Laurinda (32 page)

Then, while dessert was being served, Mr Sinclair stood up to introduce me. “I nominated Lucy Lam to speak tonight,” he said. “Not only is she an insightful student of politics, she also espouses the values of honesty and humility that make for a lifelong learner.”

It must have been a baffling introduction for anyone used to the way Laurinda unfurled a list of achievements like a long banner. Mr Sinclair had even left out the thing the school considered most important: that I was the inaugural recipient of the Equal Access scholarship.

Now I was standing onstage.

“Thank you, Mr Sinclair, and thank you, Mrs Grey, for giving me the opportunity to speak this evening,” I began. “My mum and dad are not here tonight, but their names are Warwick and Quyen Lam. We came to Australia on a boat from Vietnam when I was two. We are Teochew Chinese. I come from Stanley, one of the most socioeconomically disadvantaged suburbs in Victoria. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics . . .”

I was speaking the truth, and rattling off some impressively grim numbers, but my heart wasn’t in it. My figures stacked up on top of one another like worthless currency, as I looked out at the audience and they smiled back at me. A desire to please started to rise up in my throat like sick, but I suppressed it.

It was really awful to speak after Markita White! Damn it, her tale of slum-dwelling South Asian kids had trumped my carefully crafted script, because now people were listening to me as if I were just another poor child with outstretched hands to be helped by Laurinda.

Was this why Mrs Grey had let me stand here tonight – to bring diversity, to demonstrate that the school was charitable and I was deserving of its charity through my stoicism and spirit? To give a talk that would stir a few warm feelings before everyone went back to stabbing their raspberry chocolate tortes with their little silver forks? To be “that impressive Asian scholarship girl” parents would speak about on their drive home because they’d forgotten my name, while their own kids went to an after-party?

I’d expected my declaration of allegiance to Laurinda to be easy, especially since Mum and Dad wouldn’t be there to witness their daughter telling everyone about the awfulness of her ordinary life in order to demonstrate the ways in which this extraordinary school had lifted her out of it. I had to do this because I hadn’t yet accomplished anything illustrious for Laurinda. All year I’d just been trying to survive. All year I’d been searching for a sense of belonging. All year I’d been looking for my voice. And now here it was, going out clear as a bell to hundreds of people, and I didn’t even recognise it. At Christ Our Saviour, I’d never had to spin some tale of triumph against the odds because we had all been in the same boat.

I kept reading. “Leadership assumes that you have certain exceptional skills, and the confidence to make decisions that will affect other people. It assumes you possess wisdom, discernment and good judgement. Laurinda is a school that cultivates leadership in all its students . . .”

All year, we’d heard dozens of clichéd leadership speeches, and here I was making another one. It was all bull, and I saw red. I’d been a leader before, and I knew that it was not this rubbish about how everyone could be one if only they participated in enough public-speaking, merit-scoring activities. It was not about increasing my profile or clawing my way past rivals or crawling out on top of the competition heap. I glanced down at my speech and knew in a heartbeat that I could not deliver it. I wasn’t even anxious anymore. Peering out into the audience, into all the satiated faces and encouraging smiles, I began again.

“I used to be a leader,” I said. “At Christ Our Saviour I was a leader because my peers respected me enough to vote me onto the Student Representative Council. At home I was a leader because my parents treated me like an adult with responsibilities. But when I arrived at Laurinda, my mentors here told me that leadership was all about standing out. You had to stand out here because this is supposed to be an
outstanding
school. But I don’t have any special talents like my friend Trisha. I’m not a history buff like Katie, or a debater like Brodie.
Nothing about me stands out
.

“However, I have a letter from Laurinda which my dad keeps in a special photo album with all my childhood pictures. It’s a letter saying that I am the inaugural recipient of the Laurinda Equal Access scholarship. That means something to him, my dad who has no idea what ‘inaugural’ means because he didn’t even finish high school. So I thought long and hard, and realised that what makes me special at this school is that I come from Stanley, and no one else at Laurinda comes from there.

