My father comes home for ten days after every six weeks. Sometimes he leaves early. Other times, he just appears. We wake up in the morning and he’s there, eating breakfast, smiling impishly, my mother beaming.
˜ ˜ ˜
Inside the office, Saigon Duck likes to sleep on the top of a filing cabinet directly beneath the waft of the ceiling fan. My father describes to us how she takes an ungainly, flapping leap, then ruffles her feathers and looks around coquettishly, hoping no one has seen. It’s her favourite place to sleep after the shade of the tamarind tree. The urgent tapping of McKenna’s typewriter, the gentle staccato of Thach’s Vietnamese, my father’s sudden shouts from the closet he uses as a darkroom all seem to have a comforting, soporific effect.
~ ~ ~
I’ve seen ducks in cages when we go shopping at the market above Central: ducks, chickens, geese, snakes, sometimes more exotic beasts like guinea fowl or pangolin. Red characters inked on bamboo slats list their prices: 50c a catty for a ringed-neck turtle dove, 80c a catty for a box terrapin. If you want a fresh chicken, the butcher will chop off its head for you. Its eyes pop wide. Its blood runs down the alley into the gutter. If you want snake soup, the proprietor will chop one into his wok, a yellow- and black-banded krait. A glass of snake blood makes you hotter, he says. It’s good for winter, too strong in the summer.
While Ah Bing haggles, Frankie and I inspect the pangolin, rolled up like a cannonball. Its armoured scales, long claws for digging insects, prehistoric defences, are useless here in the Chinese market. An old woman pushes up against Frankie, babbling, her teeth stained black with tobacco.
‘What’s she saying?’ Frankie asks, as Ah Bing protectively shoves the woman aside.
‘Old lady say pangolin soup will make you hou leng,’ very beautiful, Ah Bing translates. ‘All the boys will want to marry you.’ She laughs. There are pangolins in the hills of Hong Kong, a few deer too, civet cats, wild boar and monkeys. Most of them have been eaten, captured like this one to sell at the market, cooked in soups that make you healthy or hot or beautiful. Not for Ah Bing, she’s a vegetarian. She doesn’t eat meat. She doesn’t like men either.
˜ ˜ ˜
The deaf boy knows about pangolins. He knows about tiger grass, bamboo, banyan trees with hanging aerial roots that suck moisture out of the wet air itself. He knows about black-eared kites, swifts, barking deer. He can name the plants and birds as we walk around Lugard Road, a jungly path that rings the Peak.
‘Well done!’ Miss Tipley says. These things matter to her too.
Behind us, our mothers follow, quietly talking about school, the summer heat.
‘When will your husband next be home?’ Jen asks. My mother’s hair is pinned back. She wears a sleeveless dress, pink and cool, the colour of a flamingo. The deaf boy is thin, gangly. He carries a battered pair of binoculars around his neck.
Miss Tipley says the cockatoos that fly up to the Peak, past her swimming pool, are feral. They’re descendants of two pairs released by Major-General Maltby during the war. On Christmas Day 1941, the British commander stepped out along the wide, shady veranda of Victoria Barracks and defiantly released the birds from his aviary. I imagine them, green and red parrots, blue-throated bee eaters, yellow warblers, emerald doves flying out, one by one. Finally, the cockatoos, skimming the tops of the cotton trees like white flags of surrender as the Japanese marched up the road to take Hong Kong.
‘He was just selfish,’ Frankie says. ‘He didn’t want the Japanese to get them.’
‘That’s true,’ Miss Tipley agrees. ‘Many English burned their furniture and books rather than leave them to the Japanese soldiers.’
The Japanese threw the British and Americans into a prison camp at Stanley village, Miss Tipley says. They tortured and executed many Chinese. Others fled to mainland China because there was so little food in Hong Kong.
The people who stayed had to eat pangolin, cockatoo, snake, monkey, rat, cockroach – whatever they could catch.
ten
Usually my father sends us tapes, wrapped in brown paper. We smuggle them up into the jungle behind the house, away from my mother, from Ah Bing, from Ah Fu, the gardener, who grumbles at us, strange foreign vermin infesting Chinese soil. Past Mr Mok who shuffles out in boxer shorts and an undershirt, carrying a small dish of bugs. He picks the choicest out with chopsticks to feed to a pet mynah bird in a rattan cage. Tufts of black hair sprout from his armpits. Sometimes he spoils the bird with treats. Other times, when it screeches too loudly, he swears and throws a greasy towel over its cage.
