Under Your Wings, page 22
‘On her third aristocrat,’ said Estella.
Estella chiming in like that startled me a little. She usually left the snide quips to me, but she’d grown more assertive over the course of this trip. My sister followed this remark with a question of her own.
‘Why did you leave?’ she asked our aunt.
‘It’s a long story,’ came the reply.
‘We have time,’ my sister assured her, resting her mug of tepid coffee in her lap.
Our aunt scrutinised us, deliberating.
‘How much do you know?’ she asked finally.
‘Nothing,’ said Estella.
Our aunt chuckled. ‘At least your Oma could be trusted with that,’ she murmured. ‘Well, you have come a long way,’ she continued in a louder voice. ‘And I suppose finding me deserves some sort of reward.’
Reward wasn’t the right word, but Estella and I had no way of realising that until after.
He’d said his name was John, and our aunt had taken him at his word. It was what he’d chosen to call himself in Australia because he’d liked having a fresh identity to go with that new stage of his life. And it was almost the truth; all the Aussies called him ‘Johnno’ anyway, which bore a striking resemblance to his real name. But looking back on it, she might have been spared a great deal of heartache if she’d known he was actually ‘Jono’.
They were both students at the University of Melbourne – and Asian, which had been enough reason for her to ask if the seat next to him was taken. When, upon the conclusion of the lecture, she discovered they were both from Indonesia, Jakarta no less, the name ‘John’ made everything fall pleasingly into place – especially when coupled with his appearance, so deceptively Chinese it bordered on racial caricature (slanted eyes, yellowish skin, even a bit of buck about the teeth). She wasn’t on the lookout for potential differences between them, not in that foreign land, so close to home geographically, but populated with Caucasians and sheep. And so, her assumption was that he was like her: of the same ethnicity, most likely of Protestant or Catholic background, and from a family either Westernised or with aspirations thereto. If he’d used his real name, ‘Jono’, it might have raised a red flag – that he was likely Javanese (aka pribumi), thus probably Muslim, and therefore from a wholly different world. But instead he’d claimed he was John. He was shy and sweet, and they got along right from the start.
The tone in which Tante Sandra related these events had a sandpapery texture to it, almost as if she were trying, in the telling, to smooth the splinters and sharp edges of the past. Yet it also laid bare the rawness of the wounds, giving us a glimpse of the Tante Sandra of our memories, vulnerable and tender, beneath the scars.
‘Oh, there were warning signs,’ she said shaking her head. ‘He barely spoke around my friends. And once he tagged along for a dinner at a Chinese restaurant and didn’t eat anything but soy sauce and white rice. I used to invite him to join us for all sorts of activities: bowling, picnics, parties, visits to the beach, the zoo. He always said he had to study, or sometimes he said he was sick.’
It was only when he finally told her about his true identity that the strange behaviour made sense: he was afraid her friends would sniff him out if he said too much; every dish they’d ordered at the restaurant had pork in it; he worked part-time to make ends meet and rarely had the cash or the time for the kinds of excursions she and her friends liked to take.
He was right to worry that her friends would expose him, though, really, they merely created the conditions for him to expose himself. It had been someone’s surprise birthday party and she’d persuaded him to come along. The majority of guests had gone home, but the remainder chatted idly in the host’s living room as someone strummed a guitar. Her friends were various nationalities of ethnic Chinese: two others from Indonesia, but the rest from English-speaking Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. They started talking about exams – one of the Malaysians had boasted that he had better things to do than study, like sleep.
The other Chinese-Indonesian girl laughed and called him as lazy as a bumiputra – the Malaysian equivalent of Indonesia’s pribumi and Singapore’s ethnic Malays. The Chinese-Malaysian guy scowled – ‘That’s not funny,’ he said with a glower, which only made one of the Chinese-Singaporeans tease him even more: ‘Be careful, if your face gets any blacker you’ll really look like one of them.’
Meanwhile, Jono turned red and went very still. Sandra laughed along with the rest of them and only noticed something amiss when he stood up abruptly and stammered that he should get home. He ran out and Sandra followed, catching up only after he’d made it a good way down the street.
‘That’s when it came out,’ our aunt told us, ‘that he wasn’t actually Chinese.’
They ducked into someone’s garden and sat on the grass behind a tall hedge to talk about it. In their earnest, youthful minds the matter seemed far too important to leave for another time. She learned that he was Javanese and Muslim, and he was poor. By her standards, at least. His father worked as a low-level manager at a margarine factory. The fact that John was attending university in another country was beyond anything his family had imagined possible, but the death of a moderately well-to-do relative had resulted in a windfall for his father. John had convinced his father that sending him to Australia to do an engineering degree would be a good investment. Australia wasn’t charging university fees at the time, not even for international students. He worked like mad on his English-language skills, then enrolled in a program that placed him in a public high school in Melbourne so he could take the qualifying exams to gain entrance into one of the universities. The money was enough to pay for English lessons, various fees and a one-way plane ticket, with a little left for initial living expenses; but once he was on the ground, he would have to find some sort of part-time work. And that was how he came to be there, he concluded, defensively. Then she asked the burning question she’d been saving for when he was done: so he really didn’t have any Chinese blood at all in him?
