Her Father's Daughter (10 page)

DAUGHTER—

It was when she was sick that she first realised her father would do anything for her. She must have been about five. She woke up in the middle of the night, and he made her jam on toast. Then, when she had heavy asthma at eleven and was housebound for two weeks, he bought her ice cream, the expensive kind, with real strawberries in it. But when she was really little, about four, she had the flu and had some idea about death. She whimpered on the couch and said, ‘Dad, I don’t want to die.’

‘Be quiet and drink this Milo,’ he told her, rubbing Vicks Vaporub on her chest.

Her father, she noticed as she grew older, never used the words death or die, unlike her mum and grandmother and aunties. If they dropped something, it was ‘Si oh!’
Go die
. If they made a mistake. If they heard some bad news, such as their child getting less than ninety per cent in an exam. But her father never uttered it.

There were some things they would never mention again, like the box-cutter boy. And other things which he didn’t mind her finding out. ‘If you want to know about the time of Pol Pot, I will introduce you to people,’ her father told her a year after the box-cutting incident, ‘and they will talk to you and tell you about their lives.’

He took her to visit his friends in suburban houses with neat front yards in Footscray and Springvale, and they would tell her tales of survival. She remembered these moments, how at some pivotal point these older folk began to speak to her as if they no longer saw her as a child but as someone who would store these stories, and who might one day convey them to their own progeny, who were too preoccupied with building houses and bringing up babies to sit still and listen.

There they both were, she and her father, sitting on a couch in a strange man’s house. The man, a friend of her father, was a furniture-maker. He had made the couch himself. She looked at him, and then looked back down at the couch. How could a man as thin as that make a thing of wood and leather as robust as the sofa set they were all sitting on? She realised her father and she sat in the exact same way. They perched on their tailbones at the very edge of the seat, as if to sink back and get comfortable would be to indulge themselves.

Perhaps this story was not meant to begin on a bus in China at all.

Perhaps it was meant to begin on another bus, in another place, during another time.

The bus, the man said. It loaded us on, and then it took us to the top of a mountain and dumped us there. The mountain was dotted with landmines. At the top there was no food or water, so we went down and exploded and died.

But the man was sitting in front of them, telling this story, so obviously he had not died. Neither had his wife, who was serving them cups of tea. Chinese cups were very small, she realised. You could not hug them in your hands and lean back on a couch, ready for a yarn. The size of a cup was probably the measure of a society’s loquaciousness. You couldn’t tell a longwinded story about a visit to the supermarket while holding a Chinese cup with two fingers. Its contents were two gulps. The end. So your story needed significance, but not the kind of tall-poppy significance that would upstage your friend. One thing those who came from Cambodia were good at doing was keeping quiet, and listening. Another thing was telling a story using the most direct route, like that bus carrying those people she would never meet. Depositing them like a dumpster at the precipice of a very high tip. Who was the first at the top of the mountain to start worrying, she wondered, and the first to make their way down?

She may never know what happened, but perhaps it was time for her to take a stab in the dark.

In the beginning there was a man and a bowl. A piece of cloth for a covering, perhaps orange like the sunrise, or brown like the ground. He would go from door to door, and people would give him food. No one called him a beggar, they called it giving alms.

The madman looked like a benign grandfather, as they often do. He didn’t have eyes like caves or hair on his face to hide a disturbing smile. In fact, when he smiled, it seemed sincere. But it was not a smile to make new friends, it was a smile to ward them off. It was the smile of the four-faced stone Buddhas on the Angkor Wat, after a rocket had been launched at it.

The madman, whose name was Saloth Sar, had once worn an orange blanket, had once carried a bowl. For a time there he chanted and lived a life of complete dependency on the grace of others. But then he started to realise that the order he belonged to was wrong when seen from the angle of a new world. Monks floated around like orange butterflies, and butterflies were creatures that were superfluous.

The madman took his new name of war not from a virtue like courage, or even from a creature like a snake. His name came from the coldest of places – a concept,
Political Potential
, and an ideal, fraternity. Brother Number One, or Pol Pot for short, had visions for a brave new world that would grow green over the cratered old one.

A few decades ago, the French had discovered the temple in the forests, the Angkor Wat. They were astonished by such a miracle, but it had always lain there, in wait. Meanwhile the carved stone pillars had coupled with the trees so that when the archaeologists discovered the lost world, nature and man-made history seemed to be conjoined companions. But this was a benign creation, unlike the new world to come.

In Pol Pot’s godless prelapsarian paradise, everything was presumed perfect about the original man, the ‘Base Person’. The Base Person was as if moulded from clay, emerging from the earth on which he stood. Sometimes his skin was even the same colour. The peasant who had tilled this land for hundreds and hundreds of years with self-sufficient stoicism had no need for glasses, false teeth, walking canes, shoes. Only jumped-up city folk needed such things because they couldn’t walk barefoot on the land without their soft soles bleeding. Some of them even died from walking on the land. They called it infection, but the revolution called it weakness. All those soft, soft soles. The only thing a person in this brave new world needed was a body fit for work and a clean mind.

