The Family Law (9 page)

Our teacher, Linda, was a Hong Kong-born woman in her late forties, the same age and background as my mother. As a result, I felt acute, personal shame every time I let her down in class, which was often. At our first lesson, she asked us to introduce ourselves in whatever Cantonese we already had in our arsenal. Sebastian volunteered first, and told us not only his name and the undergraduate degree he was studying, but also about an upcoming holiday in which he'd be flying to Norway to meet his ‘very good friend.' It was clear to me that Sebastian meant a boyfriend – a boyfriend who, I imagined, modelled for Versace when he wasn't working as a foreign diplomat or training for the Winter Olympics.

When it was my turn, I introduced myself and my Chinese name. ‘
Ngau-goh joong-mun-mehng hae …
Yuk Nung?' I said. My tones were all over the place. The statement came off sounding like a question.

‘
Yuk Nung
?' my teacher asked, peering over her glasses.

‘
Hae
,' I said. ‘My name's spelt “yuk,” like when you're disgusted by something, but it actually rhymes with “book.”' Linda pursed her lips. I realised I'd been speaking in English when she'd specifically asked us to speak in Cantonese. ‘
And I
am twenty-one years old
,' I added in Cantonese, sheepishly. Then in English: ‘That's all.'

‘
Yuk
,' Sebastian said, repeating my Chinese name. ‘
Yuk
?' He pulled out a pocket translator. He punched in some buttons, and then passed it to Linda. ‘Is this the right Chinese character set?' he asked. Almost miraculously, he'd conjured up the character for the first part of my name, the only Chinese script I recognised apart from numbers. Then he said the same character in Mandarin, to make sure he was correct. Linda clasped her hands together in delight. My shoulders slumped.

As the weeks went on, the verbal and spoken assignments got harder. They reminded me of high-school drama examinations, in which poorly performing students had to be prompted for every line before being failed in front of the class. Some students became flustered and clumsy under the pressure.

‘
Lae-seurng
…' Linda prompted.

‘
Lae-seurng
…' repeated the student, a nervously smiling teenager who was the only person worse than me. ‘Um, what's the next bit?

‘
Mm-seurng
…'

‘
Mm-seurng
…'

The student paused again, biting her lip. She looked towards the rest of us frantically.

‘Uhm, line?'

Because the classes were so early, I'd sometimes catch myself falling asleep at the desk.

‘Benjamin?' Linda said. When she didn't get a response, she switched to Cantonese and sounded chillingly like my mother. ‘
Yuk Nung. Are you awake? Why are you so sleepy all the time?
' At that, everyone started laughing at me. Sebastian glanced over with cool pity. When I realised my eye was crusted over with sleep, I rubbed; the sleep fell onto the desk in clumps.
Ngan-see
, I thought vaguely to myself. That's what ‘sleep' is called in Cantonese: eye shit. At least I knew that.

 

*

 

Weeks after the course finished, an advertisement for McDonald's came on the television, featuring Sebastian licking a soft-serve ice-cream cone. ‘Oh my god,' I said. I called Scott over from the other room. ‘Scott! Scott! This is the Eurasian guy I was talking about. You're going to cream yourself over him.'

Scott came over. ‘I resent that,' he said, before turning his attention to the TV.

‘That's him,' I said, ‘the Eurasian dude from the class; that douche-bag I was telling you about.'

It hurt to look at him. Part of me liked to think that because we shared some racial heritage, I might look like Sebastian from some angles. However, watching the advertisement, I realised that this would require major facial reconstructive surgery. Here was a person who was a better version of me in every single way, and a self-destructive impulse made me want to gauge Scott's reaction to him. I watched Scott closely after the advertisement finished.

‘Oh, Ben, he's not that great-looking,' he said. ‘In fact, I think his face is sort of weird and girlish.' And just then, with sharp clarity, the Cantonese words for ‘I love you' darted into my mind.
Ngoh ngoi lae.

