This story I entered in the Monash short story comp...
The Beginning“Lucky indeed,” my mother thinks proudly as she gazes around the room. The paint on the walls is peeling, and the TV is staticky. The carpet is threadbare and the chairs are mismatched. The crowded room is overly warm because there is no air conditioner, only a plastic fan that erratically spins cooled air from side to side. But that doesn’t matter. Sitting in the fridge is a large, gaudily-decorated birthday cake. A wondrous thing, purchased just that morning from an Asian bakery in Springvale. In the adjacent cupboard is a wax ‘1’ waiting to be impaled in the brightly coloured icing. A massive array of food, mostly stirfry, gently steams in the mismatched dishes sitting on the wooden table with peeling veneer.
What a difference from China, where birthdays were celebrated arbitrarily, if they were celebrated at all, and where a birthday feast was an egg boiled with some noodles. My parents didn’t even have birth certificates until they migrated to Australia, and they simply made up their dates of birth because no one had bothered to properly record it - my father’s birth certificate reads two years older than he actually is.
Right now one-year-old me is crawling around on the floor, seemingly oblivious to the mass of people chattering - which one is she going to pick? Surrounding me is a circle of objects - money, pens, a calculator, cards, and various other symbolic items. This is traditional on a baby’s first birthday - the item they choose shows what the baby is going to grow up to be. Personally, my mother hopes I will choose the money. That means I’m going to be very rich. It doesn’t really matter, as long as I don’t pick the cards and become a destitute gambler, she thinks. But of course I won’t. Because I’m growing up in the Lucky Country.
The friends cheer as little me grasps the pen with both hands, and I look up with wide baby eyes. One of my parents’ friends, Edwin, the one who is forever wielding a camera, takes a shot, and this photo of a plump one-year-old wielding a pen ends up in a flowery, pink photo album which was purchased at a stocktake sale at Target.
“Just like her father!” they cry, congratulating my parents on their little daughter. The feast soon begins, getting rowdier and rowdier the more alcohol is consumed. The assortment of guests range from George, the elderly white next-door neighbour whom I adore, to my mother’s best friend who has a daughter just a few months younger. Little me watches the proceedings solemnly. My mother does the customary hostess’ job of piling copious amounts of food onto everyone’s plates but her own, despite the various loud but futile protests.
She thinks again how lucky her child is, beaming at the raucous crowd assembled in her small living room. The pen means that I will be an academic child. At the ripe old age of one, my future is set out. A scholar, because I chose a pen. A good girl, because I almost never cry. Prosperous, because my Chinese name means ‘little stream running through the forest’, and also beautiful, because my English name is the same as one of the most beautiful actresses of the time, or so my father thinks.
I will be perfect. My mother cannot conceive of me being a rebellious teenager, because she never remembers being one. She cannot imagine her daughter as an artist, a musician, an author. In her hometown, if you didn’t work, didn’t try, didn’t study, you were stuck there, among overworked fields, dirty snow. She was the one who went to a school for the gifted, went to university in Beijing, and flew to a distant land named Australia which had just opened its doors to new immigrants. Australia, where the grass was green and the toilets weren’t holes in the ground.
So she simply smiles, content in the knowledge that I will grow up in the Lucky Country.
