Peripathetic, p.13
Peripathetic, page 13
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, genuinely upset. Until now, I thought it was all fun and games.
After I stop pointing out Michelle’s mistakes, the incident is quickly forgotten. My work roster stays the same: one or two nights after school, on the weekends, and as much as I can during school holidays until it’s time for O-Levels.
brand ambassador
I can’t go back to the recruitment agency because I hadn’t given them any notice when I left the job at the bank, so I return to the trusty classifieds, bearer of jobs. By this time, the tension at home has reached a point wherein I feel I’m a tenant in what is supposedly my family home. I don’t look my mother in the eye as I give her money for bills, then disappear into my room to look at the computer screen. ‘You’ll see!’ my mother screeches. ‘One day when I win the lottery we will be rich! I will give you all the money in the world!’
I say nothing in return; I’m just glad to owe her nothing so she won’t weaponise anything against me later. If the aggressor has no ammunition then I am safe. After all, I am now paying for my room and board. It’s a well-worn script she will take to her grave, and I hope under my breath that my sibling will be rich and successful because I sure as hell can’t afford the funeral.
But the classifieds deliver again, and after a quick phone call I make my way to a trendy clothing store at a well-known mall on the main shopping drag. The manager gives me a once-over. ‘Can you start on the spot?’ I’m desperate to have the job, so I agree, and at $5 an hour begin to sell clothes and shoes to women who are engaging in retail therapy. Every day is a dull struggle: I drag my feet on the way to work and provide emotional labour to shoppers whom I am supposed to make feel at home in my presence, so they’ll feel inclined to buy the product, and which also means I can make a 2 per cent commission. We’re on the roundabout of validation. ‘That looks really good on you!’ I lie, after a potential customer steps out of the fitting room. ‘Maybe you can match that with this?’ I point out items I have little interest in and say I have one exactly like that. In reality, I haven’t bought anything, because I’m trying to hold on to every cent.
information input specialist
After six months at junior college, I find myself extremely bored. Do I want to be here? Under Singapore’s extremely psychotic education system, where every student is streamlined according to some kind of meritorious intellectual hierarchy that begins as soon as you turn ten years old, undertaking two years of post-secondary study is a surefire way to get you to university, even if I am at the worst-ranking junior college in the country. Having spent the previous year extremely depressed and skipping classes three-quarters of the year, I surprise teachers by doing well at the O-Levels. According to the aforementioned system, this means that I don’t have to contend with a mere ‘diploma’ at a polytechnic, or worse, a ‘certificate’ at a technical institution – I get a shot at obtaining a degree. In a land where children are often reminded that educational failure guarantees that one will have ‘no future’, there seems to be a glimmer of hope for me after all.
An extracurricular activity I participate in is librarianship, and the library, as ever, is a salve. Between shelving books I play a game to see how many wallets I can steal from the unguarded bags near the entrance. As much as I try to be as nondescript and invisible as possible, I’m nonetheless disgusted by my schoolmates’ flaunting of their socioeconomic status, something I eventually find to be par for the course in junior colleges containing students generally streamlined from the ‘independent’ (i.e. private) school system. They can’t tell I’m not like them, because I don’t discuss my home life and speak English as a first language as they do, a consequence of all the books I’ve read. Most wallets I find contain hundreds of dollars. Mine always contains ten, at most.
It’s not long before I get caught. My parents are called into the principal’s office. No one mentions the fact that my father has only just gotten out of prison a couple of years ago. ‘You are painting a picture that is untrue,’ the school principal later admonishes me. For the first time in my life I see that a statement can hold both a truth and a lie.
It is at this point that I don’t see the point of returning to school – half wanting to preserve whatever dignity I have left and half not seeing any reason to continue an experience I find abhorrent. My parents work long hours, so they don’t have time to coax me into returning; they seem to believe that I can get a job if school doesn’t work out. After all, they have noticed how the McJob ended up working out to their benefit even if it was at first a cause for embarrassment. Weeks pass, and it becomes increasingly clear I’m not going back. I hold on to my student ID so I can continue to use it to get a cheaper fare on public transport.
