Unpolished Gem

Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung Read Free Book Online
Authors: Alice Pung
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ammunition. Of course, there were short sporadic bouts of open fire, when the thought of the second wife was too much for first wife to bear, but my grandfather had a simple and effective way to silence these remonstrations: “If you could give me sons, then I wouldn’t need to go over there!” In the end, he thought of a way to put a stop to all his problems, an ingenious way to shut up first wife and make that supercilious second wife learn a little humility. Of course, like all his plans, whether they came into fruition ultimately depended on my grandmother, and this irritated him no end, but there was nothing else for it.
    *
    “You have to help me!” cried my grandmother, banging on the wooden door to Ah Gim’s house. “Help! Help! Thief! Robber!”
    When Ah Gim opened the door, my grandmother charged inside and slammed the door. Standing with her back against the doorway, she heaved and choked, her face the colour of taro, a nebulous grey-pale-purple. “Lowliest scummiest lowlife mugger in the world!”
    “Sister, sister, what is the matter? Who robbed you? Was it at the market? Where is your handbag?”
    “Handbag?” My grandmother stared at Ah Gim as if she were the hysterical one. “Handbag! Hah! She thinks it’s my handbag! Yes, a handbag I have been carrying for nine months!” Her eyes rolled towards the ceiling, and then back towards her friend, focusing for the next outburst. “He took my son! He took my baby!”
    “Wah! Woe!” cried Ah Gim, “Who? When? How did it happen? Did you see his face?”
    “Of course, I know every speck on that no-good face. It was my husband!”
    “Your husband! Where did he take your son?”
    “To the Other Side!” shrilled my grandmother. “He took my son to the Other Side! Oh, he had this planned for so long! He was waiting for the boy to be weaned, he was waiting with his eyes glinting and his hands itching!”
    Her friend stood there helplessly. Clutching the sides of her trousers with tight hands, she wailed, “But sister, what can I do?” She was one for commiseration, not action, one who waited for others to save her.
    “We’re going over to his first wife’s house and we’re going to snatch my boy back!” It was not a request, it was a command.
    “Aiyah, oyah …” Ah Gim lamented. Somehow the presence of this woman cast a dark shadow over her own small selfhood, made her aware of her ineffectuality.
    My grandmother grabbed Ah Gim’s wrist. “Now!”
    Ah Gim had to obey, she had no choice, she was led by her guilty sense of gratitude and my grandmother’s powerful tug.
    But the tug was not strong enough, for they came back empty-handed.
    *
    How did that happen? I often wonder. How could someone like my grandmother bear to have her baby given away? The alternative I cannot fathom – that it would have been an arrangement, and that she would have known during the pregnancy. Yet characters are only fixed through experience, and usually bad experience. Before character there is only personality, and who knows what kind of person my grandmother was back then?
    Yet one thing I know for certain. He was never snatched back, that last son. Fast-forward fifty-five years, and a man from Macau appears at her funeral. He is very short with a gentle face. He was never snatched back – you can tell because he looks into the glass of her coffin without the same solemnity as the rest of my uncles. Why was my grandmother unsuccessful at stealing her son back? Perhaps she just learned to let him go. After all, there would be more children. There would always be more children, to cling to her pants-legs, to ask her about maths problems, to make paper chains with, and to share her big soft bed.
    “Tell me a story,” I would plead, snuggling up to my grandmother in her bed. My grandmother always had a queen-sized bed in Australia. “Tell me a story.” And there would be stories such as I had never known, could never tell, and will never know again because my

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