I look around, and feel a sudden impatience. Time is pressing. History cannot wait. I cannot wait for Pierre, for the explanations, the introspection, the long theoretical disquisitions on the nature of humanity. The satchel can go in the lost property at Liverpool Street. I turn back to the lion one more time, but he has already slunk away into the darkness. So I shift the satchel onto my shoulder, feeling its love letter and its pages of scribbled notes shift, and then settle. I work my way as quickly as I can towards the exit, without a further backward glance.
Forbidden Cities
November 15, 1968
Dear Professor Hayes
I am writing to you on behalf of my student Miss Tessa Marshall, who I understand is facing a Board of Discipline hearing that may, at worst, result in her suspension from the University of British Columbia.
Miss Marshall has been an exemplary student in our still fledgling department of Asian Studies over the last two years, and has shown great diligence in working on her Mandarin Chinese. As with many of our students at this time of change, she has passionate and indeed radical political opinions, and these no doubt led to her participation in the recent student “liberation” of the Faculty Club. However, my own acquaintance with her would lead me to suppose that she was a voice of moderation in that unfortunate episode, and indeed instrumental in the students’ leaving the club the next day in order to pursue their demands in a more civilised manner.
I understand that a primary concern of the University is Professor Huberman’s contention that Miss Marshall may have in some way damaged diplomatic relations between Canada and the Republic of Singapore. Let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. Miss Marshall has given me permission to enclose below some pages from her diary, which I believe present her actions in a very different light. As you will see, Miss Marshall has perhaps unrealistic delusions of grandeur regarding her ability in what I now understand is in some regions of the university known as “Creative Writing”, and I am particularly puzzled by her insistence on including the description of an intimate episode I can only describe as sordid. However, it is surely relatively easy for men of our experience to look beyond the somewhat hysterical style in which these pages are written and make a dispassionate judgment. I should just add as a noted textual scholar who has been given access to the manuscript, I have no doubt that it is genuine.
As a foreign national, Miss Marshall faces deportation should her studies be suspended. I do hope that the board will take all extenuating circumstances into account when it interviews Miss Marshall, and then reaches its decision.
Yours sincerely
Richard Hsu
Professor
Department of Asian Studies
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
• • •
October 22, Morning
“You’re learning Chinese.”
I fumble with the flash cards of characters, upsetting the little pile I’ve built for myself on the counter. He is apologetic, remarking that he didn’t mean to startle me. He, like me, has just sat down, and is waiting for the waitress with her beehive, polyester apron and bright early morning smile.
Coffee first. We turn our cups right side up in expectation. As he talks, he rebuilds my pile of cards, pushing away my hands when they try to interfere. He was just impressed, he says, to see someone like me studying Chinese. It will certainly be the language of the future.
The coffee comes. He stares in puzzlement at the Creamo, and so I serve him, look at him with raised eyebrows, and stir it into his coffee when he nods. We order: I, my usual bagel and cream cheese; he, after a quick scan of the menu, an English cooked breakfast.
He reaches out his hand.
“Lee.”
“Tessa Marshall. I’m a student at UBC. In Asian Studies. But you can probably tell from the way I talk I’m not from here.”
He has finished reassembling my cards: they are stacked up in the neatest pile I have ever seen, so perfect that I feel I never want to touch them again. He didn’t realise I was a foreigner here. Like him, then. He is also visiting the campus.
He looks away, over the clatter of cutlery, through the glass windows, to the trees on Main Mall, still clinging onto their leaves. A grey sky, with high cloud, and the grey finger of the clock tower raised towards us.
I cannot quite place his accent. Not British, not North American, but fully at ease with the language. If I closed my eyes and listened to him, I would say that he was Indian. Look at him without listening, and I might think that he was from Taiwan, or Hong Kong. I push back my hair, resolve to tie it back before the lecture.
“You’ve come here on sabbatical?”
He smiles. “You might say that.”
