The Family Law (19 page)

‘You see,' Mum would say, watching me hobble into the bathroom, my headphones still plugged in. ‘You're doing this to yourself.'

‘That's not true,' I said. ‘Don't you remember what Doctor Mark said? I'm
diseased
.'

As I brushed my teeth and listened to my Walkman, I realised that Mum simply didn't understand the joys of technology. She came from a different era entirely, and from a Malaysian town where they sent telegrams via monkeys; where she came from, feral dogs and homeless children delivered the mail. Hers was a generation that had embraced the television and the telephone and seemed content to leave it at that. In a way, I felt sorry for her.

 

*

 

Years later, when all the children had left home, Mum was left on her own in a house full of technology she didn't know how to use. Old computer hard-drives were stacked up in the study, beige metal slabs useful to her only as paperweights. We feared she would go crazy with loneliness and tried implementing a telephone roster. Each of us would speak to her once a week – five children, one for each weekday – by phone, the only piece of technology with which she was comfortable. Eventually, though, we became lazy. Mum would fall out of the loop, missing out on emails about our lives, and would only find out about our plans at the very last minute.

‘Why does everyone “email” nowadays?' she said. ‘Or this SMS. No one has time to pick up the phone and call their mother? One day, you'll think to yourself: “Oh, maybe I should call Mum! On the telephone like a normal person!” But hello! Jenny is
dead
! Yes! You will have a dead mother. Then how will you feel? Not even knowing your own mother is dead! You will feel so awful, I cannot even imagine. You will
vomit
from guilt. My dead body will stink up the house. That is how dead I will be.
Stinky dead
, because no one calls Mummy.'

We took this as our cue to introduce her to the world of mobile phones, and bought her a simple prepaid Nokia that was cheap to run and easy to use. We were all on the same network, so she could call us for free and vice versa. To our surprise, she took to the new technology easily. ‘Oh, this is all you have to do to make an SMS?' she said, punching in numbers that magically became letters. ‘Even someone with
brain damage
could use this.'

And so, while media commentators discussed the death of the English language at the hands of text-messaging youth, my mother's communication became more creative and avant-garde. Her texts were laced with flurries of capital letters, improvised messes of punctuation, and obsolete German characters like ß. On our birthdays, we would get SMSes recounting our births – ‘
All my discomfort ööö … And painful memories ÖÖÖ
' – the umlauted Os like a line of female mouths screaming in labour. She once sent me an outburst about an unhelpful shop assistant: ‘
Yeap! HE is a very STINgkyt stupid Cunt! L l l,MUM
.'

The Ls were her sign-off. They stood for ‘love.'

 

*

 

The internet was trickier. It had been decades since my mother had used a typewriter, and it took a long time for her to understand the difference between Shift and Caps Lock.

‘And this,' I said, guiding her hand, ‘is a mouse.'

‘Mouse?' she said. She let go of it, then took notes in her exercise book, drawing a cartoon mouse with the Chinese character for ‘mouse' on top. ‘Oh, I see,' she said. ‘Because it has a
tail
! Hello,
mousey
!'

She started petting it, then drew a tail in the notebook.

‘Stop that,' I said. ‘You're getting distracted.'

‘You don't understand! If I don't write it down, I'll never
learn
!'

‘When you're writing stuff down, you're not looking at the
screen
.'

I showed her how the mouse controlled an arrow on the screen.

‘And why do I want this “arrow”?' she asked. ‘What does this arrow do, exactly?'

‘Well,' I said, ‘it points to things.'

Many computer concepts, I soon realised, were pretty abstract. When we checked her email, she would ask confounding questions, Sphinx-like riddles that melted my brain. What
was
the internet? Was Google a part of the internet? What was the difference between Facebook and Google? Was Facebook controlled by the mouse? Does everyone on Facebook use the same mouse? What was the difference between sending an email and being online? Was she online
now
? As someone who used these technologies every day, I didn't know how to answer these questions.

‘So I just
goo-goo
this?' she asked, when we loaded Google.

Goo-goo
, we both knew, was a crude and childish Cantonese term for penis.

‘Yes, Mum, very funny.'

‘
Goo-goo
,' she said again, laughing.

Then, after a while, as we read through her emails, Mum began to slouch.

‘You're slouching,' I said. ‘This is why you have back pain – you slouch.'

At that, she stretched out and started singing.

‘Well, I'm bored now. I'm not in the mood.' She brightened up. ‘I'm going to boil an egg!'

In the kitchen, as she started boiling eggs, she asked me to print out all her emails – every single one.

‘But they're already in your computer,' I said.

‘Well, I can't
read
them on the computer now, can I?'

I went back to the computer and sat down. Now it was my turn to slouch.

 

*

 

Every time I go home to visit Mum, I try to incorporate a computer lesson. We seem to be making modest progress. She might not have time to compose emails herself, but she reads all the news we send her, and I'd like to think she now feels more included in our lives. Miraculously, she now prefers SMSes to phone calls for simple messages. The next step is to have her use Skype for face-to-face video chats.

During one session, I tried to show her how simple it was to video-chat with my sister Tammy, who was
100
kilometres away. Mum took careful notes the whole time I was setting up and, once we were online, took photos of the monitor, telling Tammy to smile. When we started to experience some audio feedback, I strapped a pair of headphones on her.

‘Don't these things make you go deaf?' she asked. ‘I remember what your Walkman did to you. Now it's that iPod.'

‘I'm pretty sure you'll survive,' I said.

After about a minute with the headphones, she became flus-tered. ‘My ears are hot,' she said to Tammy, before turning to me. ‘It feels like something bit them, like some
insect
. Are your ears hot? Mine are
very hot
.' Then she started rubbing her lower back.