Not long after, I look in the newspaper classifieds and see an advertisement for a recruitment agency that promises ‘immediate jobs’. I encourage my girlfriend to go with me, and she agrees. We met at a previous job and she thinks I’m smart for making it to junior college. I don’t tell her about the stealing. She’s just glad that like her, I’m no longer in school.
True to their word, I undergo a short interview with the recruitment agency and the recruiter tells me that there is indeed a job for me. I’m to go through stacks of documents and void credit cards either expired, lost or cancelled, for $6 an hour at a bank. It’s the most money I’ve ever made in my life. My girlfriend also gets a job at the same company, but hers is in the mailroom, sorting mail. I sit across from a man in his 40s who constantly makes googly eyes at me while we work, and I tell myself he just misses his daughter. He does this nearly every day until I finally snap. He makes a complaint to our manager and I find my hours cut. Frustrated, I sign off my last time sheet and stop going to work.
merchandise customer assistance (outdoor)
It’s the school holidays, and while some of my classmates have gone on overseas holidays with their family, my parents have never travelled outside of Singapore, so we don’t go anywhere. This doesn’t bother me, but there is increasingly little to do at home. There are only so many books I can read and websites I can look at. I’ve done all the dishes and the toilet has been cleaned. I come across a job advertisement in the newspaper, of which there are many in the house. ‘NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED’ is emphasised, and other than stating it is ‘sales’ it doesn’t say much more. On the listing is an address in an obscure industrial part of town, and I decide to see if the promise made is true, that we can ‘make up to $2000 a month’.
Upon arriving at the location, I find a group of people sitting on hard-back chairs waiting to be interviewed. There is no clear demographic, although many people skew young like myself. After waiting for half an hour, I enter the office with a spiel I’d prepared in my head. To my surprise, before I’m even finished, the manager tells me I’m hired, and proceeds to tell me about the company, a subcontractor for a bigger corporation where labour is outsourced to sell bottles of unbranded perfume to strangers on busy streets.
‘Can you start tomorrow?’ she asks. ‘Yes!’ I say, almost too quickly. Heck, that was easy. Two thousand dollars, here I come.
I’m told to meet up with some ‘team members’ in a busy part of town the next morning, and when I arrive there are boxes on the ground waiting to be opened. As soon as a headcount is underway, the designated ‘team leader’, May, opens a box and removes a little party bag from it. From the bag, she takes out a small bottle of perfume. ‘This is what we’ll be selling today,’ she chirps. ‘Have a spritz, give it a try, it smells nice doesn’t it?’ She beams. ‘We don’t have a quota, because so many of you are new, but try and sell as many as possible. You can do this!’ May high-fives us individually before she hands out sheets of paper with the spiel we should use to sell ‘the product’ printed on it. ‘It’s really easy,’ she exclaims. ‘Memorise it. Feel free to improvise. You just need to convince them’.
We are each given tote bags filled with about twenty party bags, with the instruction to return to the meeting spot once we are finished with them to collect more. I walk around the busy streets stopping people with my bag of treats. ‘Hi! Sorry to bother you, but have you heard of this brand-new perfume? It’s not on the market yet, but I thought you look like someone who’d be special enough to trial this.’ I spritz some of the cloying perfume on my wrist, bringing it up to my nose, inhaling deeply. ‘Mmmmmm, this smells amazing – give it a try?’ Hardly anyone refuses this offer – most take a sniff, usually murmuring their assent.
‘Well, it’s going to retail for $100,’ I say, spiel ready to go. ‘But for you’ – I pause – ‘For you it will cost $60. That’s our company’s special deal for special people like you’. And almost immediately, people whip out their wallets to purchase it. Whoa. It is really that easy. ‘Fake it until you make it,’ the team leader tells us cheerily. ‘You’ll be able to move so many units, maybe as much as me, when the time comes’.
