Tiger Daughter Read online

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2021

  Copyright © Text, Rebecca Lim 2021

  Copyright © Illustrations, Leni Liu, Yvette Liu & Rebecca Lim 2021

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

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  ISBN 978 1 76087 764 4

  eISBN 978 1 760106 113 4

  For teaching resources, explore www.allenandunwin.com/resources/for-teachers

  Quotations from Confucius, The Analects, translated by D. C. Lau, published by Penguin Books Ltd.

  Copyright © D. C. Lau, 1979. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Limited.

  Quotations from Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, translated by D. C. Lau, published by Penguin Books Ltd.

  Copyright © D. C. Lau, 1963. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Limited.

  Cover and text design by Romina Edwards

  Cover illustrations by Maria Voronovich (schoolgirl with backpack) and Svetlana Apukhtina (tiger stripes), iStockphoto

  Set by Romina Edwards

  To my son and daughters,

  each of whom I’m raising in their

  own image, and no one else’s.

  In this novel, references to the Chinese language are to Mandarin Chinese unless otherwise indicated. Hundreds of dialects or languages are spoken today in modern China, and people whose families emigrated from there often speak more than one of them.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  The day before things were never the same again

  PART 1

  Small misfortunes

  Bad news has wings

  Not do, not die (Bù zuò, bù sǐ)

  Common people

  One step, one footprint (Yībù yīgè jiǎoyìn)

  PART 2

  The Right Path

  Eight dishes for luck

  Something from nothing

  Danger

  Everything changes (Yīqiè dōu gǎibiàn)

  Leaving, and returning

  CODA

  PROLOGUE

  THE DAY BEFORE THINGS WERE NEVER THE SAME AGAIN

  As we take our places in the classroom, Mr Cornish writes with a flourish on the whiteboard, What is the essence of being ‘Australian’?

  ‘At least a hundred words!’ he says brightly, turning to face us. ‘In complete sentences. No shopping lists. Kon, I’m looking at you.’

  Kon’s mouth turns down at the corners.

  ‘Can’t I just write Whatever?’ Henry hisses in Chinese out of the side of his mouth.

  Henry Xiao and I are sitting at the back of the before-school, extra English catch-up class that our school runs for refugee and migrant kids. I don’t need to be here – even though I might look like I do – but my best friend Henry does. I’m only here to provide him with moral support and general translation services.

  Mr Cornish has just set another inspirational writing task in a long line of perky questions about Australian customs and sayings, and Henry’s right. Whatever, summed up by the Chinese words suí biàn – meaning casual, random, whatevs – would be a completely appropriate answer to the question on the whiteboard. But I know it wouldn’t be enough for Mr Cornish, who’s got so much bushranger beard going on that when he says things like, ‘More, Henry, I need more!’ just about no one in the room can understand him. Especially not Henry. Which is exactly why I’m here.

  A one-word answer isn’t going to improve anyone’s language skills, or mood, this morning, so I shake my head at Henry now. ‘Won’t cut it,’ I murmur, pointedly, in English, which Henry knows he should be speaking the minute he sets foot on school grounds.

  ‘And that is the whole problem with this language, Wen,’ Henry mutters back in defiant Chinese. ‘What am I cutting? For whom am I cutting it?’

  Henry’s classified as straight off the reffo boat by horrible Billy Raum. Billy believes that anyone who does their homework is a danger to society, and that people who can’t play football are genetically abnormal and should’ve been left, like weak Spartan babies, to die of exposure on a lonely hillside. I know this because he’s said so to my face. Right after he called me slant eyes. Not that they do, actually. Not that it should matter, if they did.

  ‘Is there a problem, Wen?’ Mr Cornish says to me now.

  I shrug in apology. Both he and I know that he’s doing me – and Henry – a favour by letting me even attend this class.

  ‘How is he able to produce those noises without moving his lips?’ Henry whispers in Chinese, with fascination.

  ‘And, if you have something to say, Henry Xiao,’ Mr Cornish swivels his abundant facial hair back in Henry’s direction, ‘you can say it to the whole class, please.’

  Henry screws up his face, and replies laboriously in his painfully literal English, ‘With sincerest apologies, I am bringing you inconvenience.’

  There’s a short pause in the room, like a held breath, and then everyone bursts out laughing, even Mr Cornish. The room rings with it. Henry flushes red – whoosh –from his ratty T-shirt collar right up to his hairline. He’s like a glowing stop sign.

  ‘You sound like my father!’ Josip Kovačević laughs, not in a mean way. But Henry rises from his chair, grabbing all his books and pens with shaking hands.

  I stop laughing. I get the feeling that people have laughed at Henry for most of his life and that one of his dearest wishes, when he grows up, is for that never to happen again.

  I don’t think Henry is looked after much, at home. He hardly ever has any lunch. I give him some of mine when I can spare it, and Miss Spencer and the other teachers arrange for him – and the other kids whose parents can’t afford lunch, or don’t remember to feed them – to have a sneaky sandwich from the school tuckshop at least three times a week. Henry’s this pale, skinny kid with a bad haircut, terrible plastic-framed spectacles, and trousers so short his ankles are always showing.

