The Family Law (18 page)

Over the next few hours, everything unravelled. Uncle Justin, Mum learned, had made a hasty escape with his pregnant wife and daughter, slipping out the back door of the restaurant and speeding down the highway.

‘Go, go, go!' he'd said to his wife Aunty Estelle, ushering her into the car. ‘
Now
.'

By the time he was caught, they had rounded up our eldest aunty too. In the back of the police vehicles, the four Hong Kong siblings whispered in Cantonese.
Why would the police
have come directly to the restaurant? How did they know exactly
where to come, and at what time?
Someone had ratted on them, but who? Customers? Staff? A family member? Either way, they agreed they were in deep shit. Their journey in the police car took hours, all through the night, and led them to a remote place, the name of which would eventually become infamous. It was in a different state altogether, and was a centre called Villawood.

The next day, they were allowed some phone calls, and one of the first they made was to my mother. ‘Do you even get what's happening?' our eldest aunty asked on the phone, crying. ‘Do you understand how serious this is? We're basically in prison here, sister.
Prison
.'

‘Don't worry, she's over-reacting,' Uncle Toby said, taking over the receiver. ‘It's not all bad. You know they're feeding us steak here? Actual steak! And milk, too. Can you imagine prisoners back in Hong Kong? They'd say we were in a
hotel
.'

All of this made for front-page headlines. Over the next few months, the saga played out in the news, with more than fifty reports about the case published all around the country: the
Sunshine Coast Daily,
the
Telegraph, Noosa News,
the
Daily
Sun
and the
Courier-Mail
. Alongside the standard headlines –
COAST FAMILY AWAITS FATE
;
DEPORTATION ORDERED
FOR FAMILY; RESIDENCY BID REJECTED –
was the tale of my Aunty Estelle, a sweet, apple-cheeked woman and the heavily pregnant wife of Uncle Justin. She became the public face of the family's campaign. After her husband was arrested, she had gone into labour. Detained in Villawood, he hadn't yet seen his newborn child. ‘I want to see my husband again,' Estelle told the newspapers in her fragile, hesitant English. ‘I want them to release him so he can see me again and my baby.'

All the photographs in the newspapers were the same: the squishy-faced Chinese newborn, cradled by her distressed and blameless-looking young mother. Was this really the face of a queue-jumping threat to national security? If so, it was pretty adorable, everyone thought. And weren't Chinese babies so
cute
? The public ate it up.
BABY TIFFANY'S AN AUSSIE
, proclaimed one newspaper.
MUM MAKES TEARFUL PLEA
, said another. But underneath the cuteness was a basic conundrum: the newest member of the family – an infant girl – was an Australian citizen, and her family wasn't.

Concerned citizens and classmates wrote editorials (
Family
Here for Sake of Children; Visitors Pay Their Dues
;
Don't Deport
Our Friends
), and petitioned the immigration minister directly. Schoolteachers mournfully displayed my cousin's white debutante dress to newspaper reporters, telling them she'd never get to wear the dress if she was sent back to Hong Kong.
Think
of the children!
they howled. But for my cousins, who remained in limbo at our place, it was like an extended sleepover. Andrew and I moulded playdough with them, while Mum and her sisters-in-law fretted over meals in the kitchen. We'd make them entire tenpin bowling sets out of dough, and were disappointed and baffled when we found no one could even pretend to be interested.

They left in stages, family by family, newspaper report by newspaper report. No matter how many applications were filed, petitions sent or campaigns established, nothing was of any use. Then, only weeks after my mother's thirty-second birthday, she said goodbye to her two elderly parents at the airport. They were the last to leave, having been asked by the government to go voluntarily after their application for sponsorship was rejected. Mum was four months' pregnant by then. When they left, her parents asked what the use of crying was.

 

*

 

Everyone left their stuff behind: bags of clothes, boxes of shoes, board games and trinkets. My mother dutifully packed it all into the garage, into wardrobes, into closets – every spare inch of space she could find, assuming they'd be back one day to collect it. But when she rang them up in Hong Kong, they told her to dump it all, throw it away, treat it as garbage. ‘What's the use of holding on?' they asked. ‘What's happened has happened.'

