Unpolished Gem (23 page)

Ah BuKien seemed to have lost her verbal facility for once.

She didn’t want to answer. Finally, she sighed. “My son doesn’t go to school anymore.” I was stunned. In the ensuing silence, I pretended I was dusting a toaster.

“So what is he doing now?” my mother asked.

“Working at the factory.”

“What! You mean your rice-noodle factory?”

“Yes.”

There was another silence. Then my mother responded quickly. “Oh, it’s good that he is already able to help you earn money! My daughter is a great woe to us, she has five years of law to go!”

“Well,” Ah BuKien finally said, “she may not be earning you money now, but wait until she graduates!”

“Ah BuKien and I were just talking,” I heard my mother say to my father a little later. “Her boy is already helping her earn money at the factory.”

“Oh, what a useful young man he is turning out to be!” smiled my father.

I was amazed at how skilled my parents were at acting out this pretence. I knew they believed that there was no redemption for Ah BuKien’s son. Suddenly I felt very sorry for him. His mother had truly moulded him into the consummate Rice-Noodle Boy. But I knew that her moulding days for me were now over, because before she left, she did not flatter me with a final pinch.

“W
OW,”
he breathed as we emerged from the station onto the street. The sky was slowly turning the colour of a three-day-old bruise, and the streets were wet.

I stopped walking and turned to face him.

“Come on, please get back on the train and go home.”

“Go home?” he cried in mock mortification, complete with hands-to-the-face demonstration. “Oh! I’m doing the chivalrous thing by escorting you back through these brutal streets and you tell me to nick off!”

“Well, I’ve managed for eighteen years by myself, I think I should be fine for one more day.”

“Go home?” he cried. “You have no idea! I can’t possibly go home.”

“Yes, you can. You have a Daily Metcard which expires at
2
a.m.”

“Ohhh, please don’t make me go back! I can’t!”

“Why not?”

“Because I have journeyed perilously by train to get here, wedged between disease-carrying passengers and surviving only by clinging to a hand-rail with three fingers! Please don’t send me back! Oh, such suffering I have endured to get here!”

As moved as I was by his miserable odyssey, I had to tell him that
we
weren’t parading our suffering by moaning about landmines and leaking boats.

“But that’s because you’re brave and strong. I’m just a poor orphan whose parents have not too recently died a slow and agonising death.”

“Oh yeah? From what?”

“Complacency! Their bodies are decomposing in front of the television as we speak.”

“Oh, how heartbreaking.”

“Come on, if I told
you
to go home …”

“If you told
me
to go home you’d be standing here naked and shoeless and sick. Remember, it’s people like us who sew your jeans, make your runners and end up becoming your doctors. Besides, I
am
home.”

“Want to hear a poem?”

“No.”

“I made it up just for you.”

“Err … no thanks.”

We walked past blurred aerosol graffiti written on the roller-shutters of the One Hour Photo Shop. The rain had painted the ground a dirty anthracite colour, and the sidewalk proudly displayed its shining black circles of ancient gum on the hard grey pages and pages of concrete.

The only other white boys around could hardly string a sentence together, let alone plead for temporary asylum. Empty-eyed, they loitered, wearing diarrhoea-coloured cargo pants and swearing loudly at every opportunity. Now they were staring at us.

I looked at my escort. It was bizarre how the scruffy college look that was so grungy at uni looked really derro here. In fact, he could fit right in if he tried to look drowsier and kept his mouth shut. When he opened his mouth, he killed off any chance of establishing lifelong friendships with the watchers across the road. And now they were beckoning us over – or, more accurately, beckoning
him
over.

“See what you’ve done?” I whispered. “Now they
really
think you’re chasing, and they also probably think that I’m your girlfriend, so you’re putting my life at risk every time I walk down these streets now.”

I wasn’t really scared, of course. In this suburb, I was more scared of interloping Indochinese “aunts” than the local drug-dealers, because the latter generally left me alone.

“Ummm … they want me to go over.” He looked at me anxiously.

“Sure. Go over. They’re going to invite you to their cocktail party. Remember to pop into Forges to buy a tie before you cross the road.”

“You’re not much help,” he muttered.

