Tiger Daughter Page 2

  Lots of things changed after that time, the fourth time. Things seemed even less possible than before.

  ‘I am forced,’ Dad shouted once, ‘to be nice to drunk people who are too stupid to understand that the hot, rolled, steamed cloth napkin that I bring them at the end of the meal is not for eating, but for wiping their faces and hands with!’

  Dad is wary of policemen, parking inspectors, tradies, council workers, people who aren’t like us. He speaks four Chinese languages fluently, Mum always tells me in a low voice, he loves classical Chinese poetry and can play two instruments to concert standard, But none of it is good enough in this country. I’ve never seen any of this. We don’t have music on in the house, just SBS Mandarin, and I never see anybody read. If Dad loves all that, it’s locked inside his head somewhere.

  I think Dad’s problem is that he’s too proud. He’s given up on being the surgeon he always wanted to be because he refuses to sit the exams ever again. He can’t ever take criticism, and he can’t ever yield. There is no other side, except his side. Always.

  Even without passing the specialist exams, Dad could work in the emergency department of any hospital tomorrow. They really need people like him – with perfect recall, steady hands and an unflappable demeanour. But he won’t do that. It’s not good enough. It’s too far short of the dreams that he had for himself. So he’s cut and burned that whole part of himself off, years and years of studying and training and dreaming, which is why he is now the angriest, most ruthless floor manager of the Hai Tong Tai Seafood Restaurant in history.

  He often spits, ‘They are missing out!’

  Meaning all the hospitals in this country and, possibly, everywhere else in the world.

  But I think he’s missing out. Because he won’t try anymore. One life, this life, that’s it, finished and done and over.

  Which explains why, sometimes, my dad doesn’t get out of bed for days, and only goes back to work at the restaurant when they call Mum to say they’re giving him the sack, and she is forced to plead on the phone, in rapid, desperate Cantonese, for his job. My mum who wouldn’t usually say boo to a goose yet can speak four languages herself, though she only uses one of them at home and another one at the Chinese grocery shop near our house, in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

  Mum knows all about the fear. She gave up everything when she married Dad – parties with friends, random, spontaneous outings, her university degree, her country, her parents, her sisters and brothers, the latest fashions, fun – and I know that being with him has made her smaller. I can tell when I look at the one photo album she brought with her to this country that she used to be a different person. She was decisive, I know she was. She was groovy. She was young.

  Now, too many choices on a Chinese restaurant menu will confuse her so badly that she’ll grow red in the face, her voice dwindling to a whisper, and leave it to Dad to order for all of us. She will always defer. She will always give way.

  And he never let her learn how to drive when we got here, so she never learnt to read a map and has to walk everywhere.

  We have to walk everywhere.

  If Mum runs out of household money for the month – for food, for public transport – she’s too afraid to ask for more because the trouble, and he gives her plenty, isn’t worth it. She’s been conditioned not to speak up, not to decide; just to exist, just to support. She’s like an anxious, hovering shadow. Not expecting much, not entitled to much.

  I sometimes catch her standing in front of her diminishing wardrobe of jewel-bright, ladylike skirt suits that she brought with her from China over a decade ago. I can tell from her face whether she’s fretting about whether the almost invisible darns are showing or agonising over whether to throw something away because it’s gone beyond saving. Like me, she wouldn’t dream of asking Dad for any clothes money because it will set him off; he’s like a walking lecture machine, and she knows he wouldn’t hand it over anyway.

  You’re not a doctor’s wife anymore. So there’s no point. That’s what Dad would say with his perfect, icy logic. So Mum mends, she makes do, she dwindles.

  Mum’s whole life has our small house – that smells faintly of mould and is always chilly and shrouded in stain-resistant plastic hall runners and furniture covers – at the dead centre of it. I know she had one job really, to have a son, and she managed to stuff even that up. I heard Dad shout that once, through their bedroom door, followed by the words failure and disappointment.

