by Susan Barker
‘Yida! Why didn’t you say you were here?’
Yida stares at him from beneath the wildness of her hair. She is bare-legged, in an old, holey T-shirt, and her eyes are swollen and red. She takes a drag on the cigarette and, out of practice, coughs on the smoke. Yida quit smoking years ago and has been nagging her twenty-a-day husband to do the same.
‘I got your message,’ Wang says. ‘What’s happened? Why is the bedroom turned over like that?’
‘Who are you?’
Yida asks the question slowly, cigarette smoke casting a veil over her face, a penetrating look in her eyes. Wang is confused. Yida is not in the habit of asking strange philosophical questions. Where are the keys? Have you charged the electricity card? These are the questions Yida asks.
‘What do you mean, who am I?’ he asks.
Yida glares at her husband. She grabs her mobile phone from the counter and throws it at him, hard. Wang catches the phone, fumbling as it nearly slips through his fingers. On the screen is a digital photograph, the resolution low and grainy. Wang squints to make sense of the pixels and, when he does, his insides lurch as though in a suddenly braking car. The photo is of two men side by side on a narrow bed, smoking and gazing at the ceiling as they lie on their backs.
‘Who sent this?’ he croaks.
Yida exhales from her cigarette and watches Wang squirm through the haze.
‘I don’t know who sent it,’ she says. ‘There’s one more.’
Wang scrolls to the next message, sick with dread. This time they are sitting on the bed, with Zeng’s head inclined towards him. Wang checks the inbox. No more photos. Yet. Not that it matters. Wang looks at Yida and knows the damage has been done. She stands behind her fortress of smoke as though composed, but he knows she is fighting back tears.
‘Are you sleeping with that man?’ she asks.
‘No!’
‘Who is he?’
‘His name is Zeng Yan.’
‘Your friend from the hospital?’
‘Yes. I ran into him in the street the other day. He said he worked in a salon nearby and offered me a free haircut. So I went with him and he cut my hair. I’d slept badly the night before and was nodding off in the chair. So Zeng Yan said I could take a nap in his back room before going back to my taxi—’
‘You expect me to believe this pack of lies?’ Yida interrupts. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t know it was a place men go to have sex with other men! Not even you are that stupid, Wang!’
‘Look,’ Wang says, ‘I was tired and not thinking straight. I trusted this guy, I thought he was my friend. I lay down for a nap and woke up ten minutes later to find him next to me on the bed. I pushed him away, then I got out of there as fast as I could . . .’
Wang hears his desperate, wheedling tone and knows Yida is not convinced. Sure enough, her stare remains cynical and hard.
‘You don’t look in any hurry to get out of there in that photo,’ she says. ‘You look very comfortable to me.’
‘Oh, come on! I bumped into an old friend, and made a stupid mistake,’ Wang says. ‘The thought of being with a man makes me physically sick. Yida, you have to trust me on this . . .’
‘Trust you?’
Yida stubs her cigarette out on the window ledge. In her agitation she has flicked ash everywhere, on her T-shirt, on her bare feet and the kitchen floor – an offence she would rebuke her husband for. Her eyes darken, and she nods at a cardboard box on the counter.
‘I’ve been reading your letters.’
Wang had been so distracted by Yida and the photos, he hadn’t noticed the box. He’d hidden it in the suitcase on top of the wardrobe – the suitcase they never use, because they never go anywhere. He thought the letters would be safe there. He’d never expected that Yida would one day turn the bedroom over. Yida grabs some loose papers, her hands trembling as she reads aloud:
‘“Yida is a woman who stirs up in men the animal instinct to fuck and procreate. Tempting men as spoiled fruit tempts flies. But sleeping with Yida must be a sad and lonely experience . . . The thought of you with your wife repulses me too.’
She chokes back a sob in her throat.
‘They are from Zeng . . .’ Wang stutters, thinking how odd it is to hear the letter read out in Yida’s voice. ‘I meant to tell you about them, but I didn’t know how to explain. They are harmless, I think . . . just strange.’
Tears slide down Yida’s cheeks.
‘You think you are so much cleverer than me, don’t you, Wang Jun?’ she says. ‘Because you went to university and I dropped out of school at fifteen. Because you are the son of an official, and I am the daughter of peasants from the countryside.’