“You’re a professor?”
“No, no, no.”
Something about the way he says this makes me feel rebuked, as though I am a small child who cannot possibly understand these things. Our food arrives, and we fall silent. We could not be more different in the way we eat. I have consciously abandoned English formalities; I chew on the bagel, wiping away any imagined surplus cream cheese from the corners of my mouth with a napkin. He cuts his cooked breakfast into small, perfectly formed parcels that are conveyed with astonishing regularity to his mouth, wielding his knife and fork like surgical instruments. Eating, perhaps, mollifies him. When he has finished, he is more conciliatory.
“I’m a politician,” he offers. “From Singapore.”
I do my best to look intelligent.
“I’m here to rest for a little. To stand back, to think.”
He goes on. He is staying in the Faculty Club, with its tired menus, its fuggy bar with Bass Ale and liquors, its half-baked pastiche of a Cambridge Senior Common Room. He has been dining there, but for breakfast today he thought he would escape, leave even his secretary behind, and explore the campus. Strange that he should meet me here, an English student in Canada, at the far edge of the continent. He, too, was an overseas student: in England, after the War. Only twenty years previously, but it now seems to him a lifetime ago.
When the bills come, he pays mine, brushing my protests aside. As we emerge from the café he puts on a hat, and an immaculately tailored coat. I am conscious of my shabbiness, slipping on the baggy army surplus greatcoat that I borrowed from Sean’s house this morning, its waistband fraying and impossibly tangled.
We walk together up the Mall. The trees are dark, the pavement wet, the mountains invisible under cloud. At this time of year, I joke, you might visit Vancouver and never realise there were mountains at all. Has he seen them?
He saw them from the plane, he tells me, descending to that tiny white hut of an airport. But they didn’t impress him. They dwarfed the city: they only made him realise how tenuous civilization’s grasp was on this part of the world. From what he can see here, everything is impossibly second-rate. The writing in the local newspapers is crude, inelegantly tongue-tied, filled with clichés. The campus, despite the rash of new buildings—the theatre opposite the faculty club, the clock tower, the low bulk of the student union building—still has the feeling of a logging camp, hacked out of the forest.
I couldn’t disagree more, I tell him. What I find liberating here is precisely this newness, this world waiting to be made. There is a struggle now, of course, over what the university should be. Mr Ladner gave us his clock tower, when what we really wanted was smaller classes, and better teaching. We want a different kind of university, a place where there are fewer restrictions: where young people like myself are not shut out. And things will change.
He looks at me in exasperation. I should think carefully about what I am saying. Those Czechoslovaks who lined up to cheer Dubček, where are they now, now that Soviet troops have come in? And think of those demonstrations at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, those hippies, is that what you call them? The riots will hand Nixon the election on a platter.
“Yippies. They’re against violence. And Jerry Rubin
is coming to UBC in a couple of days’ time.”
He shrugs. He has a way of making me feel like a petulant little girl. He looks out, over Burrard Inlet, at the white mass of cloud. A ship’s foghorn sounds.
“You know,” he begins, “there was a time when I thought as you do now.”
He pauses, and I wait for a “but” that never comes. His face twitches, and his expression changes. I can’t quite read his face. Pain perhaps, or more precisely that moment of anticipation of pain when you stub your toe, in that second before the sensation comes. Or the sudden apprehension of a smell, pleasant in itself, but connected by a long, inescapable thread of memory to something long forgotten, long hidden away. He recomposes himself.
At the entrance to the faculty club, he shakes my hand.
“Miss Marshall. A pleasure to have met you.”
“Mr Lee. Perhaps I’ll see you on campus again?”
“Keep learning Chinese.”
He turns away, and climbs the stairs to the club’s entrance.
