2

Two knocks on her bedroom wall. It was Jess from next door. Coffee? Three taps back. On my way.

Her father was already at work, so it was only her mother stern-eyeing her as she hit the kitchen.

“Bye, Ma,” she said, picking up her packed lunch from the bench.

“Don’t be wasting so much time with Jessica,” her mother said in Vietnamese. They always spoke Vietnamese at home. Her mother could speak only a small amount of basic English. Survival English. It was a miracle she could speak it at all after a total of twenty weeks of language class more than twenty years ago. Vân Ước had always offered to teach her more, but her mother waved it away. Too late, too late. She was probably right. She had only ever worked with other Vietnamese women, hung out with them, shopped in their shops on Albert Street… she didn’t need much English to get by. Especially not with a daughter on tap as interpreter/translator.

“Quick coffee, Mama—I’m so early. We get into trouble if we’re too early.”

Her mother never had a clue about what school approved or disapproved of. That world was as remote and mysterious to her as the moon. She had a generalized fear of the school: it gave her daughter a scholarship; it could take the scholarship away. Vân Ước always had the trump card: all communication from the school was via her. Sometimes it felt mean, and too easy, to play it like this, but it was, finally, an upside of being the family English speaker, whether or not she wanted to be, for all these years.

She chose a banana from the fruit bowl and kissed her mother good-bye.

Her mother nodded and shooed her out dismissively. “Be good. Study hard.”

How much did she hate it when her mother said study hard? How many times did she have to hear it? (Three thousand six hundred times, she had estimated. Give or take.)

She walked to Jess’s, the twelve big steps along the concrete hallway that used to be sixteen steps when they were little. The metal screen door was open, the coffee ready. Jess’s parents, both cleaners at the local public hospital, were working early shifts and long gone.

“Your mum would kill you,” Vân Ước said, nodding at the open door.

Jess shrugged. “She’s not happy unless I’m giving her something to kill me about.” She handed over the coffee in a tall glass. “How was IB day one?”

Vân Ước took a sip. Instant, mixed with a heap of condensed milk and some boiling water. A Vietnamese specialty. A great heart starter for the walk to school. It made you fly on a little cloud of sugar and caffeine. One of the many off-curriculum things she had learned at Crowthorne Grammar was that instant coffee was a crime, a hideous faux pas. If you didn’t pay four bucks and have someone else make it for you, it wasn’t coffee. They didn’t know what they were missing.

“Eck—the usual. More work than I signed up for,” she said, thinking, IB had started weirdly. With Billy Gardiner talking to me after school. She wouldn’t tell Jess about that until she’d figured it out. “How’s year eleven going?”

“Same. All they’ve done basically is tell us it’s more work than we realize and we’d better work like we mean it from day one if we want to compete blah-dy blah…”

Jess’s school—Vân Ước’s old school—offered the standard year eleven and year twelve Victorian Certificate of Education program. Crowthorne Grammar offered VCE plus an alternative, encouraged for the smarter students: the IB program. It was crazy that Vân Ước had won a scholarship to Crowthorne Grammar in year nine and Jess hadn’t. Their scores all through school had been pretty much on par. They switched first and second place in most of their subjects. The irony was that Vân Ước—she realized later—got the scholarship because she was so sure she wouldn’t. Because of that sudden conviction, she had spoken freely in her interview about what she thought of the current state of politics and society, and her intention to study art eventually, and what her plans were for her art portfolio over the next few years.

Jess had given the more standard, well-behaved answers that they’d been trained to give at scholarship coaching, and she didn’t get one. A scholarship. She wasn’t lying when she said she was happier to stay where she was at Collingwood Girls Secondary College. And Vân Ước half wished she were still there, too. But the awful truth was that Vân Ước had made her parents happy and proud, and Jess had disappointed hers and caused them to lose money when the coaching didn’t pay off. The old joke was that the Asian “fail” was an A-, but in truth the Asian fail was not getting a scholarship. Vân Ước also had what the girls called the “oboe advantage,” playing one of the more obscure instruments for orchestra. It had only been chosen for her because her father had found the instrument sleeping in its crimson-lined case in a pawn shop on Bridge Road for twenty dollars. Jess was just one more violinist.

Along Albert Street the shops were opening, and footpaths being washed clean of late-night vomit and early-morning dog pee. It was Thursday, so all the restaurants with toilets out the back would already have locked those doors. Government benefits payment day was also look-for-a-handy-place-to-hit-up day.

“Vân Ước, Jessicaaa!” The girls stopped at the doorway from which the screaming had come. It was Liên Luu from their block. She managed a bakery, the sort that had an improbably large selection of sweet and savory bread products, and—lucky day—she had a couple of misshapen fruit buns to give away. Liên Luu was also the auntie of cool Henry Ha Minh, of Henry Ha Minh Rolls fame.

The two girls walked and talked and chewed their way past the security-grilled, graffitied, and bilingually signed tailors, dry cleaners, two-dollar shops where most of the stuff cost more like five dollars, fishmongers, kitchen-supply places, huge grocers and electrical goods stores, and many “original” phở joints so beloved of Melbourne’s middle class.

Now, of course, second-generation Vietnamese kids had their upmarket witty designer versions of all this food at three times the price and away from the mini Saigons of Richmond and Footscray and Box Hill. Henry was one of them. Henry Ha Minh Rolls was on Chapel Street and always had a queue of people waiting outside. Vân Ước and Jess worked there on Saturdays making rice paper rolls or, if they were on the early shift, doing prep for making rice paper rolls.

The girls gave each other their standard two-way bro-knuckle farewell and went in opposite directions when they hit Punt Road.