Leo works as an engineer but dreams of being a painter—though he never says he dreams, simply that he is: “I’m a painter.” Both his mathematical mind and creative soul materialise in his apartment. Oil portraits hang on the walls, science-fiction titles line his shelves. He paints Nikola Tesla on a clock. His objects have objects: racks, frames, a beaker holding chopsticks in the kitchen. In the corner of his paintings, a neat signature: L. Wang.
There are no signs in my apartment that I dream of being a writer. When you are poor, what you own mostly says you are poor. Though my prospects are now bright as a junior data analyst, I’ve never bought a book. Almost everything I own is either a bed, for eating or soap. Stories are an extravagance I still can’t afford.
When you are poor, what you own mostly says you are poor.
After years of shabbiness undecorated (once I live in an apartment with the shower in the kitchen) I am mostly desensitised to my surroundings. When I move into my current share-house, I don’t notice the black mildew covering the bathroom walls. It doesn’t occur to me that the soot staining the old beige carpet won’t budge when several months later I scrub, anxious over the prospect of a date staying the night.
Leo visits my side of town just once. The area is rapidly gentrifying, allowing us to buy takeaway cocktails from a truck. I accidentally think aloud, “It's funny, walking around with alcohol.” My hand grips the $18 pink passionfruit paloma and its rainbow striped curly straw like a prop. We reach the brutalist flats standing across from my apartment, the closest Leo ever gets to coming inside.
“We’re outside public housing,” he says. “I'm sure they’re all used to it.”
My mum lived in public housing when she first came to Australia. Dad did begin drinking in the decades since. But whenever I feel alone, I look out my bedroom window and watch lights in the flats blink on and off, imagining the families inside. Everyone I picture is fully formed, with hopes and fears and dreams. If anyone is drinking, it seems to me a minor detail. I don’t invite Leo home. What if he doesn’t see the mildew and the stains as minor details either?
…
My parents’ love story is mum felt so alone in Australia she married the first Chinese man she met. Her dialect is Cantonese, his is Shanghainese. Together they try to run a Chinese restaurant three times, closing down within a few years each attempt. After some stints as a forklift operator, he stops looking for work.
When I am at my most empathetic, I believe it’s shame at not having made something of himself that makes dad so hopeless. One of my earliest memories is watching one of those reality shows where a white family is surprised with a home renovation. He turns and looks me in the eye, voice certain: “That will never happen to you.”
Dad pours any remaining optimism into the bright lights of pokie machines. He drowns his regrets in waves of liquor. When mum won’t give him money, he is violent—no metaphor suits. A patch of paint in my childhood bedroom, where he once punched a hole, is a little lighter than the rest of the wall.
Fed up with poorness, my parents never support my writing. One drunken evening though, dad demands I transcribe a book about his life. He grips my arm, restless, tremoring with some insatiable need. The $15-for-four-litres De Bortoli Premium beside him is only half-empty.
Still in high school, I’ve moved on from the teenage fiction shelves at the library and can tell him that migrant stories end in success. A nut stand blooms into a booming franchise. A brown man works two jobs while at medical school and becomes a surgeon. Sacrifice isn’t meant to end in regret.
I’ve moved on from the teenage fiction shelves at the library and can tell him that migrant stories end in success.
But my parents would almost certainly be better off never having come to Australia. Back in China, mum’s brothers are rising the ranks as local government officials. When visiting, dad’s sister gives me a $440 pen from Tiffany and Co.
Tears pool at the rims of his eyes, spilling down into his glass of goon. The saddest part is it’s not tragic enough to write down either. Never having read an English book, dad doesn’t know that Asian pathos is only ever given value by devastating historical magnitude: dictatorship, civil war, famine. He should have stayed in post-Cultural Revolution China. Here he is in Australia drinking boxed wine and badgering me for petty cash.
…
A glass of water gives me hope that Leo and I aren’t so different. He asks, do I want it hot or cold? Anything is fine. He nods to himself, “Hot.” The temperature of a glass of water is a minor detail. But it is an incredibly Chinese way to show care. When I was a child, mum always insisted I drink boiled water. Ice was a cardinal sin. No other man has ever asked if I’d like my water hot or cold.
The men I date are mostly kind, but white. There is always something to explain. “I get you’re vegan, but mum steams a ginger and soy-sauce fish for guests.” “Mum cooks dinner in the shed because she doesn’t want to mess up the kitchen.” “The first question mum will ask is how much you earn.” Other men are less kind, but still white. They clutch my body hungrily and moan in my ear: “I’ve always wanted to pound a tight Asian pussy.”
When Leo folds his fingers softly into mine or caresses my face, the touch is brief before he pulls away. His kisses graze my mouth, respectful, almost apologetic. His gentleness makes me feel delicate, like something precious. But the discretion of this affection also makes me desperate for something explicit—a bold, undignified confirmation, affirmation so candid it must be true. In short, I want him to pound my tight Asian pussy.
But the discretion of this affection also makes me desperate for something explicit—a bold, undignified confirmation, affirmation so candid it must be true.
“Leo?”
