The Family Law (6 page)

For years, everyone had thought I was such a good boy – so polite, so hard-working – but now the cracks were starting to show. I was the boy who'd vandalised books, the pervert who'd mutilated the reproductive system, the son who said dark, unspeakable things about his mother. At night, I'd sob quietly to myself, knowing I was an impostor, convinced I was nothing but bad news, believing I deserved whatever punishment was coming my way.

Tourism

My family isn't the outdoors type. Despite being raised on the coast, Mum detested visits to the beach (all the sand it brought into the house), while Dad disapproved of wearing thongs (‘It splits the toes'). We never camped. All those things involved in camping – pitching a tent; cooking on open fires; the insects; shitting in the woods; sleeping on rocks; getting murdered and raped in the middle of nowhere – they never appealed to us. ‘We were never camping people,' Mum says now. ‘Your dad never wanted to camp, and insects eat me alive. See, Asians – we're scared of dying. White people, they like to “live life to the full,” and “die happy.”' She pauses. ‘Asians are the opposite.'

We preferred theme parks. For parents raising five children, theme parks made so much sense. They were clean and safe. There were clearly designated activities, and auditory and visual stimuli that transcended racial, language and age barriers. Also, you could buy heaps of useless shit. This is an exercise at which Asians of all backgrounds seem to naturally excel. Venture into my childhood home, and in amongst the epic piles of suburban debris you'll still find a plush blue whale wearing a Sea World cap, T-shirts emblazoned with Kenny and Belinda – the now defunct Dreamworld mascots – and a pox of fridge magnets commemorating each visit.

It was family tradition that once a year, our family of seven (eight, including my grandmother) would cram ourselves into a
1990
grey five-seat automatic Honda. Faces smashed against the glass; no leg room; the two smallest children illegally wedged between various legs – we travelled like this for a good three hours before we reached the Gold Coast. We'd fall asleep at such extreme angles that our spines contorted. When we woke up, our shirts would be covered in drool we weren't even sure was ours. By the time we got to the theme park, our limbs were numb, our nerve endings destroyed.

On the day of the trip, we'd wake up before sunrise in order to get there by opening time. Despite enduring three hours of vivid pain in the car, we'd feel an overwhelming sense of awe as the Thunderbolt, Dreamworld's rollercoaster, painted with flames, emerged from the trees that bordered the Pacific Highway. It would appear so suddenly, like a strange apparition or a mirage. We would crane our necks back, trying to take in the sheer majesty of it. For a non-religious family like ours, the experience was borderline spiritual.

Once through the gates, we kids would do our best to distinguish ourselves from the Asian tourists. We'd make our Australian accents more pronounced and end our sentences with ‘eh.' Our trousers were pulled further downwards, away from our navels. We refused to wear bumbags, and spoke English very loudly, with proper grammar and syntax. The hordes of Japanese and Chinese tourists would point to the most innocuous objects and proceed to take photographs like idiots. We could only imagine what they were hollering to each other as they churned through their film. ‘Look, a fire hydrant!' ‘Over here, a drinking fountain!' ‘Wow, there is a toilet: a public, shared facility and receptacle for my waste. Why not take a photo of it!'

Mum would sabotage all our efforts to set ourselves apart. She wore her hair in a Bozo-esque clown perm and insisted on wearing her fluorescent Dreamworld T-shirt if we happened to be at Dreamworld, and her killer-whale Sea World T-shirt if we were visiting Sea World.

‘Mum, come on,' I said, as she posed us at the entrance of yet another ride. ‘Everyone's going to think we're tourists.'

‘We
are
tourists,' she said. ‘Now smile big!'

It would take her about twenty seconds to press the shutter. Once the button was finally pressed, it would take another five for her to release it.

 

*

 

When my parents split up, I was twelve years old and had just finished primary school. Trips to theme parks became less frequent. Custody was split. Mum hated driving long distances. Dad threw himself into work at the restaurant. The mood became downbeat and glum. The separation also made our family the subject of gossip amongst the local Chinese community, whose members were scandalised. Elderly Chinese women who smelled like mothballs and grease would corner my siblings and me in the shopping centre, pulling us to one side, shaking their heads and clicking their tongues, lecturing us in Cantonese.

