Her Father's Daughter (3 page)

When she stepped off the plane into the ferny corridors of Macau International Airport, she wanted to lick the walls. She could have poured her plane-issued crackers on the ground and eaten them from the floor. The world seemed so clean.

‘Alice! Alice!’

She turned her head towards the voice. Suddenly she saw him, her Elder Uncle – her father’s older brother – with his crooked walk and wooden cane. He was in his seventies, wore square glasses and had a bung leg. ‘Bunged it up in Shanghai,’ he explained to her. ‘Those crap Cultural Revolutionary doctors operated on me twice.’ It stuck out like a tripping device when he sat, but now he was hobbling towards her, looking so happy. The deformed dumpling in her chest that was her heart swelled and she thought she would cry. Instead they gave each other a hug.

‘Let’s go and collect your bags.’

‘This is it.’

‘That’s it?’

Elder Uncle looked at her one piece of carry-on luggage for the entire week. He probably wondered what she was doing in this tourist city as a young woman if she wasn’t going to shop. ‘Hong Kong is only an hour’s ferry ride away,’ he advised her. She looked like she’d just paddled across the sea in a boat, with her worn-out red bag and ‘Vietnamese hair’, as her auntie and uncle called the braid down her back.

He took her to his apartment in the city. Elder Uncle’s residential compound resembled a picture in a Jehovah’s Witness paradise pamphlet, but with pink apartment blocks. It had gardens with waterfalls spouting out of artificial rocks, and children’s play equipment on little patches of greenery like daubs of coloured paint. A doorman and concierge stood in each foyer, and marbled elevators took them up to his home overlooking the water.

Elder Auntie greeted her and handed her a pair of sandals. There was a different pair for every room of the house. ‘There is water in the bathroom and oil in the kitchen. Those don’t mix,’ her auntie explained.

Then they sat her down and asked about Beijing.

How long had she been living there?

One month.

What was she doing in Beijing?

Writing.

Oh, really? What about?

I don’t know yet, she confessed.

Luckily they didn’t ask her why she was in Macau. Instead, Elder Uncle took her on a walk down an escalator and into a strip of shops. He bought her a boiled egg, a sandwich and a cup of Ovaltine. She hadn’t eaten a boiled egg for so long that cracking the little dome with a spoon made her teary with nostalgia and gratitude. Elder Auntie took her shopping on the first evening, bought her some stylish black ‘young people’s clothes’, while Elder Uncle waited on a bench inside the mall, his stiff leg sticking out like an inadvertent prank. The following day they both took her through the beautiful streets and she realised that in some quarters if you removed all the black-haired pedestrians and Chinese shop signs, this could almost be a city in Europe. They visited the Kun Iam temple with its golden Goddess of Mercy rising twenty metres from the lotus rooftop, wandered through halls of celestial kings and looked at the festively plump stone Buddha sitting there smirking at his own private joke. Behind the temple they walked through the Chinese garden and its ‘Tree of Loving Couples’, where she watched young lovers offer prayers for good fortune in their future lives. After these trips, her uncle and auntie left her to her own devices.

*

She was in this city to see him, of course.

When they met each other again, there was the awkward moment of how to greet each other. To hug or not to hug, that was the question. They had thought so much about it that their thoughts flushed away all spontaneity, and they ended up just saying hello.

‘It’s good to see you.’

‘You too.’

He took her to see his spartan white flat on the fourth level of an apartment block. The rent was much cheaper than the other levels because the Chinese here were superstitious and the word for ‘four’ sounded too close to death.

He showed her his paintings and sketches while she sat on his white couch. There was a great big window at one end of the flat and a great big screen at the other. The noise of the city below, and the sea so close by. Could you imagine yourself living here, he was asking her, without words. She tried to imagine it – her and her computer and notebooks and nothing else. Perhaps some clothes, but that was it. She would leave her flat in Melbourne behind. Her family. Her friends. Her students, her work, her colleagues, even her baking tins, and live the way an adventurous twenty-something would live. A spontaneous and in-the-moment existence, until the end of their love.

Yet their adventures in this city seemed so transient and surreal. They went on a tour of all the establishments that served dessert. They ate dessert for lunch and dinner two days straight. It was so pleasant and sweet that she forgot her doubts. But in the evenings, when she went back to her auntie and uncle’s flat where oil did not mix with water, an ill feeling congealed in the pit of her stomach. This life would drag her away from everything that grounded her. She couldn’t see love the same way he did.

They only spent three days together, and on their last day he took her to the zoo. The animals seemed to howl, even though the cages were enormous compared to those at Beijing Zoo.

‘What do you think they are saying?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know.’
Desire was a hard thing to kill
, she thought.

But she didn’t say it, because she knew what his reply would be:
Then why kill it
?

