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

anger and the same pettiness she abhorred in them. She paced the kitchen, counting up the traps she had fallen into in the space of an hour; she had taken offence at a photograph of a poor boy, she had hurt her father, and she had hurt Lam too. Even if Lam had really started it, Tuyen was supposed to be above it.

She had left the embrace of her family—truthfully, not embrace, her family did not embrace. They fed you, they clothed you, they fattened you, but they did not embrace. Yet they held you. With duty, with obligation, with honour, with an unspoken but viselike grip of emotional debt. Tuyen wanted no duty. And perhaps that is what she had arrived at. Yet she wanted an embrace so tight, and with such a gathering of scents and touches. She wanted sensuality, not duty. She wanted to be downtown in the heat of it. Everyone walking in the city was senseless. She loved that. Everyone escaping the un-touch of familiars and the scents of fatalism gathered in close houses. Familiarity was not what she wanted or what would make her feel as if she were in the world. It was the opposite. The alien touch of sidewalks, the hooded looks of crowds. She loved the unfriendliness, the coolness. It was warmer than the warmth of her family in Richmond Hill.

Theirs wasn’t warmth, it was readiness, a businesslike readiness to have all the world had to offer by way of things. A voracious getting. They had everything and nothing. They didn’t even like or savour having everything, they simply had it as a matter of course. Cars, cellphones, computers, expensive clothes, unused bicycles, unused toys, unused kitchen gadgets, unused birthday gifts, gifts that only had a momentary charge of excitement that was not excitement but agitation. The rooms of their big house in Richmond Hill were stuffed with clumsy furniture. There was a television in each room, turned on endlessly and loudly. Her mother, Cam, didn’t throw away anything. So there were generations of furniture and generations of pots and pans and generations of all the things a house can use. Then there were papers of all kinds: pay stubs reaching back to when the family first came to the country from Vietnam, every single receipt for any item they bought over the years above fifty dollars, every bank statement when they finally trusted a bank with their money, and every lease of a room or apartment or house they had rented on their way to Richmond Hill.

Her mother had cried the day she moved out.

“I need to get out,” Tuyen told her.

“Why? Why? Why do you want to leave us?”

“I’m not leaving you … but look, look around here. It’s schizophrenic.”

“Don’t you use words like that with me. I know what they mean. That’s not good of you.”

“Okay, I mean there’s too much clutter, too many things, I can’t think.”

“You were always a bad child. You think you know everything.”

Her mother’s words belied her limp body sitting in a chair, eyes red, tissue paper wet from tears balled up in her hand.

“Ma, Ma, I’ll be fine. It’s not a sad thing. It’s great …”

“I am not giving you your birth certificate. You will lose it. You’re not good with business. And your health card—give it back to me.”

Cam suddenly sprang up, wrestling Tuyen’s bag from her.

“Ma, what if I get sick?”

Cam went limp in the chair again. “That is what I’m saying. Why are you leaving? Anything can happen.”

“Jeez, Ma, it won’t.”

Tuyen’s mother had a mad fear of being caught without proof, without papers of some kind attesting to identity or place. Cam had laminated everything in sight when she discovered a shop, Vickram’s, that did laminating. If she could wrap everything in plastic or laminate it, Tuyen felt, she would. Which is why the carpeting in their spacious house had a path of plastic running over regularly travelled surfaces. And the chairs and couches were not only Scotchgarded but covered in protective plastic that made sitting the most uncomfortable act. Cam’s main preoccupation, though, was birth certificates, identity cards, immigration papers, and citizenship papers and cards. She checked incessantly and duplicated them tenfold, keeping them in cookie jars, vanity drawers, and breadboxes. With all that anxiety, Cam was slender in frame and quick in movement.

Her parents’ eccentricities by turns amused and frustrated Tuyen. She would regale her friends with stories of her mother’s attempt to plastic over every surface, of how Mr. Vickram loved her mother because she was responsible for one-third of his earnings, and that if they ever saw her coming back from one of her visits wrapped in bubble wrap, they should not be surprised. In fact, Tuyen mounted an installation once of herself in bubble wrap, with stickers from various countries pasted on her naked body. Calling the installation Traveller she instructed the audience to lift her and pass her around the room in silence for ten minutes. But then there was the other side of the eccentricities: she hated knowing that they came from a real moment of devastation, not personal quirkiness—her mother’s insomnia and her frantic retrievals of hidden or lost papers at night, her father hiding money in shoes and books. And the incoherent fights between Cam and Tuan about who was to blame.

“I didn’t see …”

“What is the point?”

“It was the authorities …”

“How long should we have …”

“Why didn’t I see?”

“It makes no sense to argue. It’s done.”

“We shouldn’t have come.”

“Do you remember anything?”

“What life is here, tell me?”

“You write and you write and you write. Do I say no?”

“Why? Why should you? Next time I won’t tell you, that’s all.”

“Quiet.”

And about sending money abroad, about who was selfish, who was unwilling. Tuyen had eventually moved out of the uneasy luxury of her parents’ house when she couldn’t bear overhearing any more.

She not so much overheard as sensed, since her own understanding of Vietnamese was deliberately minimal. She’d only been able to gather in fragments, and in