‘
Wah
, what is going on?' they'd ask, raising their tattooed eyebrows. ‘You need to tell your parents they must make an effort to get back together!
Ai-ya
, why would any parents split up like this? You're only children! And no marriage is a walk in the park, is it?'

None of these concerned citizens ever visited my mother during this period. Mum was always a tiny woman, but she began to lose weight quickly and her low blood pressure got worse. She became prone to intense dizzy spells that would immobilise her for days on end. At my fourteenth birthday party, she almost fainted.

Mum and Dad instituted a rotating custody roster. The five schooldays, Monday to Friday, were considered neutral territory; it was the weekend that was considered important family time. Mum and Dad would take turns, Dad taking us for every second weekend. But despite these days being technically ‘Dad's,' Mum insisted on coming with us, declaring boldly that it was her right as a mother. Plus, when did
she
get to go to theme parks? Never. And who was she going to go with?
Herself?
It made far more sense for her to come along, she said.

Poor Dad. It really put the pressure on him to make those four days a month memorable and worthwhile. At the time, he was working as a chef in a hotel at night, and sleeping during the day at his mother's place. He couldn't afford the luxury of time, so when it came to his designated weekends, Dad needed quick and convenient options. He needed theme parks.

 

*

 

The Sunshine Coast hinterland is a haven for miserable theme parks. In contrast to the Gold Coast's pleasure domes (Dream-world, Movie World, Sea World), which are show-offy and grand, garish and decadent, theme parks on the Sunshine Coast are poor-cousiny, half-arsed and afterthoughtish. Come to Superbee, where our prime attraction is free honey tasting! Also: you can buy honey! Look, here is a man dressed as a bee! Here at the Hedge Maze, get lost! In a hedge! We also have scones!

On one of Dad's more disastrous weekends, we travelled to suburban Noosa to visit a deserted tourist attraction called the Big Bottle. It was, as its name implied, a giant bottle. You'd climb the staircase inside, which was made up of hundreds of empty beer bottles. Once you were at the top, a giant metal slippery slide curled around the bottle's exterior and you'd slide down on a hessian sack. Inside the bottle, it smelled awful, like the piss of a hundred dehydrated men. Because the entire interior was made of beer bottles, you would never know which ones contained the urine. The bottles weren't exposed to the sun, so the piss never evaporated. It smelled so bad. We never went there again.

Another time, we visited Forest Glen Deer Sanctuary, a typically neglected drive-in wildlife preserve near Yandina. Despite its catchy television jingle, the place was starting to lose business to the reptile park a few kilometres away, which had recently renamed itself Australia Zoo. We bought bags of feed at the entrance, then drove slowly around the dirt track. The deer came up to the car in packs, and we fed them through the windows. Amongst the deer and kangaroo, there was also a single emu. It started walking towards our car, pushing its way past the does and fawns.

‘Are we even supposed to feed the emus?' Tammy asked. ‘Isn't this stuff just for deer?'

‘Maybe it's developed a taste for it,' Dad said.

The emu proceeded to eat all the feed from my hand, then moved on to Michelle's open hand. When we ran out of food, we wanted to keep driving. But then the emu spotted my paper bag, still full of feed and reserved for the deer around the bend. It made a terrible, ungodly noise – an almost carnivorous, honking screech of excitement, not unlike the velociraptors in
Jurassic
Park
. Its neck came the whole way into the Honda, and we screamed as pellets flew around the car.

‘Drive faster, drive faster!' Michelle screamed.

Dad put his foot on the accelerator and the emu squawked, trying to keep up the pace.

‘Wind up the window!' Dad said.

What Dad didn't understand was that because most of the emu's head was in the car already, winding up the window would make the situation worse. But in my stammering panic, I reached out, grabbed the window winder and start winding up. The emu refused to retreat. Its head became stuck, and it croaked and coughed at us, banging its head against the car ceiling in wild, spastic fits.