We are drifting asleep, on our sides, noses separated by an inch.
“Yes?”
“I like you.”
“I like you too.”
Like all the other men, Leo asks so many questions. This time, the answers are scrunched-up paper in my throat.
“Why aren’t you a journalist anymore?”
Two years ago, I traded writing stories for code. The truth is as poetic as programming syntax: higher pay and a paranoid habit of stock-piling funds in case dad does something ludicrous.
“What is it you really want from life?”
He wants to talk about hopes and fears and dreams. I tug his hands to my breasts, reach between his thighs.
It’s hard to believe a guy whose life is so together might want a girl with such a cluttered heart. Leo doesn’t just own many objects, but the entire apartment housing them. Mum would be so happy if I brought home a nice Chinese boy showing no signs of sinking into alcoholism. I’m fantasizing. An ocean still separates migrants whose rags have become riches, and migrants whose rags stay wiping tables at an unprofitable Chinese restaurant.
…
Mum’s first job, before she can speak a word of English, is at a biscuit factory. Now she stacks shelves at a dollar store, gently calling customers “darling” and “honey” when they ask prices of Christmas decorations, water pistols, confetti. No-one would imagine this timid woman once defied China’s hukou system, which confined her prospects for schooling and work to the then-impoverished countryside, by boarding a plane halfway across the world.
Mum’s journey is the stuff of fiction, were it not for the ending. A friend of her great grandfather, who migrated to Australia by boat three generations earlier, gifts the plane ticket out of nostalgia. She arrives on a tourist visa. The Tiananmen Square massacre, bloody, unspeakable, is her saving grace. Bob Hawke grants permanent residency. Her dream is to attend university and she plans to work until she can afford it.
What I want most is for someone to see my mildew as beautiful.
Thirty years later, she has $1,000 in her bank account. She keeps bills in a cardboard box marked “CHOC CHIP COOKIES.”
Dad is always yelling, always yelling, leaving me to imagine mum’s interior world. I can’t remember if I’ve seen her cry. Perhaps when I was very young—frantic rifling sounds, a glimpse behind a door of blue, veined bruises—but I’m not sure. How could I have pieced together at eight or nine that she hid savings in a wardrobe, but not well enough? I’m an adult now and still wonder about her. There are so few photos from her past, no mementos.
Growing up with little, I believed we would have more if mum simply left dad. It never occurred to me she already tried once to build a life anew and might no longer be willing to return to the loneliness of that plane. In boarding it, she too once wanted so much more for her life than what she had. She must have wanted in that moment so much more than what she has now.
In my anger, I saw her as a simple and stupid woman. “I wish you’d never had me,” I told her the day dad punched a hole in the wall. They are the worst words I have ever uttered. But mum took them as she had everything else that life gave her, quietly. “If you are feeling angry, then you can hit me. Then the anger will go away,” holding her palm out towards me.
“I wish you’d never had me,” I told her the day dad punched a hole in the wall. They are the worst words I have ever uttered.
My Cantonese is poor, but I could not ask the questions I would like even if I had the words. It’s un-Chinese to be direct about suffering. Talking about the ways dad has constrained her life, how she feels about it all, would make mum uncomfortable. I can’t tell her how brave I think she is, how strong. That I’m so sorry for not having seen her as a hoping, dreaming woman.
…
Leo never explicitly mentions a middle-class upbringing, but he says he’ll achieve his ambitions if he works hard. His dream is to have his paintings shown in a gallery. I have worked hard: two part-time jobs on top of university, where I still managed to graduate top of my class. I will eventually take for myself, and mum, every material thing we have hoped for. Even so, I’m not sure my dream will ever come true.
What I want most is for someone to see my mildew as beautiful. Without the context of what they were born into, and what they went through, a poor person’s life easily looks ugly, failed, worthless. I’d like somebody to enter my empty apartment and understand, without me having to put it in words, that I have a rich inner world. Never owning much to look at has made me sensitive to minds and hearts, and this is how I have best made something of myself, something out of nothing.
I tell Leo that I’d like to write about people who are born with not a lot but face difficult circumstances—without pity, without drama, just with enough detail that a reader might begin to see someone like mum as a complex whole. He doesn’t understand why I don’t just do it. “Why don’t you chase your dream?” I don’t know how to explain to him that when I write, I never feel in pursuit of anything so much as running from a churning, spiralling undertow that will disappear me unless I record something of myself just so: in prose so perfect, so plain it can’t be misunderstood.
“Why don’t you chase your dream?” I don’t know how to explain to him that when I write, I never feel in pursuit of anything so much as running from a churning, spiralling undertow that will disappear me
“We’re just too different,” Leo says. Migrant stories must end in either heartbreak or success. He messes ours up by adding, “at the moment.” It’s overly open-ended, in-between. Painful yet hoping. It's what happened. Lying close to a nice Chinese boy can be grasping for the right words and shared secrets kept unsaid, all at once. I never mention the glass of hot water. But I write down these minor details, the mildew and the stains, exactly as they are.
This story is the winning entry of the 2021 SBS Emerging Writers' Competition.
