Free Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung

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    My mother would deliver her wares wrapped up in face-washers and dishcloths. She visited shops in Footscray, Richmond, Springvale and St Albans. She carried all her merchandise in her handbag, and that handbag was always close to her side. Sometimes customers would not pay up, or owe her gold and not give it back. She relied only on their promises, which were written on scraps of old paper or scrawled in her notebook in numerical form. There was no legal redress if she was gypped or cheated, since all she had to rely on was the good faith of her buyers. And the waiting! The waiting at the jewellery shops was the worst. Some of them were so small they did not have any chairs. Whenever a customer came in, the jewellery shop owner would serve that customer first, pushing aside the handful of gold nestled in crumpled paper napkins; ignoring the mother with the handful of kids breathing on the glass cabinets.
    I could never wear gold myself. All those trays, all those hours of work, all those hours of leaving me to look after the babies when all I wanted to do was my own thing, until I no longer knew what my own thing was. My mother didn’t wear gold either. “Some people walk around dripping with gold,” she said, “showing how much they own, while their husbands are working in factories. Hmmph. I don’t know why some men are so stupid. Anyway, if you are already beautiful, you don’t need jewellery. And if you aren’t, then there is not much a pair of dangly gold earrings can do, is there?”
    My mother walked down the streets of Footscray as if she were a much larger, heavier person; with her legs apart in large thumping steps, the bones of her ankles creaking. She walked as if she were completely oblivious to her diminutive size. A person of such petite proportions was meant to be delicate, breakable, breathless. Yet my mother defied every law of her own physiology. Biologically she was destined to be delicate, to age into a thin, tiny woman. Yet the decades of work filled out her frame, widened her shoulders, gave her hands like cracked coal and the pounding walk like thunder.
    She negotiated. She supplied, she marketed, she chased up creditors. She did all that without being able to speak English. Fortunately the small-business owners she dealt with rarely spoke English either. They probably asked their primary-school-aged kids to help them fill in their business registration forms. Yet my mother never saw herself as a businesswoman. Businesspeople were the representatives from Sony and Sharp who came to see my father at work to negotiate the supply of a new range of televisions. Not housewives with a handbag filled with gold wrapped in McDonald’s napkins.

“W HY is she having so many children when she can’t even look after her first two?” my grandmother would tut-tut with her tongue. “Look at them, skinny and brown as beef jerky and dressed like beggars, those kids.” Aunt Que had decided that while my mother was ill, it would be a better arrangement for everyone if my grandmother moved in to live with her. Every time my grandmother came back to visit or to collect more of her belongings, she would comment on the shambles.
    With my grandma gone, I started looking dishevelled. No red ribbons in my hair, no egg for breakfast every morning. No potty beside the bed. No one beside me at night to tell me stories, except my little brother, Alexander, who snored like a motorbike. But I had finally worked out how to turn myself on and off like a tap, regardless of any anxiety or agitation, so no more smelling like weed fertiliser.
    Still, relatives would shake their heads in dismay. Even my friend’s parents would see me with another sibling on my hip, and exclaim, “What? Another one?” They would look at me as if I were responsible.
    My mother’s pregnancies were the worst times for all of us. My sister Alison was a heavy heaving pregnancy that made Ma’s belly and ankles swell up and nothing she