Behind the Moon (6 page)

Her mother was late. In the end, Tien ate by herself in front of the television.

Linh was exhausted by the time she got home. She was surprised at the trouble Tien had taken to prepare dinner but she did not have much of an appetite. She ate the stirfried beef with rice vermicelli desultorily and said, ‘Whose recipe did you use for the
nuoc cham
, Tien? The proportions of fish sauce and lemon juice aren’t quite right.’

‘Auntie Ai-Van’s,’ Tien said sulkily. ‘We like it this way.’

Belatedly, Linh remembered to say, ‘Thank you for preparing dinner.’ Her daughter did not answer, so she said, ‘I like Gibbo. You can invite him over whenever you want to.’

Gibbo needed no second invitation. He liked Tien’s mother and was comfortable with her. He came over almost every weekend and sat at the table talking to Linh, entertaining her with tales of Aussie life, helping her to cook and clean.

‘Jeez, I’m bored,’ Tien interrupted one morning. ‘Let’s go out and do something, Gibbo. Let’s go to the movies or something.’

‘In a minute,’ he said, and continued a tedious tale he was recounting to Linh. Then he said, ‘I know. Let’s go to Chinatown for yum cha. Hey, Miss Ho, why don’t you come along?’

Tien watched the two of them with hostile eyes. Linh was a woman who was good with men, she remembered. She had stolen Gibbo away from Tien.

The Urge to be Asian

Once in a thousand years! Is that the most

the best of friends may ever hope to meet?

Two wanderers will part ways—where shall I find the crane, the cloud that roams the wilds and heights?

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

As long as Gibbo could remember, he wanted to be thinner and he wanted to be Chinese, just like Justin.

He had been ecstatic when Justin was expelled from his private school and joined him and Tien midway through high school. His two best friends—his two only friends—with him in school, fortifying him against his own oddness, demonstrating to the rest of his classmates that he was no longer an outsider. Two could still be the class rejects; three were a
gang
! He belonged to a group. Reading Dumas at the time, he liked to think of them as the Three Musketeers! All for one and one for all!

He mentioned this once, and the following afternoon Justin fashioned a pair of big black cardboard ears, stuck them onto Gibbo’s head and pranced around chanting: ‘M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E!’ Then, in a pinched falsetto: ‘Hello, mouseketeers. I have a message from the Mouse. He can’t be with us today because he’s eaten stinking blue cheese and has got the runs. For those of you hoping for a personal appearance, stiff shit. So long, boys and girls.’

‘
Hi-yah
, you
chee sin lo
,’ Gibbo said, laughing. He yanked off the ears and jammed them onto Justin’s head.

‘Oh god, here we go again.’ Tien rolled her eyes.

‘Your accent’s terrible,’ Justin said, pulling off the ears. He crushed them into a ball and tossed them from hand to hand. ‘My mum’d have a fit if she heard your pronunciation.’

‘Why do you keep pretending to be Chinese?’ Tien said, exasperated.

‘Because I am,’ Gibbo said.

‘It’s ridiculous.’

‘It’s true. My great-grandfather came over from China during the gold rush. He opened a grocery store at Ballarat but they eventually moved to Sydney. Then my great-grandfather fell in love with this Anglo woman and they had an affair. When she got pregnant, her brother and their neighbours found out and they beat him up. He died in the streets, right where they left him. She had the kid but gave it up for adoption. That was my grandfather. He anglicised his name to “Gibson” and covered up his Chinese roots. But I’m actually fourth or fifth generation Chinese. My piano teacher, Miss Yipsoon, is some kind of cousin to Dad. That’s the only reason why he sends me for piano lessons. It’d be too wussy otherwise.’

‘Well you don’t look Chinese,’ Tien said, as she always did whenever Gibbo made this claim.

‘But I am,’ he insisted stubbornly.

Gibbo wanted so desperately to be Asian while Justin and Tien tried so hard not to be. Even as Justin had speech lessons with Gillian so that he could talk like a ponce and Tien tried her best to imitate Bob’s ocker Strine, Gibbo was busy patterning his speech after Annabelle Cheong’s Singlish. He peppered his speech with inappropriately placed ‘
lah
s’, sighed ‘
hi-yah
’, marvelled, ‘
Wah
, so good!’ and exclaimed ‘
Ai-yo
!’ He learned to request chillies with every meal (‘
Lay pey ngor laht chiu see
,’ he’d enunciate carefully in his broad Australian accent to bewildered waiters in the Vietnamese restaurants at Flemington) and asked his mother, ‘Where’s the
choy
?’ when she brought out the chops and mashed potato.

‘What
choy
?’ Gillian asked, puzzled.

‘Green veggies,’ Gibbo explained.

‘Bloody idiot,’ Bob growled. ‘Speak English, why can’t you. And you eat what your mother puts on the table.’