Beyond the peeling red railing at the back of the garden, the ground is littered with broken flower pots and discarded roof tiles. A rattan basket collapses towards the ground. A derelict washing machine is half-buried in dirt. We push through palms, past a grove of green bamboo, crawl under the wide translucent leaves of elephant ears. We’re American soldiers. Viet Cong. Our feet slip on the rot and mould at the bottom of an old cement nullah, part of a Victorian water-catchment system. Butterflies flit past, tiny yellows, blue-spotted crows. A lumpy toad jumps out of our way.
Three hundred feet up, we scramble on to a cement platform, scratching our knees. It’s the ruined foundation of a small house.
‘Password?’ Frankie asks.
‘Ho Chi Minh,’ I reply.
The house isn’t bombed, just abandoned. Its iron supports stick out rusted and bent, tangled with vines, its stones clasped by roots as the jungle creeps forward to reclaim it, like crashed airplanes or ancient temples sprouting trees.
It’s our hideout, a no-man’s-land, a place no one will find us, where we keep secret treasures. In Vietnam, girls our age collect shrapnel or nails stolen from USAID projects, deliver them to Viet Cong cadres who pack them into explosives. Our own treasures are more innocent: forbidden chewing-gum begged from the taitais, the elderly wives of Mr Mok’s father; silk scarves from the Chinese Emporium; cigarettes Frankie pocketed from the purse of a dinner guest.
Most essential is the chunky black tape player our father gave us, a bundle of his tapes neatly bound together with rubber bands, small pieces of him we claim for ourselves. We hide them in a large rusty tin with the words Danish Butter Cookies half scratched off, pushed under a rusted piece of tin roofing.
When we squat, sweaty, our ankles caked with mud, our faces gritty with fern dust, sticky with spider web, we’re crouching over a fire that won’t burn because the jungle’s too wet. My father says the floor of the jungle in Vietnam is so rich with rotting vegetation that it glows at night like phosphorescence in the sea. Bright enough to adjust the settings on your camera, to scribble in your notebook. He says the jungle breathes in and out like a tiger, crouching.
˜ ˜ ˜
Frankie lays out the coloured scarves, lights the stub of a cigarette, passes it to me. I inhale, careful not to breathe too deeply. I’ll start coughing because of my asthma. The smoke makes me light-headed. I unwrap the small brown package my father’s sent, careful not to rip the stamps, and pass the tape to Frankie who takes charge of the player.
‘Hello, children.’ My father’s voice, alive, deep, crackly, spreads under the green jungle. We hear water running, the sound of a duck quacking. I think I hear my father kick the water from the tap to elicit more sound effects. ‘You remember Saigon Duck?’ It’s hard for my father to begin. Sometimes, he’ll rewind the tape several times to get the right start. Saigon Duck’s his ruse, his foil.
‘Yesterday, I went for drinks with McKenna at the Cercle Sportif,’ he says. ‘It was warm as usual, but with that heavenly river breeze Saigon gets in the evening. We were just opening a bottle of Algerian wine when there was a noisy commotion at the other end of the patio. At first we thought there might be a fight, or maybe some sort of bomb scare, but then we saw it was just the gardener trying to chase some ducks out of the swimming pool.
‘Poor man, he had a rough time of it. Each time he chased the ducks out from one end, they flew back down to the other
. They were very noisy and disgruntled. Finally they took offence and flew away, like outraged dinner guests. Later, I realized we don’t have a pond at the office and Saigon Duck was probably dying for a swim so I’ve brought her back to my room at the Continental and put her in the bathtub! It’s a very large, old-fashioned tub.’
Saigon Duck’s a magic duck, enchanted. A feathered Scheherazade spinning stories to postpone the day her head will be chopped off. In his tapes, my father translates her stories. Stories of a Nguyen princess who falls in love with a fisherman; a loyal queen rewarded in heaven; two courtesans so vain that a goddess turns them into butterflies. ‘Exquisite butterflies with shimmering deep-blue wings and tails that drip like teardrops.’ My father describes the slow, melancholy way they flap their wings. ‘Beautiful for ever but cut off from human love.’
