Young creatives awards 2020 Writing Winners
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Pills by Kiet Phan (12 to 15 years)
When people look at the photos on the wall, they
see a ‘happy family’ - me, my brother, my mum and my dad - but they never look
close enough to notice the bruises peeking out from under my sleeves.
Often, I’d
imagine what it feels like to have a normal life like my Australian friends,
without coming to school each day with a brand new bruise on my body, without
having to replace the worn-out duct tape holding my shoes together each day
when I come home.
The feeling of the
cane against my wrist, sending the paralysing pain throughout my whole body,
leaving the bright red line tattooed on my skin. The helpless feeling of
knowing that I can only stand there taking in the pain whilst holding back the
tears. The feeling of divergence, knowing that I am in this alone. But the
aspect that hurts the most is that my dad would never even attempt to apologise
after.
Sometimes, I can predict when the
attacks are coming, but that anticipation is worse than the sudden unprovoked
assaults. Opening the door most afternoons to the stale aroma of exhaled
alcohol that sticks to your lungs and stings your vision, greeted by my dad’s
menacing sulk or his ice-cold eyes glaring at my every movement with a brooding,
glowering anger.
But sometimes there
were no signs that an attack was coming.
That day at school, my friends
told stories of their dads taking them on holidays. Taking them to BBQ’s.
Having fun playing with them at the beach - and all I can do is sit quietly,
lightly brushing over the bruises covered by my sleeves, imagining what it
would feel like to be a typical Australian.
“Gia đình mình không
giống họ,” my dad's voice echoed in my mind,
reminding me: we’re not like other families.
Although he is a violent person, we still do have
‘family’ dinners and ‘family’ gatherings. But they never go as planned. They
always end with me gaining another bruise, another scar.
Family dinners go
through in oppressive silence. I keep my head down, dolefully eating my food as
I can feel my dad’s glare, searching me for anything he can scream at me
about.
“Ăn cho đàng hoàng,
không là coi chừng,” he would always say,
warning us to eat without spilling or we would get punished.
Family gatherings go great...for him.
“Tôi biết cách làm
cho nó nghe lời,” he announced as he
shows off to all his friends - I know how to teach my kids.
“Con của anh ngoan nhỉ!” his friends exclaim - He obeys you!
- as they observed me ruefully observing my dad.
“Chỉ vì con bị đánh thôi,” - he beats me if I
don’t - I whisper quietly, and the crowd explodes into laughter as if I had
told a joke, not a secret. I knew I’d get punished for that.
“Lúc
bố đánh con bố đau hơn,” he would always say, telling me that
when he hits me, it hurts him way more. But is he the one limping to
school the next day? Is he the one that receives the brand new bruises?
That night he
lectured me, drunkenly addressing space in the middle distance, somewhere
between him and I, telling me the best way to educate your kids is by force, is
by violence. The way that our ancestors taught their kids. But he doesn’t know
that it’s different now. Our society has grown while he has stayed the same.
Like a boulder still standing sturdy as the years go by. He is still trapped in
the Vietnamese way of living many years ago. He, and his trauma, is what
defines me. His backwardness defines my Australian way of life.
Limping home each day like an injured
soldier, I cross the Harbour Bridge staring dejectedly into the distance at the
glowing Opera House with each tile reflecting the warm rays of sunlight. But
even with the warm beams of light shining on to me… I still feel cold.
During
these long walks home, I often have strange thoughts. Wondering whether I would
ever be able to escape the constant assaults. End all the pain. End all the
loud words that are spat at me when the alcohol consumes my dad. To be, or
not to be...
That’s
when I glance at all the trucks speeding pass me across the bridge, wondering
if they are moving fast enough. Or peeking over the edge of the bridge,
wondering if the water is far enough below. Or taking out the bottle of pills I
bought a long time ago, now buried deep within my drawer, and examining the
bright red capsules, looking for the courage to open the cap each day.
