Unpolished Gem (20 page)

“Why don’t you get on stage too?” my parents asked me. As if I could just jump on stage with people I had never spoken three words to all year and insert myself gracefully into their picture. And suddenly the reality must have sunk in for my parents, for
all
the parents on our table, that their children were not more popular, that we did not talk to the beautiful people. It must have hit them hard – that we were still sticking by each other, sticking with each other, and not getting out, not fitting in. They had thought of this new life in simple cause-and-effect terms: that if they worked their backs off to send their children to the grammar school, then we would automatically mingle with the brightest and fairest of the state.

But to the beautiful ones, we were the non-party people, the ones with frightening parents and skirts down to our ankles. To the intellectual ones, we were the ones who never had enough time to join in debating, the boring compliant people who just studied and studied. If only they knew our lives did not revolve around study as much as theirs did – but they would never know. We may have been the dull people with no time, privacy or glamour, but we had our fierce pride.

With my camera, I migrated to my older teachers, the sanest people in the whole royal red and gold room full of colour like a watermelon turned inside out, soft and pastel and pink in some places and yet sharp and blood-red in others. The future people would get their photographs developed from this evening and see the yesterday girl, the small one standing next to them, the one wearing the funny twelve-year-old bridesmaid’s dress, and five years down the track they would not remember her name.

I had nothing to lose. So I walked up to Edmund Chan-Johnson, tall awkward Edmund with the serious brown eyes who had no idea that he had been loved all year by the silent girl sitting two seats behind him in Literature class.

“Edmund.”

He saw me. He said the words I had him rehearse in my mind a million times so that when it really happened I would be gracious and generous. But I had heard it from and told it to so many others so many times this evening that they didn’t mean anything.
Don’t lie, Edmund
, I thought,
my lipstick is too
dark, my shoes are too high and I look like Lolita going to confirmation.
I don’t look like the real me, I have never looked like me and you
have never ever looked at me
. But instead I muttered, “You look good too.”

“Thanks.”

“Can I have a picture with you?”

“Umm, sure.”

After Nina took the photo, I ran away with my camera flailing at my side.

She caught up with me and we returned to our table, to take the
real
photographs, photographs of the people who mattered most to us – our parents and friends.

And then it was all over, and I was back home in the bathroom pulling the black bobby pins from my hair and wiping the make-up from my face with cotton balls, pulling off the white dress and getting into mismatched pyjamas, lying in bed waiting for the long sleep to come.

*

By the time my exams arrived, I was so far gone that even reading the newspaper was difficult. Suddenly, all writing confounded me. Sentences suffocated me, they seemed strung together like code. “It’s only some stupid exams,” my parents told me. “Just aim to pass. A pass is all you need.” They were not even convincing themselves. They knew that in my condition I would not be able to live a normal life, let alone sit exams.

At school I was sent to a little office I had never known existed. There Mrs Trengrove taught me how to breathe. How many other people visited this office, I wondered. How many of our smiley-faced classmates came every Wednesday, every Tuesday to learn how to breathe? “You’re not going to fail,” the counsellors all told me.

You don’t understand, I wanted to say. If I fail, I am condemned to a life sentence of dirty dishes and rubber-faced, blank-wall staring, and I will go mad. If I fail, everything my whole life was meant to lead up to will be gone. “Study hard and go to university,” my grandmother had always told me, my grandmother who now lay staring at the ceiling in a dark and musty room. “Study hard and be a scholar.” Failure was annihilation. I was never the spunky valedictorian girl declaring her smartness to the world with a defiantly upturned chin, I was the one slinking into shadows with my eyes glued to my books hoping only to fulfil the set criteria. I was a blank just like the walls with the posters removed. How easily they came off – they were only stuck on with blu-tack, like my personality.

