“It’s our toilet!” said my mother fervently. “It’s our toilet!”
My father’s hands stopped moving. Had my mother gone dingdong? “Which one?”
“Our toilet! In this room! The ensuite toilet!” cried my mother. “That’s the answer to the problems I have been having!”
“What do you mean?”
“I just had a dream,” cried my mother, “about our Buddhist shrine, you know, the one downstairs with your father’s picture on it! Aiyoh, how could we be so stupid as to put the family shrine in such a place?”
“Hah?” My father was befuddled. “I thought we agreed that the study was the best place, no kids coming to whack Ah Bah’s photograph off the shelf!”
“No, no, no!” cried my mother, “you don’t understand! The shrine downstairs is
directly below
our toilet upstairs! That’s why I have been having such troubles! That’s the reason!” We were crapping on our gods and ancestors. That was why there was no peace in this new house, why my mother clutched her heart every day and complained of the largeness of everything. Once we moved the shrine to a more auspicious place, all her troubles would be alleviated.
*
Dreams about ancestors and gods were serious matters, to be discussed over the breakfast table or over dinner. “Last night,” my father would say, “I had a dream about Ah Bah. It is not right for me to go back to Cambodia this year.” My father had been saying that for the past one and a half decades. Ah Bah’s ghost, the ghost of my solemn-faced grandfather, was still floating around in the Mekong, molecules of his soul extending as far as Melbourne, warning my father not to go back. After a while, my father began to abandon his plans to follow in the footsteps of Uncle Pheang, who already owned six banks in Cambodia and went everywhere in a black bulletproof four-wheel drive with four bodyguards. Since there was no going back now, there was only one way for our little nuclear family to go and that was forwards. Forwards to the Great Australian Dream.
I thought about how my grandmother had saved up the profits from her plastic-bag factory to build her triple-storey terrace house in Phnom Penh. A week before they were to move in, Ah Pot’s men were swarming across the city, and a week later all the residents of Phnom Penh were prodded into the countryside to work or die, or in most cases work
and
die.
Now in this new country, my father was in a position to build his own dream home, in a location untainted by bad dreams and ominous paternal warnings. Every evening for a month, we pored over the details of how exactly our new house was to be built, this house with popping-out bay-window eyes, in muted hues of cream and white. We squished together on the floor in my parent’s bedroom in our Braybrook home, heads bent over plans, fingers pointing here, there and everywhere. “Such a big house for such little people,” my friends commented.
As the house was being built, my father took his only day off work to drive us to its foundations. This was our weekly Sunday trip, to watch the temple being constructed and to worship the fruits of our labour. My thirteen-year-old brother and I walked on the set-concrete foundations, through the wooden-plank doorways and wahhed over the wooden-beam skeleton of the house, reckoning where the rooms would be and marvelling at the largeness of it all. After about ten minutes, we were thoroughly bored, but my parents would still be walking through the wooden ribcage of the house, hand in hand, looking up up and up towards where the upstairs area would be. And they would comment to each other on where things were going in the new house, comparing it to our neighbour Danny’s.
Meanwhile, my sister Alina would squish her four-year-old feet into the mounds of soil dug up at the front, and later, the mountains of sand. She would smile her perfect-toothed, dribbly-chinned grin and fall on her hands. She would pick up half-empty chip packets the builders had left behind and shove the contents in her mouth if we weren’t looking, or collect Coke cans and the contents would pour down her front when we tried to snatch them away from her. Alison, who was seven, was more collected. She would walk up and down the mountain of building sand, careful not to step on nails. She would also stack small blocks of wood, building replica palaces for the indifferent ants. My mother put my sisters in dresses for these outings, though it was not as if we were going to church. I suppose she was practising for the time when we would move into this new life, a life of navy-blue and white tailored dresses and Mary-Jane shoes.
