Allison Wang

Allison’s story aims to capture the complex relationship between an individual and her dual identity as both Australian and Chinese. This was composed for our Year 10 unit on ‘Contemporary Australian Experiences’ in Term 1 2023.

Salmon Fish Migration

The Mandarin word for “mum” is 妈妈 , which sounds a lot like mama, like ma mère, like a word that wraps all around your chest and holds on tight. When I was little, my mother used to take me to see the fireworks. She’d hold my small hand in her larger, calloused one, point to the bursting lights in the sky with a smile, and I’d watch the colours dance on her face. She was so beautiful then, with her hair down and eyes burning with quiet mirth. I’d try to catch the sparks. The harbour would shake with all the stomping footsteps of people celebrating and I’d listen to her tell me stories about the new year over and over. Pop! Bang! And so the people of the village came together, fireworks in hand, to scare Nian, the monster, away.

It’s been a while since we’ve really sat together and talked. Knowing what to say is something that comes with age, I guess, with growing older and growing apart. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, but in spite of that, I still dial her number on the phone and press it to my ear, waiting. It takes her a moment to pick up, because she hates her phone and always keeps it at a distance – something that my sister and I used to laugh at, when we were teenagers. “Hey,

She always answers in Chinese, and it’s always the same questions: Are you studying well?

How are your friends? Have you eaten? The tightness in my heart loosens a little when I hear her voice. I wonder if she feels the same. I answer each of her questions in turn, with a yes, I’m doing great, my friends are cool, I just had lunch, and she hums under her breath. This is routine; I call her every Friday in my dorm, cross legged on the bed, facing the window. Outside, there are students, some lying on the grass, others hunched over their notebooks, all making the most of the afternoon sun. Everything is softened by an orange glow.

Then my mother says, You don’t have to come home this weekend, if you don’t want to, and that softness shatters. My chest becomes tight again.

Your sister might not – and here she pauses –She’s not staying for the New Year. Very busy with her overseas business, now.” My sister is very different from me. While I try my best to sink into my surroundings, she repels it. When I try to assimilate, she rejects. It’s like she’s a singular puzzle piece, destined to never fit.

She always sniffs and says that Sydney will never be her home – she was born seven years before me, in China. I’d only been alive for half a year before we’d left, so I don’t remember it much, but it’s not like we’ve suffered here. We lived typical lives in a typical suburb. Apples and sandwiches for lunch, running down to the park in the afternoons. In some ways, though, I understand where she’s coming from; there isn’t much you can do when you get wrenched out of one place and planted in another, except feel a sense of utter hopelessness, I suppose.

Sometimes, I don’t know how to talk to her, but we’re sisters. There’s supposed to be this intrinsic bond between us. We’re supposed to be able to read each other’s minds. She told me a couple weeks ago that she was planning to move to New York, to pursue a marketing degree there. I asked her why she couldn’t just stay, do it here instead, and she hung up on me, very abruptly.

“Mum,” I say, “It’s nearly Lunar New Year. I’m coming home for the weekend, and she will too. I’ll talk to her about it,” and I can hear my mother sigh slowly over the phone.

My mother is equally soundless when I open the door, and I know I shouldn’t talk to her right now. She’s got her own things to mull over, and I’ve got mine. The only time she speaks is to tell me that dinner will be in an hour. There’s no Welcome home, no I’m so glad you’re back! In this family, we’ve all got strange definitions for love.

I busy myself with unpacking, and then I check the fridge to see if there’s anything that needs restocking. If there’s a tradition in this household, it’s gorging ourselves on good food when we’re together, and sometimes we eat so soundly that I feel like we’ve been starving ourselves in between these gatherings. Before long, I find myself at a supermarket, flicking my way through packets of instant spice, a bag of tomatoes hanging from the crook of my elbow.

It’s an Asian supermarket, one with old Chinese grannies who always wear long pants even when it’s hot, who walk around like they’re lost inside the aisles. They always know which produce is the best, and where the best deals are. One of them recognises me as I pass her, eyebrows lifting and wrinkling her forehead even more. She’s got her hair cut short, now, but I vaguely remember her with a tight bun and less crow’s feet around her eyes. I think she used to give me milk sweets, always infinitely supplied with them in her pockets. Today, she reaches forward and pinches my cheek.

Ah, child, she says, in a brittle kind of voice. I haven’t seen you in a long time.

I smile apologetically and nod until she lets go. She frowns.

Why do you never come home anymore?

