DAUGHTER—
Every time she calls home, these are the sorts of things her father thinks she needs to know: ‘Always lock your doors, and always look behind you when you walk through a doorway. Did you hear that a Korean boy and a Chinese girl jumped to their deaths from their Sydney balcony when an intruder followed them into their flat with a knife?’
‘Wear earmuffs. Your Uncle Kiv told me that when the Cambodian refugees came to Canada, their ears froze off during the first winter. They had never felt snow before.’
‘Buy a face-mask to ward off the pollution.’
‘Don’t go out when it is getting dark.’
She imagined walking through the ancient city, touch entombed in gloves, hearing buried beneath earmuffs, smell suffocated behind a white paper mask and blinkered eyes watching for wayward cars and potential rapists while wonderful things like the Temple of Heaven passed her by.
I hope nothing happens to you seemed to be the secret wish behind every phone conversation. Yet to stop bad things happening, you had to stop anything happening.
The next time her father calls, he tells her about the bushfires raging through Victoria’s summer, while she is in the middle of a frozen Beijing winter. The fires are reported in the China Daily, but not on the front page because of the everyday man-made horrors constantly happening here. Mines are collapsing, schools are tumbling down, trapping only-children inside. Milk for babies is poisoned, killing more only-children.
‘Staying and defending your home is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,’ her father rails. He feels let down: Australian democracy should be infallible. ‘Why does the government let them stay and defend?’
When she was seven, her teacher advised that if ever their house burnt down, they should save the family photos.
‘Ridiculous,’ her father replied when she reported this to him. ‘You don’t save the photos. You save yourself. And then perhaps the money and the gold. That is all.’
If their house burnt down, she knew her father would not stray from his word. Leave it, he would command, no matter what they clung to. They would grab Alina to stop her going back for her guinea pig. But Dad would not tell Mum to let go of whatever she was holding onto, because Mum, like Dad, had been through this before. They knew what to do. Mum would be clutching small bags of gold and wads of money, things that could easily be carried in the hand to start over.
In her childhood she had grown up with survivors – weary-looking men and women who took sewing home or made jewellery or worked in factories, people who did things that didn’t involve much talking. First, they didn’t know much English, and second, they didn’t talk about these things with people who would never understand. But among themselves, it was different. Her parents and their friends greeted each other not only with ‘How are you?’ but also, ‘So you survived the Black Bandits?’ That last question was a question that did not need an answer: the answer was right in front of their faces, in the breath that came in and out. And finally, the question they had all asked each other in their previous lives, but which now took on an extra weight, like something still to be digested in the stomach: ‘Have you eaten yet?’
So when she was eighteen, she began to research how not having any food kills you slowly. She learnt about the body breaking down its own tissues and muscles to keep the heart and the nervous system thrumming away. She read about ailments such as anaemia, beriberi and pellagra, which sounded more like the three Graces in a pidgin language than the effects of vitamin deficiency as a result of starvation. There was even a word for the sense of exhaustion that comes with being starved: inanition.
And then she stopped.
She thought of her grandfather – her father’s father – dead of starvation, her two cousins buried alive, half her relatives wiped out, the whole of Cambodia reduced to one extended bony arm begging for a bowl of rice. This was her heritage. No wonder her father didn’t want her to see it. Her parents were born in Cambodia, but her grandparents were from China. So she would begin this new book on a bus instead, in her grandmother’s hometown, as all such heart-starting stories of homecoming should begin.