Four Parts
Alan
It was Sunday which meant that Alan had to help out at the family restaurant. Sunday’s was the day that they made the dumplings that were then frozen and sold both wholesale and for big take-home orders. Alan’s job was to make and roll out of the dough into long sheets; his mother, his grandmother and his auntie cookie-cut the dough into circles, put a palm-full of filling into each circle, and sealed its edges into a dumpling. Then, Alan placed the dumplings into plastic containers by the dozen and put them into sections by type in the walk-in freezer.
Between the different fillings — like pork and chive, beef and onion, and the pumpkin and prawn his trendy sister who was doing marketing at Macquarie Uni talked them into — they aimed for 5000 dumplings every Sunday while his father kept busy with the walk-in customers and their orders.
For Alan, it was ten hours and 5000 edible reasons to be grumpy and pissed off. He only had limited time outside of school work where he was doing advanced maths and physics, and the last place he wanted to be was in the restaurant. Everything was always about the restaurant. They might as well live in the storage room among the heads of cabbage and bottles of soy sauce. Their house in Dundas was basically just a place for mattresses that got slept on and showers that got taken when the restaurant wasn’t open.
What Alan wanted to be doing on his Sundays was rugby league. Going to games at places like Leichhardt Oval or the new stadium at Parramatta, or watching all of the round’s games back-to-back on the Fox subscription that he paid for with what he earned at the restaurant, listening to the commentators doing the call, the sideline reports, the colour and the analysis. Every bit of it — every piece of gossip about a player signing, every big hit on the field, every change on the ladder — was a piece of relief and joy for Alan. Every bit was 180 degree opposite from the restaurant.
That’s why Alan didn’t have a favourite team. If he picked say only the Dragons or the Eels or heaven forbid Manly, it felt like he couldn’t enjoy everything on offer. Alan loved the whole game too much to be exclusive to one club. He’d even dug into the history on the Internet and knew the finer points of the debate about who was the first club in 1908 — the Glebe Dirty Reds or the Newtown Blue Bags. Besides, if he was going to achieve his goal, Alan had to be objective about all the clubs and not be seen as playing favourites. He certainly didn’t want to be seen as ‘that Chinese guy whose one-eyed about the Rabbitohs.’
Alan rolled out another sheet using the long wooden pin. His air pods were jammed in his ears and he was listening to ABC Grandstand’s call of the Warriors versus Storm, an important top of the table clash that he’d been reading about on-line all week. At the same time, Alan thought about what the post-game analysis might sound like. Especially how to take it to the next level of technical discussion about attacking structures.
That’s what his podcast would do that nobody else was doing. He wasn’t going to be the ‘first Chinese rugby league analyst’; Alan was going to be the best regardless. The guy who really dove deep into technique and strategy. But first there were another 1000 dumplings to go and his mother was trying to say something to him in Mandarin, which he was ignoring. His sister, sitting at the ‘family table’ by the kitchen and pretending to build them a website, waved to get his attention.
‘Offside’, he thought to himself.
Qazi
He’d spotted the Chinese dumpling place from the bus on the way home and thought about going there. About doing something different than his daily grind. About eating something new and from some other part of the world. But Qazi was too tired and too dirty; from his hair to his fluoro hi-viz shirt to his steel-caps, he was covered in grey building dust.
‘I’m a ghost,’ he thought to himself, as the bus rolled past the Vietnamese bakeries, dodgy tobacconists, and NDIS providers’ shopfronts.
He had just finished his sixth 7am to 3.30pm shift of the week at the construction site in the city and was booked that night to cover for his cousin, Sayed, in their Uber. Sayed — though distant by blood — was his only relative in Australia; by some default of familiarity and practicality, they lived together in a one-bedroom flat with two other Hazara men. They had bought an old Toyota Corolla together. They needed to get a return on the investment by keeping it on the road as much as possible, cruising the silent suburbs from Penrith to Parramatta.
‘This is the first step, Qazi,’ Sayed often said. ‘Inshallah, we will have many other successful businesses together.’
