Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung Read Free Book Online Page B

grandmother was possessed of a form of magic, the magic of words that became movies in the mind. The people she spoke about came alive through her voice, her pauses, her animated eyebrows, and the distinction between reality and fantasy no longer had any force. There was no distinction, and in the safety of the blankets, all past children no longer mattered. I was her one and only, and I would never have to find out about the one who was given away.

“W OE,” cried my grandmother, “why do you smell like piss?” My grandmother alternated between “Wah!” and “Woe” to express extremes of emotion.
    “I pissed my pants.”
    “Why didn’t you tell the teacher you needed to go to the toilet?”
    I shrugged and shifted about uncomfortably. Foreign words did not seem to slip out of me as easily as the contents of my bladder, but I knew my grandmother would keep quiet about this. She would protect me from prying parents and their ability to turn my humiliation into an after-dinner anecdote.
    *
    It was kindergarten photo day and I had been bundled into my pale-blue padded Mao suit with the frog fastenings. Underneath, my grandmother had made me wear my flannel pyjama top and thermal tights. All this clothing made my arms stick out from my sides as if I were a penguin. It was spring Down Under, but my grandmother lived in constant fear that I would freeze like the communist peasants from the Middle Kingdom she had left over half a century ago. My hair was tied with two red ribbons on top of my head, and pulled so tightly that my ears almost met at the back of my head.
    “Go down the slide, Alice,” coaxed the teachers, “go on!” Terrified, I could not move. I knew that if I were to go down the slide I would leave behind wet streaks of incontinence. The teachers wondered what was wrong with me. The photographer was waiting with his camera. I shook my head.
    The swings, perhaps? But I refused to move. I pointed indoors. I went indoors and stayed in there for the rest of my photographs. I stayed there for the rest of the day, doing the only thing possible for me to do standing up.
    When the photos were developed, my parents proudly proclaimed, “Ah, look! We have an artist in the family!” My kindergarten album was filled with pictures of me standing next to the easel in a Raggedy-Ann smock, smiling at my own ingeniousness.
    That night, in my grandmother’s queen-sized bed, she quietly asked me, “Do you know how to tell the teacher you need to go to the toilet?”
    I nodded. I did.
    “Then why didn’t you tell the teacher?”
    “I don’t know,” I confessed. But I did know. Fear.
    There was silence. I thought my grandmother was asleep. I stared at the gold ring on her hand that was around my shoulder. Then, just as I was about to drift off to sleep too, she suddenly asked, “Have you gone to the potty yet?” My grandmother kept a little tin pot in the corner of the room for both of us to use.
    “I don’t need to go.”
    She made me go anyway.
    When I came back, she waited until I had snuggled into my characteristic cocoon-shape before she spoke.
    “In the past in the Golden Towers,” my grandmother began, and I knew she was going to tell me about the other country where everybody lived a life before me. All her stories began with things in the past, in Long Mountain, China, or Cambodia, the Golden Towers. “In the past,” she said, “when your father was small, we had a mattress, one and a half metres wide, two metres long. Your First Uncle, your Second Uncle, your Third Uncle, your Fourth Uncle and your father – all very small then – all crammed onto the mattress with me. In the middle of the night one by one they would go shhhhhhhhhhhhhh” – she paused for the cocoon to giggle – “and I would wake up with my clothes dripping wet. The mattress would be soaked too, with that slightly minty smell of urine.” So that was how she could detect piss from metres away. She told me that she was glad