‘WHAT, YOU’RE GOING TO HONG KONG AGAIN?!’ MY classmates always ask in disbelief. Most of them have never been further south than Esperance or north than Bali. ‘Back to see all the Ching-Chong-Chogies,’ someone will sneer. Then the group will chant, ‘Ching-Chong-Chogie, Ching-Chong-Chogie,’ and I’ll laugh as though I’m in on the joke, not the butt of it.
The next time I visit Hong Kong, the second time this year, Lukin isn’t there. It’s already 1986 and we’ve caught up four times since our first awkward meeting, usually playing Lego and video games or digging in and around the Peace Mansion gardens. We kept writing in between, but that’s become less frequent because his father has been transferred back home to Dubai. Lukin now flies there from his British boarding school during semester breaks, and I doubt we’ll ever see each other again. The year before, it got a bit weird when he kissed me – we were only ten. It was an innocent kiss on the cheek and would have been sweet if it hadn’t happened while I was admiring my effort to build a taller Lego tower than his. One minute he was reading an Astro Boy comic book, the next his lips were on my cheek. It kind of spoiled our friendship, but I still miss him a little.
‘I know!’ says Aunty, doing a hip wiggle. ‘Let’s go to the beauty parlour.’ She always thinks getting my hair and nails done will cheer me up. ‘Rukin is such sweet boy. You can stay in touch, you know. One day you could be a diplomat and he could be a diplomat and you may meet again.’
Every year I am Aunty Theresa’s little protege for a month or so – two visits, roughly a fortnight each, sometimes more. I am like a daughter to her. Aunty really wants me to be a diplomat, but I don’t quite understand what that is. ‘You hold your head high,’ she explains. ‘You talk to people. You travel. You are like royalty. You meet royalty. I met many, many diplomats on my flights. They really do have the life. Parties and socialising. Wearing nice clothes. I was like a diplomat once. I did some translating for some important men. I was very young, my English was terrible. I don’t know what they ask me, or what they are saying at all, but I’m good at pretend.’ She laughs, and I giggle. ‘Did I tell you about the elocution lessons I had with stones in my mouth?’
We sit side by side having our nails done. I choose a lurid fluorescent pink for my fingers, while Aunty just wants her toes done – in red.
‘I always leave my fingernails natural. On the airline it was forbidden to have a colour. And I swim so much these days, they’d get ruined now anyway.’
I drink in the way the salon staff defer to Aunty as if she is some kind of aristocrat, and then how quickly she puts them at ease. In no time they’re treating her like an old friend.
‘You know’ – she winks, and a young apprentice places a milkshake in front of me – ‘you must know how to treat people.’
I draw the delicious vanilla-flavoured milk into my mouth through a straw.
‘If you smile . . .’ Aunty pauses for me to finish her sentence.
‘The whole world smiles with you,’ I complete the phrase, wiping a drop of milkshake from my chin.
She grins as I fan out my fingers and blow on my wet nails.
‘Everyone loves you, Aunty.’
She raises her chin and looks down her nose at me. ‘Well’ – she smiles again – ‘maybe it’s because I am interested in everybody and I do not judge them or what they tell me. Rich or poor. Important or not important. Complaining or happy. I simply say, “Is that so?”’ She laughs. ‘If the news sounds good, I smile. If it is so-so or not so good, I keep a face like this.’ She straightens up her face. ‘Serlious. Velly serlious.’
I adjust my expression to match hers.
‘Many people likes to complain very much,’ she continues. ‘So I do like this.’ She nods slowly with a serious expression. ‘And I say . . .’ she pauses, and we finish the sentence together: ‘Is that so?’
‘Never frown,’ she tells her little shadow. She reads me Lao Tzu philosophy. ‘Never boast. Boastful people do not know how to behave.’ She teaches me Tai Chi. ‘Let the light from within you shine. Never let them know if you are upset.’ And she paints with me. ‘There are so many ways to express yourself.’
At night while Brigit irons, I hear the maid’s laughter and dismay – ‘Oh no, Ferdinand!’ – over her favourite Filipino soap opera on Hong Kong free-to-air. It flickers on a small black-and-white TV on the chest of drawers in the corner of her tiny room.
I sit beside Aunty in her palatial study as she writes letters to ladies and baronesses, and an occasional Kwa. When she writes to a Kwa, it’s usually in delicate staccato pen-stroked Chinese characters down a page, often finished off with a marble chop of her name character. She dips it in red paste from a green stone bowl with a carved dragon on its lid, gently wiping any excess on a spare sheet of clean paper before bringing the pillar shaped stone chop down firmly to stamp the denouement of her prose. After just a second, she lifts the chop back up and cleans the chiselled stone with a soft leather navy-blue rag.
Aunty writes a cheque and slips it into an envelope addressed to a Kwa. She does this a lot – sends thousands of dollars to help educate half nieces and nephews, distant cousins and their spouses. ‘If we can help, we should.’ She turns over the monogrammed envelope and dabs her finger into a small round carved wooden dish containing a wet circular sponge. ‘You know, your third cousin, Nin Hua, in Guangdong, is a doctor now.’ To moisten the glue, she runs her finger along one side of the triangular flap then the other. ‘And Seventh Brother from Second Grandfather has a daughter in Montreal studying law.’ She seals the envelope. ‘I helped them both.’ In her desk drawer, she finds a stamp. ‘This is for your niece in Hainan province.’ Aunty wets the stamp on the round sponge and presses it down with her forefinger. ‘She wants to be a chef and work in a big hotel one day.’
