Free Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung Page A

swallowed would stay down. Morning sickness, afternoon sickness, evening sickness. Our bare feet sticky, we would run with buckets, usually too late. She would throw up all over the tiled floors of our living room, our bathroom, our kitchen. “Get the mop, Agheare,” she would gag at me. When the mess was cleaned up, she would continue to work in the garage, well into the early hours of the morning while we were sleeping.
    The heavy brown curtains in our living room were always drawn, but we never had any visitors anyway. That was the year when I learned to be alone, the year I realised how solitary we were. I rarely ventured outside anymore, not even into the backyard. Instead, I explored every nook and cranny of the house. Once, in the small cupboard under my grandmother’s brown Buddha shrine, I found a plastic bag filled with what seemed like black fur. When I opened the bag to see what was inside, I was shocked to discover hair. Human hair. One very long braid, and two long ponytails. Warm and firm as live creatures, the hair was the brown-black-orange colour you can only get when the sun fades away the ebony. It was tied together with rubber bands that crumbled away when I tried to pull them higher up. I was fascinated. How old was this hair? Whose hair was it? Why had my grandmother kept this hair? I straightened out the strands and found new rubber bands to tie up the ponytails. I took the plait and put it at the nape of my neck, hanging the end over my shoulder. The things I could do with hair this long! I was thinking of the ways I could explain to my friends how my hair had grown overnight, when my brother came into the room looking for his grey matchbox truck.
    “Hey Alexander, look at this.”
    “How’d you get that hair?” he asked, steering away from me.
    “I found it. In here.” I pointed to the cupboard.
    “Whose is it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “It might be some dead person’s!”
    “Don’t be stupid. Why would Granny want to keep the hair of some dead person?”
    But I put the hair away, retied the plastic bag and placed it back in the cupboard.
    A few weeks later, my grandmother came back to collect the rest of her belongings from our house. As she knelt down by her Buddha shrine, I told her, “Ah Ma, there is hair in there.” I didn’t want to sound as alarmed as I felt.
    “Where?” asked my grandmother.
    “In there.” I crawled in the cupboard and brought out the plastic bag. “Here.”
    My grandmother didn’t tell me off for going through her personal things.
    “Ah,” she said, holding the hair in her hands, stroking it as I did, looking at it as I did. How strange, I thought, Granny is too old to want two ponytails dangling from the sides of her head, isn’t she? But then again, she always wore lipstick when she went out, so there was no telling what new beauty trend might take her fancy.
    “This hair is your Auntie Que’s,” my grandmother explained. “When she was little, she would grow her hair long. I would always braid it for her before school. And whenever she had her hair cut, I thought wah! Such a waste of beautiful hair. So I tied it up and kept it.”
    “When your Auntie Hy Que was born,” my grandmother told me, “I was so happy. At last, a girl. Your grandfather could not understand why I was so happy. But of course he couldn’t, he was the one who had howled and bellowed at me for wanting to swap my son for a girl. I called her Hy – happiness, and I kept her long hair every time I gave her a haircut.”
    *
    She could never forget the two who had died back in Cambodia. Her first babies. Two girls who would be forever toddlers, neither of them living long enough even to make it into family photographs.
    When she was giving birth to the first, my grandpa took a chair and sat outside the room. When he heard the wahwahwah sound of the child crying, his foot stopped tapping on the floor and he stood up. The midwife came out and told him it was a girl. A girl!