My father carries two cameras. He uses Nikon Fs and Leicas. Extra body armour, he jokes. Once a Viet Cong sniper shot a camera right off his chest. He uses two lenses mostly: a 28mm wide-angle, and a 105mm portrait lens. He keeps rolls of film in specially sewn pockets down the sides of his camouflaged olive-green trousers, where soldiers keep bullets. Two films in his breast pocket, next to his notebook for recording the shots he takes. ‘Snaps’, he calls them.
˜ ˜ ˜
Frankie makes coffee. We’re not supposed to drink coffee and she doesn’t know how to make it. It tastes bitter and muddy. We put lots of milk in and drink it anyway, become giddy, excitable, because we’re alone and we can do what we like. We’re still in our pyjamas. Light cotton Chinese pyjamas with cloth buttons and front pockets embroidered with lotus flowers and pagodas. When Frankie tries to suppress a laugh with her mouth full, she sprays coffee over the table. I grab the newspaper to save it from getting drenched.
There’s a story in the paper about a bomb in Wanchai blowing off a policeman’s hand: ‘a homemade bomb made from firecrackers stuffed in a biscuit tin’. Dozens of bombs have exploded in Hong Kong since the beginning of July. Bombs left in trash cans, on park benches, on the steps to movie theatres. Bombs thrown at policemen or at the British Army patrols which now man the border with China. They are planted by local Red Guards, radical followers of Mao Zedong, who want the British to leave Hong Kong. ‘Police urge bystanders to stay away from street demonstrations and to report any suspicious packages,’ I read out loud.
There’s an update on Tropical Storm Anita, which veered southwest towards Hainan Island at the last moment, merely skirting Hong Kong: ‘The colony received an inch of rain last week but the water shortage remains acute. Water rationing will remain in place.’ Frankie snorts. It’s the rainy season but rainfall’s at a record low, the Royal Observatory reports. If you try to turn on the taps, all you hear is a hollow gurgle. A memory of water, like putting a shell to your ear.
‘An outbreak of fighting in Canton between Red Guard factions, workers and soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army is to blame for a rash of bodies floating up on Hong Kong’s shores,’ I read to Frankie. ‘Horror bodies,’ the paper calls them.
‘Recent arrivals describe a “state of anarchy” in the provincial capital with bodies lying in the streets, hanging from lampposts, and clogging the Pearl River.’ These bodies are carried down the river out to sea.
My mother removes the papers if the pictures are gruesome, the stories violent, but usually she’s too late. I study the photograph of Vietnam. I think I see my father.
‘He’s in the Mekong,’ I tell Frankie. ‘He’s walking down a river lined with trees. There are fish in his trousers. Leeches in his socks.’
‘How do you know?’ she asks, pulling the paper out of my hand.
four
Frankie’s knees scratch against the rattan mat that covers Ah Bing’s cot in the tiny amah’s room behind the kitchen. She spreads her arms, kneels upon the piece of plywood which serves instead of a mattress, Ah Bing’s single blanket neatly rolled up at one end. She rolls her eyes back to show their whites, rocks gently from side to side.
‘Ah Bing, the dead person came up right under me, just like this,’ she says.
‘Mou chou.’ Be quiet. Ah Bing grunts, and turns away, refusing to look. As if she’s afraid the dead woman’s spirit might come out of Frankie, float right out of her mouth. Ah Bing’s our amah, which means she’s our nanny and housekeeper. Or, as she would have it, our Chinese mother.
She squats on a low stool. Her wide bottom engulfs the small wooden seat. Her knees spread to either side like a giant praying mantis. She combs her hair, long, black and thin, down over one shoulder, twists in a false strand to thicken her bun. She has a wide, kind face: strong cheekbones, a flat nose, and generous, long-lobed ears. Good-luck Buddha ears, she calls them. Luck she doubles by wearing a pair of heavy gold earrings which have, over many years, stretched the cartilage. Her face and hands are weathered brown from sun and hard work, but where her black trousers ruck up above her ankles, I can see her skin is as pink and smooth as the inside of a conch shell.
I lie down next to Frankie on the cot, flatten my stomach. I cup my chin in my hands, press my toes against the cool whitewashed wall, watch the smoke from Ah Bing’s joss sticks waver in the hot air.
