Great flying soar and in command – by Lily Chan
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My brother’s name is Haoren. It means great flying, soar, esteem, in command. His name is Bob when he orders takeaway. Nobody mishears Bob. Nobody checks Bob’s ID. Bob has no history and is taken at face value. He has the cheekbones of a deathless vampire from a K-pop band, honed from evening climbs of Jacob’s Ladder, 242 unbroken concrete steps showing a panoramic view of King’s Park in Perth.
We were born in Kyoto and raised in a small country town in the Wheatbelt of Western Australia. I wonder how we would have lived in the patriarchy of our motherland, where women slowly unpick age-old traditions and navigate institutional sexism, such as a 2018 scandal where several medical schools confessed to rigging exams in favour of men.[1] Modern Japan is a difficult place for young people – a low-wage economy with an increasingly sexless, lonely cohort, disconnected and alienated. Our parents import expectations from the 1980s and they remain frozen within the family unit and the pressure cooker of our country town; to fulfil a pre-ordained role is not repression but freedom. To avoid being crushed by his militant upbringing my brother slowly hardens into a kind of obsidian. He is not allowed to play or make mistakes, to be a child or a teenager. He spends his adult life catching up.
Aged seven, I long for my brother’s eye on me – when I bodyboard a wave or build a sandcastle or master Fish or Snap or Uno and can prove my utility as a worthy contestant. I suffer through the younger sibling indignities of being ignored or dismissed or so thoroughly beaten at a card game that I burst into great, shuddering sobs. He reads Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, David and Leigh Eddings and LE Modesitt and so do I. He goes through an Anne of Green Gables phase and so do I. I try very hard to get into JRR Tolkien but the world of hobbits and elves remains impenetrable to me until the film trilogy bursts into the cinema. In VHS family videos, I totter after him with adoring eyes, copying his every move.
For years we orbit around my brother’s semi-professional table tennis career. His days are filled with tournaments and trialling double-rubber racquets with odour-free grip tape. He finesses a defence transition game and acquires a sponsor called Butterfly, a Japanese manufacturer of table tennis equipment with a ubiquitous purple-winged logo against a moss-green backdrop. Butterfly sponsors my brother’s table tennis scholarship to Japan. Walking past his empty bedroom, I feel a physical pang in my chest. His voice sounds miniscule on weekly long-distance phone calls. I dream he is standing in a laneway in Japan, somewhere in a city with food stalls, looking forlorn while the lanterns glow and a crowd bustles. He has the determined, attentive face of a protagonist in a Hayao Miyazaki film – devoid of self-pity.
My friend from grade two sleeps over. She wrinkles her freckled face at dinner. This is disgusting. She spits. Don’t eat it then, my brother says. He stares her down. I squirm. I wish we are having tomato soup or a roast or pasta or whatever it is that white people eat, not this spread of miso soup and bok choy with garlic and tofu fried with slivers of celery and carrot and a hotpot of daikon and lotus root and konnyaku, a grey speckled jelly made from yam.
We swim at the pool every summer in the small Wheatbelt town which is our home. Our skin is salty and sticky after the heat dries the chlorine sting. There is not much to do but suck Icy Poles and avoid the sun. One afternoon I crouch on the floor reading The Babysitters Club, picking lint and dry skin from the groove between my upper thigh and torso, inching in closer to my bottom. My brother leads a tribe of his friends – three brothers, golden and tall like the Hemsworths – into the room to find a boardgame. He is pale with embarrassment and disgust. Yuck, he says. Picking your bum! The Hemsworth brothers shuffle their feet and avoid my gaze.
At the Christmas school play my brother dons a head-to-toe hairy suit and realistic gorilla rubber mask and clambers about the audience, eliciting shrieks. The Hemsworth brothers play a trio of giraffes lost in the jungle. For an English assignment he crafts a giant, floppy potato-shaped face in butcher’s paper and permanent marker and tapes it to his skull. The monologue is a serious one – inspired by a historical figure from a curriculum text - but the performance with the bobbling, wobbly head overlays it with incongruity. I think he is a genius.
My brother goes on a day hike with our father at Karijini National Park. I shadow an evolving crush in the campground: a blond boy who, with his cowlicked mop, evokes ‘Jem’ in To Kill a Mockingbird. This Jem doppelganger ambushes me on the jungle gym and drags me down the double-barrelled slide. I struggle out of the tan bark and shout hysterically, tears coming to my eyes. While I nurse my heartbreak over a camp dinner, my brother storms into the caravan park, yelling I almost died! He had survived a precarious overpass by clinging to a small ridge while our father shouted at him to inch along. But there are no witnesses, nobody to verify his experience. Over and over he exclaims, I almost died! Dad took me on a climb where I almost died. He is astonished by our father’s audacity.