• • •
October 22, Noon
After the lecture, before lunch, I make my way to the Main Library stacks, click my way through the turnstile, and clamber downwards on the narrow metal stairs. The building always surprises me: the original grey stone Gothic library from fifty years ago, little bigger than a Shaughnessy house, now nestles between puce-coloured extensions that stretch away on either side like enormous wings. The heating has been turned on and the stacks are dry and airless. I find what I am looking for: a Singapore Yearbook from 1967. There are pictures of cranes, of a harbour full of ships, of land stripped raw and levelled for new factories just as land is levelled on our campus for all those new buildings. I read on. The economy is booming since the separation from Malaysia. Soon enough I come across a picture of my breakfast companion. Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister, touring the new housing estates, a garland of flowers round his neck. Socialism that works!
Statistics bore me. I replace the handbook, and work my way back along a seam of bookshelves to the high cool ceilings of the reference room and its rows of encyclopaedias. He was educated at Cambridge, I discover, and then returned to Singapore to enter politics. He has been in office since 1959. And then a different story from the yearbook. His party is centrist, and a strong anti-Communist ally. He has been so successful in his struggle for power that there is now not a single opposition member of parliament.
The newspapers next, taken down from their racks and spread out on the table in front of me. He arrived the day before yesterday. At the press conference, he refused to answer most questions about politics, about Malaysia, about Vietnam. He was here for a sabbatical, he said, for a time to step back after ten years in power: he was searching for new energy and fresh ideas. He would be giving two lectures while in Vancouver, but would not talk further to the press. This satisfied no one.
A note to myself—contact Albie, from the Ubyssey. I’ve written for the student newspaper before, after all. Perhaps I have an opening here, the chance of an interview with Mr Lee, a way of unravelling these contradictions. A scoop. And sure enough, splashing my way from the library steps to the Buchanan Building, umbrella open, I run into Albie, nervous as ever. “Sure,” he says to my suggestion, pausing to wipe the raindrops from his glasses. “Get the copy in by Friday evening, though. Jerry Rubin’s coming to campus, with Pigasus. You’ll be fighting with them for column inches.” And then he pulls up his collar and makes a run for the library.
• • •
October 22, Afternoon
Characters to transcribe onto flashcards
– ko2 ming4 – revolution
– chieh3 fang4 – liberation
– she4 hui4 chu3 i4 – socialism
– chih2 min2 ti4 – colony
– hsin1 chia1 po1 – Singapore
– Li3 Kuang1 Yao4 – Lee Kuan Yew
• • •
October 22, Evening
It’s five o’clock when I get to Sean’s place. Still light. I leave my bike outside, take the salmon I’ve bought, climb up the peeling wooden steps that flex, creak, but do not give way. The doorknob’s solid brass, cold to the touch now, a rare reminder of how magnificent this house must have been half a century ago. The door’s unlocked, as it always is, and I push my way in, along the long corridor lined with heavy coats that tug at me on either side. The salmon’s awkward to hold on to in its paper wrapper, and I find myself cradling it like a child. When I’m past the coats, I pause at the foot of the stairs. This place, I have discovered, is the centre of the house. To the side, the stairs clamber up to bedrooms in the roof. At my feet, an iron grille, installed for some long-forgotten purpose, gives a glimpse of the basement floor. Stand here and you can hear everything: lovers’ whispers on the futon downstairs; the rattle of plates in the kitchen; pages, even, crinkling as they turn over at a study desk in a room above. I listen. A radio is playing. Someone’s been smoking grass, and the smell still lingers. There is something else, too: a vibration that runs through the house, almost undetectable, below the threshold of the senses.
When Sean puts his hand around my waist, I’m startled for a moment, but then I fold into him, as if he were one of those old coats in the hallway. He pulls me into his room. I lock the door after us, hook into eye. His hook into my nether eye. From where I lie, on the mattress, I can look up, into the branches of the horse chestnut tree outside the windows. The leaves have not yet all fallen; those that remain stretch out towards me, like splayed hands. Soon the ground will be thick with them, clogging, wet. I might burrow into them, just as Sean burrows into me, for warmth as much as for pleasure.
