Benjamin Law

Pictured: Jenny Law and Benjamin Law

As a writer, Benjamin Law is a regular contributor to a variety of publications, including a weekly column in Fairfax’s Good Weekend. His memoir, The Family Law, was shortlisted in the Australian Book Industry Awards for Book of the Year in 2011 and has been adapted into a TV show for SBS. He’s the kind of guy who loves sharing a good story – even if it means revealing some personal details. And his mum doesn’t seem to mind. Benjamin admits that the relationship between him and his mother may be closer than most. Are they the world’s only mother and son sex advice columnists? It’s a reasonable assumption…

I was seventeen when I came out as gay to Mum. I’d already told my best friend, Rebecca, and that gave me a bit of forward momentum to be able to tell my mum because I knew that she was the second person I wanted to tell. It was scary. I had that whole: ‘Mum I have something I need to tell you,’ and I was crying so much that I couldn’t even get it out, which, of course, would freak any parent out.

She was like: ‘What is wrong?’ And because I couldn’t get it out, she started playing a guessing game.

‘Are you on drugs?’

‘No.’

‘Have you gotten Rebecca pregnant?’

‘No.’

And I’m thinking to myself: ‘You’re definitely getting colder.’

‘Are you gay?’

‘Yes.’

Her shoulders slumped in relief and sympathy, and she patted my back and said: ‘Don’t be silly, there’s nothing wrong with being gay – it just means that something went wrong in the womb, that’s all.’

I think that response is so hilarious in retrospect because she’s comforting and reassuring me, while also basically telling me I’m deformed in some way. You know: ‘You don’t need to blame yourself – it’s just that my womb malfunctioned…’

It was her way of saying: ‘Look – it’s a glitch in the natural order of things,’ – and in a way it is, just as left-handedness is. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just how people come out. And that’s what she was trying to communicate with me in a very roundabout way.

I don’t think I could have continued having an honest relationship about my life and my friendship circles with my mum if that conversation hadn’t happened.

I’m one of many siblings. There are five of us. Amongst my mum’s generation, a family that size isn’t unusual, but on the Sunshine Coast growing up in the eighties and nineties we were definitely the biggest family at our school. And I’m smashed right in the middle – the meat in the sandwich. And I’m happy to be the meat in the sandwich because that’s the part that everyone enjoys, right?

I was born in 1982. There was my older brother, Andrew, and our eldest sister, Candy, who’d come before me, then four years after me Tammy, my sister, was born, then Michelle.

I’m at the age now that all my friends are popping out their first and sometimes second babies, and you see the pressures up close – what’s involved in parenthood first-hand – so I asked my mum: ‘How did you have five? And why did you have five?’

And she said: ‘Your Dad and I just never had that conver­sation.’

I guess that shows the extent of their communication skills with each other, which is probably why they got divorced when I was twelve years old. I guess the other explanation is, my Mum just loved being a mum – she loves being a mum still. She always loved having kids in her life – whatever the ups and downs in her marriage, she thought we were wonderful and adorable, and she thought we were really cute. We seemed to really cheer her up. For my father, I think he always wanted a big family – there’s some prestige and status in having a big family, especially when you come from China. He was the only child of his family – that was pre-one-child policy.

My parents met in Hong Kong in the early 1970s and they got married super quickly, after only a few months of knowing each other. Dad knew that he didn’t want to live in Hong Kong. He wanted to live in a place where there was opportunity and room to raise a family. Hong Kong has neither of those things. Hong Kong has great shopping, but it also has claustrophobia – so they moved to Australia and set up shop. One of the reasons they moved to Australia was that my dad knew some people in Queensland already in the restaurant trade.

My mum, on the other hand, had never been to Australia. As an adult, I think back on what a huge gamble she took in trusting a man she didn’t even know that well to go to a country she’d never visited – where she had no friends, no family members – to start a new life. I think that was very brave.

The restaurant business, as anyone who’s worked in it would know, is pretty brutal. They were both working seven days and nights a week.