  Mr Cornish sees my steadying hand on the frayed cuff of Henry’s sleeve and stops laughing as well. ‘It’s my turn to offer sincerest apologies, Henry,’ Mr Cornish says gently, ‘but you need to find a happy medium between what you just said – I’m sorry would have been enough in that context – and the one-word answers you usually like to give.’

  Henry sits back down abruptly, something clearly having piqued his interest. He mutters to me in Chinese as Mr Cornish turns towards the whiteboard, ‘I understand the meaning of happy, but medium can mean many things, Wen – a person who speaks with the dead, an art form, an average, a substance – what is he talking about with this use of the word medium?’

  ‘Average, balance,’ I murmur out of the side of my mouth. ‘As in happy balance. He wants you to find a happy balance when you speak in class.’

  When you speak at all, I almost say, but don’t.

  Wanting to add, You just need to speak, Hen. It does get easier.

  ‘Ah,’ Henry says brightly. ‘I will use this term in our forthcoming entrance exam. Happy medium, this is good.’

  ‘Uh,’ I begin. ‘About that exam we’
re supposed to be taking …’

  ‘Do not jinx us!’ Henry says sharply, for once in word-perfect English, and I close my mouth with a snap at the expression on his face. Mr Cornish looks around at us, frowning, before turning back to the whiteboard.

  Henry has this crazy idea that if we both sit the entrance exam to this amazing, government-funded selective school next month, we’ll get everything we ever wanted, and our lives will change for the better. Our form teacher, Miss Spencer, told our whole class about the exam, and the school, but we’re the only two kids who can be bothered doing it because the place sounds like an impossible mirage. It’s on the other side of town, but it might as well be on the other side of the world.

  Henry’s insisting that we’ll both get through with flying colours, and that the excellent science and maths program (for him) and the outstanding arts, athletics and humanities program (for me) will mean that we’ll become the people we’re supposed to be – instead of being two migrant kids living an hour’s train ride out of the city (on a good day) in a suburb that’s known in the newspapers for its homeless people, drug deals and gang violence. It’s so bad here that Mum still walks me to and from school every day, even though I’m almost fourteen, and taller than she is. There’s nothing beautiful about where we live except for the friends I’ve made at school, like Nikki Kuol and Fatima Salah, whose families come from opposite ends of Sudan and who’d probably not be friends if they still lived there, instead of here. If we’d never come to Australia, I wouldn’t have known them either. So this school is the safest place in my life, and Henry’s, and I’m not sure I want to leave it.

  ‘What if we don’t get in?’ I keep my voice very quiet. ‘What if Miss Spencer’s wrong about us being ready?’

  ‘Miss Spencer used to teach there,’ Henry reminds me under his breath. ‘She only left because her mother got too sick to look after herself. Miss Spencer says that we’ll love it there. That it has everything. That we’ll fit right in, remember?’

  He gets a faraway look in his eye and I know he’s thinking about the gleaming new two-storey library we saw in the brochure in Miss Spencer’s office that also talked about the debating and fencing teams, the robotics club, the performing arts centre and the biennial space camps at NASA.

  I look at Henry, whose long-sleeved T-shirt is so stretched and wash-faded and threadbare that it looks like a ghost garment, then look down at me, in my too-tight school sweatshirt, and jeans that are about to bust out in holes around the bum area. The denim is so thin that people will be able to make out the colour of my underpants any moment now. I don’t ever feel I can ask for anything new, so I don’t ask; until someone, eventually, notices that my clothes are so tight or so short or so scandalous, that I look like a sausage busting rudely out of its skin, and one new garment may suddenly appear at the end of my bed. Just one; so that I don’t get ideas. From a seconds warehouse somewhere; the kind filled with racks of clothing in shades of apricot, grey and aqua that are all marked $5.

  For a moment, I do feel longing for a place that will make me become a better version of me. But unlike Henry, I don’t feel like there is such a place, or that it can ever come true. What I feel most days is that nothing is ever going to change. That my life won’t even start, and I’ll be stuck like this forever.

  ‘My parents will never let me go to that school,’ I whisper. ‘I have to lie to my dad just to keep you company in this English Enrichment class, remember? He thinks I’m coming here for my own personal “enrichment”. If he knew I was only coming here for you, that would be it. No more class. I’m not allowed to have friends, or “fun”. I can’t even leave the house if I’m not with him, or with Mum. I don’t think I’ll be able to so much as sit the exam, let alone ever go to that school. It’s wrong for you to even put the idea in my head, Henry Xiao.’

  ‘People who come out of that school can do anything, and be anything,’ Henry insists, and is only prevented from continuing by the bell that signals morning rollcall.

  The look I give him says, Don’t be so sure.

  Mr Cornish stops the two of us before we leave the classroom. ‘Henry,’ he says, his voice serious. ‘Life is about taking risks. The more you do it, the easier it will become, okay? Don’t be afraid that people will laugh, and don’t –’ he gives me a shrewd glance, ‘stay inside that comfortable shell you’ve built around yourself. That shell, Henry, is an illusion. To live, is to risk everything,’ he finishes grandly, twirling his moustache at one end.