My Auntie Ly visited Cambodia and came back with stories about our impoverished, skinny cousins – all in their late forties, all unmarried. “Please, Ly,” they begged her, “please set us up with men in Australia so we can get out.” They had waited too long to marry, they had waited for men who could take them abroad. They did not want to settle for a local, because they did not want to settle for a life in Cambodia. My auntie promised that she would do her best to help them look, but said, “I don’t know many men, the ones I know are divorced or wife-bashers.” “I don’t care, I don’t care!” the cousins insisted. They just wanted to get out.

I understood them, these poor cousins. I understood how terribly they must have ached to get out. My role now, after final exams and the end of high school, was to wait for my hair to grow and then attach my tentacles to an emotionally un-bruised boy with a doctor’s bag. It wouldn’t be too hard to do – I was in high demand with demanding mothers-in-law, and eventually one of them was bound to have a son doing medicine. Then I would be his little attachment, and I would not have to say a word. There would be a courtship by half-smiles and lowered lashes, crossed legs and charming blunders. She can cook a good bowl of rice. She is parsimonious, it is guaranteed by her mother. A lifetime warranty. At least I could marry well.

I felt great contempt for anyone who was interested in me at this time. I thought they were sick, to want something so sick. The horror of it all was that they liked me
as I was
. How could they love this
me
, sapped of all essence? They loved a shell, they were content with a shell. This was what my future held – I was a void to be filled by others.

I had done everything right, and I had turned out so wrong. I turned out empty. I turned out faulty. I felt like my grandmother, lying in bed staring up at the ceiling, waiting for it all to end, yet so afraid of the end that she always slept with a light on. “Agheare,” she cried, “take me to a place with no darkness.” Oh Grandmother, if we could both go to a place with no darkness, I would get us first-class tickets edged with gold. You can chant your Amitabhas and I’ll have red ribbons in my hair, and my little hand will fit in yours as perfectly as it did when I was small, and I will not demand that you buy me anything along the way, and you can wear your pink lipstick because you would never go out without your lipstick. Oh Grandma, wherever we go and whomever you meet along the way, you will tell them, “This is my granddaughter, she is so clever, she is so smart. She knows everything, for someone so young. Aiia, she can also make anything and do everything.”

“H
EY Alice, Granny died.” “When?” I put down my bags. It was the last thing I expected to hear from my little sister Alison.

“Last night.”

My grandmother had caught a cold, my father explained, her immune system was down. It happened in the middle of the night, he told me, it happened so quickly that by the time he drove to Aunt Que’s house my grandmother was gone. That was all my parents would tell me. They probably wanted to spare me the details. I had been away for a few days on a camp, and they could not bring themselves to break the news to me in the car driving home.

“Oh no,” was all I could say. My grandmother was not meant to die. She was meant to be with me forever. Even in her illness she was the one person who was always happy to see me, and she did not care that my store of Teochew words was diminishing. She knew we were both going the way of the ghosts, except my ghosts were white living ones and hers were unknown. “The Buddhas will protect us,” she told me, “just pray to them in times of darkness, and there will be light.”

My grandmother’s funeral lasted for three days and three evenings, with people from the Bright Moon Buddhist Association chanting prayers around the clock. Granny who used to set me on the table, was now laid out on a table herself, dressed in imperial yellow with a little yellow cap. During the last stage of her illness her white hair had started to grow back black, as if miraculously there was renewed life, as if her body were regenerating, a reincarnation without death. But now all this regrowth was covered by the cap, and when I looked at her I knew that something vital had slipped out, so all that was left was the shell of a person.

My grandmother was meant to be a part of me forever, so that I would always know that there was a life before me, and a life after me. My grandmother and her stories. What would I do without them? She asserted my existence before I knew I had one – before I was conscious I had a life beyond the present – and she told me my childhood. “Agheare, when you were small you could recite long Teochew songs and poems.” “Agheare, when you were small you could speak in Cantonese.” It seemed as if I could do anything when I was small. We slept in the same bed, and it was always warm. Now there would be no one left to remind me of my roots, no one to tell me to be proud to be part of a thousand-year-old culture, no one to tell me that I was gold not yellow.

