What We All Long For Page 6

  When she decided to live on College Street, Tuyen’s parents were angry. After all, that was where they had lived when they first arrived from Vietnam with their two daughters. In a rooming house on Ulster Street before Tuyen was born, and before her brother Binh was born, their small terrified family had occupied one room on the top floor, sharing the kitchen and bathroom with students from the university. By the time Tuyen came along, the Vus had moved to Alexandra Park. Then they moved out of the housing development to a damp house near the market. The rooms were never warm in the winter, and they were sweltering in the summers. Now they lived beyond all that drama of material poverty, in Richmond Hill.

  Tuyen disliked the house in Richmond Hill. It was artificial. The whole development seemed highly contrived, as if it were made all of cardboard and set down quickly and precariously. Someone’s idea of luxury, which was really antiseptic, and for all its cars and spaciousness, it was nevertheless rootless and desolate.

  Each time she came home for a visit, her father would ask, “What you want to go live there for? I’m finished with you this time. Why you want to spend good money on a cesspool like that?” By “this time,” he meant unlike the last time, when she dropped out of draftsmanship and started sculpting. He had forgiven her that time because he remained convinced that he could persuade her to go back.

  “It’s my shit hole, Bo.” She knew that he would not abandon her. She was his possession, like his whole family was.

  “You bring these children here and this is what happens to them. They disobey.”

  “You didn’t bring me here, Bo, I was born here. Wellesley Hospital. Remember?”

  “And on top of everything they talk back to you. They have no respect. Why do I buy this big house for you to go live where we started out?”

  “I’m not moving out of the city, Bo. You’ll see me.”

  It had been four years since she’d left, and this was their exchange each time she returned. The same words, the same answers. It had become a kind of play with them. On her visits she raided the refrigerator and borrowed money from her mother and rifled through her sisters’ clothing. Tuyen spent nothing on clothes, and even if her sisters’ tastes were miserable, she managed to look good in their seconds. She was the youngest, which is why she got away with things her siblings didn’t. Her father had been much stricter with them. Ai and Lam and Binh would never have dreamed of breaking the rules as she had. Their father, Tuan, had them on a tight rein. But Tuyen had been able to somehow circumvent or disarm her father. Perhaps he was growing weaker with age, or perhaps he was baffled by her strong resolve in everything. Tuyen never gave in to him when he said that she should do this or that. He found himself having to reason with her, rather than order her. He didn’t mind it at all except in important matters.

  After she’d spent the morning trying unsuccessfully to convince Jackie and Oku that there was something wrong with Carla, Tuyen shambled her way to Richmond Hill, intending to borrow some money from her mother. The money from her last installation party—money, that is, from the booze and the donations—was just about done. In the daytime she could count on her mother to be home alone. But more importantly she wanted to find out if her mother knew what Binh was up to. She knew that she had to ask this in a delicate way; she didn’t want to open up any grief in her mother or cause her any pain. She had hoped to avoid her father and another argument about where she lived.

  Her mother was home, still in her room, but so too, uncharacteristically, was her father. She had expected him to be downtown by now, preparing for the lunch crowd. He was in the kitchen, still in his pyjamas. He looked vulnerable, his hair receding and thinning, the skin sagging a bit on his stillfit body. The small scar near his mouth made the lines on his left cheek even deeper. He seemed tired. He smiled faintly at her, a delight passing briefly over his face, and then he launched into his usual.

  “Why do I spend money on a big-time education for you to go live without your family? How you think a family works? Same house, same money, same life.”

  Tuyen knew this was her father’s way of welcoming her and saying that he loved her. Love for him meant a kind of gruff duty and care.

  “Makes sense for you, Bo, but I didn’t leave the family. Am I not here, right here, now? I just have to be on my own.”

  “That is not sense. On your own for what? What is out there?”

  “I don’t know, Bo. That’s just it, right? I don’t know. You don’t know.”

  “Stupid girl. I know. You go. You see.”