When her first child came, she kept working, and when Andrew was born things got busier, but they still worked at a Chinese takeaway restaurant called Sunny Village in Caloundra. When I was born, I created a bit of a rift between my parents, because Mum just knew immediately – with three kids, very young children with only three years between them, it would be unsustainable for her to keep working at the restaurant, and if my father wanted to have a family with three kids, part of the deal was that she wasn’t going to work any more.

Apparently Dad was pretty angry about that, but Mum – all credit to her – was very steadfast and firm that she wasn’t setting foot back in the restaurant. She was going to raise the three kids full-time at home.

I got the full force of my mother’s love from day one. I had a fantastic childhood – the teen years weren’t so happy but childhood was really fantastic. As a young child, you’re born into this ready-made ecosystem of love and affection – you’ve got your natural allies there in your siblings and because my mum wasn’t working outside the home, I was very well taken care of.

I was a very low-maintenance child, she says. She could plonk me in front of the television or with some books and milk and I’d be very, very happy, so she could wrangle Candy and Andrew from getting into fights. It was a house of great affection and love and she provided that – she was at the heart of it.

There’s that cliché that the younger child gets it easy and in my case that’s definitely true. I think with Candy and Andrew, she was very protective – being a mother for the first time in a new country added to that – but with me, she knew the ropes, so I think I got that sense of leniency and adventure.

I was such an attention hog – even then I was seeking the limelight. I totally embraced the fact that I was the youngest child at that stage, the fact that I had a bit of novelty value – and they completely gave it to me. As much as I was a low-maintenance child, I was very rude and cheeky and as soon as I could talk, I was saying rude and disgusting things. I think everyone found their place very quickly.

Reading came to me naturally and I think a lot of it had to do with my mum, partly because I always remembered there being a lot of books in the house. My parents themselves aren’t huge readers but they always had a lot of kids’ books – for them, books were never a waste of money. That whole thing about Chinese parents and the emphasis they place on education is very real and certainly was in my family. One of my happiest memories is being snuggled up in Mum’s bed – I’d snuggle into the pillow with her and we’d read the books together.

She was very sentimental. She had big old cassettes and a dictaphone that she probably bought from Brashs or something, and cassettes of us reading are still in the house somewhere now, I think. Even then, she knew that those memories would be very precious to her. Looking back, it made me feel very special that this seemingly ordinary moment was something worth recording. She was recording us because we were the most precious, interesting, fascinating things in her life, so video cameras, dictaphones, cameras – they were all there.

When I ask her whether she had ambitions outside of motherhood she has different ways of responding. She always wanted to be a mum and I think that’s something that’s not appreciated enough these days – that, for some people, motherhood is the ultimate. For her, it certainly was. Partly that’s a generational thing and partly that’s a cultural thing. She realises she is very much the product of her own circumstances – she says she would have also probably made a good nurse.

Her eldest sister, Josephine, was a nurse and I think my mum admired that because part of Mum’s family story is that the eldest sister supported their huge family. My mum is one of seven children, but her oldest sister supported the family for a really long time when they were having trouble in Hong Kong.

While Mum admires Josephine for what she did, she can’t stand the sight of blood. She was fine fixing up our scrapes and that sort of stuff but she was like: ‘I was happy dealing with your blood and poo growing up, but I’m not sure how well I’d go dealing with other people’s blood and poo.’

Looking at the job I have as a writer and journalist – my sister is a writer, too – it might have been influenced by the fact that Mum’s a really good conversationalist and raconteur and she’s very curious about people. I think those are two qualities that are vital in writing human stories and writing real stories. She sometime speculates that she would’ve liked to have been a journalist or a writer of some sort – and I think she would make a good one. But, really, she did fulfil her own ambition, which was to be a mum – and a really good one at that.

My mum recently had her sixtieth birthday and after we toasted, I asked everyone at the table to name something that they inherited from her. We all said we inherited her skin. She has very good skin – she looks twenty years younger than she is. In terms of other things I inherited from her, one would be a deep sense of sentimentality. I’m such a sook. Mum’s a bit of a hoarder. She finds it very difficult to let go of things – especially things from our childhood – and for a long time I was like that too. I’m very conscious of the fact that I’ll hold onto things as a keepsake or a souvenir, when it’s like, Ben, you really don’t need that in your life.

