Girl Fighter

Prologue of Girl Fighter

"You look fine."

Her injuries are buried within the three-pound mass in her skull. Despite decades of psychiatric studies there are limited means of diagnosing brain disorders. All she has are medical terms from brain scans and talk therapy with which to label her conditions - 'Traumatic Brain Injury' or 'Early Relational Trauma'. An arsehole once claimed her aloofness is a sign of sociopathy. Sometimes a bigot would call her a 'crazy, angry bitch.' The hodgepodge of mental disorders that torments her brain is occasionally crippling, rendering a young, otherwise strong body useless. Yet the impairments are too often rejected as something 'all in her mind'. Her injuries are invisible; she is anything but fine.

She was born in Melbourne, Australia. The ethnic background of her family is colourful, but usually she is branded Asian. She once researched her family history to suss out if crazy is something she inherited. One of her forefathers had been locked in a madhouse several times. The search for her defective gene did not lead to a scientific conclusion, but it helped her understand how some of the peculiarities of her family contributed to the misfit she is, as though the seed of her fate was planted a hundred years before she arrived in this world.

It started when her great-great grandparents-a mix of Han Chinese and Mongols-left the forbidding cold Shenyang and headed south for prosperity. It was pushing the end of the nineteenth century and when the pair reached the Canton province and thought it wasn't possible to move further south, they discovered an enormous continent named Australia. Brokers promoted this

strange land as the "New Gold Mountains". They thought the new was probably better and if they kept heading south, surmised that winter would no longer exist. That was how they became the last Australian gold prospectors.

Nomadic tendencies and defiance are prevalent traits in her family. Even when her great-great grandfather was over five thousand miles from his homeland, he couldn't resist being a smart mouth to his new white leaders. Their ancestry records revealed how frequently he was locked in gaol or an asylum after arguing against laws drafted by the colonial rulers to isolate the Chinese. She was confounded when she realised that she wasn't the only one in her family to have been in an Anglo criminal court. The bitterness she always felt for her country of birth perhaps a residue from her predecessors.

Three generations later, that journey to Australia was reversed when her dad took off to China in his late twenties. Unlike their forbearers, her dad left a comfortable home and a successful career as a computer engineer to venture into the far-flung corners of China. Initially, he wanted to explore the Himalayas, but his two-packs-of-cigarettes-a-day habit forced him from the mountains to an unexpected detour in Xinjiang, North Western China. He met a Kazakh nomad in Urumuqi and fell in love. The nomad was tall and athletic, her features a mysterious blend of Persia and the Orient. He thought she was the most beautiful creature alive, better than the dozens of Chinese girls his parents relentlessly matched him with. He took her home as his bride. The two arrived in Melbourne in 1983 and settled into a blissful marriage, surrendering their vagabond lifestyles.

Her dad's stubborn streak never permitted him to forget the mountains he did not manage to summit. When his wife was pregnant with their first child, he discovered the third highest peak in the world-Kangchenjunga. By chance their family name was 'Kang'. Typically a Han name starts with the family name and continues with two more characters. Each character has its own meaning, sometimes a third meaning when the two characters are added together. He read and re-read the word Kangchenjunga and saw within those characters the name 'Kang Chen Jun' in Pinyin, the Romanised system for standard Chinese. In a eureka-moment he decided that he would have a son who will become an adventurer and mountaineer.

Kang Chen Jun was born during a late Melbourne spring, 1983, but was not the male mountaineer-to-be he had hoped.

His choice of Han characters for Chen (Dawn) and Jun (Soldier) was

meaningless, masculine and vaguely violent. Her mum tried hard to persuade her husband to keep the name for a son; they were young and had plenty of time for more children. But he was intractable. He explained that a Chinese name would have little significance in this country. Aussies would likely shorten her name to 'Chen' or 'Jun' or worse, confuse her given name with her family name. For the hundreds of years that the Chinese had contributed to the development of the nation, Australians still failed to understand the logic and structure of a Han name-they didn't give a toss.

After some days of silent warfare he let his wife have her input on a non- Chinese name. Her mum decided that she would pass her Kazakh origins to her firstborn. Her family was Muslim and were predominantly given Arabic names. She remembered her grandma as warm and kind and decided her baby girl would be named Aliyah. Neither of the parents realised that Aliyah in Hebrew means going up. The genius of the name, 'Ascending Kangchenjunga' was lost to them. Aliyah Kang Chen Jun's unusual name prophesised her life of uphill climbs, destined to be fighting an unseen, omnipotent force like gravity.

The joy her parents brought to her life merely exists in her subconscious as her mum perished under the wheels of a truck before Aliyah turned two. A wanderer where land was vast and uninhibited, her mum struggled to understand that roads in a modern city were a threat. Aliyah knows that happiness exists in a remote corner of her obscured memories and is acutely aware that she was robbed of every person's birthright-love and affection. But throughout her childhood she was told that she was lucky, because she was too young to have remembered her mum and at least her dad was still around to provide her food and shelter.

The chore of raising Aliyah was mostly abandoned to her grandparents, who tried unsuccessfully to tame this half-bred offspring of a barbaric woman. Her dad became a shell of a man who woke every day to go about the task of living but was not quite alive anymore. Once in a while, Aliyah would wake in the wee hours of the night for the bathroom and see him sprawled on the living room couch with the TV on and empty cans and bottles by the coffee table.

At eighteen, she left to travel half way around the world pursuing a prestigious scholarship. In hindsight, Aliyah realises she did not leave a comfortable home to fulfil her nomadic tendencies. She left because the suffering she endured was never acknowledged, but now dismissed that as a poor excuse for her failed life. The intelligence she had inherited from her dad did not help her deduce that fleeing from an unhappy home would do nothing to relieve the damage etched in her being.

And thus Aliyah went through with her escape plan to London. At the send- off, her dad could not bring himself to hug her, but gripped her on her shoulders and said the most emotional words he'd ever uttered to his daughter in their lives together, "You have my brains and stubbornness, but thank God you look like your mum."

Part One: Girl

"Traumatic events of the earliest years of infancy and childhood are not lost but, like a child's footprints in west cement, are often preserved lifelong. Time does not heal the wounds that occur in those earliest years; time conceals them. They are not lost; they are embodied."-Vincent J Felitti