FORTUNE COOKIE Read online

  After each day’s work, the first two hours after sunset were taken up with mostly silent bowing and nodding as he helped serve food to an increasing number of illiterate and raucous larrikins, who seemed to delight in finding new racial insults. Ah Koo cared little that he was required to be subservient to even the lowest slobbering gwai-lo; it was a small price to pay for freedom and a measure of independence, even if only because he and Little Sparrow were essential to the white man’s needs.

  Like every Chinese, Ah Koo secretly longed for an extended family to give him an identity but accepted that the first tender roots of his new family tree had barely penetrated the topsoil. The first generation is always hard won in the face of sickness, accident and disaster, but Little Sparrow, sweating over a steaming wok, would prove to be fecund, a mewling baby constantly at her breast and a squall of snotty-nosed infants of various sizes crawling in the dust around her feet. He took a secret pride in the fact that he was to be the forefather of many in a new land, even though a Chinese heart always belongs to the motherland, where it hopes to rest in death. He was often taken by surprise when he realised there were already four additional mouths to feed. His heart swelled with gratitude at his good fortune that all were male progeny, a clear indication that the gods were smiling.

  The years passed. As the timber-getters penetrated deeper into the cedar forest, he bought a donkey cart to transport his produce. Nothing much changed; he and Little Sparrow worked seven days a week, at least twelve hours a day – he in the garden, apart from the two hours after sunset, which were taken up with helping his wife serve food to an increasing number of oafish timber-getters, agricultural workers, bullock-wagon drivers and government timber inspectors.

  Every February they’d celebrate Chinese New Year with one day of respite from their labour. In China, New Year is a spring festival, but in Australia, summer is at its height. The darling buds of promise and new life are long gone, green has burned to bleached brown, the creek is down to a sluggish trickle, and everything is struggling to survive the long, dry never-ending days of shimmering heat. However, traditions must be honoured, and so the chophouse closed for the day and, to the delight of the children, Ah Koo and Little Sparrow lit Chinese crackers to drive out evil spirits, burned incense and offered their thanks to the gods who had now blessed them with six sons in a row.

  The house was thoroughly swept and every corner dusted and cleaned to oust any lingering evil and clear the way for good luck to enter in the year to follow. Doors and windows were decorated with red paper and charms – red to symbolise fire, to ward off bad luck, and the charms for wealth, happiness and longevity. The boys were given lucky money in red envelopes and wore red shirts. Chinese New Year celebrations traditionally end with the lantern festival, when the community gathers under the full moon to watch the dragon dance. As theirs was the only Chinese family in The Valley, they were forced to forgo this joyous gathering. It was Little Sparrow’s greatest unspoken wish that some day she and her family might celebrate New Year properly with their own people.

  Then, thirteen years after their firstborn son, came the double misfortune of twin girls. One girl is ‘bad rice’, twin girls are ‘bitter rice’. Ah Koo stoically accepted Little Sparrow’s lamentations and abject apologies and decided that he must have incurred the wrath of the gods. He couldn’t think what he might have done, but then they were a notoriously fickle and cantankerous lot. It was clear they were telling him he had quite enough healthy sons to ensure comfort in his old age as well as to start a new dynasty. His good joss, at least in the matter of further male progeny, had been used up.

  He burned incense at the family shrine, made a sacrifice of food and added a small bottle of brandy for good measure. Building the shrine was the only request Little Sparrow had ever made of him. It wasn’t much larger than a birdcage and was set on a carved pedestal, but he’d made it from cedar. The shrine was Little Sparrow’s most precious – in fact, her only – possession, and she prayed before it every day. Ah Koo promised the gods that he would never again enter his wife’s exhausted body, a vow he kept and one for which she may or may not have been grateful, as she was still a comparatively young woman.

