Tiger Daughter Read online

  ‘Doesn’t she want him to go ahead with it?’ I ask in a small voice, and I’m worried about me, I admit. I can’t do it by myself. It was our plan, not just mine. I’m not brave enough. I’m only sharing Henry’s dream. The dream was too big for me in the first place.

  Miss Spencer makes a weird, hiccupping noise and shakes her head so that her tight curls and big gold earrings bounce around. ‘I don’t think Mrs Xiao even knew what Henry was planning. She had nothing to do with it …’ Her mouth starts turning down again at the corners.

  I step back in alarm, trying to put some distance between me and her.

  ‘… and everything to do with it.’ Miss Spencer suddenly looks down at her shoes, her shoulders shaking.

  I’m used to my dad telling me No to everything; how final and hopeless and immovable that feels. ‘Did she tell him No?’ I ask tentatively as Miss Spencer smudges the heel of one hand across her eyes. ‘Do you want me to explain how important the entrance exam is to Henry’s mum? Do you want me to change her mind? I can speak to her,’ I add eagerly. ‘She’ll understand me. We share a common dialect, the same way Henry and I do. I can go over there and talk to her.’

  Miss Spencer finally sweeps her wet, smudgy brown eyes back up to mine, and says in a low voice, ‘Wen, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Henry’s mum... she died yesterday. Henry was getting ready for school and found her in their backyard. By the time he got outside there wasn’t anything he could do. His dad had already been gone for hours. We only know because the police called us and I went over to check on him and there he was...’

  There’s suddenly no air in the room, and I start shaking too.

  ‘... trying to deal with it.’ A tear slides down Miss Spencer’s cheek, and we both pretend it isn’t there.

  ‘I’m really afraid,’ she pulls herself together with difficulty, the words forming on her lips even though I’m unable to make sense of them through the roaring in my ears, ‘for Henry. He needs to come back from this. He can’t be allowed to give up, not now. We have to do everything we can to help him.’

  In art class in the afternoon, the boys give me stick for the entire period. But I just ignore them. I have to finish it, and Henry has to understand what it means. Fatima gives my arm a quick squeeze of encouragement as she passes to get more sequins and glue, but like most of my other friends, doesn’t know what to say. Someone in the principal’s office must have blabbed after they hung up on the police and what’s happened to Henry’s mum is everywhere, everyone knows already, it’s the worst thing anyone can possibly imagine, you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.

  ‘Ooooooh,’ some of the boys say. ‘Wen’s got the hots for Henry. Just look at what she’s making him!’

  I know it’s over the top. I can’t help it. I’m trying to tell Henry how important he is, this is, how important our plan is for the both of us. How dreams, just like food, can keep you alive. I’m trying to tell him that someone cares. Not just in words, but in cardboard and paper, plastic beads and glitter glue. As vital as words are, sometimes they aren’t enough.

  After school, Mum is waiting for me as usual, her long, sleek black hair tucked behind her ears. She’s wearing a neat pink skirt suit and white blouse, her white handbag slung over one arm in exactly the same shade of white as her high-heeled shoes. Pearl earrings. Immaculate, just the way Dad likes her to dress, even when he can’t see her, even though he won’t give her money for any new clothes. She represents him, you see, at all times. Which means she never wears jeans or gym gear or thongs. She doesn’t even own any.

  She looks very pretty. If you don’t look too closely, you can’t see that her suit is fading around the neckline and armpits, and that she’s had to stitch up the right pocket of her blazer so that it doesn’t hang lower than the other pocket. On the surface, she’s shipshape and spick-and-span.

  I don’t have time to explain to Mum what I’m doing, I just run all the way to Henry’s house, which we have passed almost every day of our lives since we arrived in this country. It’s on the main road, almost in the shadow of a huge, concrete pedestrian bridge that goes over the top of the traffic to get from my side of the suburb to Henry’s side. They say over fifty thousand cars travel past his house every day. I don’t even know how he can study for the honking, the fumes and the noise from all the cars and long-distance trucks that speed by on their way to somewhere else, somewhere distant.

  Trailing behind, protesting, Mum does what she always does. She follows.

