“Well, this stuff might be too hard,” I said, discreetly shoving the piles of paper under her bed. “Why don’t you start from the very beginning?” I picked up my five-year-old sister’s school reader. “Pat is … a … Cat,” my mother read. “He is a black and white cat.” Her fingers, gnarled as just-dug-up ginseng, pointed at each word. She could read the whole book through not once, not twice, but three times.
She sighed a big sigh. “Ah, it’s no use. No use! It is all useless! I don’t understand a thing.”
“But Ma, you just read the whole book through three times!”
“No, I didn’t!”
“Yes, you did!”
She turned to the middle pages and pointed. “I don’t know what it says. I can’t sound out the words. I just memorised the whole thing when you first read it out to me. Don’t teach me any more. Go off and study. I’m getting old, going blind, my working life is over, I can’t even see well enough to be able to link these chains of the little gold bracelets together, I keep cutting myself. I am old, and I am going to be relying on you in the future. Go off and study.”
Yet the more I studied at school, the more mute I became. I lost so many words that there seemed no possibility of ever recovering them. Although I ticked “English as a second language” on all official forms, I was beginning to think in English. It was true, too, that the more I studied, the dumber I got. I could not even answer the simplest questions my mother posed of me. At least I was losing my word-spreading status, I thought – soon my mother might even forget that I had once told tales. Now there weren’t even enough words to say how I was feeling, and all feeling was reduced to the simplest of three emotions: “I am happy”, “I am sad” or “I am angry.” My mother’s moods alternated between the last two. She made the most of the words she still had by delivering them at ten million decibels in the car. “Woe and great suffering,” she yelled. “You are all going to leave me. I am getting old and you are all going to leave me because I don’t know the English!” Knowing the English became her obsession. She would ask us what certain words meant whenever she heard snatches from television. “Agheare, what is ‘Spotlight’? Agheare, what are they saying in the movie?” She grew frustrated when she could not understand, when we could not translate, when we were too busy with a book in front of our face to bother telling her what stupid things like “Big M” meant. “Why is it called that?” “What meaning does it have?” “Why do the Australians call their milk that?” My mother’s questions became more difficult to answer than the literature we had to study in class.
*
One day when I did not have school, I spent the day with my mother. She drove to my Aunt Bek’s house. As we approached the front of the mock-Georgian house, she said, “Watch to see if the husband is home! Is that his car at the front? If he is home, we’d better drive off quick!” My mother was on one of her “rescue raids” again. I later found out that she conducted these raids often, after she had dropped us off to school. She would drive to my auntie’s house and take her around to our house to talk and help her do housework, or she would help my aunt do her own housework. I checked to see if the red Corolla was in the driveway. “No, Ma,” I replied, “the uncle is not at home.” The uncle was Aunt Bek’s husband. My aunt opened the door and let us in. The house was still and silent, with both her twin sons at school. It was as quiet as our house.
I realised then that it was the same everywhere. Inside these double-storey brick-veneer houses, countless silent women were sitting at their dining tables. They were living the dream lives of the rich and idle in Phnom Penh, and yet their imposed idleness made them inarticulate and loud. They didn’t know how to live this life of luxury and loneliness. Used to working for others all their lives, they did not know how to be idle without guilt, and they could not stop working.
“How fortunate you are!” my mother said to my aunt. “Much luckier than I am. I suffer so much. My husband is always working and never drives me anywhere. On weekends all he wants to do is sweep the floor and sit around resting.” But my auntie would have none of it. “I suffer much more than you do!” she cried. “At least your husband does the housework. At least you can drive. My husband won’t let me drive anymore since I smashed into the tree-trunk of the telephone pole!” And on and on it went, a litany of lamentations about who had the worse state of affairs, culminating in the topic of Disappointing Children.
“Terrible, aiyoh, just terrible!” My auntie is telling a story. Her eyes widen and her mouth twists to prove a point about my twin cousins. “Can you believe sons like that? Useless! ‘Hey Pa,’ they say, ‘you can let us off here. Don’t drive in front of the school, I will walk from here!’ After how Ah Buong worked to get them in that school, and in the first week they are ashamed of the car their father drives!”
