Authors: Hsu-Ming Teo
Behind the Moon (17 page)
In loving anticipation,
Gibbo
From: [email protected]
Date: 2 October 1997
Subject: I don’t understand!?
Dearest Linh,
I got home over two hours ago but I haven’t been able to get to sleep. It’s now three in the morning but I feel I have to write to you.
Linh, I don’t understand what tonight was all about. I had planned it to be something so special and I don’t understand what went wrong. Did I do something wrong? Did you not like the pink tulips I gave you? You have to tell me how to please you! I would do anything to make you happy.
I thought you were happy. I’ve been saving up for weeks to take you somewhere grand. I thought you’d like the restaurant overlooking Circular Quay and the Opera House. I wanted it to be romantic and special for you. For us. You let me hold your hand and kiss you, then you tried to jerk away from me. I understood: you were shy in public. The modesty your cultural background instils in you is just one of the many things I adore about you.
I understand your background; I’ve read the Lonely Planet guide to Vietnam to catch up on the culture bit, and anyway, I’m sort of Asian too. I share your culture but sometimes the Anglo part of me gets carried away. Was I too exuberant in my affection for you publicly? I didn’t mean to embarrass you. But when your heart is overflowing with love like mine, it’s hard to keep it all bottled up inside.
I thought you enjoyed yourself at dinner. I thought you liked your meal. Maybe I didn’t order the right wine for you? I’ll do better next time. I’ll learn more about it, and be as knowledgeable as Stanley, I promise. I’ll do whatever it takes not to embarrass you socially or make you feel uncomfortable in any way.
But if it wasn’t the meal, then what was it? One moment you’re letting me hold your hand and kiss you. Then after dinner you say we have to talk, and you don’t want me holding on to you. I can’t believe you didn’t want me to hold your hand! And then the things you said. I don’t understand. How could you hurt me like that?
Linh, what’s going on? I know you love me. I have to hold on to that knowledge. It’s all I have in my life. You are everything that’s good in my life.
I know what it is. You’re being too noble as usual, thinking only of me and not of yourself. You said that you don’t think of me in a romantic way and that in time I would come to see that you are much too old for me. Dearest, kindest Linh to be so concerned about how I feel! Always putting others’ needs and feelings before your own! But don’t you see, my darling? You don’t have to! I love you with the kind of love that concertinas time and space and crushes all distinctions of age, erases all differences of race, and annihilates all opposition to the inexorable triumph of our love.
I drove you to Bronte and we sat by the beach, and you let me put my head in your lap and weep for the infinite emptiness inside me. I know it’s inside you too. I see it in your sad eyes. Don’t you realise it yet? Together, we have enough love to make each other whole. But you rejected that. You rejected me. Instead, you made me take you home and you said that I must never again tell you that I love you.
You may as well tell me to stop breathing! I love you. I love you. I love you.
And I know you love me. You must love me. With your words you tell me that we can only be friends, but with your eyes you show me that your soul is the other half of mine.
I won’t give up. Perhaps you’re confused right now, but I have enough certainty and clarity of vision for the two of us. I’ll hold on to you no matter what. You will come to see that this is no passing infatuation on my part, but the type of love that comes once in a lifetime. And in the end you will come to me freely and tell me what is in your heart: that you love me too.
Forever yours,
Gibbo
From: [email protected]
Date: 15 October 1997
Subject: PLEASE STOP CALLING ME!
It was a mistake to go out with you. Don’t contact me anymore.
From: [email protected]
Date: 16 October 1997
Subject: CAN’T YOU SEE HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU!
Dearest Linh,
I’m desperate for contact with you. You say I mustn’t call you. All right, I’ll stop for now. But at least email me. I don’t deserve to be treated like this. What’s happening to you? What’s happening to the wonderful, sweet, loving Linh that I know and love? How can you do this to me?
I feel so helpless and despairing. If this is another one of your tests, then I suppose I must just ride it out and hope that your true nature resurfaces. Please, please turn back into the sweet woman I adore.
What else can I do? Don’t you understand? There is NOTHING ELSE in my life but loving you.
Gibbo
From: [email protected]
Date: 26 October 1997
Subject: STOP SENDING ME ROSES EVERY DAY!
I don’t want your bouquets of red roses at 7.15 in the morning. I don’t want your little presents on my doorstep when I get home, or your love letters in my mailbox. I don’t want anything from you. All I want is for you to leave me alone! I don’t want to hurt you, Gibbo, but you must understand that I don’t want you around.
