Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung Page A

passages, I watched Outside Ma suck the snot from his nose with her mouth and spit it into the sink. “That’s disgusting!”
    “He’s only a little baby,” Outside Ma muttered. “How do you expect a little baby to blow his nose? He hasn’t learned to yet, so I do it for him.”
    “Aaarghhh! That’s sick!” I cried, fleeing from her.
    *
    When the immigration papers were finally processed, my other set of grandparents had arrived at Melbourne airport in their homemade cotton Mao suits of dark blue and earth-brown. My Outside Grandparents.
    My mother recognised them immediately as they came out of the airport terminal. “Ay, ay! It’s Ma!” she cried. “It’s Pa!” She stood there, face to face with her parents. She touched her father on the sleeve. “New travelling clothes!”
    “Your mother made them just before we left,” my outside grandfather said, grinning his toothless grin.
    “You should see the clothes that you will get here!”
    “YiMui,” my outside grandmother said to her second daughter, “you’ve grown fatter.” My mother was a couple of months pregnant with my brother Alexander, and still only forty-seven kilos.
    “I’m having a baby, remember?”
    “Where is our first baby grandchild?” demanded my outside grandmother. Then they saw me.
    “Wah! That’s not a baby!” exclaimed my outside grandfather.
    “How old is she now?”
    “Almost three.”
    “So big!”
    I was just festively plump.
    “This is your Outside Grandmother,” my mother instructed me. Outside because my mother had married into my dad’s family.
    “How are you, Outside Ma?”
    “Wah, how clever!”
    Funny how adults found certain things clever. Carefully peeling gum from the bottom of the plastic airport-lounge chairs and popping it in my mouth wasn’t clever, but repeating four stupid words was.
    That day, all my grandparents could do was look – wah, lights at the airport in the daytime were so bright, how did they get them to be so bright? Amazing. And faces were so fat! They had never seen a bunch of more beautiful people in their lives. They took it all in with their wide-open eyes, and ignored the white ghosts floating in their peripheral vision. These people in front of them were the people who mattered, these faces were the faces of the family.
    My mother could not stop her hands from moving. She pointed, she jabbed, she spoke at a hundred miles an hour. How happy they all were, and how happy my mother was to see her parents. Everything was so bright and big to my outside grandparents, how much she would have to teach them. Supermarkets. Moving stairs in glass buildings taller than anything imaginable. Hospitals where it was all white inside and like those hotels for Westerners back in the old country. She would show them how they would get a house here even bigger than any of the houses in which they had ever lived in Vietnam or Cambodia. How the government would give them money. “Every Thursday,” my grandpa would later hoot almost with tears in his eyes because of bewilderment at the generous whims of the government. “The government gives me money and not only that, when I am standing at the counter, they say ‘thank you’ to me, a useless old man!”
    But Grandpa proved to be far from useless. When he and my grandma moved to their own house in Springvale, Grandpa turned his whole suburban back lawn into a ploughed field of brown parallel lines. He dug deep complicated irrigation channels and collected rainwater in big barrels. And in his field he planted Chinese vegetables, flying dragon plants, four types of hot basil, turnips, melons, potatoes, chives, cumquat, plum and lemon trees. At eighty-four he got up at six every morning to water his plants and plough his field, with the bottoms of his homemade polyester-blue pyjama pants rolled up. Meanwhile, Outside Ma continued to sew her Mao suits, right down to the cloth-covered buttons. She even made underwear, with a little pocket on the