That was what Pol Pot, once known as Saloth Sar, expected of his people. They were to start the world anew from Year Zero. It would be as if they were to wake up every morning with the past wiped out, their minds blown up clean and taut and soaring like balloons. Those who couldn’t wipe their minds hard or fast or clean enough would be popped.

At the same time, another story is lived.

Once there was a boy, Kuan. This boy knew nothing of the man who came before, and who was to come into his world and turn it inside-out. When this boy was young, he slid down banisters, wore ironed white shirts and lived in a house with a grandfather clock. His father wore a real Rolex, and they had a chauffeur to drive him to lessons. He learned to speak French and English, and played the guitar and double bass in the school band.

He was born in Cambodia and grew up in its capital city, Phnom Penh, where no building was more than four colonial storeys high. French terraces snuggled up against their modern boxy counterparts, their sulky-jawed balconies jutting out. On these balconies after work, the people of the town would stand and watch each other and the street below. The heat made people’s muscles feel melty, and their hearts beat slower. Men and women merchants would sweep the front of their stores in slow motion and jam the broom in between the slots of their roller-shutters. They would wipe down the metal and then sit outside and wait to hear the sound of crickets. The evenings stretched like coloured looms across the sky.

Kuan’s house was one of the French-styled ones, and served, as most buildings did, as a factory, business and private residence. The ground floor of his house-factory buzzed when the reel of the plastic-bag-making machine was switched on. The machine rolled out undulating flat white tubes, which they carried, still warm like a limp bride, to the second floor. Here were the men of the factory, before they were sent off to war, wearing white singlets like cotton facsimiles of the bags they made, operating the cutting machine.

Bags were not the only things the factory produced. In fact, the bags were secondary to his mother’s first business, on the third floor of the house. This was Kuan’s favourite area, the Room of Letters, where the walls were lined with hundreds of thousands of words, each made of lead. Each Chinese character would be selected and loaded onto the
cliché
, a printing plate cast from movable type, and then passed through the printing press. ‘All the words in the world,’ his mother told him in their native Teochew Chinese dialect, and this was how he learnt to read when young, helping his mother string together sentences. How he loved modern technology.

His father did not live at home with them, because Kuan’s father had two wives. Every time his father had an argument with his mother, he would move back to his first wife’s house.

Kuan’s mother was a woman who could read a face in a matter of moments to determine whether she wanted anything to do with its owner or not. After hopping off the boat from Chaozhou in China, where she was in deep trouble for writing articles denouncing landlords who abused peasants’ rights, she had found work as a schoolteacher at the local Phnom Penh Chinese school. That was when she met Kuan’s father, a Chinese man also from Chaozhou, and decided that he was red enough for her. Unfortunately, he was already married with two daughters, but that didn’t stop them. They had each met their intellectual equal. They had to be together, but once wedded, their minds were welded like a knife with a blade on both ends. Sharp and brilliant but bloody. They argued all the time, and their arguments probably started because of Kuan’s father’s house-jumping habits. ‘Why do you have to go back there to those dull-eyed worms when I’ve given you six sons?’ his mother used to yell. She had a special way with adjectives.

His father would heave a big gasping sigh and shake a thin finger at her, about to open his mouth and expel more words, but she always beat him to it. ‘You will be the death of me, I tell you!’

‘No!’ his father yelled, ‘I am telling you, Huyen Thai,
you
will be the death of me!’ And so it went, each accusing the other of plotting their demise until they were heaving with the effort of trying to detail their own ends.

Left for stretches of time to fend for herself and her ten children, Kuan’s mother became no-nonsense. When her nephew arrived from Long Mountain raving about the printing factory at which he had worked in China, Kuan’s mother told him, ‘Let’s no longer work for other people. Let’s start our own business.’ She entered into a partnership with her nephew, whom they called Chicken Daddy. That mysterious moniker was already attached when he arrived so no one knew its origin, but it was probably a childhood pet name bequeathed by an affectionate grandma that had stuck, so much so that Chicken Daddy’s own children were known as Chicken Sister, Chicken Brother and the youngest, Egg.

Chicken Daddy provided the capital, and Kuan’s mother provided her labour. In the beginning they had a single pedal-powered printing machine, and when her children slept, Kuan’s mother would sit up half the night at the machine, filling orders for flyers, advertising pamphlets, letterhead stationery. She even printed invoice books and made tear-off perforated holes in the pads with the unthreaded needle of her sewing machine.

Kuan was the fifth son. His earliest memory was of his mother taking him to a Charlie Chaplin movie once, by himself, when he got perfect marks in a school test. They rode in the back of a cyclo. At the cinema, Kuan watched the tramp twist his shoelaces around a fork and pop them into his mouth. By the time Kuan reached his twenties, his brothers and older sister had married and moved out of home. Some were living in Hong Kong, others in communist China. His parents had sent their first three sons to take part in the great proletarian revolution. Only his older brother Kiv remained in the family home after marriage.

