Funny ethnics, p.5
Funny Ethnics, page 5
One apple pie the size of Dad’s Sony Ericcson P900
On a fresh piece of A4 paper nicked from the school library’s printer, I wrote down the most decadent menu of my wildest dreams in my best handwriting and using my best pen, the one with metallic lilac ink from Morning Glory, a store in Bankstown Square that sold cute stationery imported from Korea. It was the era of blonde Disney pop star Hilary Duff, who sang ‘What Dreams Are Made Of’ while wearing silver flares embellished with rhinestones. What were my dreams made of? Melted cheese on a soft beef patty, smooth white ice cream like a cloud on my tongue, and slim fries with crispy pointed ends that I could stick in each side of my mouth.
Yagoona had looked technicolour when a letter of offer from Sydney Ladies College arrived in our mailbox. Mẹ was the one who opened it. She hugged me when I got home from school. I rubbed my cheek on her fleece zip-up and breathed in Dove soap and sesame oil. When Ba hugged me, I breathed through my mouth because Hugo Boss Infinite was infinitely overpowering.
That weekend, I was treated to a feast from the Bass Hill McDonald’s to celebrate doing better than expected in the selective school test, getting into Sydney (Freaking!) Ladies and graduating Dux of Yagoona Public School. Memorising the Macquarie Dictionary, going to all the tutoring centres Western Sydney had to offer, having a breakdown every time I was ‘below average’ on a selective school trial test, praying to Buddha every night before bed – it was all worth it, just for a bit of fleece, Dove and sesame.
~
(White + linen) × your whole outfit = effortless elegance. That’s what I learned from an issue of Vogue that sat curling at the edges next to a wooden abacus in the waiting room of Dentist Vu’s clinic, which was a renovated brick house in Bankstown. Was the abacus for men and the magazine for women? My parents were buying groceries at Saigon Place nearby and had left me in Dentist Vu’s office for the first phase of my braces fitting. They rarely left me alone anywhere but they trusted Dentist Vu – he was revered as a community leader and President of the Bankstown Vietnamese Community Association.
I hid behind the pages of Vogue, avoiding Dentist Vu’s wife’s gaze. I wasn’t fooled by her pastel blazers and frilly blouses from Portmans. I knew she was a tough lady. It was common for aunties in The Area to tattoo their eyebrows but not many of them had the nerve to also tattoo their waterline – the millimetre-wide strip of flesh that the eyelashes grew from. I shuddered, imagining a whizzing needle so close to my eyeball.
I watched her, peering over the Vogue in my hands. ‘Huh-huhhhhhh’, she purred. Our eyes met. My hands went cold. I couldn’t handle the intensity of her owlish glare so I focused on her hair, which was parted in the middle and sprayed with so much Elnett that the bits near her widow’s peak puffed up with gravity-defying volume.
‘Sylvia, darling, did you hear the butcher’s boy is going to James Ruse? Did your parents put James Ruse on the list or was Sydney Ladies College the top choice? Was it because your maths wasn’t good enough? Are you aiming for medicine?’ Her eyebrows rose high up her forehead, just like the ones on the snarling dragons at the gates of the temple out in Wetherill Park. I could barely plan what I was going to wear to the Orientation Night at Sydney Ladies College let alone the next two decades of my existence in the waiting area of her husband’s clinic. I scanned the Vogue article just in case there was advice on how to deflect the local dentist’s wife’s invasive line of questioning. If I stayed silent for too long she’d think I was being rude and she had the power to broadcast her thoughts to the rest of Bankstown. ‘Yes, Cô … Khuhuhawhaw-heeer-hurr’ – I fumbled for a name and pretended to cough one out – ‘my Maths and GA scores weren’t the best but my marks in the creative wri—’
‘Tuh-huh! An Asian bad at maths?’ Dentist Vu’s wife laughed and threw her head back. Her widow’s peak fringe remained a steady solid unit. She dismissed me from the conversation by glancing at the rose gold watch on her wrist. I felt the heat return to my hands. My jaw clenched as I fantasised about striding up to her desk and asking, ‘How does it feel to be the wife and not the dentist? Why are you growing a Macca’s drive-through on your head?’
I came home with numb gums and thin lines of steel running over both rows of teeth, and pulled out all of the white clothes I had. Cargo pants from Just Jeans and a Fiorucci T-shirt with Renaissance cherubs from DFO. I was convinced this was the ‘effortlessly elegant’ look that would make the best impression on Orientation Night at one of the top schools in the city. No one would ever know I was from Yagoona, that I was still working on enunciating my ‘th’s’ like Juanita Phillips – think not fink, three not free – that I lip-synced to ‘What Dreams Are Made Of’ in the mirror. Instead, they would know that I, Sylvia Nguyen, was destined to have a Hilary Duff smile and was on my way to be The Dentist. Not The Wife.
