DAUGHTER—
There should be a word for a memory that you had deliberately forgotten to remember: a Dismemory. This is what her father had. Dismemory sounded like a foreign country filled with heaps of miscellaneous cast-offs. And people in clusters, picking up the pieces, also called Dismemories. People wearing their Dismemories like armour, or perhaps sewn into a strangely coloured suit with small lapels. But maybe a person grew until their Dismemories became too tight and the seams could not help but tear. Had she ever walked around with an enormous hole in the middle of her back that she did not know was there because she could not see it? Or maybe another time her knee had been exposed, right in the area where doctors tested your reflexes with a small hammer, to make sure you still felt the feelings that kept you alive. Her Dismemories were small, but her father’s were enormous.
What if it gets worse, she wondered, but never asked him.
What if what gets worse, he would have wanted to know.
Your dismembered memories. Your Dismemories.
No such thing.
But of course there was. There was Dismemory in his trying to cut off the sharp tip of a knife with another knife, and Dismemory in the way he wrapped an unpeeled banana in cling wrap so it would not be contaminated in his children’s school bags. Dismemory in the way he surrounded himself with a kaleidoscope of ever-evolving electronics. There was Dismemory when he took walks near the Maribyrnong River and feared drowning, and Dismemory in the way he plotted that she would either move back home or stay inside the college. Dismemory in the secret glee he felt that his daughter could find a job where she sat in one warm safe room for eight hours a day. Dismemory in the way he loved innocence.
During her childhood, she found that the most difficult thing was to argue with her father. She could never win, because you could never argue with anyone who wanted so much for you, whose very arguments were motivated by this love. As the years progressed, nothing seemed to have changed.
‘Why can’t I stay out past eight p.m. in summer?’
‘Why do you whinge so much? Why don’t we just let you wander the streets? See how far that gets you.’ Even in her second year of university they still imposed that ridiculous curfew on her.
He made her so furious sometimes. But you could never question the paranoias attached to this love, because to him it would mean questioning the love, which was unconditional. And what kind of ungrateful troublemaker would ask questions about a gift many families lacked?
So instead she asked him about those he had loved before. ‘What was Chicken Daddy like?’
‘He was a very hard-working man,’ her father would reply.
‘How did Chicken Sister look?’ she’d inquire, and he’d give her a blurry description of what colonised Indochinese considered beautiful.
‘She was very pretty, big eyes and pale skin. So perhaps you’d better not write that her brothers called her Spider when she was young or no one will have any sympathy for her.’
She understood how he thought people would respond: sympathy for beautiful and perfect characters only. But she couldn’t make any of it perfect. Perfection did not bring them back to life. She gave her father her writing to read, and he corrected only the factual errors.
‘Thanks, Dad, but do you have any other suggestions?’
‘No. I don’t know much about writing.’
‘Come on, Dad, just tell me whatever comes to mind.’
‘Do you think there’s too much suffering in the Cambodian part? Maybe white people don’t want to read about too much suffering. It depresses them.’
She didn’t know what to say about that. She knew exactly what he meant, though. Her first book had been filled with the sort of sardonic wit that came easily to a person whose sole purpose in life was to finish university and find her first graduate position, knowing full well that she was on her way to becoming comfortably middle-class. She had refused, just as her father did, to look beyond the here and now. If you looked at darkness through rose-coloured glasses, all you got was a congealed blood colour. A colour that should have a specific name, like blug, a clotty mixture of mucus and blood. A word that was not in her father’s dictionary. It was best not to look at all.
But now that she was older, she saw that in his quest for modernity and upward mobility, her father had given his children a completely different history, drilled into them that they were part of a Chinese culture that spanned centuries, which was true; made sure they were also aware they were bonafide born-in-Australia kids. But in doing so, he had wiped out the most significant part of their identity.
