CHAPTER 9
When we scramble inside the house, Dad’s sitting in front of the TV, watching the evening news. Even though we’re making loads of noise, he doesn’t look around when we pass the doorway to the lounge room, on the way to the kitchen. He just sits there like a stone, unmoving, still wearing his suit and tie and shoes. The light of the TV is flickering over his face because he hasn’t bothered to turn on the light and the room is dark.
It’s something Fay Xiao would have done, and my skin tightens in alarm.
I think of all the times when Dad hasn’t been able to get out of bed. When life must feel so worthless to him that he doesn’t speak to anyone, or look at anyone, he just withdraws while Mum keeps the whole house ticking over until he decides to emerge again.
I don’t know what’s worse – him shouting at us with his face all twisted up and dark with fury, or him immobile and unreachable behind a closed bedroom door or in front of a flickering TV in the dark. It feels like there’s never any in-between. I can’t breathe.
Mum and I look at each other anxiously as she shrugs off her brown suit jacket and puts on her black apron. ‘Go and ask him if he wants any soup,’ she tells me urgently. The same soup Mum used as a base for the thermos of congee we just left at Henry’s house.
Congee and soup is pretty much all we have left in the house to eat. If Dad wants eight dishes tonight, we’re in real trouble.
‘Could you ask him?’ I beg, thankful we came home empty-handed, with nothing to explain.
Mum gives me a hard look and hurries out. For several minutes, I hear her voice, sharp and enquiring, but I don’t hear Dad’s.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she finally shouts in frustration. ‘It’s like speaking to a statue when you’re like this!’
I go very still. Mum never yells at Dad. She’s never dared.
She comes back into the kitchen, and I see it before she does. My eyes widen in warning at how Dad jumps out of his chair and runs at her, pulling her around by one arm so that her long hair flies out behind her, and she cries out in pain and alarm.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he roars. ‘With her?’
He points at me with a shaking finger, and I go hot, my whole face flushing from my neck to my hairline with fear. What is it that I’ve done? This is Dad when he’s in a mood to burn things.
He screams, ‘I forbade you to have anything to do with those people, and you defied me!’
Our eyes, Mum’s and mine, fly to each other across the kitchen. How does he know?
‘I saw you,’ Dad shouts, as if I’ve just spoken the question out loud. ‘I saw you leaving something at the house of that disgraced man. A man who is not your husband. A man I told you to stay away from!’
He shakes Mum hard by the arm and I yell, ‘Stop it! It was my fault! I made Mum do it. She didn’t want to do it. I forced her to help me, to help Henry.’
Dad turns on me, his grip so tight on Mum’s arm that his knuckles are white. ‘Who is the adult here? You or her? This is her fault. The fact that you are a stupid, lying, disobedient girl is your mother’s fault. Who is with you all day? Who has made you into this useless, insolent child? She has.’
Actually, you have, I think, too afraid to say the words out loud. You’ve made us this way. Having to sneak around just to get the things that should be done, things that are good and right, done in peace.
‘Jin, please,’ Mum pleads, twisting in his grip. ‘We won’t do it again. Forget about it. It’s not important.’
‘Mum,’ I insist loudly, ‘it is important. Dad’s always talking about benevolence and what it means to be good, to be cultured, to be worthwhile. He gave me a boy’s name, remember? Cultured strength. Being cultured and being benevolent and being strong can’t just mean that we only help ourselves while other people are suffering and we can do something about it! It can’t just mean that we serve our parents while we ignore all the other people who need our help.’
Dad drops Mum’s arm and turns to face me, gripping the back of one of the kitchen chairs.
‘Why are you talking back?’ he roars. ‘Who gave you the right to speak to me like this? We cannot be connected to people like them. I saw you,’ Dad repeats. ‘I was driving home and I saw you. I could not believe my eyes, that you are living here in this house and openly disobeying my rules. It is complete chaos, disorder, everything is upside down, you are a child…’
Dad’s voice cracks and Mum and I look at each other in horror when he gobbles, ‘They fired me! Me! An educated man. They sent me home! And then I saw you …’
‘What have you done, Jin?’ Mum breathes. Her eyes fly to the fridge that she and I both know to be practically empty except for a few slices of bread and ham. Friday is payday. It’s still two days away. The first of the month is always payday.