During a break in the ceremony and chanting, I looked over at my mother and noticed that one of her arms was heavily bandaged. “What happened to your arm, Ma?”

“When you were at camp, the soldering torch I was using slipped,” she explained. The instrument she was using for her jewellery work was so old that it had burst into flames and given her third-degree burns.

“The job is dangerous,” my father told me, “so your mum is not going to be doing it anymore.” She was going to sell all her machines and take her framed
Registration of Business
down from the wall of our house.

So the day my grandmother died was also the day my mother finally decided to end her outworking career. It was a decision resulting from an accident – but the decision itself was no accident, it was one we had seen coming for a long time. I didn’t suppose my mother knew what she was going to do with her time now, but she had made the decision at last and I figured she would find something. After all, time was so finite, it was the only thing you couldn’t buy. “You can’t buy old people,” my grandmother had told me the last time I visited her, “you can hand over some money and buy a little child, but you can’t buy old people. So remember, Agheare, to spend your time well with your parents.” Then I remembered another thing she said to me, punctuated with the deepest saddest sigh her old lungs could exhale: “But who would want to buy a useless old person like me anyway?”

E
VERY
year for the past five years I had made a list of “fifty things to do before I die”. I now needed a new list every day, a list I would lose and forget, a list that told me to wake up and get out of bed and eat and walk and move and smile and bathe. This was my list.

Yet the exams came and went, and I sat them.

“Now your exams are over, you can go out and play,” my mother told me. “Go on, go and have fun while you’re young. Go out with boyfriends.” If I was in a normal state of mind, I would have keeled over and died of shock.

“Brush your hair in the mornings,” my father urged. “Make yourself look pretty.”

“Do some housework, that will keep your mind off things,” my mother advised me. “This is all your fault,” she would rail at my father. “See, you have spoilt her. Now she can’t even do housework, doesn’t even want to crawl out of bed in the morning.”

I could not muster the energy to see friends or to look presentable. When friends asked me out after final exams, I would tell them yes, yes over the phone. But immediately after hanging up, the anxieties would start to kick in. Oh no, I could not do it. I could not appear in public. They would be able to see through this rubber mask. They would know how unwell I was, and they would never see me in the same way again.

After much coaxing from my parents, and after I had taken on a deathly pallor, I agreed one day to go bowling for a distant friend’s birthday. My parents were so glad that my mother even drove me to Highpoint shopping complex and gave me forty dollars.

When I arrived, there were so many people. So many people in the mall, all scurrying to buy things or try things or keep their eye on things, and I wondered, was that all there was to life? During the whole ordeal, all I could do was smile. I smiled the way a skull smiles, all teeth and no flesh. It was eerie to my friends, this rictus of someone who was feigning that they were still alive when in actuality the shell had been cracked and the person inside had escaped.

I rolled one weak ball after the other down the alley. I used the lightest balls, but they felt as if they were ripping my arm off. So much energy to lift them and then drop them, and what was the point of all this?

Everyone pretended that there was nothing wrong with me, all playing along with my deceit. They didn’t know what else they could do, with a friend who had helped them with their assignments and edited their English pieces, who had counselled them through boyfriends and been the excuse for them to see their lovers.

I rarely went out after that. To friends who didn’t know about my condition, I wrote letters, each convivial sentence forced out like a self-inflicted punishment. There was only one friend, Kathryn, who could actually stand my company. Once she gave me a yellow gerbera and spent a day trying to cheer me up. She took me out to lunch and we went to the beach. I couldn’t believe that she could tolerate my presence, this big gaping hole beside her. She stayed on the phone with me despite the silences on my side because I had no more words to give. She talked to me as she was taking her dog for a walk, and invited me to her house where she played the violin for me. She was Goodness Incarnate, but I still felt the summer stretch ahead like a rope, a rope for a head that was now defunct.