“Stanley is a place where many people work in banking and advertising – that is, their mums clean banks and their brothers put Safeway ads into mailboxes. It’s a place where people have four cars in their driveways – but only one that is working. It’s a place where the bogan and the bog
asian
sometimes coexist peacefully, but more often don’t.”

Whereas before everyone had been half-dozing, a few students and teachers now chuckled awkwardly. But not Mrs Grey. I could see her at the front table, her hand clamped tightly around her upright fork, a disapproving metal exclamation mark. The speech I’d shown her was still in front of me, but it didn’t matter anymore – not the passage about tradition and unity, not the accompanying out-of-context Confucius quote, nor the final cliché about how what lies ahead of us is nothing compared to what lies within us.

Sure, I had just told a self-deprecating joke, but it was no more of a joke than the entirety of my prepared speech. Sure, I was not as polished as Markita White or Brodie, but at last I had my true voice back.

“So you can understand that when I first came to Laurinda, I wasn’t sure whether I’d ever be up to scratch. All year I’ve been scared of not being good enough, smart enough, of not being ‘leadership material’.”

I looked around the room and could see many students nodding.

“I had so much to learn about my new school, my teachers and the new friends I would make. I wanted to understand the people who seemed so different from my friends back in Stanley. For nearly all of the students here tonight, graduation simply means moving on to the last two years of high school and then, hopefully, on to university.

“But for some of my old friends, graduating from Year Ten will be the last of their formal education. Many of them will never come to a dinner where they use three different forks. In the future, the only politics they will know will be from the television. The last literature they will read in their lives will be their Year Ten English texts. The only professionals they will regularly see will not be their friends, but their family doctors.

“We are all born into a particular set of circumstances – a home, a family, a neighbourhood. And to adapt to new circumstances takes time. At Laurinda I had to start from the beginning, and to take baby steps again. So I knew I wasn’t going to shine straightaway and make this school proud.”

I didn’t dare look at Mrs Grey at all now.

“But teachers like Ms Vanderwerp and Mr Sinclair showed me that good leadership does not necessarily mean loudly stamping your boots,” I continued. “It can also mean treading lightly like Aung San Suu Kyi. She said that if you have enough inner resources, you can be by yourself for a long time and not feel smaller because of it.

“I have a baby brother. I’m responsible for looking after him a fair bit when I’m not at school. When I walk him through a busy street, he’ll suddenly stop in the middle of the footpath and squat down, not caring that people’s legs are swirling past him. His attention will be completely focused on a dropped bubblegum wrapper, or a snail, or a dandelion growing out between the cracks of cement.

“I used to tug his arm to get him going again because he was wasting time, but one day I just stopped and squatted there with him. I realised he was learning by being still, by noticing all the small, discarded things that we usually pay no attention to.

“So, while we are all aiming high and marching forward in harmony, I think we should remember that looking down does not mean you’ll get vertigo and feel sick and lose your footing.” Oh my god, I thought, that was a really terrible, stumbling metaphor, but I had to continue. “It might also mean you notice what is good and what keeps you grounded. You don’t make wrong judgements based on the opinions of others.”

I had to finish the speech before I ruined it, before I let loose with a profanity and told people where to go.

“So for me, leadership is about building your own character before you start influencing anyone else. To be a true leader, I think you must first learn what it is like to follow, even if it means squatting on the ground with a toddler to look at old things in a new way. And to follow without losing your own moral compass, you have to know yourself and appreciate where you come from.

“My name is Lucy Linh Lam. Thank you for listening.”

Phew.

*

“That was such a great speech,” smiled Brodie when she came up to me afterwards, and for the first time ever I knew she meant it, because it came through gritted teeth and she threw in a backhanded compliment: “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

They were just words, I thought. I would go home this evening to a mother who couldn’t even write me a note, and I’d know exactly where I stood. But I also knew now what I had always doubted: that I could make it at Laurinda.

