Free Her Father's Daughter by Alice Pung

where Bill Clinton played.’
    Her parents had bought the block while she was interstate, and signed as her nominees. She knew well enough to resign herself to such surprises. They never threw surprise birthday parties – bad for the heart – but unexpected acts to secure the children’s future seemed to be the done thing.
    ‘Don’t worry, your mortgage will be cheaper than the others,’ Dad told her. ‘We got a real bargain.’
    ‘Why?’ she asked. Uh-oh. ‘Aren’t they all the same?’
    ‘Well, your block is actually close to something that you probably won’t notice when the houses are built, because they will all be building double-storey houses anyway to block it off.’
    ‘What?’ All she could ask of them was ‘what’ and ‘why’. She was a living perplexed eternal query.
    ‘There is a mobile-phone tower behind it,’ said Mum. ‘A Telstra one. Don’t worry, Telstra was state-owned, so it should be safe.’ She didn’t understand the correlation between a phone company that was owned by the government over a decade ago and the safety of its towers, and what any of this had to do with the block of land.
    ‘I don’t think it’s cancerous,’ Dad said. Then she understood – they were worried about radiation from mobile-phone reception towers!
    ‘When you get the Vendor’s Statement, you can check out the Environmental Report to see if the tower is poisonous – but I am sure it won’t be. And what’s more, you have a cooling-off period.’
    ‘Solicitors don’t have any cooling-off period,’ she told her father.
    Her mother and father glanced at each other. They had woken up early and lined up like teenagers to get the best concert tickets – except they had got her a mortgage instead. They had been telling her to put her money into real estate since she was twenty-one, but being the practical people they were, they knew that they had better act for her because if they didn’t, all her earnings would evaporate.
    ‘Damien across the road from us has already bought his block,’ her mother said. Damien was twenty-five, married and visiting display homes every Saturday. Her parents talked about her future neighbours: ‘The Vietnamese family who lined up to get the block next to yours seemed very nice and decent. And if any of your friends want to buy a block, I think there are a few left.’
    Her father showed her the plans on the contract, including the AV Jennings fold-out at the back, with four suggested architectural designs. If they were faces they would all have looked the same, but for the eyebrows.
    Who knows, it could be fun, she thought, building a new house. And perhaps she did want to live a short walk away from Highpoint Shopping Centre and the Bill Clinton golf course. She tried to get excited at the idea of the block. But the truth was, she had wanted a house.
    They had spent weekends searching and searching, she and her father. The areas they had targeted were in the western suburbs of Melbourne: the properties in front of the carpet factory in Braybrook, the weatherboard homes in Footscray, Sunshine and Maidstone. They planned their day according to open-house times, and parked the car five minutes before the arrival of the agents. At every house they inspected, she noticed at least five other Asian couples or families. She had no idea which ones were planning to buy investment properties and which were wanting to break out of the rental cycle, since they were all dressed alike in shabby Saturday clothes that they had owned for decades or made themselves.
    Entering each house, she was hit by the smells of sleep, cooking and the familiar stuffy stench of daily life conducted in such close quarters. She saw the sewing machine next to the baby’s cot in the back room, the Laminex table and cork chairs. The curtains nearly falling off their rods but always drawn so that outsiders could not look inside. The children’s rooms packed with boxes of miscellany from import