Lucy and Linh (13 page)

One afternoon, when Mrs. Leslie was returning some books to the library, she spotted me getting a yearbook from the shelves. I quickly shoved it back and pretended to look at the spine of a book about Caravaggio.

“Lucy!” she called out, sauntering over. “It's so wonderful to see you!”

I smiled.

“You're in Amber's English class now! How are you doing there?”

“Good.”

“I've missed your insights,” she said. “You must be studying
Emma
now. How I love that book! How far into it are you, Lucy?”

“The very beginning.”

She asked if I was enjoying it, and I lied. This was what I was learning at Laurinda, Linh: in order to be nice or polite, you had to lie. Back at Christ Our Savior, you could tell a teacher straight-out that you did not like a book, so long as you didn't use swear words. But here I felt I was constantly tiptoeing around egos like they were eggs, and one clumsy step could mean someone's self-esteem would come leaking out.

“I have the BBC collection of
Emma
and
Pride and Prejudice,
” Mrs. Leslie told me. “Amber just adores Mr. Darcy. Perhaps you could come over after school one day and watch it with us?”

I marveled at the naïveté of Mrs. Leslie, Linh, a grown-up who thought she could put her daughter and me together to watch a few videos and we would become best friends while she brought us milk and cookies.

“Sure, Mrs. Leslie,” I said. “That sounds like fun.”

As you know, my mother never did anything slowly. She gulped down her coffee. She slurped up her food, even laying down sheets of newspaper on the table when she was eating so that the splatters could just be scrunched up and tossed in the bin. She'd eat grapes from a bowl next to her sewing machine with a wet towel folded beside her to wipe her fingers on, so that they wouldn't stain the denim or polar fleece pieces.

When she was pregnant with the Lamb, she had bad morning sickness; once she ate a bowl of pho and vomited it back out again within half an hour. I had to clean it up, and in the sick were long white tendrils of noodles, and beef slices that were still disk-shaped. My mother barely even chewed her food. If her sewing machine were a car, she'd constantly be driving way past the speed limit, her foot jammed down flat on the accelerator pedal.

Mrs. Leslie did everything as if she had all the time in the world. She waited for me patiently after school in her dark blue BMW, just as she said she would. The seats were warm, as if the car had been sitting in the sun on a ninety-degree day, except that it was sixty degrees outside. She saw me touch the leather. “Oh, they're heated,” she explained. When I gave her a blank look, she told me that if I pressed a button to my left, I could turn it off.

She was taking me to her house for a cup of tea and a catch-up. When I had told my father about it last week, he had just about been ready to take the day off work and drive me there himself. That was how excited he was, Linh. “Make sure you ask her lots of questions about things you are stuck on,” he advised me.

As Mrs. Leslie pulled out of the parking lot, I asked, “Where's Amber?”

“She has band rehearsal. She'll catch the school bus back at five.” The school had four buses to ferry students to and from their after-school activities, although they never went as far as Stanley.

I felt relieved that it was just me and Mrs. Leslie. I felt more comfortable with her than with her daughter. While she was driving, she asked me the usual questions about school and whether I felt I had now adapted. “It's never easy, is it?” she sighed. “You're very brave, Lucy. Amber's been at Laurinda since kindergarten. Sometimes I wonder whether we did the right thing by her.”

She paused, and I knew she wanted me to say something affirming, but I had no idea what that might be. “Amber's nice,” I reassured her.

Linh, what has become of me? I lied to fill in a moment of silent awkwardness, becoming a simpering people pleaser, when I could have stayed quiet.

“But she's so insular. I wish the two of you could be friends, Lucy. You'd open up her world—I dare say even open her eyes to her self-centered ways.”

Where was this heading, Linh? I thought only Asian mothers did this kind of thing.

“I worry about her,” Mrs. Leslie confided. “She's always been so sensitive, but never that sensible. She's been friends with Brodie for so long that sometimes I feel the friendship has held Amber back from becoming her own person.” She paused. “Now, I do think Brodie is a very talented young woman, but she is so brilliant that Amber seems to get lost in her shadow. I think she doesn't try very hard because she feels there's no way she could ever measure up to Brodie.”

