Liverpool Road is pretty quiet. Most people are already at home, tucking into their weekday dinners. The setting sun lines up perfectly between two buildings, which I take as a good sign. I don’t bother with Ashfield Mall, but go to one of the corner shops, their veggies piled in boxes out the front.
The girl behind the cash register doesn’t look up from her phone as I grab a shopping basket and peer over the choy sum. Baba taught me how to pick produce, eyeing the freshness of the leaves, the wholeness at the ends of the stalks. Split ends mean the plant has been cut too long ago and is drying out. I pick an okay-ish looking bunch of greens and look for a protein.
There’s not much meat in the fridge, and what’s left is covered in freezer burn. I go to the freezer and pull out a bag of frozen dumplings. Michael will want noodles, I think, but I’ve already put the rice on. I stand in the middle of the dried goods aisle, wondering what I can do with rice—maybe add some Chinese sausage and shiitake mushrooms to make a lunch or something.
A peal of feminine laughter from the front of the shop makes me look up. There’s a gang of girls gathered there and I recognise them from school. They’re out of their uniforms already, dressed in jeans and short skirts. I duck into an aisle of sauces to keep myself hidden from view, my heartbeat sounding in my head as I silently pray to whatever gods there are that the girls won’t see me.
If you listen to the teachers, they use words like ‘diversity’ or ‘intersectional’ when talking about the school, but the reality is that the students are all pretty cliquey and grouped up based on our heritage. The Asian kids hang with the Asian kids, and the Lebanese kids all band together. When we were young, the boys and girls stayed pretty separate, but by Year Ten, hormones meant the sexes gravitated together like galaxies circling each other. I’m not really in any of those groups. My used-to-be best friend Emily moved to Melbourne in Year Nine and we sort of lost touch after a while. I didn’t make enough of an effort to find someone else, and what with everything at home, I don’t really have that much time to do normal stuff with people anyway.
‘Dude, I’m starving! Can we get bubble tea or something?’ I recognise the girl named Wei. She’s in one of the popular Asian groups in Year Eleven, where the girls are all skinny and pretty and the boys act like wannabe gangsters.
‘Oh my god, can you stop with the boba? That shit’s so bad for you! You’re such a cow.’ I shrink further when I hear the voice. Connie Zhong is the leader of this group of girls and thinks she’s the prettiest. Without looking, I know her dark eyes will be rimmed in thick winged eyeliner and her highlighted hair pulled back into a tight high ponytail, a classic Asian Baby Girl (ABG). Normally, she wouldn’t know me from a block of wood except for the fact that her dad runs an import-export business and supplies our restaurant with all of its sauces and dried goods. Her family invited us to some big show-off banquet at a swish restaurant all the way in Chatswood, like they were rich Chinese moguls. Ma got too anxious with all those people in the room and we had to leave halfway through the soup course.
Wei scoffs. ‘You’re such a bully. I’m getting a drink at least. Don’t leave without me.’
She’s heading into the store. I panic and look for some way out, eyeing the twenty-kilo sacks of rice as a potential hiding spot. But it’s too late and Wei spots me.
‘Hey, Anna.’ She comes over with a cheery smile. I force a smile and wave. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Um, shopping. Dinner. Stuff.’ I rattle off quickly. Good job with the words, genius.
‘That’s nice. Hanging out in the hood.’ She nods, and I’m surprised she’s being so friendly. ‘We live in Burwood but I like coming out to Ashfield. It feels more authentic, you know what I mean?’
‘Wei, who are you talking to?’ Connie’s voice travels unwanted through the air like passing gas. ‘Oh my god, is that Anna Chiu?’
I want to disintegrate into the sack of rice as Wei gives me an apologetic shrug.
‘Hi Connie,’ I say through gritted teeth.
‘How are you, Anna? It’s been aaaages,’ Connie coos even though we just saw each other in class today. Her shimmery-rimmed eyes home in like a hawk’s and she winks at her friends. ‘Hey, your mum shops at Aldi, right?’
I wasn’t expecting that question. ‘Ah. Yeah, sometimes.’ I don’t know why she would bring Ma up; it’s definitely not a subject I talk about. Something inside rubs the wrong way, like sandpaper.
‘I thought so.’ Her grin is fake and saccharine sweet. ‘My mother said she saw her at one of those Aldi deals a while back. Apparently, your mother was buying out the shop in walnuts.’ She winks at the other girls and they snigger. ‘She tried to make my mother buy some too. She was, like, forcing them into her basket.’ She mimes this, and the girls laugh more, except for Wei who won’t meet my gaze.
I’m burning hot and want to die. My hands squeeze the basket handles so tight, I can feel the edges pressing against the bones of my fingers. I remember Ma coming home with the walnuts a few months back. ‘They’re good for the kidneys,’ she had insisted after reading some health article in a Chinese newspaper. She bought twenty one-kilo bags; most of them are still sitting on the top shelf in our pantry. And out of all people, Connie Zhong’s mother saw Ma’s walnut frenzy and told her daughter.
It takes everything in me to not break down in tears. I want to say something, smack the eyeliner off her face. Call her a million things in English and Cantonese. But I just stand there, clutching the basket, willing myself not to cry.
Someone’s phone goes off. ‘Yo, that’s the boys.’
Connie rounds up her troops. ‘We gotta get out of here. Wei, let’s go.’ She delivers her queenly command as her subjects flurry around her.
Wei flashes me a sheepish look and mouths ‘seeya’ before scuttling off after the group. I hear the loud not-so-whispers of their conversations as they drift out of earshot.
I approach the counter, basket in tow. The palms of my hands have sharp red tracks where my nails have dug in. I pull out the items from my basket one by one. The girl behind the counter doesn’t look at me as she rings it all up.
‘Eight dollars and seventy-two cents,’ she says in deliberate, practised English.
I hand over a tenner and take the flimsy blue bag with dumplings and veg. I manage to hold it together all the way down Liverpool Road. It’s only when I turn off the main road that I dare to remove my thick frames and dab at my watery eyes. I bring the inner part of my elbow up to my mouth, and I let out a scream. The softness of my own flesh muffles the sound.
Dinner is dumpling and noodles with Campbell’s chicken stock as a base. The rice I put in the fridge; Ma might want it tomorrow. There’s no time to do things properly. Otherwise I would have loved to make a broth from scratch, boiling a juicy carcass and skimming off the top layer of oil and fat to keep it clear. Like Baba, I love to cook; the methodical processes of chopping, gutting, boiling and steaming combined with creativity and craft is like a cool salve to the burning soul.
Even if I only have pre-prepped stock, I take the time to slice spring onions into thin slivers to top off the broth and add a generous dollop of sesame oil and a dash of chilli for flavour. These are the secrets Baba has handed down to me from the weekends I used to spend in the restaurant kitchen.