“I told you to go home, but you didn’t take my advice. Board the train if you don’t want to put your back-door virginity at risk.”

“I’m not leaving you here alone! What do you think will happen?”

“Nothing. We’ve just been standing in the middle of the street talking for too long, and any two people who are stationary for more than three minutes are suspected of carrying stuff. Remember, this is all your doing. Keep walking and ignore them.”

As we kept walking, a stupid smirk appeared on his face.

“What’s so funny?”

“Heh. Now that I’ve put your life at risk, I’m going to have to escort you back from the station to your father’s shop every day.”

My knight in shining aluminium foil, please don’t feel it necessary
to martyr yourself. My pa will kill you if he sees you.
Thinking of my father, I walked a little slower.

“What time does your dad’s shop close tonight?” he asked.

“Nine o’clock. It’s Friday – late-night trading.”

“Errr … it’s only six-thirty at the moment.” He had stopped in front of a shopfront with neon lettering on the outside declaring Hai Duong Vietnamese Noodles. Mr Hai Duong himself was probably inside declaring, “Wah, isn’t that the Newtone Electronics daughter and what is she doing loitering with scruffy white demons?”

He looked at me. “Umm … want to grab some dinner then?”

I hesitated, and tried to think clearly.

He really likes you
, I told myself.

No way, he likes the
idea
of you,
the less feeble part of my mind insisted,
he’s probably a sinophile. Don’t forget that he’s doing
an Asian Studies major. You’re like his third-world trip or something.
He’s too broke to go overseas so you’re his substitute exotic experience.
You go to dinner with him now and he’ll think you’re going to
be his Cheery Chysanthemum forever, or at least until he gets bored
of you and the next little Oriental Oleander comes along. Then you’re
going to be sorry.

Bugger, what’ll I do?

How the hell am I meant to know, I’ve never been on a “date”
before! But you’re not going to last long if you keep using words like
bugger, because authentic Chinese chicks don’t speak like that, you
sound like a bloody ocker.

Well, what am I supposed to do?

Firstly, stop having this dialogue inside your head because he’ll
realise that you’re not only slow but insane too. Secondly, tell him no,
tell him he’s a show-off and a sinophile only interested in your ethnicity,
tell him you don’t do conventional
Karate-Kid-Part-II
romances,
tell him you have to head back before it gets dark, tell him you have to
help your father sell Walkmans, tell him you have to go to the May
Madness Sale at Forges to buy plastic tofu boxes for your mother, tell
him you have to go to the local pool before closing time to check out
those fabulous homeboys getting changed into their flannelette shirts
and trousers before they retreat back to their com-pu-tahs, tell him
you have to find a way to dispose of those prying Indochinese interlopers
who will stare at you and report back to your relatives when you
eventually tell him …
“Umm, yeah, okay.”

Bugger.

After all, what’s the big deal?
I reasoned to myself,
have some
humility. A young man casually mentions that you might have
dinner together and you think he’s asking for your hand, you think
you’re going to end up being his little Indochinese wife and in a
decade’s time you won’t be fascinating enough any more because he’s
just drawn to the idiosyncrasies of your culture, and he has no idea
that your culture extends to looking after your folks in their decrepit
dotage and constantly looking out for ASIO which has caused you to
develop a nasty compulsive head-swivelling habit. And of course he
has no idea that ASIO really stands for Asian (Southeast) Investigation
Organisation, but if you tell him, perhaps one day when you’ve
both graduated, he can help you sue the organisation for causing you
chronic pain and suffering …

I was still not convinced.

Oh, come on,
Voice of Reason cajoled,
you’re turning into one
of those anxious killjoy Asian women who worry so much that they
end up with dried-fig faces at the age of thirty; come on, you’re only
eighteen, just sit down, just relax, just have dinner, and don’t take
things so seriously.

So we entered the mirror-walled, plastic Ikea-chaired surroundings of Hai Duong, and when we sat down, he asked me:

“What will your father say when I ask you to be my girlfriend?”