  “Bo, why don’t you come visit me, then? But call first,” she added too quickly.

  “Don’t you worry. I won’t come there. You stay there with your dirty friends. Let me tell you, friends will take you but they won’t bring you back. And don’t ask me for any money.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Bo! You think because you have a little money, it makes you better? It just means that you sacrifice everyone around you. That’s how people make money …” It was out before she could stop herself. Then she didn’t know what to say. It was not something she was supposed to speak about. About her oldest brother, whom she had never met but who had been lost, literally, years ago. “Bo …” Her father gave her a wounded look and left the kitchen.

  Lam, one of Tuyen’s older sisters, had overheard them. She’d been doing the morning dishes at the sink, her hair open and draped to her waist. Lam had never cut her hair because she thought she was ugly in every other respect. She had a large face with prominent cheekbones. She cultivated the black glistening hair like a treasured crop. She herself had never dared to talk back to her father.

  “You think you’re so smart, eh?” Her voice slid into Tuyen like a knife in butter. “I know why you live downtown.”

  “Then why, huh?”

  Tuyen was really more concerned with what she’d just said to her father. Lam, she knew, resented the overindulgence Tuyen got from everyone. She would never have had the nerve to answer her father in the way that Tuyen did. She chafed like the rest under his rule but didn’t dare disobey him. Tuyen was the baby; Tuyen and, before her, Binh, they were pampered. Lam and Ai were reminders, she suspected, of their parents’ past, their other life; the life that was cut in half one night on a boat to Hong Kong. Lam and Ai had become shadows; two little girls forgotten in the wrecked love of their parents. At times Lam had felt wrong for surviving, wrong for existing in the face of her parents’ tragedy.

  “I know, I know.” Lam sounded childish in her own ears.

  “I don’t care what you know.”

  Tuyen was dismissive, as she’d always been of Lam. She was still thinking that she’d committed the worst faux pas with her father. Lam looked at her with a mix of sibling hatred and pure envy.

  “I will tell them about you.”

  “Why? Why would you be that evil?”

  Lam was taken aback. She felt withered, she felt like the younger sister. She pointed a finger at Tuyen and left the kitchen, stupefied and enraged.

  Tuyen hadn’t meant to accuse her father of anything. She had meant to humour him, if not get him to understand. She spent a few more minutes in the kitchen thinking about this, convincing herself that her father did not take it as an indictment of what had happened so long ago. Perhaps he understood her remark as criticizing his drive for making money. That would be better. Besides, he had never told her the whole story. And certainly never how he felt. She had merely overheard, here and there, snippets of conversations. She had made sense out of nonsense. She comforted herself that it was just their usual sparring; that her father had not made out any reference to the loss of her brother Quy. She felt no danger from Lam, and anyway, she told herself, she was making a different life. On her own.

  The threat from Lam was just childish. Lam would no more hurt her parents than Tuyen would. At least never intentionally. Tuyen knew this. If there were some way she could hurt Tuyen without hurting them, perhaps. So she was in no danger from Lam. Tuyen had known what b
uttons to push with Lam and Ai since she was small, and growing up hadn’t altered her reckless use of them.

  She made her way to her mother’s room. Her mother and father had stopped sleeping in the same room when they moved to Richmond Hill. What with her mother’s insomnia and her father’s equal sleeplessness, their schedules of paltry intermittent sleep did not coincide. So as not to disturb each other, or as Tuyen suspected, so as not to have to talk to each other, to go over the worn language of disappointment, they each had a separate room.

  Cam was lying in bed, her head propped up on pillows, her mouth slightly open. The room was dimmed to the daylight outside by heavy curtains. Tuyen watched the shallow breathing lift her mother’s chest. On the night table was a brass incense burner and the perpetual photograph of the brother she had never met. All the innocence reflected there was doubled in her mother’s sleeping face. Tuyen felt a surge of resentment for the boy, a familiar feeling. One that embarrassed her now, but one that had become a reflex to any image of him. Not that she hated him, she didn’t know him, he had simply been an impediment to … to what? To things she no longer needed, had never needed, but observed as missing. She thought of picking her way through the room looking for more letters—thinking there was some way of using them in her lubaio installation—but then, adoring her mother’s sleeping face, she changed her mind. Tuyen closed the door quietly, hoping she hadn’t awakened Cam, and went back to the kitchen.