  When I stop outside Henry’s place, my heart is hammering and sweat is running down my back, under my school sweatshirt, between my shoulderblades.

  When Mum demands in Chinese what we’re doing here, why I made her run in her only pair of good shoes left, I tell her to be quiet, because this is important. Her mouth snaps shut in outrage. I know I will pay for this insolence later somehow, because Mum tells Dad about everything that I do, right or wrong. Mostly wrong, because after Dad hears about my latest misdeed, or failure of judgement, he will usually quote something obscure from the philosopher Confucius like There are young plants that fail to produce blossoms, and blossoms that fail to produce fruit, and my parents will frown at me, together, in the certainty that my future is likely to be blossomless, or fruitless, if I continue in the disastrous way that I’m going.

  I study the front of Henry’s house while Mum fumes beside me, every hair, and her foofy white blouse, still immaculate, while I’m puffing and red-faced and sweaty.

  As always, the curtains in the window that looks out onto the tiny, patchy front yard are tightly drawn and there are weeds everywhere, in all the beds, because weeds are the least of anyone’s concerns, in the Xiao household. I know Henry’s bedroom is down the back, right beside the laundry. It looks onto the twisted apple tree, which is almost the only living thing in the Xiaos’ entire backyard. He told me that. He said even the grass had given up, and that they don’t grow grass back there, they grow mushrooms and snails.

  Nothing survives but that tree.

  I can’t imagine what Henry saw, or felt, when he woke to go to school two days ago. What did he do? What would I have done, if it were my mother I saw through the window? I go cold inside, even though my pretty mother, dressed all in white and pink like a neat gift, is standing right here, anger and incomprehension and fear rising and rising under her skin, like blood.

  I ring the doorbell and hear nothing. No footsteps, no noises. Maybe no one is home. But I know Henry must be home. In his tiny, peeling bedroom filled with Chinese books and English books that would tell anyone who is paying attention that he is a boy on a mission to get up and out of here, the street of fifty thousand cars and trucks. I ring the doorbell again and again.

  In the front window of the small, single-storey house next door, built in exactly the same style as Henry’s but with added black mould growing up the striped awning that hangs over it, I see a curtain twitch, and know that someone is watching me and my hovering, overdressed mother. That Henry’s horrible, nosy old neighbour, who yells Ching Chong Chinaman! over the side fence at Henry’s family whenever he hears any of them moving around the garden, might even rush out and tell us, in awful detail that I don’t want to know, what happened to Fay Xiao.

  What she did to herself, the silly cow.

  With Mum now hissing at me (‘Your father told us no stops, Wen! No stops! Is this not a stop?’) I crouch hurriedly at the base of the steel security door and fumble the thing that I made in art class out of my backpack, feeding it under the door. I make sure the lavish confection of cardboard and paper, beads and glue, disappears entirely through the gap so that it’s safely inside Henry’s house. Where he might find it before it’s too late.

  I made it this shape because I don’t want him to lose heart. It’s as simple and corny as that.

  Inside the card, all I wrote, because today I had no words to describe what I was feeling, was:

  You’re not going anywhere without me.

/>   And I’m not doing this without you.

  As I crouch there, listening at the door for a little too long, Mum surges forward and wrenches me up by the arm onto my feet. And this time it’s Mum running home in her good shoes, dragging me all the way, the fear hanging over both of us.

  CHAPTER 3

  NOT DO, NOT DIE

  Bù zuò, bù sǐ

  When we get home, the landline is already ringing. Dad is checking, like he always does, that everything is in its place in our little world, and that I’m doing my homework and not snacking to the point where you get fat.

  I’m still out of breath, and my forearm hurts from where it was clenched in Mum’s apprehensive claw the whole way home. I shake my head when she gestures at me with the handset. I can’t speak to him today; he’ll be able to tell from my voice that something is very wrong. I’ll have no answers to the inevitable questions about school, the icy sarcasm, the reminders of my many and various failings. I’m not in the mood to be picked on, or compared to unproductive trees today.