I shrug, and there’s a prickling sensation on the back of my neck. I turn back to the shelf of spices, and none of them look appealing anymore. From where I’m standing, I can see past the open shop front to the other side of the road, where a broad-shouldered man, skin tanned lobster-red from the sun, is buying a meat pie. I forgot to check if we had any eggs left. I call Mum to ask.

When I was ten, my mother told me to record her voicemail for her, because I was the only one in the family who spoke English without stumbling. It always jars me now to hear my own voice whenever she doesn’t pick up.

My sister arrives as my mother is handrolling dumpling wrappers and I’m unloading everything I bought into the fridge. Immediately, my mother lifts her head, and I try not to be bitter about it. They hug, and then my sister calls my name out, and I have to face them both. I feel like a kid again, back when it seemed like my mum and my sister were the same person. As soon as I come to face her, she presses something small and red into my palm. It’s a lucky charm; red cord knotted into a flowery pattern, with tassels hanging from it.

For the new year, she explains. To new beginnings. I don’t understand why everyone can’t just speak English. My sister tilts her head, watching me.

“Thanks,” I say with a wince, because my voice comes out dry and croaky. She’s still holding on to the charm as well, fingers pressed to the inside of my hand.

别客气, she replies with a smile, and trying not to roll my eyes becomes a herculean task. I know that it’s the proper response to someone thanking you (bié kèqì), but I can’t help but remember its literal translation. Don’t be polite. Drop the niceties. I think she’s a bit of a hypocrite. I stuff the trinket into my pocket, and then our mother waves us apart, tutting, shooing us towards the kitchen table, and we sit down beside each other awkwardly, because the chairs have uneven legs. Mum brings out a bowl of mince, and a plate with all the wrappers. We start folding dumplings, one by one.

The process is simple but precise. You can’t put too much mince, or the dumpling will break when it cooks. Put too little, my mother claims, and you might as well be eating air. I lose myself in the repetitive, mechanical motions, scooping and pinching and scooping and pinching. Beside me, my sister’s speeding through her pile of wrappers, the finished ones sitting in circles on her plate. say – my mother freezes, chopsticks still in hand, and I see my sister’s ears turn red. I try to bury myself in my bowl of dumpling soup. A kookaburra, blissfully unaware of the slowmotion car-crash occurring in the dining room, laughs its shaky guffaw through the stillness. My sister, in turn, begins to look even more like she’s about to combust. She keeps glancing towards our mother, who stays stoically silent.

She used to laugh fondly when I couldn’t quite get the pinch right, and I remember the three of us passing lopsided dumplings around a table. I used to be jealous of how she made everything seem easy, used to hate her for how tall and knowing she seemed. But now, I look at her and all I can see is my big sister. She’s got lines around her mouth that I want to smooth away, a wrinkle in her forehead that wasn’t there the last time I saw her – and I’ve grown taller, too. Our mother frowns and leans over to say something in her ear. Her face tightens. They’re so alike that it scares me, sometimes.

The dumplings get slowly cooked in hot water, and we eat with a weird sort of tension between us. I feel as if I’m stuck in a moment in time, in a portrait painting where the light is dappled and the people are fixed into place.

“You don’t get to judge me for this,” she says. I can hear some deep, cutting hurt woven in her voice, sharp like a shard of glass.

“I’m not judging you,” I reply, and I’m speaking the truth. I just don’t understand why she always feels the need to leave before she gets settled, and I tell her as much. When my sister was in high school, she transferred three different times, for “academic reasons”, she told me, but now I think it was just because she was untethered, a dandelion seed in a hurricane.

She shakes her head. “Australia’s not right for me. You might be okay with being complacent, but I want something more than that.”

“At least I’ve got the guts to commit.” Choosing to stay isn’t complacency. It takes effort.

“It’s not about whether you have guts or not,” she retorts, incredulously. “America is unique, a clean slate. I need a change of scenery. 妈妈, surely you understand.” Her breathing sounds ragged, and her voice cracks. She turns to look at our mother again, and practically stumbles backwards in disbelief when she doesn’t reply. I know what our mother is thinking – there’s plenty of scenery here in Australia; my sister just wants to run away. My sister turns back to me with a watery shine to her eyes, which I ignore.

“You’re never satisfied with anything,” I spit.

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

There’s a sudden clang of chopsticks meeting ceramic. Our mother sets her bowl down with trembling hands.

Stop, she says. You’re speaking too fast for me to understand.

We both go completely still, and her face twists. My sister glares at me, as if to say, look what you did, you’ve ruined this beyond comprehension, and she stalks away to her room, leaving me with Mum, who still has barely said anything. It strikes me, then, that she has never seen us fight, not really. It was always me under my sister’s wing, back when we were kids. Always my sister looking after me, even though we were so diametrically opposed.

