Free Her Father's Daughter by Alice Pung Page A

businesses, or stacks of cut fabric. She looked down and saw the grouting of the tiles clotted with blackness. She looked up and saw the plastic prints of fluorescent deities on the wall – Buddha or Jesus looking down at her, condemning her condescension.
    She saw backyards filled with weeds and sad broken clotheslines, some of which were just strings tied to the side of the house.
    Her father did not seem to be affected by all this. ‘How many square metres is it? What is the rental in the area like?’ he asked the agent, taking notes.
    ‘Of course you’re not going to live in it,’ he told her when he noticed her dismay at how windowsills were cracking, and windows were coated with grime.
    But she had seen people’s long johns hanging on clothes horses, five Indian families to one Footscray dwelling, freshly renovated Victorian houses with the interior painted the colour of pig’s liver. Those were people’s homes, and they were where lives were lived. Molecules of former existence floated through every wall and partition. A house was substantial. A block of land was just a block of land.
    ‘How am I going to pay all this off, as well as build a house on it within two years?’ she asked, looking at the contract.
    ‘Well then, you have two years to find yourself a partner who will marry you and help you pay off the mortgage and build the house.’
    Poor bugger, she thought, coming into this predetermined life. Then she realised that perhaps there were a few lazy men who would think this was an excellent arrangement, coming into a wife and home like a Lego-set.
    ‘Mum says she will help you out,’ her father told her, and began to scrawl on the back of an envelope lying on the table. He reassured her that he and her mother had worked out an arrangement whereby they would lend her a sum of money, interest-free, and she could pay them back slowly as well as pay the mortgage. Drawing diagrams and writing down figures, her father pointed and enthused, ‘See how soon you can pay off this mortgage with this plan!’
    That did seem very soon, she thought. Suspiciously soon. How exactly did it work?
    ‘Oh, simple,’ said Dad, ‘you will just move back home.’
    ‘Move back home …?’
    ‘And you’ll continue to work at the law office, but if you need extra money we can help you – you can work at the shop too.’
    She should have seen this coming. It was like when she was eighteen and her parents wanted her to work every spare moment during university breaks at their shop and put all her earnings into paying off her university loan.
    ‘You will be able to pay the mortgage off in less than ten years!’ her mother advised. Life was filled with figures for them, figures to be crossed off.
    Ten years! she thought. She would be thirty-six. She would be stuck at home with her parents still setting a 10.30 curfew for her. She would have worked for ten miserable years of her life just to pay off a piece of property.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I will just pay off the mortgage slowly.’
    ‘But it’s thirty years!’
    She could cross off figures too, but she definitely wasn’t going to move back home.

ARRIVING
    FATHER—
    What was wrong with these kids, he wondered. They seemed to have no future plans, and yet they also resented it when he and Kien stepped in and tried to help. Like they didn’t need help at all, as if they were completely independent beings.
    He remembered when he first arrived in this country. The sweet bread-and-butter faces of the Australians and their tenderness like pudding. They didn’t see human debris when they first looked at him. They saw a man and his very pregnant young wife, his 28-year-old sister and his 72-year-old mother.
    He remembered when he first saw Melbourne, too. The geometrical wonder of the city rose from the horizon, each skyscraper a glorious robot rooted to the ground by the strength of its individual personality. Across the metal and cement marvel that was