As the years passed, we went on to accumulate piles of crap of our own, too, toys and clothes, books and CDs, electronics and games – the childhood detritus every suburban home acquires. Living directly opposite a major shopping centre didn't help, and we didn't have a basement or attic. We never got rid of anything: there were no spring cleans or annual audits, garage sales or visits to the tip. Instead, we were sentimental to the point where it became pathological. Even now, our school books are lodged in our backpacks – one for each year – and stowed in the garage like filed evidence. My mother's walls are adorned with my high-school artworks, including the painting
Alien Birth
from a Womb of Pus
(Benjamin Law,
1998
), the clay sculpture
Bird Emerges from Household Toilet Eating Snakes
(
1996
) and the installation work
Angel-Demon Twins Inside Papier-Maché Uterus
(
1999
). Mum kept everything: every book we ever read, all the tennis trophies and tenpin-bowling medals we won. Things accumulated like plaque, growing out ramshackle from the walls. As we grew, the house contracted. We found ourselves tiptoeing around piles of ancient magazines and shoeboxes of old school projects, and I became too embarrassed to have friends sleep over.

When I was a teenager and after my parents had divorced, my Uncle Toby visited us from Canada. We didn't know much about Mum's older brother, although he told us he'd once lived in Australia too. We were probably too young to remember, he said, but it was okay if we'd forgotten. Uncle Toby was charismatic and his English was good, which made us feel even more ashamed when, upon inspecting our house, he was dumbfounded. Why was our house so cluttered? No, no. ‘Cluttered' was the wrong word: to his eyes, the place looked like a dump. With a stranger's eyes cast over our house, I could suddenly see it for what it was: a mess.

‘This is terrible,' Uncle Toby said to my Mum in Cantonese. ‘What's happened here? How can you live like this?'

The exchange made us uncomfortable, as though he was confirming something we'd suspected for a long time: there was something wrong with us. ‘I'm only here for a little while,' Uncle Toby told us all. ‘But at least we can try to tidy up this house while I'm here, right?'

When he said that, I felt like punching my fist in the air.

Yeah! Let's get rid of it all! Hell, let's build a goddamned FIRE.

Throughout the week, Uncle Toby took it upon himself to take stuff to the tip, clearing out the living room and some of the garage. He wouldn't have time for our closets. The whole time, Mum hovered nearby, wringing her fingers, unsure how to intervene or contribute. Eventually, looking numb, she backed off entirely, unable to bring herself to get involved.

‘Do you need to keep this?' Uncle Toby would ask her in Cantonese, holding up an old book or magazine collection, old cassettes or a bag of marbles.

‘I don't know,' Mum said quietly. ‘I just don't know.'

‘What do you mean,
you don't know
?'

Only a few days later, the living room was unrecognisable. It was clean, and you could walk in a diagonal line from one corner to the other, just like at my friends' places.
Friends
, I thought.
I could invite my friends over.
‘And look,' Uncle Toby said, leading us through our own house, as though we'd never seen it before, which, in one sense, we hadn't. ‘When you open this liquor cabinet,' he said, opening the latch, ‘this light inside comes on automatically! Did you know that?'

No, I didn't know that!
I thought. Hell, I didn't know we had a liquor cabinet. And there it was, with actual liquor inside too! I was almost nauseous with excitement. Now we were like those families in magazines, the ones who served food on matching crockery, and who drank water from glasses instead of mismatched mugs. We applauded.

In the days after Uncle Toby flew back to Canada, Tammy and I wore thick socks and skidded across the new-found space on the tiles.

‘Look, Mum!' Tammy said. ‘We're ice-skating!'

But Mum remained quiet, which was odd for her. Then she burst into tears.

‘Your uncle came in like a cyclone,' she said, sobbing. All sorts of things in the garage had been thrown out, she said, and now she couldn't even figure out what was missing. It was too difficult, and she was confused. ‘After everything that's happened,' she said, ‘he should know better.'

We had no idea what she was talking about.
What
had happened, and
why
should he know better? We didn't ask those questions then, but we sensed they had something to do with why our house had become a museum over the years, preserving artefacts from an era I didn't even begin to understand.