*

My cousin Melanie had recently married her skip boyfriend, although I don’t know why he called himself that. “Hey I’m just a skip!” he kept insisting, “I won’t be offended if you all call me that, ha ha!” He grinned like a goof at his own generosity, not realising that all my other relatives had already determined from day one that they would refer to him as the Round Red-haired Demon, even in Melanie’s presence. They congratulated themselves on their own magnanimity of spirit – after all, we were well known for calling “our own people” such affectionate names as “Horseface”, “Toothless Aunt”, “Duck Brother” and “Big Fat Potato”.

Big Fat Potato was the boy to whom I was to have been betrothed according to the whims of his mother. When that hadn’t worked out, she quickly put him on a plane to Vietnam and he came back with better goods. Oh, much better! The girl was beautiful and shy and sweet, and I wondered whether she knew she had ended up with the son of a Permanent Pincher. Perhaps she didn’t know. Perhaps he seduced her with a suitcase loaded with Ferrero Rocher chocolates and Gloweave shirts.

I was not invited to the wedding, of course, so the first time I ever met Big Fat Potato was when I accompanied my mother to the Grand Opening of his mother’s new grocery store. There I saw a skinny young man with his chin almost touching his chest, watching the register. He looked like a sad squid with a big head. “Ay.” His mother grabbed him by the shoulders and glared at me: “This is Tim.” Her chin was as high as her son’s was low, and she thrust him forward as if to say,
Look here, this
is what you could have had if your parents didn’t think you were too
good for him. Now that he’s married, your snobby old man has not
only lost a son-in-law but also a Chinese Grocery Store, mwwaahhh
hah hah, go suck lychees and dieeee!

I barely glanced at the son, as if to say,
Dear Aunt, you can
shove durians up your Chinese Grocery Store for all I care.

“Hello,” I muttered.

He glared at me with lowered eyes, as if to say, You
are the
one my ma thought would make me a good wife, so you must be a
traditional tea-pouring, tale-telling bitch and I hate you.

“Hi,” he mumbled.

Should I ask questions? I wondered. “How is your wife?” No, too personal.
How did
you
know about my wife, you gloating
gossip?
“How’s business? Must be good working here hah?”
I’m
stuck at my mother’s store selling Vietnamese beef jerky, how do
you
think business is?
“Having fun at the counter?”
Ecstatic fun,
would you like me to dance the merry little “Buy Korean Gingseng”
jig for you?

Fortunately, my mother broke the silence by exclaiming, “Wah! Your son! Married now! And your daughter-in-law is so beautiful, so useful, so helpful, so good!” Too bad the girl couldn’t hear these compliments because she was packing boxes in the back room.

“You know,” my mother said, “my niece got married recently too, but she married a white ghost. I always tell my daughter never to pick one of them because you know how they tend to sleep around.”

“Oh, but they’re not
all
like that. Also, having a white son-in-law could be good,” declared Fat Potato’s mother, “more people kowtow to you, you know.”

Of course. Melanie’s father knew that very well. We could never escape the counter-effects of colonisation, they were passed on two generations and more. “When Melanie takes the Round Red-Headed Demon back to Cambodia for the honeymoon, they will be swamped by kowtowers from all sides, heh heh!” boasted Uncle Frank. He loved his new son-in-law as much as his own child. The white skin did the trick. The white skin would ensure that Uncle Frank got the respect his own small sense of self denied him. We were funny that way, always believing that we were rescued by white people even when the white people didn’t see themselves as our rescuers – in fact, they probably thought that we were self-sufficient, hard-working heroes from Hanoi or Hunan who manufactured their T-shirts and married their sons.

But we were also hypocrites. We loved them for their easygoing natures, their laid-back generosity, their simple acceptance of our culture, or whatever we told them constituted our culture. We fed them fluorescent yellow lemon chicken and sludge-black beef in black-bean sauce and they lauded our fine Chinese cuisine. Anything nuanced, like brown braised chicken’s feet (we were never wasteful) was also cultural but in an idiosyncratic “only the Chinese eat that” sort of way. We loved their country, their supermarkets and their sheer genius in inventing Glad-Wrap; and the more we loved these things, the more it made us realise how much we hated the dirt, the sludge and the smells of our homelands, the squelchy grottiness of our markets and the self-abnegation of our souls.