Kuan’s father decided that he should have a fiancée too. They found him a nice woman who had been educated at the same high school. Sokim had liquid black eyes and the first time they met, their parents sat between them. They were so shy they could barely look at one another.

As the world changed, suddenly so did the street signs. One day, on government orders, all the Chinese lettering on the shops was painted over. No more funny foreign writing on the streets. Soon enough, the ethnic Chinese schools were closed down.

A girl named Kien, who lived a couple of blocks away from Kuan in a rented house with her parents and nine siblings, found herself tossed out of her grade two class. She spent a year roaming the streets during the day, mucking about with a group of her classmates who had also been ejected from school. Once, for fun, they let the air out of the tyres of the Mercedes-Benz cars parked in the wealthier end of the city. Then she found work in a factory, and the money she got at the end of every week ended her seemingly endless boredom.

On the day of Kuan’s engagement to Sokim, all the workers in his family’s plastic-bag factory heard footsteps up above and saw flashes of red. Double-happiness signs made of cut-out paper were stuck over the front of the store, and the girls in the factory were hoping for a glimpse of the bride-to-be in the afternoon when they had their midday break. One of them, Kien, the girl who operated the bag cutter, would be his future wife, but they did not know that yet, because she was only thirteen, and life had not yet been turned inside-out.

In 1969 and 1970 Nixon and Kissinger, names which made you think of cartoon characters with sweet puckered lips, bombed a neutral land without the knowledge of their own country-folk and called it ‘Operation Breakfast’.
Breakfast
was hanging by a thin strip of meat the colour of prosciutto, a boy’s arm from a torn T-shirt sleeve, swinging like a hock of ham, well smoked. Fried eggs in the womb of a young woman, fully cooked.

But breakfast was not enough. It was as if they could not find the cheap plastic toy in the cereal packet. Their B-52s could not dislodge the Vietcong from their bases, so they decided that a full ‘Menu’ operation was in order.

Lunch:
slow roasted ragged folks thin as tarantulas, seasoned with sweat and the salt of the earth.

Snack:
crackling skin with beautiful blisters, Lady Fingers, already peeled.

Supper:
rare, medium or well done, small ones squealing like piglets, medium-sized ones bleating like hoary goats. There were no large ones.

Dessert:
sweet young girls, blouses burst open, tender as pink cupcakes. Hundreds and thousands on top.

As the Vietcong moved deeper into Cambodia, so did the bombing. It sucked the air from people’s lungs. The ground shook, disgorging the visceral fruits of the earth. Split-open brains and sweet blood leaked from lives in a cacophony of colour. When the giant insects of metal buzzed in the sky, people had to act as though they were already cadavers. They crossed their arms, hugged their shoulders and lay on the ground. They taught their children to do the same. They lay like mummies and bred a whole generation of drop-dead-at-the-drop-of-a-bomb babies.

Sixty days later, when 11,000 were dead, Nixon declared this the ‘most successful operation of the war’.

From Beijing, the father-prince of Cambodia, Sihanouk, felt the sting of what was happening to his country. ‘Brothers and sisters,’ he entreated, ‘go to the jungle and join the guerrillas.’ No wonder the guerrillas emerged from the jungles burning with hatred for technology: the bomb, the mine, the gun, the giant prehistoric insects in the sky.

*

War pumped up business for Kuan’s family, which his elder brother Kiv ran. Their factory was thriving. With all the men off at the war to fight the Vietcong, they hired children, girls of twelve to fifteen. Girls had nimble fingers and seemed more docile. They were filling orders from the overseas aid agencies, who needed plastic bags for food distribution. Peasant-farmer refugees who had lost their homes were now gathering at the edges of the city, starving, selling their labour, begging.

Every day an unknown and faceless black force seemed to be creeping closer and closer to the city. They were rumoured to be a nationalistic group known as the Khmer Rouge, the guerrilla army that Sihanouk, the good Prince of the Land, had summoned to defend the country. The land was theirs, they had been tilling it for thousands of years, and they were coming to reclaim it. Dressed entirely in black, they grew like mushrooms in the darkest dampest jungles along the Cambodian border, casting their spores towards the villages, slowly spreading towards the capital.

In the evenings Kuan heard the rockets screeching. He knew the moment they were launched, because there would be a whistling sound, whooooooo, like a kettle on its final wail before the stove was turned off.

One night a house a few doors behind theirs was hit, and another time, at midday, a nearby primary school. He went to the Buddhist temple afterwards and saw dozens of dead bodies lying on the floor. ‘The four adults are their teachers,’ he heard someone yell out. Blood was still slithering out of some of the children. It coiled thick on the floor like a snake sunning itself jerky-dry.