Qazi picked up his duffel bag and tapped off the bus near the Merrylands train station. He envied Sayed’s soaring self-belief. Not just self-belief, but also Sayed’s unshakeable view that they had made the right choice to leave their lives and their families in Afghanistan and that Australia was indeed a land for their dreams to be achieved. Sayed’s new Quran was faith in a newly-purchased house in someplace like Bella Vista or Schofields, a wife organised by his family in Kabul, and a shiny Lexus.
‘No more Toyotas for me, cousin. Just first class all the way! Inshallah,’ Sayed would say.
He was totally beat, but had to eat, if more from habit than for nutrition or pleasure. Qazi walked into the biryani café that one of their community had opened up on the shopping strip. At the tables, there were his fellow ghosts, he thought to himself.
Four other Hazara’s in hi-viz, each at a separate table. Each had a bowl of yellow rice and lamb meat in front of him. Two had their smartphones leaning against their plastic water glasses, watching YouTube videos. Imams singing the call to prayer. No one looked up, perhaps careful not to irritate each other’s exhaustion.
Qazi could hardly remember what it was not to be bone-tired. To constantly feeling numb and hazy. To have no feeling but for the pain in his hands, which cramped from using the jackhammer and crowbars all day on the building site. The Aussies there called him Q.
Maybe, before the interminable tiredness, he recalled, there was the time back at the madrasa of his childhood, happily memorising verses and playing football in the school’s courtyard. Laughing as somebody’s sandal went skyward after a wayward swing at the ball.
He ordered through the QR code. One of the other guys laughed at the phone screen he was hard-wired to. Something needed to change, Qazi resolved.
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While he waited for his food to come out, he Googled the big Decathlon sports store in Auburn. They were open until 8pm, which he could probably make. He saw he could buy a football for $20. He could keep it in the boot of the Uber. In between passengers, where he could find a public park, he could take the ball out. Qazi pictured himself juggling the ball with his feet and counting how many taps he could get to.
Or, he could do what he’d never done before because ‘it was for the Aussies’. He could go for a Thai massage on George Street in Parramatta at the place he had spotted while driving. Just let himself be rather than making himself do.
Nissa
It took Nissa at least the first two months to get used to them. The Aussie bodies that slogged into the Thai massage parlour where she was working — they were clumsy and huge to her. So much bulk; layers of pasty fat and little-used, slack muscle; joints stiff like thick cardboard. These bodies with their possessors complaining of sore necks, bad backs and tight calves. They were like the baby elephants back home, she thought to herself, but without the cuteness.
After ten hours at the parlour, her hands and shoulders were sore. From the pushing and pulling, the kneading, the application of pressure to points. Back in Chiang Mai, massage with her countrymen and women was more like a choreographed dance between the masseur and the massaged; each anticipating the other and accordingly responding by lifting a leg or changing an angle. But the Aussies were big slabs of meat — heavy and hard to manipulate.
She turned on the water and ran her thin wrist under it. She always needed a long, steamy shower after work to loosen up her own body again. To be in touch with her own needs and not touching those of her clients. In the mirror, for the first time in her 33 year-old life, she noticed dark half-moons under her eyes.
Lately, Nissa had started to follow the shower with a mug of Milo, a drink that her roommate, Lamai, who had been in Australia for nearly two years, had introduced her to. The drink was chocolatey, warm and comforting, and she decided she would make one tonight too.
It was one of the few things that Nissa had experienced so far that was really Australian. Lamai and her, and the other women at the parlour, worked six days a week. There was only the routine of sleeping, eating instant noodles with some added buk choy, taking the bus to Parramatta, massaging up to eight customers per shift, going home. After six months of this routine, Nissa knew she was weary, but she kept smiling at the customers and she kept counting the money that she was making for her family back home. The most satisfying part of her week was hitting the send button on her Wise money transfer app.
Her nine-year-old daughter, Mae Noi, was being looked after by Nissa’s parents while she was overseas. Tonight like every night at 9pm, Nissa would call Mae Noi to talk about her day at school. It was her 6pm; the grandparents and her would have finished their dinner. That they were still close and that they shared everything, Nissa told herself, but she knew that life across screens was exactly that. Contained, limited, technical.