There was a man there in a booth a little larger than a toilet cubicle, with a glass window. He was probably the zookeeper. He kept an eye on the animals from his little cage. She would not have noticed if it was not pointed out to her, because she kept her gaze on the ground.

She could not look at her companion beside her, because every time she did she would be reminded that he was someone who saw these little things.

‘What is your favourite animal?’ he asked her.

‘The elephant.’ The elephant had self-awareness. She remembered reading about experiments in which they put mirrors in front of certain animals – dogs, cats, cows, elephants. While the dogs rushed up to play with their companions in the glass, the elephants opened their mouths to check their teeth, then checked their ears and up their noses.

Yet it was not the elephant from Beijing Zoo that had stayed with her, but the rhinoceros, because it was in the cafeteria. There were the usual plastic tables and chairs, and the stalls selling fairy floss and meat on sticks and reheated meals. Then in one corner was a tiny concrete square, where the rhino lay on its side as though dying. The square was so small that there was only enough space for it to walk two or three steps. It didn’t even bother to stand up; there was no point. People were throwing apple cores at it.

She did not tell him about the rhino.

She tried to be happy that day, but the zoo reminded her of cages, and people who lived in cages.

*

They sat across from each other at a table in a restaurant and shared a last meal together. She could not look anywhere but at her hands.

‘I can’t believe you ended it,’ he said. ‘And,’ he added, one eyebrow raised, ‘unconsummated too!’ They would laugh over this in the future. It was so much fun, what they had, but it would never have lasted. That didn’t matter to him, because he probably didn’t expect it to anyway. But it mattered to her.

What was the matter with her? Instead of discovering more certainty as she grew older, and finding conviction in a course through life, or else discovering that its impermanence heightened the desire to seize whatever happened to fall her way, she had decided
not
to have an experience. His parting gift was a pomegranate from his travels. He gave her an orb of perfect seeded gems encased in incarnadine, but inside her ribcage was rotting fruit.

After they parted, seeing all the beautiful perfumed young women floating around the city with places to go to and things to do made her feel weary. There she was, with her grimy heavy boots, wandering through streets of designer stores where people would go if they had a big win at one of the casinos. She glanced in a shop window and discovered that it had
Newsweek
magazines. It was the first time she had seen something in English in a long, long time. She entered and sat down to read, but despite this sudden small jackpot of words nothing seemed to register. She read an article on the death of the book, while four male hairdressers with ridiculously trendy hairstyles like hedgehogs milled around her in a squeezed-up circle.

Twice in the past she had decided to lop her hair off, but to no avail. The first time, in Footscray, Veronica the Vietnamese hairdresser would not do it for her.

‘How you want?’ she asked.

‘All off.’ She pointed to her ear.

‘No, no good, you look like boy!’

Veronica just trimmed the ends and charged her twelve dollars. Then decided that it was too much and gave her back five.

The second time, on her way to the hairdresser again, this time in Richmond, an earnest ground-level window cleaner stopped her in her tracks and told her how lovely it was. Vanity stopped her from going any further. There was something vestal about long hair, since the girls who wore ao dais and saris to their friends’ weddings had it. Funny how people inadvertently conspired through sheer kindness to make her into someone she thought she was not.

‘We thought you were Vietnamese,’ one of the four hipster hairdressers told her. ‘Only Vietnamese girls have hair this long.’ Their job in this glamorous city was to erase any sign that you had just come off a boat.

They tied back her hair.

She read about how the book was dying in its rectangular tree incarnation.

They began to braid it.

She turned the page and looked at pictures of electronic books.

Then they lopped it off.

She closed the magazine and looked in the mirror.

Afterwards, they wrapped it up in cling-wrap for her, so it became a macabre thing she had to carry around all afternoon. She couldn’t go home to Elder Auntie and Elder Uncle yet. They thought she was going out with friends, not that she was passing time alone in malls, lost, clutching a cling-wrapped wad of hair in one pocket.

The first time she went to the loo, she realised she did not have to think about whether her hair was up or down. It had been the first thing she would think about before she sat. When you had hair that long, you did not want to take its ends on a crappy swimming expedition.

She sat in a plastic chair in a mall café and gulped down some murky brown soft drink. Halfway through, she felt a choking sensation. That lump in her throat was like a golf ball. She wiped her eyes with a sleeve. She no longer cared how emotional she got in public. It must confirm everyone’s suspicions of her being a straight-off-the-boat. She didn’t care.

‘I don’t think I will ever see him again,’ she wrote in her notebook. Funny that in an era of mass global communication and email and Skype and all the rest of it, a person could still make such resolutions. This was the end. No longer would she see his handwriting tumbling down white sheets, sometimes sprawled, sometimes the characters curled and spooned into one another.

*

When she returned to the apartment, it was already past midnight. Her uncle and auntie were still awake. They weren’t waiting up for her, they reassured her; they were just insomniacs who stayed up watching television.

