was both the Vietnamese and the Chinese word for gold, so all the jewellery shops were called Kim Heng or Kim Huang or Kim Ngoc, depending on the family name of the owners. These little shops epitomised Family Business, and there were so many of them down the shopping strips of St Albans, Springvale, Richmond and Footscray that I had trouble remembering their names, so that they melded into one continuous never-ending counter filled with red velvet and 24-carat gold. The owners of the jewellery stores I herded into one collective noun – the Kims. One Kim had her daughter’s dental surgery above her shop. Another Kim had two sons working there. A third Kim wore make-up like the actors in Farewell My Concubine and painted her eyebrows three centimetres above her real eyebrows, or where her real eyebrows would have been if she had not plucked them out. One day after school I went with my mother while she did her round of visiting the Kims. I was still in my school uniform, and my mother let me collect the money for her, put it in a used white envelope and double-check that it was the right amount.