“Aiyoh, they don’t speak to me anymore!” continues my auntie. “When they come home from school, they just rush to their rooms and go on their com-pu-tahs. They can sit still for hours in front of the machines, and I don’t know whether they are playing games or not!”
“Aiyohh, yours don’t speak to you anymore? Well, I have it worse. Mine
can’t
speak to me anymore!” lamented my mother as she raised one eyebrow towards me. “See that one there? She can’t even string a proper sentence together!”
“At least you have a girl! A girl can keep you company when you are old.” My auntie watched me at the wok, trying to fry up some taro cakes for lunch.
“Yes, but she’s gone with the ghosts already. She’s going to marry one, and then it will be the end of us. At least you have sons who can marry good Chinese girls, give you daughters-in-law who will listen to you, as daughters never do.”
“We’re doomed, we who do not know the English!” lamented my aunt, “doomed!”
Both my mother and my aunt sat at the dining-room table, submerged in their doom and gloom. “What woe it is not to know the English and to be depending on your useless children!”
“And when we grow old, they’ll do what they do in this country and cart us off to old people’s homes! And we’ll be stuck with the old white ghosts. Eating their food, their cheeses and other vomity things.”
“How terrible!” This vision of nursing-home nausea so overwhelmed my mother and my auntie that they both turned their heads towards me.
“You won’t let that happen to us, will you?” asked my aunt.
“Kids these days have no loyalty,” sighed my mother. “When they get husbands, they are going to move far far away from us. It’s no use digging up promises from them now. Just wait till they get older, they will follow their husbands. And we’ll be like mutes! Wordless!” My mother’s voice was rising.
“All women are mute and wordless when they have husbands,” sighed my auntie.
“No, they get mute and wordless when they have mothers-in-law like mine!”
Both women looked at me, making sure I learned this important lesson.
“Agheare, you have to be fierce,” my mother told me. “Not like us, always working for other people.”
“But you can’t be lazy either,” my auntie told me. “Being lazy is the worst thing a woman can be.”
“Aiyah, what’s the use of teaching her these things when she is going to leave me anyhow? She is filled with foreign thoughts and she thinks these foreigners have all the answers!”
*
When I burned the taro cakes while frying them in the wok, I realised I knew nothing, that I could do nothing. That all this learning inside my head was of no use in life. “Aiyah, you don’t squish them like that!” cried my mother, “Look. Watch. Just pour lots of oil in and swirl it around. Like this.” She grabbed the metal stirrer from me and with a few deft flicks turned the cakes over. I watched in admiration.
“Ma, you need to teach me how to cook.”
“You don’t need to learn how to cook. When you get married, you’re going to be making ghost food,” she said, “for your ghost husband.” She imagined future dinners for me, with boiled broccoli and mashed potatoes and slabs of meat, all seasoned with salt and pepper. She had given up on me! “What is the use of teaching you when you are going to leave me anyway?” she said. “You never listen to what I say.”
If I listened to what she said, I would be one of those girls who could cook proper food, and would marry a nice Teochew boy and be sweet and obedient. If I listened to what she said, I would not be this woeful daughter with a head crammed full of foreign thoughts, only using Chinese to ask questions or get things: “What are we having for dinner?” “Did you get the money back that was owed you by Ah Kim Heng?”
Yet these questions were of no consequence. What were important were the big questions, the big questions we never asked each other, for lack of words. I watched my mother and her sister as they sipped tea while simultaneously wiping the kitchen table. I put the taro cakes in a plate and placed them on the table. As I watched them quietly eating the squashed and slightly burnt squares, with no words for my incompetence anymore, I wanted to cry.
Late in the afternoon, my mother drove Aunt Bek back in the car, getting back before her husband arrived home. “I saved her from spending the day sleeping in bed,” my mother told me as we headed back home. “I saved her from being alone. And we got the floors wiped.”
I remembered something. “Ma, didn’t you have English lessons this morning?”
