FATHER—
His daughter is coming home. Well, not exactly home, but back to Australia. It panics him whenever any of his children are far away. She has been gone nearly three months – the first time she has lived outside the country. And to think that less than a year ago he had made such a fuss when she went off to Perth, on the west coast, for three weeks to edit a book. ‘Why do you need to go so far to write?’ he had asked her. But there was nothing he could do. She wasn’t a child anymore. Still, she called home every evening for the three weeks she was there. In China, she is not so diligent. If three days pass and he has not heard from her, he will assume the worst.
His daughter is in a different country and she will get herself into trouble. He just knows it. He has a feeling. He remembers at the airport a woman with a baby in her arms, carrying two suitcases, waiting to board the same plane as his daughter. He saw his daughter offer to carry one of the bags, just as she was about to pass through the boarding gate. He was too far away to call out to her, and he felt ridiculous. It was only a domestic connecting flight and there was no death penalty in Australia. But he worried about drugs. Why did she do such stupid things? And now she was in Beijing, living in an apartment by herself, writing. Why did she have to go so far away to do that? With modern technology and an imagination, she could look at the country through the internet. He remembered when she showed him Google Maps before she left, and how to roam the foreign streets to find Peking University where she would be staying. It was incredible – you could even zoom in on the red and white tennis courts. ‘Can you see people too?’ he had asked.
‘Of course not, Dad. Don’t be silly. What do you think this is for, surveillance? They’re satellite pictures.’
Well, why couldn’t she just see the world through these satellite pictures? It was safer. She could watch movies. Why did she think people invented such things? They said that a desktop was a dangerous place from which to view the world, but it was also the safest spot for the watcher.
He wants her to live a life where she will not be harmed by anything more than the occasional paper-cut. He is pleased she has a job she can do safely ensconced within four walls. If she wants to write, then he will give her stories. Why did she need to go overseas to find them? But there is so much to occupy his mind now, and no time or desire to plunge a hand back into the past to pull out details. He wishes that he had photographs, but he owns nothing that is older than 1980. Everything in his life before then has been taken, lost, wiped out.
*
‘Australians are strange,’ he remarks to his daughter over the phone the next time he calls her room at the Peking University guest house. ‘Why don’t they buy insurance? How can they think that safety and peace of mind are expensive?’ Their conversations across continents are often confined to things he has read in the newspaper.
‘I don’t know,’ she replies, ‘but I can understand why they stayed to defend their houses. Some of them were over sixty. They might have felt it was too late to start all over again. It was their family home.’
People want to hear stories of great horrors and triumphs. His daughter’s stories so far seem to be about small things. He wants her to write about the glories of a civilisation that once claimed to be the heartbeat of the world, and how proud she is of having ancestry from the Middle Kingdom. Instead she writes about taking a bus to go strawberry-picking on a farm outside Melbourne, and about his wife Kien learning English word by word from his youngest daughter’s school books. What is the point of telling a story if it is only about things that happen every day? They are so easily forgotten. She needs to see the world through a larger lens. But what does he know?
To live a happy life, he believes, you need a healthy short-term memory, a slate that can be wiped clean every morning, like one of those toys he bought for his daughter when she was young – an Etch A Sketch. If you turned it upside down and shook it, your art disappeared.