By the time he wakes up, and comes to find me in the kitchen, it’s dark. I’m scaling and cleaning the fish with a blunt knife, and the stove is hissing with warmth. He touches my shoulder, sits down at the table, next to the books I’ve taken out of my bag and which now sit in a haphazard pile on the table under the downlight. He picks them up one by one. The Singapore Yearbook 1967 is quickly discarded. The Tasks Ahead, the first manifesto of Lee Kuan Yew’s party, interests him more. He thumbs through it, nodding along with its plans for a socialist society as if he’s keeping time to music. And then, he takes up something altogether more weighty, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. He begins reading where I have left off, in the last chapter. I wrap the salmon in tinfoil, and place it in the oven.
I look across at him, his face earnest, shadowed by the light. He is like a bear, I think, although a thin and still elegant bear. He likes to hibernate. When he emerges, he is hungry. He lumbers into politics like a berry patch, pulling at everything in sight, stuffing himself full of sweetness, moving with a brute weight and heft he does not quite understand.
I tell him about my breakfast conversation, and my discoveries in the library. While I check the salmon, he looks at the Singapore books again, with renewed interest.
“This Lee,” he says finally. “Is he a revolutionary or a reactionary?”
“Maybe I’ll ask him.”
He shrugs, and returns to his Fanon. I find, miraculously, some clean plates on the shelf, and then trawl for cutlery among the mismatched knives and forks jumbled in a lower drawer. I look at him again. He’s paused in his reading, his forehead furrowed in concentration, his finger tapping on the page.
“Stuck?”
He nods. “At least with Fanon you know where he stands. But I don’t get this bit you underlined. He’s sometimes difficult to figure out.”
“Read it to me.”
He reads, with that deep, soft voice I sometimes think is the best part of him. “No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men. The caravan should not be stretched out, for in that case each line will hardly see those who precede it; and men who no longer recognize each other meet less and less together, and talk to each other less and less.”
I wait. The room is full
of the smell of salmon.
“So what does he mean?”
“That when you go forward, you need to go forward together. That you shouldn’t forget where you came from, what you originally wanted to do.”
His mouth opens, and he’s going to ask another question, but he thinks better of it, and returns to the book.
The salmon’s ready. I serve it, with vegetables from the stove. He sits there. I sometimes wonder whether the world has really changed. I cook for him, just as my mother cooked for my father. In bed, I am solely responsible for precautions. He tickles my affection, perhaps, without ever giving me real pleasure.
“Jerry Rubin’s holding a rally on Thursday,” he says, his mouth half full of food. “With that pig that they put up for presidential candidate. Are you going to be there?”
Of course, I tell him. But first I have to try to get an interview with Mr Lee.
• • •
October 23, Morning
Characters to write on flash cards and memorise
– ti4 kuo2 chu3 i4 – imperialism
– mao2 tun4 – contradiction
– nan2 nü3 ping2 teng 3 – sexual equality
– ta4 nan2 jen2 chu3 i4 – male chauvinism
• • •
October 23, Afternoon
It’s not till the afternoon that I can get away from classes. A grey day, umbrellas sprouting like mushrooms on the Mall. The Bus Stop Café windows are steamed up; as I walk past, I notice that someone has drawn a peace sign on the glass with an unsteady finger. The oak trees are darker, shedding the last of their leaves. No piles to kick now on the sidewalks; only a black mulch that clings to the soles of my new boots. The boots themselves are too tight; they pinch at my calves on the steps up to the faculty club.
It’s warm in the lobby, with the sweet scent of pipe tobacco. In the distance, I can hear the clink of glasses, and the murmur of conversation. A man’s voice laughs, suddenly loud.
“Excuse me!”
The Suit at reception looks at me sceptically, over steel-rimmed glasses. I struggle to fasten my umbrella closed.
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