A Milk Bar is a milk bar
Milk Bar
3 Main Street, Stawell, 3380 VIC
2004 - 2006
I will start by telling you about the time I returned to Stawell on a cold Sunday in August. I went with my parents and we took turns driving the 3-hour trip. The roads were bare, so I had to entertain myself with the barren landscape of the Australian countryside. We were listening to forever music, the term my mum has snobbishly coined for 70s rock classics and pop ballads by Celine Dion and Whitney Houston.
As we closed in on our destination, my parents felt the need to lament the same old stories that I had heard for many years about the Milk Bar. Mum was searching for an older woman named Noelene who had frequently taken care of my sister and me in our younger and more vulnerable years. When we left Stawell, she was running the local bed-and-breakfast with her husband Barry. The last my mum had heard of her was when Barry visited The Cafe on his motorbike (he had 9, I think, including a plastic child-sized one) and told her the story of their divorce. But even this was over 8 years ago now. Her plan was to ask around town for anyone who may have known her which both Dad and I decried as an inevitably fruitless exercise.
But I don’t trust their stories, so for the most part, I gave muted hums in response before we eventually allowed silence to occupy its deserved space. Well, to be precise, it’s not that I believe they were lying to me, it’s just that I don’t trust their words, much less my grasp of Mandarin or their grasp of English and least of all, language itself - seeming to me an entirely ornamental and imprecise exercise. For example, it is impossibly difficult to make sense of the statement: “Everyday we worked and 吃苦 but the school here is so stupid.” And to make matters worse, my memory of this place and time that I was journeying towards is faded at best. My mum’s stories were interjected with frequent questions about my memory of the Milk Bar: “do you remember the wall you 容得乱七八糟 ? How about Noelene?” The answer was no, or sort of, I guess.
As the stretch of road in front of me shortened, our car continued to drag my already porous memory along with it and I was overwhelmed, instantly and all at once, with the realisation that my aspiration to provide an account of what took place was, and is, in fact, a mere illusion; indeed, the concept themselves were already a strict game of fiction. The problem is that all you have to do is to introduce a figure of speech, a colloquialism or a simple “if” for fiction to begin creeping into the narration, altering or falsifying it. In that instance, I found that I’ve had enough of writing without the hope that I would ever surpass myself, that I would ever be capable of leaping over my shadow. It’s true, up to a certain point I have been honest with you, in the only manner possible for me; that is, I wanted to say everything about myself, absolutely everything. But so much more bitter was the illusion.
Before I could resolve the knot in my stomach that had been tied by the realisation of my inevitable failure, we had arrived. Yes, still, nothing has really changed. The Milk Bar had changed hands a couple of times since we left but the family who ran it now were a mirror image of us. A father, a mother, a daughter. Given my feeble memory, I came to understand my history as I saw it reflected in this small family and, quite fortunately, I liked what I saw.
This is Brooke. We are similar in many ways:
We are both Chinese (though her mandarin is a lot better than mine)
We both own two fish (hers are named Sunshine and Moonlight)
We both ask our dads to buy us treats because our mums will most certainly say no
We both leave our schoolbags at the door
Our parents both owned the Milk Bar in town
I was aware that we, the Milk Bar and I, had grown older at a distance and that the demise of our relationship would have been more tragic had I stayed. But still, walking into this house I used to live in: the fact that it still exists some 17 years later, so concrete, makes everything that has happened since seem somehow insubstantial. Without structure, events are unreal: the reality of the family who owns it now, like the reality of the Milk Bar, was structural, determinative.
Anyway, you always forget far too many moments and days and months and years, and the scar on my back that I felt and caressed as it faded with time. You forget whole years, and not necessarily the least important ones. But Barry is dead and Noelene is now 71 and the Milk Bar is a milk bar is a milk bar is a milk bar.