You should have been kinder, my mother says, finally. I’m still mad. My mother walks over to where my sister was sitting, lowers herself into the chair and places her hand on mine. I’ve got my fingers clenched tight in a ball, my skin crawling with the urge to pull away.

“I didn’t say anything I didn’t mean,” I huff, and she whacks me firmly on the arm. Talk to me in Mandarin, she reprimands, or don’t talk at all. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been on edge the entire day, or if it’s just because of my sister, but the frustration and anger and resentment boiling in my stomach starts spurting out like venom.

It’s your fault, I say, voice shaking. You brought us here.

The soft sadness on her face falls away completely. It’s like watching a windscreen wiper sweep away all the emotion in her eyes. I don’t dare say anything more. All I can hear is my mother’s controlled breathing.

“Christ, you sound just like Mum –”

Then she bows her head and whispers, almost to herself, Your sister can leave whenever she likes. You can too, for all I care. My chest tightens at the dismissal, and I draw my hand away from hers.

Maybe I will.

And I push myself up and away from the table, chair squealing against the hard wooden floor. She doesn’t make any move to follow me. The air around me feels suffocating, like the whole house is trying to choke me to death. Every thought in my head echoes too loudly. I try to breathe through my nose, count to ten, but nothing stops the overwhelming sense of powerlessness. I feel vaguely dazed, so I stop near the hallway, bracing myself on a door frame.

From where I’m standing, I can still see my mother sitting at the table. She looks small, and her head is still bowed. I watch as two teardrops roll down her cheeks, one for each daughter, landing in star shaped splatters on the kitchen table. Guilt crashes onto me in rolling waves, punching the breath out of my lungs, and it doesn’t recede when I turn my back and walk away. I stand in the centre of my room for a moment, feeling as if I’m balancing on a rocking boat, and nausea builds in my throat. I go to sleep, uneasy.

In the morning, I stubbornly decide not to think about the night before. Instead, I go to the kitchen and cook. It’s been a while since I’ve made a proper meal – university life rarely affords anything greater than a microwaveable dinner from Woolworths.

As I pick out four tomatoes from a shelf, my mother comes back in from the verandah, having hung a load of washing on the line outside. She looks at me, and I feel more than see her gaze as it drifts over the top of my head. She doesn’t say anything, but takes a bundle of chives from the fridge and crouches on the floor. I stop my movements to watch her.

She lays out the chives on sheets of old newspaper, spreading them into thinly layered rows of green, running a wrinkled knuckle over parts that need smoothing. The morning sun sends slats of light through the windows, spilling over them in a yellow glow. I blink, and then go back to picking out the tomatoes. I choose the ones that look the ripest, that feel a little tender, that sit in my hand well. I always take longer than I should to pick. My mother used to tell me that.

First, I boil the tomatoes until they soften enough for me to peel the skins. The tomato juice stings my nail-bitten fingers as I strip the tough outer layer off the first, then the second, leaning over the sink so it doesn’t stain my shirt. I really should have put on an apron. Then, I slice them into wedges, slide them into a wok with a little oil and water. The sizzle is soft in the silence of the house, accompanied only by the snores of my sleeping sister, and my mother is already gone from her seat on the floor to complete other chores.

As they cook, I retrieve two different types of soy sauce, dark and light. I never really understood why there were two – it wasn’t like I could taste the difference – but I remember my sister explaining it to me; something about how 老抽 (lǎo chōu), the dark soy sauce, brings colour and flavour, while 生抽 (shēng chōu), or light soy sauce, adds saltiness. It was something she’d learnt from our mother’s mother, from before we’d arrived in Australia. I don’t remember her at all. They’re like brothers, my sister had said, as a very commanding fourteen-year-old. If she and I were sauces, I think I’d be the light one, and she the dark.

I pour a bit of both into the wok, two parts dark and one part light, and a deep, rich sort of scent begins to fill the room. I stir a little, pushing chunks of tomato around with a big wooden spoon. My mother walks back into the room. She sits at the dinner table, in the same chair as last night, and watches me. I tense, and suddenly feel self-conscious, as if her mere presence has made my noodles worse. The tomatoes swirl in soy sauce, and I set the wok back down over the stove to get some eggs. They split open with a crack against the benchtop, and I am left with a bowl with runny, translucent egg-whites and three bright orange yolks. I start beating the eggs. My mother gets up from her chair, muttering under her breath until she comes to stand beside me.

