clothes for my sisters Alison and Alina. People always assumed that the digital dexterity of Asians was a genetic trait, some God-given talent. But that was not entirely true. While other kids were glueing icy-pole sticks onto paper plates, Asian kids were attaching eye-hooks to designer skirts because their parents’ eyesight was failing.

Neither of my parents could sew, but before I started high school they saved and saved to present me with my first love. His name was Janome. He had a beautiful cream-coloured complexion, and all the pieces of my life began to fit together after I met him. He worked wonders with me. We functioned as a unit, so completely in synch with each other’s movements that it was magical. Sewing was essentially like driving a car. You pushed your foot on the pedal, and guided by the light of the machine, you made the lines swerve and twist and turn towards some distant point far from home.

I started off with children’s clothes. The comparative shapelessness of their little bodies meant that fitting was easy – no complicated tucks and darts. I bought patterns and taught myself how to piece them together. I made myself a party frock in blue taffeta, complete with hundreds of hand-sewn sequins and an invisible zip. Clothes that were bought on sale didn’t necessarily match with other items bought on sale. Sometimes they didn’t fit properly, but we were left to grow into them. I doubted that our arms would grow down past our calves, or our shoulders to our elbows. But now with my beloved Janome, I worked miracles.

And self-made miracles were exactly what sustained me through my adolescent years, when other girls were getting into trendy clothing labels and boys. Pretending that I had nothing more to worry about than which new Sportsgirl summer dress I should purchase was already too much trouble – especially when I had to hand-embroider the accursed Sports-girl logo, with all its curves and flourishes, onto my self-designed creations. Who needed to smoke ciggies or get petted by boys or drink booze when I was already a rebel of the most exciting kind? I was a veritable
pirate
.

Because I seemed to have nothing better to do with my time than practise for an outworking career, relatives would leave their children with me when they went out, or whenever they had “other things to do”. “Ah, Agheare is so good, she is so responsible,” they would say. “We can always trust her with our children and they won’t get hurt.”

“Why don’t they make Alexander do it?” I would complain to my mother.

“He doesn’t know how to look after babies. He’s a boy. Besides you are more responsible and mature than he is.”

I was not won over by their sedulous flattery. Girls only matured faster because they had to do more. I hated housework, and I often let my mother know it in no uncertain terms. “I am so busy, and you do this to me!” my mother would scream, almost in tears, “working till I am so tired, and none of you ever help out, and your father is always saying, wah, don’t let them work, they have to study, while I have to do everything and still you are so bad and do this to me! Aiiyyyaaaahhh, why do you do this to me?!” And then I would feel infinitely guilty. What to do, I thought, when one was responsible for the torment of the family and in grave danger of becoming a lady?

A lady was the most abhorred thing you could become, because ladies were lazy bums who sat around wasting their husband’s money and walked down the street with perfectly made-up mien visiting the jewellery stores to which my mother delivered her wares. My mother was certainly not a lady. She worked and worked and worked, and when she wasn’t working she was cleaning, and when she wasn’t cleaning or working she was sick. You could always tell who was a lady by what they complained about, the length of their nails and whether they put milk or butter into their coffee.