Unpolished Gem (12 page)

“You know, good young men are not sneaky and they respect parents,” my father told me, standing in the doorway of my bedroom. But fifteen-year-olds were boys, not young men; there were many things they did not know. My brother did not know. Vincent did not know. Cousin Andrew did not know. Then how was it that I knew perfectly well the guilt and the agony and anticipated it in advance? From where did I learn this guilt-laden look over the shoulder?

During my two weeks of torment, I doubted the boy had any idea about the effect of his careless phone call, that it would annihilate all the days of my term break and leave me skulking in my room. “Your father can’t even take you out to work at the shop,” complained my mother “what with that expression on your face looking as if you were freshly dug out of the morgue!”

To raise a girl, I realised, you’d need gallons of Social Conditioner with added Spirit Deflator. Rub onto every limb until limp, put the child into a chair and wait until she sets. When appendages harden, you know you have a perfect young woman – so still and silent and sedate that you could wrap your precious one up in cotton wool and put her in a cabinet. Ah, look at the darling geisha behind glass.

*

“Love sensibly,” was my grandmother’s advice to me before she died.

Yet she of all people would have realised that passion cannot be experienced sensibly – and it was her impassioned fight for peasant rights that had landed her in trouble in China when she was young. Her impoverished family had sent their daughter to get an education at Chaozhou Women Teacher’s College, and after learning about Marx and the revolution of the masses she wrote articles for newspapers about land rights and landlord abuses. She really was the princess of the proletariat, and because they had no money, her currency was words, the exchange rate measured in truth.

But too much truth can land one in deep trouble, especially if those in power only like the
idea
of the starving peasants. The idea was good political ammunition, but the reality was something else altogether. These peasants were the disenfranchised and disempowered in China, wrote my grandmother, the valuable but suffering
real
people. Help us, she wrote. Help. Us.

Get lost, they told her, get lost or we will get you.

So I imagine my grandmother Huyen Thai as a young woman arriving in Cambodia with her brother. It is a familiar story – the revolutionary fleeing a homeland that is now hunting her down. She would never see her beloved Long Mountain again. She would never again see her home village, her parents or the women teachers’ college for which they sacrificed so much to send her to. What she saw now was the heat, the colour and the crowd of a strange city with a stranger name. The revolution, it appeared, was only just beginning and now she was so far away from it all, she could not participate in it, she could not see it, she could not even write about it. So she found herself a job as a schoolteacher at the DongHua Chinese school. It was there that she met my grandfather.

Who would have thought that the old teacher and the young girl fresh off the boat from Long Mountain would become such kindred spirits? Who would have thought that they would share a mindset? But they did. My grandfather must have thought that there was something extraordinary about the young woman who drew chalk circles on the concrete and made children stand in them instead of using the ruler for discipline like everyone else. And my grandmother must have seen something in my grandfather, the unsmiling solemn man with a Mao Ze Dong mole on his chin. She must have been assailed by some strange disease, some affliction that women of my family continued to speak about behind her back, even after her death. When they spoke of it, it was always in hushed, incredulous tones – that someone who had made rational decisions all her life would go a bit ding-dong and decide to pursue a man more than ten years her senior who already had a wife and children. It was a revelation that brought secret consolation to legions of suffering daughters-in-law. “Did you know that your grandmother had to carry tea to your grandfather’s first wife?”

Diseased with love, they called it, those who watched like hawks to note any departure from sense. They said things like, “Woe and wah, she is diseased with him very deeply,” as if the two people were rotted by love, and already melding into one contagious sticky miasma. It was a terminal illness.

*

Deep in my emotional quagmire, I was sitting hunched over my desk. I had been like this for more than a week, a listless sad-sack, feet tucked under the chair and head whammy on the tabletop, quivering like agar-agar. I heard the doorbell ring, but I refused to move. I could hear my mother’s thumping footsteps at the front door, and the squeal of the hinges of the iron-lace security door. “Aiyah! Sister! How good to see you!” she exclaimed, and I knew it was not one of her own sisters come to visit. “Come in! Come in! Sit down! Sit down!” Fragments of conversation drifted in to me, but I was too tired to notice. I would be glad when all this was over, I thought, when I could get back to school again and immerse myself in homework. I would be glad when I did not need to think about whether the next phone call would induce a new round of interrogation. Dressed in old tracksuit pants and a holey brown jumper, my socks pulled over my pants up to my knees, I was too embarrassed to go out to face anybody.

Suddenly, a rotund woman appeared in the doorway of our room. I wanted to acknowledge her only by blinking. Any other movement took too much energy. Funny, but people looked small sideways. In fact, I could make her disappear entirely by squeezing my eyes into smaller and smaller slits. My mother was standing behind her. “This is my daughter,” she said to the woman. Then she turned to me. “Agheare,” she said, “this is Auntie Ah BuKien.”

“Wah! So grown-up now!” the woman exclaimed. I managed to lift my head up off the table, pretending that too much study had made my brain heavy.

“Do you remember me?” I hadn’t the faintest clue who she was, and didn’t know whether to lie or tell the truth, so I smiled, because I knew that a smile was always the right answer for a girl.

“I knew you when you were little, and look at you now!” she exclaimed.

And look she did. In fact, she was
really
watching me. She didn’t see the ugliness, she didn’t see the lack of energy, she didn’t see the deflated spirit, and of course she refused to see that I had been stuck at home for two weeks sedated by a handful of
Reader’s Digest
s and dreary
Dolly
fiction. What she saw was a quiet little seated saint.

“Agheare is so good, she stays at home and studies,” said Ah BuKien, “and wah, she has such a pretty little nose.”