Under her cot, Ah Bing hoards supplies: a pile of my father’s worn, faded shirts; jars of dried mushrooms; a pair of my outgrown school shoes, blue and scuffed; a stack of the week’s papers to be sold to the lapsap woman. Castoffs Mao no longer allows her to send to China even though her relatives write pleading for wool, rice, sugar. The latest regulation: only three catties of new plain-coloured cloth allowed each month. China is proud. It doesn’t need second-hand goods. When Ah Bing goes to visit her relatives at Chinese New Year, she wears three pairs of knitted stockings under her trousers to unravel when she gets there. Her punishment is a severe case of prickly rash.
‘Po! Mao Zedong Dog!’ Ah Bing spits. Ah Bing detests Mao. It’s because of Mao that her aunt and uncle no longer own their own rice paddies, their own pigs. A cadre of Red Guards, teenagers, no older than Frankie and me, ransacked her uncle’s house, smashing everything. The four old elements must be destroyed, Mao said: old customs, old habits, old culture, old thinking. It’s the aim of China’s Cultural Revolution. Schools are closed, students summoned to be Mao’s vanguard. Ah Bing says the villagers were just jealous of her aunt. Her aunt owned more than the others only because she worked harder, and she was smarter.
More hateful is how Mao wrecked the Kuan Yin temple in the middle of the night. Ah Bing narrows her eyes, draws in her breath. Her comb flipping through the air, that’s Mao’s fist banging on the temple door. Her arm thrust out from her chest is Mao’s arm, the many arms of his Red Guards. Like a Tantric Buddha gone mad, they smash the porcelain statuary, rip down the embroidered silk hangings, swing hammers into the carved altar table, shatter the ancient statue of Kuan Yin. Sharp splinters of wood. Buddhism and praying are also forbidden. Religion is backward, ‘an opiate of the people’. ‘Aiyah! Mao come! Heisan!’ Wake up! The Buddhist nuns woke each other, eyes wide, in the middle of the night.
‘Mao sent the young girls home to marry,’ Ah Bing mutters, softer now. ‘For the old ones, too late. Who would want them?’ She lowers her head. I’ve seen photographs in the paper of monks denounced by Mao, paraded in long robes, hands tied behind their backs, heads bent, their bodies weighed down by huge placards denouncing their backward thinking, their feudal tendencies. Jeering crowds throw vegetables and buckets of human night soil.
‘But Ah Bing,’ Frankie protests, her tone impatient. We’ve heard Ah Bing’s story before. ‘How did Mao make the body float up from the sea?’
‘Po! Nobody like Mao!’ Ah Bing retorts. ‘Now everybody tries to swim to Hong Kong. Some, shark eat! Some drown!’ Her hands retreat to her hair, which she twists fiercely, netting her braids into a high bun. I want to tell her what I read in the paper about the horror bodies, the fighting in Canton between Red Guards and the PLA. But I can tell she’s had enough. Tucked tightly against her temple is a long brass pin with a tiny spoon at one end, which she inserts first in one ear, then the other, gently scooping out the wax. She flicks it clean. Clean of Mao, of China, of us too, insolent gwaimui, white ghost girls. Then jabs the pin through her bun.
A pillar of ash tumbles off one of the joss sticks before her small altar to Kuan Yin and down into a Campbell’s Soup tin filled with sand. A dank, earthy, wet smell from yesterday’s leaf fire seeps in under the edges of a metal-framed door that leads to the back patio, mixes with the other smells of Ah Bing’s room: sweet joss, sharp tiger balm, musty clove hair oil, steamed rice. It’s bad luck to imitate a dead person. That’s why she turns away. Ah Bing knows we’re no longer safe. From Mao. From dead bodies. From ourselves. We’re changing too fast. We can’t be trusted.
Oh Merciful Kuan Yin,
she prays, protect me from hungry ghosts. From bodies floating up from the sea. From the foolish pleasure of heathen gwaimui. From Frankie gajie, older sister. Her bosoms tumbling out of her pyjama top because she isn’t careful to button it up. From Katie-ah, muimui, younger sister, just beginning to change.
I will shed my skin, Ah Bing says, like a seed breaking from a pod, a snake slithering from its skin, a silk moth chewing its way impatiently out of its precious spun cocoon. Only the lucky survive. Silk-workers throw bags of cocoons into boiling water. The dead worms rattle inside.