I do this job two days a week for the next month. It’s a steep learning curve. The probability for failure, of course, increases with the more interactions I attempt. I get snubbed, with some people being outright rude, whereas others are curious and interested as to what else they can purchase on their weekend shopping trips. I never make more than a couple hundred dollars each week. Two months in, the company gets busted for embezzlement and shuts down. I never hear from them again.
commis chef
I travel half an hour on the slow Adelaide train to get to the shopping centre in Elizabeth where the food stall is located, a suburb some of my friends consider ‘dero’. I’m not sure what that means, looking around warily in case anything untoward happens. But nothing happens and everyone looks normal, with some looking more dead-eyed than those in the inner city. I’m used to this.
The trial shift goes well. I make the Australian version of jianbing – Chinese ‘crêpes’, which I’d not heard of or eaten prior to this – on a hot griddle behind a glass panel, so people can watch their exotic food being made in real time. The Aussie owner ends up hiring me on a permanent part-time basis. ‘We’ll train you,’ he booms.
Everyone working at this stall is a Chinese international student – most are from China and there’s a guy from Hong Kong. Here, the lingua franca is Mandarin Chinese; I find that I have to listen carefully to understand conversations. As always, I’m a humorous novelty: one woman scoffs at me and says that Chinese people should be able to speak Chinese well. I know she’s just speaking her mind, but I find myself at a loss, eyes darting around, trying to connect with these people who are seemingly the most like me in this strange stolen land. ‘We’re all Chinamen’ (‘大家都是中国人’), someone tells me one day, and while I’m grateful for what appears as acceptance, I’m also confused.
Like everyone else, and under the watchful eye of my manager, soon I’m able to make single crêpes in under two minutes. My manager, Pixie, a soft-spoken woman from Chengdu, congratulates me. ‘Are they really like this in China?’ I ask. She laughs raucously. ‘Of course not! Jianbing is nothing like this. This is fake.’
At this job, we talk about our non-work lives, especially during lulls or while closing up the shop. Some women are impressed to discover I have a white boyfriend. ‘How do you find them?’ Ivy asks. I find this display of neo-colonialism awkward, but don’t have the language to express it without being perceived as even stranger than I already am. Even so, I’m unable to express my feelings or politics in Mandarin. ‘I don’t know, maybe at pubs? You can come with me if you want,’ I venture, unsure of how to answer the question, and not wanting to come across as if I’m hoarding any white-man-acquiring secrets either.
Over time, my wariness surrounding the suburb lifts. It’s been six months, and nothing out of the ordinary has happened, even while walking from the shopping centre to the train station after closing time at night. ‘Why do people think this neighbourhood is bad?’ I think aloud while finishing up a shift with Pixie one day. ‘I think it’s because the people are poor,’ she responds, as she wipes each skillet down. That day my closing tasks involve cleaning the surfaces and the floors. ‘Beware of the blacks, though,’ she continues, a pointed look cast in my direction. This is when I begin to realise we have little in common, despite my attempts at grasping for sameness through ethnicity. In an attempt to create a distance from Pixie’s anti-blackness, I find that I am gradually ashamed to be seen in my co-workers’ likeness.
After nine months on the job, I’m given the responsibility of opening up the shop, which causes me to think that perhaps I’ll eventually be promoted to manager. But I come to work five minutes late one morning, and the owner finds out. Unbeknown to me, the Aussie women at the sandwich shop opposite have been watching our every move, dobbing us in at any given opportunity. I hear about someone who was fired for taking seven-minute toilet breaks. ‘Five minutes can mean a loss of $50 for the shop,’ the owner growls, every word slow and overly enunciated. Pixie and Ivy say nothing as they continue working at the front of the shop. As punishment, the owner docks $50 off my pay for the week and cuts all my shifts for the next week. ‘Go home and seriously think about it! You Chinese people need to be more grateful that we even bother giving you a job in this country.’
I tell my boyfriend after I get home, and he immediately confirms that what the owner had done is illegal. But he is unsure about what I can do, as he’d never had this happen to him before, suggesting that I should ask our friend Simon. Simon’s also a staunch union member, so he’s seriously annoyed. ‘Fuck them in the ass,’ he nearly yells on the phone. He becomes even angrier when he asks if they pay me superannuation. ‘I don’t think so …?’ I respond, somewhat confused. I’d never heard of that term until then.
