DAUGHTER—
When the academic year started, she began to learn about the traditions and rituals of a residential college. Twice a week there would be high-table dinners. At the commencement of each meal, the principal would recite a Latin prayer, and the tutors, dressed in black academic gowns, would be served a three-course meal by the students. The principal explained to her that this tradition dated back to medieval times in the Benedictine monasteries, where St Benedict’s fundamental rule was that the strong should protect the weak. The head monks would impart their knowledge to their novices, and the novices would serve them a meal as a sign of gratitude for their teaching.
When the students started to arrive, she was laughed at, in a good-natured way, for being the tutor who would not let any male student step an inch inside her flat unless accompanied by a female student – not even to help her change a too-high-to-reach light bulb. They didn’t realise how much she depended on this job, and how she had to be seen as completely proper. She was the mentor to twenty students living on her floor, and meetings were initially held on two chairs set outside her doorway, while students discussed how they were settling in at the university.
*
On weekends she would return to her parents’ house. She would sleep in the same bed that she had shared with her little sister Alina when she was still living at home.
‘When are you coming back, Alice?’
‘I don’t know, pet.’
‘What if you never come home?’ Alina rubbed at her eyes with her fists. She could tell by the small squelching sounds from her knobbly fingers that she was crying.
Alina was eleven, Alison was fourteen. They were creeping out of childhood, and she felt bad for leaving them behind. Their pictures were stuck all over her new bedroom wall with Blu-tack. In the evenings there was no warm little body next to her. In the mornings, no milky breath in her face. As an infant, she had shared a bed with her parents; from the age of four to seven with her grandmother; then with her younger brother Alexander; and finally with Alina, who had crawled into her bed one evening complaining about an ache in her leg. Her siblings were the people who would be most biologically similar to her, made of half of each of their parents’ genetic material. Even her own future children would not come this close. It awed her to think that they’d be made of half of some stranger’s DNA, someone she was yet to meet.
Every year since her sisters were five, for their birthdays she had made them cakes shaped as their favourite cartoon creatures. She had sewn their costumes for their school dress-ups. She wanted to give them the Women’s Weekly kind of childhood that she thought would lead to healthy adolescence. When her sisters’ friends were discovering the Build-a-Bear Workshops, franchises that let kids shove polyester stuffing and a little felt heart inside a pre-sewn bear and then deck it out in an exorbitantly priced costume, she went to Spotlight Haberdashery and bought fleece, glass eyes and a pattern. ‘This is the real build-a-bear workshop,’ she told Alison, showing her the flat furry cloth, teaching her how to cut out the torso and limbs. This was the way she understood the world and how things fitted together.
Yet during law school, she felt that she had just been stumbling through, feeling stupid with the rest of the class while the two most vocal members engaged the lecturer in prolonged debate. Five years later, she understood the wild look in a student’s eyes in tutorials when words were flying too fast to follow. She instinctively knew when a student would stay back after the others left and burst into tears. Usually these were the country students, beautiful young women who had not yet developed a penchant for wearing black so as to fit into a new and sleek city life. She took them to McDonald’s and bought them Happy Meals when they were particularly sad.
‘I just don’t get it,’ a student would sob. ‘People seem to know everything.’
And there was so much to know. If Blake could see heaven in a flower, why couldn’t the students see globalisation in the toy in their Happy Meals: forty-three separate pieces of man-made polyester stitched together by a group of young people in a factory in China, possibly around their age, maybe even younger? Or why couldn’t they watch family law in practice at the table next to them, as a mother waited for her ex-husband to pick up the kids following a shared-parenting order?
At the college she would tutor any subject they gave her, order the reading notes from the university, study and summarise them for each lesson. She became the tutor in political science, creative writing and linguistics. How did the university expect first-year students to jump into postmodernism without any definitions or starter course? How did they expect the world to make sense when students were being taught the abstracts before they could open their eyes to the concrete?
For linguistics, she led them up and down alleyways in Chinatown. She wanted them to distinguish between different dialects, to listen to the cadences of an unfamiliar tongue. She was not prepared for the reaction of her American exchange student, Jess. ‘Oh my gaahd, you can’t do this! You can’t do it! You just can’t! We are so going to get mugged.’ Their first experience of Engrish was in the aisles of an Asian grocery store, where one of her students bought some biscuits named Colon.
For creative writing, she took a group of her first-year students to read aloud from their work in a bar in St Kilda. A silver-haired old man from Venezuela bought their little group a bottle of wine. During global politics, she asked her father to come in one evening after work and tell them what it meant to go through a real and bloody socialist revolution. She brought in her good friend Luke to talk about working for the United Nations’ International Labor Organisation.
She kept her students busy while they spoke to her about their personal problems, kept them knitting, or folding origami, or helping her make pastries.
*
‘Do you miss home?’ her mother asked over the phone.
‘Yes,’ she lied, hoping that this would not make them tell her to come back.
When her parents came to visit after she had settled in, she opened her wardrobe and showed them her academic gown. She told them she had to wear it to high-table dinners. They tried on the gown and she took photographs of them posing by the fireplace.
‘Heh heh, look at your mother.’
Her mother had put on her glasses. ‘Wearing this gown brings out the stupidity in me. Heh heh, look at your father pretending to be a professor. Old man, you look like you’ve robbed a graduation parade.’
The gown was so long that it fell past his arms. Her father held up some rolled-up sheets of papers, pretending he had degrees.
They looked so happy.
She knew that they didn’t mind her being here after all.
*
Another time, her parents came to visit her after work with a pot of tapioca pudding. She wanted them to have dinner in her flat. ‘Are you sure?’ they kept asking. ‘We don’t belong here.’
She kept reassuring them that it was fine, that other tutors had their parents come and visit, that the students would be happy to meet them too. Funny, but she suddenly realised how proud she was of them. She wanted to show them off in the way Chinese parents wanted to show off their kids’ piano-playing awards or A-plus report cards. Her parents’ accomplishments were more than the material gleanings of life. They represented everything that was possible if your new life followed a narrow path, from which you did not deviate because you knew no other way. Failure? There was no way to fail in a fresh new world that offered you a life starter kit.
As they were walking up the stairs to her flat, they came across two of her tutor friends, Allan and Benita, who asked her, ‘Are you coming to the tutors’ dinner tonight?’
‘What dinner?’
‘The one the social club organised.’
‘Oh, I completely forgot!’ There would be other dinners with her friends; they were always organising social functions of one kind or another. ‘I’m having dinner with my parents in my flat.’
‘Okay, see you soon!’ Allan and Benita left.
‘Were you meant to have dinner with your friends?’ asked her mother.
‘No, we’re having dinner in my flat.’ Her parents had never eaten there before. They did not know that it was here that she cooked three-course meals, that she baked brownies and muffins and complicated cheesecakes, and even made fudge.
‘No, no, you’d better go off with your friends. You don’t want the other tutors thinking you are strange and don’t like to be around other people.’
‘You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t make friends at college,’ her father told her, ‘and if you stay in your room all the time.’
‘You need to go out and meet new people.’
‘We’d better be leaving now.’ And with that, they disappeared down the stairs and back out the gate. She followed them, asked them to stay, and they kept telling her to hurry and catch up with her friends. She watched their car backing out of the driveway. She felt a sadness seeing her parents shuffle away like that, so afraid were they of interfering in her new world. When she came back from the dinner with the other tutors, she noticed that her mum had left the pot of tapioca pudding at her door.
As six months turned into one year, and one year into two and then two into three and four, one thing became clear: although her parents would always be willing to wait outside to pick her up and take her back home, they would never come and eat with her in her flat.