  Not a great deal more is known about my great-great-grandmother other than a recurring dream that was instrumental in changing her husband’s life. Only one studio daguerreotype exists of the entire family, taken when the twins were around sixteen. The oval-framed image shows Little Sparrow as a moon-faced woman with pockmarked skin, her eyes two dark lines that reflect no light under the narrow curves of her eyebrows, her mouth set hard. Silver-grey plaits hang almost to her waist, and she is wearing a pao, a black silk top, and a pair of black pants, a ku. On her feet are what appear to be white slippers.

  She stands next to Ah Koo, her head not quite reaching the point of his thin shoulder. Her hands are held loosely at her sides, her body language impatient. It is as if she believes her hands have been idle too long in this pointless pose, which patently she feels her hands (and perhaps those of the twins) don’t have the right to be. Nevertheless, she completely dominates the photograph. The rest of the serious family appear to be a pretty scrawny bunch, but what Little Sparrow lacks in height she more than makes up for in width: she is built like the proverbial brick shithouse.

  Which pretty much describes my own body – five feet eight inches in height and 210 pounds, all chunk, no fat – I’m a definite throwback to my great-great-grandma. Think rugby union prop forward. I’m a dead ringer for Little Sparrow, the full tree-trunk torso and flat face. I was playing for the under-fourteen rugby team at Cranbrook when I first got the dumb nickname that has stuck to me ever since.

  We were playing Scots College, just up the road from Cranbrook. The two private schools were deadly rivals: Cranbrook was smaller and prided itself on the individualism of its students, while Scots was the traditional model that produced future leaders, meaning the standard private-school product of wealth and privilege. Or so the theory went, anyway. The Scots’ favourite taunt was a rhyme that went:

  Tiddly-winks, young man

  Get a woman if you can

  If you can’t get a woman

  Get a Cranbrook man!

  Scots, the larger school, usually gave Cranbrook a walloping at every sport and in particular on the football field. On this particular day, the Cranbrook under-fourteens were, by our usual standards, a pretty good side, and two fathers, both leading businessmen and mates, both wealthy and highly competitive, started a friendly argument about who would win. It seems this got somewhat out of hand, so that the bets on either side kept rising, to the amusement of the assembled dads and the disgust of the few mums who dutifully watched their sons playing in the first game on a wintry Saturday morning.

  In a close game, Scots got a penalty with two minutes to go to fulltime, which put them three points ahead, and it seemed to be all but over for the Cranbrook dad, who stood, by this time, to lose thirty quid. But at the restart after the penalty, I caught the ball and started to run with it; lumber is probably a better description, for, even at fourteen, my bulk was formidable. I managed to barge through and run half the length of the field to score under the posts. We converted the try and won by two points – a converted try in those days was only worth five points. The final whistle went and the Cranbrook dad was jubilant. When we came off the field, he shouted at me, ‘What’s you name, son?’

  ‘Koo, sir,’ I replied in the accepted private-school manner, identifying myself by my surname alone.

  ‘And your first name?’ he called again.

  I was still panting heavily and was perhaps over-excited at having scored the winning try. Had he asked for my Christian name I would have said Simon, but my first name in Chinese was Kee, so that’s what I stupidly said.

  He handed me two pound notes, shouting, ‘Buy both teams a cream bun and a lemonade’ – the accepted schoolboy treat at the time – ‘and … thanks. You won me a fortune, Koo Kee.’ He must have known
that Chinese surnames come first. The team and the parents heard it, to much laughter, as, ‘Thanks. You won me a fortune cookie.’

  From that day I was forever after nicknamed Fortune Cookie. The under-fourteen blokes stayed together throughout our schooling, and in our final year most of us played for the first fifteen that would be unbeaten, something Cranbrook School had never previously managed. After that I was selected as one of the props for Australian Schoolboys, where my nickname, unfortunately, spread far and wide. When I played rugby for Sydney University, there were some who speculated about me getting a state or even eventually a Wallaby jersey, but it was not to be; this particular tree trunk was due to crash. I badly injured my knee and that was the end of my football career. But the nickname persisted.

