What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

“Oh, for God’s sake, Bo! You think because you have a little money, it makes you better? It just means that you sacrifice everyone around you. That’s how people make money …” It was out before she could stop herself. Then she didn’t know what to say. It was not something she was supposed to speak about. About her oldest brother, whom she had never met but who had been lost, literally, years ago. “Bo …” Her father gave her a wounded look and left the kitchen.

Lam, one of Tuyen’s older sisters, had overheard them. She’d been doing the morning dishes at the sink, her hair open and draped to her waist. Lam had never cut her hair because she thought she was ugly in every other respect. She had a large face with prominent cheekbones. She cultivated the black glistening hair like a treasured crop. She herself had never dared to talk back to her father.

“You think you’re so smart, eh?” Her voice slid into Tuyen like a knife in butter. “I know why you live downtown.”

“Then why, huh?”

Tuyen was really more concerned with what she’d just said to her father. Lam, she knew, resented the overindulgence Tuyen got from everyone. She would never have had the nerve to answer her father in the way that Tuyen did. She chafed like the rest under his rule but didn’t dare disobey him. Tuyen was the baby; Tuyen and, before her, Binh, they were pampered. Lam and Ai were reminders, she suspected, of their parents’ past, their other life; the life that was cut in half one night on a boat to Hong Kong. Lam and Ai had become shadows; two little girls forgotten in the wrecked love of their parents. At times Lam had felt wrong for surviving, wrong for existing in the face of her parents’ tragedy.

“I know, I know.” Lam sounded childish in her own ears.

“I don’t care what you know.”

Tuyen was dismissive, as she’d always been of Lam. She was still thinking that she’d committed the worst faux pas with her father. Lam looked at her with a mix of sibling hatred and pure envy.

“I will tell them about you.”

“Why? Why would you be that evil?”

Lam was taken aback. She felt withered, she felt like the younger sister. She pointed a finger at Tuyen and left the kitchen, stupefied and enraged.

Tuyen hadn’t meant to accuse her father of anything. She had meant to humour him, if not get him to understand. She spent a few more minutes in the kitchen thinking about this, convincing herself that her father did not take it as an indictment of what had happened so long ago. Perhaps he understood her remark as criticizing his drive for making money. That would be better. Besides, he had never told her the whole story. And certainly never how he felt. She had merely overheard, here and there, snippets of conversations. She had made sense out of nonsense. She comforted herself that it was just their usual sparring; that her father had not made out any reference to the loss of her brother Quy. She felt no danger from Lam, and anyway, she told herself, she was making a different life. On her own.

The threat from Lam was just childish. Lam would no more hurt her parents than Tuyen would. At least never intentionally. Tuyen knew this. If there were some way she could hurt Tuyen without hurting them, perhaps. So she was in no danger from Lam. Tuyen had known what buttons to push with Lam and Ai since she was small, and growing up hadn’t altered her reckless use of them.

She made her way to her mother’s room. Her mother and father had stopped sleeping in the same room when they moved to Richmond Hill. What with her mother’s insomnia and her father’s equal sleeplessness, their schedules of paltry intermittent sleep did not coincide. So as not to disturb each other, or as Tuyen suspected, so as not to have to talk to each other, to go over the worn language of disappointment, they each had a separate room.

Cam was lying in bed, her head propped up on pillows, her mouth slightly open. The room was dimmed to the daylight outside by heavy curtains. Tuyen watched the shallow breathing lift her mother’s chest. On the night table was a brass incense burner and the perpetual photograph of the brother she had never met. All the innocence reflected there was doubled in her mother’s sleeping face. Tuyen felt a surge of resentment for the boy, a familiar feeling. One that embarrassed her now, but one that had become a reflex to any image of him. Not that she hated him, she didn’t know him, he had simply been an impediment to … to what? To things she no longer needed, had never needed, but observed as missing. She thought of picking her way through the room looking for more letters—thinking there was some way of using them in her lubaio installation—but then, adoring her mother’s sleeping face, she changed her mind. Tuyen closed the door quietly, hoping she hadn’t awakened Cam, and went back to the kitchen.

Tuyen stayed in the kitchen, waiting for her father to return. Opening the cupboards, she scooped cans into her bag. She was also hoping to find one of her father’s stashes of money. He always hid small amounts of money around the house, “just in case,” he said.

She always meant to be more sensitive to Lam and Ai, more understanding to her parents. She would arrive at the house with the best of intentions in that regard—to show them all that she had made a different life for herself and was no longer bound by the smallness of family. But on encountering her real family, not the one she had analysed with pity and felt compassion for, her resolve invariably blew up into tantrums. She always fell into the traps of