Until maybe it isn’t.
I take a step closer to Mum, who’s rubbing her arm absently, her eyes fixed on Dad.
Dad is breathing very hard as he leans on the back of the kitchen chair and I wonder whether the two spheres of his life have finally met and crashed together. The man he is at home – unpredictable, unreasonable, controlling, hot-tempered – and the man he’s supposed to be at work where nothing can ever be too much trouble – icy, remote, but polite in the face of every indignity, every customer’s whim, no matter how ridiculous. (Can I have the sweet and sour sauce in a little jug on the side? I asked for three types of chilli sauce and you only brought me two? Does it come with zucchini? Can you take the zucchini out because I hate zucchini and it makes me cry?)
Dad looks up at us now with red eyes. ‘The man deserved it!’ he spits. ‘The whole table was full of drunk white men, rude, racist, unbearable – but he was the worst! When he called me an uppity little Chink…’
I gasp out loud and Mum takes a step backwards, towards me.
‘… I tipped an entire plate of Cantonese beef over him. The owner told me to leave at once.’
‘Jin!’ Mum’s voice is hushed as Dad makes a harsh barking sound, like a sob.
I’m not really thinking when I mutter out loud, ‘What are we going to do now?’
Dad raises his head higher and draws the chair out from under the table, shakes it at me.
‘We,’ he snarls, ‘are going to give our parents no further cause for anxiety. We are going to obey without question. We are going to stop making a spectacle of ourselves by aiding the family of a disgraceful suicide!’
‘And what happens if we don’t?’ I regret my words as soon as they tumble out, but I plunge on anyway. ‘What if we don’t stop helping because it’s up to us,’ my eyes fly to Mum’s, beseechingly, for backup, ‘to get Henry well enough and strong enough to sit an entrance exam this Saturday? An exam that I am also sitting for, so that I can learn enough, and be enough, to one day take care of myself and my family so that the fridge will be full of everything we need, when we need it?’
I know that by saying what I’m actually thinking for once, I’ve said too much.
Something in Dad’s face shifts.
For a second, there’s so much rage in it that he doesn’t look human. He lifts the chair he’s holding even higher and cracks it onto the floor so hard that one of the wooden legs splinters through the middle. Mum and I jump.
The chair leg is hanging at a funny angle as Dad points what’s left of the chair at me. ‘You stop – you stop right now doing what you’re doing, or you can get out of this house.’
‘Wen!’ Mum breathes. ‘Just go to your room. Please. I’ll talk to him, he doesn’t mean it.’
But Dad does mean it, because he roars, ‘Don’t like it? Don’t like my rules? Then just get out of my house!’
‘Jin!’ Mum’s voice is high and frightened. ‘How can you say this? She’s a child. She’s your daughter.’
Dad turns his red eyes on Mum and doesn’t reply, because he doesn’t have to.
If I was a boy, life would be different. Life would undoubtedly be better. The universe would be in perfect balance. I wouldn’t be a walking daily reminder of something missing, some kind of lack.
But I’m not a boy. And I can change that as much as I can change where my heart lies beating inside my chest. Which is exactly not at all.
My voice sounds small and funny as I remind Dad, ‘Tzu-Chang asked the master about what makes a benevolent man. There are five things …’
I search my memory quickly for one of Dad’s interminable lectures. They are all there, filed away, because I may be bad at maths, but I have a memory like an elephant for words.
‘One is respectfulness,’ I continue breathlessly. ‘The second is tolerance. The third is trustworthiness. The fourth is quickness. The last is generosity. If a man is respectful, he will not be met with rudeness. If a man is tolerant, he will win people over. If a man is trustworthy, he will be given responsibility. If he is quick, he will achieve results. If he is generous, he will be put in a position over all others.’
Dad’s face is so mottled, so still, that I have to resist the desperate and immediate urge to run far, far away.
‘I’m trying, Dad,’ I say quietly, moving around him so that I’m standing near the doorway to the front hall, fighting the overwhelming feeling of wanting to hide. ‘Mum’s trying. We are both trying to be good men. We have always tried, every day, every moment we are awake. Now it’s your turn.’
‘Wen!’ Mum whispers.