He translates stories of Saigon Duck’s later life, digging for bugs and worms along the paddy dykes before she was brought to market. ‘She was kept quite comfortably by a well-to-do farmer in the coastal valley near Quang Ngai. A thin strip of arable land nestled between the sea and the blue mountains of the Annamite Cordillera. Green as a parrot’s wing.’ In the evening, the farmer’s daughter would herd her home along the dykes of the paddy fields, my father says. ‘Imagine them like black paper cutouts, the line of ducks, the girl with her long willow herding stick, silhouetted against the orange sun setting in the rice paddies.’ When he comes home, my father tacks the girl’s photograph up on the darkroom wall. Girl near Quang Ngai, he scribbles underneath.
Saigon Duck asks my father to describes for us the great stone Buddhas she visited as a child, carved deep in caves of the Marble Mountains, ‘near a place called Danang’.
‘There are five outcrops of rock that make up the Marble Mountains. Each one is named after a different element: water, fire, metal, earth, wood. They jut up unexpectedly, like the drip castles we sometimes make together on the beach. Twisted, hollowed by wind and rain. The Vietnamese believe they are the remnants of a giant turtle egg.
‘Saigon Duck wants me to tell you how the Buddhas are lit from above by an other-worldly green-blue, sunlight refracted as it seeps through cracks and fissures in the earth. I would like to visit them one day.’
As I listen to my father’s voice, I imagine the great Buddhas, green and blue as if they were underwater. I feel I am swimming in to see them. Butterflies whirl around me. Ducks dive from above, snatching at fish.
‘He never tells us anything,’ Frankie interrupts. She lies hunched over the tape player watching the cassette spool round, like a cat eyeing its prey. Her shoulders are brown, strong, ready to spring. Her dark hair spreads loose along the pink, orange, blue of the scarves.
‘Maybe Saigon Duck doesn’t know about the war,’ I say stupidly. ‘Maybe she doesn’t read the newspaper.’
Frankie laughs. She sits up, relights the stub of her cigarette as if she hardly cares to listen to the rest. When she breathes out, the smoke curls from her nose like a dragon.
She’s right, of course. We’ve read about the fighting along the Central Coast, about the American bombing campaigns in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin. We know about Viet Cong mortar attacks on the Danang airstrip. In our Danish Butter Cookie tin, we keep a handful of photographs we’ve lifted from the darkroom bin, slightly crumpled, discarded because they are blurry or badly exposed. One, marked Quang Ngai, shows a thirty-foot palm tree blown right out of the ground into a nearby rice paddy. In another, taken from the air, some families cook over a fire at the black entrance to an underground tunnel. The charred remains of villages make ugly, grey squares in the lush landscape.
Saigon Duck’s stories are fairy tales for children. In them we don’t grow up. We have to ferret out the stories my father doesn’t tell, fill in the relevant facts, the things we need to know, like hunter-gatherers, enemy spies. The reason he can’t visit the Buddhas is that the Viet Cong hide there. It’s from those outcrops, the jagged shell of a turtle’s egg, they rocket Danang. Night explosions shake the Marine press camp along the Han River where my father stays.
Late at night, travelling opera troupes sent from Hanoi sing anti-American ballads. Their high voices echo through the caves, lifting the spirits of the Viet Cong, filling them with ardour. Towering above, the Buddhas look down, huge, serene, indifferent.
˜ ˜ ˜
I clasp my hands around my knees. Bury my eyes, pressing them into the dark of my bones. Listen to the noises of Pok Fu Lam village drifting up: a dog barking, a radio whining, the distant throb of a jackhammer, calls of workmen. The chatter of crested bulbuls, noisy birds that flit from tree to tree. Sailing into Hong Kong, a pair of junks from China, their red-brown sails patched like the mended shirts under Ah Bing’s bed. The junks bring pigs and ducks. Sometimes they smuggle refugees who hide in their airless holds, knee-deep in bilge water, waiting to be dropped off on outlying islands. There are people who drown trying to swim across to Hong Kong, the bodies Ah Bing spoke of. Other bodies float down the Pearl River, from the fighting in Canton.
I try to imagine my father’s room in Saigon. It’s big and dark. A mosquito net is tied over the bed. There’s a map on the wall. The chunky child’s magnet he borrowed from us, and tweezers, to help pry tiny bits of shrapnel out of his shin. An instruction manual for newly issued infrared, night-vision goggles. His helmet. Otherwise, his room is fairly spartan. Except for his cameras, my father travels lightly, a single suitcase of clothes, his film, a notepad in his front pocket for keeping a record of the photos he takes, the places he’s been.
