The Family Law (3 page)

Dad quickly turned a corner, applied the brakes and clambered out of the car. At that moment, Mum felt a wave of calm wash over her.
We have arrived at the hospital
.
Everything will be
okay
. Her breathing slowed; her heartbeat resettled. Then, after staring at the quiet evening sky for a while, she began to fret. Why was it so silent? And where had her husband gone? Where were the nurses? Just then, her mother-in-law's head poked through the rear window and hovered above her, like a hallucination.

‘
Ah-Jun
,' my grandmother said, still wearing her work apron. ‘Are you in pain?'

She connected the dots later: instead of arriving at the hospital, they'd parked at my dad's restaurant. Hungry, he'd sped to work to grab some leftover rice for dinner. The delay meant that by the time they got to hospital, Mum was already crowning. Nurses swarmed around, almost skipping, and cried out to her in sing-song voices. ‘Jen-
ny
!' they trilled. ‘We won't have time to shave your va-
gi-na
!' As my mother huffed her way through my labour, all she could think about was the various ways she could kill my father.

Their fighting continued and crescendoed right through to
1986
, when Mum was pregnant again. When she was due for a standard check-up and scan, Dad stayed in the car while Mum gathered up her belly and walked to the waiting room, tiptoeing on legs tied up like Christmas hams in maternity tights. It was meant to be a quick affair, a thirty-minute check-up at most, but waiting-room dramas turned it into an exercise in tedium that took over an hour. My father was livid.

‘Thirty minutes!' he said when she finally emerged, shaking his head and starting the engine. ‘You said it would take thirty minutes. Do you even have a concept of what thirty minutes is?'

They drove and argued; argued and drove. When the lights turned red, Mum got out of the car and slammed the door. To her surprise, Dad called her bluff and sped off when the lights turned green. No U-turn; no pleas to get back in. He was gone, on his way to work. To get home, she would need to navigate a course of pathways, parks and bridges so narrow that passing trucks would create gusts of wind so great they threatened to lift her – a heavily pregnant woman – off her feet. By the time she got home, she was out of breath and ready to give birth. The nurses had been right: walking helped the process a lot.

Some days later, while she was cradling Tammy in hospital, her gynaecologist – the affable and bizarrely named Doctor Dick – sat beside her. ‘Jenny, you can count as well as I can,' he said. ‘You're thirty-two now, but this baby is number four. Physically, your body's probably had enough. You should think about tying your tubes.' She was nearly won over by the concept, but balked at the idea of going under general anaesthetic again. And because it never occurred to her to ask Dad for a vasectomy, she was pregnant again three years later with Michelle.

After Michelle was born, Mum was too exhausted to open her eyes, but could hear Dad and his mother in the room, murmuring softly to each other. It took a while before she realised that Dad was consoling his mother. But what about?
Had something gone
wrong with the baby?

‘
Leui-jae doh hoh
,' Dad was telling his mother in Cantonese.
Girls are fine enough too
. He said this to console my grandmother, who was hoping for a son, but Mum took it personally. After giving birth to five children, she felt like someone had finally come clean and summed up her role in life: that as a woman, she wasn't anything special, just adequate enough.
Leui-jae doh hoh.
By the time she opened her eyes, my father and grandmother had gone, and everything in her line of vision was streaky and blurred. She began to sob, snotty and miserable.

In the end, Mum reluctantly went under and got those tubes tied. She left the hospital feeling numb, and barely acknowledged Dad's presence as he opened the car door for her. As he drove, she looked at her new baby, who slept inside the rented car capsule. Sleeping and quiet, Michelle looked like one of the plastic babies Mum had seen in toy shops, all perfect skin with poked-out lips like she was about to kiss you. When the car hit a bump, Michelle woke up, sleepy-eyed and dough-faced. Mum laughed to herself: she'd almost forgotten how cute babies were. It wasn't much, but it was enough.

 

*

 

When all five kids spend time with Mum nowadays, we slip into childhood habits. We take long naps in the day, shop or swim in the afternoon, then gross each other out over the dinner table with stories that involve poo or sanitary pads. Lately, for kicks, we've started a new tradition of showing each other foul videos we've found on the internet. I'd already shown everyone the video with the two girls and the cup, as well as the one with the cyst being popped open. This new one began with a sombre warning: ‘This video contains graphic scenes of an elephant birth.'

