Mimi Kwa - House of Kwa

For John and our children,

Royston, Mason, Harper and Berry

In memory of Aunty

YOU KNOW THAT FEELING WHEN YOUVE BEEN BURNED BY someone you love and you think you can only save yourself from the flames by walking away? When that someone is your family, there are, as I see it, three options: estrangement, obligation, or forgiveness and gratitude. Theres no right answer, and the path will always be complex.

When you join me in my story, please remind yourself that the lens of a child is not the one I look through now. As an adult I can see other points of view right or wrong, good or bad that werent available to me then. Delving into my past to bring fractures of time into focus has uncovered my story through a kaleidoscope of experiences. Here on these pages I seek to make the brushstrokes of my family portrait dance to life.

Today, I reach into my trove of painting implements and pass to my own child an heirloom, handed down for a thousand years. Accepting it tentatively, she examines its soft grey bristles shaped like a turnip bulb into a point. She weighs and turns the decorated bamboo stem in her small hands. You are holding an ancient Chinese calligraphy brush, I say. Imagine how many artworks this brush has painted, how many stories it has told, how many hands have held it, and how much more it has to say. She hesitantly hovers the tip of the brush over a petite porcelain well. Now, dip the brush into the ink, and daub it gently from point to base, pulling it downwards lightly before quickly lifting. There, youve made your first stroke.

As she wields the brush, I see the hands of our ancestors gripping its shaft, wrestling with its handle to bring the most vivid images into view, the black pigment bleeding into flax paper to create shadows and shade. I speak to my child of a dragon and a tiger, and tilting my head towards her mark on the page, I watch her confidence grow as she makes another. You see, my love, this is who you are. This brush will tell you a thousand tales, and in the end you will use it to paint your own. Because this is a story that began millennia ago and has no end. This, my darling, is the brush of Kwa.

GREY HAIR, LIKE MARIE ANTOINETTE. IT CANT REALLY BE possible, but as I examine the phenomenon in the bathroom mirror, theres no denying I went to bed without any grey hairs and now a brittle, coarse sprig of them is right there on my scalp.

The cause is a letter from my father, the latest of several hed sent recently. After finding it in the mailbox, I had ignored it for days, on the kitchen bench, the piano or the dresser, or shoved under the stairs on a stool next to the schoolbags. Then, finally, last night, when the kids were asleep and my husband was watching TV, I opened it.

THE SUPREME COURT OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Kwa v Kwa

I had no words. All the strangeness in my life, the past Id tried to put behind me, it kept coming back, smoke wisps around my feet: the dragon.

Dad was suing me.

Now, as I stare into the mirror, I have flashes of my child self, from age ten, proofreading Dads legal letters and court documents. They would stream through a dot-matrix printer, perforated paper swallowing every available space in his home office. I would catch the pages as they spewed out and guide them into neat, concertinaed stacks. Dad was always suing someone, and as late as one in the morning he would come into my room and ask me to check his letters.

Excuse me, Mi. I need to get this off tomorrow. Hed hand me a wad of legalese that Id scour with my pen, returning it to him after Id applied my system of placing an x in the margin at the end of the line to indicate a correction.

If only Id spent as much time studying as I had working for Dad. At least he prepared me for fighting him in this latest legal tussle. His combative spirit is perhaps natural for a man who has been through so much, but all the same why would he do this to his own child? Kwa v Kwa is something I never dreamed could happen.

Cortisol and adrenalin surge through me, a survival response triggered since childhood, a response passed down from my ancestors. My very existence, the very Kwa of me, is under siege, this time in the unfamiliar territory of the courtroom, which is Dads patch, his dragon stomping ground. Im a tiger running towards a fire, leaping into the flames while I look behind me as far back as I can, to ancient China, near the Emperors palace in Beijing.

The sky opens, and the shamans almanac, which he uses to predict all things, shows clearly beneath my Wood Tiger stars that it was always my destiny to be trapped in a battle with a dragon.

And then the book closes, and all that remains are tendrils of smoke from Great-Grandfathers pipe and Grandmothers cigarettes. There are whispers of you are Kwa, you are Kwa for even in visions, my family members repeat themselves. I am surrounded by their stories, flooding through windows and under doors, House of Kwa tales curling round the leg of my chair, clinging to my curtains like Aunt Theresas brushstrokes on silk.

I watch a tree grow from my table, branches and twigs rapidly filling the room, blossoms blooming in sharp bursts of spring colour, like fireworks, like bombs: our family. From all the tragedy, silken threads weave together into a picture of survival, a banner of hope. Then a dragon flies from the tree and, without warning, engulfs the branches in flames. As the tree burns, the dragon disappears, but for his eyes lingering in the sky among the stars that said I would always be exactly here, that we cannot escape what is already written.

Of course, a tiger cannot help but stop to look at her reflection as she passes by water under a burning tree, beneath dragon eyes in the sky. This image of her and what shes endured may show her how she became so fierce...

Descendants of the dragon

I AM A DIRECT DESCENDANT OF THE EMPEROR OF CHINA, Great-Grandfather hollers. How dare you hide from me.

Its the Year of the Wood Monkey, 1884. My great-grandfather is looking for his servant Chen She.

Where is he? spits Great-Grandfather in his best nineteenth-century Mandarin, arms outstretched and laden with layers of soft glossy silk. He warms his hands on a heating pipe as ladies of the elite bustle across his courtyard in their own silken finery, the sheets of vibrant thread dancing in the gentle rays of spring sunshine.

Gossiping, always gossiping, Great-Grandfather mutters resentfully before turning to scream across the decadent compound. Chen She!

Great-Grandfathers voice carries through a lace wooden window embedded with tessellations of rectangles and squares, a honeycomb of shapes protecting the privacy of the many stone rooms interconnected with terracotta roofs, garden walkways and broad internal corridors: hard to see in, easy to see out.

Great-Grandfather steps out of a door into the courtyard and leans on a post encircled with etchings of dragons ascending to heaven. He heaves a frustrated sigh and shouts, Must I find my own opium pipe? His fury replenished, his best Mandarin slips, giving way to an enraged common dialect. A timber lantern swings in the gusts of his temper. Must I stoke my own pipe?

The two stone lions at the compound gate bristle with alarm. Up on the roof ridges, terracotta dragons turn to one another in panic.