Her Father's Daughter (20 page)

FATHER—

He and Kien had bought the enormous black table a decade ago, at a warehouse sale. ‘Granite is harder than marble,’ he told the kids. Before then they had not known that granite was a slice of rock, cut off and polished. He wondered how these kids could not know that. At the warehouse, Kien had tapped the table with her knuckles. He saw that she still had black dust around her nails. When she first started working, she would get terrible injuries – scalpels slipping and embedding in her palm, cuts to her fingers, burns on her arms. But now the skin on her hands was as tough as that of the peasants who had lined up to receive acupuncture from him all those decades ago.

His wife’s hard hand, tapping on one of the hardest rocks of all: at the sight of this, he decided on the table. ‘Let’s take it.’

When they eventually moved into their new house, the family sat around the table for at least half an hour each day and ate together. They had built an open-plan kitchen, which meant that the cooking was shared – with his wife as task-master, and he and one or two of the children as sous-chefs. His kids would always complain that he washed the vegetables too slowly.

‘Don’t waste water, Dad,’ Alina would say.

‘You’re washing all the vitamins out of the lettuce,’ Alison would remind him, but they had got used to his careful ways, and they were affectionate.

‘A little bit of dirt in the food helps build up the immune system,’ said his eldest daughter.

As usual, his son did not say much, but he knew the boy had inherited his habit of cleanliness.

After dinner, they would all go upstairs. He and his wife would go to their bedroom, the kids to their separate rooms. It was different, this sharing a room with his wife and having no kids present. Kien would go to sleep at least three hours before he did, because she woke up at six in the morning to work. It had been her habit since she was thirteen. She would sprawl stomach-down on the bed, head facing the television, with it switched on to some DVD drama or late-night movie, until she fell asleep.

He would read newspapers, sometimes cutting out a clipping of his oldest daughter to put into a big black folder of all the articles he was collecting about her. The daughter who had moved out of home and somehow found her way into the world. Sometimes he would look at the picture of her that they had on their dresser, her hair still tied with two ribbons that her grandmother had put in, on her kindergarten photo day. In that photo, she was cutting something out with a pair of yellow scissors.

She had brought back a Chinese edition of Barack Obama’s autobiography for him from Beijing. She told him that it was the bestselling book in China at that time. He didn’t see what the big deal about this book was, but maybe it was just a bad translation. Maybe it was a cultural thing and he did not understand good writing in America. His favourite English book that his children had bought him was
How To Win Friends and Influence People
. Sometimes he felt that he had raised four foreign creatures who were now cultured in things that he could not even begin to imagine. He liked that about his kids – how they said thank you to each other, and how they apologised if they so much as accidentally nudged one another. He liked the fact that his daughters were demonstrative with their affection for each other, how the oldest called the youngest one ‘pet’.

He liked these quiet times at night, when he could get up and walk into any of the rooms of his children and see them on the computer, or rearranging their blankets for bed. Before bedtime, he would go back downstairs, and sometimes one or two of them would be down there, getting a drink, looking at one last snippet in the newspaper underneath a single light-glow. Sometimes his son would be there, reading, because of his insomnia.

‘Go to bed,’ he would tell them. ‘It’s late.’ They would shuffle around, finish up their reading, talk to each other for ten minutes more. But they always headed upstairs, and he marvelled at this – that they were considered ‘grown-up’ in this country, but that he could still ask this of them and they would do it. Not because they felt a particular need to, but because they cared about his anxiety about their lack of sleep. It was a complicated way to care, and he knew – as he never knew before, never knew when they were children – how much his children accommodated him, and accommodated his fears.

He made sure all the windows and doors were shut. He made sure all the knives and sharp kitchen utensils were in their drawers, and that there was nothing on the tiled floors that might trip anyone. One of his fears was that a robber might come into the house late at night and if he did not hide the knives, they would have a weapon ready to hand. He also did not want any burglars to trip up, because he had read somewhere that he could be sued if they injured themselves on his property. It seemed to him to be an insane legal system, but this was the price you had to pay if you wanted a system that put a person first.

Sometimes, when one of his children was out late, his wife and he conspired to stay awake. They did this by egging each other on in their bedroom.

‘Aiyoh,’ his wife would complain, ‘why do you always let them go out so late? I told you that you shouldn’t be so easy on them.’

‘Stupid kid,’ he would say, ‘always doing this. Why are they always doing this? How selfish. Selfish kids.’

And so on and so forth they would go, fuelling each other’s annoyance at the one kid who had stayed out late, so as not to be sleepy. So as to be awake to see the car pull into the driveway. It was only then that they could turn off the light and go to sleep.

My deepest gratitude to: Chris Feik, Denise O’Dea, Sophy Williams, Thomas Deverall, Elke Power, Nina Kenwood, Caitlin Yates, Duncan Blachford, Elisabeth Young, Kate Goldsworthy and all at Black Inc.; Clare Forster; Professor Ronald Sharp and Inese Sharp, Vassar College; Professor Susan Smulyan, Brown University; Christopher Merrill; Dr Damian Powell, Janet Clarke Hall; Ormond College; the Pung family in Cambodia; the Pung family in Hong Kong; Kathryn Hamill, Daniel Morrow and Jillian Mathes for their wise judgment and invaluable insight; Professor Robert Cording; the incredible support of my workplace, in particular Joelle Leggett, Miranda Pointon, Elizabeth Leung and Shannon-Kate Archer; Asialink and the Australia Council for the Arts; Peking University; the Iowa International Writing Program; the US Department of State; the Hermitage, Florida; the Island Institute, Sitka; Kathryn Favelle from the National Library of Australia; Sally Rippin; Natasha Klos; the Derks; Uncle Martin Gawler and Auntie Stella Gawler; Therese Robin; Bianca Ascher; Huyen Le; Katharine White; Alexander, Alison and Alina; my students, who have taught me much over the years; and ‘Teodoro’.

Finally, to Kuan Kieu Pung and Kien Chia Pung, for sharing their stories and unconditional love.