 

*

 

I'm trying to become more disciplined, but my Cantonese is still a joke. Michelle takes the joke further and makes up new Cantonese words, creating an indigenous dialect known only to my family. When it's Chinese New Year, my dad and grandma will issue the mandatory New Year's greetings Sun-Leen-Fai-Lok and Goong-Hae-Fut-Choi, and Michelle will respond with Choot-Cheen-Yut-Ding, a popular brand of instant noodles from Hong Kong. I admire that. She takes Cantonese tones and bastardises them. If your Cantonese is beyond a joke, you may as well get to the punchline first. It might seem insulting to make a mockery of an entire language, but we only do it because the language has been mocking us for years.

A full semester of Cantonese classes had no discernible impact on my vocabulary. Before I left, having failed our final oral assignment, I stole the library's entire collection of Cantonese language CDs and burned them onto my computer. A single volume usually cost hundreds of dollars, but now I have language lessons whenever I need them.

When I drive long distances – say, to my mother's place – I start the CD lessons from the beginning, saying the phrases over and over until they stick. When I park the car and ring the doorbell, I try to drop the phrases into conversation before I forget them. ‘
Excuse me, Miss, but Mister Leung is currently busy
,' I say. ‘
Would you like me to show you to his office
?' Mum pretends to be confused, but she knows exactly what I've been doing.

There are other times, though – like right now – when I forget the word for ‘office' altogether. At times like these I find myself staring at a blank wall, wishing someone had stuck a note there to remind me how to pronounce it, and what it means.

A Room of One's Own

Our mother always told us that
hate
was too strong a word. In our household, you could sometimes get away with
bitch
,
slut
and the occasional
fuck
, but
hate
was completely off-limits. ‘You don't hate your brother,' Mum would say, correcting me. ‘That's such a strong word. You might dislike him very much, but you definitely don't hate him. How could you? He's your brother.' Hearing this, I wanted to ask her what emotion, if not hate, had once compelled her to scream in guttural, animal rage before throwing a frying pan at Andrew with such force that it left her bent over and heaving.

The problem was, when it came to Andrew and me,
hate
didn't even begin to describe it. Andrew, three years older than me, was the sibling who'd once crept up behind me in the kitchen and pinioned my arms before flashing out a large knife – the giant one usually reserved for bones and root vegetables – and whispering in my ear, ‘Don't struggle, Ben, just stay still.' With that, he ran the blade across the soft fleshy underside of my forearm, the part used for suicide. When I finally found my voice, I emitted high-pitched wails, like a scandalised eunuch. Then Andrew slapped me on the back of my head and laughed. ‘Dickhead, it's just the
back
of the knife!' he scoffed, before showing me my unmarked arm. By the time my sisters arrived to find out who'd died, I'd collapsed on the floor, shaking, holding my arm to stop the imaginary blood loss.

Another of Andrew's favourite pastimes was to pin my arms down with his legs, cover my mouth with his hand and tickle me while I spasmed underneath him in pain, crying silently. My gulping, fish-like convulsions reminded me of an incident in a telemovie we'd seen. Set in an all-women's prison, it followed a new blonde inmate who had been wrongly convicted of murder. On her first day inside, the Bambi-eyed prisoner was cornered by butch lesbians, who massaged their knuckles before pinning her down and covering her mouth. The blonde prisoner's eyes widened in horror, but there was no way to scream: she was well and truly muffled. My siblings and I had watched what followed, covering our eyes with cushions and screaming for her as she squirmed and kicked.
So
, I'd think as Andrew held me down and tickled my sides,
this is what it's like to be raped
.

‘Oh, don't be so dramatic,' Mum would say later in the kitchen. ‘He only does that because he loves you.' But we all knew Andrew was dangerous. After all, he had worked his way through the siblings, almost methodically, and permanently scarred each one of us. Candy had a pockmark on her face where Andrew had gleefully ripped off a pus-filled chicken-pox welt, Tammy's arm was missing a patch of skin because of a biking accident, and I sported a perfect triangle of missing flesh on my ankle, from the time Andrew had dragged me along the road on my tricycle, attached to his big-wheel with an occy strap. When Michelle was born, my sisters and I conspired to protect our infant sibling from the same fate, but we knew we couldn't do much. The best we could hope for was that she wouldn't lose something she really needed – an eye, say, or an adult molar.