“What? Oh, English lessons. Stopped going.”
“Why?”
“Who would I speak the English to, I ask you?”
I was silent in the back seat.
“I
T’S drip-drip-dripping,” said my mother. “The light is dripping with water-spirits.” At least, that was what I heard her say. I looked up. The chandelier did droop with crystals. There must have been close to a hundred of them. I switched it on to see the full effect.
“Turn it off!” cried my mother. “What are you doing? Stupid, turning it on and off like that, wasting energy!” The chandelier was supposed to be saved for visitors. Just like the sitting room, with its cream leather sofas that were never used, and the glass dining table that had never seen a dinner on its surface.
I flicked off the switch because my mother’s eyes were sunken and the skin around her sockets was like crumpled parchment paper. She had just woken up from her sleep. “Aiyyyah,” she sighed, deep and slow. “Time to pick up the kids. Time to make dinner.”
No, I wanted to tell her, it was
not
time to pick up the kids. That was over forty-five minutes ago. And it was
not
time to make dinner. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, for crying out loud.
“What time is it?” she asked me.
I told her.
“Bloody hell!
4
.
37
! Why didn’t you tell me? The kids are still at school waiting!”
“No, I picked them up on the way home.” It was a one-and-a-half kilometre walk for them back home, because no buses ran up the hills of Avondale Heights. When I arrived at the school, my sisters were the last ones there – waiting outside closed office doors. Bobbing down beneath the grey sky in their green uniforms and brown socks, they dug small sticks into the dirt of the curb.
My mother’s shoulders loosened, but they also slumped. Another failure on her part, she thought. Firstly she could no longer work, and secondly she could no longer look after her kids. All the things that my grandmother had predicted – or cursed – were coming true.
My mother had stopped working on the gold a few weeks ago. The chemicals were getting to her and making her cough, she told us. The coughs never seemed to get better. So no more familiar wax smells wafting from the other room to mingle with our toast and decaffeinated coffee in the morning. The room next to the kitchen, where my mother grew her wax trees, was dark. An old bedspread covered her work-table like a shroud.
*
“Your father told me to sell all my tools and machines, and live my life looking after the children and taking care of the house,” she would tell me, as I sat in the study which also doubled as my mother’s workroom. I was trying to write essays for my final-year high-school assessment. She sat slumped in her torn vinyl work-chair. “What do you think I should do?”
“It is so terrible,” she continued. “I feel like a useless useless person now. Should I sell all my machines? Should I?” She looked deep into my eyes, something that Asian parents never do to their children – but she was desperate.
“I don’t know.” I tried to get my mind off the “Multi-tiered System of the Australian Judiciary” for a little while. I tried to be reasonable. I tried to put myself in her place. “Could you be happy not working?”
“No.” Of course not. A stupid question.
“Then maybe you could just continue working.”
“But Agheare, I am getting old! Getting old. I can’t do this forever. How long will it last? Three years? Five years? I am too old to go running around Footscray and Richmond and Springvale with a bag filled with gold, always scared that someone will snatch it. I am too old to be working late into the night. My eyes – they are getting weaker and
moh-moh
blurry. Getting old, getting old! And this job – it will be the end of me! My end of days will come sooner than most people’s end of days.” My mother worked with dangerous chemicals – sulfuric acid, ammonia, gold-potassium cyanide. “Look! Look at my hands!” She held them out in front of her, fingers spread. They were cracked and blackened at the tips, almost as if they had been burnt. They were a coal-miner’s hands, I realised.
“So much cleaning in the new house!” she cried, even though it was not the house that needed cleaning, it was her mind. “And no one ever helps!”
“I wish I could be like your aunties and work at the shop counting money. But I don’t know the English!” she cried. And then she really cried, heaving heavy honking sobs. I sat still, my back straight. I had tried to comfort her once by putting my arms around her. She pushed me away. I learned never to do it again, so the only consolation I could offer was silence.
“What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I am a useless person!” she wailed. Alina stuck her little head around the door to see what was going on in the study.