Chelsea and Amber suddenly appeared too.

“Oh my god!” squealed Chelsea. “Lucy Lamby, who could have guessed that you were such a sly little fox?
Following
us all year to suss out how we
led
the school! Ooh, ooh, Brodie, we’d better watch out.” She gave me an affectionate punch on the shoulder, but Brodie looked as if she wanted to punch me in the face.

“Do you want a picture with us?” Amber asked.

They still thought they were the school’s illuminati, granting me access to their world. I’d proven myself to be a worthy competitor and now they wanted me on their side. I looked at them – Brodie decked out in so many school medals that her torso looked bulletproof, Chelsea still referring to me by pet names, and Amber with her camera ready to immortalise me in their ranks. They looked kind of ridiculous.

“No, thanks,” I replied and walked away.

*

Mrs Leslie and her cluster were standing near the bar with glasses in their hands, their daughters nowhere in sight. “Very surprising for him to have won the Miles Franklin,” she was saying to her group of Laurinda ladies, “because the last book, as I recall . . .” She then noticed me. “Lucy, you star!”

Even Mrs White gave me a gigantic hug. “Chelsea could take a leaf out of your book,” she told me. “Where are your mum and dad? We want to congratulate them!”

“Oh, they couldn’t make it tonight,” I said, ignoring their pitying expressions.

“You’re the girl who taught us how to make rice-paper rolls!” declared Mrs Newberry. “My, you’re a dark horse.” I had no idea whether that was a compliment or an insult. “Thank you,” she added, “for being such a good influence on Brodie.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I laughed, wondering whether Brodie had told her how I’d sworn at her at the school gate.

I looked around. Everyone was being so pleasant to each other, filled with good cheer and good manners. The final words of a play I had once read came back to me:
They were not good. They were not bad. They were just nice
.

*

“Congratulations, Lucy,” came a familiar voice from behind me. “Spoken like a true Laurindan.”

Mrs Grey.

And with those words, it hit me that she was the only adult here who knew what I was really capable of. Unlike Mrs Leslie, who just saw me as a sweet girl who wanted to do well in life, Mrs Grey appreciated that my ambitions were larger than even I had recognised. Against the odds, she had taken a chance on me instead of choosing the more malleable Tully, and against all expectations she had let me deliver the closing address at the dinner. Only she understood the insinuations in my ad hoc speech; only she recognised how deeply I understood the machinery of her school.

And only she appreciated how far I had truly come – from the startled girl who had blurted out all her feelings when nudged, to this
true Laurindan
who now layered her words with care and cunning. She was the only person in this room who had peered into my heart and recognised my dark and secret need to be acknowledged.

It was then that I finally accorded her the respect she was due.

*

And so here we are, Linh, at the end. You like to think that within you there is quiet courage and conviction, a sense of righteousness that is not judgemental. That’s what you like to think about yourself. But you’re wrong. You are not truly good until you are tested, and even then you might become a worse person.

I’d seen how the top-performing girls at Laurinda were cultivated like hothouse strawberries – bright and lush. Out in the real world, they would bruise. I wanted to see how the Cabinet would cope in two years’ time, when they would be in the same classes as my most driven and hard-working Christ Our Saviour friends, and the most tenacious and gifted public school students, the hardy banksias and olive trees and root vegetables that would last all through winter.

In Stanley, we all knew that going to university guaranteed that we would never have to work like our parents did in the factories or garages. Yet I still think about that day on the 406 bus and how we backstabbed that poor girl with teeth like brittle toffee who gave her bag its own seat. When Tully had turned and muttered, “Look at her, Linh. So selfish,” an older woman behind you had yelled, “Stop speaking your own bloody language on a public bus – youse don’t belong here!”

“Of course I don’t,” Tully had calmly said in our secret language. We knew you couldn’t put someone like that in their place by yelling back. “One day I’m going to be out of here, out of Stanley, and I’ll pull my parents out too, and we’ll never look back.”