‘Wah!’ they exclaimed happily. ‘You look so modern now, and so much younger!’

At night the sleeplessness caused her to make strange shapes in her solitary bed. One knee up and the other straight out, one arm draped over her neck, eyes wide like a traffic conductor who hadn’t seen the car coming in time. Or she would try to sleep with her arms folded behind her head, both knees towards her chest like a sunbather afraid of shallow-swimming sharks. Or arms and legs bent in tight towards the torso – praying mantis wedged between a car and its tyre with nothing more to pray for except that the car would stop. Her world was peopled with attachments and yet she was afraid of being alone. The world was spinning too fast. Stop! she wanted to yell, Stop the world, I want to get off for a bit. Have a little rest and then step back on.

She returned to Beijing, to the chimneys belching black smoke like giant cigarettes against the sky. In the taxi the driver asked her to guess his age. She looked at him – the skin on his hands like uncured leather, grooves etched in the corners of his eyes from a lifetime of squinting at the sun and snow. He looked forty-six but she wanted to be generous, so she guessed a decade younger.

‘Wrong!’ he laughed. ‘Thirty-two!’ She realised she hadn’t hidden the surprise on her face well enough, because he then laughed and said in Mandarin, ‘Being poor makes a person look so very much older, wouldn’t you agree?’

He stopped at her university and let her out. The young guard at the gate let her past with a slight nod of his head. She walked through the empty streets of the campus. It was the semester break and the students had all gone back to their hometowns.

The food halls were empty, so she went to the university supermarket, which sold mostly snack food. She grabbed a plastic bowl of dehydrated noodles and lined up at the checkout. Three of the young security guards were in front of her. They were handsome boys, she realised, as she looked at their faces. Each of them clutched four or five plastic bowls of instant noodles, their meals for the next two days, supplemented only with a few roasted yams perhaps, or insipid boiled corn bought from the roadside.

Now, back in her own room, she was feeling flatter and emptier than ever. It seemed that the outer edges of her sight had started to shrink, until her pupils became self-absorbed pinpoints. It was as if there were too many details in the world and she had to home in on one thing at a time or else she would go mad. Being alone in a foreign country like this had made her peripheral vision disappear.

All thought and feeling was condensed to simple words. I am well, I am hungry, I am tired, thank you thank you thank you. It seemed that nuances of feeling did not exist anymore if she didn’t know the Mandarin words for them.

But she didn’t feel hungry. It was as if desire and appetite were from the same source – which they probably were – and when one dried up, so did the other. She took to eating one meal a day, like a Buddhist monk. She just wasn’t hungry anymore, for anything.

You could have lived out the experience with him, she kept telling herself, on the overnight train, on the bus, on the road. You could have had company in China. You didn’t need to be alone.

Her parents had spent their honeymoon in the jungles along the Thai–Cambodian border, fleeing from the Khmer Rouge. For true intensity of experience you could not beat that. She was afraid of loss, and of change, and of all the inevitabilities of life. She never let relationships run their course. She didn’t want to believe that love could die.

*

Her three kindly professors took her out to lunch and commiserated over the loss of her hair. ‘She used to have beautiful braids,’ Professor Liu told Professor Hu. Professor Liu was a large-hearted, practical woman who had helped her get her meal and library cards at Peking University and settled her in.

Professor Hu, who was seventy-five and dressed like her grandfather, told her a story about when he was young. ‘A very long time ago, of course,’ he laughed. ‘I was in love with a girl who had very long hair. I tried to help her braid her hair one day, but I could not do it and messed it up terribly! It was very funny, but it was the end. Sometimes when you’re young, small things like that can end big things very quickly.’

Professor Hu asked her to visit his apartment after lunch. His wife peeled and cut up an apple. The pieces filled two small tea-saucer plates and a bowl. ‘Hu and I can’t finish one of these apples ourselves,’ she said, ‘because they are so big. So we eat bananas and save our apples for guests.’

Professor Liu said to Professor Hu in Mandarin, ‘She is so independent. She came here and didn’t phone me for help or anything after our first meeting.’

Professor Hu’s wife said something in Mandarin about how hardy and self-sufficient young foreigners were.

‘This old grandma is praising you!’ Professor Hu joked, before she left their warm apartment.

She didn’t feel too independent. There had been hours of loitering alone, feeling lost, feeling like there were feral kittens fighting in her solar plexus.

But perhaps she was.

*

They had told her back home that she would have a ‘fish out of water’ experience, but she knew that fish died out of water when their gills no longer flicked like the pages of a book. It was dead, dead, dead, and she might as well keep it closed.

It was time to return.

She arrived back in Australia on the worst day of the bushfires that had burned all through the summer, Black Saturday. The plane flew low in the afternoon, through turbulence and dense clouds. The clouds looked like the thick batter of an orange and poppy-seed cake.

When the plane landed, the passengers clapped.