One day after school I went with my mother while she did her round of visiting the Kims. I was still in my school uniform, and my mother let me collect the money for her, put it in a used white envelope and double-check that it was the right amount. “Look how much I make,” she told me proudly as I counted the $
50
and $
100
bills. “All in one day.” Yet I knew it was not all from one day’s work. It was weeks and weeks of labour. It was just that the pay all came at once, when she did her rounds of the shopping strips. “This is my daughter,” she told all the Kims. “My daughter is in Year Eleven. She is going to become a lawyer.”
Hey
– since when was I going to become a lawyer? Even I hadn’t decided that yet. It was because I was terrible at maths, my mother told me in the car afterwards, and had no way of ever becoming a doctor. She secretly hoped that one of the Kims’ sons was studying to be a doctor.
The Vietnamese lady Kims made themselves look very attractive. They painted their faces with powder and foundation and sometimes the hue did not match their necks, but that didn’t matter once you saw the face. The Chinese lady Kims, on the other hand, seemed less chic. They had tight perms and an earthiness about them, a turnip-and-carrot-soup sort of existence. Their lives, like my mother’s, seemed removed from their gold. They worked for the gold, but they did not own the gold – the gold owned them. What were they working for? What indeed? They did not work to prettify themselves, they did not work for the status and prestige because it was dirty work, it was work with dangerous chemicals and blackened fingertips. They worked for their children, and when you are a child with parents killing themselves with dangerous chemicals just so you can live a comfortable life, there is no comfort within, just a gnawing guilt only to be alleviated by being at the shop after school, helping your parents read the stacks of letters and bills and notifying them of their business registration renewals. The kiddie Kims grew up fast, they had business acumen inculcated in them early. Meanwhile, the Mr Kims only made special appearances at the shopfront to deal with a difficult customer or to count the gold. They usually sat at the back of the store with files and surgeons’ scalpels, making more jewellery or adjusting customer purchases – fixing wedding and engagement rings that were too wide, or bracelets that were too loose. They also polished the pieces to a gleaming yellow and did a whole host of other things I did not see or understand.
Sometimes the Kims would do runners, those that were going bankrupt. One week they would accept wares from my mother, the next week they were nowhere to be seen, their stores had closed down and the windows were covered in newspaper. Such a shame to go bankrupt, that was why they told nobody – but it also meant that they did not have to pay off their debts to the outworkers. My mother could not stand debtors who made false promises.
One time, some Kims owed her and had not paid for many months. So she paid them a visit. She brought in a big old coat and a bread bun in a plastic bag and sat in the chair reserved for customers. She waited patiently until the Kims were done serving their customers. They tried to ignore her. More customers came in. She still waited. In between intervals of customers, she told the Kims she was waiting for her payment. She waited until closing time. The other Kims from the block and from the other suburbs’ stores had warned my mother that this Kim was going bankrupt, that they were soon closing down because Mr Kim loved Crown Casino too much.
“We can’t pay you yet,” the Lady Kim said. “We don’t have the money.”
“That’s what you always say, sister.”
“But this time we really can’t!”
“Well, I am going to wait here until you can pay me,” my mother said. “Because I am not coming home tonight without my pay. You haven’t paid me for three months. My husband will think I wasted all those hours of my life doing the work. I will be too ashamed to go home without the money.”
“Well, there is nothing we can do about that,” said Mrs Kim. “As I told you, we have no money.” She could see my mother looking at her cases and cases of gold.
“Chinese people shouldn’t owe any debts,” said my mother.
“Come on, we are going bankrupt! Our house is going to be sold,” entreated Mrs Kim as she started packing up all her trays of jewellery, hoping my mother would get the message.
“Why don’t you go home?” Mr Kim beseeched her.
My mother started to unwrap her bread roll. “Can’t,” she said. “Not until I get paid.”
“Well, you can’t stay in our store!”
“You just pack up and don’t mind me. You can go home but I am going to stay here overnight.” She leaned back in her chair.