From: [email protected]
Date: 27 October 1997
Subject: Thank you!
Dearest Linh,
You are so sweet to me. You don’t have to assure me that you don’t wish to hurt me. I know that it is not in your generous, loving nature to hurt people. You’re very kind to be concerned, but you needn’t worry that I can’t afford the things I give you. I’ve dropped out of uni and have got myself a job. I’m working in a pub in Homebush and I earn nearly $450 a week! Can you imagine? I’m saving up so that I can take care of you. We’ll be together very soon.
Your devoted
Gibbo
From: [email protected]
Date: 7 November 1997
Subject: You’re scaring me
Don’t keep coming round. I will never open the door to you again. Put it out of your mind and leave me alone.
From: [email protected]
Date: 8 November 1997
Subject: I LOVE YOU!
Dearest, darling Linh,
Why are you doing this to me? Don’t you understand how much I love you? I would never hurt you. I want to take care of you. I love you forever and ever.
Gibbo
From: [email protected]
Date: 15 November 1997
Subject: FUCK OFF!!!
Gibbo, you fat pathetic turd! How dare you stalk my mother! How dare you even think of being in love with her! You’re sick. Just fuck off, do you understand me? I’m only warning you this once. Stay away from her. Contact her again and we’re going to the police. Fuck off or I’ll get her to take out an AVO against you.
Kieu said: ‘You once bore me, you’ve brought me up, a double debt I’ve not repaid one whit.’
Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu
There had been a time when Linh thought of nothing else, asked for nothing else, but survival. Then she had survived, and all she wanted after that was to be reunited with her daughter so that they could live ordinary lives in suburban mundanity.
She was so grateful to the universe at first. She noticed little shocks of beauty all around her as she took her morning walk through the sleeping suburban streets. Brick and weatherboard houses with low eaves hugging their crowns like brown-rimmed hats, a garden splashed with paintdaubs of pink azaleas. Two black crows stooped on a bare branch. Cloud clots in the yawning blue. Vehicle-choked Vietnamese auto-mechanics’ yards adjoining cemeteries of rusting steel and tumbled tyres, the pyramids of car bones piled skywards. Everything she noticed brought her kinetic joy.
Eventually, she got used to it and was no longer surprised. How quickly she then forgot the upheavals of her past and became accustomed to the torpor of the suburbs. Within a few years normality inflated her hopes even as it fuelled her restless dissatisfaction. Motherhood was unfulfilling and fear began to lap the edges of her life. She was determined that never again would she or her daughter be in a position where they had to flee their homes and have their fates determined by the impersonal bureaucracy of government organisations, where answers were rarely forthcoming because nobody seemed to be in charge and no-one wanted to know anything about her as an individual. She was determined never again to be another number which simply made up a statistic. Life had taught her that only the famous or the wealthy were safe from the rigid regulations of bureaucracy. To be safe, she needed to have money, and lots of it. For danger did not arise merely from war, famine, communist upheaval. It was all around her, right here in Middle Australia.
As she burrowed deeply into Australian life, she read the tabloids, watched current affairs programs on television and realised that she lived in a nation beset with fear. Australian life, she saw, was a patchwork of constantly dieting mums, shonky builders, tyrannous bank fees and branch closures, teenage crime and lax laws upheld (or not) by corrupt police. Occasionally the stormy surf of Australian current events was broken by the elation of sporting glory; the crime, corruption and incompetence featured in current affairs programs was interrupted by bedazzled interviews with swimmers and cricketers, or actors who had Made It Big in Hollywood.
But then the undertow of ordinary life sucked you down and the waters closed overhead, and as political parties ebbed and flowed on the beaches of the rich and powerful, the nation drowned in perverted morality tales of insurance scams, corporate takeovers and exorbitant payouts, rabid demutualisation of companies, ruthless shareholder profit-taking, vertiginous executive salaries, mass-scale retrenchments, unemployment figures that refused to diminish and welfare statistics that soared because there were too many single mums and dole bludgers out there who refused to get off their bums and go out and get a job.
Ordinary Australians teetered on the verge of victimhood, clinging on with a death-grip to a nostalgic past when unity of race had ensured equality in the nation, and they cast panic-stricken glances around for someone to blame for all this gut-roiling fear. It was infectious, this deep anxiety that strangers were moving into the neighbourhood and now you had to lock your doors and barricade yourself into your home; that even in the midst of plenty, you hovered over the precipice of poverty.