Wang shakes his head and mumbles weakly, ‘No.’ But what she says is true.
‘But I am not so stupid that I don’t know you wrote these letters yourself,’ Yida cries. ‘This is what you do at night, isn’t it? When you stay up late and don’t come to bed. You are writing these crazy stories on the computer . . . writing nasty things about your wife!’
She crumples the letter up and throws it at Wang. The balled-up paper bounces from his chest.
‘Yida, I swear I never wrote those letters,’ Wang protests. ‘Zeng Yan wrote them . . .’
Yida rubs her eyes, and for a moment looks as young and vulnerable as when he first met her during the storm, and it pierces Wang’s heart. He wants to go to her and put his arms around her – something he once did without a second thought. But now he hesitates, as he would before scaling a hazardous barbed-wire fence. He steps towards her, and Yida steps back.
‘Don’t!’ she warns. ‘Don’t come near me! Why did you marry me if you think so little of me? What does that say about you, Wang Jun?’
Wang shakes his head. He starts to tell her, No, he does respect her. Then stops as Yida snatches the cardboard box from the counter and hugs it to her chest.
‘I am throwing these away!’ she says.
‘You can’t!’ Wang says. ‘They aren’t yours!’
Wang lunges for the box as Yida spins to the window and leans over the ledge, holding the letters out over the yard below.
‘Don’t!’ he yells.
But she lets go, and Wang reaches the ledge in time to see the lid come off and the letters tumble out into the car park four floors below. He turns back to his wife and shouts, ‘What have you done?’
Yida stares at her outraged husband. She bites her lip, eyes wide with the fear that she has gone too far. Then she bursts into giggles.
‘Quick! Run down and fetch your precious stories, Wang Jun!’ she says. ‘Hurry! Before Granny Ping reads them! Before the wind blows them away!’
Wang turns to go down and do exactly as she suggests. But Yida calls after him, stopping him in his tracks.
‘Lin Hong warned me about you! Before we got married she came to see me, and warned me that you liked men. I thought she was making trouble, and I didn’t listen to her. But now I wish I had. I hate to think of all the men you’ve been with behind my back over the years . . .’
Wang strides over to her. ‘Well, don’t you offer special services to your customers at the Heavenly Massage? Didn’t Zeng Yan pay you six thousand yuan to strip for him the other day?’
Yida gasps. ‘Wang, have you lost your mind? I don’t work at the Heavenly Massage. And I’ve never met Zeng Yan in my life. What are you talking about?’
‘You know exactly what I am talking about.’
Wang hadn’t believed the letter at first. He had thought the ‘exposé’ of Yida was an imaginary scenario straight out of Zeng’s perverted mind. But Wang now looks at Yida, gaping at him, lost for words, and knows the letter was telling the truth. Yida had stripped for Zeng. Not for the money, but to make a fool of him. To prove he didn’t own her.
‘You’ve been screwing your customers for years! You think you can hide it from me, but I’ve always known what you’ve been up to!’
Blood rushes to Yida’s head as she leans towards him
. She stabs her finger at the door and shouts, ‘Get out of my home! Get out! You’re fucking crazy!’
Wang sets her straight. ‘It’s not your home. It’s mine. I brought you here off the streets, remember?’
Sobbing, Yida shoves him with both hands, pushing him out of the kitchen. But Wang won’t be thrown out of his own home. He grabs Yida’s shoulders and shakes her hard, with more strength than he knew he had. As he shakes her and shakes her, a strange thing happens. He somehow detaches from his body and hovers above them, watching him shaking Yida until she stops screaming, until she stops fighting him off and goes limp and insensible as a rag doll. When he stops shaking her, after a minute or two, his wife is silent. She stares at Wang as though she had glimpsed something nightmarish in his eyes.
‘Who are you?’ Yida whispers.
Wang smells the cigarette smoke on her breath. Even through his rage, he can still see how beautiful his wife is, desirable to any man. He takes her head in his hands and kisses her hard on the mouth, feeling her teeth beneath her lips. He knows he is hurting her, that later he will regret being so aggressive. But he takes her slack wrist and pulls her out of the kitchen. He is sick and tired of the dishonesty in their marriage; the time has finally come to show Yida who he really is.