At precisely
4
.
30
p.m., Mum terminated the chat session.
The Bold & The Beautiful
was on, a show she referred to as
Staring,
Staring
. (‘See,' she'd explain, ‘the whole episode, they just keep talking and staring at each other.
Staring, Staring
; so much staring.')

‘So we're just giving up on the computer lesson, then?'

‘I'm not really in the mood anymore,' she said. ‘My back hurts; my ears are hot. I've been sitting down too much. And look:
Staring, Staring
is starting.'

As we sat down in front of the television, Mum leaned back against her latest purchase: an electronic massage device for her sore back, an orange latex cushion with rotating metal hands inside. When she switched it on, the hands groped out, pressing against the latex skin. It looked to me like a foetus trying to claw its way out of the womb. Hours passed. We swapped seats so I could give the massage chair a go. After we'd watched the news, two current-affairs programs and
Dancing with the Stars
, it was nearly time to go to bed. She continued to watch TV until she passed out, and I worked on my laptop until the battery died, both of us massaging our poor, atrophied muscles with the latest in domestic engineering. We hadn't done anything all day but stare at boxes.

Oceans Apart

My father doesn't believe in holidays. It's difficult to recall a time when the guy didn't work a fourteen-hour shift each day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. By New Year's Eve, he can look back and see nothing but days joined together by shifts, months threaded together by weeks, his entire waking life one giant, unending stretch of work.

It's my idea of hell. I've read that working without a break technically constitutes torture. But to my dad, the reasons why other people stop working seem strange and perhaps even lazy. He's never stopped to commemorate the birth of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the birth of the nation or the death of the Anzacs. He might sit through his own birthday with us, but it's only to humour us for an hour before he drives off to do prep in the restaurant.

Even now, he's like a machine: unstoppable, robotic, all-engines-go. What would be an unbearably relentless rhythm for normal people is his default factory-setting. After years working alongside him in his restaurants, I'd be hard-pressed to recall a time when he even went on a toilet break. It's as though he doesn't pass waste, but stores it economically somewhere on his body, to be dumped at a more convenient time. His body seems designed to operate with a cruel, business-like efficiency.

When it comes to birthdays and Christmases, what do you buy someone like that? Someone who doesn't have – or believe in – free time? You can't buy things to cater to his hobbies; he doesn't have any. Over the years, buying gifts for Dad nearly always ended in tears or in panic attacks at suburban shopping malls. He complicated things further by actively discouraging us from buying him presents, sometimes expressing his disgust so forcefully that it ruined Christmas. He's the father, he'd say. He was supposed to provide for
us
.

On Christmas Day, when it came his turn to open a present, he'd always draw out the process by meticulously cutting the sticky tape with a small dagger-like knife in monk-like silence.

Once the gift was revealed, there were no expressions of delight, no thank-yous or hugs. Instead, he'd slowly scan the item with a completely neutral look on his face, turning it over in his hands like an antique dealer who knew he'd been handed a counterfeit. Eventually he'd find what he'd been looking for.

‘See this?' he'd say. He'd point to a microscopic label on the side, showing it to us like a warning. ‘
Made in China.
No good.'

Whoever had given him the present would look devastated, and the rest of us would start to argue. ‘That's not fair,' we'd say. ‘
You're
made in China.' It never made any difference. We were stupid to have wasted money on him like this, and he'd ask us to immediately retrieve the receipt so we could claim back the cash and buy something for ourselves – something practical, like a leather watch or an Akubra hat; something made in Australia. These suggestions always had the same effect: we'd run to our rooms, howling and slamming our doors.

I began to compile lists of potential gifts for him in advance, presents that could potentially, conceivably work: olive-leaf extract as a health tonic; a wind-up torch for emergencies; paw-paw ointment for burns inflicted at the restaurant. Individually, these small items made sense, but I'd assemble them side by side in a makeshift ‘hamper' – really a disused shoebox packed with cellophane – only to realise they looked ridiculous alongside each other, like a cobbled-together prize in a badly planned church raffle. More recently, I made another list, of all the things I knew about my father, hoping it would provide clues as to what to buy. The list depressed me:

1
. Dad likes eating fruit.

2
. Dad has mild diabetes.

3
. Dad works a lot.

4
. Dad watches Chinese soap operas.

5
. Dad is losing his hair and I will too.

6
. Dad reads the newspaper every day.

7
. [
blank
]
8
. Dad likes eating fruit.

That year, I gave up and handed over a thick ream of Instant Scratch-Its for his birthday. As much as this seemed like a legitimate birthday present, we both silently acknowledged that it was also a gesture of defeat. ‘Happy birthday,' I said glumly. ‘Enjoy the scratching.'

When the tables were turned and Dad had to give the kids presents, it was less of a challenge than you'd expect. Whether it was a birthday, a wedding or a marriage, a lot of Chinese parents took the same approach to gift-giving, one shared by Mafia hitmen and pirates: just hand over thick wads of cash. As a kid, I loved the tradition and pageantry of it, but that changed when I became a teenager and felt no one understood me, least of all my father. I began to regard this open slather of cash as coarse and insulting. Couldn't he put in some effort to find out what I actually liked? Cash was something you gave to employees, maids and prostitutes, not your children. If my father and I were honest with ourselves, we'd realise that gifts weren't just gifts, but a test of how well you knew a person. It was starting to feel as though we'd done nothing over the years but fail, fail, fail.

 

*

 

Bear with me while we skip back a decade or five and travel through time and space to investigate another father–son relationship, this one set in China. My dad and his own father only saw each other once in their entire lives, when Dad was around twelve. Give him any sympathy about the fact now, and he'll make a little dismissive noise.

‘Come on,' Dad says. ‘It's not that sad. Sure, I never saw my dad growing up, but what are you going to do?
Cry
about it?' Which is, of course, exactly what I would have done.