Linh bought it all. She devoted herself to the pursuit of affluence. She believed she could win her daughter’s love with a bigger TV and a new entertainment system. She joined the ranks of the Aspirational. Then one day she awoke to find herself in possession of a two-bedroom apartment in Flemington, a healthy bank account, an investment property out in Casula, two jobs, a seven-day working week, and not a single person she could really call her friend. Her daughter had already moved up in society and out of the west. Once a week, Tien would emerge from the eastern suburbs for stilted visits with the extended family. They had little to say to each other.
Linh searched the faces of Duong and Ai-Van, Duc and Phi-Phuong, and she discovered they were strangers to her, as she was to them. They had meals with each other several times a week, yet they did not realise how little they knew each other. The proximity and familiarity of each other’s bodies gave rise to the illusion of soul-to-soul closeness, heart-to-heart intimacy. In fact, they pointed proudly to the strength of the Asian family and boasted that their remarkable prosperity arose from the bonds of blood.
The Anglo-Australians were envious and alarmed that so many Vietnamese migrants could afford to buy houses so soon, but they did not understand the extraordinary resilience and resourcefulness of the Asian family! People in the West, her brothers were fond of saying, could be independent individuals and break away from the family if they wanted, because they thought that, as a last resort, they could rely on the government to take care of them. People from the East, on the other hand, realised that few governments could be trusted and, in the end, they had to subordinate their independence and individuality to the will of the family, because their security in life arose from the prosperity of the family as a whole. It was the old story of the sticks: one stick could easily be broken, whereas a bundle of sticks had collective strength and could be used to bludgeon someone over the head.
And that was true enough if you were a stick, unanimated by individual dreams, unhaunted by loneliness, untroubled by the desire not merely to be one stick among many, but to merge your soul with another’s and thereby experience the miracle, the wonder, of being human. Being in love. After a decade of living and thriving in Australia, Linh woke up, wondered what the point of her life was, and yearned for just such a miracle.
What she got instead was a persistent young boy— younger even than her own daughter—who read love into her words and actions when there had only been the vestiges of pity. And perhaps the slightest, most hesitant reaching out as loneliness kissed loneliness. Now look where her quest for love had landed her. She shook aspirins out of a bottle, inhaled slowly and deeply to calm herself, and could not believe she was being stalked by Gibbo.
‘You have to go to the police and report this,’ Tien insisted.
One Sunday afternoon in December, when the air was hazed with the siege of summer smoke from distant bushfires and shadows drooped over listless streets, she visited her mother and found herself with nothing to say or do. She booted up the computer and logged on to her mother’s internet account. When she saw the long list of emails from Gibbo clogging up the inbox she had no scruples about reading them. With growing incredulity, she noted his obsession with her mother.
It was ridiculous. It was laughable. It was pathetic. It was utterly offensive, not just that he was stalking Linh, but that he had the nerve to imagine himself in love with her mother. Her reaction vaulted beyond mere concern for Linh. She felt nauseated at this turn of events and she didn’t fully understand why. In some way, she felt violated. She felt that their friendship—such as it was these days—had been desecrated, that Gibbo had committed an unspeakable crime against her. And layered over that was her ever-present guilt.
She was responsible for this. Gibbo had been her friend and she had introduced him to her mother. Linh would not have met him otherwise. She had not been a good daughter or her mother would have been able to confide this problem to her. Why, half an hour ago they had sat at lunch, politely asking after each other’s week, the silence of the meal broken only by Linh’s occasional exhortation to eat some more, and take some back for Stanley too. She knew next to nothing about her mother’s life. Linh remained a stranger to her, the path to familiarity and understanding barred by the mental list of maternal misdeeds she continued to review at regular intervals.
Guilt and shame made her determined to fix this problem for Linh. She wanted to act decisively to make up for her previous neglect; to show Linh just how strong and capable she now was in this country to which they had fled in confusion and fear. And she wanted to wreak vengeance on Gibbo for this terrible betrayal of their childhood friendship. She would sail in and set all things right.
‘We’ll get the local magistrate to issue an Apprehended Violence Order against Gibbo,’ Tien said briskly. ‘But you must report this to the police first.’
‘You don’t go to the police for this sort of thing. In fact, you shouldn’t go to the police for anything.’
‘Maybe not in Vietnam, but you do here.’
‘Tien, what do I say? Excuse me, constable, but a young man has been sending me a dozen red roses every day and I don’t like it? They will laugh at me! Anyway, I can handle it. It’s not a big deal. I take the flowers to the hospital for the patients.’