It felt strange, being privy to this. It was a bit like when Mrs. Cho started running down Tully to me. Yet this time I wasn't sure that Mrs. Leslie was aware she was speaking aloud—she almost seemed to be talking to herself.

“But you, Lucy,” she concluded, “you're just such a hardworking, self-contained little hive of industry. You never let things get you down.”

I knew Mrs. Leslie was itching to remind me how proud my parents must be and what a great contribution to this country we refugees made. I felt awkward because she did not know the real us; I wondered how she'd feel about Ivy's brother Ming, with his prison time. Her naïveté was a beautiful thing, I decided, because it meant she would always see the best in us. Although Ming's parents would probably never be able to excuse his vices and habits, there would always be someone like Mrs. Leslie, far away from our lives, who would.

Luckily, we had arrived at our destination. Their house was really something, Linh. The first thing I noticed was the wooden floors. “Wooden floors are what villagers have,” my father had said when we ripped up our dark and grimy carpets five years ago and discovered the old floorboards. “Let's tile over them.” And so he and cousin Claude had spent a week and a half mixing cement and grouting, aligning the little plastic plus symbols to keep the corners of the white tiles even, and cutting ceramics to shape.

Not only was Amber's house uncarpeted, but the floorboards were bare. They were so shiny that you could almost see your reflection, your face lost in swirls of wood-grain waves in the timber ocean.

There was a polished wooden sculpture in one corner of the living room that was like a tree branch kissing the floor with its wider end, an invisible tap pouring a puddle of wood onto the ground. I was afraid to ask what it was in case it was phallic, but Mrs. Leslie caught me looking at it.

“Oh, that's a didgeridoo,” she said, almost as if we were back in remedial class.

I told her I'd never seen a didgeridoo like that before.

“It's a pared-down one.” Mrs. Leslie laughed in an embarrassed way, though I didn't understand why she felt embarrassed. Somehow I knew that there was another, more complicated name for it, or for that style of art. There was no way Mrs. Leslie would buy a random “pared-down” hollow tree branch.

“Where does it come from?” I asked.

“An art gallery in the city,” she replied.

“What's the gallery called?”

“Oh, Lucy, it's just a little art gallery in the city,” she said with a small laugh, and I felt ashamed to have sounded so pushy, although really I was only thinking that if I passed it one day I could go in and have a look. But I suspected the art would be heart-stoppingly expensive.

“Would you like a cup of tea, Lucy? We have oolong or jasmine.”

“Black tea is fine with me, Mrs. Leslie.”

She went into the kitchen and, not knowing what else to do, I followed. Her kitchen looked like something from a magazine, all granite and pure white cupboards and stainless steel. I noticed small things, like the soft paper towels that they wasted wiping spills—the sort of thing, if we had them, we would use to wipe the Lamb's face after a meal instead of pilfered McDonald's napkins or plain old toilet paper.

There was a cabinet where all the nice plates and bowls were on display, some on special stands so that the pictures on the plates faced you like paintings. What awed me most about her house was that Mrs. Leslie had all this expensive stuff lying around. My mum and dad always told me to hide our valuables if any visitors came by.

On the kitchen bench, next to a phone, I suddenly spotted a familiar object—a blue notebook. No, I thought, that can't be the same Mercury Stool–signed article. Because this one had pages torn out and phone messages scrawled all over it.

“What's she doing here?” Amber asked when she arrived home at five-thirty and saw me sitting at the Leslies' dining table, drinking tea from a cup on a saucer. A little plate next to me was filled with Oreos.

“I beg your pardon?” For a moment Mrs. Leslie sounded scarily like a teacher.

“
Sorry.
Lucy, what are you doing here?” she asked me.

I didn't know what to say. This was embarrassing, but I wasn't sure why. All I knew was that, somehow, my presence was annoying to Amber.

“Lucy and I are having a little catch-up,” said Mrs. Leslie. “Would you like to join us?”

“Oh, I see,” said Amber. “Well, she's not going to disappear, because she's in my English class now.”

“Yes, I know,” replied Mrs. Leslie.