  Mum doesn’t tell Dad about the detour because she still doesn’t understand why we were standing outside that woman’s badly kept house on the main road. She says this immediately after she hangs up on the sounds of the cooking and wait staff at the Hai Tong Tai Seafood Restaurant stuffing down a quick, early dinner before the dinner rush begins.

  ‘Why were you sending …’ Her eyes widen at the memory of the heart-shaped thing I shoved under the front door. ‘… notes to the Xiao boy? Is he your boyfriend?’ At the words boy and friend, in rapid Mandarin, Mum’s voice rises, panicked. ‘No boyfriend!’ she insists. ‘Too young for boyfriend! What will I tell your father?’

  I can’t stop my face crumpling as I reply in the same language, ‘Henry de māmā, zìshā.’

  Henry’s mum killed herself.

  There is no way to dress up words like that. They are as blunt and final as they sound.

  And they sound so wrong in my mouth that I can’t help crying, just like Miss Spencer did.

  Mum freezes where she’s standing and inhales sharply, as if she’s drowning and going under a wave, the exact same way I did on our last school excursion to Cape Schanck to look at an old lighthouse and a bunch of rockpools. I’d lost my footing on the rocks and had to be saved out of a rip by a student teacher, who ended up with stitches trying to protect me from getting smashed. All I can remember is going under and going under and going under until it seemed that all the water was in me and through me; there was no beginning or end to the water. I couldn’t reach the light, for all the weight of the water above me, and I was so far out, by the end, that I was flotsam. It was the closest I’ve ever come to just giving up.

  Mum’s eyes are very bright as she puts one hand over her mouth, briefly, then leans against the kitchen bench for support.

  She doesn’t try to touch me as I cry, or come any closer. There are a thousand expressions flitting across her face as she watches me silently, and I think she’s actually going to say something else when she murmurs instead, ‘Bù zuò, bù sǐ.’

  It’s my turn to inhale sharply.

  The words mean, Not do, not die. What she said was: it was Henry’s mum’s fault for doing something stupid that led to this tragedy. Action, consequence.

  Fay Xiao should have known better.

  ‘How can you say that?’ I reply, shocked, in English. ‘Henry’s mum died and that’s all you can say?’

  ‘To show weakness like that is … unfixable,’ Mum replies fiercely in Chinese, almost hissing in distress. ‘If every woman did that in a moment of, of … weakness, of pain, the world – it would be full of motherless children! I abhor her actions. She has cursed herself, and her son. She has marked him forever. Can’t you see that?’

  ‘She was sad,’ I shout. ‘She was sad enough to kill herself, Mum.’

  ‘We are all sad, Wen,’ Mum says, tiredly. ‘Some of us just hide it better. Now go and shower.’ She turns away and takes off her immaculate pink jacket before strapping on a black apron and knotting up her shiny hair in a low, rough ponytail. ‘Do your homework, especially your maths. It’s the only way to get better at it. Do it until he has no more words to say on the matter because words will no longer be necessary. Dinner is in twenty minutes, no arguments.’

  When I think of my dad and my mum, I actually think of two different philosophies of life, two ‘Ways’ of being, if you like.

  Dad, in my head, is always this famous Chinese philosopher called Confucius who said helpful things like Being good as a son and obedient as a young man is, perhaps, the root of a man’s character, and Mum is this other famous Chinese philosopher called Lao Tzu who would have replied (more calmly than perhaps he was feeling, if he was arguing with someone as infuriating and inflexible as my father):

  Know contentment

  And you will suffer no disgrace;

  Know when to stop

  And you will meet with no danger.

  You can then endure.

  You can tell which Way makes more sense to me, because I’m not a son, and I’m not a man, not even a young one, not now, not ever. Confucius, I always think, when Dad hits me with another round of ancient philosophical wisdom, or just with whatever is handy in warning against talking back, is a fish bicycle to most Chinese girls. His Way has no room for us in it anywhere, and I have to suppress an acute eye-roll every time I hear a quote about what a gentleman or scholar would do in similar circumstances, or the shortcomings of small men.

  Not my actual, specific problem, Dad, I always think. No men in this house but you. Small or otherwise.