*
Before we moved, my mother packed away the colourful dresses and tracksuits with their little embroidered cotton patches of puppies and girls with woollen braids and appliquéd cat faces on the front. She stuffed them into a swollen orange plastic Brotherhood of St Laurence bag to be shipped off to those new Fresh-off-the-Boats-and-Planes who would, we hoped, marvel over them with the same awe and seemingly everlasting gratitude that we once had. Gone now were the days where a one-dollar plastic brown vinyl coat was a birthday present from the government.
Now we could exchange our old clothes for new, and we could look at the recently arrived ones, noting their grey tights with yellow dresses and velcro shoes, and we could roll our eyes and think that although they didn’t know any better now, they would learn, oh they would learn to adapt or be laughed at. But they were the ones who were laughing, and oh how they laughed, with their mouths wide open and their eyes shut tight, and when they were not laughing they were walking around with their eyes wide open and their mouths shut tight taking it all in – all the things that we had taken in a decade ago. And we felt pity and resentment and plenty of embarrassment for their eagerness and their countryside errors. But most of all, unacknowledged envy of their pure, rooted-to-the-moment, everyday-is-a-wonderland existence, because it reminded us of a distant self we once were, we of the wide-eyed, shut-mouth stupor, we of the wide-mouth, shut-eyed delirium, when things were louder and funnier and lettuce was greener and gleaming concrete seemed newer.
*
When we moved into the new house, there were no more paper-chains from the Target advertisements strung up from the stipple-dot plaster ceiling. How could we even imagine sticky-taping the clean white walls with our painted-macaroni works of junk? Things needed to be different, things were whitewashed. Nothing could look too peasanty. No dark wooden furniture, but rather white and peach and pale green. Family came to visit, not to celebrate but to do the tour so that they could get home-furnishing ideas for their own houses, so that they too would look modern and not too peasanty. They did not even sit down long enough to have a cup of tea, or if they did, their conversation would always turn to the New House. “How much per square metre?” “Where did you get the glass table?” “Did the builder try and rip you off?”
After seeing our place, Aunties Que and Anna bought land in the area too – Aunt Que immediately across the road from us, with the Maribyrnong River as her back view; and Aunt Anna behind our house so that we were neighbours. When my grandmother’s Buddhist monk came from Vietnam to visit her, she brought him to our house to bless it. Even though our property was an irregular skirt shape, he lauded my father’s fine choice. All the feng shui elements of our house were in balance, and it was to be a place of much happiness.
“Do not build your house on a hill where the back slopes down,” advised the monk, “because all your luck is going to slip down that hill.” And so my Auntie Que sold her property before she could even plan for architects to come and have a look at the land, and she moved away from us.
Aunt Anna, on the other hand, stayed where she was – the monk had said that her land was good. My father helped her with the architectural plans, and within a year another Avondale Heights mansion had arisen. Around us were palaces with Don smallgoods trucks parked at the front or white panel vans to carry the bolts of fabric or dumpling pastries to the factories in which family members worked. And work they did, for we would only see the vans and trucks parked in their driveways very late at night, or very early in the morning when we were heading off to school to embark on our own first steps in fulfilling the dream.
*
Yet there was still a piece missing. My mother could feel it, even after we moved the Buddhist shrine away from the room beneath my parents’ upstairs ensuite toilet. The Jump Rope for Heart mascot was still hammering away in her chest, and in the mornings she would wake up with black crescents under her eyes. Even so, she would wake up at six or seven and set about her work. When all else stopped, physically, mentally and spiritually, work was her only constant, the life-raft she built with whatever little life spark she had left in her.
The second revelation came, as dramatic as the first, yet to act on it was no easy matter. “I know why I have been feeling this way!” she cried, shooting up in bed a second time. She couldn’t find the little glass jars of gold she had buried in the backyard when we first moved to our old house in Braybrook; the jars of gold we kept as a residue of the fear left from the old country – the fear that money could so easily become worthless pieces of dirty paper, and the conviction that the only permanent security was gold. “We haven’t dug them up yet!” she cried. “I remember there being four more jars of gold we haven’t dug up yet!”
“Are you sure it exists?” asked my father. “Are you sure?”
But she could not remember. “But I had the dream,” my mother said, “and in my dream, I remembered we buried them!”