In poorly lit factories in southern China, young girls poke the floating cocoons down into the water with forked sticks, turning them, submerging them, waiting for the silk to unravel in the steam. Thread so fine you can hardly see it.
five
Here’s a photo of Frankie and me, one my mother keeps on her dressing table. In it, we’re wearing light cotton dresses with sashes that tie around the back. The dresses look too young for us, too innocent. They contradict our faces and bodies. They are dresses my mother makes us wear. If you could see our backs, the bows would be crumpled, half-undone, creased with sweat from the hot drive.
Our hair is tidy because my mother asked us to keep the window up. ‘The wind will tangle your hair. I want you looking neat,’ she said. ‘Just for the morning.’ If Frankie’s braids are tied with ribbons, it’s because my mother chose them. Frankie ties them sullenly without bows. She doesn’t wear the short, cotton gloves my mother asked Ah Bing to iron for us.
I put the gloves on. It seems so important to my mother. When I inch my scratched, nail-bitten hands down into the gloves, I feel I’m pulling on someone else’s skin, whiter, smoother than my own. The skin my mother wants for me. Skin with straight seams that catch when I rub my fingers against one another. The skin I might have, maybe, if I were a real American girl, if we still lived in New York or on my father’s farm in Vermont.
˜ ˜ ˜
It’s rare, this photo of us. My father photographs the war. He tacks his photographs up on the walls of his darkroom, a former laundry room. A soldier shoots through the open door of a Huey. ‘Squirrel hunting’, my father’s scribbled underneath. A tall, sad-faced Marine lifts an old Vietnamese woman from the rubble of a burned-out house. The woman’s arms stick out stiffly, as if she’s scared of being touched. ‘Saving Tuyet Diem’, my father’s written. A tangled hunk of metal abandoned in the jungle: French tank at Gio Linh. A baby’s face covered in flies; a mother doesn’t brush them away because she’s holding her hands out to beg: Outside Saigon Cathedral.
There are other photos, labelled simply with place-names: Chu Lai, Binh Long, Khe Sanh. Photos of dead bodies, headless, armless, legless, mangled, clothes torn. A pair of delicate, bare feet point outward like a dancer’s.
My mother paints landscapes: quiet watercolours of Hong Kong. My mother took the photo of us. My father doesn’t go to church. She brought one of my father’s cameras with her, one he left behind in Hong Kong to be fixed. Maybe she realized it was a rare chance to present us almost the way she would want us to look. Usually, we go half-naked and barefoot or in flip-flops. But in the picture, we’re dressed for church. You can see the arched entrance in the background, the pale yellow of St John’s. Next to it, the tapered, grey trunk of a royal palm. Its bark, wrinkled like elephant skin, makes you want to run your hands along it, bare hands.
It’s a testament to my mother’s strength of will that she gets us to church in this heat. The power of her sudden need to rein us in, dress us, render us up for God’s inspection.
˜ ˜ ˜
In the photo, Frankie looks sultry, as sultry as you can in a white cotton dress with puffy sleeves and a bow around the back. You can tell, just from looking at her, these are not the clothes she would choose, this is not the photograph she would take. She’d rather take one of herself naked, sitting cross-legged, eating pomelo in the garden. Her hair would be loose. She’d stare out from under it as from under a veil. She’d rather pose this way – Gauguin’s Tahitian native.
Me, I am thin and angular, boyish. My dress hangs off me. My hair is cropped. I look directly at the camera, guarded, slightly hostile. It’s an anxious place for me, caught between my mother’s need to dress up, maintain appearances, Frankie’s desire to strip, to expose herself and everyone else’s nakedness.
˜ ˜ ˜
The picture I keep of myself is one my father took in the half-light of early morning. It’s underexposed, grey tones instead of black and white. I stick it on the wall next to my bed. You can hardly make me out but you can feel the warm wet, a slight wind. You can smell Ah Bing’s steamed rice, her joss, the rotting damp of the garden, hear fishermen heading in, hurrying now because of the typhoon. My face is shaded. Already, you can see I’m quiet, secretive. I keep myself camouflaged.
six
It’s Sunday and we’re on our way to church.
‘Can’t we go out on the junk? Can’t I stay here with Ah Bing?’ Frankie pleads. It’s no use. My mother has decided we need God’s help.
Dressed, combed, we squeeze into the hot olive-green Morris, a car my father has nicknamed The Pickle. I rest my feet on a gas can we keep full of water for when the car overheats, separate my legs to stop them from sticking together.