Our interests diverge in high school. He paints Warhammer figurines with single-haired brushes and collects Magic: The Gathering cards to wield in closed tournaments. I nurture Tamagotchis and craft outfits for a Spice Girls tribute band which performs to the prep students. We adopt a squinting, sideways look, as if our internal gaze is focused on things in the distance instead of the present. We’re the supporting cast in a film, trying to upgrade into main roles. I gather up my fringe and wear it in a sideways ponytail, which offends his sensibilities. We are uneasy in our skin and look to the teen fashion of the nineties for guidance: cargo pants, butterfly clips, chokers and mullets. He seems content with his own oiled hair meeting in bristling horns over the centre of his forehead. He consumes vast amounts of food but his angular head seems to bob like a stalk on his neck. Cancer snappy. Scorpio moon. Secretive. Scorpio rising.
We download a dud file of Since U Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson using dial-up internet. It takes two days. The file is blank and sounds like static. The second try is a success. We cheer and high five as her powerful soprano rings through the computer stereo. Pirate Bay is a portal to owning coveted digital pop culture without spending money. I tutor English to high school and international students. My brother delivers for Domino’s Pizza with his 1999 Ford Falcon, which melts down after one shift too many without a service. It is replaced by a dark blue 1997 Volvo XC90 with a clunky gear-shift. He bluetooths in his mp3 collection of K-pop. On the back seat, a camel hair jacket and some flash cards inscribed in careful, ant-like writing, containing tips from The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick Up Artists by Neil Strauss. Peacocking. Negging. Showing indicators of interest.
After all, everyone’s favourite subject is themselves.
All your emotions are going to try to fuck you up … you must deal with it like you deal with a pebble in your shoe. It’s uncomfortable but you ignore it.
You ran right back to her like a puppy dog.
He watches me pop a contraceptive pill from the foil with alarm and raises my potential promiscuity to my father, who explains, in an abbreviated fashion, the long journey of menorrhagia, constant low-grade menstrual bleeding, my low iron count, fatigue and moodiness mistaken as teenage angst, of homeopathy and ayurvedic remedies taken without avail. Oh, says my brother. He doesn’t bring it up again.
I begin plucking the hair from the centre of my scalp until a bald, coin-shaped disc can be seen in school photos. My brother picks at scabs on his legs, leaving scar tissue webbing over his calves. We separately develop trichotillomania, marked by obsessive, concealed habits of mild self-mutilation. What we share is an abiding sense of being an outsider and the accompanying shame of it. He sinks into the shogunate crest, that ornate motif of ancient patriarchy. His face grows more angular, his widows peak more pointed. Is it Perth? Is it nihilism? Is it the crowd? I wonder if he is encased in the empty machismo thrumming through suburban Perth and which Martin Mckenzie-Murray describes in A Murder Without Motive: the Killing of Rebecca Ryle as the badlands: a place not materially impoverished but haunted by low expectations.
My brother’s day has a rhythm. He works shifts at two different pharmacies and returns home to fuel up, shower, pretty up and head to a club, taking breaks to refine his manifesto on economic theory and gender investment, informed by deep reading and select online forums. He wants to replicate the empire-building of my father, to marry a woman like my mother, to flourish in a tax haven of speculative investments. He spends weekends in an assortment of bars and clubs where he knows the bartenders and security guards by name. He welcomes newbies gregariously as if they are gaining entry to some exclusive roost over which he presides – an underground of singletons faintly smelling of loneliness.
He wants to marry a woman like our mother, but he dates strong, fiery women from Iran and China, women with huge eyes, delicate faces and convivial characters who temporarily wrestle him into some domestic contentment. From these relationships he returns subdued, as if he has visited a foreign land from which he has suddenly been exiled. We enter the era of our peers filing for divorce with young children in tow. He takes great delight in the existence of children – instinctively, he knows how to play. In playing, he abandons the strictures of manhood and adult responsibility, of being a pharmacist and eldest son and inheritor of the family mantle. The presence of a child frees him momentarily from these expectations, these Saturnine loads.
Our father dies within a year of his cancer diagnosis. We eat Guzman y Gomez as his body stiffens in the adjoining room. When the doctor comes to issue the death certificate, we are smeared in jalapeno cream and guacamole. My brother doesn’t speak much about the bereavement. He grips the steering wheel of the car and mutters: He shouldn’t have suffered as much as he did.
As soon as you ask yourself whether you should or shouldn’t, that means you should.
He looks at me as if I am a plant popped out of radioactive compost. He says, half-serious: I am a far right ultra-conservative and you are a bleeding-heart leftie. I wish I could say, you don’t have to be the king of the world. You are the king of our world. We are two owls perched on fence posts, hoping the other will turn their head, unsure if we will like what is being held in each respective beak and whether we will approve of it.
My brother retired from table tennis when he was 15 years old. He handicapped himself during the RSL round-robins in our country town by playing with his left hand. I was incensed. It was like seeing Superman fling off his cape and throw it in the bin. He was quiet and calm about it. He knew it was time to let go. ▼
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46568975
Image: Chris Leipelt - Unsplash
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