Unpolished Gem (6 page)

*

“You have to help me!” cried my grandmother, banging on the wooden door to Ah Gim’s house. “Help! Help! Thief! Robber!”

When Ah Gim opened the door, my grandmother charged inside and slammed the door. Standing with her back against the doorway, she heaved and choked, her face the colour of taro, a nebulous grey-pale-purple. “Lowliest scummiest lowlife mugger in the world!”

“Sister, sister, what is the matter? Who robbed you? Was it at the market? Where is your handbag?”

“Handbag?” My grandmother stared at Ah Gim as if she were the hysterical one. “Handbag! Hah! She thinks it’s my handbag! Yes, a handbag I have been carrying for nine months!” Her eyes rolled towards the ceiling, and then back towards her friend, focusing for the next outburst. “He took my son! He took my baby!”

“Wah! Woe!” cried Ah Gim, “Who? When? How did it happen? Did you see his face?”

“Of course, I know every speck on that no-good face. It was my husband!”

“Your husband! Where did he take your son?”

“To the Other Side!” shrilled my grandmother. “He took my son to the Other Side! Oh, he had this planned for so long! He was waiting for the boy to be weaned, he was waiting with his eyes glinting and his hands itching!”

Her friend stood there helplessly. Clutching the sides of her trousers with tight hands, she wailed, “But sister, what can I do?” She was one for commiseration, not action, one who waited for others to save her.

“We’re going over to his first wife’s house and we’re going to snatch my boy back!” It was not a request, it was a command.

“Aiyah, oyah …” Ah Gim lamented. Somehow the presence of this woman cast a dark shadow over her own small selfhood, made her aware of her ineffectuality.

My grandmother grabbed Ah Gim’s wrist. “Now!”

Ah Gim had to obey, she had no choice, she was led by her guilty sense of gratitude and my grandmother’s powerful tug.

But the tug was not strong enough, for they came back empty-handed.

*

How did that happen? I often wonder. How could someone like my grandmother bear to have her baby given away? The alternative I cannot fathom – that it would have been an arrangement, and that she would have known during the pregnancy. Yet characters are only fixed through experience, and usually bad experience. Before character there is only personality, and who knows what kind of person my grandmother was back then?

Yet one thing I know for certain. He was never snatched back, that last son. Fast-forward fifty-five years, and a man from Macau appears at her funeral. He is very short with a gentle face. He was never snatched back – you can tell because he looks into the glass of her coffin without the same solemnity as the rest of my uncles. Why was my grandmother unsuccessful at stealing her son back? Perhaps she just learned to let him go. After all, there would be more children. There would always be more children, to cling to her pants-legs, to ask her about maths problems, to make paper chains with, and to share her big soft bed.

“Tell me a story,” I would plead, snuggling up to my grandmother in her bed. My grandmother always had a queen-sized bed in Australia. “Tell me a story.” And there would be stories such as I had never known, could never tell, and will never know again because my grandmother was possessed of a form of magic, the magic of words that became movies in the mind. The people she spoke about came alive through her voice, her pauses, her animated eyebrows, and the distinction between reality and fantasy no longer had any force. There
was
no distinction, and in the safety of the blankets, all past children no longer mattered. I was her one and only, and I would never have to find out about the one who was given away.

PART II

“W
OE,” cried my grandmother, “why do you smell like piss?” My grandmother alternated between “Wah!” and “Woe” to express extremes of emotion.

“I pissed my pants.”

“Why didn’t you tell the teacher you needed to go to the toilet?”

I shrugged and shifted about uncomfortably. Foreign words did not seem to slip out of me as easily as the contents of my bladder, but I knew my grandmother would keep quiet about this. She would protect me from prying parents and their ability to turn my humiliation into an after-dinner anecdote.