“So she's not like Zi Wei or June Moon.” Amber turned toward me. “Two Asian girls that came here on exchange a few years ago. They went back home to China and Korea, back to their rich mums and dads, but my mum here—you should have seen her carry on. It was as if the girls were going back to kneeling on broken glass or something.”

“That's enough, young lady.”

“You're not supposed to have favorites anyhow.”

“Enough!”

Amber ignored her mother and busied herself making a snack. I noticed how she used half a dozen utensils to make a sandwich.

“Hey, Amber, you have an interesting-looking jotter,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Next to your phone.”

“Oh,” she said, barely glancing at it, “that piece of crap. I think Gina gave it to me.”

“Amber Leslie, watch your language!” fired Mrs. Leslie.

My father came to collect me half an hour later. Amber opened the door, and Mrs. Leslie came to tell him how much she had enjoyed having me over.

“
Wah,
look at the size of that place,” my father exclaimed after he'd pulled out of the driveway. “What does her father do?”

“I don't know, Dad. Some sort of engineer.”

“Your friend looks like a movie star.”

I could see how pleased my father was that I was friends with Amber, whose mother worked at the school and who lived in such a fairy-tale house. “I'm glad you are making good friends.”

My father was happy on the drive back from Amber's house, because he thought that I had made progress. But I felt the opposite. I was regressing as a person. Those two hours with Mrs. Leslie and Amber had drained me, Linh. It was exhausting to be the sort of person they expected me to be.

When I was six years old, Dad bought a cheap one-pound bag of mixed candy from Tien, who worked at the Allens' factory. He made me stand outside the front of my elementary school and hand them out to the neighborhood kids walking home. He hung back behind me. It had been a hot day, the bag was heavy and I was not interested in either the candy or the other kids. I just wanted to get home and watch
Fat Cat and Friends.

Nor were the other kids interested in me. They would come up, grab a handful of candy and walk off. Some parents made their kids say, “Thank you.” Other parents said it on their kids' behalf and smiled warmly at me. One mum pulled her little boy away from my bag when she saw my dad hovering behind me, even though he was smiling broadly at them. In fact, that probably creeped them out even more.

When my father walked me home that afternoon, he said, “Well, Lucy, now that you've had a chance to get to know the kids at the school, some of the older ones will look after you.”

Maybe you could pull a trick like that in Hanoi, because people were so broke, and older kids knew to look after younger ones, but here in Stanley my poor father had no idea of the difference between exploitation and friendship.

So when he proposed that I invite some Laurinda girls over for a movie night, I had to quash the idea.

“This is the first time it will be on television!” he said. “It is a huge event, and it would be nice for you to share our culture with your friends.”

“No, Dad, I really don't think the girls will want to watch
Hope in Hanoi.
”

My father had been waiting for this movie, which was set during the Vietnam War, to come on TV for years. All movies ended up on the television eventually, he reasoned, which was why we never, ever went to the cinema. Someone at the factory had told Dad that the movie was going to screen that Friday night.

“We could have a little party, order some takeout food.”

“No.”

“I can't believe I have a daughter who is ashamed of her culture. So ashamed she won't even have her friends over to see a movie about it.”

My father made me livid with rage. If Dad thought that the war represented the sum of our culture, I couldn't be bothered arguing with him. “We'll see,” I said, to shut him up. But he seemed to sense something else I was thinking.

“Do you think that a lovely girl like Amber will care what our house looks like?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I retorted. “Amber would care. But Mrs. Leslie wouldn't—she'd just feel sorry for us.”

“And what is wrong with that?”

At that moment, I could not stand my father.

“What is wrong with living humbly?” he continued, determined to make his point—a point that he knew was wrong, which was why he had to twist words and call it “humble” instead of what it was. Even his voice made me want to snap a chopstick in half. “They would see how hard we work, and feel admiration for how hard you try at school.”

He wanted us to act like stoic refugees when it worked to our advantage. According to my father, it was an easy role to play—all I had to do was keep my head down, keep quiet and work hard, and then everyone would like me. There was no such thing as having trouble fitting in if you presented the right image to your audience.

“You have to be sociable at the new school,” he advised. “It's not like Christ Our Savior, where girls just stuck with each other because they were Asian or Spanish or Greek or whatever.”