He admitted it then: a great-great-grandmother from his mother’s side was reportedly Chinese. The looks had skipped everyone in his extended family except him, where they’d banded together to make his childhood a living hell. How they’d teased him about it – everyone, from his classmates to his cousins. His nickname was Cina – ‘China’ – and the jokes never got old:
Hey, Cina, don’t be stingy. Lend me some cash.
Hey, Cina, watch where you’re going. Or can’t you see with those slitty eyes?
Go back home, Cina. Indonesia’s through with communism.
John laughed bitterly as he spat out the remarks, each one evidently seared into his memory like a cattle brand. He’d never told anyone before, but the jokes were why he’d made such an effort to leave.
‘That’s when I should have walked away,’ muttured our aunt. ‘That’s when I should have figured out that something wasn’t right.’
But she hadn’t. She was stupid and young and idealistic back then. And there was something magic about the setting that blinded her to the danger of their situation. There they were, in a stranger’s garden, a little after midnight, whispering together about profound things like racism, poverty and childhood trauma. The cool dark was redolent with the scent of eucalyptus, and the low hoots of the tawny frogmouths overhead lent the moment a wild and wondrous touch. Instead of walking away, she kissed him. Just a hasty peck on the lips. He looked stunned for a few seconds, but then he broke into a bashful smile.
They were an unlikely pair, the rich Chinese girl and the misunderstood pribumi boy from the other side of the tracks, but they’d connected with each other, and wasn’t that what mattered? If only she’d known she’d misread him, that experiencing discrimination hadn’t given him empathy for her race, but the exact opposite – a budding resentment towards her kind for causing him trouble through no fault of his own.
Still, as long as they stayed in Melbourne, everything was fine. She stopped expecting him to spend time with her other pals and they hung out alone instead, studying together in the library, strolling along the Yarra River, treating themselves (in keeping with his budget) to shakes and sandwiches at their favourite milk bar.
‘Fantasy land,’ remarked our aunt. Estella and I nodded, recalling our own college days; or our freshman year, at least. Entomology, each other and solitude. The enchantment cast by university life apparently transcended time and space.
John’s summons back to reality was unnecessarily cruel. His father was hit by a bus. The news came by telegram. He borrowed money from Sandra to pay for the plane ticket, and he never came back.
They wrote letters to each other at first (Tante Sandra didn’t go into details about the content), but as the months went by, he wrote less frequently until he stopped writing at all. It was understandable, she told herself. He had a lot to handle. He had to support his mother and younger siblings. His father’s supervisor had kindly let him have his father’s old job at the margarine factory, but then his mother came down with a mysterious lung infection and there were doctors’ bills to pay and medicines to buy.
She knew it was unreasonable to demand more attention from him, especially since their relationship had barely begun when he’d had to leave. She hadn’t told her parents about him, and now she wasn’t sure if she had anything to tell. She planned to visit him when she was in Jakarta, but she didn’t get there until over six months had passed – she’d already planned a trip to New Zealand with her friends for the upcoming break, and the long break after that had been promised to our family. (That trip to London, where the photo of her at Buckingham Palace had been taken; where she’d ploughed through pigeons and offered us hot chestnuts.)
When she met John again, in Jakarta, she was a term into her third and final year. He greeted her stiffly, as if there had never been any romance between them, or even friendship. Not only that, but the toxicity she’d overlooked on that magical night had already begun eating away at him. Months: that was all it had taken, triggered by the steady shower of unfortunate events that hadn’t stopped pitter-pattering on his head since his father’s untimely death. He told her all about it when they met at the coffee shop around the corner from where he worked – at a different job from when he’d last written. He’d been let go from his previous position. The margarine company had been bought out by a Chinese-owned conglomerate. They’d enacted a massive restructuring, which resulted in him being made redundant, and it had taken him some time to find employment elsewhere. To pay for his mother’s medical treatment and keep up with the rent, he’d resorted to borrowing money from a loan shark. Even though he had a job now – as a foreman in a mosquito repellent factory – it paid less than the previous one, and that made it hard to keep up with repayments.
He spoke calmly enough about it – or rather, he spoke softly and low, avoiding eye contact as he stirred the coffee in his glass mug, bringing the sugary black grounds swirling to the top. In her naïveté, she reacted dramatically: That’s terrible! How can I help? – something like that. It was a mistake. He sunk his head between his shoulders, muttering that he was sorry for mentioning it, he wasn’t asking for help. He would manage just fine.
You could find another job with better pay, she suggested. She immediately felt stupid for proposing something so obvious.
Sure enough, he responded with a sneer: yes, that had occurred to him. But it had taken so long to find this job he thought it would be better to stay put. The last thing he could afford was another interruption to his pay. He was about to say something else, but seemed to think better of it. He closed his mouth. After a few seconds, he opened it again and said it anyway: he suspected it had taken him so long to get hired because the interviewers thought he was Chinese. It was hard to ignore how he looked.
He could apply to Chinese employers, she proposed awkwardly after a silence that lasted too long.