In the end, frustrated and feeling sorry for her, the Mr Kim took out a gold bracelet from his tray and told her, “We’re going to give you jewellery for surety until we can get the money to pay you back.” My mother watched as he carefully measured the bracelet on the scales to make sure it weighed as much as my mother was owed.
When my mother got home that evening, she showed us the bracelet. It even had little cubic zirconias in it. Two months later, when the debt-owning Kims sold their store, they called my mother up to tell her that they had money for her. She returned the bracelet and collected the money.
Perhaps the Kims did not know enough about the Australian law to figure out that outworkers were not subject to protection in debt matters. We all came from countries where the laws were scattered and broken, and where they could be bought with bribes, where wars happened and currency was rendered worthless at the flash of a bomb, so that the only dependable commodity of trade was gold. The Kims were used to trading on the basis of word of honour, so this became our business protocol. And when the word was not honoured, the worker was all alone. Most of the Kims were decent people; and, locked out of the language of the outside world, they knew they had only their outworkers to keep them in business. No sane Australian would be willing to work under such conditions, for so little. And yet, the dollar they paid kept dropping.
“Ten dollars a ring? You have got to be kidding me!” The Kim flung up her hands in horror.
“But that’s how much I always charge for the ones with the stones in them.”
“No, I can get it from that new man from Vietnam. He only charges eight dollars.”
My mother would leave to go to another store. But then she found out that the new man from Vietnam had been there too. She would then have to come back to the first store and try to bargain them up.
“Nine dollars then.”
“Come on, you have got to be joking. Move with the times.”
“My craftsmanship is better.”
“Yeah? Look at this.” The Kim held out a ring for her to take a look. It was polished with no strokes of the jade polisher, all even and shining. It was good craftsmanship, but more importantly the new man from Vietnam had superior technology. He had a machine.
“Okay. Eight dollars-fifty then. Eight-fifty is my final offer.”
“Come on, you don’t need the money. Your husband owns the two Hi-Fi stores.”
That was the excuse they now all used. You don’t need the money. Your husband owns two Hi-Fi stores.
In fact, you don’t need to work at all.
This was their power over her, which they thought they were only using to undercut her. After all, business was business. They did not realise that they were also stripping away her sense of purpose. She calculated that she still had twenty-five years of working life left. If she had no work, what would she do with those years?
An outsider looking in would see myriad options. Why doesn’t she go to school and learn English? We had enough money now that she didn’t need to work. Why didn’t she start a small business? Most ridiculous of all, why didn’t she take it easy and live a life of luxury?
M
Y mother was not a talker, she was a shouter. The worst shouting was in the car with my auntie. Scared of not being heard, she would hurl out her sentences, punctuating them with exclamation marks. Each sentence was loud and grating, and when she got to talking about people she did not like, oh God, you would need earplugs if you were in the car, or a very loud Walkman, and you would have to conceal the wires of the headphones underneath your scarf, cover your ears with your hair. Nod nicely and look intensely as if you were listening. She would start off talking normally, and then get louder and louder, until the whole conversation turned into a screaming match without an argument, just statements about where were the cheapest Flying Dragon vegetables and instant Indo Mie noodles. Cursed be the soul who tried to contradict her. The less she had to say, the louder she got. “Three ninety-nine! I have been shopping for twenty years, I would know a cheap ten-pack of toilet paper if I saw it! None can buy as cheaply as me!”
“But for four-fifty …” her sister would begin.
“Four-fifty!” scoffed my mother, “four-fifty is stupid, four-fifty is fifty cents more!” My mother’s motto was never to pay full price for anything, and bargain-hunting for us did not mean going to the half-price sales, it meant rummaging through the shop-soiled and cast-off trolley at Target.
But you could not buy an education for half-price. “How is a $
115
wool jacket supposed to help one study better hah?” my mother demanded as I clambered into the back of the car after school. I had no idea about the correlation between wearing a blazer and academic brilliance either, but she wasn’t talking to me, she was talking to my Aunt Bek, who was in the passenger seat.