~
On Anzac Parade, a golden balloon wobbled in the wind. It was tied to the main gate leading into the grounds of SLC. The sky was darkening as the sun set and my white cargo pants took on an ultraviolet tinge, making me doubt whether I still looked as ‘effortlessly elegant’ as I had planned when I left Yagoona. Mum, Dad and I had caught the train to Central and then a bus to the school to attend the Orientation Night. It was the commute I’d take once high school started. As we walked closer to the looming brown buildings, I saw other girls entering the school gates with their parents. Most of them were East Asian, with a couple of South Asian kids here and there. My mind replayed the whiny voice of a woman who had called in to ABC Radio the other day. I drive past a selective school every morning and there are so many Asian students. How do we fix that?
I turned and watched the traffic backed up on Cleveland Street. Were any of the drivers watching this spectacle: a prestigious selective school being swamped by Asian teenagers? My stomach grumbled and contorted itself into a fist. A sharp ache festered in my abdomen, making me hunch over as I walked through the gates of Sydney Ladies College.
Behind the gate was a garden that looked like something out of an Enid Blyton book. Fat pink roses, a turret-shaped gazebo, an archway adorned with green leaves leading to the main door. There were rows of plants, each exploding with purple flowers that grew in spherical clumps like a mini galaxy. My head swirled, taking it all in. I was sure I was experiencing ‘cosmic vertigo’, a phrase I had learned from Radio National, which was meant to describe the feeling of being overwhelmed by the sheer size of space. Except this wasn’t a vast expanse of sky speckled with glowing pinpricks of light. I was only an hour out of Yagoona.
‘Ê! Ê! Ê! Có chổ parking nè Mẹ!’ a voice rang out from the side of the building.
I swivelled my head towards the familiar torrent of words. My stomach unclenched itself. The voice had a low raspy tinge like the person had just finished coughing out crispy shards of bánh mì that had been lodged in their throat. I walked towards it, passing the Alice in Wonderland garden. A Vietnamese girl was doing star jumps in one of the empty parking spots. Her mum, driving a faded blue Toyota, was slowly reversing into the spot. She stuck her head out the driver’s window and called to her daughter, ‘Ê Tâm, mầy nhắm chổ dùm tao nha.’
Tâm sprinted backwards until she was at the rear yellow demarcation line. She screamed, ‘Okay, tới nửa, tới nửa!’ and waved a hand half-hidden in the sleeve of a green school uniform.
I recognised the golden lines stitched on the collar of Tâm’s green sweater. Georges Hall Primary. Their debating team, full of Opportunity Class kids, always came out on top in the South Western Sydney Primary Schools Championships, but I hadn’t seen Tâm on the debating circuit. Her sweater was frayed at the sleeves, her black shoes were scuffed and two strands of brassy hair framed her face while the rest was tucked behind tanned elfin ears. She was more AZN Pride than Asian Nerd.
‘Trời đất ơi, we Vietnamese can be so uncouth,’ Dad muttered, testing out a new word he’d picked up from last week’s ‘Column 8’, where some guy in Drummoyne wrote in complaining about rap music. ‘This isn’t the bloody fish market down in Bankstown.’ Dad placed a heavy hand on my shoulder and steered me forward.
‘Why allow girl have gangster hair?’ Mum sniffed, adjusting her handbag higher on her shoulder.
My insides seized into a knot again. I imagined my large intestine wrapping itself around my stomach like a python. A spasm of pain coursed towards my pelvis and shocked me into scurrying ahead.
Rows of seats were arranged on a gleaming wooden floor. Deep khaki silk scrolls bearing the school’s emblem hung on either side of the stage. This hall was at least five times bigger than the ‘hall’ Yagoona Public School held its assemblies in – an iron shed. Dad chose seats in the third row and we found a program on each chair that listed the evening’s schedule. At the back was a list of names of the Class of ’04.
‘Look at all these Kim, Lee and Li!’ Dad pointed. ‘Must be Korean and Chinese.’
‘Those Koreans make good phim tập these days,’ Mum whispered.
Dad grunted. All the Viet oldies at the Post were obsessed with Dae Jang Geum, a South Korean soap series about the first female physician in the Joseon dynasty. Now that Dad and Mum didn’t have to monitor my studying for the selective school test in the evenings, they spent their weeknights watching Dae Jang Geum while I was free to read Harry Potter without having to stuff the books under my sweater and hide in the toilet.
