The Family Law (4 page)

‘Will we get our own rooms?' we asked.

‘Of course!'

‘And a rooftop pool?'

‘Yeah, a rooftop pool would be awesome!'

Dad laughed. ‘Okay! I'll see what my architect can do!'

Everyone kept shooting out ideas: a rec room, a bike rack, a guinea-pig hutch, a spa bath, a rooftop bridge, an enclosed space for the dogs and various barnyard animals we'd buy. On Dad's desk-sized pad of paper, I started sketching what my room would look like, and the exact spots where the powerpoints, fitted lights and chandeliers would be. In all the excitement, none of us noticed Mum's absence. The whole time, she stood by the door silently, outside of the conversation, arms by her side, watching.

 

*

 

My parents' separation a year later was devastating: it was really difficult to accept that we weren't going to get that rooftop pool. Dad went ahead with the Asian grocery store anyway, moved upstairs, and we worked there on weekends. As a staff member, I was clumsy. Once, when I was scanning a bottle of dark soy sauce through the register, it slipped from my hands and smashed on the granite bench, exploding in a million shards, black sauce spraying in all directions.

‘Oh no,' I said.

When I looked up, a brunette mother in her forties – kids waiting in the car – was covered in the stuff. Her white blouse was stained black, with small white islands of fabric where the soy hadn't touched her. It was in her face and hair, tiny speckles of liquid like dew drops gone foul.

‘Oh no,' I said, unable to think of anything else to say. ‘Oh no.'

‘It's fine.' But she said this motionless, standing there in her badly applied blackface, as though moving might make the situation worse. ‘I'm all right.'

Without ceremony, she picked up her groceries and walked towards the car, seemingly in shock. Biting my lip, I watched her leave.

‘See you soon!' I called out. ‘Please come again!'

Not only was I clumsy, I was a pathological liar. When customers asked me something I didn't know, I suddenly became an oracle on anything Oriental or food-related. The merits of five-spice. The freshness of duck meat. The political situation in China. Could you freeze bean sprouts? Sure you could! Later, I'd find Dad in his office. He'd visibly aged since leaving the restaurant and starting up the supermarket. His hair was getting whiter, and he was losing sleep from accounts that didn't add up. He'd look up from his paperwork and smile at me. We'd chat for a while, and I'd eventually ask him for cooking advice.

‘So, can you put bean sprouts in the freezer and defrost them for later?'

He made a face. ‘Of course not. They'd go all slimy like slugs. They have to be eaten fresh. Within
days
.' He rubbed his temples. ‘Why?' he said. ‘Who asked?'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘Nobody. Just curious.'

 

*

 

It wasn't long before Dad closed the place down and was forced to sell. I felt partly responsible. He couldn't go back to Chinese restaurants. In the years that had passed, they'd become a joke – dinky novelty eateries that displayed Christmas lights in April and served food on mismatched melamine plates. Melamine. Even the name suggested something tragic and poisonous, something that might kill you. The Chinese were being pushed out to make way for other ethnicities. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing; in hospitality, it was just called business.

So Dad became Thai, just like my uncles in Canada had turned Japanese. I'd never seen him work so hard. Tammy and I worked at his Thai restaurant in the holidays, and the shifts were frantic. Dad would work behind the counter, a multi-tentacled blur of efficiency. One moment, he'd be pulling out the emptied guts of rice-cookers; the next, he'd be removing something from the fryer with one hand and garnishing satay sticks with the other. Every night, I came home smelling as if I'd worked all day in a rancid margarine factory. Even after soaking my shirt, it would stink of grease. I'd take extra-long showers to work off the grime, and then I'd look into the mirror and notice bags under my eyes. With a mixture of fascination and horror, I realised I was starting to look and smell just like Dad.

 

*

 

All of us want Dad to retire soon. There are only so many times you can see your father sweating in an industrial kitchen while angry mothers scream at him, demanding their takeaway. But none of this has stopped the flow of business projects that keep him awake at night, each scheme more harebrained than the last. Recently he called me out of the blue to look up a website that traded in gold bullion: he'd read in a Chinese newspaper that lacing gold into your tiles and walls would purify the air. When we did our research and discovered that even small amounts of gold would cost hundreds – no, thousands – of dollars, I exercised tough love.

‘Dad, you can't believe everything you read in these newspapers,' I said.

It reminded me of when we were kids, and we'd sit with Dad while he read the same Chinese tabloids. In one edition, there was a photograph of a twelve-year-old girl's face, which was somehow attached to a pig's snout. She looked sad. ‘What does it say, Dad? What's wrong with her face?' Dad read the story to himself, looking serious and squinting. Then he announced: ‘This girl. She is half person, half pig. The newspaper says this is what happens when humans have sex with pigs. Disgusting.' The papers he read weren't exactly the most reputable sources.

‘But the scientists said gold is the best thing for your health,' he said now. ‘It clears the air.'

‘So wear a gold bracelet. Buy a ring.'

‘It's about being healthy,' he said.

‘You want to purify the air?' I said. ‘Go for a jog. Plant a tree.'

Although I was getting impatient, I also felt needlessly bullying.

‘Okay-okay-okay,' he said, sensing my frustration. ‘We'll talk soon.'

Because I have a writing degree, he'll still hand over crisp new correspondence for me to peruse and decipher: letters from council; quotes from builders; blueprints from architects; flyers about rezoning laws. It's a world I know nothing about. Even though I tell him this, he says he still wants my opinion. For whatever reason, what I think matters to him.

