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.
“Ngo, that woman’s going to buy the last air fryer! Quick, help type out the receipt,” my mother urges her sister, so my aunty has to pause taping up the Midea box and enter the customer’s name and address on the invoice. My mother has been one of the top salespersons here but she can’t read or write in English. She’d invested money into this shop from her decade of outworking in our cramped garage when we were growing up, making jewellery and dealing with dangerous chemicals like potassium cyanide. And for almost 15 years, she has worked selling modern technological marvels along this shopfront down Springvale Road.
When the shop first opened, I was just a child. 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 – a delicious lunch break in between selling white and brown goods to white and brown people, and then in the evening, we’d all frock up and go somewhere exciting. But the reality was, my parents never went anywhere. The shop was our life, and it was enough. There was a short-lived McDonald’s when I was 16, but Dad and I would still go to the chicken rice and pho restaurants for lunch. There were bubble tea shops, the library where I wrote some of my first book, and the literal wet market where mangoes were a dollar a kilo at the end of the day.
On this final day, we unearth Sony Walkman cases, cassette holders, a Nintendo Game Boy cassette (Kirby’s Dream World) and a bag of polar fleece rags from three decades ago when my aunty worked sewing and thought these scraps would be handy to wipe the dust from hi-fi equipment. A CD player designed to look like a vintage 1920s radio, gadgets you plug into the wall that apparently emit a repulsive sound only mosquitoes and rats can hear, battery-operated “face massagers” displayed with Philishave razors because my folks had no idea what their real use was, and even a boxed mermaid Barbie from the 1990s. “Was saving this for when grandchildren visited,” my mother says when I show her.
In the electrical appliance retail world, if Harvey Norman stores are the sleek prime thoroughbreds and the Good Guys are the affable blue heelers, then Betta electricals and Retravisions are like beloved long-living mutts: resilient, beloved and sustained by their local communities, containing a mixture of everything.
“It’s really the end of an era,” friends tell me. And before me, I see an inventory of my parents’, aunty and uncle’s lives. The tiny kitchen upstairs, amid boxes of irons and popcorn makers, where we’d scoff down our food if there were customers downstairs. The little window through which we watched the neat south Asian man who slept atop the hard-rubbish skip bins in our car park, carefully folding his blanket and disappearing during the day when our delivery truck rumbled into its spot. The trips my then-two year-old daughter made every Monday with her grandparents: when it was their day to mind her, they took her with them on the train to work, where there was an endless supply of toys and 15 televisions to watch at the same time.
“What will your parents do in retirement?” my friends asked.
“Retirement?” my mum scoffed. “No way. We’re all just going to work in the Footscray shop now.”
And at Footscray Betta, Aunty Kieu and David were still going strong. My father, in his mid-70s, can still calculate in his head the horsepower needed for each air conditioner depending on the size of the room. Uncle Fang was working right up to his 80s. These survivors of the killing fields and Mao’s China who’d been denied modern medicine, the marvels of electricity, the wonder of white goods – this was not just their existence, this was the entirety of their new lives, their second chance at redemption.
“Footscray’s closer to home,” my mother added. “Less of a drive. And you’ll be able to visit us more often.”
Alice Pung is an award-winning author, artist-in-residence at the University of Melbourne’s Janet Clarke Hall and an adjunct professor at RMIT University
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