Definitely life with Mum is a big, loud gabfest. My mum is like a shark – sharks will die if they stop swimming, and my mum will die if she stops talking. We sometimes share hotel rooms when we’re travelling together and I’ll just be slowly waking up but she’s talking from the moment she’s conscious. Once I’m awake, I tend to like talking quite a bit, too.

As for nature vs. nurture, it’s very hard to differentiate the two because for me those things in our household were just so close in a way. I know I got some things from my father – I look exactly like my dad. I think there are some values they instilled in us that I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have if I was raised by anyone else.

Five kids is a pretty big troupe – it’s almost like a science experiment, in a way. You’ve got these five kids and you’ve got these extremely different personality types, but the things that unify us I think we must have absorbed from our parents – one is a deep value of education.

They weren’t tiger parents by any means – they never said: ‘Be an accountant, be a doctor, be a lawyer.’ But it was a huge thing to be able to go to a good school and to learn, and that’s something a lot of my friends didn’t have because their parents were more relaxed about that ratio between leisure and work time.

From both of my parents I inherited a strong work ethic. My mum was always of the belief that if you committed to something, you had to see it through, and I’ve always felt that myself. I think a lot of it is witnessing what your parents do in their own lives – it’s not even them sitting you down for a lesson.

My parents split up when I was twelve and they had a really protracted divorce arrangement – they weren’t even divorced by the time I was seventeen.

So, my high school experience was pretty miserable and I was often the middleman. Divorce is an interesting thing. It’s a situation that can compel adults to start behaving like children. I mean, I love my parents but I think all adults are capable of behaving like children, and during the divorce proceedings they definitely were like that. They weren’t talking to each other – they were so furious with each other they could only communicate through intermediaries and I was one of the primary ones. I really resented that.

Sometimes, some of the siblings would stay with Dad more, and it broke Mum’s heart that her children were being separated from her and each other.

When you’ve got a parent who’s not coping and you normally rely on them, you can lash out. That was me. I think Mum paints a rosier picture – she says I was actually quite good during this period – but I remember saying some pretty awful things to her, telling her to her face to basically get her act together. Whereas, in that moment and in that period, I think it’s very difficult for anyone to get their act together. That pressure of parenthood, combined with your own personal challenges of divorce, is pretty wearing.

I think we’ve got a really great relationship now. One of the breakthroughs was when she discovered text messaging. I don’t know what it is about my brain wiring but I’m a text-based person – emails, texts. I’ve never been that fond of phone calls.

Mum was really frustrated by that because she wasn’t that confident using new technology. We tried teaching her how to use a computer for a very long time but the breakthrough was actually getting an iPhone – finally, she could actually touch things on a screen and she loved it, so now we’ve got this really fantastic text messaging relationship. She’s fluent in emoji – she’s far more fluent than I am. It sort of feels like teenage exchanges with each other. A bit of gossip comes through – I show the text to my boyfriend and it’s like deciphering hieroglyphics, but she’s so expressive through these emojis and pictures. Her favourites are the poo emoji, the dancing senorita emoji, the delicious emoji, where the smiley face is licking his lips – it’s just very, very funny.

I wrote a book about my family that came out in 2010, called The Family Law. Everyone assumes that writing a memoir is easy – you know the story of your life and your family’s life. The truth is it’s very difficult because you realise that there are huge gaps in your understanding of your family story, and to go about it professionally and interview your parents and ask questions you hadn’t thought to ask them simply as their child reveals all these histories and truths that make you extend huge reserves of sympathy and empathy for the lives that they’ve led. I think that was a real turning point. I always thought that my mum was strong but, writing that book, I realised what a hero she was.

When we went to New Zealand to celebrate my mum’s sixtieth, no partners chose to come with us, I think because they knew better. It was the first time all five kids had been together like that with Mum – probably since we were children. Part of me was dreading it because I could just see disaster happening. Even though we love each other and we get along great, I think any time with any family can end up pretty fractious if you’re in a contained space with them – but I think age has mellowed us.