When it rains, he’ll throw open the doors to his balcony, let the rain wash the salty sweat from his face, his hands, soak his white shirt. Across the square, he’ll look down on the old French Opera House and the modern Hotel Caravelle.
I imagine my father. He’s sitting on the closed lid of the toilet seat, his back leaning against the mould-streaked wall, his legs pulled up, feet resting on the chipped porcelain of the bathtub where he watches Saigon Duck preen. The spools of the tape player wind around quietly. Through the shuttered window, the sounds of Saigon cry out: the roar of motorbikes, Hondas and Cambrettas, so loud, it’s as if they tear through the room; cyclo drivers offering ‘good price’ to wary hotel guests; the high, persistent pleas of refugee children begging for money; the scratch of palm fronds against the shutter. The feel of the heat is like here, I think, but carries different smells. The smell of the Mekong, of triple-canopy jungle, of artillery fire. My father’s quiet now. He holds the tape player on his knees. It’s hard for him to remember us sometimes. He loves Vietnam so much.
eleven
Red banners. Red flags. Little Red Books of Mao Zedong’s edicts wave in the air. Red bursts of firecrackers. Red drums. Red Guards. We see them well before the ferry docks: over at the far end of the village, where old men usually sit and play mahjong under the shade of banyan trees.
‘Sons of dogs. Whores’ children. Troublemakers,’ Ah Bing mutters. Too young to know, or care, what Mao has done to China. Her China. What can these people know of her auntie, beaten in her home? Po! Even worse for second uncle who could only turn his head. They held him back, tied his arms. Jars of rice wastefully thrown to the floor. Nightdresses, clothes all torn. Auntie’s precious necklace scattered. What did the Red Guards want with her auntie? She only had one pig, a small bit of land. She wasn’t rich like Hong Kong people. Later, second uncle was found. He had hanged himself from a tree.
‘Useless no-goods, stupid, spoiled sons of bitches in heat,’ Ah Bing swears. Playing with troubles bigger than they know.
The noise of the protest is momentarily drowned out as the ferry engines are thrown into reverse. ‘Mui Wo. Mui Wo,’ a recording blares through the loudspeaker. A shower of nutshells, pits, plastic wrapping, cigarette stubs cascades down over the railings into the white frothy sea. Sailors in blue uniforms throw heavy mooring ropes.
In China, the Red Guards smashed her temple, confiscated the property. Mao stole it, she says
. Here on Lantau Island, she and her friends have built a new temple. She likes to bring us along on her day off.
‘Fai di la. Fai di.’ Hurry. Hurry. Ah Bing herds us towards the gangway. Huffs as the upper ramp is lowered first. Why pay an extra fifty cents to sit on the top deck when it’s perfectly nice down below? ‘Topside is for gweilos and rich people,’ she says.
When it’s our turn, we surge forward, push on to the ramp even before it bangs down on the high concrete pier. Frankie and I elbow and shove. We’re as fearless at that as local children. We manoeuvre past fishermen, village women laden with bags, a man wheeling a large object covered with a plastic sheet. It’s an entire cow’s leg; the bloody hoof sticks out, attracting flies. In front of us, a shopkeeper pushes a cart with trays of tofu, white fleshy squares that wobble under a wet cloth. ‘Hou sun sin,’ very fresh, Ah Bing croons. She’d like to stop him and buy some but a group of village women push us forward, shouting high-pitched advice.
‘Aiyah. What’s all that commotion up ahead?’ they ask. ‘What are all those city people doing here?’
On our way up to the temple, Ah Bing will stop to buy some fresh fruit. ‘Good sweet mangoes, smooth and yellow,’ she says. ‘Longans, dry and crinkly like old ladies’ skin. But inside, plump and ripe like the flesh of young girls.’
‘Aiyah, much too dear,’ her sisters at the temple will protest. ‘You take them home. Give them to Katie and Frankie, ah.’ But of course they expect these gifts. Their protesting’s just a game, like the way they pretend it’s good times again back in China. Try to forget what’s happened. Families without enough rice. And later, they’ll eat the fruit, but only after they’ve left it out on plates – colourful, sweet offerings to Kuan Yin.
White Ghost Girls Page 4