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wanted you to know I’ve never done that,’ she said. ‘Never even thought about it, even when you’ve misbehaved or caused me pain.’
    â€˜Right,’ I said. ‘Well that’s reassuring.’
    And in so many ways, it was.
    *
    A few days after this conversation, my mother phoned me. ‘Just in case you write about this,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t referring to my vagina. My vagina is fine. Write that down: my mother’s vagina is fine. In fact, my vagina hasn’t been touched in so long, it has sealed back up.’

The Family Business
    In Hollywood, they have these celebrity tours where the general public are guided from mansion to mansion. The point is to ogle. Look: this is where Oscar-winning actress X lives on summer vacation. Over here: a bungalow where Emmy-nominated actor Y was shot dead in 1989 . If you’re adventurous and fit, you can buy a map and do it by foot – a pair of binoculars around your neck, an autograph book on hand, just in case you’re lucky and encounter a celebrity caught out on bin day. Otherwise, you can pay a fee for shuttle buses and buggies to pick you up and zoom you from Affleck to Damon, Spielberg to Streisand.
    Similarly, if I picked you up in a car and drove you around the Sunshine Coast, we could make a little tour ourselves, tracing my father’s various business ventures from the mid- 1970 s to the present-day. There’s the restaurant in Caloundra where my parents first planted themselves as two dewy-eyed newlyweds just arrived from Hong Kong. Over in Minyama, you’ll see a pink and blue Asian supermarket, my father’s biggest gamble, where he found out the hard way that most people are still content to cook Asian food from a jar, rather than use the raw ingredients.
    Our road trip would be a strange coastal pilgrimage, through bustling Thai restaurants by the sea and sex shops in suburbia, to deserted takeaways near abandoned theme parks. All over the region, we’ll find randomly chosen plots of land, marked in Dad’s mind for unspecified projects I can’t even begin to understand. Present me with a map, though, and I could place coloured thumb-tacks on all the spots where my father has built, opened, developed or invested in something. Link them up, and we’ve got ourselves a bit of a tangle.
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    All of Dad’s businesses can be traced back to 1975 , a time when Australians saw China as the epitome of exoticism. China: it was on the other side of the world. You dug through tectonic plates and bulldozed through the centre of the goddamned earth to get there. Tiananmen hadn’t happened, so Australians didn’t yet associate the place with massacres and bloodshed. What they knew of the Chinese was limited to a few scattered things like communism, and what seemed to be their national cuisine: deep-fried slabs of hacked-up hog meat, slathered in artificial sauce and served with rice.
    If you lived in Caloundra, you would have ordered this meal from my parents, two of the first Chinese people to arrive in the area. In contrast to Hong Kong – a throbbing, stinking metropolis of concrete, where people hung out their laundry thirty storeys up – Caloundra was a ghost town. Literally so: everyone was white. On their first day there, unpacking suitcases and moving around boxes, Dad came up to the bedroom to see Mum pushing her hands against the bedroom window, perplexed.
    â€˜What’s wrong?’ he asked in Cantonese.
    â€˜Oh nothing,’ she said, retracting her hands like she’d been caught out.
    â€˜Tell me,’ Dad said.
    She put on a weak smile. ‘It’s strange, that’s all. This window’s sealed shut.’
    Dad frowned. ‘That can’t be right. Here, let me try.’
    But no matter how he pushed and shook it, the thing wouldn’t open: it was sealed up and airtight. Dad’s mother and uncle, who’d moved into the