We all watched with hands over our mouths as a pregnant elephant started pacing in her enclosure, stretching her body, her trunk extended horizontally into a silent scream.

‘Aw,' Mum said affectionately, her heart clearly going out to her. ‘The poor thing's in pain; look at its mouth all open.'

Then out of nowhere, a gooey and mucus-covered sac started to drop out of the elephant's rear, droopy and slimy, like something had prolapsed.

‘What,' Tammy asked, staring, ‘is
that
?'

The sac kept on extending and stretching out of the elephant – ‘Oh
god
, oh
god
,' Michelle said – before slipping out of the mother in one quick, slithery movement and exploding on the floor like a dropped water balloon. Blood and amniotic fluid went everywhere, and the mother elephant daintily lifted her leg as a waterfall of liquid drained out and onto the ground.

Everyone screamed.

‘Oh
gross
!' Candy screamed. ‘That's
disgusting
.'

While the rest of us made vomiting noises, Mum nodded in solidarity.

‘Do you still want to have children?' she said, feeling vindicated. ‘That happened to me
five
times.'

We all looked at her.

‘You're not an elephant, Mum.'

She put her palms up, frustrated.

‘What-
ever
,' she said, rolling her eyes. Then she started telling us those familiar stories of old Chinese superstitions: how she'd been quarantined after her miscarriage, prevented from petting animals, denied being photographed while pregnant. Back in China, she went on, aggrieved mothers would beat themselves between their legs whenever their children misbehaved, slapping their vaginas and moaning horribly until they bruised themselves. It was an elaborate public display of regret, signalling that they wished they'd never had children.

We stared at her, silent and wincing.

‘That,' I said eventually, ‘is a hideous story.'

‘Why are you telling us this?' Andrew asked.

‘Well, I just wanted you to know I've never done that,' she said. ‘Never even thought about it, even when you've misbehaved or caused me pain.'

‘Right,' I said. ‘Well that's reassuring.'

And in so many ways, it was.

*

A few days after this conversation, my mother phoned me. ‘Just in case you write about this,' she said, ‘I wasn't referring to my vagina. My vagina is fine. Write that down: my mother's vagina is fine. In fact, my vagina hasn't been touched in so long, it has sealed back up.'

The Family Business

In Hollywood, they have these celebrity tours where the general public are guided from mansion to mansion. The point is to ogle. Look: this is where Oscar-winning actress X lives on summer vacation. Over here: a bungalow where Emmy-nominated actor Y was shot dead in
1989
. If you're adventurous and fit, you can buy a map and do it by foot – a pair of binoculars around your neck, an autograph book on hand, just in case you're lucky and encounter a celebrity caught out on bin day. Otherwise, you can pay a fee for shuttle buses and buggies to pick you up and zoom you from Affleck to Damon, Spielberg to Streisand.

Similarly, if I picked you up in a car and drove you around the Sunshine Coast, we could make a little tour ourselves, tracing my father's various business ventures from the mid-
1970
s to the present-day. There's the restaurant in Caloundra where my parents first planted themselves as two dewy-eyed newlyweds just arrived from Hong Kong. Over in Minyama, you'll see a pink and blue Asian supermarket, my father's biggest gamble, where he found out the hard way that most people are still content to cook Asian food from a jar, rather than use the raw ingredients.

Our road trip would be a strange coastal pilgrimage, through bustling Thai restaurants by the sea and sex shops in suburbia, to deserted takeaways near abandoned theme parks. All over the region, we'll find randomly chosen plots of land, marked in Dad's mind for unspecified projects I can't even begin to understand. Present me with a map, though, and I could place coloured thumb-tacks on all the spots where my father has built, opened, developed or invested in something. Link them up, and we've got ourselves a bit of a tangle.

 

*

 

All of Dad's businesses can be traced back to
1975
, a time when Australians saw China as the epitome of exoticism. China: it was on the other side of the world. You dug through tectonic plates and bulldozed through the centre of the goddamned earth to get there. Tiananmen hadn't happened, so Australians didn't yet associate the place with massacres and bloodshed. What they knew of the Chinese was limited to a few scattered things like communism, and what seemed to be their national cuisine: deep-fried slabs of hacked-up hog meat, slathered in artificial sauce and served with rice.