‘That’s not the point. He’s stalking you, and you’ve got evidence. You’ve got the emails.’
‘Going to the police is too drastic. Even if they take it seriously.’
‘You’re the one who’s not taking it seriously. Don’t you know how dangerous this can be? He’s a stalker. He’s getting more desperate. His stalking might escalate and he might try to harm you one day.’
Her mother smiled tiredly. ‘I don’t think so. And I’m not going to get poor Gibbo in trouble with the police just because he thinks he’s in love with me at the moment. It will pass. Just give him time.’
‘And what if he gets more obsessed with time? What if the stalking gets worse and your life is in danger? Or do you actually like this? Maybe you’re secretly flattered by his obsession. Maybe you like all the attention.’ Tien looked resentfully at her mother and thought:
all the attention you
never gave me, which you should be giving me now before
I get married. It’s too late. I don’t know why I never learn.
I don’t know why I ever expect anything from you
.
Linh felt the sting of her daughter’s disrespect like a slap in the face. She did not know why her daughter was so difficult. Even if love was grudgingly given, respect was always withheld. ‘I think you should apologise, otherwise you should go. You’re not helping matters at all. What kind of daughter says these things to her mother?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Tien said, but the apology was ungracious. She knew she was in the wrong, but still she felt angry. Her mother never missed a chance to fault her. She left soon after that. She had not been able to take control of the situation and protect her mother after all. She felt like a failure because she had perceived this as an opportunity to reach out to her mother. She had meant to be kind, supportive and mature in the face of this crisis; she’d meant to show her mother that she loved her. Instead, she had become rude and hectoring when her mother hadn’t responded according to the script that was playing out in her head. The habitual pattern of mother–daughter relations was too strong to be so easily overcome. They fell back into the stock roles the family had assigned them: mother as saint, daughter as villain.
Tien determined to try harder the next time. She was an adult now, not a child to throw a temper tantrum because her mother hadn’t done what she wanted. She would return next week to talk calmly and reasonably with Linh. Linh would come to see that Gibbo was indeed a danger to her, and that Tien was responsibly, thoughtfully,
respectfully
, looking out for her rather naïve mother. Linh had to see that Tien was a good daughter who did indeed know
hieu thao
(for, try as she might, she could not shrug off the filial expectations rubbed into her by the family’s love). But Linh fluffed her lines again.
‘Tien, where is your compassion for your friend?’ her mother asked sadly. ‘You and Gibbo have been friends since childhood and you want to ruin his life and bring this shame on Bob and Gillian by going to the police, on top of what Stanley is doing to Gillian by suing her? If you want to help, why don’t you help Gillian by persuading Stanley to drop the lawsuit?’
‘She’s the one who assaulted him. Stan could have been killed or brain damaged. And anyway, Gibbo is not my friend,’ Tien said. ‘Not any longer. No friend of mine would be such a sicko as to go after my mum.’
‘Is that it? Is that the crux of the problem? You’re angry with him not so much for being a stalker, but for falling in love with me.’
‘Don’t talk rubbish. He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t know you.’
‘Of course he doesn’t know me. But neither do you. You made up your mind about what I was. The bad mother at first, and now the foolish mother. Why do you just come here and tell me what to do? Why don’t you ask me what I think, or how I feel about all this? It is because you don’t want to know. You just want to walk in here, do what you think is your duty, solve this problem and get on with your life with a clear conscience.’
It was so like Linh to try to turn the tables on her, to put her in the wrong once again. Tien took a deep breath and reminded herself that she was going to respond in a mature, adult way. ‘Maybe that’s true. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know you. I certainly don’t understand why you’re acting this way. But it’s not just me. It’s you. You don’t allow anybody to know you. I’ve seen how you act with that guy you were going out with briefly. You nod and smile and you say nothing. You don’t tell him what you think and feel. You don’t tell me, or Ong Ngoai, and you also hold back with the rest of the family. So where does that leave you?’
‘Alone,’ Linh said. ‘Just like you. When have you ever spoken your mind to Stan? We’re more alike than you think. Maybe that’s what you’re afraid of.’
Linh turned away from her daughter and walked to the kitchen. After a moment, Tien followed.
‘I don’t want to argue with you over this. Maybe I’m not doing this right, but I really care, Mum. I hate seeing you like this,’ Tien said helplessly as she watched her mother running water into a glass and shaking two charcoal tablets out of a bottle. ‘You thought it was him, didn’t you? When I knocked just now? And now you’re so stressed you’ve got a stomach-ache.’
