Close to Home by Alice Pung

Author:Alice Pung
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

SEARCHING FOR AI HUA IN AMERICA

In a far-flung corner of the world, I had been asked to search for my mother’s childhood friend. And she was still unmarried, my mother added in an eye-widening, voice-quietening manner, as if she were saying that her friend had leprosy or cancer. ‘That girl was always too stupidly generous,’ my mother sighed, ‘she always kept giving things away, and paying for things for other people. Her father died when she was young.’ My mother paused. ‘She had a suitor once, who wanted to take her abroad. But the mother didn’t want her daughter to leave her all alone in her old age.’

This was the first time I’d heard of the ones who’d chosen to stay behind. My mother’s best friend, back then, would have probably been in her mid-twenties, knowing that if she couldn’t set sail with her lover, then she would miss both her boats. But she stayed in Saigon after the war.

For my mother, friends were memories from childhood and young adulthood. Once in Australia, she no longer had any more friends. Friends were to while away idle time with, and my mother had no more idle time. All she seemed to do was sequester herself in the garage, working at her jewellery trade, chipping away at the decades with her peeling tools and peeled hands. After a while, work became more fulfilling than the strain of watching people’s moods. As much as she tried to lock them into her mind as fixed personalities so they would not come up with unpleasant character surprises, and as much as she tried to set them with her words – ‘always like that, so clumsy’, ‘always so reckless’, ‘always telling the same story’ – people would always shift and change.

So the friends of her childhood were the only ones that had aligned themselves completely with my mother’s visions. Even when their lives branched out in strange permutations and bore stranger fruit, she would try to find a way to link their narratives to the fixed seedlings in her head. Her childhood best friend, Ai Hua, was working at a Chinese restaurant because she had always been placid and family-orientated. Ai Hua was in her early fifties, and now an illegal immigrant in the United States, living in her boss’s back room between the laundry and the toilet. She’d made it out of Vietnam in her mid-forties and had been living this illegal limbo life for seven years. During this time she had written letters to my mother. One of the letters attached a photograph of a smiling woman with her hair parted in the middle like the open pages of a book. She was standing in front of roses in a public park, far removed from what I imagined to be her usual sink space in a cramped back-corner kitchen.

‘Don’t go and visit her at her place,’ my mother warned me when I was about to travel to America for a writing residency, ‘because if the police catch her, you don’t want to be involved.

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