‘Drive slower!' I said, my voice squeaky with panic and puberty. ‘We're going to rip its head off!'

Dad slowed down, inching the Honda forwards, but the emu kept up, walking alongside the car, still screeching and honking.

‘Stop the car, stop the car!'

We killed the engine, and I slowly wound down the window.

The emu gave the car's ceiling one last bang with its head, before sliding its neck out and stumbling away from the car in a daze.

We drove home in silence.

 

*

 

A fortnight later, Dad called me at Mum's place.

‘So, what's the plan for this weekend?' he asked. ‘You got any ideas?'

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘Haven't we done everything around here already?'

‘How about the Ginger Factory? Or Underwater World? You guys like turtles. They're Tammy's favourite, right?'

‘We did that last month,' I said, sighing. ‘We don't have to go somewhere special every weekend, you know. We could just hang out.'

I detected a faint click over the telephone line and coughed loudly – a clear message to Mum that I knew she was on the other phone, listening in to my conversation with Dad.

‘You know, I'm looking to invest in a new restaurant in Pacific Paradise,' Dad said. ‘There's a theme park there we should check out. What do you reckon?'

 

*

 

Nostalgia Town's motto was ‘A Laugh at the Past.' Its main attraction was a family cart-ride, a journey into an era when fibreglass brontosauruses roamed the earth alongside tableaux of Anzac diggers and plastic Aborigines. Slouching, I sat at the back of the ride with Mum, while Dad sat at the front with Tammy and Michelle. In the carts in front of us, mothers and fathers sat alongside each other, their children jammed in between them.

I wondered what they thought of our family, and whether they questioned why the Chinese family's mother and father sat so far away from each other. Maybe it was a cultural thing, they'd think. I'd watch them, wondering how, and why, their parents got along so well. I'd watch them intently: like an outsider, like a tourist.

 

*

 

Nowadays, if you drive through Coomera, towards Dreamworld, you'll see the Thunderbolt has been dismantled. Nostalgia Town has long been torn down, and the deer at Forest Glen have disappeared, presumably having undergone a mysterious transformation into venison. (I don't know what happened to the emu.) That old wildlife sanctuary is now a luxury tourist resort. I can't find any evidence that the Big Bottle still exists, so I can only assume the piss fumes proved a health hazard and that it was torn down too.

Right now, my family's planning to spend New Year's Eve together. Everyone except Dad. We're throwing around some ideas for what to do, since it will be the last time the family will be in the same place, at the same time, for quite a while. Someone has suggested we go camping.

Sleep Cancer

Out of nowhere, my mother developed this thing for buying products from television infomercials. As far as vices of housebound mothers went, it was better than a valium addiction or having indiscriminate sex with neighbours, so we left her to it. In those rare windows of opportunity when all the housework had been done, the kids were at school and Dad had left for work, what else was there to do?

So Mum would switch on the television, sit in her favourite chair, get herself comfortable with a mug of room-temperature water and acquaint herself with the latest in patented, revolutionary inventions: hair-removal devices with hundreds of miniature rotating tweezers; no-name-brand CD players; kitchen appliances with attachable options; bagless vacuum cleaners that could pick up bowling balls. Even now, she regards all of these purchases as necessary, cost-saving devices – except, perhaps, for the body-hair remover. The last time I saw it, it had been hastily unplugged and forcefully lodged in the back of her bathroom cabinet, like it was shoved in there after a sudden bout of fury and disappointment. Upon closer inspection, I found several long, curly hairs lodged in its tiny, angry metal tweezers, like the teeth of a baby shark that had accidentally eaten a wig.

One of the first items Mum bought from the television was a birthday gift for me: my very first alarm clock. It was a sturdy rectangle of beige plastic, roughly the size of a slim brick, with a cartoon decal of a rooster stuck to the speaker. The rooster was depicted leaning back, puffing out its chest with its beak open, as though making a friendly community announcement. The TV infomercial had shown the alarm emitting a friendly ‘cock-a-doodle-doo,' which my mother found adorable and irresistible.
What child wouldn't love this clock?
she'd asked herself.
Who wouldn't love that friendly rooster?