The Family Law (8 page)

Andrew would peg the shoe with startling precision. The initial impact would paralyse the cockroach for a few seconds before Andrew went in for the kill: a series of unforgiving poundings that would reduce it to an unrecognisable mash of guts and legs. The rest of us became bloodthirsty and primal, like in those movies where small-town mobs are taken over by psychotic bloodlust. ‘KILL IT!' we'd scream, as Andrew kept smashing the thing into the floor. The bigger ones would explode, their insides squirting in all directions like a splattered boil, with pus and plasma that looked almost human. By the end, Andrew would be bent over and panting, trying to catch his breath, and all of our hearts would be racing, our blood boiling in the tropical heat.

 

*

 

Every year, Dad called pest control. Every time he called, we hoped that would be the end of the problem. Somehow, though, the cockroaches always survived. After a pest-control bomb failed to get rid of them for the third time, we reconciled ourselves to the idea of living in a roach-infested hellhole for the rest of our lives. What else could we do? In the summer evenings, when the heat was so intense that it would wake me up, I'd get out of bed to go to the toilet. On my way to the bathroom, I'd casually smash cockroaches with a plastic slipper, before wiping up their remains and flushing them down the toilet. We all did our bit. After one of these bathroom visits, as I made my way to the kitchen to get a glass of water, I thought about the argument I'd overheard my parents having in their bedroom earlier in the day, behind closed doors. It was something that had started to happen more.

As my eyes adjusted to the kitchen's darkness, I could see the walls were moving. When I could finally focus, of course it wasn't the wall that was moving but the clusters of cockroaches that rippled across the kitchen like a nightmarish curtain. When I took a step back, I nearly stepped on one before it crept off into the shadows. As I rinsed my tumbler, I wondered what the point of washing anything was, since everything would be covered in cockroach germs the next morning.
No wonder my
parents aren't happy
, I thought to myself.
Whose parents could be
happy in this house?
I figured if the pest-control man wasn't going to do his job properly, I'd have to take matters into my own hands.

I'd read in the
Australian Women's Weekly
about a surefire way to trap cockroaches. You got an empty ice-cream container, soaked stale bread in it with fat, sugar and alcohol, and greased the rim with oil. At night, you put the container in the corner of your kitchen and the cockroaches would climb in, driven crazy by the combination of sweetened liquor and grease. They'd try to get out, but the greased sides would keep them inside.

The morning after I made the trap, my siblings and I, dressed in our school uniforms, approached it slowly. The first thing we noticed was a scratching noise from inside. Together, we peered into the container.

‘Wow,' one of us said. ‘That is so gross.'

Inside was a stack of cockroaches, almost ten centimetres deep, crawling on top of each other. The cockroaches at the base were either dead or drunk, and the living ones were stepping on the bloated corpses of their comrades, trying to escape.

Without saying a word, I carefully balanced the ice-cream container in my hands, while someone else opened the sliding door that led to the yard. In one swift motion, I threw the container up into the air, and it landed upside down on the ground. No one said a thing, but we all knew what to do. As the cockroaches scuttled away – big and small, fast and slow – into the corners of the garden, we screamed and started smashing them into the dirt with our school shoes, hollering like we were possessed. These things had ruined our home, they'd taken over our house, and now they were getting what had been coming to them. Finally, finally, finally, we had the motherfuckers cornered, something to destroy, something we had control over. We stomped and screamed while Mum watched on, bleary-eyed from another evening without sleep.

 

*

 

One of the first things my mother did after she separated from my father was to buy herself a new oven and dishwasher. The oven was fitted next to the cabinets without any gaps, and her new stovetop rested magically flat on the bench: no electric coils, just a polished ceramic top that lit red when in use. After the spaces between the bench and the dishwasher were sealed shut, the cockroaches disappeared almost overnight, taking their babies with them. With my father gone, the cockroaches evicted and new household appliances doing her work, my mother seemed to have a new lease on life. When I went to wash my glasses and mugs, she'd holler from the other room, ‘Don't worry! I have a dishwasher now! You can use as many glasses as you like!' Then she'd laugh like someone deranged, as though she could barely believe her luck.