‘These days Koreans make cars, films, mobile phones. China might get a man on the moon soon. Vietnam makes mail-order brides for the ugly bastards in those countries,’ Dad said. ‘Sylvia, that’s why you have to study even harder than before.’
I wanted to shake my parents and tell them they were missing the point. Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese – what did it matter? SLC had a Hogwarts vibe but it was full of Cho Changs, Claudia Kishis, Trang Paks and Miss Saigons. A school with so many Asians just confirmed that Asians form ghettos and do not assimilate. My abdomen yowled. My intestine-turned-python was not satisfied with constricting my stomach. It crept upwards and squeezed my oesophagus. I sneezed. Pain rattled through my rib cage.
‘Ha, bless ya, ’ey. Anyways can me and my mum sit ’ere?’ I looked up and saw Tâm standing on my left-hand side. Her hair strands fell over the apple cheeks of her diamond-shaped face. She tucked the strands behind her otherworldly ears which up close, I discovered, were studded with multiple steel dots. Dad said I wasn’t allowed to get my ears pierced until I turned sixteen. I felt Mum shift her handbag closer to her body.
‘Sure, knock yerself out,’ I told Tâm, trying to sound as nonchalant as she did.
‘’Kay.’ Her bony butt hit the seat beside me at the same time as she smacked a wad of Wrigley’s peach between her teeth.
‘’S’ah fucken Asian supremacy up in ’ere, ’ey,’ she said between squelches of wet chewing. I turned to face her, eyes bulging. How could someone be so vulgar but so right at the same time? She winked at me.
‘Fuhgot to intro myself, ’ey – Tammy. Tammy Tran.’ She extended a hand with nails coated in chipped black polish.
‘Sylvia Ng—ow!’ I felt a sharp elbow poking my ribs. I turned to Mum, who was tilting her head at the stage at the front of the hall. The principal, Ms Snowflake, a thin blonde woman who I recognised from photos on the school website, had marched to the lectern in sturdy black heels and a sleeveless black jumpsuit. She ahemmed into the microphone. The hall fell silent.
‘Anyways. Gud ta meet ya, Sylvia Ngow,’ Tammy whispered. She cracked her peach whip and turned to the stage.
I didn’t listen to anything Snowflake was saying. Her newsreader voice fell away into the background like the TV at dinnertime. I was distracted by the way Tammy’s fingers kept looping around the bits of hair that framed her face. She couldn’t decide whether she wanted the strands resting on her cheeks or behind her ears. Mum’s elbow tapped my ribs again. I faced the front and looked up to the stage.
‘I see one hundred and fifty future leaders before me,’ Ms Snowflake said, pearl necklace shimmering. ‘This is one of the best schools in New South Wales, if not the country. We encourage our girls to be well rounded. That means being great at everything.’
My intestine python writhed and squeezed my stomach. A lightning rod of pain charged straight into my lower abdomen. I doubled over. My brain was boiling and sweat seeped through the cotton of my white Fiorucci shirt.
‘Y’alright?’ Tammy asked. She shoved her hand up the sleeve of her Georges Hall jumper, pulled out a stick of Wrigley’s peach gum and offered it to me.
‘Thhhhhanks,’ I wheezed, taking the gum. I unsheathed it from the thin paper wrapper and popped it in my mouth. Sweet peach nectar surged over my tastebuds. I straightened myself back up. The pain faded into a needling ache. I tucked one ankle behind the other and rested my trembling hands in my lap the way Anne Hathaway was taught to do in The Princess Diaries. The rough fabric of my cargo pants rubbed against my knuckles. Effortlessly elegant. My ass.
~
After the principal’s speech we were led on a tour around the school in groups of ten by prefects who wore the senior girls’ uniform – brown blazer, white blouse and brown knee-length skirt. I trailed behind my parents through corridors lined with classrooms four times larger than the ones back in Yagoona. There were at least three computer rooms, but what intimidated me the most were the stairs. Just the mere presence of them. Snaking up and down all of the buildings. At Yagoona Public, everything was flat – we walked from one demountable building to another.
The school even had a bear pit – a giant concrete cylinder rising out of the grass with an arched steel gate. ‘A zoo occupied the grounds in the late 19th century before the school moved to the location in 1921,’ our guide, a chirpy Year 10 East Asian girl named Camellia, explained. Our group walked up the double staircase that curved along the sides of the cylinder pit. At the top of the stairs, I realised we could stare straight into the bear pit as there was no roof. I thought about what it would have been like for the 19th-century bears – no shelter from the rain or harsh sun, existing to entertain and intrigue the masses.