  Tuyen stayed in the kitchen, waiting for her father to return. Opening the cupboards, she scooped cans into her bag. She was also hoping to find one of her father’s stashes of money. He always hid small amounts of money around the house, “just in case,” he said.

  She always meant to be more sensitive to Lam and Ai, more understanding to her parents. She would arrive at the house with the best of intentions in that regard—to show them all that she had made a different life for herself and was no longer bound by the smallness of family. But on encountering her real family, not the one she had analysed with pity and felt compassion for, her resolve invariably blew up into tantrums. She always fell into the traps of anger and the same pettiness she abhorred in them. She paced the kitchen, counting up the traps she had fallen into in the space of an hour; she had taken offence at a photograph of a poor boy, she had hurt her father, and she had hurt Lam too. Even if Lam had really started it, Tuyen was supposed to be above it.

  She had left the embrace of her family—truthfully, not embrace, her family did not embrace. They fed you, they clothed you, they fattened you, but they did not embrace. Yet they held you. With duty, with obligation, with honour, with an unspoken but viselike grip of emotional debt. Tuyen wanted no duty. And perhaps that is what she had arrived at. Yet she wanted an embrace so tight, and with such a gathering of scents and touches. She wanted sensuality, not duty. She wanted to be downtown in the heat of it. Everyone walking in the city was senseless. She loved that. Everyone escaping the un-touch of familiars and the scents of fatalism gathered in close houses. Familiarity was not what she wanted or what would make her feel as if she were in the world. It was the opposite. The alien touch of sidewalks, the hooded looks of crowds. She loved the unfriendliness, the coolness. It was warmer than the warmth of her family in Richmond Hill.

  Theirs wasn’t warmth, it was readiness, a businesslike readiness to have all the world had to offer by way of things. A voracious getting. They had everything and nothing. They didn’t even like or savour having everything, they simply had it as a matter of course. Cars, cellphones, computers, expensive clothes, unused bicycles, unused toys, unused kitchen gadgets, unused birthday gifts, gifts that only had a momentary charge of excitement that was not excitement but agitation. The rooms of their big house in Richmond Hill were stuffed with clumsy furniture. There was a television in each room, turned on endlessly and loudly. Her mother, Cam, didn’t throw away anything. So there were generations of furniture and generations of pots and pans and generations of all the things a house can use. Then there were papers of all kinds: pay stubs reaching back to when the family first came to the country from Vietnam, every single receipt for any item they bought over the years above fifty dollars, every bank statement when they finally trusted a bank with their money, and every lease of a room or apartment or house they had rented on their way to Richmond Hill.

  Her mother had cried the day she moved out.

  “I need to get out,” Tuyen told her.

  “Why? Why? Why do you want to leave us?”

  “I’m not leaving you … but look, look around here. It’s schizophrenic.”

  “Don’t you use words like that with me. I know what they mean. That’s not good of you.”

  “Okay, I mean there’s too much clutter, too many things, I can’t think.”

  “You were always a bad child. You think you know everything.”

  Her mother’s words belied her limp body sitting in a chair, eyes red, tissue paper wet from tears balled up in her hand.

  “Ma, Ma, I’ll be fine. It’s not a sad thing. It’s great …”

  “I am not giving you your birth certificate. You will lose it. You’re not good with business. And your health card—give it back to me.”

  Cam suddenly sprang up, wrestling Tuyen’s bag from her.

  “Ma, what if I get sick?”

  Cam went limp in the chair again. “That is what I’m saying. Why are you leaving? Anything can happen.”

  “Jeez, Ma, it won’t.”