‘When I was little, your grandmother took me to church every Sunday,’ my mother says, encouragingly. ‘I had to sit still for hours while she used a hot iron to put my hair in ringlets.’ My grandfather was a minister. When my mother was little, she had to call him Reverend or ‘Father’, never Dad.
Below Pok Fu Lam Road, the sea blinks invitingly. The red flowers of flame of the forest trees burst like firecrackers. Cars full of bathers, picnickers, pass in the opposite direction, heading for Deep Water Bay, Repulse Bay, Middle Bay and Stanley, the string of beaches that line the south side of Hong Kong.
Inside the car, the air-conditioning barely moves the stale air. When I lean forward, my back and arms peel off the vinyl seat.
At Bonham Road, we veer inland under the dark shade of banyans where tangled aerial roots drip down like the beards of old men. Past the Italianate red-brick buildings of Hong Kong University. Shops with roll-up metal fronts and signs painted with red Chinese characters sell soda, film, medicinal herbs, funeral paper. There’s a line of idling cars; my mother slows, stops.
‘Kate, roll up your window!’ she orders sharply. It’s a tiny crack, I didn’t think she’d noticed, just enough to stick the tips of my fingers out, my white gloves shed on my lap. Three policemen overtake on motorcycles, then three others speed past the opposite way and I realize she’s not worried about keeping neat. In front of us, we hear chanting, drumming approaching.
‘Red Guards,’ Frankie hisses. She peers out, her face flattened against the window. It was worth coming after all. I crane my neck until I too see the marchers approaching down each side of the road.
‘Don’t look at them!’ my mother says. ‘Don’t make eye contact.’ Frankie and I stare. The protesters are young, orderly. Smooth-faced university students with glasses. They wear green caps with the red star of Communist China, wave large red flags crisply, hold up their Little Red Books of Mao’s quotations. They look earnest, a little frightened. Some of the girls cling together, awkward and prim like regular schoolgirls. These are not the bomb-throwing leftists, the dastardly Communists we read about in the paper.
‘Look, it’s him!’ Frankie cries, suddenly pointing to my side of the car. A huge mouth with full lips fills my window, kisses the glass, then pulls back.
It’s Mao’s face, enormous, his broad forehead, hair neatly parted to one side, his lips, the mole on his chin, his high, starched collar, all instantly recognizable. The same picture that’s in his Little Red Book, enlarged to poster-size.
‘Good thing Ah Bing’s not here,’ Frankie says.
I look up into Mao’s eyes. The eyes of the man who smashed the Kuan Yin Buddha, turned the old women from the temple, sent the dead body
floating up under our junk. Mao’s eyes are wet and baggy. They look sad and full of longing.
Behind Mao, the students carry other posters, of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, each taller than our car – godlike.
˜ ˜ ˜
My father has told us about Mao. The year of the Long March, when Mao and 80,000 other Communists secretly abandoned their encircled Soviet stronghold in Jiangxi Province. Slipping past Nationalist lines, they forded rivers, climbed mountains and trekked 6,000 miles up into Sichuan and Tibet.
He lies on the floor of our bedroom at night. He bends his knees to keep his back flat because he hurt it in a helicopter crash. Sometimes he has to wear a brace. In the dark, I trace the outline of his body against the black, lacquered floorboards.
‘The famous capture of the Luding Bridge, high over the Datong River,’ my father begins. ‘The Guomindang removed all the wood planks to stop the Communists from crossing. But by night, twenty soldiers managed to crawl, hand-over-hand, across the bare suspension chain. Imagine the river rushing hungrily far beneath them, swirling around jagged rocks and pointed trees. They carried grenades on their belts and in their mouths.’
Maybe that’s what makes Mao sad. Remembering the more heroic, simpler days, before his followers rampaged through the streets of China, smashing Buddhist statues, wrecking village homes, setting off bombs in Hong Kong; before he unleashed the Cultural Revolution; before he was old. In those days, Mao never dressed in a starched shirt with a pinching collar. His hair was wild and shaggy, not combed high off his forehead, neatly parted to one side.
Or maybe Mao is remembering his malarial sweats in the freezing cold of the Great Snow Mountain ranges, 16,000 feet high. ‘Many of his followers lost their lives or limbs to the cold while Mao’s fever burned,’ my father continues. ‘By the time they reached Yanan, ninety per cent of his troops had deserted or died.’
White Ghost Girls Page 2