23
Ah Qin and the Sea
Qing Dynasty, 1836
I
SLUMBERING BEAST. YELLOW slit of eye. Slobbering on the cobbles of Hog Lane, as though gnashed up in the jaws of the Sea Daemon and spewed out. Hairy-knuckled hand, sleep-scratching the crotch-rot between his legs. Yellow matted hair like trampled straw. He should have been set ablaze, he was so crawling with filth and disease.
It was the hour of the ram and Hog Lane was empty. No pole-carrying porters, tinkers, or rat-catchers, or peep-show men. Only toothless Ah Ling under the bamboo awning of his junk shop, whose sly grin said, ‘Go on, boy, fleece the barbarian!’ Jack’s Ale Tavern was rowdy with the beast’s shipmates, who’d swagger out later with bladders full of firewater, looking for a whorehouse or a brawl. But first, the drinking had to be done.
I was a young boy then, and scared out of my wits. I crept over to the slobbering beast and whispered in Ghost People tongue, ‘Mister? How do you do, old boy?’ The beast slumbered on. His breath stank of firewater – alcohol and tobacco juice, with a dash of arsenic, and something viler, as though a rat from the ship’s hold had crawled into his guts to die. My hand shook as I reached for the coin purse in the barbarian’s pocket. Blood crashed in my ears, and I was so intent on my thieving I didn’t see one of his shipmates staggering out of the tavern.
‘Oi!’
He shackled my wrist with his hairy hand and hauled me up so I was staring right into his snarling face, breath of firewater stinging my eyes. Coins jingled out of the stolen purse on to the ground as he walloped my backside like he was beating dust out of a rug. Whack! Whack! Whack! More beasts spilled out of the tavern to cheer as I howled. Down the lane, Ah Ling sniggered on his stool.
‘Mister! Let me go!’ I begged in Ghost People tongue.
I wriggled and kicked out backwards like a donkey with its hind leg, and struck something soft. The beast squeaked, let go of my wrist, and I ran off.
I ran up Hog Lane, past the dens of opium smoke and sinful deeds. I ran past the shophouses of Old China street, and the factories of Thirteen Hong Lane, where flags of other lands fluttered from the flag staffs. I ran past the warehouses of tea and silk, porcelain and furs, and past a foreign devil squinting through a monocle, inspecting a pocket watch on a chain. Some of the drunken beasts gave chase, but I outran them.
I was running down a narrow alley leading out of Fanqui Town when I looked back at the herd lumbering behind. The next thing I knew I’d barrelled straight into one of the sailors. He grabbed me and twisted my arms behind my back, as the rest of the beasts, furnace red and out of breath from the chase, caught up. The one I’d kicked between the legs came over. Out of his pocket he took a knife, and flicked out the blade.
‘Mister!’ I pleaded. ‘Old boy, please!’
I was done for. A Tanka boy losing his life for kicking a white man – that was fairness in the barbarian’s eyes. He leant in close, grabbed a fistful of my hair and brought the blade to my neck. The other beasts crowded round, and their calm was more chilling than the cheers in Hog Lane. I thought of poor Ma Qin in her wash boat, about to lose her only son.
But fate wasn’t to have it that way. Fate had you waving your walking cane in the air and shouting at them instead. The sailors looked over at you, limping up the alley. You were odd-looking, even by barbarian standards, with your ship’s prow of a nose and orange hair and freckles on pale skin. One of those gweilos who even on the hottest days wore a waistcoat over a stiff-collared shirt, long breeches and shiny leather shoes. You hobbled over to us, your cane tapping, lame foot dragging. The sailors, not having much respect for cripples, sneered.
A drunken sailor’s a barrel of gunpowder that can explode at the slightest spark, and so you spoke to them carefully. The barbarian with the knife yelled and stabbed the blade at you, but you stood your ground. Though thin and weedy as he was barrel-chested and burly, you had the cleverer tongue. The beast soon flipped the blade away and backed off. One last kick to my backside and they staggered back to the ale taverns of Hog Lane. You watched them go, leaning on your cane and dabbing your brow with a handkerchief.