  Tuyen’s mother had a mad fear of being caught without proof, without papers of some kind attesting to identity or place. Cam had laminated everything in sight when she discovered a shop, Vickram’s, that did laminating. If she could wrap everything in plastic or laminate it, Tuyen felt, she would. Which is why the carpeting in their spacious house had a path of plastic running over regularly travelled surfaces. And the chairs and couches were not only Scotchgarded but covered in protective plastic that made sitting the most uncomfortable act. Cam’s main preoccupation, though, was birth certificates, identity cards, immigration papers, and citizenship papers and cards. She checked incessantly and duplicated them tenfold, keeping them in cookie jars, vanity drawers, and breadboxes. With all that anxiety, Cam was slender in frame and quick in movement.

  Her parents’ eccentricities by turns amused and frustrated Tuyen. She would regale her friends with stories of her mother’s attempt to plastic over every surface, of how Mr. Vickram loved her mother because she was responsible for one-third of his earnings, and that if they ever saw her coming back from one of her visits wrapped in bubble wrap, they should not be surprised. In fact, Tuyen mounted an installation once of herself in bubble wrap, with stickers from various countries pasted on her naked body. Calling the installation Traveller she instructed the audience to lift her and pass her around the room in silence for ten minutes. But then there was the other side of the eccentricities: she hated knowing that they came from a real moment of devastation, not personal quirkiness—her mother’s insomnia and her frantic retrievals of hidden or lost papers at night, her father hiding money in shoes and books. And the incoherent fights between Cam and Tuan about who was to blame.

  “I didn’t see …”

  “What is the point?”

  “It was the authorities …”

  “How long should we have …”

  “Why didn’t I see?”

  “It makes no sense to argue. It’s done.”

  “We shouldn’t have come.”

  “Do you remember anything?”

  “What life is here, tell me?”

  “You write and you write and you write. Do I say no?”

  “Why? Why should you? Next time I won’t tell you, that’s all.”

  “Quiet.”

  And about sending money abroad, about who was selfish, who was unwilling. Tuyen had eventually moved out of the uneasy luxury of her parents’ house when she couldn’t bear overhearing any more.

  She not so much overheard as sensed, since her own u
nderstanding of Vietnamese was deliberately minimal. She’d only been able to gather in fragments, and in the letters she read surreptitiously and despite herself, the story that haunted them; the one that made her mother insomniac. The story about the beautiful boy Quy, the child they had lost in the South China Sea while fleeing Vietnam. Quy meant “precious” and Cam and Tuan tortured themselves in arguments about whether they had made a mistake, whether they had tempted fate by calling him Quy. They argued about who was at fault for leaving him, for taking their eyes off him for a second at the boat site.

  Tuyen heard them hissing in whispered shouts, through her own sleep. Cam had been watchful to keep the whole family together. Tuan had paid off anyone they had to pay off for the passage on a boat to Hong Kong. Then Quy had drifted off in the night mist in a boat when one of them thought that he was with the other. Quy, their last child then and their first boy, so he was called precious. Their next son, the first born in Toronto, they called Binh, meaning “peace,” which was their beseeching for mercy for that terrible loss.

  In Toronto, her father had tied them all to a cash register. Tuan used to be a civil engineer in Vietnam, Cam, a doctor. When they arrived in the promised land, the authorities would not ratify their professional documents, and Cam became a manicurist in a beauty salon near Chinatown while Tuan unloaded fruit and other produce from trucks to the backs of stores on Spadina. Cam knew nothing about manicures, of course, except what she had done with her own well-shaped hands weekly. But that was sufficient. The rest she faked. Renting a chair in a corner of the beauty salon on College Street, her quick elegance adding to the pretence, she set up the warm water for the hands, the little white towels, the cuticle remover, the nail buffer, the nail polish, and charged twenty dollars per customer. Pedicure was thirty dollars. On certain days Cam went to English language classes and on others she studied for her medical exams in English. This after being in practice in Saigon for seven years as a family doctor.