The name of the nose.(Short story)

When we first came to inspect this house in Hill End, my mother's initial thought had been how bad the fengshui was. A gravelled path led to a flight of timber stairs, to the front door from which blue paint peeled off in flakes, some as big as my hand. A mat of blue dandruffy flakes had collected at the bottom of the slightly-askew door and when you opened the crappy blue door, the first thing you saw was the toilet. A straight line connected the toilet, the front door and the street. Mother couldn't help exclaiming, "The luck and money will all roll out, nothing to stop it."

"What money?" my brother had demanded to know. He was fifteen, a head taller than Mother and I, straight-backed, regular-featured, arrogant. He had discarded his birth name of Yap Wah Chong, and now styled himself as Warwick Young: we need to assimilate, he asserted, to avoid racist attacks. You always say the nail that sticks up must be hammered down, he pointed out to Mother, well, it's the same principle. So he'd set about getting himself on the school cricket team, and joined the local junior rugby club. With his broad shoulders, quick hands and daredevil courage, he was soon wearing the Number 12 jumper for his club. He liked being the inside centre because it's a position where he could get involved in all stages of the game. When he played on the wing, he complained that he had to wait for someone to give him the ball. I was secretly pleased that his classmates called him Wozza: the informality brought my brother down a peg or two, and made him easier to live with. To our mother and me, he is always Ah Chong, though we have instructions not to call him that except in the privacy of our home. The oldest boy in a traditional Chinese family enjoys a special status, and despite his desire to be dinky-di, my brother did not forgo the privileges of being the first-born son.

This was the umpteenth house we'd inspected, and we were footsore and thirsty, becoming disheartened about being able to find a place we could afford. I felt the September sun warm on my head, and noticed its beams highlighting the worry lines on my mother's forehead, and under her eyes. She's thin in the way that women from the south-eastern provinces of China are thin, sparrow-like, with tiny wrists and ankles. My mother and the other women in her extended family all seem to have that look of determination about them, suggesting some indefinable capacity for eating bitterness, some obstinate self-belief that makes them keep putting one foot in front of the other till they overcome their travails.

Mother wanted the estate agent to feel confident that we would be good tenants: she had dressed neatly, as she always does, in plain dark brown slacks and a short-sleeved white blouse with a bit of embroidery on the collar, her abundant hair coiled in a neat bun. She wore no jewellery; even her pierced ears carried no earrings, because she had none. What little she had brought with her from Vietnam had been sold to buy food and school uniforms. School, always school, is her first priority. Chinese families bang on interminably about school, school and more school.

For a small person, my mother has an unusually deep voice which tends to imbue her with an authoritative air. I noted the sympathetic gaze of the estate agent on Mother: this woman Marina Lubowicz too had once been a new immigrant who had travelled this rocky road of searching for cheap accommodation. Like my mother, she had what must once have been raven-black hair: now long silver filaments gleam here and there, and the temples carry the beginnings of silver wings.

We should never have been boat-people, arriving in the Lucky Country with just one small portfolio containing our birth certificates and family photographs. We are not Vietnamese people, but a part of the Chinese diaspora who are scattered throughout South-East Asia; we happened inadvertently to be in Vietnam when the mass evacuations took place, and the Americans had fled, cutting us adrift in more than one sense of the word. Some of the other evacuees received clothing, food parcels, short-term accommodation and some even obtained employment, from church groups, or the ...