Gibbo ate it, but he didn’t like it. He had discovered a passion for yum cha. He loved pork and prawn dumplings and he forced himself to develop a taste for pork knuckle, braised tripe and chicken’s feet. He sucked the skin off the claws, spat out the bones and looked pleased with himself when Annabelle said, ‘
Wah
, look. Gibbo knows how to eat
foong chow
. So clever!’

‘That’s because I’ve got a bit of Chinese in me, Auntie,’ he said.

‘Is it? True or not?’ Gullible Annabelle, in characteristic wide-eyed wonder.

‘True, you know.’

Tien just looked at him and shook her head, never able to understand why he did not want to reap the rewards of being an Aussie male.

One weekend not too long after Justin joined them in high school, they met at Gibbo’s house in Homebush and cycled down Arthur Street then turned onto Centenary Drive. They made a right into Weeroona Street and thrust their bikes through the rusting iron gates of Rookwood Cemetery. Hot asphalt melted beneath soft tyres. Summer clutched them in its sweaty fist and they panted heavily as they flung their bikes aside and gained the cool concrete shelter of the green-roofed pavilion amid the Chinese gravestones. They sucked on plastic bottles of cordial and snacked on Twisties and Tim Tams, scattering their homework over the stone tables. Glancing up from algebra equations and English essays, they saw a woman stooping over a tombstone with an armful of flowers. When she straightened up, the boys saw it was Miss Yipsoon with a bag of joss sticks and plastic daffodils. She recognised them and beckoned them over.

‘What are you kids doing here?’ she asked. ‘It’s not safe to play among the dead, you know. The spirits are always watching. They might follow you home one day.’

‘Dad’s singing karaoke again. He thinks he can do the best Dean Martin impersonation this side of the Great Dividing Range. There’s nowhere else to go where there’s a bit of peace and quiet,’ Justin said. ‘Who are you visiting?’

‘My grandmother’s tomb,’ Miss Yipsoon said. She moved slightly to one side and they crowded round to read: ‘Mary “Chookie” Yipsoon. Died 1954. Beloved wife of Sam Ah Seng Yipsoon. Mother of Lily, Thomas and Jimmy, tragically dead at age 32.’

‘Why Chookie?’ they wanted to know.

‘I don’t know,’ Miss Yipsoon said. ‘I never asked my mother. All us kids just called her Por anyway. Maybe her Chinese name was Choo-Kee or something. Or maybe she raised chooks. I know one time they had a farm out Fairfield way.’

‘Why was Jimmy tragically dead?’

‘He was beaten to death in Surry Hills one night. Nobody knows what happened. Por never got over it. She loved him best, I think, because he was the youngest. He was really talented, Auntie Lily says. An entertainer. He did a gig at the old Tivoli once. Por wanted to bring Uncle Jimmy’s body back to the ancestral homeland in China, but those were the days of the White Australia Policy and Goong, my grandfather, was never really sure that she would be allowed back into the country, so they never went.’

All this time Gibbo kept nudging Tien with his elbow. ‘See! I told you how it was.’ He was bursting with ancestral pride at Jimmy Yipsoon’s bloody death. He wanted to say something to graft himself into the Yipsoon family, but he didn’t get the chance.

Justin said facetiously, ‘They could have paid the Walkers of the Dead to come and walk his corpse all the way back to China.’

‘What are the Walkers of the Dead?’ Gibbo wanted to know. He looked slightly crestfallen at this gap in his knowledge about Chinese culture.

‘They’re these really powerful mediums who are paid to make dead people get up and walk back to the ancestral burial ground so that families don’t have to go to all the hassle of transporting the corpses back themselves,’ Justin explained. ‘My grandmother told me about them. She said that in her village, when they heard that a Walker of the Dead was coming through, everybody would rush inside their houses and bar the windows and doors until the medium and the corpse had passed through the village. If you look at the corpse, you’ll drop dead.’

‘Wow,’ Gibbo said, suitably impressed. Then he remembered himself. ‘I mean,
wah
.’

‘Honestly, you kids are so silly,’ Miss Yipsoon said. She pointed to a small patch on the right where modest white headstones had been washed nearly anonymous with the passage of time and the caress of the weather.

‘Uncle Jimmy used to be buried over there somewhere. But a few years back Auntie Lily decided she wanted to keep the family together so she applied for the bodies to be exhumed. She bought this plot and got the Italians to make a fancy tomb for us all. Look at it.’

They surveyed the red marble tomb in silence. It was a massive slab, measuring just over a metre and a half, with sloping sides that hugged the grave like a fat mother’s arms. The whole thing was enclosed by an ornamental white concrete balustrade. The front of the tomb announced ITALIAN FUNERALS in gold-leaf sans serif type. More gold leaf sprouted up each side of the gravestone, twisting into elaborate birds and flowers intertwined with Chinese characters. On the flat surface of the marble, the joss sticks which smouldered in the metal cage of a built-in censer were now joined by a pale blue vase sprouting plastic flowers.