Years later, when I was eighteen, I had moved out of home and was living in an old Queenslander, a house that faced south, retained heat in summer and let in the freezing air in winter. In the damp, stormy summers, mushrooms would grow out of the shower fittings and fleas would make their way indoors, even though none of us ever let animals in. When the heat became excruciating, I'd lie in bed all evening with bowls of ice, moaning and nude. I thought I'd escaped them, but this new place was paradise for vermin and pestilence too. Still, I had a system for each species. The mosquitoes would be smoked out. The spiders would be let out gently. The fleas would be fumigated. And the cockroaches would be crushed without mercy, with no hesitation at all.

Tone Deaf

When my dad sees an English word in the newspaper he doesn't understand, he points to it and asks us for the definition. He'll say it a few times to himself, rolling the word in his mouth and chewing on it, until the meaning and the sound collide, soften and stick to his brain like gum. Likewise, when my mum learns a new word from television or conversation, she writes it down in her notebook. If the word is particularly tricky, she asks me to spell and define it, then scrawls it down onto scrap paper and sticky-tapes it to the wall to help her remember its meaning and spelling, the way foreign-language students do in the lead-up to exams. Even now, the word
diarrhoea
is stuck to the dining-room wall.

In this way, every migrant family is the same: children learn from their parents, parents learn from their children. It's all very educational. Controversially, though, Mum insists she first learned the word
cunt
from me. I don't remember the exact circumstances clearly enough to verify the claim, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. Mum says that afterwards, as often seems to happen when you've learned a new word or concept, she inexplicably started seeing and hearing it everywhere.

‘The next night on SBS,' she told me, ‘there was this European movie with a woman screaming at her husband because she found out he was having an affair. She yelled to him: “You only like her because her cunt smells like eggplant!” That's what it said in the subtitles. And suddenly I realised that I knew what this word was.
Cunt.
It was that same word you told me not to use at parent–teacher meetings.' She paused to think. ‘I wonder whether I would've worked out its meaning if I hadn't heard it from you.
Smells like eggplant.
Yes. Yes, I think I would have.'

Apparently, I'd given her strict instructions at the time not to use the word amongst friends or even with her gynaecologist. She understood, but has since embarked on a lifelong, covert love affair with the word. The lawn-mowing man who screwed her over? She knows just the word to use. The drunken New Year's revellers who left beer bottles in her yard? There's only one word to describe people like that.

In stark contrast to the dedication of my parents, I've become complacent about Cantonese over the years, to the extent that I'm now uncertain whether I can lay claim to the language at all. Now and then, the same tick-a-box question comes up in forms and surveys, questionnaires and applications, leaving me confused and anxious. ‘Do you come from a non-English speaking background?' it asks. ‘YES/NO.' It seems like such a straightforward thing to ask, but my pen always wavers. Eventually, I select either ‘yes' or ‘no' at random. Looking back, I've probably filled out a
50
–
50
share of ‘yeses' and ‘nos.' What is your ‘language background'? What language do you speak at home? They seem like such simple questions. But they're not.

 

*

 

Cantonese is the language predominantly spoken by my parents, and the main language spoken in Hong Kong, Macau and southern parts of China. In and of itself, it's one messed-up dialect. The audio instructors on my Teach Yourself Colloquial Cantonese CDs are more technical and polite about it, referring to it as a ‘tone language.' This means the same syllables, pronounced in different pitches, can mean completely different, incongruous things. Consider this sentence: Goh-goh goh-goh (that older brother there) goh goh (is taller than) goh-goh goh-goh (that other brother over there). Again, that's: Goh-goh goh-goh goh goh goh-goh goh-goh. Pause, then add another goh – with a different tone this time – and you're telling the same brother to cross the road. Depending on how you say it, gau can mean ‘dog' or ‘nine,' ‘enough' or ‘rescue.' Mae could mean ‘rice' or ‘not yet,' ‘flavour' or ‘tail.'