  I had always wanted to be an artist of some sort but my family believes in education of the kind that produces lawyers, doctors and businessmen. We’re big in several businesses – coffin manufacture (Gold Chisel Caskets), funeral parlours (Blue Lotus Funerals) and restaurants (the Little Sparrow restaurant chain). Eating and dying are both inescapable and therefore good business, but art, in the family’s opinion, is an occupation for dreamers who have little or no chance of earning an honest quid. Had it not been for Ah Koo four generations back, I’d have had Buckley’s of becoming an artist. Even so, I was required to go to Sydney Uni where I did an honours degree in Commerce majoring in economics. Only then was I allowed to study graphic design at Sydney Technical College and finally move on to my present life in advertising, a compromise my folk find barely acceptable. If I know my mum, she’ll probably attempt to buy the agency one day. Fortunately, it is a very large multinational with its head office in America, and therefore unlikely to come up for sale. Still, you never know with her.

  I guess my parents are pretty disappointed that, as the oldest and only son, I haven’t gone into one of the family’s three areas of business. Pointing out that I’ve got three sisters who are not exactly intellectual slouches, and fifteen female cousins, most of them highly qualified, smart as whips and climbing the family corporate ladder in a competitive scramble, doesn’t seem to help. We’re pretty integrated as an extended Australian family (my grandfather was the last male Koo to grow up speaking Cantonese), and we’ve fought in every war, including the Boer War, but excluding Vietnam, where my name didn’t come up in the lottery. But some Chinese customs persist, the privileges accorded the firstborn male being one of them.

  When my three sisters and I were kids we would play a game called ‘Hawks and Doves’. I would stand on a chair and be the hawk, while my sisters, squatting on the carpet, would be doves. ‘Koo! Koo! Koo!’ the doves would call, while I glared down at them ferociously, choosing my prey. If my mother caught me before I leapt, she would remind us sternly, ‘Your name may sound like the call of a dove, but you will all be hawks, remember that.’

  The eldest son of each generation of the Koo family has taken over as group chairman of the various family enterprises. Even though some of my dad’s younger brothers, my uncles, were obviously smarter than he was, Dad still got the top job. If it hadn’t been for my mum not so quietly taking the reins, the various businesses might not be where they are today. Not all Koos have proved to be happy little Vegemites. My dad has a problem with alcohol, is an alcoholic, which seems pretty rare among Sydney Chinese, but then perhaps it is simply kept well hidden, as things are in our family, or it’s a gene picked up from one of his convict antecedents.

  But that’s the advantage of a large and varied family business: there’s a place for everyone, be it chairman of the board or forklift driver in a warehouse. As an example, there are aspects of the death business that are better served by the exceedingly dull though trustworthy members of the family. Collecting the dead and dealing with the results of their bowels loosening and evacuating their contents at the moment of death is not for the squeamish. Preparing corpses, plugging orifices or babysitting the dead is not for the overly imaginative.

  My dad’s a pretty benign drunk and seldom creates a fuss, but my mum hates weakness of any sort. Her catchcry is ‘Well, what can you expect? After five generations of intermarriage with convicts, your family is bound to have picked up a few bad habits.’ Perhaps it’s the intermarriage that has made him less obviously concerned with all things Chinese, whereas my mother, who came from Singapore at the age of three with her parents, is very proud of her Straits-Chinese heritage. Her dad was the youngest of four brothers in a family that was well placed in the palm-oil business. As number-four son he was last in the pecking order but was evidently pretty bright, so when he’d completed his matriculation at Raffles Institution in Singapore in 1910, he was sent to Cambridge and took a degree in organic chemistry.

  Returning home just before the Great War, he was recruited by Levers to work in their new Malaya palm-oil plant, experimenting with industrial uses for palm oil, in particular, glycerine for explosives. He was considered a key man, his job essential to the war effort, and he was not permitted to join up. He married and my mum, Phyllis, was born in 1915. Four years later, with the war over, Levers offered him a position in Australia to establish a laboratory to produce refined glycerine. Levers had just signed a contract with the Nobel people, who had set up factories in Sydney and Melbourne to manufacture explosives in which nitroglycerine was a key component. While this wasn’t a government initiative, Canberra nevertheless saw the local manufacture of explosives as important. Importing explosives during the war had proved both dangerous and costly. Australia was isolated from its allies, especially in the event of future hostilities. The fact that Albert Kwan, my grandfather’s Europeanised name, was Chinese – and therefore subject to the White Australia Policy – was quietly overlooked, due to the importance of his work to Australia’s future defence. In fact, he was given a token interview and made to translate a piece of writing into English, avoiding the usual dictation test in Russian, Hungarian or Scottish Gaelic, if necessary, which was used to deny entry to undesirables such as blacks and Asians.

