The Family Law (20 page)

Just after my grandfather got my grandmother pregnant, he moved out of their small village on the outskirts of Canton to work in San Francisco. The contrast between the two places couldn't have been greater: one was a robust modern city undergoing a blooming post-war renaissance; the other was a village with no sanitation. Back in my grandparents' village, human shit was collected every few days by government workers and pooled as a slurry-like fertiliser for edible crops. I would have left too.

My grandfather reasoned with his wife. ‘I'll be earning American dollars over there,' he said, ‘so you'll never need to worry about money to raise our son.'

Over in the US, my grandfather soon found work as the head of staff at the local Mandarin Club – a sort of gentlemen's club for Chinese-speakers and Sinophiles – and would wire American dollars back to his wife and the son he'd never met. Back in China, Dad heard only the vaguest stories about his father, not enough to cement an image in his mind: his father was generous; his father worked hard; his father always thought about his family; his father was good. Those were the only things he knew.

Things in San Francisco became more dour. Lonely and guilt-ridden, my grandfather drank in the evenings after hearing stories from relatives about his wife and boy back home. ‘Back in China,' they'd tell him, ‘your kid's as skinny as a rake. What are they eating down there? Tumbleweeds? Thistles?' My Dad was just a runt of a kid and there wasn't any problem, but comments like these were enough to make a father fret.

When Dad and his mum moved to Hong Kong, my grandfather started doing some depressing calculations. A one-way trip from San Francisco to Hong Kong would take weeks by boat, and a tonne of savings. Once he got there, he'd have to stay and not look back to make it worth the time and money. But this wasn't his main worry: the idea of meeting his son for the first time terrified him. How do you say hello to a son you've never met? He thought he'd like to get him something for the occasion – a stuffed animal, a toy – but would he be too old for that sort of thing now? What animals did he like, anyway?
Would he even
know who he was?
Stewing over these questions kept him up at night, and he'd go to work the next day feeling ragged. After work every night, he'd drink, wire more money to my grandmother, douse the night with whisky and fumigate his head with cigar smoke, until he finally passed out.

 

*

 

To sail from San Francisco to Hong Kong takes roughly a month. Look at a world map, and you'll see the space between the two points is a massive expanse of blue – one of the largest stretches of water on the globe – with hardly any land to interrupt the endlessness of it all. There's just water – lots of water. If you're lucky, you might pass a Hawaiian island, but of all the cross-oceanic journeys you can take, it's perhaps the most boring. Every waking day looks exactly like the last, and you begin to question whether the ship is moving at all. And you have a lot of time to think. On those nights sailing from America to Asia, my grandfather would have insomnia and would drink whisky to lull himself into unconsciousness, leaving him feeling more anxious and seasick the next morning.

When he arrived at the Hong Kong apartment where his son and wife lived, he took a moment outside the door before knocking. He was sweating a lot, had been nursing a headache all day, and the long ocean voyage had disoriented the hell out of him.

With a sinking feeling, he realised he'd forgotten to buy his kid a present.
Why hadn't he bought anything?
But before he could knock, the doors flew open and a cacophony of voices took over.

‘You're here, you're here—'

‘Come inside, yes!'

‘Take
off
that coat! Such a
beautiful
coat but it's so
hot
—'

‘The journey by boat must have taken you
so
long! To think—' ‘Don't be silly, take a seat, take a
seat
!'

Hands were everywhere, faces smashed into his, and he didn't know where to look. In front of him was the wife he hadn't seen in a decade. Over there: his sister-in-law and whip-smart niece. And in the middle of them all was a shy, pigeon-toed twelve-year-old, scrawny as hell with a head like a bobble.

‘Well, look at you,' he said to his son. ‘
Ah Leung
. Do you know who I am?'

‘Hello,
Ba-Ba
,' his son replied quietly. ‘I'm pleased to meet you after all this time.'

My grandfather laughed at the politeness of his kid, and everyone else joined in. ‘My son,' he said. ‘What a nice guy!' Even though he was a little overweight, he leaned over and picked up his son effortlessly, gave him a squeeze and marvelled at how light he was – almost like a sack of hollow bones.