  I’m reminded of all this the minute Dad gets home, near midnight as usual. He always makes a huge racket coming into the house, because he can; he’s worked hard all day, and he’s tired, and he wants Mum (and me) to know exactly how tired he is, how very late the hour. I haven’t been able to sleep anyway, wondering what Henry and his dad are doing right now, in that cold, unwelcoming house.

  I hear Mum tell Dad hurriedly about Henry’s mum’s suicide before Dad’s even had time to hang up his overcoat. And Dad uses that actual word, disgrace, after a moment of shocked silence, and then says dismissively, ‘Fay Xiao was weak, that much was well known. She did not conduct herself properly while she was alive, and now she has brought Ah Yuan and his connections great shame. We must all learn from this.’

  I lie there in the dark, unable to sleep after Mum and Dad move away down the hall towards the kitchen, burning with the great unfeelingness of him, how the biggest crisis in Henry’s life has been reduced to a teaching moment – a veiled warning to my mother to endure, or else.

  On the way to school in the morning, Mum picks up her pace in her tan high heels as we pass Henry’s house, which looks as closed and blank as ever.

  As she drags at my arm, hissing, ‘Hurry, you’ll be late,’ her head turned sharply away from the Xiao house so as not to have to look at it, or consider what’s going on beyond its bland, blond-brick façade, I see a man’s hand draw the closed curtains in the front windows even more tightly shut. I crane my neck back in wonder that Henry’s dad is actually home, during the day.

  Because Mr Xiao brings the fresh stock back from the wholesale fruit and vegetable sellers in a rusty truck before the local market opens, then hauls things like huge bunches of bananas all day, he has to get up every morning before it’s light (except Mondays), returning around four in the afternoon to see to Henry’s dinner. My dad is usually at home in bed until at least ten in the morning because he works like a dog until late and doesn’t leave home for work until just after eleven.

  Dad’s and Mr Xiao’s paths should never cross, but the Chinese community here revolves around the local market and the local shops, and I wonder how Mr Xiao can bear everyone knowing. When we stopped (very quickly) at the pharmacy for more bandaids for my eczema, even the pharmacist, Mrs Xenakis, wanted to have a chat about the Xiao family and asked if she could do anything to help that poor boy and his father
.

  When we reach school, and Mum has tottered away in her impractical shoes, matching tan bag and neat mauve skirt suit with discreet repairs to the lining under the armpits that no one ever sees except me, Miss Spencer catches me at the lockers before she goes in to mark the class roll. In her hand is a plain manila envelope stuffed so full of papers that it can’t be sealed properly. She has a thinner one for me, with my name on it.

  ‘Henry’s not here again,’ she says hurriedly. ‘When I called his house this morning, his father said he wasn’t feeling well, and I didn’t want to push it. I know you go past his place on your way home – Henry’s told me that before. Can you leave him these? We can’t let things slip. It’s too important – especially now. It’s revision. You’ve got the benefit of me talking at you all day, Wen, but he doesn’t.’

  I have to remember to shut my mouth after Miss Spencer walks away, and put the envelope for Henry into the mesh side pocket of my backpack so that seeing it, facing out all day, will remind me about what I have to do. We’re going to have to make a stop on the way home whether Mum likes it or not.

  ‘Not again,’ Mum says in Mandarin as I halt outside the Xiao house. ‘No. There’s nothing we can do. We shouldn’t get involved. Your father, his father, wouldn’t want that!’

  I give Mum such a fierce look that she drops her hand from my elbow as if she’s been scalded. I swing my backpack off my shoulder and place it on the ground, crouching to pull the rolled-up envelope of papers Miss Spencer gave me out of the side pocket. Before I think too hard about what I’m doing, I march to the door and press the doorbell three times.

  Henry will speak to me, I’m sure of it.

  There’s a long silence before I hear the shuffle of slippers approaching the front door. There’s the sound of a chain being pushed across and the wooden door finally opens, but I can’t see who’s standing there because the heavy wire security door is impossible to see through in the bright afternoon sunlight – I can only make out a vague dark shape. I say politely in Chinese, ‘Miss Spencer, the teacher, she wants Henry to do this homework. It’s very important.’