  I study Mr Cornish, with his oiled beard and trendy new plaid shirt, dark pants, sockless shiny leather loafers and nice sporty silver car that drives him away at 3.57 every afternoon. We’re just the start of his teaching ‘journey’ – Miss Spencer said so. We’re the difficult stepping-stone Mr Cornish must jump from to reach a place in some inner-east private school for rich kids. I wonder if he really believes what he’s just said, or if it’s just something catchy he’s read somewhere.

  Mr Cornish, fresh out of teachers’ college, wilts a little as we walk out without a word.

  He doesn’t understand that every day Henry and I are alive, there is no comfortable shell and we are always at risk. It’s in the air we breathe, it’s in our bones, and people like Mr Cornish have Absolutely. No. Idea.

  PART ONE

  The Master said, ‘The gentleman hates not leaving behind a name when he is gone.’

  — Confucius, The Analects, Book XV, 20

  CHAPTER 1

  SMALL MISFORTUNES

  When my friends ask me what my life has been like so far, mostly I remember the rage.

  Like the time last year when I wrote a letter to my aunt in China – the youngest one on my mum’s side, the kind one – about how my dad is so strict that I’m never allowed to go to my friends’ birthday parties. Somehow, the letter got returned while I was at school, and Dad opened it – even though it had my name on it, not his – and read it.

  Then he went into my bedroom, and tore down every poster and picture and letter from friends that I had stuck on my walls and set them all on fire in the backyard. He stood there watching them burn to make sure the job was done properly, Mum whispered, as I surveyed the empty walls of my bedroom with a crushing weight sitting right in the centre of me. When I got home that day, all that was left of the things I’d drawn and collected since coming to this country as a little girl was a small pile of ashes that was still warm.

  I can’t remember if I cried. I’m sure I did. It’s a bit blurry after the part where I was made to understand that, because of that letter I wrote, the pile of ashes was all that was left of my most treasured things. Action, consequence. There wasn’t even a corner of anything I could save.

  I’ve left my bedroom walls bare since then, because nothing feels like it will be safe or permanent anymore. I haven’t even taken the blobs of Blu Tack down. What’s the point?

  Another time, when I tried to discuss the possibility of having ballet lessons like my friends do, straight after school in the assembly hall, Dad rolled up the Chinese newspaper he was reading and hit me across the side of the head with it for being insolent because There is no point to art. Things like wanting to learn ballet, or reading for fun, or painting, Teach you nothing useful.

  And there was that time he kicked a footstool clear across the room in front of me because I really, really wanted to have a sleepover at Michaela Shand’s house and I’d begged a few times too many. And the time he hit me across the back of the hands with a bamboo cane because I was rude to my mother. She’d been telling me to do some extra maths – in the spare time I had between doing rounds of extra maths, Chinese calligraphy, piano and violin – and I think I lost it, finally, and screamed at her to Just shut up and leave me alone, because Mum was the safer target.

  She’s always been the safer target.

  And, well, blam.

  Because children don’t ever answer back, in my family. They don’t have opinions. They don’t have the right to run their
mouths off. They are the property of their parents, especially if they’re girls, until they are the property of their husbands and are off their parents’ hands at last and for good. (Just another mouth to feed, useless.)

  I understand that it’s bad to have daughters, because your family name dies when you have daughters, and girls can’t do everything that boys can. It’s a proven fact. Everyone knows that. I’ve been told this so many times, I go into another space and time dimension in my head when the lectures start.

  But you can’t tell people stories like this, because then they will worry, or call home to see if you are all right, and then there will only be more rage.

  At me. Or in the air. Rage like air, present but invisible, permeating everything. Taking up the space behind my eyes that is not otherwise occupied by the tight, prickly feeling of wanting to cry.

  There is outside the house, and inside the house, and what is spoken of outside is not welcome inside, and vice versa. They are two spheres that must never meet, orbiting politely at a distance. With me in the middle, caught in the heavy gravity, slowly tearing apart.

  Actually, more even than the rage, maybe what I mostly feel is the fear.

  Not just mine. Which is always present, like a low-level background hum that only I can hear, ready to ramp up in a heartbeat. I’m constantly afraid of setting off all the little bombs I don’t even know I’ve trodden on until they go off in my face. Was it something I said? Was it the missing 48 per cent on my maths quiz? Was it because I asked for more tuckshop money? What?

  But there is also always his fear. The fear of people being rude to him because he speaks funny, of people not giving him the respect he deserves because even though he manages a Chinese restaurant now, he was once a promising young doctor in China who couldn’t get into a specialist medical college here, even though he tried four times.

  The last time he failed the exam, when I was ten, Dad went missing for hours, and my mother burst into tears the minute she heard his key in the door, at 3.12 the next morning. I know that, because the sound woke me up, and the numbers on my alarm clock seemed to grow redder and brighter as she cried, and he yelled.