“Are you sure you didn’t turn them into jewellery to sell?”
“I can’t remember, but I can’t have been feeling this way for so long for nothing! There has to be a reason, and if it is not the shrine being in the wrong place, it is our gold being in the wrong place!”
My father’s ears were getting irritated and tired, and he had to think about his business meeting the next day with the suppliers from Hitachi. “Well, how are we going to get the gold back from the new owners of the Braybrook house hah? As if they are going to let us come over and dig up their backyard for jars of gold!”
“That Cantonese Chicken Market lady!” lamented my mother. “She works in Footscray and she doesn’t even remember to return our mail to us! Woe, how are we ever going to get the gold back?” My mother thought about the endless suffering ahead if the gold was not dug up, and she sighed her ten-thousand-sorrows sigh. All that hard work, all that effort – buried and forgotten!
Finally, my parents devised a plan. They
would
go back to the old Braybrook home, and they
would
dig up the backyard. And of course, the Chicken Market lady would let them in.
“Aiyah, aiyah, of course you can come!” urged the new owners of our old house when my mother called and told them what she needed to do. “Come as soon as you can!” The Chicken Market lady’s voice was throbbing with anxiety. She was scared to death of the ancestors, everybody was. My mother had told her that she needed to go back to dig up the remains of her ancestors from the terrible years in the old country. They were unquietly resting in urns buried throughout the backyard.
While it was my father who had concocted the plan with my mother, it was actually my Auntie Anna and my mother who executed it. Equipped with shovels, incense and bulldust Buddhist mantras, they knocked on the familiar front door. “Cut down our plum tree at the front,” muttered my mother to my auntie.
The Chicken Market lady did not welcome my ma and my aunt into the house, but instead told them that she would open the gate leading to the backyard for them – “more convenient”. “She just doesn’t want ancestor-diggers in her new house,” muttered my mother.
When my ma and aunt came into the backyard, they noticed that our old lemon tree was still in its corner, with its lemons hanging from the limbs like big bright yellow eyeballs watching without blinking.
My ma lit incense sticks and bowed in various places in the backyard before sticking the sticks in the ground. My auntie stood over them and recited Buddhist prayers. These incense stalks were little markers for those coveted pots of gold. They burned in the wind, and the orange glow went out of some of them, but they were not relit. There was no time.
The sky was grey so my ma and aunt set to work quickly with their shovels, while Chicken Market lady stood by. “Did you find it yet? Did you find it yet?” she kept asking anxiously. Later, as the sky began to spit rain, she watched from our old kitchen window as my auntie and my mother dug holes in her backyard.
The souls of seven dead kittens were dug up in the process, and old childhood toys with the plastic palely discoloured. A lot of stones and rocks and stubborn grass-roots clung to the dirt, so they dug, deeper and deeper, and the incense sticks burned out one by one in the wind. Finally, when all the markers had been explored, and the holes had been made, my mother dropped the shovel.
“Didn’t find anything,” my mother sighed, her hands hanging limply at her sides. The Chicken Market lady flung her hands up to her head.
No, this cannot be!
she wanted to cry,
get
these disturbing ancestors off my property. Try harder, dig some
more!
But then she took one look at my mother’s face, black crescents beneath the eyes, rain-soaked and steeped in defeat, and she kept her mouth shut.
“K
IM” was both the Vietnamese and the Chinese word for gold, so all the jewellery shops were called Kim Heng or Kim Huang or Kim Ngoc, depending on the family name of the owners. These little shops epitomised Family Business, and there were so many of them down the shopping strips of St Albans, Springvale, Richmond and Footscray that I had trouble remembering their names, so that they melded into one continuous never-ending counter filled with red velvet and
24
-carat gold. The owners of the jewellery stores I herded into one collective noun – the Kims. One Kim had her daughter’s dental surgery above her shop. Another Kim had two sons working there. A third Kim wore make-up like the actors in
Farewell My Concubine
and painted her eyebrows three centimetres above her real eyebrows, or where her real eyebrows would have been if she had not plucked them out.