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WASHING NIGHTS
A petite dark-haired girl in jeans and a round collared shirt, about seven years old, is jumping the cracks of the footpath. She’ does so with intense concentration and drama for to her they are dangerous snakes in a jungle to be carefully negotiated. It’s suburban Bulleen, eastern Melbourne, a small set of shops in a sea of new suburbs a little after five. Standard local conveniences: liquor, laundromat, milk bar, Chinese restaurant, real estate and accountants. It is quiet. And it’s a Thursday, because on Thursdays her family comes here to the Ayr Street shops to do the washing and when its finished eat at the Chinese; so mum doesn’t have to cook. I see myself as if from a disembodied observer’s point of view, cinematic, yet I am that child and simultaneously I study the footpath through a child’s eyes, a quirk of time. By these things I know it’s a memory from the 1970s, time is moving more slowly.
The wide shop verandas, angle parked cars in shade. The opposite verge is a dirt ridge bathed orange in sunset; driveways carve through it at regular intervals like claw marks. Fluoro lights buzz above. Passing cars are large, rolling down the hill to a valley where one day the eastern freeway will flow. Trees are small, the view unobscured.
In the shortness of my life to this point, it seems we’ve been doing this forever, maybe four years. Mum is working and we multitask housework and family time. She’s sworn off washing machines that always break down. The laundromat is cheaper than service calls and is preferable, she asserts, because all the loads of washing can be done simultaneously, folded while still warm from the dryer (reducing ironing); and my father and I both help. Kids at school think its weird not to have a washing machine. We’re different.
Washing still takes forever. Like all laundromats, it has a hollow core of red-flecked laminex tables, dryers to the left, top loaders to the right are chunky buttermilk; an acrid dash of burning dust and motor oil in the warm steamy air, lino floor, tattered magazines with the crosswords filled out. The machines drone cyclic white noise, hums, clicks and vortex whining. Red lights blink. No sounds from outside penetrate. I’m very bored.
I escape to the street. My parents pay no mind to my straying, I’m safe; they’re occupied talking over the week: the work politics, the funding cuts imminent, the reshuffles predicted. The last shop of the row, the grog shop, marks the abrupt end of the footpath. It’s dark and intimidating, large men go in and out without looking up, butting out on the stoop as they enter. Around the corner a concrete drain cover sits surrounded by gravel and exposed dirt and ragged grass, a small leftover triangle called a park. Sometimes I throw stones.
Finally, when the clothes are piled into the back of the old EH Holden, we walk two doors up to the restaurant. The same family has run it for years, they live in an apartment above, every member has served us at some stage, mum at the till, dad in the kitchen and sons and daughters waiting tables. Over the front door a dripping air conditioner butts out inelegant and precarious, the plate glass shaded with white lace, the large window mirrored, an exterior tiled in small pink speckled squares. Inside a sharp right at the false wall directs customers past plastic seats to the main dining area. The Sounds of Silence, the Simon and Garfunkle kind, is perpetually on the turn-table.
Without fail, once we settle at a red-aproned table, my father remarks that he was fifteen before he ever went to a restaurant. “Fifteen!” I parrot back under my breath. My life is extraordinarily privileged, apparently though I know nothing else and am ill-equipped to appreciate it. The faux dark wood walls are interspersed with traditional Chinese scenes, red faced women, dragons, misted turrets and mountains, garnished with glitter and mother of pearl. Heavy fans languidly turn from the ceiling. The lights are dimmed and voices hushed. Muffled chaos shines through the occasional opening of the swing door at the back where a toothless elderly man laughs and rocks on a stool and children do homework.
My parents drink their b.y.o. wine while I munch prawn crackers and doodle on paper napkins waiting for our food. Black Bean Beef for Dad, Chicken with cashews for Mum and I have ordered Lemon Chicken with Special Fried Rice.
“Wouldn’t you like to try something else?” My mother’s kohl-lined eyes peer over her vinyl-covered menu at me. My father joins in, but laughs at the futility of convincing me; I’m not to be persuaded. I have it every week.
This is because it’s perfect. The chicken is cut up chinese-style bones and all, roasted so it has a crisp skin, a soy-darkened dimpled brown with crunch. The meat comes succulent and salty with lots of bits to suck on; the lemon sauce, homemade, tangy and piquant. Some people find the revealed rib cage too challenging but to me it’s exotic, reflecting the adventurousness and sophistication of the diner. The fried rice comes white and slightly crisped, crammed with peas, unspeakable parts of pork, yellow spit-balls of egg and those tiny little prawns. Every week I have piled my plate high, discolouring it all ecstatically with lashings of soy sauce. I pick the bones clean, slurp up the last grains of rice; love the gelling of the soy as it swirls in the remaining lemon sauce leaving dark streaks.
But this night it changed. The son of the family is in his twenties, shaggy haired, a moustache, coarse and sparse like walrus’s whiskers, open necked shirt and a gold ingot on a chain. He has been gradually taking over the business; becoming the manly entrepreneur before our eyes. With a wide toothy smile he puts on our table a plate of deep fried, battered objects swimming in a uriniferous sweet sauce. The skin was gone. When bitten into, the pale yellow exterior revealed a white pasty internal rim, the meat texturised and anatomically unrecognisable. My inside still tightens with remembered outrage, as only a child can feel when disappointment is so earth shattering, its like a plumber has stuck a metal-pipe down my throat.
Maybe that was my first understanding of how times change, a sign of the 80s to come. It was the same dish you will find today in every food court, every chinese food establishment, everywhere in the world. Cheap, easily mass-produced and popular, a triumph of culinary assimilation, disconnected from the people who make it, faceless. It’s a dish with no authentication, a hybrid invention, an ode to fatty fast food and western pallid palates. Eating the thick batter no longer made me feel special, different or privileged. It made me like everyone else. What they had served had been a personal interpretation, unique, and then it was gone.
Slowly we stopped going. We didn’t have the time. My mother’s new job that frequently took her interstate. My father lectured at night. I wouldn’t be seen dead out with my parents. We got busier. We got take-out. There were more and more options competing for our attention, spoilt for choice. We discovered: Malaysian, Indian, Japanese, Thai; a voracious appetite for the new; a flavourful pursuit of fashion. When we did go there the shops had a tired air as the huge shopping mall up the road sucked everything dry. The restaurant seemed daggy, the dark unchanged interior tacky and gloomy. Eventually we even got a washing machine.
The brightly lit milk bar is empty of customers in the darkness of a winter’s early evening, not quite 5.30, 2006. The grog shop has closed for the night. A stripped shell remains of the laundrette. I’m standing before the dusty sheeting that curtains the abandoned restaurant. It’s taken almost thirty years for Peking-style roasts to again be available around here, albeit in a shopping centre food court several suburbs away and without lemon sauce. I wonder where the family went and how long they lasted; what they’re doing now and hope they got out alright, noting the signage for a Vietnamese next door which has come and gone. The road is neatly curbed with regular speed traps to deter freeway traffic. It’s very quiet.