M
Y mother and father still call each other “old man” and “old woman”. My mother got her title first. When she was thirteen, one day she was waiting at the corner of the street in Phnom Penh with all the other little factory girls for the rain to stop so they could walk home. My father felt sorry for them and picked them all up in his factory van. As she got in the van, my mother almost slipped on the first step because of her wet shoe soles. “Watch your step eh, old lady,” my father said, steadying her.

“I never thought I would end up with your father,” my mother told me. “I can still remember the day of his engagement, because that day I was working at the factory. I don’t think he remembered me much, because I was just a little kid.” She was only thirteen then, and working at my grandmother’s plastic-bag factory. He was in his twenties and would sometimes come in to check up on the workers.

One day, however, barely anyone came down to check because my father was getting engaged to a woman named Sokem. The marriage had been arranged by my grandfather. It was also a happy day for my mother, because after work my grandmother summoned her upstairs, where she was given an entire container of roast pork to take home to her family.

The previous year, when all the Chinese schools were closed down, my mother had loitered with a gang of twelve-year-olds who haunted wealthier districts and let the air out of car tyres. She also went into an alleyway to try her first and last drag of a cigarette, and later, when her brother bought a motorbike, she “borrowed” it for rides when he was out.

My father had a distinctly different childhood – he studied French and classical guitar, went to the countryside to catch pet puppies, slid down the wooden banisters of the stairs in his triple-storey factory-house, swam in the river, climbed palm trees four times his height and practised acupuncture on volunteer patients after a two-week course in China.

But then Pol Pot’s army swarmed into Phnom Penh like angry black ants and cleared the stage. My mother and her family escaped to Vietnam, while my father and his family were sent to the Killing Fields.

When they met again, it was more than half a decade later. She was selling material in the market-place in Saigon. She would wake up at four in the morning to go on that long, long walk to the village to buy fabric. When she arrived at the market, she would set up her stall and lay the pieces of material on the table. She learned slowly how to count in Vietnamese:
how to discern whether a customer was going to buy a piece of material, and how to bargain a buyer down.

During the war the women worked, while the men seemed to fade into insignificance. Women were in the market-place selling things and buying things. Women cooked at home, set up stalls and smacked their kids. Their husbands might have rode their bicycles to pick them up after work, or sat by their wives at the stall counting the money, but they seemed the tack-on helpers. My Outside Ma sold rice-cakes. My mother and Aunt Ly sold cloth. Aunt Bek worked cleaning houses, and my eldest uncle sold movie tickets. Anyone who could work in the family worked, and they pooled their money to live from day to day.

“Four years in Cambodia under Pol Pot,” my mother told me, “and your father emerged looking like a brown skeleton.” At first, my mother didn’t recognise him at all. She and my Aunt Ly had sold their material and were sitting around eating noodles. Ly suddenly pointed past my mother’s ear and exclaimed, “Oy, isn’t that Little Aunt?”

Even though they had left the plastic-bag factory a long time ago, the respectful name Little Aunt still stuck when they talked about my Aunt Que. But the skinny girl Ly was directing her finger at was so thin and scruffy! How could it possibly be Que with the hair once so shiny that it had matched her school shoes?

“Ay, Little Aunt!” Ly called.

The young woman turned around and saw my mother and her younger sister. She looked at them both for a very long while, as if trying to match childhood faces to unfamiliar new grown-up figures. “Ah Ly!” she mouthed in astonishment, “Ah Kien! Wah, so you are in Vietnam! What about the rest of your family?” After Ah Pot’s revolution, people from the Land of the Golden Tower no longer greeted each other with “Have you eaten yet?” No, now it was “Who is left in your family?”

“Our family is all here in Vietnam!” Ly proclaimed. “What about Old Auntie?”

“My mother is here too,” said Que.

“Wah, that is just too good, too good!”

“And my brother is just over there!” In the middle of the market-place, she suddenly bolted off, yelling, “Brother, Brother! Guess who I found? You will never guess who is here!” She came back dragging some dumbfounded young man by the arm. When my mother looked at him, it made her think about how strange life was, that she and my Aunt Ly were here eating noodles and seeing their former bosses, all skin and bones, wide-eyed and bewildered like village folk having lost all their crops.

When my father saw my mother, he could not believe she was the same scrawny thirteen-year old operating the plastic-bag cutter. She was now twenty.

“Hey, you’ve grown up, Old Lady,” he said to her, with a smile that almost split his face in half.

Even though surviving was what they were doing in Vietnam, my mother and father began to “walk together”. Not alone, of course. Once my father went to the goldsmith and came back with a silver bracelet each for my mother and Aunt Ly. When Outside Ma found out, she exclaimed, “You be careful of this young man! A bracelet for each one of you! How very strange! You be careful that he is not one of those types of men who chase after two women at the same time!” But my mother knew the truth – she knew that my father really liked her but was too shy to make it clear. So he bought things for Ly too, because when they went out Ly was always trailing behind. My mother would ride on the back of my father’s bicycle and they would try to lose her. The more agitated Ly became, the more fun they had.

Meanwhile, on the other side my grandmother was scared to death that my father liked Ly. Every time Ly came over to visit, my grandmother would give her the itchy eyeball glare. Although Ly had her charms, all my grandmother could see was that she couldn’t sit still and wore bright yellow stilettos in the strappy, ankle-snapping style of the era. “Kuan’s mother doesn’t like me,” Ly told my mother matter-of-factly. It didn’t bother her much.

“If you didn’t dress like such a shiny red
Ung Bao
package, maybe she would stop it,” my ma suggested helpfully.