You’re doing it wrong, she berates, gesturing for me to hand her the bowl and the chopsticks. I hand them over, but I can’t hear any real heat behind her words. She beats the eggs and I watch as they almost fly out of the bowl in small yellow whirlpools. Then she stops, hands everything back to me, and says, Now you try.

I tentatively start to whisk, but she tuts again, grabbing my hand. She rotates my wrist once, and then again, guiding my hand through the movements. The chopsticks clink against the edge of the bowl.

Don’t be afraid to spill some of the egg. It’ll make the rest taste better.

I nod and try again. She smiles a very small smile. There we go. She takes the bowl, pours the eggs through my tomatoes, and it feels like a truce.

My sister stumbles into the kitchen, yawning. She runs a hand through her hair, then freezes. She doesn’t meet my eyes.

“What are you making?”

Mum answers – 西红柿鸡蛋面 (xīhóngshì jīdàn miàn). Tomato and egg noodles. Mandarin can be very literal, sometimes. All I can think of is how we used to make this dish together, as a family, and how I started this morning alone.

“I’ll help,” my sister says quietly. I take a shuddering breath.

We haven’t cooked the noodles yet, I reply. She looks up. I grab a packet and hand it to her, and in doing so, realise that I still have the lucky charm she gave me. I press a hand to my pocket, and quickly make a wish. My sister fills a pot with water and brings it to a boil. My mother continues to stir, and lowers the heat beneath the wok. We stand in the kitchen until the entire house smells of soy sauce and something that I cautiously label as love.

Afterwards, we sit at the dinner table again, bowls cradled in our hands again, this time full of warm noodles. I clear my throat to speak.

“I don’t want you to leave,” I admit. My sister tilts her head and her mouth curves up in one corner, but her eyes still look sad.

She pauses, thinking for a moment. “You know how salmon fish migrate?” I wrinkle my nose at the metaphor, but she continues. “They live and swim and feed in the sea for years, but somehow, they always know how to get back home to the stream they were born in.” She sighs, looking down at her hands, and it sounds like she’s exhaling all the air out of her body.

“It’s not about leaving, okay? It’s about coming back home.”

“You said that Sydney would never be your home.”

“Perhaps not,” she acquiesces, and then she looks up at me and Mum, “But you are.”

“The noodles are getting cold,” I say, because I’m still sort of angry, because I can tell that she is, too. It’s a work in progress. Our mother sits quietly, watching us, but her silence is loving and warm.

“You’ll survive without me,” my sister replies. “I promise.” She reaches out for my hand again. I take it with a squeeze, and then let go.

And then we eat. We eat until our stomachs are full and our discontent diminishes. We eat, and in eating, the noodles take the place where our sorrows used to sit. Instead of feeling heavy, I relish in the meal I made with my own hands. The egg is fluffy and the tomatoes are soft and the flavour is just right. I almost begin to taste the two different soy sauces, and it makes me smile. My mother brings out big, half-moon slices of watermelon, cold from the freezer, and it tastes sweet, like youth, like healing. Juice dribbles down my sister’s chin as she bites into a piece, and we all laugh.

I think to myself, Hey. We’re getting there.

My sister leaves the next day, like she said she would. I help her pack her things.

“You know,” she says as she folds a shirt, “I was the one who made you sandwiches for lunch.”

I furrow my brow. “I thought Mum made them for both of us.”

“Mum made us fish, tofu, and green bean porridge – it stank,” she replies, looking at me pointedly. All of a sudden, I understand. I open my mouth, then close it again, swallowing thickly.

“Thank you,” I say, and she shakes her head.

“Don’t thank me. I’m not sure if I regret it.” She leans over to clap me on the back, hard enough that I cough a little, and switches the topic. When she finally steps out the door, I keep one hand clenched tightly around the charm and its little red tassels. I think I’ll keep it with me. I hug her and promise to call more often. Mum and I say goodbye to her quietly, our voices echoing through the empty afternoon. I feel my mother kiss me on the head, softly.

Later that night, we’re both crouched on the step of the verandah and watching the stars. They’re not as bright as fireworks, not as colourful either, but they are constant –fireworks always go out quickly, in a blazing trail of glory, but stars are perpetual, like little pin pricks that a giant poked through the sky. I lean my head on my mother’s shoulder. She looks beautiful tonight, with her hair in a bun and creases at the corners of her eyes, her hand in mine.

I love you, Mum, I tell her. The words feel strange in my mouth.

She nods. I know.It’s not yet New Year’s Day, but it feels like it.

“妈妈,” I whisper into the darkness. “Tell me a story.” She clears her throat.

Once upon a time, there was a monster named Nian… •