These thoughts
are felt often. Mostly whenever the attacks happen, when the red line on my
skin slowly turns purple, developing into a bruise.
His hands are clenched around the
cane when I get home. The flame in his eyes rages furiously as if making the
stale aroma of alcohol more intense. He spits the staggering words at me, like
a snake spitting its venom.
“TẠI SAO CON ĐƯỢC ĐIỂM THẤP VẬY?!” he shouts, blustering me about my B
grade in Maths, shaking my report card furiously in his left hand.
He
doesn’t know or care that I achieved the highest in my class. The frustration
brings tears to my eyes as I storm into my room, shutting the door loudly
behind me as if trying to block him out. I allow the streams of tears to
cascade now. Now that no one is watching. I open my drawer, digging through the
piles of ripped shirts as I search for the bright red bottle through the
curtain of tears... I have almost gained enough courage now, all my anger and
hatred slowly melts into sorrow and melancholy driving my hand towards the
bottle.
Taking one
long breath and wiping the tears away, I open the cap… probably not taking them
tonight, but knowing that that day is getting nearer.
Knowing that one day, when
people look at the ‘happy family’ photos on the wall - they’ll only see my
brother, my mum, and my dad.
Vegemite by Zoe Hamra (16 to 18 years)
Inspired by the theme of
alienation in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.
“Vegemite?” Dad asks, holding up two white squares. “Vegemite,” we
answer, nodding. Max jitters the foot I’m trying to lock into his greying
leather shoe. “I’m cold”, his small voice whispers to me. I tell him that I’ll
pull up our bedroom blinds when I’ve finished his laces. He likes to sit there,
cross-legged, in the patch of sun that hits around seven fifteen, lining up his
four chipped Pokemon figurines the same way other boys organise their shiny
ones. Dad and I keep warm by singing about gravy and Christmas for the rest of
the morning, twirling past the cracks in the living room and over the ones in
the floor, until he has to go to work and Max and I have to go to school.
I make three cards from the stuff in the craft box at lunch - one for
dad, one for Max, one for Ms Kelly. Ben and his group don’t do craft cause
they’re too busy arguing about which houses Santa would skip if he runs out of
time on Christmas Eve. They reckon he’d still visit their houses but the big
brick buildings across Illawarra Rd wouldn’t make the cut because “they’re
smelly and dirty and Santa wouldn’t wanna give presents to litterbugs anyway!”
Ms Kelly knows I live there so she tells them not to be rude, but she doesn’t
stop them any more than that and I can tell she secretly thinks the same. I
concentrate on colouring in the last star on Ms Kelly’s card.
On Friday afternoon, Max and I walk home through the park where those
little fig things squish under your feet. Then I go to Jessica H’s place to
make Milo cupcakes with her and Sarah Lang. Dad says we always have to bring
something when we go to someone’s place, ‘cause, sunshine, that’s very good
manners’, so I bring a half-full punnet of strawberries from our fridge to put
on the cupcakes.
Jessica H and Sarah Lang recite all the things on their wishlists
while we’re waiting for the brown circles to rise in the oven. It takes them a
long time. I tell them that all their things are on my list too. It gets hard
to keep pretending I know all the YouTubers Jessica H and Sarah Lang talk about
though, and I don’t want to leave Max home alone much longer because he’s only six, so when Jessica H’s mum, Cecelia, asks us to stay for dinner, I
say “I think I should go home”. Cecelia says she’ll drive me and goes to get
her sunnies.
Shiny leather squeaks underneath me even as I sit very still in the
seat behind Cecelia. The normal colours of the houses outside have gotten
darker, I think by a combination of the funny windows that this car has and the
red button. Nan says that God has a remote for the world and that he clicks the
red button every night to make it dark so we can sleep, and, even though Dad,
Max and I don’t believe in God, I like the remote story. It makes me think
we're all in a TV show, and then I can pretend I’m famous and that I have lots
of things and live in a really big house with a green garden and a lake out the
back.
I realise that I need to get out of the car before we get to my
street.