  So Mum and Dad are a package deal. If he says No, Mum’s Maybe, yes? becomes a No too. She’s expected to have a big bowl of soup for us to share, plus at least seven more dishes as well as rice on the table on the days that Dad isn’t working at the restaurant – eight dishes for luck, or there will be problems, no answering back. She’s also expected to iron all the tablecloths and napkins he brings home from the restaurant for her to wash, keep the house tidy, get the best discounts on fresh meat, fruit and vegetables at the market or the grocery store, get me to and from school on foot (No stops!) and have her hair and make-up perfect every day after she gets out of bed. And those are the very outer limits of her life.

  I imagine our footsteps, Mum’s and mine, carving these narrow lines into the path between home and school, between the local shops and home, without deviation; every day getting a little deeper. She actually doesn’t walk everywhere, she scurries, as if someone has a stopwatch on her. That’s the only way I can describe it. Mum’s life is a beep test. A beep test without end.

  You’re lucky to have this, to even be here in this country! Dad reminds Mum constantly. Because you were already old for an unmarried woman, and no good at your studies.

  No brain, no application, no prospects.

  I know that’s what Dad thinks I’m like, too, because he constantly calls me lazy, stupid, small and insolent and says that I watch too much television and will end up being nothing.

  I don’t care so much about the birthday parties or the sleepovers. I don’t care that I find out a lot later about things that friends have gone to that I was never invited to because most people have given up asking. When the answer is always No, people get the wrong idea about you: that you’re not interested, or just too difficult. A princess (even if you’re as opposite to a real princess as it’s possible to be). Or they think you just don’t like them. I get that.

  Well, I do care. But I have a plan.

  Because unlike my mum, one day I will be free. And even though I’m lazy, stupid, small and insolent and watch too much TV, my friend Henry is going to help me get there.

  CHAPTER 2

  BAD NEWS HAS WINGS

  Because I’m no good at maths, and love reading, long-distance running, dancing and drawing, Dad has pretty much given up on me and tells me all the time that I’m destined to be a waitress, like that’s a bad thing, or a housewife like my mother if I’m lucky.

  No amount of extra maths tuition on Saturday mornings or extra helpings of maths homework have been able to sew shut the maths-shaped gap in my brain. I’m impervious to improvement, I tell Henry, loftily, all the time. That’s a fancy way of saying I am resistant to mathematical theory in any shape or form.

  You do not take after me! Dad roars every time I bring another maths test home with all the letters of the alphabet on it, except the one that really matters.

  She takes after me, Mum will murmur tiredly, I was not very strong in maths.

  To which Dad will give his usual response in Chinese, Useless.

  Or, No brain.

  But my study buddy, Henry, is more stubborn than I am and keeps telling me, You’re getting better all the time. He’s made it his mission to get me to an A in maths the way I’m trying to get him to an A in English. Henry’s always complaining that English, the language and/or the subject, makes no sense, especially the writing of stories, and that nothing is sufficiently certain. I tell him it’s the opposite for me with maths – it’s all too sufficiently certain and there’s no room for improv
isation, which is what I am good at. I tell him English is like drawing, more free-flowing and imaginative, which Henry is good at too, although he doesn’t think so. But Henry’s pictures are like his maths – precise and detailed and internally consistent. He doesn’t think drawing is important to life on earth, the way I do.

  Henry’s family came from a different part of China than we did, and only arrived a year ago, so when he speaks he’s almost impossible to understand; that’s what all the other kids say. But we’re the only two Chinese kids in our class so, at first, he had to hang with me for necessity, and now we’re actually mates. When people want to talk to Henry, or vice versa, they have to go through me.

  He’s like a kid behind glass, kind of untouchable and remote. He won’t let anyone but me get too close, because he’s already hurrying on his way to somewhere else – somewhere better. And that’s the beauty of being Henry’s friend. Because when it all gets too much, and too hard, especially at home, he reminds me that one day things will change for both of us. They have to.