Even now, whenever I'm on the Sunshine Coast, I'll get stopped in shopping centres by perfect strangers, men and women in their fifties and sixties, who ask me whether I'm one of Danny's boys. It's not surprising: our physical resemblance is growing stronger. And when I say yes, they tell me that Danny's like a star around here, and pin me down with stories about the first time they met him in Caloundra, or how they miss the Asian groceries he used to sell, or the meals he made them at Happy Dragon. But what they love most of all is the Thai restaurant he's got right now, which has become a local institution.

But that's only part of the picture, I want to say, and I almost offer to take them on a tour of all his businesses: the ones that took off, and the ones that faded out. It'll end with a stop at his latest project: towering extensions to his old house, which he plans to rent out or sell. If you were to drive past it more than once, you'd see the place expanding like a pop-up book in slow motion. You could watch it sprout balconies and improvised-looking storeys from the original base, like a tree that's begun to sprout new and unlikely branches. It's the home of a star, you'd think, or the place where a local celebrity must live.

Scenes from a Family Christmas

Told in 100 words

Tree
. Growing up, I thought all Christmas trees were hideous, but it was only ours. Our mother always insisted on decorating the
1
.
5
-metre plastic shrub with every school-project decoration we'd ever made. Up went the cardboard Jesuses, cotton-wool sheep and pipe-cleaner shepherds we'd crafted. My friends' Christmas trees were picture-book perfect, while ours was a melted showcase of texta and clag. Eventually, my mother got a new model: it's miniature, electronic and rotates. Now, when I sleep in the living room, its fibre-optic wires illuminate the walls, like I'm in the high-roller room of the P&O
Fairstar
. Now that's class.

 

Puppy
. We were allowed pets, so long as they weren't mammals. Fish: yes. Dogs: no. If they didn't bite, they'd pass on worms; if they didn't maul, they'd stain carpets. They were like children and our mother already had five of those. Still, my Christmas wish-list that year was one word, repeated over and over. PUPPY. When my mother started yelling at me, I wept in protest. ‘It's just my dream!' I cried. ‘Aren't I allowed to dream?' This continued until I began to adopt the same vocal cadences as Martin Luther King Jr; then I stopped because it was insulting.

 

Uncle
. Over the Christmas holidays, we'd spend time with my grandmother's myriad siblings, elderly people who smelled of camphor. In my father's car, we'd yow-cheh-hoh, a Chinese term that meant driving without a destination. Because the car was always too cramped, we'd take turns sitting on the lap of a man we simply called ‘Uncle.' When the car started to move, he'd massage our laps, a little too slowly, a little too gently. Afterwards, we compared notes and protested to our mother. From then on, we insisted, none of us were required to sit on any man's lap, including Santa's.

 

The Holy Spirit
. As a child, I had an aversion to all avian life, having watched Alfred Hitchcock's
The Birds
at too young an age. Then, in my first year at a Lutheran school, I learned about the Trinity: the Father (a creator), Jesus (a man) and the Holy Spirit (a dove). At Christmas, learning about Jesus' conception upset me. He only existed, I discovered, because the Holy Spirit had impregnated Mary without her permission. In my family, we had a word for this, and it started with ‘r.' The fact a bird was involved was too awful for words.

 

Rudolf
. As a teenager, I had terrible acne, the type that not only looked disgusting, but physically hurt. My secret wish was that I'd wake up on Christmas Day and suddenly have no pores. (As a bonus, I'd have developed actual eyelids, too.) Anxious and inflamed, I tried a suite of remedies before facing everyone at the Christmas table. Aloe vera; witch hazel; Clearasil. Then, in desperation, I rubbed lemon juice on my swollen nose, which was a mistake. Later that day, Andrew made me cry by singing one carol, over and over. It was about a very special reindeer.

 

The Space Between Us
. At the family counselling session, we'd been asked to draw family members as dots, mapping out the relationships between each other. If the dots were close, the relationship was strong; if the dots were distant, the relationship was cold. It reminded me of the Christmas before, when Mum had insisted on visiting Dad with us. Despite high hopes, it ended in catastrophe: tears and screaming. By the end of it, we all stood there unmoving, hands by our sides and crying, mapping out our own distances from each other, like constellations of stars, some light years apart.

 

Seafood
. It'd been a rough year. Christmas needed to be perfect. Everyone was assigned specific food to prepare, and one sister was responsible for seafood. On Christmas Day, however, there was none on the table. ‘We'll just buy it today,' she said. But calls to the fishmongers confirmed they were closed. ‘Are you retarded?' I asked. ‘Who's open on Christmas Day?' My over-reaction shocked people. Instead, I made lamb, and became emotional when people avoided the gravy. It had been made of blood: the lamb's, of course, but the way I was acting, it may as well have been mine.

 

Hypotheticals
. Over Christmas lunch, we play a game of hypo-theticals. ‘Would you rather drink a bucket of piss or eat a teaspoon of poo?' Tammy starts. Everyone else weighs it up – urine's sterile, but the shit would be over quickly – but Michelle responds quickly: ‘Bucket of piss!' Mum prefers the urine too. ‘Shit is so dirty,' she says. Andrew remains silent, so we press him. ‘I wouldn't choose either,' he says, which disappoints us. ‘What if someone was holding a gun to your head?' I protest. He stares at me. ‘Well, I wouldn't get into that situation, would I?'