After I’ve shut the front door behind me, my shoulders release their
grip on my neck. I eat Max’s chips lying on the pile of saggy rectangular
pillows that dad calls a sofa but which I call a pile of saggy rectangular
pillows. My mind starts to get fuzzier and fuzzier.
“Sola! Sohhh-la! Look! SOLA!” Max calls out and gets rid of the
fuzziness really quickly. He’s staring through a gap in our bedroom blinds and
doesn’t even peel his head away as I kneel next to him. He points to a huge
silver Holden pulling into our building’s carpark. Max loves those cars.
We watch the silver giant as it just sits there with its engine
running, puffing fuel clouds. Max wants to know who's inside and what they’re
doing and why they’re here and when they’re gonna get out of the car, but I
don’t know so I just tell him to keep watching.
The driver’s door opens.
Then I flinch, because the woman with big sunnies and white jeans that
the silver giant just spat out is Cecelia. And, when I squint really hard to
see through the darkness, I can see she’s holding my water bottle. The old one
with my name and address sticker on it. I could kick myself.
“What?” Max asks, “what Sola?
Who is it?” I shush him and don’t breathe out as I watch her heels crunching
through the sea of gravel, towards our building’s red door. Cecelia stops when
she gets to the concrete path Donnie was standing on last night when he was
yelling at Jean. Donnie and Jean used to live together in the apartment beneath
us, but now only Jean lives there and she has big locks on her door. Cecelia
lifts her sunnies onto her head and her eyes dart around, taking in the shadowy
milk crates and the big black tarp and the landings with shirts and undies
still hanging over them even though the sun disappeared hours ago.
It looks like she’s gonna knock. Maybe she’ll come in and ask where
our parents are, and, since now she knows we live here anyway, maybe we’ll tell
her how Dad doesn’t get back from the factory until nine. Then maybe she’ll
stay and make us dinner and become friends with Dad and give him his favourite
bottle of grown-up Ribena for Christmas so he gets more than just cards drawn
with textas.
But Cecelia suddenly bends down. She leaves my water bottle on the
doorstep, puts her sunnies back on and hurries back to the silver giant. The
car’s gone in the blink of an eye and it’s as if she was never here.
“Aww” Max falls back from the window and lies on the floor. I get off
my knees and rub them, trying to make the redness that comes from leaning on
old carpet for too long go away. I breathe out and look down at Max, whose head
is upside-down from where I stand. His gaze shifts from the ceiling to my face.
“Toast for dinner?” I ask. “Yeah,” he replies.
“Vegemite?”
“Vegemite.”
Soft Touch by LiLy Cameron (19 to 24 years)
1. Over the past few years, I have developed an obsession with hands.
I don’t seek them out consciously, but they come into my life all the same,
images that grasp and don’t let go. In her book Bluets,
Maggie Nelson writes, “We don’t get to choose what
or whom we love… We just don’t get to choose.” I asked a friend to design a
tattoo for me: a right hand gently posing in port de bras, adorned with
silkworm moths. I had it inked onto my arm. My partner gave me a ring that
grasps me with its own tiny silver fingers. It’s not lost on me that I carry
these images around, hold them close, closer than my skin.
2. Over the years my mum has collected countless hand totems, her
house is littered with them: candle holders, incense burners, a votive
necklace, a terracotta sculpture which split across the fingers, leaving a mark
like a scar. Some I’ve given back to her, an attempt to solidify this
connection between us.
3. I’m sitting at home with my phone pressed to my ear. From over 100
kilometres away, I try to tell my mum exactly what happens when I see hands in
films or in paintings, even when I read about them. “It’s like staring into the
sun,” I say. “The hands just linger in the back of my eyes, and my mind will
keep returning to that image again and again. No matter what I do I keep seeing
them.” I ask her what it is that attracts her to hands, what has kept her
collecting things in their image. “I don’t know, Lil,” she says. “I don’t
remember why it started. I don’t remember what was first.” She seems a little
put on the spot, flustered that I would pose this question to her out of the
blue. “It just became a part of my body—part of my life,” she says.