It was opposite to her ‘real life’ with Mae Noi. She missed being in bed with her child, going under the blanket, snuggling in matching Hello Kitty pyjamas, reading a pop-up book about a magical prince using the torch on her mobile phone for light. Their little world that was now on hold. Plus, being five thousand kilometres honed her worries about Mae Noi’s missing father suddenly turning up with accusations, demands and new crime gang tattoos on his face. ‘It’s only temporary’, Nissa told herself about their situation, as she pushed down the button on the kettle. ‘Until we have enough money for me to set up my own business.’
Nissa wanted a future of colour and texture not grabbing and grinding. A future with freedom not back-to-back bookings. Her dream was having a market stall that specialised in silky textiles and buttons. Dozens of rolls of different materials for clothing, curtains, and furniture. Each standing tall around its sturdy cardboard spool. And, thousands of buttons — bright, shiny, sequined, in dozens of shapes and sizes — arranged in small plastic display boxes. She could picture a wall — like a tapestry — of all the buttons behind her as customers came to admire and inquire. Nissa wanted a shop where even the most specialised lady would always find what she was looking for to sew the perfect outfit or the best throw-pillow. A haven of sewing and making amongst Chiang Mai’s tussle of tuk-tuk’s and tourists.
The kettle’s light went amber and steam rose from its plastic spout. Nissa flipped the tin lid off the container of Milo and it rattled around on the kitchen benchtop. She put an extra spoonful of brown powder into her mug and poured the hot water in. After the call to her little one, she decided she would go online tonight before bed. And look for button suppliers.
Kaleo
The company-issued polo shirt was too small for his tank-like Islander frame so Kaleo left the top buttons unbuttoned. His biceps stretched out the short sleeves. Kaleo’s earpiece crackled.
‘Sector 4 all clear,’ said another security guard’s voice.
It was always all clear, it seemed to him. With another four hours to go on his shift, providing security at Council’s market stall day, Kaleo sometimes wished something would actually happen. Not a really bad thing like a shooting or a stabbing, mind you, but just something. Something meaningful where he could show his strength and courage, the qualities his grandfather back in Samoa used to talk about. Something where he could be more than just another big body stationed for intimidation.
Instead, all that happened was the fringe people, it seemed to Kaleo. Twitchy druggies who would come up and ask him ‘what’s doin here, mate?’. Hurried homeless guys pushing trolleys filled with dirt-caked sleeping bags and empty soft drink bottles quickly moved through the outdoor square. Eshays with Gucci shoulder bags keeping their distance. Because of how he looked and the hi-viz, Kaleo knew from behind his wrap-around sunnies that he scared ‘normal’ people from talking with him.
So, Kaleo sang songs in his head. Hymns from the three-hour long church services his mother used to make him go to in traditional dress. Old school hip hop by L-Fresh the Lion; drill from Onefour; newer stuff too.
But what Kaleo really liked humming were the American R&B classics his father used to play when driving him and his two brothers to Two Blues rugby practice when they were kids: KC and the Sunshine Band, Earth Wind & Fire, the Commodores. Simple tunes that sailed through the day and soothed the soul, he thought.
He pictured himself on a stage, say at an Australia Day concert down the park. He was wearing a pink sequined jacket, a bow tie and a tight pair of black slacks. His hair was slicked back and there was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead from the bright stage lights.
‘Celebrate good times, c’mon’, Kaleo boomed into the microphone a la Kool and The Gang, as he struck a pose. The crowd — people of every colour and creed — sang along with the tune and bopped away. The little kids down the front happily jumped up and down like popcorn heating up.
‘Kaleo, take your meal break now,’ his supervisor’s voice said through his earpiece, and it roused him from his musical meander.
He walked to the van that they used as their command centre for events, and pulled out his Esky for lunch. Then, he found a shady tree off the square. With his back up against the thick trunk, Kaleo took a bite of his Devon sandwich. He remembered being back in Samoa on a family visit. Being under a palm on the beach with his granddad, his dad, his mum and his brothers. Aunties and uncles who all knew him. The old man started a harmony, his dad strummed his ukelele, and everyone joined in.