‘That’s it. They’re fucked.’ He outlines all the ways I can approach various organisations, and while it appears daunting at first I navigate all the phone calls and paperwork without much trouble. I’m awash with gratitude for being able to live in a place where employees’ rights are seemingly protected. I also feel a sense of undeservedness – what about those who aren’t able to find recourse as easily? I do everything Simon tells me, such as claiming back pay for lost wages and reporting the business to the tax office. During this time the owner texts to say I’m fired before I’m due to receive next week’s roster. I’m worried nothing will come out of the reports, but the stolen land delivers to settler–migrant me once again: the owner is forced to pay me a full month’s pay on top of backpay and the superannuation he owes me. I’m sure he’s been fucked.
professional server
Despite our mutual distaste for the heteronormative-industrial-complex, in which unions are made sacrosanct through acts of (un)intelligibility known as ‘marriage’, my boyfriend and I decide to jump through the bureaucratic hoops of applying for a partner visa for me. It’s the only way I can continue staying on this continent whether I like it or not.
No employer will sponsor me, and I know that going to university as an international student will put me in debt for life with no guarantees. While I gather all the required documents and wait for the partner visa to be approved, I’m put on a temporary visa which stipulates that I can only work twenty hours a week. As a newcomer to both Australia and Adelaide, I don’t know where to look. I search Gumtree, but every lunch bar or cafe calls me to do an unpaid one- to two-hour ‘trial’ then never calls me back. I begin to doubt my abilities. My boyfriend tells me about indeed dot com after one such miserable trial. He works in a retail store selling soap and I hate that he’s paying for my food, too aware of the power differential between us – it looks like a white man is supporting his mail-order Asian bride.
On the jobs site, I find a listing looking to hire waiters at the local convention centre. They have an application form on their website, which I take as a good sign. I don’t know any locals who can act as referees, so I call my mates Dan and Simon to pretend to be my ex-bosses. The centre never calls them, and I get the job two weeks after I submit my application. I’m ecstatic. My first Australian job! Coming from a country with no minimum wage laws, $17 an hour is a shit ton of money. I’m beginning to sound like a grateful migrant, the kind the system loves.
At a paid training session, which feels akin to a school orientation, we play bonding games meant to build and strengthen our ability to work in a team. It’s a mixed bag of Australian teenagers and international students from all over the world. The feeling is not unlike socialising at a backpackers’ hostel. We’re taught to carry a waiter’s service cloth on one arm at all times, with the other arm behind our back to indicate that we are indeed professionals in the fine dining arena. We’re also taught to carry three plates at once on a single arm, and I watch a supervisor effortlessly carry five.
When it comes time for the real thing, the plates are hot. More often than not, too aware of my inherent clumsiness, I choose to carry two. The supervisor looks on disapprovingly, even though she had said at the training, ‘If you can’t carry three, then carry two.’ Why say something you don’t mean? I learn that I have to read between the lines often when talking to Australians, and this is exacerbated in workplaces.
‘Do you want to clear that table?’ someone asks. Of course not. I don’t want to do the thing, but I have to do it anyway. A French co-worker echoes this sentiment one day, except she says it aloud and it’s meant to be cute – for some reason, I know it won’t be the same for me.
Three months in at twenty hours a week, I find myself hating the job more and more, the requirement to perform a deferential decorum to business execs grinding me down. How many more galas can I take? I see a co-worker try his hand at four plates, which ends in tragedy – a lamb shank falls on a lady’s evening gown to result in a loud shrieking. But there’s little option to leave, for I have no idea what my future as a temporary migrant looks like. I’m just glad to have regular income so I can stop relying on the kindnesses of people around me, another privilege in itself. ‘Well done!’ My boyfriend’s loving parents congratulate me, they who never seem to discourage anything. I’m serving the elite their banquet dinners at a fucking convention centre, not teaching at a university. I don’t have a roadmap for any of this.