‘Oi, this could be a sick smoking spot, ’ey.’ Tammy jostled her way through the tour group and stood beside me, punctuating her remark with a clack of gum.
Why was she following me around? Did she think I was just another Viet from out west who could relate to her ganga ways? Could she tell I was uncomfortable yet fascinated with her at the same time? Either thought was too terrifying to digest. My stomach thrashed like it was caught in the jaws of a bear trap. The piece of Wrigley’s she had given me earlier was now a soggy bland mess that I was dying to spit out.
Back at home, in the toilet where I had once hidden to read Harry Potter, I unzipped my white cargo pants. The waistband eased away from my skin, leaving pink vertical indents in my wheatish skin. Relief. For two-point-five seconds before the ache in my abdomen flared and the pain shot all the way up to my eyeballs. All I saw imprinted on the back of my eyelids was the yellow light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Tiny swinging moons with Tammy’s smartass face on them. I sat down on the toilet seat without taking my undies off, pants around my ankles. My throbbing head was about to hit my hands when I caught sight of the inside crotch of my pants. A brown and red butterfly dragging its wings through pure white linen.
~
First period. Maths. Parallel lines. Heather Jeong, the girl sitting next to me with cheeks pushed up against her glasses, opened her bright red Hello Kitty pencil case and pulled out a fluoro green protractor. When her pudgy hand moved back to her notebook, I saw ‘100’ written on Hello Kitty’s forehead in thick black Sharpie.
‘Why is there 100 on your pencil case?’ I asked.
‘I want 100 on all my exams,’ she replied.
I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Six weeks into Year 7, I was still getting used to all the stairs, the automatic silence that settled in the classroom when a teacher spoke and the hour-long commute from Yagoona to the city. Heather hunched over her textbook and expertly twisted her protractor this way and that. Mr Bagnado, who I called Avocado in my head because he was shaped like one, only had to explain it once – something ‘alternate angles’, something ‘transversals’ something – and Heather got it, while I was stuck staring at the way the Sharpie ink on her pencil case had revealed thousands of tiny crevices on Hello Kitty’s head.
Second period. Visual Arts. Already known as the ‘Bludge Period’. The teacher, Miss Navin, had hair as red as Ronald McDonald’s and she wore loose linen jumpsuits that were as tawny as Macca’s Sweet ’n’ Sour sauce. My favourite things about her were her cigarette-stained voice and casual use of the word ‘shit’. Our project for the term was to create a sculpture out of florist and chicken wire, bits of colourful tissue paper and glue. The boring bit was to write an essay about our creation.
‘Ladies, don’t just put shit out into the world. Make it mean something,’ Miss Navin croaked, waving her thin freckled arms.
Tammy bent her wire into the Playboy bunny logo and covered it in light pink paper and glitter. Miss Navin asked if she was ‘intending to be subversive’ and Tammy said, ‘Nah Miss, if I don’t get into uni I’m gonna get a boob job and be in Playboy.’ Miss Navin laughed but made Tammy start again.
The chicken wire assignment was harder than I thought. At least with creative writing I could bullshit and pretend to be a variety of characters – brunette surfer chick, honey-blonde horse girl, Lindsay Lohan even. Nobody asked me to rationalise those choices. I wiggled my fingers through the hexagonal holes in the metre-long sheet of silver wire on my desk. Who wanted to see a sculpture made by some Asian nerd who had no life outside of studying and tutoring?
Miss Navin appeared beside me, smelling like lavender stuck in an ashtray, and leaned onto the edge of the desk with an arm full of thick silver bangles. ‘Pick something that makes you curious. Anything,’ she said, patting me on the shoulder. Then she moved to the next table where Heather Jeong was making a stethoscope. When the bell sounded for recess, I went into the computer hub next to the art classrooms and googled ‘Navin art teacher’. The first result was a link to a PDF of an ‘Aussie Teachers 4 Refugee Rights’ petition. Underneath it read: ‘Australia is the only country that has mandated the detention of all unauthorised arrivals throughout the refugee determination process. End this cruel policy now.’ The rest of the document was a spreadsheet of names and Miss Navin’s appeared in one of the boxes. I knew my parents were classified as ‘refugees’ because they had come to Australia by boat, but I knew very little about that journey. Something about dressing up as happy wedding guests to evade the công an at the ports. Something about my grandparents sobbing their eyes out on the eve of Tết. Something about running out of fuel halfway. Dad always got so pass-agg when Mum talked about the somethings. ‘I don’t need sym-pat-ee from air-nee-body,’ he said, jaws clenched and lips flushed a reddish-purple.