If you lived in Caloundra, you would have ordered this meal from my parents, two of the first Chinese people to arrive in the area. In contrast to Hong Kong – a throbbing, stinking metropolis of concrete, where people hung out their laundry thirty storeys up – Caloundra was a ghost town. Literally so: everyone was white. On their first day there, unpacking suitcases and moving around boxes, Dad came up to the bedroom to see Mum pushing her hands against the bedroom window, perplexed.

‘What's wrong?' he asked in Cantonese.

‘Oh nothing,' she said, retracting her hands like she'd been caught out.

‘Tell me,' Dad said.

She put on a weak smile. ‘It's strange, that's all. This window's sealed shut.'

Dad frowned. ‘That can't be right. Here, let me try.'

But no matter how he pushed and shook it, the thing wouldn't open: it was sealed up and airtight. Dad's mother and uncle, who'd moved into the house with them, tried too, but the window wouldn't budge. Soon, they realised everyone's rooms had the same problem. Dad crossed his arms.

‘It's no big deal,' he announced. ‘Plenty of air coming up through the stairs, right?'

For the next few years, upstairs became an oven of badly ventilated bedrooms. In summer, they kicked off the sheets in their sleep and woke up stewing in sweat. Their restaurant, Sunny Village, was downstairs, where everyone slaved over woks and grills, undergoing a weekly cycle of burnt fingers and broiled faces. There were other problems too, like the army of stray neighbourhood cats, sent moaning and insane with pleasure by the kitchen's meat scraps. When one jumped into the restaurant's kitchen in a single neat pounce, Mum screamed. It hissed at her, took some meat in its mouth and ran off. After Candy was born, Mum put an umbrella over her bassinet, just in case the cat returned with rabies.

After Mum quit work and Dad leased a new takeaway called Sun-See, it was rare to see him during daylight hours; work rendered him almost exclusively nocturnal. In the mornings, when Mum would get us ready for school, he would lie immobile under the blankets, having fallen asleep only three hours earlier. After we'd put on our school uniforms and eaten breakfast, we'd sometimes stand next to the bed and poke him.

‘Mmm?' he'd ask in his sleep. ‘Mmm?' He continued to snore, oblivious. When we got back from school, he'd already have left for work.

During the school year, there would be fleeting windows of opportunity for Dad and I to see each other. When I woke up in the middle of the night, sleepily trudging to pee, he'd be in his usual spot: watching television in the living room, eating fruit with a small kitchen knife. Nothing much changed about this routine except for the fruit – kiwis, apples, starfruit – which depended on the season. He'd always be watching an episode of a Cantonese soap opera, one of the stack of videos he trucked between the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane, distributing them to what seemed like the entire region's Chinese community. These melodramas had been recorded from television to video, and then copied from tape to tape and transported from Hong Kong to Macau, Melbourne to Sydney, Brisbane to the Sunshine Coast. By the time they got to Dad's video player, the colours were saturated and bleeding, the audio buzzy and sharp. After flushing the toilet, I'd watch them with him, lying on the sofa, dozing in and out of consciousness, trying to follow the latest family scandal.

‘What's happening?' I'd ask groggily.

He'd point to the television with his fruit knife. ‘See this woman? She had an affair,' he'd explain, ‘and now she is crying because both of her men have left her.'

‘And what's this other woman saying to her now?'

‘She's saying it was all her fault.'

‘Wow,' I'd say. ‘What a bitch.'

Dad would nod in agreement and pop a bit of chopped apple in my mouth. The next day, I'd wake up in my own bed, not remembering how I got there.

 

By the time Dad was running his new restaurant, Happy Dragon, his reputation had taken off. Situated in a beachside hotel resort, it boasted a cocktail bar and framed art you plugged into the wall. When switched on, the picture simulated a real, flowing waterfall, which blew our minds. In summer, we'd drink pink lemonade and swim in the resort's freezing kidney-shaped pool, pretending we were famous and devastatingly rich, which – to some extent – we were. By then, Dad was earning enough money to send all five kids to a private school, and our pocket money became spontaneous and unplanned, like some demented game-show. Here, have five dollars a week! Or how about twenty dollars to cover the fortnight? Here's fifty dollars today! Dizzy with success, Dad drafted plans to realise a lifelong dream: an Asian supermarket, on top of which we'd live in mansion-like splendour. When he laid out the first blueprints in his study, all five children gathered around, gawking.