The Family Law Read Online Free

It took a while before she realised that Dad was consoling his mother. But what about? Had something gone wrong with the baby?
    â€˜ Leui-jae doh hoh ,’ Dad was telling his mother in Cantonese. Girls are fine enough too . He said this to console my grandmother, who was hoping for a son, but Mum took it personally. After giving birth to five children, she felt like someone had finally come clean and summed up her role in life: that as a woman, she wasn’t anything special, just adequate enough. Leui-jae doh hoh. By the time she opened her eyes, my father and grandmother had gone, and everything in her line of vision was streaky and blurred. She began to sob, snotty and miserable.
    In the end, Mum reluctantly went under and got those tubes tied. She left the hospital feeling numb, and barely acknowledged Dad’s presence as he opened the car door for her. As he drove, she looked at her new baby, who slept inside the rented car capsule. Sleeping and quiet, Michelle looked like one of the plastic babies Mum had seen in toy shops, all perfect skin with poked-out lips like she was about to kiss you. When the car hit a bump, Michelle woke up, sleepy-eyed and dough-faced. Mum laughed to herself: she’d almost forgotten how cute babies were. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
    Â 
    *
    Â 
    When all five kids spend time with Mum nowadays, we slip into childhood habits. We take long naps in the day, shop or swim in the afternoon, then gross each other out over the dinner table with stories that involve poo or sanitary pads. Lately, for kicks, we’ve started a new tradition of showing each other foul videos we’ve found on the internet. I’d already shown everyone the video with the two girls and the cup, as well as the one with the cyst being popped open. This new one began with a sombre warning: ‘This video contains graphic scenes of an elephant birth.’
    We all watched with hands over our mouths as a pregnant elephant started pacing in her enclosure, stretching her body, her trunk extended horizontally into a silent scream.
    â€˜Aw,’ Mum said affectionately, her heart clearly going out to her. ‘The poor thing’s in pain; look at its mouth all open.’
    Then out of nowhere, a gooey and mucus-covered sac started to drop out of the elephant’s rear, droopy and slimy, like something had prolapsed.
    â€˜What,’ Tammy asked, staring, ‘is that ?’
    The sac kept on extending and stretching out of the elephant – ‘Oh god , oh god ,’ Michelle said – before slipping out of the mother in one quick, slithery movement and exploding on the floor like a dropped water balloon. Blood and amniotic fluid went everywhere, and the mother elephant daintily lifted her leg as a waterfall of liquid drained out and onto the ground.
    Everyone screamed.
    â€˜Oh gross !’ Candy screamed. ‘That’s disgusting .’
    While the rest of us made vomiting noises, Mum nodded in solidarity.
    â€˜Do you still want to have children?’ she said, feeling vindicated. ‘That happened to me five times.’
    We all looked at her.
    â€˜You’re not an elephant, Mum.’
    She put her palms up, frustrated.
    â€˜What- ever ,’ she said, rolling her eyes. Then she started telling us those familiar stories of old Chinese superstitions: how she’d been quarantined after her miscarriage, prevented from petting animals, denied being photographed while pregnant. Back in China, she went on, aggrieved mothers would beat themselves between their legs whenever their children misbehaved, slapping their vaginas and moaning horribly until they bruised themselves. It was an elaborate public display of regret, signalling that they wished they’d never had children.
    We stared at her, silent and wincing.
    â€˜That,’ I said eventually, ‘is a hideous story.’
    â€˜Why are you telling us this?’ Andrew asked.
    â€˜Well, I just