After Uncle Toby's cyclonic clean-up, things managed to creep back into the house. Nowadays, the house itself is falling apart too, as though all those years of being over capacity have taken their toll. Right now, my siblings and I are trying to help Mum move out, sell off the land, demolish the house, get rid of it all. ‘What's the use of holding on?' we ask her. The doorknobs of the storage closet that Andrew, Tammy and I used to share have broken off and are now attached only by masking tape and twine. Everything has been left behind, still inside the closets, with the doors sealed shut like a tomb, like a vault, or something that's supposed to be buried.

We Have the Technology

As a teenager, I developed this weird limp. Whenever I had a medical problem – and there were many by this stage – my mother would take me to see Doctor Mark, the handsome young Irish doctor down the road, whose boyish good looks I found both attractive and intimidating. Thanks to his Aryan bone structure and Hollywood teeth, telling Doctor Mark about my bad skin, anxiety attacks and back pain – all while wearing a food-encrusted orthodontic plate – was humiliating and made me feel repulsive. But I figured there was no other option.

‘What seems to be the problem?' Doctor Mark asked.

Mum nodded to cue me, so I started to mumble about my limp: a crazy peg-legged walk that had only developed in the last six months. Walking used to be an automatic task that didn't require any thought, but now it was a gruelling, self-conscious ordeal just to get from my locker to the tuckshop. As I hobbled through the school quadrangle, I could feel my brain straining to move my legs. Jocks with names like Adam and Jonathan would yell out and laugh at me. I kept my head down to avoid making eye contact, which meant I had a bird's eye view of how weird my stride had become; it was the drunken waltz of a demented pirate. After a day of limping like this, my back would be sore, my knees inflamed. This limp was ruining my life, but I didn't tell Doctor Mark that.

‘I have a limp,' I said.

Doctor Mark nodded as I answered his questions. ‘Well, I'll need to see this for myself,' he said, rolling up his sleeves. There wasn't enough space to walk up and down in his office, so the three of us went outside to the carpark, and Doctor Mark told me to parade for him in the disabled zone. As I walked back and forth in a staggered rhythm, Doctor Mark and Mum observed me, concerned, whispering questions to each other.
How long
has he been walking like this? Is this normal, doctor?
Cars pulled up and passengers watched the display encouragingly, rallying for this young Chinese amputee who was clearly giving his new prosthesis a test run.

When we sat back down in his office, the news was grim.

‘What you have,' Doctor Mark said, ‘is a disease.' He explained that my condition was a result of the muscles and bones in my leg growing at different rates. This was apparently common in adolescent boys experiencing growth spurts and, in most cases, eventually sorted itself out. On one hand, I should have felt better hearing all this; it didn't sound especially serious. On the other hand, I was diseased. As I took in the news, I slouched in my chair. Mum scowled at me and gave Doctor Mark a pleading look.

‘You know, Ben,' Doctor Mark said, grinning at Mum. ‘You can always make these things worse with a bad posture.' At that, I immediately straightened up; not so much for my back's sake, but because I wanted Doctor Mark to like me.

As soon as we got home, I sat down at the computer and immediately started slouching again. My mother bristled. ‘You know what's ruined your back?' she said. ‘It's not just that limp. It's all that
slouching
. You're always sitting in front of your
boxes
and slouching.' By ‘boxes,' Mum meant the various oblong obsessions that had apparently corrupted me over the years. There were magazines and novels to begin with, and then the Walkmans, video games, televisions and computers that had infiltrated my life, reducing to an empty shell the child she had raised and loved. ‘See, you're even slouching now,' she said. ‘And you don't even notice it. Also, you
never
talk to me anymore. You're always talking to that
box
.'

If the computer was ruining my back, she said, then my Walkman would ruin my hearing – although we both acknowledged that I did have weirdly excessive ear-wax, which Doctor Mark drained at least once a year, which probably affected my hearing. The Walkman was a recent purchase, a state-of-the-art Sony model with a mega-bass function. I kept it on at all hours, even at bedtime, when I'd lie in bed and listen to the Austereo broadcast of
Doctor Feelgood
, a late-night sex-advice program. Doctor Feelgood – whose real name was, incredibly, Sally Cockburn – was frank and unflinching. Women would phone in about their yeast infections, and married truckies called in with disturbing tales of having sex with other men in roadside toilets. In the morning, I'd wake up, curled around my Walkman, my back cracking, sore and twisted.