I know I’ve passed the point of no return. I feel like I’ve lost my footing and a rip is sweeping me out and I’m losing sight of the land. I know that feeling. The sound of the waves pounding down on my head, how there is no longer any air to breathe, no light, and the only element left is one that can kill you.
I can either swim now, or I can drown.
I hold up my hand to stop Mum saying anything else. The way we are is more than a little bit my mother’s fault. For not ever pushing back. For allowing our ‘permitted’ boundaries – hers and mine – to get so small. It’s true.
I’m a kid. It shouldn’t be up to me to always be pointing out the things that don’t make sense, that aren’t fair, that aren’t right.
Dad’s eyes are very bright and hard as he snarls, ‘What makes you a better man than your own father?’
He throws the chair down, and it falls on its side as Mum and I flinch. ‘That entrance exam? They will laugh at you, they will laugh at Henry, like they laughed at me! What makes you better than me?’ He scoffs again. ‘What makes you think you can pass when your own father can’t pass? Why bother? It will end in nothing.’
‘Something always comes from nothing,’ I retort, and there’s a shift in Mum’s pinched, white features as she recognises the words that she once told me, the words of the ancient philosopher Lao Tzu, which I’ve never forgotten either. ‘Miss Spencer and Henry think I’m good enough to at least try. I haven’t given up on trying yet. If they laugh at me, and it ends in nothing? I will try something else. I will never stop trying.’
Dad rears back, pointing a shaking finger at me. ‘For people like you,’ he spits, ‘life will break your heart. Over and over. Unless you get wise, unless you get smart.’
‘Still,’ I say, backing away from the light of the kitchen, from the two of them standing, framed, in the doorway, receding in my sight. ‘I don’t want to end up like you – smaller and meaner than you should be.’
‘You’re a child,’ Dad reminds me again shakily, as if I didn’t recognise that fact every waking moment of every day. ‘You must obey me under the law. I forbid you to help Henry Xiao, and I forbid you to sit that exam.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say, more bravely than I’m feeling, ‘because in this country, the real laws protect even the children. Miss Spencer will help me do what it takes to sit the exam. Even if it means I have to leave home to do it, and live somewhere else.’
Mum gasps and puts her hands over her mouth.
Dad is still roaring, ‘You can’t do it! You’re not good enough!’ as I walk out the front door, still wearing my school uniform and the slippers I’m only ever supposed to wear inside the house.
I’m on autopilot as I storm towards the corner where the shops are, my floppy indoor slippers tripping me up with every step.
Instead of turning left to go towards Henry’s house and my school, I go right towards the scout hall where Nikki Kuol is going to have her big birthday party on Sunday – the one that I’m not allowed to go to, but long to attend so fiercely, it’s like a pain in my body.
No you can’t do it.
No you aren’t good enough.
No, no, no, no, no.
I sit outside the scout hall for a while, on the steps. Everything is dark now. There’s no one around, and it feels like nothing in my life will ever change. I will always be caught up between the rage and the fear and it will never get any better than this.
For a second, I wonder if being caught in that gap was too much for Henry’s mother. And just for a second, I think I understand why she did it, and I feel so much sadness that tears spill down my cheeks in the darkness.
After that, I lose track of time as I walk around the neighbourhood aimlessly, dashing away the tears that keep running down my face. It’s when I hear the sound of a stone being kicked off the footpath behind me that I realise I’m not alone.
Two men are walking behind me, talking quietly. I don’t know how long they’ve been there and, instantly, every hair on my body seems to stand up in warning.
I cross the street quickly, almost falling out of my house slippers, and they cross too. I start heading back in the direction of the scout hall, and the sound of their voices seems to grow louder, their footsteps speeding up as if they’re trying to catch up with me.
They will eventually, I know they will; I can’t run properly in these slippers.
I cross again, taking a diagonal path towards Mrs Xenakis’s pharmacy, and they cross as well. They’re now only a hundred or so metres behind me as I pass the local shops. A scream rising inside me, I cross another street, and this time I hear laughter, very close. For them, it’s a game. I’m not sure what that game means for me and don’t want to find out.
Half running now, as fast as my slippers will let me, I head towards the pedestrian bridge that leads to Henry’s house and hear their footsteps pick up even more quickly behind me.