That Friday evening, Dad came home with three big bags of McDonald's. Enough food for a family three times our size.

“
Wah,
what's with all this food, old man?” my mother asked.

My father looked at me as if I'd poured one of the plastic cups of Coke over his head. It was a wordless look of exorbitant disappointment. “I thought you were bringing some friends home.”

I didn't want to make the situation worse, so I didn't tell him that the types of girls I now hung around with didn't consider McDonald's the epitome of modern, hygienic, healthy food. They considered it the food of poor, fat rednecks.

My father's adoration of McDonald's was completely without irony. “The Australian government would never allow advertisements to lie on television,” he once told me. I knew the Laurinda girls would not share his love of the perfect golden fry, or marvel over the milky nutritional glory of the ninety-nine-cent cone.

“Let's have a look at what's inside, Lamb,” I said, shame preventing me from looking at my dad. I opened up one of the Happy Meal boxes and rummaged for the surprise toy.

“Who is going to eat all this, I ask you?” my mother scolded.

“Our daughter said that she would bring some friends.”

“You should have asked her how many people were coming.”

“I didn't say anyone was coming!” I protested.

There was silence. The Lamb found the toy and started to bite away the plastic packaging with his four front teeth. “Lamby,” I said to him, “let me open that for you.”

“Indeed,” my father lamented, “who is going to eat all this food?”

I sighed. “I will. I love this stuff. I will eat both the Big Macs—one for dinner and one for breakfast.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” said my father. “Do you want to turn into a fat pig like the white girls here in Stanley with their bums hanging out of their pants?”

At this point in an American sitcom, there would be canned laughter. Then the teenage protagonist would run to her room and slam the door. The American mum would hold her hand up to her mouth and exclaim, “Rich, you can't say things like that!”

But this was our cement house, we never locked our parents out and we could never make a comedy about the people who let us live in their suburb and their country and put up with our ethnic ways.

We just looked at the television, all three of us, and didn't say another word, because the movie was about to begin. I had the Lamb on my lap, and I inserted fries into his mouth at regular intervals.

Nothing much excited my parents these days, but movies like this one did. It began in a small Vietnamese village and told the life story of one woman. It was also about a white war veteran who had always wanted an Asian wife. He took the village woman to the United States and she adapted there, but he couldn't go back to his old life so he shot himself in the head. It was one of those movies you would call intense and epic.

But these times—sitting with my family and watching Vietnam War movies filled with limbs being blown off, rapes and women digging their own graves—were the happiest of my childhood. I was glad that people kept making these films, which were bonding Asian families together all over Australia.

Ivy called me up afterward to talk. She was excited because her family had made a night of it too. And then I talked to you about it, Linh.

I think my dad is pissed off at me, I said.

Why does he want your new friends to come over so badly?
you wondered.
It's not like he ever wanted Yvonne or Ivy to come over when you were still at Christ Our Savior.

Yeah, I mused. In fact, he asked me if I was still hanging around those “gangsta girls,” and told me to watch out because it would be my ruin.

My father had once marveled at Ivy's big, fat birthday cake of a house in Sunray, with its Italian pillars at the front and granite tabletops inside. But now that he had seen a different type of wealth, he didn't want me hanging around with her. Ivy's family might have money, but they weren't that different from us. In their double garage, Ivy's mother had set up not one but five sewing machines, and various cousins and aunties came over regularly to earn some money. Ivy's parents' wealth was a wealth without power, my dad believed, a hot, stressed and determined wealth that was insular and left them unable to fully enjoy its rewards.

“Her parents work all the time in the garage, so she goes tramping about at the shopping center with her designer clothes and her airy attitude, and when it's time to hunker down and do some real work, she turns to you,” my father reprimanded. So that had been the end of Ivy's visits.

As for Yvonne—forget about it, she was with that gangsta Viet boyfriend now. “A beautiful white girl like that, hanging around with that hooligan!” was how my father put it.

In fact, besides a couple of times when you visited me, visits that my father bore grudgingly, none of my Christ Our Savior friends came over to study anymore. My father didn't want them “using” me.