GREY HAIR, LIKE MARIE ANTOINETTE. IT CAN’T REALLY BE possible, but as I examine the phenomenon in the bathroom mirror, there’s no denying I went to bed without any grey hairs and now a brittle, coarse sprig of them is right there on my scalp.
The cause is a letter from my father, the latest of several he’d sent recently. After finding it in the mailbox, I had ignored it for days, on the kitchen bench, the piano or the dresser, or shoved under the stairs on a stool next to the schoolbags. Then, finally, last night, when the kids were asleep and my husband was watching TV, I opened it.
THE SUPREME COURT OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA
Kwa v Kwa
I had no words. All the strangeness in my life, the past I’d tried to put behind me, it kept coming back, smoke wisps around my feet: the dragon.
Dad was suing me.
Now, as I stare into the mirror, I have flashes of my child self, from age ten, proofreading Dad’s legal letters and court documents. They would stream through a dot-matrix printer, perforated paper swallowing every available space in his home office. I would catch the pages as they spewed out and guide them into neat, concertinaed stacks. Dad was always suing someone, and as late as one in the morning he would come into my room and ask me to check his letters.
‘Excuse me, Mi. I need to get this off tomorrow.’ He’d hand me a wad of legalese that I’d scour with my pen, returning it to him after I’d applied my system of placing an ‘x’ in the margin at the end of the line to indicate a correction.
If only I’d spent as much time studying as I had working for Dad. At least he prepared me for fighting him in this latest legal tussle. His combative spirit is perhaps natural for a man who has been through so much, but all the same – why would he do this to his own child? Kwa v Kwa is something I never dreamed could happen.
Cortisol and adrenalin surge through me, a survival response triggered since childhood, a response passed down from my ancestors. My very existence, the very Kwa of me, is under siege, this time in the unfamiliar territory of the courtroom, which is Dad’s patch, his dragon stomping ground. I’m a tiger running towards a fire, leaping into the flames while I look behind me – as far back as I can, to ancient China, near the Emperor’s palace in Beijing.
The sky opens, and the shaman’s almanac, which he uses to predict all things, shows clearly beneath my Wood Tiger stars that it was always my destiny to be trapped in a battle with a dragon.
And then the book closes, and all that remains are tendrils of smoke from Great-Grandfather’s pipe and Grandmother’s cigarettes. There are whispers of ‘you are Kwa, you are Kwa’ – for even in visions, my family members repeat themselves. I am surrounded by their stories, flooding through windows and under doors, House of Kwa tales curling round the leg of my chair, clinging to my curtains like Aunt Theresa’s brushstrokes on silk.
I watch a tree grow from my table, branches and twigs rapidly filling the room, blossoms blooming in sharp bursts of spring colour, like fireworks, like bombs: our family. From all the tragedy, silken threads weave together into a picture of survival, a banner of hope. Then a dragon flies from the tree and, without warning, engulfs the branches in flames. As the tree burns, the dragon disappears, but for his eyes lingering in the sky among the stars that said I would always be exactly here, that we cannot escape what is already written.
Of course, a tiger cannot help but stop to look at her reflection as she passes by water under a burning tree, beneath dragon eyes in the sky. This image of her and what she’s endured may show her how she became so fierce . . .