  ‘We’re comets,’ he will say simply. ‘We’re going to burn our way out of here and leave a trail that people can see.’

  My usual response to that? ‘Sure, keep believing that, mate.’

  But, still, it would be amazing if it came true.

  Henry’s dad, who left school at fifteen in China, works for a distant relative at the fresh fruit and vegetable markets near where we live. He gets up before dawn every morning, leaving Henry’s much younger mother – who can’t speak any English at all – at home all day by herself. Henry gets himself to and from school while his mum watches Chinese-language TV, and cries.

  Mum says it’s widely known, and talked about, what a bad mother Fay Xiao is. Often when Henry’s dad gets home from the market, late in the afternoon, Henry’s mum won’t have moved at all from where she’s been sitting in her armchair opposite the TV. The house will be dark and cold, and there will be no food on the table or in the fridge. On the very worst days, when she’s paralysed by sadness, she won’t even have washed her face or brushed her hair. Henry says when his mum isn’t crying, she’s screaming at his dad, who is like this tense, angry knot all the time.

  ‘The house is either silent, or on fire,’ Henry tells me, half in Mandarin and half in English, which I insist that he uses so that he can practise.

  ‘Since you’re stuck here, like I am,’ I remind him casually, ‘you might as well try to speak English.’

  And Henry will screw up his face and end up making both of us laugh helplessly with the twisted words that come out of his mouth. ‘Rs are kind of optional in Chinese, remember?’ he snorts, as we laugh at each other in a way that Mr Cornish’s before-school English class has no right to do.

  ‘Stand in my shoes, be inside my skin,’ Henry once said grimly, ‘and then you may laugh.’

  I tell Henry about my dad all the time, all the things he does, and Henry completely gets it – how fury is like this thing that holds the entire house up; how all of us are suspended like hot-air balloons and drifting further and further away from each other, and from our true selves. Henry understands how anger has tides and temperatures and speeds that can suck you down, or spit you out, depending on the day, the hour, the moment – changing you forever.

  ‘Who knows what would happen if, suddenly, all that anger disappeared?’ Henry said once. ‘What would we do with ourselves then?’

  ‘We would feel joy,’ I’d replied immediately, sure of it. ‘Life wouldn’t seem so … narrow.’

  ‘Yes,’ Henry had replied simply, understanding right away.

  Henry wants an A in English to match all the other ones he gets for science, maths, IT and design and technology. One day, he wants to build aeroplanes from the ground up, from wheels to seat covers. He is obsessed with flying, with machines, with speed and power, with speaking the international language of numbers so that he will never feel tongue-tied again and can talk to anyone, from any country, in numbers and pictures and fiendish 3D diagrams.

  His plan is to escape his awful home life by going for a place at that big high school that’s so far away from home – near some huge mansions by the sea – that it could be on another planet. Just about everything will be solved, Henry says, if he can get that place at that school full of clever kids. And Miss Spencer is in on Henry’s plan as well. That’s who Henry got his idea from – the idea that people who come out of that selective school by the sea can do anything, and be anything. It gives him the feeling of infinite possibility. And that feeling, of being able to do anything, or be anything, is very much missing from Henry’s life. So the mere idea of that school, and going to that school – even if it will take him two separate bus lines to get there, over an hour on the road each way, or four hours of extra study at night – is something so powerful, it gets him out of bed when he doesn’t want to.

  Against my better judgement, Henry’s convinced me to sit the entrance exam as well. That’s our project for me, even though I still think of it as largely theoretical and almost wholly fantastical. He says if the school sees one of the stories I write, and the way that I draw, how hard and how far I can run, they will want me to go there too. Mostly, I think Henry’s dreaming – how could a school like that want someone who can’t even do long division properly? – but a small part of me is excited that I might have a chance at a different life too. Just a small part.

  The part of me that isn’t sensible or realistic.