How could she forget the men and women who came to their house in Braybrook when she was young, who had no idea of privacy? They would poke and prod their heads into any room and ‘wahhh’ when she and her toddler brother were getting changed. Whenever they were expecting visitors her parents would hide the valuables, but they never failed to offer food, and as much as anyone wanted. ‘We’re having dinner! Join us! Join us!’ And before the person could refuse, a bowl heaped with rice would be thrust into their hands and a chair pulled out. Her mother would cook Vietnamese food because that was what she was taught in Saigon: Bánh hói, Bánh canh, fish soup and rice-paper rolls with hot Thai basil and mint. Their fridge was filled with jars of homemade fish sauce; their bedrooms were guarded by glassy-eyed porcelain Buddhas. The Goddess of Mercy floating on her lotus had watched them grow up from her place on the mantlepiece, but gradually they ignored her as they dismantled their filthy former habits.
When one of her uncles first arrived in Australia, he kept a wastepaper basket beside his loo. He thought that flushing used toilet paper would block the pipes. Some migrants washed their hair with dishwashing detergent because they couldn’t read the labels, but the pictures of lemons gave them a feeling of zesty succour. Others dried meat on flat pieces of newspaper in the living room, or pickled onions in empty Nescafé jars. They were always afraid of scarcity because they were not Mainlander Chinese but Diaspora Chinese, driven from place to place, destined never to feel a sense of belonging; knowing they would never be a part unless they kept themselves apart and hid what was most important of their heritage inside the home. In Cambodia they were the walnut-faced grandmothers selling boiled eggs in the marketplace, or the goldsmiths making jewellery for weddings. In Australia they were the model minority only once they were no longer scrambling in the factories and picking fruit on the farms, and once their kids could speak English.
And when she and her brother came home from school speaking English, her father knew it was time. He wanted to whitewash their history so they could begin anew. No prying ways, no crap on scraps of paper lying around the house. Her father had named her Alice because he believed this new country to be a Wonderland, where anything was possible if only she went along with his unfailing belief. His patriotism rang truer and more annoying than any bogan supremacist’s. ‘Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free.’ This to him was the most beautiful national anthem in the world. There was golden soil and wealth for toil. Who wanted to be anywhere else? In other countries, where their anthems were all about rinsing the land in blood of the brothers?
He would never let her go to Cambodia. ‘You can travel anywhere in the world except there,’ he told her generously, but still she would not relent.
When she reached adulthood, she kept at it. ‘But Alexander went when he was nineteen!’
‘That’s different. Your brother is a boy.’
The boys were allowed to go back on holidays, and after the age of thirty if they were still single, they were sent back to find themselves wives.
‘If you want to go back to Cambodia, you must stay with Uncle Kiv,’ her father had told her. ‘He’ll look after you.’ Uncle Kiv was her father’s hero. Her father would show every visitor to their house brochures of Uncle Kiv’s banks in Cambodia, shiny full-colour booklets designed to entice investors. These brochures clearly were not literature, but inside their pages her father found a story of success that he could not resist bringing out whenever any of her friends’ parents came to pick them up.
‘But I want to go with you, Dad,’ she kept insisting.
‘It’s too dangerous still,’ he’d reply. Finally, ten years later, he relented. He and her younger sister Alison were going to go with her. She was to return to Beijing for one week for a writers’ festival. Afterwards, she would meet them in Hong Kong and they would fly to Cambodia together.
‘I’ll bring the best Panasonic camcorder that’s on display at the shop,’ her father told her, ‘so you can remember the details of the place exactly as it is.’ These weren’t fields of golden wheat or barley they were going to see. They were the killing fields her father was going to show her, the daughter he wouldn’t even let out to see movies at Highpoint mall in her early teens.
When she left her parents’ house, her father was waiting outside on the porch in his woolly old argyle jumper, black buildings behind him against the quiet sky, still dark but ripening for the day. He was watching her taxi drive away, no doubt memorising the numberplate in case the driver didn’t take her to the airport.