Maybe Dad was right. Maybe it’s always too dangerous to leave home for people like me. There are so many stairs ahead! They might catch me on the stairs. I might trip and fall. I don’t know what I’m going to do.
It’s late, so there’s less traffic than during the day. I make the split-second decision to rip my slippers off and run straight across the road, six lanes wide, in my socked feet through the steady traffic that’s still passing up and down in front of the Xiaos’ place. Someone honks at me loudly as I run, the sound of an engine brake shuddering nearby almost scaring me out of my skin. Out of the corner of my eye, a light-coloured hatchback swerves to avoid me. Mum walks me to and from school every day just so that I don’t ever do anything like this – dodge between the cars and trucks, taking my life in my hands just to save a few extra metres. But I’m terrified.
Should I go for the doorbell or just bang on the windows of Henry’s house when I reach it? What if they don’t hear? What if they don’t let me in? What if something really bad does happen to me, and no one ever finds me, and that’s it – one life, this life, finished and done and over?
The breath is sobbing in my lungs and throat as I throw myself up the footpath at Henry’s place, desperately mashing the doorbell beside Henry’s front door with my thumb.
The two men are right there, standing at the very edge of the Xiaos’ front yard, talking and laughing and watching. But they turn and skulk off finally when someone throws open the wooden door and light streams out onto the front porch from the inside.
I blink through my tears at the light, refracted like rainbows in my vision.
‘Wen?’ Mr Xiao says in surprise through the screen door. ‘It’s late! What has happened?’
He’s too polite to mention that I appear to be standing on his doorstep in my uniform and socks, with no shoes on.
I see the silhouette of Mr Xiao’s head peering from left to right, looking for my mother, my father.
He starts unlocking the wire door and I say tiredly, ‘Please, if it’s all right, I’ll just sit here for a while, Mr Xiao? I don’t want to come in. I was just being followed, and I didn’t feel safe. I’m sorry about the congee we left you before, how tasteless and measly the serving was. I’m sorry to trouble you.’
I collapse on the front step with my back to the security door, resting my sweating, teary face in my hands. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so scared in my life. Not even when Dad broke that chair in front of us just now.
I had a context for a broken chair. But not for being followed by two men in the dark.
‘If you’re sure, Wen?’ Mr Xiao’s voice is worried. ‘I’ll just leave the front door open so that you can call out, if you need anything …’
I feel him hovering there for a moment more, behind the locked screen door, unsure what to do about me sitting on the doorstep in my school uniform and socks at 10.04 pm.
At 10.11 pm, just when my heart’s slowing enough that I’m thinking of sprinting home, I hear someone sit down heavily on the floor on the other side of the wire door.
Senses on high alert, I keep sitting with my back to him, and we sit, not talking, just breathing the same air companionably, until I start talking, all of it spilling out. About Dad losing his job, the fight, Nikki’s party, the men sniggering and following and getting closer and closer in the dark. At some stage I find I’m crying again, tears sliding down my cheeks, and I’m glad Henry can’t see me.
‘But enough about me,’ I say finally, smearing the back of my hand across my face. I’ve said too much. I should be letting Henry talk.
There’s a long silence. I can almost hear Henry’s brain grinding slowly into gear, telling him, This is whereyou are expected to say something in return. In English. She wants you to practise your English.
‘Actually, you don’t have to say anything,’ I say hastily, out loud. ‘You don’t have to say or do anything at all.’
But in a voice that sounds strange and rusty, as if from disuse, Henry declares, ‘To live is to risk everything!’
My cheeks are still damp with tears, but it makes both of us laugh, unexpectedly, to hear Henry channelling Mr Cornish, with his twirly moustache.
‘Only on Wednesdays,’ I reply tiredly. ‘Wednesdays, when your father loses his job.’
‘On Wednesdays, when your father loses his job,’ Henry says carefully in English, ‘there is no “happy medium”.’
‘You’re so ready for that exam,’ I murmur back.
‘So are you,’ Henry says hesitantly, still speaking in English. ‘See you on Saturday.’
As I’m about to turn out of the front of Henry’s place, I look back quickly to see the light streaming around his seated figure silhouetted behind the wire, facing me.
The silhouette raises its right hand slowly in a victory fist.
I’m still smiling as the shadow of Henry Xiao is lost to sight.
He’s still not outside, I think, but it’s a start.