He’d tried, he replied in all seriousness. But they always figured out quickly that he wasn’t one of them. The shift would be subtle but always detectable – a fading warmth, a stiffening smile, a slight shrinking inward like that of a fearful snail.
He made a feeble joke about Sandra being the only one he’d been able to fool. Then he looked at his watch and said he should get back to work. As an afterthought, he asked her what she had planned for the rest of the day. She said she didn’t know, though that was a lie. She was going to the beauty salon with her mother, to get their hair done for Vera Sukamto’s wedding reception that night. But she felt that to tell him the truth would make a mockery of the hardship he was suffering.
He asked when she was going back to Melbourne. In a week, she said, before asking tentatively if he’d ever be able to resume his studies there. He shook his head. No, it had been selfish of him to force his father into squandering all that money on an overseas degree. If only his family had that money now. He looked at his watch again. They wished each other the best and parted.
‘And guess what?’ said our middle-aged aunt, her voice full of scorn for her younger self. ‘Even after that, I didn’t get the hint. Would you believe I still wrote to him from Melbourne, even though he never replied? Would you believe I suggested we meet again the next time I was back?’
‘Why?’ I couldn’t help but ask.
‘Who knows,’ she answered, taking the last cookie on the plate even though Estella and I hadn’t eaten a single one. As she bit into it, she frowned. ‘Maybe it was too hard to let go of what we had. What I thought we had, at least. And once I was back at university, our differences seemed so small again: so what if he wasn’t Chinese, so what if I was rich? It didn’t seem right to abandon the relationship, at least not without a fight.’
At the end of this reflection, she appeared for a split second like the naïve Sandra of the tale we were listening to. Then the Tante Sandra of the present reasserted herself.
She and John met three more times after that, the next two meetings occurring on visits home during her final term in Melbourne. Both times they met in the same coffee shop, and against the unchanging backdrop the alterations in him seemed more pronounced. It was like seeing a cliff collapse, she told us. Each time, a new chunk had fallen off. The second time he told her to stop calling him John. Going by a different name had been stupid and pretentious, he said.
He told her that his mother’s lungs stayed in bad shape no matter what the doctors prescribed, but he’d found extra employment to help the family scrape by. The work was beneath him – washing dishes three nights a week at an upscale seafood restaurant. But he couldn’t be picky. Every bit helped.
Lots of Chinese customers, needless to say, he added offhandedly. Her people did well for themselves. Her family included.
Our aunt could have sworn she saw a thin smile cross his face; then it vanished. He explained: he’d read a newspaper article about synthetic textile manufacturing. It had mentioned Sulinado Group, its founder-patriarch and the five children who helped run it. He remembered she had five older siblings and put two and two together.
She didn’t think it mattered, she said, feeling guilty all the same. The omission wasn’t deliberate; it had just never come up. He supposed, in a quiet voice, that it didn’t matter – at least not in Australia, not back then and there.
He rose to his feet to go. She stood as well and bade him goodbye.
They met for the third time after the end of her final term, once she had returned to Jakarta for good. To her shock, he was the one who proposed it, in a letter. The letter came as a surprise too, congratulating her pre-emptively on finishing her degree. It was hardly warm, but it was civil, and in it he mentioned they should meet once she was back.
Their last meeting had left such a sour taste in her mouth that she’d sworn off trying to maintain their bizarre and estranged relationship. He obviously couldn’t stand her any more and the way he talked about the Chinese made her squirm. Yet after reading the letter, she found herself relenting. Maybe his hostility had all been in her mind. So what if he’d mentioned that finding work had been difficult because he looked Chinese? And so what if he’d faced discrimination when trying his luck with Chinese employers? That was the reality of life in Indonesia, and she’d simply never felt it because she was rich.
So what if he’d found out her father was Irwan Sulinado, the rising textile tycoon? It was true, and arguably she was at fault for not mentioning it sooner, thus making him think she had something to hide. It was probably true too that a lot of the patrons of the restaurant where he worked were Chinese. Even if the implication was that a lot of Chinese had money to spare, that was undeniable as well: her people had made good in Indonesia. In short, John – or rather, Jono – had simply been stating the facts. She was the one who’d been sheltered from them all her life.
She decided to write back telling him when her flight home was and saying that she’d like very much to meet.
‘By the time we met at that coffee shop again, I was convinced that I’d been the one in the wrong.’ As our aunt said this, she shook her head at her younger self’s idiocy. ‘Stupid, I know. But can you blame me for trying to believe the best of him after all he’d been through? His father’s death, his mother’s illness, having to pull out of university and scramble for a job? And let’s not forget his little brother and sister. He had to support them too, make sure they weren’t forced to drop out of high school to find work. Going through all of that would be enough to make anyone bitter. He’d lashed out. He couldn’t help himself. I thought I should give him another chance.’
Estella and I stared silently into our mugs. I felt suddenly ashamed of our presence there, our prising open of the life of this woman we’d presumed to know and love, whom in actual fact we had never really known at all.
Of course the meeting with Jono had been awful – made worse because she’d hoped for the best. He’d lost so much weight he was barely recognisable; there was nothing left of his face except those cartoonish buckteeth and slitty eyes.
