My parents’ Betta electrical store, Springvale: the shop was our life, and it was enough

‘Springvale, with its underground tunnel to cross the road, $2 bánh mì stores and shops selling diamante-encrusted formal dresses in majestic hues of emerald, purple and navy blue, was my vision of what adult life should be like,’ writes Alice Pung Composite: Guardian Design

It is the last day for my parents to pack their stock, peel off the handwritten “SALE: please ask for Special” posters and close their Springvale shop of almost 35 years.

We aren’t supposed to open the doors, because we’re still packing, but my mother insists. We aren’t just boxing toasters and air fryers and blenders, speakers and sandwich presses, but more curious things not found in regular Betta stores: cloth-covered shopping trolleys, wooden-handled umbrellas (marked at a bargain $10) and a dozen pink glitter pencil cases my mother had bought during a post-Christmas Kmart sale to gift to children so their parents would stay longer and hopefully buy that fridge they’d been looking at for the past 40 minutes.