  Miss Spencer and Henry put in all the forms for me. The forms claimed that I live at Henry’s home address, and I’d asked, shocked, ‘But what about my parents? They would never say yes to this.’

  Miss Spencer’s mouth had gone all tight and funny and she’d said, ‘We’ll deal with that hurdle when we come to it, Wen.’

  When I reach the classroom on Tuesday morning, Henry isn’t in his usual seat in the corner, up the back. I don’t bother asking Nikki or Michaela where Henry is, because most people don’t talk to him; in fact, they seem a little afraid to.

  In the beginning they tried, and some kids – the jokers and the mean ones – even stole his phone out of his hands when he was looking at it and held it away from him for hours, or shoved him around or tripped him up, just for a laugh. But people leave him alone now because there is something so wise, and sad, and clearly special about Henry. He always knows the answer – any class, any subject, any question. If you’re a kid that can’t even speak properly but can’t ever be caught out, that means something around here. People just let him be these days because he looks like, any moment, he could break apart.

  Miss Spencer’s up the front, glancing with a frown at Henry’s empty seat and taking the roll, when the deputy principal, bosomy blonde-tipped Mrs Douglas-Williams, hurries into the classroom and whispers in her ear. Miss Spencer actually drops her clipboard, which falls to the ground with a bang like a gun going off.

  We all jump, muttering among ourselves when Miss Spencer leaves the room with Mrs Douglas-Williams, a hand over her mouth, and doesn’t come back at all for the rest of the day.

  Mr Fraser, the geography teacher who’s really bad with kids, takes over. You can tell he hates kids, and wishes he were something else, like an international airline pilot, or a spy. And we wonder what could have happened to Miss Spencer to make her just leave like that. She loves us, and she loves teaching, the way Mr Fraser doesn’t, you can tell.

  We all forgot about Henry, completely. Even me.

  The next day, Henry’s still not in his chair and I’m the only one who knows that yesterday and today are connected because while all the other kids are laboriously writing a narrative – which I’ve already finished because I could write stories all day, it’s not even work, honestly – Miss Spencer takes me aside in the tiny staff kitchen next door to our classroom.

  ‘It’s about Henry,’ she says, blinking rapidly, and something inside me switches to high alert immediately. ‘I know how close you are …’ and I’m horrified whe
n her big brown eyes become shiny. I go hot, then cold, thinking of all the things that might have happened to Henry. Like, did he have an accident?

  I relax a little when she says, ‘You need to convince him to come back to school. It’s really, really important. The entrance exam is in less than two weeks. The finish line is right there. You’re almost there, the two of you. You’ve worked so hard.’

  ‘Has he got cold feet?’ I ask, wrinkling my nose in consternation. ‘I can’t do it without him. We were supposed to do this together. I can’t believe he’s thinking of quitting! That’s so selfish.’

  As soon as I say the word selfish, Miss Spencer places both her hands on my shoulders and closes her eyes tightly, drawing a deep breath. I’m horrified all over again when I see that her mouth is … quivering. When she opens her eyes, there are tears in them. I don’t know what to do – should I just pat her shoulder? Find her a tissue? Call for help?

  As I’m panicking about what to do, Miss Spencer finally lets go of me, crossing her arms and stepping back. She’s wearing black trousers and a white shirt today and looks like a sad panda with a cloud of brown hair around her small, heart-shaped face. I don’t know what to say and neither does she, because I can almost see her picking the words she’s going to use, in her head; examining each one and dropping some of them in favour of others. She’s silent for a long time.

  Her voice is funny, but her words, when she finally speaks, are very careful. ‘I don’t know … if you know Henry’s mother, Fay?’

  I shake my head, confused about how Henry’s mother – his silent, ghostlike mother who refuses to do any actual mothering and is staging a sit-in protest about her own life – could have any impact on Henry’s decision not to do the exam. Once Henry decides to do something, that’s it, it’s done. Or as good as. There is this part of him that’s made of actual iron.