Two dollars. What can I get for two bucks? A single disposable face mask, when the receptionist at Haymarket Medical Centre furrows her brow at me and points down at the poster taped to the front desk: MASKS NOW MANDATORY DURING APPOINTMENTS $2 EA @ RECEPTION. Small fries at a Maccas drive-thru. Or a fridge magnet. For my dad in the year 1997, two dollars was the fee charged for every minute he was late to pick me up from childcare in Melbourne. Melbourne was the city he migrated to from China and the city where I was born. For me in 2021, standing in the light-filled kitchen of my parents’ Sydney home, two dollars is the reason I have to endure my dad’s annual sermon about the time he paralysed his pinky finger.
It’s that time of the year again. My protests of "Yeah, I remember," and "Dad, it’s almost peak hour!" prove to be as impactful as the tree that falls alone in the forest, so I sigh and drop my keys back onto the kitchen benchtop. I tap my foot as my dad slowly stirs the clay pot on the stove. The smell of red-braised pork belly makes me regret not staying for dinner. All the pig fat in hong shao rou is meant to be good for your brain, which is why it was a favourite among Chinese revolutionaries back in the day – or so Dad says. I just care that it’s delicious. I check my phone impatiently. Maybe I’ll detour to Oporto’s on the way home. My dad uses a knife to scrape slices of ginger off a wooden chopping board and into the pot. I look up at the clatter of the lid he puts on to let the pork simmer. My dad turns around to begin his story, the way he always begins it, by holding his hands out in front of him.
“See? Tai haa. Look at my finger,” he demands in Cantonese. His palms are faced downward, veins bulging out from his sandpaper-skin in teal knots. They are weathered – what my mum used to call ‘farmer’s hands’. The smallest finger on his right hand is lifted and quivering. Like a flimsy little branch waving in the wind.
I know what happened like I know the back of my own hand. In 1997, back when we still lived in Melbourne, my dad worked as a machine operator at a cable company. He never fails to mention that he was also studying an IT degree at Monash University at the time, which is what’s really important, since I mustn’t forget that this is as much a life lesson as it is an anecdotal story. The cable company let him out late on a night I needed to be picked up from childcare and by the time he ran up to the side of Caulfield station his train was already peeling onto the platform.
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Missing the train meant 10 minutes and $20 he couldn’t afford. So, he did what any time-poor ethnic would do and leapt onto the chain-link fence separating him from the station platform. The train doors opened. He climbed to the top like Asian Tarzan in a metal jungle and hoisted himself over. Commuters shuffled around on the platform. My dad digresses at this point to emphasise how hard it was to scale a fence wearing steel cap boots and how even today as a lou jan gaa he is more athletic than I am. I notice my legs ache from standing. I lean resentfully against the benchtop ledge and the quartz is cool against my hipbone.
My dad digresses at this point to emphasise how hard it was to scale a fence wearing steel cap boots and how even today as a lou jan gaa he is more athletic than I am.
When my dad heard the intermittent beep beep signalling the train’s imminent departure, he knew there was no time to descend. He had to jump. As he pushed off from the top of the fence his right hand caught, fingers writhing, in the metal. He yanked them free and fell to the ground, crushing his elbow under the side of his body. I imagine the familiar disembodied robot voice ringing out: ‘Stand back, doors closing.’ My dad scrambled to his feet and heaved himself in through the shrinking slit between the train doors. He emerged on the other side, cradling his mangled hand – a victor.
“And my whole arm turned swollen and purple. Like an eggplant!” Dad makes a shape in the air with his hands as though holding an imaginary bulbous vegetable, in case I’d forgotten what an eggplant looks like. He seems distracted by his own gesturing and looks down at his finger. “I didn’t know what to do,” he says absentmindedly. My dad traces the knuckles of his pinky gingerly with the tips of his left-hand fingers. He speaks to it like he is seeing it for the first time. “I had to cover it at my job. I hid it every day.” Aside from the paralysis, his pinky finger looks aesthetically the same as the rest. Knobbly and worn. I get the sudden urge to hold it myself. I’m not sure I ever have. If I squeeze, will it splinter into a billion pieces? “It’s been many years now and… my hand is healed. But I still can’t type very well.”
“I didn’t know what to do,” he says absentmindedly. My dad traces the knuckles of his pinky gingerly with the tips of his left-hand fingers. He speaks to it like he is seeing it for the first time.
I am quiet. Every other time he’s told this story it’s ended with the glorious final scene of him riding the train like a Spartan warrior on his chariot. It was an old migrants’ tale, the kind most second-generation kids are raised on, where if you work hard enough it will all be worth it in the end. I wish he’d stuck to that story. I don’t want to hear about the typos he makes with his maimed pinky just because he needed those $20, 20 years ago. I glare at my dad but he has already moved on, satisfied with his spiel, back to the bubbling pork belly. I hate seeing him for what he really was – just a tired father trying to survive. If I look around, I see a million other tired migrant parents – studying and working and scaling fences – just like mine. My phone buzzes with a new notification, something about COVID-19. I think about the in the pandemic fall-out.
My gut twists with anxiety or maybe hunger. I sigh as I hear the stove turn off. I want to be at home, devouring a triple-filet Bondi burger, away from my dad and his stories. He turns around to face me, holding the clay pot out by its handles with a tea towel. The pork belly is gelatinous and a perfect shade of reddish-brown from simmering all afternoon in soy and star anise and spices. My dad’s pinky finger juts out from the tea towel. “It’s late now. Will you stay for dinner?”
This article has been published in partnership with Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement.