I found all of us willing to be very accommodating with each other. We’re just in the process of moving Mum out of our childhood home, too, which sounds like a sad thing – and in some ways it is – but it’s Mum turning a new page. She’s really thrilled, excited, nervous and giddy about the prospect of moving from the family home in the Sunshine Coast to a new place in Brisbane to be close to where most of her kids live now. I think there’s a sense of optimism. It’s really improved everyone’s mood.

She loves my boyfriend, Scott – we knew each other as friends in high school, but we didn’t get together until we were at university, so she already was a bit familiar with him.

Gays don’t really date, they just hook up and take it from there, really. So, in a way, Mum and Scott had a date before he and I did. She wanted to know more about him, so they went to the local Sizzler restaurant and it was adorable. She thinks he’s great and Scott’s been such a rock for my mum in so many ways. She calls him her other son and I have to remind her: ‘You’ve actually got two sons already, Mum,’ but he’s another one. Scott’s very good at providing emotional support for her – because she’s known him for such a long time, there’s inherent trust there. Sometimes Scott’s having a moment with his mum and I’m having a moment with my mum and we’re just like: ‘Do we just want to swap – how about I talk to your mum for a while and help her out and you talk to my mum?’ That’s actually quite handy.

Both of my parents, but especially my mum, always told us: ‘Make sure you’re doing something you like, make sure you’re good at it and make sure you can earn money from it.’ All the kids have ended up doing something they wanted to do – so it was really fantastic that they instilled that in us.

A lot of my writing is about my family – and a lot of my writing features her as well. She embraces that – in fact she’s been onstage with me at festivals talking about it and I think that writing, for me, has been an important way of reconciling with my family and my family history. She feels that, for a long time, she was the least heard voice in the family, which is funny because she’s very much heard, by virtue of her talking a lot. But being able to present her story to a wider audience has been a very satisfying thing for her. I’m not one of those people who’s going to write something and put it out there only for her to discover it later – it really matters what she thinks about my writing.

We’ve turned The Family Law into a TV show on SBS, which aired in early 2016. As strange and surreal as that experience was – we’re getting actors to play versions of us on television – for my mum and all my family members, seeing that version of our lives being put on screen was kind of affirming.

Mum and I write a sex and relationships advice column together for The Lifted Brow – a literary journal out of Melbourne – so people send us really revolting personal questions and Jenny goes first and Benjamin goes second. That’s pretty special – and unusual.

The questions we get are all uncomfortable – I mean, they’re talking about vibrators and masturbation and threesomes and polyamory – but my mum is so open and curious and fasci­nated by other people, and especially about sex. A lot of people are so shocked that a mum and her children would talk about things like that so frankly, but that’s always been the case for me growing up.

She used to say when we were growing up: ‘No ring – no ding,’ which basically meant no sex before marriage, but now, considering how terribly her marriage ended, she has more of a ‘try before you buy’ belief system.

Mum is a big lover and almost patron of the arts in a way – she loves anything that really stimulates her artistically or culturally. She’s a creative girl at heart herself, I think.

I think my mum loves to travel as much as she loves the arts. She’s got a school reunion in Malaysia and she needs company with her – she hasn’t got a partner – so we’re going to go to that. I love spending time with her because, even now that I’m an adult, she has so much to teach me. For example, when I’m moisturising my face, I just kind of slather moisturiser on my face – you know it’s just cream – and she’s always telling me: ‘You’ve got to just moisturise with your ring and pinkie fingers because that applies the least pressure on your face.’

One of things I sometimes think about – it’s slightly odd – is I wonder what would it have been like to know my parents at the same age as I am now? Would we have been friends? Would we have gotten along? It’s a wistful exercise, I think, and to see these other women at the reunion who know a version of Mum that I don’t will be really interesting. I’ll have a lot of questions.

Mum and I went on a road trip together a while back. I had a work commitment in Alice Springs and I thought: ‘I should take my mum, she’s always wanted to see Uluru.’ We only had one major fight, which is a pretty good strike rate for us. One of her favourite things about the trip was being able to pee in the desert. She loved peeing out in the open.

I can’t fake anything in front of her. Mum knows me in many, many profound ways. I think it’s really comforting – for some people their greatest endeavour is to be known, for people to understand them. I think that because of my mum, I’ve had that from a really young age.