  Born in Singapore, my mother grew up in Australia and was educated at Presbyterian Ladies College in Pymble and is, to all intents and purposes, Australian. But that’s not how she sees it. Her grandparents managed to flee Singapore just before the Japanese invasion of the island during the Second World War and hid out for its duration in one of their more remote palm-oil plantations in Malaya. But they lost two sons who’d joined up to fight the Japanese. After the war her grandparents returned to their large villa on Tanjong Katong (Turtle Bay) and resumed their place as an important Straits-Chinese family.

  My mother’s parents, Albert and Gloria Kwan, subsequently returned to Singapore island, where Albert joined his brother, Robert, in the family’s palm-oil business. Both my mum’s parents were tragically killed in an automobile accident in 1948.

  So my mother regards herself as a well-born Chinese, who, in 1935 at the age of twenty, had the good fortune to marry into a very rich family, and the corresponding misfortune to blend her pure blood with that of a ratbag, mixed-up Chinese-Australian family with almost no sense of being Chinese. It didn’t help either when my dad, leaving her with a two-year-old, joined up and was sent to New Guinea. Because of his experience in the coffin and funeral business, he was attached to the Army Graves Service as an officer and rose to the rank of captain, but in 1945 he returned to her a drunk.

  Furthermore, my sisters, born after the war, don’t look particularly Chinese – well, perhaps if you take a hard look. Their hair, but not much else, shows their Asian heritage – so my pretty mother could take delight only in her first child, a throwback to my great-great-grandmother with a build like a tree stump and a flat Chinese peasant face that looks as if I were slammed very hard against a brick wall at birth.

  With my great-great-grandfather producing six sons, all of whom survived childhood by some miracle, you’d think there’d be Koos aplenty, and, indeed, after four generations, my extended family runs to over two hundred members
. But my father’s generation must have offended the gods in a big way, because not one of my six Koo uncles has produced a male heir. I am the last of the male Koos. My recalcitrance in choosing not to join the family business empire (we also own a vast amount of real estate, known as First Nest Investments) has resulted in a fair amount of criticism from and disappointment amongst my extended family, and my failure to marry and produce a male heir hasn’t helped my status much either. Despite our childhood game and my superior role in it, it seemed that I was the dove and my sisters were the hawks.

  Anyway, enough of that Chinese dynastic nonsense. Ever since high school I’ve been called Fortune Cookie. I’ve grown so accustomed to the nickname that if any one of my friends were to call me Simon, I’d most likely do a double-take before responding.

  However, I digress.

  Great-great-grandfather Ah Koo was a philosophical sort of bloke, prepared to bide his time and cop what life brought him, good and bad. Like almost all Chinese peasants, he knew how to grow things, and the soil was his security, his guarantee of life, but it wasn’t where his heart lay. He’d been trained as a carpenter and secretly longed to return to his vocation. He loved wood for itself and he was also, it seems, something of an artist.

  In the Yass mining museum, there’s a sluice made from ironbark rescued from a Lambing Flat creek bed that had once been a busy prospecting site. My grandfather claimed it once belonged to Ah Koo and that it carries his chop carved into one of the sluice planks.

  A gold prospector’s sluice is a pretty basic piece of field equipment: a few wooden posts and planks and, if you were lucky, a tin lining beaten out of kerosene cans. While I haven’t seen it, this one is said to be practically a work of art, the ironbark sides decorated with dragons and birds, and the posts entwined with carved lotus blossoms.