FATHER—
His kids were keen on birthdays. He wasn’t, at least not for himself. He didn’t want to be reminded that he was aging. He and Kien had never celebrated their birthdays, but he remembered one year when he had wanted to do something for her.
When she turned forty, he took her to Starshots studio to have her picture taken. The make-up artists spent two hours on Kien. They styled her hair, and even gave her a set of false eyelashes. He’d never told her that she was beautiful. In fact, when he was younger, he’d even hoped that she would not think it of herself, because he didn’t want her to leave him. She never wore make-up in her twenties, and before she turned thirty she got one of those old-granny perms from Veronica, the home-garage hairdresser. She told him it was easier to manage.
When the Starshots photographs came in, they both pored over the small sample prints, in order to choose larger ones. His wife looked a different person with all that make-up on her face. She picked out a couple of photos she liked, and he blew them up to the size of oil paintings. He had them framed in gilt frames and hung the largest one in their living room. There were barely any pictures of Kien in her early twenties. When he thought about it, he realised that their lives had never been about looking at themselves in the past.
‘Lucky they all look like Kien,’ he would say of his children, ‘and not like me.’
*
Kien was always going on about how slow he was. ‘You’d never come late to pick up your children, but you always come late for me and make me wait at the train station.’ He was used to her complaints. Three decades of marriage and he could not imagine having such arguments with anybody else. Those Australians on television always made up with ten million apologies and flowers and sweets, but he and his wife never said sorry to each other. They knew that they’d still be together. There was no conceivable way they would not be. Their love was a closed circle.
He thought about the few church weddings he had been to over the years, and how there was a part of the ceremony when everyone had to be silent while the vows were made. Love, honour and cherish. In sickness and in health. For better or for worse. People had to remind each other of these things because life was so comfortable here. Because they had been brought up expecting separation from their parents once they reached a certain age, these new adults had to learn to depend again.
What was wrong with dependency, he wondered. If you didn’t depend on anyone, you died.
*
My old man, Kien said to him, as she fed him a green leafy vegetable at the restaurant table. He was suddenly aware as he was chewing that his daughter was watching him. Crap, he thought, she might even write about this. He had only just turned sixty and already his wife was shoving bite-sized pieces of food into his mouth. But it wasn’t that. It was that they were acting like lovelorn teenagers, he and Kien – that was what his daughter’s astonishment-face was about. When had this happened? He had no idea until he saw it through her eyes. But when he examined it, it wasn’t puppy-love playfulness. His wife wasn’t a particularly playful person; she took things too seriously, which resulted in her taking tablets for her blood pressure.
It was just love, he concluded, love that could adapt and change. She was too careful, his daughter. She thought and thought about potential partners and never did anything about it. She weighed up the pros and cons, as if perfect adulthood were something to be totted up. She was never any good at maths. Why was she doing this? She was going to be thirty, but it was as though she couldn’t wait to be sixty, and all the intervening years were just getting in the way.
He wished that his daughter would go out more, yet he himself had never set foot in a nightclub. Why did people want to romance in dark-lit places? Because in the dark, the other person’s chins sank away in shadows and their eyes lit up like possum orbs. They could hide their shonky teeth and oily skin. Those women back in Cambodia bloomed at fifteen and their faces rotted at twenty, at least the ones in the clubs and brothels, not that he had visited such places, but he had seen them during the day, buying fruit in Phnom Penh’s New Market. Even the swanky bars in Melbourne, which his daughter assured him were absolutely safe, he felt wary of. Why sit around drinking a small glass of Coke through a straw in the company of drunkards? Even if there were no drunkards, even if it was in one of the almost-all-nighter coffee shops near his daughter’s university, well, why did it have to be so dark? People were always keeping themselves in the dark.
Love was having all the lights on, and it was love at first sight with Kien. Well, no, that was a lie. He knew Kien when she was thirteen and working in his factory, of course, but he did not fall for her then. He was not a Happy Uncle. He was fond of the kids who worked there, although Kien told him that she had been scared of him. All of the little girls were – he was the foreman, he came down every once in a while to see what was happening.
So it was love at second sight, if you wanted to be precise about it. But how could you be precise about such things? It was first sight for him, because his life began when he was thirty, after he left the Kingdom of Hell. Bang! It hit him like that. If Kien had asked him why he loved her back then, he would have said Because I can feel feelings again! Singing it loud to her like the opening line of the opening number of a musical.
He had waited for Kien with the anxiety of a child. How young she was, and how she made his heart come back to life. How he fell for her. How high and how deep and how single-mindedly.
Sometimes he looked at his wife and thought, this is what I have done to another human being. This is what my love has demanded of her. Three decades and four children later, and she was a middle-aged woman who still could not read or write, but who commanded staff at his store, carried vacuum cleaners and food processors and laptop computers from the warehouse to the shop floor, and sold the most stock of anyone.
And now she was sitting there without thinking, feeding him with a pair of chopsticks. ‘My old man, what are you thinking about?’ she asked. Inside, he felt the same as when he was thirty. That was when he was born again. Not born to Christ or even to the Buddha, but just born and that was enough.