Is it possible to describe what happened next without sounding like a liar? Because what took place after this is the stuff of the strangest fiction, a plot contrivance so unrealistic it would seem manipulative to include it, if it hadn't actually happened. But it did happen: thirty minutes later, my grandfather was dead. One moment he was chatting and bouncing my father on his knee; the next he was putting his hands to his forehead, saying a polite ‘Excuse me,' before collapsing on the floor, sprawled across the apartment tiles.

The women started screaming and flocked around him, bouncing from foot to foot and wringing their hands.

‘What's happening, what's
happening
?'

One of the men checked for a pulse – ‘
Call an ambulance!
' – while another relative slapped him in the face, calling out his name.

‘Can you hear me?
CAN YOU HEAR ME?'

My bug-eyed dad, just a kid, stood in the background perfectly still, his mouth forming a stunned little O.

‘Okay, okay!' Dad's cousin said. ‘Calm down! Ring the ambulance, yes, but help me check his goddamned pockets first!'

In emergencies, people tend to respond to clear directions, and this situation wasn't any different. Everyone helped remove my grandfather's American coat and shirt, and they went through his pockets and felt under his trousers. What they were looking for was money: traveller's cheques, cash – anything the ambulance officers might soon enough steal. On his waist they found a travel belt containing tidy stacks of cash, in both American and Hong Kong currency. His body was covered in the stuff.

Things happened quickly after that: the ambulance hauling him away to the hospital, the confirmation of death, the weird funeral days later, everyone more confused than mournful, melancholy rather than sad, the way people are when they bury someone they haven't seen in over a decade. Afterwards, the family used the money. They put half of it into the bank, invested the rest in enough apartments to house seven tenants, and started collecting rent. In the end, my grandfather had been right about working in San Francisco. His family would never have to worry about money.

‘He came back, and I think he was too happy,' Dad says now. ‘Maybe over-happy. It was like his brain – it was bleeding.' He wasn't drunk when they met, Dad clarifies. He was just overexcited. Sometimes, he says, you just get so excited your head explodes, you know?
Ka-boom
: just like that.

 

*

 

After years of searching for gifts suitable for Dad, I think I've made a breakthrough. Ever since he and my mother divorced, the signs have been there. There is a universal image associated with single fathers the world over: decaying Y-fronts hanging on the line, handwashed in substances other than laundry detergent. (In Dad's case, that substance was Dettol.) His underpants looked as though a plague of locusts had devoured them. The material was so threadbare that to use it as a rag – which he eventually did – seemed an insult; an insult to rags.

Still, buying underwear was difficult. Every pair of jocks or panties, no matter what the brand, originates from China. You can have as many merino sheep, kangaroos, Akubra hats, Australian flags or Pat Rafters on the packaging as you like, but the fact remains: those garments come from the vast, mystic land of the Orient. They're not made by hardened sheep farmers and their weather-beaten wives, but by Chinese women and children who don't know who Pat Rafter is and have no need for hats because they work and sleep in factories, where they debate whether the giant hopping rat on the label would be any good for food. In the end, I resorted to mail-order briefs.

On his sixtieth birthday, when he opened the ethically produced, organically grown, sustainably managed American underwear I had bought him online, something strange happened. He smiled, and even commented on the bright colours I'd chosen: pine-forest green, bruised-face purple, baby-turd mustard. For a moment, I thought we were going to have a genuine father–son moment. But instead he leapt up, instructing us all to wait while he got something from his bedroom-office. When he returned, he was carrying five red envelopes, one for each child, each with a thick wad of cash inside. We started protesting. What was he doing, giving us money? It was his birthday, not ours.

‘But it's a special occasion, isn't it?' he said. ‘And you bought me presents, so these are presents for you!'

We tried to explain that wasn't how it worked, but he looked so happy – it felt mean-spirited to argue with him. ‘Thanks, Dad,' we said in unison, and we kissed him. Then Dad dusted his hands and announced he needed to go to work. As usual, no cake, no ceremony – no need.