4. Hands started taking over my small apartment, appearing in prints
on my walls, cut out from magazines and collaged in notebooks. I would fixate
on people’s fingers as they talked, watching words manifest in gestures. That
feeling persisted, the shadow of the sun, the hands in my eyes.
5. We don’t get to choose what we love. Jean Baptiste-Lamarck is best
remembered for being wrong; about genetic inheritance, heredity, and giraffes.
An offshoot of Lamarckian evolutionary theory—the controversial science of
epigenetics—proposes that in fact acquired traits can be, and are, passed down.
6. Epigenetics research often focuses on the traumatic. In the 1990s,
researcher Lars Olov Bygren studied women who were born during or just
following a famine. He found that several generations later, these women’s
descendants were at a greater risk than the general population of dying from
heart disease.
7. Another epigenetics researcher, Michael Skinner, conducted
experiments on mice during the early 2000s that involved exposing them to
acetophenone, a chemical which smells like almonds or cherries, depending on who
you ask. In conjunction with the release of this scent, Skinner would shock the
mice until they began to associate acetophenone with pain, with fear. The pups
of these lab-mice were born sensitive to the scent as well, as were their pups. I try to
imagine what it’s like, smelling marzipan and thinking pain. A jar of
maraschinos making me flinch.
8. We were nervous, I remember that. My mum had never been tattooed,
and was a little apprehensive about the pain. I was worried about the finality
of it all, whether having an image of a body part permanently on your body was
some strange form of cannibalism, and, if I’m being honest, about seeming dorky
for matching. We caught the 433, found our way to the artist’s Airbnb, paid her
$200 cash, and had the stencils put on our skin. I went first: a design of
hands cradling each other, waiting to hold something, put on the back of my
arm. Mum got the opposite: an illustration of palms faced down, placed just
below the crook of her elbow.
9. She became obsessed with how her hands seemed to be ageing a few
years ago. She bought white cotton gloves and a night cream, applied both
before going to bed. I’m offered a product called Tough Hands every time I
visit, a viscous kind of liquid that promises visible effects after five
days.
10. She told me that when she
was a child, her mother instructed her to always put sunscreen on the back of
her hands, that’s where women show their age. She instructed me to do the same.
11. Much like advice, mitochondrial DNA is passed down to children
through their mother’s sides, and continued by daughters. Mitochondria live in
the cytoplasm of cells, working to convert energy from food into a form that
cells can use. A small amount of DNA lives within these little ovoid bodies,
about 16,500 base pairs, a minuscule number when compared to the 200 million
plus base pairs that are contained in the nucleus of cells. Mitochondrial DNA
doesn’t change much, if at all, when passed from mother to child; my
mitochondrial DNA is probably almost identical to my maternal ancestors’ from
tens of generations ago.
12. I put sunscreen on every day.
13. Carl Zimmer quotes biologist Robert Martienssen—who is in turn
quoting 19th Century plant-breeder Luther Burbank—in his book She Has Her
Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.
He says, “Heredity is only the sum of all past
environment.” I picture a mother moulding a baby out of clay, shaping it with
her fingers and leaving it to dry in the sun, the baby’s palm cracking into
wrinkles as the clay bakes.
14. It feels like a middle-aged white man thing to do, trace one’s
ancestry, take note of the marriages and death and property, but I catch myself
doing it every once in a while when I tote a washing basket on my hip and some
strange sense memory is activated by the pressure on the bone. I feel the
weight of those women’s labour, the clothes they would have carried, the water,
the babies. Some kind of maternal remembering, or perhaps past life.
15. The last names of women before me are largely lost. There was
Thacker and McInerney and Newman and Ballantine and Kelly and Herden long
before there was me. I carry these women’s names with mine, in the base pairs that live in my mitochondria, in
every cell, and on my hip, where they used to carry babies.