Though you’d saved my thieving neck, I turned to run as far from Fanqui Town as my legs would carry me, without a word of thanks.
‘Wait!’ Cantonese, with a strong barbarian accent. ‘Are you hurt?’
I stared at you. Who knew foreign devils could speak? Most sail all the way to the Celestial Kingdom without even knowing how to say hello.
‘Stealing is wrong,’ you scolded. ‘You shouldn’t steal.’
Ah, a Jesus Preacher, I thought, edging away. But the sermon ended there. I wanted to run, but something in your green-coloured eyes held me in the alley. You stroked your beard and side-whiskers and looked at me.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Ah Qin.’
‘I am Ah Tom,’ you said. Another dab of your brow with the linen in your pale, freckled hand. ‘You’re a Tanka, aren’t you? Want to make some honest money? Come with me.’
II
‘This is the British factory.’ You pointed your bamboo cane to the sagging flag on the flagpole. ‘That is the British flag.’
Your cane tapping the wooden floor, you led me through the factory, down the hall to the rear. Through one doorway I saw a dining room with silver candlesticks on a long cloth-covered table, and a portrait of the She-Emperor of England on the wall. I saw the Chinese servants, polishing silver things that I knew were called ‘forks and spoons’, though I didn’t know which were which. The servants frowned at me, the Tanka boatboy in rags, tagging after Master Tom. They frowned as though they’d seen the glint of thievery in my eyes.
You led me to a chamber of leather-bound books and sat at the desk behind the abacus, ink pot and quills and stuffed the bowl of a long-stemmed pipe with tobacco. A servant boy poured us tea and, puffing on your pipe, you told me you were a book-keeper for the British factory.
‘I am a writer too,’ you said, ‘writing a book about the people of China.’
In the leather chair by the desk, I was ready to bolt. I hadn’t seen a Red-haired Devil up close before, and I stared at the red bristling from your head and chin. Were those orange freckles a skin disease? Could I catch them? What a hiding Ma Qin would give me if I went back to the wash boat with orange freckles caught off a gweilo. You cleared your throat.
‘I want to write about the Tanka,’ you said, ‘but, as foreigners aren’t allowed in the floating city, I can’t find out much. Can you tell me about your people, Ah Qin? What are your customs? How do you marry, for instance? How do you bury your dead?’
Back then, I was ten years old. What did I know about ‘customs’? What did I know about
marrying, or burying the dead? But you dipped your quill in an ink pot and gazed at me, feather poised over the blank page. So I opened my ten-year-old mouth, and this is what came out.
‘The Tanka come from the sea,’ I said. ‘We were fish people long ago and lived in the ocean. Then we learnt to breathe the air, and walk on legs, and came out of the sea to live on boats . . .’
You nodded and wrote this down.
‘Some Tanka are born with fish scales,’ I went on. ‘When a Tanka baby is born more fish than Tanka, it is thrown into the Pearl River and swims away to live in the sea.’
‘Born with fish scales . . .’ you murmured, your feather spilling ink on the page. ‘Swims to live in the sea . . .’
Where had I heard such strange things? Pa Qin had told me before he died, back when I was small and waddled about the boat with a wooden float strapped to my back. Whether Pa Qin’s tales were true or not, I had no idea. But you asked more questions about the Tanka people, and for another hour or so I told you what I could remember of my father’s tales. And you listened, and wrote everything down with a seriousness that made me feel very important in that leather chair.
‘What about Mazu, Goddess of the Sea, and rescuer of ships in distress?’ you asked. ‘Does your boat have a shrine to Mazu? Do you burn joss sticks for her?’
‘I know Mazu,’ I said. ‘She came to our boat when I was little. She came with her two guards, Ears that Hear the Wind and Eyes that See across the Waves. She came in the night and the ship was bright as day. Ma and Pa didn’t wake up.’
‘Did the Sea Goddess speak to you?’ you asked.
I nodded. ‘She said that one day I would go to sea. Then she went away.’
This was no Pa Qin story, but the truth. Ever since I was little, Mazu has been coming to tell me I will go to sea. That the sea is my destiny. You wrote this down, but had no more questions about Mazu. Then the British factory clock chimed five times, and you asked, ‘Do you have any questions for me, Ah Qin?’