We drove away from Dad's place in silence, until finally someone spoke.

‘Sometimes I get the feeling Dad doesn't understand the concept of presents.'

‘Yeah,' Michelle said. ‘Why did Dad give us money? It's
his
birthday.'

‘Every time he does something like this,' Tammy added, ‘I feel weird and guilty.'

As we drove on in silence, I started compiling a new list in my mind. This one was of all my preconceptions about work and family. I'd always thought of absent parents as negligent, but perhaps for some parents, working so hard that you never saw your family was a weird sign of love. Maybe knowing nothing about your children could be a strange sign of affection. Or maybe not. After we parked the car, we tore open our red envelopes and started counting the money inside, comparing notes on what we'd buy with it from the shopping centre: clothes and kitchen appliances; gadgets and homewares – all of them probably made in China.

Amongst the Living Dead

For as long as I can remember, I've thought about my mother's death on a daily basis. This wouldn't be such a strange exercise if she were actually dead, but the thing is, my mother's alive – perhaps aggressively so. For her entire life, her good health has defied a lifestyle both lacking in exercise and revolving around dietary habits like eating butter in quantities usually associated with cheese. She's got the heart of an ox and the skin of a cosmetics model; she's a woman in her fifties who still gets checked for ID. Still, despite her rude health, some strange force has always compelled her to remind her children of her imminent death.

‘Mum,' you might say, ‘I need some space.'

‘Well, you'll have all the space you need,' she'll say, ‘when I'm
dead
.'

Or: ‘Mum, I'm not going to buy this today – I can't afford it.'

‘Buy it,' she'll say. ‘You'll have all the money you need – when I'm
dead
.'

She sees her own death everywhere: a loose showerhead, a shoe without grip, an unlocked car door, a taxi driver with a weird look about him. These macabre what-if scenarios aren't limited to her own fate. In her eyes, death looms over us too, and we were taught to see it everywhere. As kids, Mum would pull us to her chest tightly every time we crossed the road for milk (we could get mowed down by a truck), or squeeze us close before we drove off to swimming lessons (all it takes is a shallow bath for a child to drown). When one of us would leave for school camp, she'd weep openly after our departure like a Mediterranean widow, because she knew – just knew – we'd be coming home in a body bag, having been torn limb from limb by a wild, rabies-infected beast thirsty for child-blood. It made for anxious formative years, and made us repeat the same question in our minds, over and over again:
Do you know something we don't?

Maybe she did. She'd experienced deaths in her own family, and we hadn't. And because Mum watched the news voraciously, she'd come to the grim conclusion that the Sunshine Coast was the nation's capital for missing and dead children. Even now, there's something about the region's terrain, its combination of coastline, mountains, hinterland and bush, that seems conducive to unseen phantoms, killers and boogiemen on the prowl for kids. The most notorious case took place when I was five, when a twelve-year-old schoolgirl called Sian – a friend of my cousin's – was abducted, raped, tortured and murdered by a psychotic married couple obsessed with virgins. Despite being so young, I remember the case vividly, and one chilling detail has always stood out in my mind: that they pulled out the girl's fingernails before they killed her. There were also the cases of the Kenil-worth babysitter killer, the lesbian vampire killers and poor Daniel Morcombe, a kid abducted while waiting for a bus – he was going to buy Christmas presents – and never seen again. In the months that followed, houses throughout the state left their front lights on for Daniel as a gesture of sympathy to the grieving family. Where we grew up, awful things happened – still happen – to children, all the time.

 

*

 

There were two times in particular when Mum was convinced I was dead. Both involved my brother Andrew, and occurred before the advent of mobile phones.

Our school, a large campus, had been built in the middle of a rainforest, a shortsighted man-made intrusion into nature's promiscuous growth. The place was like a jungle; the rainforest would have reclaimed the school grounds in weeks if the gardeners had let it. It was as if the campus was designed to eat children: no one would ever find a lost child in there. If you were lucky, maybe the thick, tentacled forest would spit out a child-sized skeleton a few weeks later, just to give you some closure.