The more I visit Hong Kong, the closer I become to Brigit. I enjoy being in Aunty’s Swatow Lace shop with Christina and Amy, but I love my time with Brigit more. To me, she is an in-house beautician, nail technician, chef and counsellor. She is like a sister. She has watched me grow up.
I’ve started trying to mirror my life of independence in Scarborough by setting out on my own between Peace Mansion and Causeway Bay, so Theresa enlists Brigit as her clandestine spy. There are legitimate fears I could be kidnapped – children of wealthy Chinese tycoons often are. ‘Aunty, the kidnappers will get a shock once they learn Dad has no money,’ I joke, but she is still protective. So, instead of us going out together like we usually would, Brigit follows me clumsily through Hong Kong’s streets. She stops at newsstands, leafing through magazines and pretending to read like the spies in the corny dramas she watches while she’s ironing. People stare at me because of my Eurasian looks and my height, making Brigit more nervous on my tail. I give her a few scares for fun but never really try to lose her.
On my way home, she boards the same bus as me and sits at the back.
I turn around and smile at her. ‘Come sit with me, Brigit.’
‘Oooooh, Mimi, I didn’t see you there.’
It’s the perfect charade. No one ever arrives back at the apartment unhappy, and Aunty scolds us both, in jest, for being late. ‘Brigit, I’m soooo hungry. Eat-eat-eat, fat-fat-fat. Where is my dinner, Brigit?’ Aunty laughs and rubs her belly, and Brigit serves a five-course meal.
While she cooks, I often flit in and out of the tiny kitchen, the output of which is like that of a Michelin star restaurant. ‘Teach me, teach me, Brigit,’ I beg. She shoos me away, but I sneak back in and skirt around her, my head bobbing up either side of her round frame, trying to catch a glimpse over her shoulder or under her arm. ‘C’mon. Teach me, Brigit.’
But she never does. She seems embarrassed that she might know anything worth teaching. ‘Oh, Mimi, you are so funny. Why would you ever need to cook?’ Brigit knows I am born of privilege and cannot comprehend that where I’m from we don’t all have maids and cooks and drivers. ‘How do you eat, Mimi?’ ‘How do you have clean clothes?’ ‘How do you survive?’ ‘Oh, Mimi, I am so sorry for you.’
I wander into Brigit’s room where she is watching another overacted soap opera, ironing and folding to the soundtrack of her life. I stand next to her and fold too. TV is her escape – it must be a nice break from her life of servitude and more plausible theatrics, and the very real act of survival. Brigit was born with a script in her hands and knows the role she must play: Theresa is master and Brigit servant, with no deviation from birthright.
‘Go. Go, Mimi.’ Brigit snatches the laundry from me. ‘Aunty will be cross if she catch you here.’
I find it hard to make sense of the inequality. Brigit stands while we eat and serves us with a lowered gaze. She follows behind Aunty, forever folding, dusting, replacing and rearranging, sweeping away dirt and disorder in our wake. Wiping, polishing, straightening, placing a stray necklace neatly in a golden dish. Everything is perfect, though not without significant effort. Brigit retires to her tiny room, exhausted from making our lives decadently comfortable. I sleep on layers of sheepskin under woollen blankets and duvets of goose down. Brigit is up before dawn, cooking and scrubbing, and whenever I offer a hand, ‘No, noooo, Mimi. Off you go.’
She heads to the market, knowing the optimal days and times for the best produce and catch. I tail her this time, following from a distance, watching attentively as she navigates Hong Kong as if it’s her home. I watch her compete against other maids, haggling over prize broccoli and rare mushrooms. She is one of them – one of Hong Kong’s hundreds of thousands of maids. She turns and sees me, then quickly pretends she doesn’t.
She sends every cent she earns to her parents and siblings back home, an hour south of Manila, visiting once a year at least when Theresa is travelling.
When no one is looking, I laugh with Brigit at silly things. I ask her questions about her life and family that no one else in House of Kwa has ever bothered to ask. She longs to go home. I hug her and cry. But I know Aunty needs her, and I tell her how valued she is and how Miss Kwa could never manage without her, adding to the guilt that keeps her here.
I am part of the problem. Aunty has taught me carefully and deliberately; she is kind and wise, but also at pains to keep some distance between mistress and servant. She and Dad grew up with maids, and until Dad moved to Australia he’d never known a life without one.
Aunty’s friends and acquaintances frequently offer advice on how ‘one must keep “the help” in their place’. One day she tells me, ‘Do not tip too much. Because next time they will expect more and then they will tell their friends. And then they will tell their friends. And then everyone will expect more, and prices will go up everywhere.’ I feel heavy with the weight of responsibility not to start a global economic crisis. I’m not allowed to tip Brigit, so with the money Aunty sometimes gives me I buy clothes for her to send to her siblings and nieces and nephews.
Another goodbye. I hug Aunty. I hug Brigit.
Dad scolds me on the way to the airport. ‘You don’t go spending your money to give her anything. That’s why your aunty employ her. She is lucky enough already. You’re too much like your mother – she give away everything to the beggar in the street.’