Because of its tonal quality, linguists describe Cantonese as a language that's sung, which might suggest the language is pretty or melodious. But songs can also be terrible and cruel. Think of the late-night sexual moans of the feral cat, the broken wail of the American coyote, or the screeching of the rabies-infested bat. To my ears, Cantonese is not a sung language at all, but a screamed one, a dialect for bickering, exclaiming over scandals and haggling over meat prices.

But hey: who am I to say? My parents speak Cantonese to me, and while I understand most of what they're saying, I'm basically mute when it comes to speaking the language myself. To outsiders, that seems like an odd arrangement, but the analogy I use is music. Everyone understands the language of music, has an innate comprehension of how it works, but not everyone can play it. When it comes to Cantonese, I can understand the music, but I can't replicate it. Cantonese might be a tonal language, but over the years I've become tone deaf.

 

*

 

Of the five siblings, Michelle and I are the worst. When friends see our mother talking to Michelle and me in Cantonese, they say how lucky we are to have a secret language, to be able to talk about people right in front of them without their knowing. When Candy, Andrew or Tammy speak in Cantonese, pointing out the girth of someone's arse or the fact that they've tucked their dress into their underwear, Michelle and I will understand and laugh with them. But when we try to speak, we lose words and grimace into space, silently moving our lips as if we've suffered a terrible stroke. ‘Goh-goh … man,' we'll say, pointing to someone behind his back, ‘hae-hoe … obese.'

For my twenty-first birthday, my boyfriend, Scott, enrolled me in a short course in Cantonese. It would have been difficult to find. While Mandarin is the language of mainland China – the future gatekeeper of
21
st-century economics, the Sleeping Giant, the Slumbering Dragon, the Sneaky Chinaman – Cantonese is considered the obscure and irrelevant poor cousin. The only people this Cantonese language course catered for were the children of Hong Kong migrants whose guilt was starting to play heavily on them, or whose grandparents were dying.

The lessons took place every week at
8
.
30
a.m. on the top level of an ugly, brown-brick, labyrinthine building that smelled as musty as a disused cellar. It was situated on the periphery of a university campus, in a spot that seemed to be bathed in perpetual shadow. On the first morning, I arrived to meet a small group of seven, all of us smiling nervously at one another as we waited for the teacher to arrive. Nearly everyone there was like me: Chinese kids raised in Australia, trying to regain the language they'd lost.
You are my people
, I thought to myself, privately exhilarated that there were others in the world who shared my inadequacies. I could bond with them.

There were exceptions, though. Peter was the lone white person, an older gentleman who'd recently begun a romantic relationship with a woman from Macau.

‘Right now,' Peter told me, ‘she speaks no English besides “yes” or “no.” And I don't speak any Cantonese at all, so that's why I'm here: trying to reach some middle ground, so we've at least got some basic communication going on.'

Their situation baffled me.

‘So how have the two of you communicated up until this point?' I asked.

‘Well,' he said, ‘I guess you could say we communicate with our bodies.'

I avoided Peter after that.

Two other students also stood apart: a young Eurasian brother-and-sister duo. Between them, they'd inherited the high Oriental cheekbones of their Chinese mother and the regal Norse forehead and nose of their Scandinavian father. The combination made them obscenely, enviably beautiful. Their hands were manicured; they didn't have pores. Looking at them made you feel as though you were bearing witness to the next stage of human evolution, a stage to which you hadn't been invited.

When they weren't studying linguistics (him) or working full-time for an international public-relations firm (her), they modelled for television and magazine advertisements. (‘It's more like a hobby,' one of them told me.) Their international names, Sebastian and Claudia, broadcast loud and clear:
We might
have been born in Hong Kong, but our parents knew how to name
us properly
. Their parents had somehow avoided the Chinese tendency to give their kids jumbled, improvised English names like Daffy and Virgyna, Nester and Cornelium
.
They could understand Cantonese already – as well as Spanish, French and Norwegian – but had enrolled in the Cantonese class to get a proper grasp of the dialect's structure. Or, as Sebastian described it, ‘the architecture of the thing.' I hated him immediately.