‘Isn’t it a beauty?’ Miss Yipsoon said. ‘One day I’ll also be buried here and my nephews and nieces will do what I’m doing now.’ She contemplated the prospect with profound satisfaction.

‘I’ll definitely come and pay my respects,’ Gibbo said, nodding earnestly.

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to be buried with my parents,’ Justin said. ‘I’ve never even had to share my room.’

‘Silly kids,’ Miss Yipsoon repeated, but without any real heat. She shook her head as she gathered up her bag and turned to leave. ‘Don’t be so careless among the dead. And you boys, don’t forget to practise. B flat major and G sharp minor scales. The Clementi sonatina. Practise right and left hands separately. And don’t drop your wrists!’

As she walked away, Justin looked up the gently rising ground and said, ‘I’d rather be a Jew buried in the Jewish plot. They have nicer epitaphs and better taste in tombstones. But Asians . . .’ He just shook his head, wanting, even then, to be anything but Asian.

Tien ran after the piano teacher. ‘Miss Yipsoon, can I ask you something?’

‘Yes, what is it?’

‘Is Gibbo related to you?’

‘Has he been telling you he’s Chinese again?’

‘Yes. Is he?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Well, he looks Aussie to me.’

‘We’re all Australians now,’ Miss Yipsoon said as she walked away. ‘Even if Nigel doesn’t feel like one.’

For Gibbo it was never a simple matter of nationality or ethnicity or culture. It was all about friendship. When Justin first joined them in high school, he called them the multicultural reject group. He meant it in a selfdisparaging way, but Gibbo revelled in the title. In their casually racist playground, there were the skips who played rugby, the wogs who played soccer, the slopes who hung out at the basketball courts, and then there was them: the multicultural reject group, who were such dags they could even encompass him. But as he watched Tien and Justin drawing closer together in the later years of high school, he felt the panicky sensation of being left out. He began to fear that it was because he was not Asian.

It bewildered him, for when he looked at Tien, he did not really see a Vietnamese. She hardly spoke Vietnamese anymore. In any case, she was a half-American . . . something. Who knew what her father was? Some of the Asian parents looked down on her, so why would she want to identify with them? Unless ethnicity was bred into your bones by the thousand daily rituals and the million different meals you ate throughout your life. Unless identity was like a radio wave that pulsed through the ether until it found an available channel which decoded it as ethnicity and broadcast that to all the world. Did Tien think of herself as Vietnamese or Australian or some hyphenated mixture? More worryingly, was there some intrinsic Asianness that would bind Tien and Justin more closely together, cutting him out of the loop and leaving him alone once again in his not-quite-Australianness?

He would have given anything to be Asian when she climbed into Justin’s boat instead of his and the two of them pedalled off together during a summer holiday in Adelaide . . .

Bob was attending a medical conference in Glenelg and Gillian had persuaded him to bring the kids along because they never went anywhere. And besides, the kids would provide a buffer between husband and wife. There were moments when Gillian could not stand her husband. He was a provocative man; an educated man—a doctor— who therefore had no excuse for mocking her desire for class and culture, constantly pushing his deliberate vulgarities in her face. She could not forgive him for holding his own son in contempt even though, if she were honest, Nigel was something of a disappointment to her too. Gillian had always wanted a daughter. She liked the imagined neatness of little girls. She thought she had one in Tien until Linh arrived in Sydney. Still, she tried hard to be a good mother to Nigel—but boys needed fathers and Bob was not much of one. That he had agreed to take the children on holiday was a major victory for her.

It was their first trip out of Sydney together and it had taken them three days to drive to Adelaide, stopping at Mildura and the Barossa Valley on the way. Adelaide was stiflingly hot but Gibbo, Tien and Justin loved Glenelg. They kicked around in the sand during the day, dipped into the purling waves, then walked to the end of the pier to watch the sun bleed into the sea. As deepening shadows washed over the sky, they climbed into a Ferris wheel carriage and felt the wind whipping through their hair as they jumped and rocked wildly at the zenith of the arc. They were still laughing when they were thrown off by the exasperated operator. Fairy lights flickered like a thread of stars.

As he pushed his face into a pink cloud of spun floss and tasted sugar fizzing on his tongue, Gibbo knew that this was the happiest day of his life. A feeling of melancholy followed later that night as he shut his ears to his parents’ habitual bickering. He tossed in his bed and kicked at the tightly cocooned sheets. Life had been so sweet in that moment on the pier that he was afraid he would have to forfeit something precious for that feeling of perfect friendship. And therefore he was not surprised at the kick in the heart he received the following day.

Tien was already in a foul mood when they clambered onto the Glenelg Tram, riding down King William Street to Victoria Square.