“Not every family can send their kids to such a school, you know,” my mother said pointedly to her oldest sister. “Especially not the girls.”
“No, of course not,” my Auntie Bek agreed. Especially not if your husband worked at the Arnotts biscuit factory.
“When we were growing up, we didn’t have such opportunities. We went to work when our school closed down. Do you remember when they closed down our Chinese school?”
“Young people these days, so fortunate hah,” said my auntie. “They know so much. Soon they will be smarter than we are!”
“No!” retorted my mother. “They spend their whole lives at school and instead of making them brighter, it makes them limp and lazy. She’s always got her face stuck in some book. And you’d think with all that education, they would at least know the simplest things, but they don’t. I tell her to look at the bank statements and explain them to me, but she can’t.”
I sat slumped in the back seat of the car. It was true, I couldn’t. It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand the English, it was that I didn’t have the Chinese terms in me to be able to explain. I was running out of words.
When our car pulled into the driveway, I slouched into the room, feeling incongruous and imperial in my fancy uniform and royal-blue hair ribbons, hands with calluses only from writing, not from hard manual work. At the new school, I never said a word in class unless the teacher picked on me. One wrong word could mean being found out for the philistine that I was. The quieter I became at school, the louder my mother became at home. She was loud because she could not read or speak the secret talk we knew. She could not read because she had been housebound for two decades. And now, over the dinner table, she would watch as my father and his children littered their language with English terms, until every second word was in the foreign tongue. We hardly noticed the food which she had prepared for us, so engrossed were we in our babble. She sat there staring at us, trying to make sense of these aliens at her table.
“Migrants don’t assimilate,” I was told by classmates in politics class. “They all come here and stick together, and don’t bother to learn the language.” But I remembered when my mother bundled all four of us into the car after school. “Agheare,” she told me, “look up the map. Find this place for me. Your father gave me the address. I am going to learn the English. I am going to learn it now, no matter what.” We did not even change out of our uniforms, there was no time. My mother decided that if she knew the English, all her problems would be solved, she would be able to do anything in this new country. Most of all, she would be able to enter the world of her children’s minds. We pulled up in front of a community centre and were met by a kind woman with a lilting British accent, hair like a soft grey felt hat on her head, grey flannel scarf and kind grey eyes. She looked like an old wise possum and she invited us all into the centre for coffee before our discussion. My mother’s heart melted. We all sat down around a table strewn with newspapers and books.
“So it says here that your mother is forty?” said the woman incredulously.
Until then, I didn’t even know my mother’s age. I asked her, and she nodded.
“Unbelievable! She looks twenty!”
I repeated this to my mother.
“Wow, forty and four kids,” breathed the woman, looking around at each of us, “incredible.” I didn’t need to explain this to my mother. She signed up for the class straightaway. After all, it was only ten dollars a term – a bargain, she thought, and such a kind teacher too.
*
My mother asked us to speak to her in English. I did so, slowly and carefully. I asked her questions: “How are you? How was your day?” But because these were questions Chinese children never asked their parents, even if she had enough words to answer me, she would not have known how. “Stop asking me crazy pointless questions,” she said, “and let me learn something useful!”
“Alright, Ma. What do you want to learn? What do you want to talk about?”
“You tell me! You’re the teacher now!” She looked at me as if I had all the answers and was keeping them from her from some perverse whim, as if I had them hidden in the inside pocket of my blazer.
The migrants in her class were all at different levels, and my mother could not understand the worksheets with the fill-in-the-blanks about Ned Kelly. “So sick of sitting down with none of this making any sense!” she cried. “Who gives a crap about the man with the tin can over his head? Stupid idiot. As if that is going to help me understand how to speak useful things better!” She dumped all her notebooks and worksheets on the floor of her room. Never put your books on the floor, my grandmother warned me, or you won’t do well in school, but I did not repeat this to my mother.