 

*

 

It was perverse that out of all the siblings, Andrew and I were forced to shared a room. I never understood why boys and girls were automatically housed together. Andrew and I might have both been male, but of the five children, we were the least alike. Andrew was sporty, and won tennis and karate tournaments; I couldn't throw a ball. While I adorned my side of the room with a giant plush-animal collection, Andrew blu-tacked his walls with photos of big-titted bitches. Andrew towered over his classmates, while I was the weedy kid who had to crawl on his hands and knees to board the bus.

We couldn't fit bunk beds in our room, so Andrew constantly rearranged our two single beds to create the illusion of space. One month our beds would shoulder each other in an L-shape; the next, Andrew would push them side by side, separating them with a long, sausage-like cushion we all referred to as the
dai goo-goo
, which translates as ‘large penis.' All this constant moving and rearranging, all this desperate shuffling back and forth: it was the behaviour of captive animals in tight confines.

The only space Andrew properly staked out as his own was the corner where his fish-tank stood. It was a glass case the size of a small fruit crate, sitting on a waist-high wooden stand. Although I wasn't allowed to touch it, I secretly loved this underwater world my brother had made, populated by golden fantails, red-capped whities and bug-eyed blackmoors, all docile and friendly. Once every month, Andrew would change the water, an all-day task that involved hauling alternating buckets of dirty and clean water between our room and the laundry. Old newspapers and catalogues would be layered over the carpet in case of spills. As I watched him measure out the chemicals, test the water's temperature with his hand and carefully lay out the gravel, I could see that this was something like an act of love.

 

*

 

Despite our differences, Andrew and I did share one thing in common. We were both perverts. Every week, we'd scan the television guide to see if there was a listing for the movie
Hot
Chili
, a sordid
1985
tits-and-arse comedy that Channel
7
would play every few months. It was the precursor to all those modern male teen flicks, except that it had no discernible narrative: some teenagers go to Mexico; they take off their clothes; they have sex with Swedish dominatrixes. The main drawcard was that it showed nipples.

While everyone was asleep and we waited for
Hot Chili
to start, television commercials came on for dating services and phone-sex lines, soft-focus shots of women in red garters and white lingerie: all the stuff that boys aged nine to twelve love.

Then, over a black screen and the soundtrack of squealing strings, a voiceover informed us that over two horrific nights, Australian television would never be the same again. ‘In a small American town,' it sneered, ‘an unspeakable evil is preying on the children.' Slow-motion shots showed a storm brewing over an American neighbourhood. A small boy in a yellow raincoat ran along the kerbside, playing with a paper boat in the gutter, until the boat got sucked down a stormwater drain. Waiting in the drain was – of all things – a red-haired clown. Something about that was utterly chilling, and I covered my eyes and whimpered. For a moment, the thought entered my mind that some images were so scary, they could actually send you insane.

Sounds of thunder were intercut with the kid screaming and the clown laughing.

‘Dude,' Andrew whispered. ‘I think that clown just ripped the kid's arms off.'

The voiceover taunted us. ‘Find out with the rest of Australia, what is …
It
?'

Andrew punched the air.

‘We're watching that.'

‘No, we're not,' I said.

‘Yes, we are.' And though I continued to protest, I knew by the tone of his voice that no matter what I did, he'd win out.

On the weekend
It
was scheduled to broadcast, we were sent to our cousins' place for an extended sleepover. Their household was more strict than ours in most ways – get anything less than an A at school, and you were flogged – but it was more liberal in others. It was rumoured that somewhere in the house was bona-fide pornography on VHS: not like
Hot Chili
where you just saw boobs, but the proper stuff, where you saw a man's
doodle
go inside a woman's
pippi
. They were also allowed to keep pet dogs and watch things that were utterly unacceptable in our household, such as Bruce Willis action movies and gory horror flicks about piranhas.