*

It was kindergarten photo day and I had been bundled into my pale-blue padded Mao suit with the frog fastenings. Underneath, my grandmother had made me wear my flannel pyjama top and thermal tights. All this clothing made my arms stick out from my sides as if I were a penguin. It was spring Down Under, but my grandmother lived in constant fear that I would freeze like the communist peasants from the Middle Kingdom she had left over half a century ago. My hair was tied with two red ribbons on top of my head, and pulled so tightly that my ears almost met at the back of my head.

“Go down the slide, Alice,” coaxed the teachers, “go on!” Terrified, I could not move. I knew that if I were to go down the slide I would leave behind wet streaks of incontinence. The teachers wondered what was wrong with me. The photographer was waiting with his camera. I shook my head.

The swings, perhaps? But I refused to move. I pointed indoors. I went indoors and stayed in there for the rest of my photographs. I stayed there for the rest of the day, doing the only thing possible for me to do standing up.

When the photos were developed, my parents proudly proclaimed, “Ah, look! We have an artist in the family!” My kindergarten album was filled with pictures of me standing next to the easel in a Raggedy-Ann smock, smiling at my own ingeniousness.

That night, in my grandmother’s queen-sized bed, she quietly asked me, “Do you
know
how to tell the teacher you need to go to the toilet?”

I nodded. I did.

“Then why didn’t you tell the teacher?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. But I did know. Fear.

There was silence. I thought my grandmother was asleep. I stared at the gold ring on her hand that was around my shoulder. Then, just as I was about to drift off to sleep too, she suddenly asked, “Have you gone to the potty yet?” My grandmother kept a little tin pot in the corner of the room for both of us to use.

“I don’t
need
to go.”

She made me go anyway.

When I came back, she waited until I had snuggled into my characteristic cocoon-shape before she spoke.

“In the past in the Golden Towers,” my grandmother began, and I knew she was going to tell me about the other country where everybody lived a life before me. All her stories began with things in the past, in Long Mountain, China, or Cambodia, the Golden Towers. “In the past,” she said, “when your father was small, we had a mattress, one and a half metres wide, two metres long. Your First Uncle, your Second Uncle, your Third Uncle, your Fourth Uncle and your father – all very small then – all crammed onto the mattress with me. In the middle of the night one by one they would go shhhhhhhhhhhhhh” – she paused for the cocoon to giggle – “and I would wake up with my clothes dripping wet. The mattress would be soaked too, with that slightly minty smell of urine.” So
that
was how she could detect piss from metres away. She told me that she was glad I didn’t have a night-time bladder. But she made me promise to learn that dreaded foreign sentence so that I would be able to make some friends. Before I drifted off to sleep, I wondered doubtfully whether my “escoose mi plis I nid to go to da toylit” outburst would persuade the other kids to share their Play-Doh with me.

It was not the last time I would refuse to speak, and my pants were filled on a number of later occasions. After the first time, I knew not to tell. My grandmother always found out anyway. It was not the end of the Mao suit, either. In Grade Two, when we studied Australian History, the teachers decided to have a colonial dress-up parade. That morning I rummaged through our wardrobe for a dress long enough to reach my ankles. The wardrobe had been kindly donated by the good St Laurence. My parents had vowed to pay alms to His Brotherhood one day, when they had enough money. But I knew that as kind as the Christians were, there was no chance that this cupboard would contain an ankle-length dress for me. My mother stood behind me watching the futile search. The Mao suit came out.

*

“Why are you wearing your pyjamas, Alice?” toffee-scented, doe-eyed, dimple-faced Kylie asked me. Loud enough for the other girls lining up in swirly floor-length dresses to hear.

Miss Higgins was cutting out crepe-paper aprons for all the girls. I had lined up too. I was the only girl in the line wearing pants. When it was my turn, Miss Higgins looked me up and down. Then came the inevitable words: “No, Alice, I don’t think you need one.”

The parade was due to begin in half an hour. I would be the only girl without a dress, without an apron! I
needed
that apron. I needed it to cover my pyjama bottoms. What would I do without it? I had no choice. Miss Higgins was getting impatient, the girls behind were getting impatient because I would not get out of the way. I had to ask. But what if she refused me again, as she refused the apron? Yet I knew I had to ask, and there was no getting out of it.

“Excuse me, Miss Higgins.” My voice sounded small and ridiculous, like a cannon firing rubber squeaky toys. Yet I had promised my grandmother again and again that I would do it. And I had failed her every time. Instead of bringing home friends, I brought home soiled washing. Now was my chance to make her proud.

Miss Higgins looked expectantly at me.

“Please, Miss Higgins, I need to go to the toilet.”

“Q
UICK, it’s getting away!” My eyes followed the moving speck. My forefinger pressed down. The enemy was wounded, then pulverised.

“Look, here’s another one!” Outside Ma yelled. “Quick, press it! Press it till it pops!” Her fingertip transferred the tiny dot from the wooden comb onto the Target clothing ad. It crawled across the remains of old allies – casualties of the war raging in the dense jungle on my head.

Crushed, it left a skid mark on the page like the flicker of a red biro, in the exact spot where the Model Child with the marble-eyes and $
12
.
99
frock had her nostrils upturned. “Look, Ma, I’ve given her a blood nose!”

“That’s disgusting, stop mucking around.” Outside Ma ran the fine-toothed comb through my hair, twenty strands at a time. “Keep your head still.”

I was at Outside Ma’s house because no other relative would have me over because of my nits. Outside Ma was my mother’s mother. Outside Ma did not ask me whether the kids at school were still playing with me. She did not ask whether I was being teased. Outside Ma’s questions mostly revolved around bodily functions – “Is your stomach full yet?” “Are your hands and feet cold?” “Is your head itchy?” “Is your nose blocked?” Then she would set about relieving our ailments. Food for the tummy, socks for the feet, gloves for the hands, a fine-toothed nit comb for the hair, and mouth for the nose. I always avoided the last remedy. When my brother Alexander was a baby and had congested nasal passages, I watched Outside Ma suck the snot from his nose with her mouth and spit it into the sink. “That’s disgusting!”

“He’s only a little baby,” Outside Ma muttered. “How do you expect a little baby to blow his nose? He hasn’t learned to yet, so I do it for him.”

“Aaarghhh! That’s sick!” I cried, fleeing from her.

*

When the immigration papers were finally processed, my other set of grandparents had arrived at Melbourne airport in their homemade cotton Mao suits of dark blue and earth-brown. My Outside Grandparents.

My mother recognised them immediately as they came out of the airport terminal. “Ay, ay! It’s Ma!” she cried. “It’s Pa!” She stood there, face to face with her parents. She touched her father on the sleeve. “New travelling clothes!”

“Your mother made them just before we left,” my outside grandfather said, grinning his toothless grin.

“You should see the clothes that you will get here!”

“YiMui,” my outside grandmother said to her second daughter, “you’ve grown fatter.” My mother was a couple of months pregnant with my brother Alexander, and still only forty-seven kilos.

“I’m having a baby, remember?”

“Where is our first baby grandchild?” demanded my outside grandmother. Then they saw me.

“Wah! That’s not a baby!” exclaimed my outside grandfather.

“How old is she now?”

“Almost three.”

“So big!”

I was just festively plump.

“This is your Outside Grandmother,” my mother instructed me. Outside because my mother had married into my dad’s family.

“How are you, Outside Ma?”

“Wah, how clever!”

Funny how adults found certain things clever. Carefully peeling gum from the bottom of the plastic airport-lounge chairs and popping it in my mouth wasn’t clever, but repeating four stupid words was.

That day, all my grandparents could do was look – wah, lights at the airport in the daytime were so bright, how did they get them to be so bright? Amazing. And faces were so fat! They had never seen a bunch of more beautiful people in their lives. They took it all in with their wide-open eyes, and ignored the white ghosts floating in their peripheral vision. These people in front of them were the people who mattered, these faces were the faces of the family.