˜ ˜ ˜
Ah Bing waited for us near the ferry pier. She didn’t go ahead to the temple. The policeman who found us said he knew who we were because Ah Bing had reported us missing. She’d run up the pier, accosted the entire police force in riot gear. What would she tell the missee if she lost the children? There would be plenty of trouble if we were hurt. And now there’d been a bomb!
‘Nidi neige gwaimui?’ Are these your white ghost children? the police officer asked. I was startled by how small and frightened Ah Bing looked sitting by the side of the pier. She tried to look after us.
‘Aiyah! Bad girls, naughty girls!’ Ah Bing jumped up when she saw us, grinning a mouth of gold teeth. She slapped the police officer familiarly on the arm. ‘Gei hou panyau.’ Very good friend.
The officer didn’t know what to do. We’re only children. We were also the only gwailos, whites, except for a group of hippies wearing leather sandals, long skirts and beads, who waited at the pier. And a single British officer, a few yards away, who was barking questions at the handcuffed Communist leader. The Communist was still wearing his dark suit. Two junior officers held him roughly by either arm. One interpreted. The other kicked the back of his knees, making him fall forward.
˜ ˜ ˜
The fruit stall was blown up. We saw it when we walked back to the pier. There was a pool of blood on the cement path. The police boat left, speeding back to Hong Kong.
The officer who found us wanted to question us. The police had seen a white girl like me just before the bomb went off, he said. But Ah Bing intervened, arguing heatedly in Cantonese.
‘Pak tuali.’ Ridiculous, she said, placing her large body strategically between us to ward him off. Our father is a photographer for an American magazine, very rich, very important, she warned.
Hearing the fracas, the British officer glanced our way, then walked over.
‘I understand you ran away from your amah,’ he chided in a mocking tone. When he placed his thick, white hand on my shoulder, I thought he would arrest me but he only meant to reassure. To him, we were naughty children, like his own maybe. He can’t imagine us as witnesses, or criminals.
I felt my body shake. The bag was too heavy. It made a loud clang when it dropped.
‘You’re both very lucky you didn’t get hurt,’ the British officer admonished, more earnestly. ‘But I can see you’ve learned a lesson. You better go up to your amah’s temple until we’ve cleaned all this up.’ He nodded to the Chinese officer, who backed off reluctantly, then returned to his interrogation of the Communist leader. Didn’t he notice how badly Frankie smelled? Didn’t he realize what would have happened if I had taken the lychees to the ferry pier?
˜ ˜ ˜
We wring out Frankie’s clothes. The water splashes into the tub. My hands are not part of my body. I watch them shake. I feel cold. On top of her sleeping cubicle, behind a red-lacquered railing, Ah Bing keeps a thick wool sweater knitted with leftover yarn and a broken transistor radio my mother threw out. I want to wrap the sweater around me, button the big buttons, thrust my hands into its front pockets, even though the heat swathes me in sweat. I want my father to fix the radio so we can all listen, out on the patio. We could sit cross-legged on the cement, me, my father, Frankie, Ah Bing, Ah Doi, Ah Mui, Ah Kuan. Listen to the BBC World Service. It would tell us what was happening in Vietnam. Report an explosion on Lantau Island.
I wander into the Kuan Yin room and stand before the altar. In the kitchen, the amahs sputter their disapproval, their disgust with Communists, their hatred for Mao; they apportion blame. Outsiders stirring up trouble. And what about us, Ah Bing’s gwaimui children, who ran off? What blame do we get?
I light three joss sticks; three not four. Four, sei, is bad luck because pronounced differently it means death. I bow, three times, as Ah Bing has taught me; then stir the fortune sticks in their bamboo canister. Ah Sun sits in a dim corner folding paper offerings for the dead and piling them up on a square table. She’s too old, too blind and too lame to help in the kitchen. Her thick cane leans against the wall.
These women in the temple are Ah Bing’s Buddhist family, her ‘brothers’, ‘uncles’ and ‘nephews’. They look after each other in old age and will worship each other after death, tend each other’s ancestor tablets. In this way, they won’t become hungry ghosts.
‘When I die, Ah Kuan will wear pearl earrings for one year,’ Ah Bing boasts. ‘She will wear white and cry for me.’ Ah Kuan is Ah Bing’s ‘son’. They met in Singapore before the Japanese invaded, when they were young. Like Ah Bing, Ah Kuan is sturdy and practical. She has a wide, mottled face and blinking eyes like a grouper. She lives at the temple as caretaker. Ah Bing chose her son well. She didn’t choose me.
Ancestor tablets line the walls of the Kuan Yin room: small blocks of wood with black-and-white photographs that stare out. One is of a young girl. The expensive blocks have gilt lettering and carved red dragons winding up the sides. Laymen pay the nuns to keep their family’s tablets here, to say prayers for them, light offerings. Once, when I reached up to take one down, there was a large cockroach hiding behind it. Ah Doi caught it in her bare hand. The women believe part of the soul resides in these tablets after death.
I shake the sticks, ask Kuan Yin what will happen to me. Will the police come to get me? Will the pudgy man come after me, bring me more lychees? Will Kuan Yin make Frankie better? Will my father come home to look after us? Please come home.
As I shake, one of the fortune sticks forces its way up, hovers tall above the others, falls out on the altar. I read the number, written in Chinese, then go to the wall to find the corresponding fortune. It’s printed on a thin piece of cheap, pink paper with red characters that run down in four straight lines. Ah Sun taps her cane against the wall to catch my attention. I bring her my fortune and she smoothes it out on the table next to the folded money for the dead. I wonder if Ah Sun is already thinking about offerings being burned for her, about her photo on an ancestor tablet. Her hands are knotty and mottled with sunspots. She smoothes the paper with the side of bent knuckles and looks at it a long time. She looks up at me, her eyes watery and milky with cataracts. She has high cheekbones and white hair. She mumbles through toothless gums, singing, chanting. It’s a high-pitched ballad about my fortune, my life.
The ash on the joss sticks I lit piles up in neat pillars before Kuan Yin. The air is thick with smoke. Moths hang unmoving from the tapestries and the ceiling, drunk on joss. One is bright green. Another is camouflaged to look like a piece of bark. A large white moth spreads furry wings over a stick of incense wood, chewing in a drugged stupor. The amahs say the moths are spirits, that it’s something of a miracle how they come. Behind a rich red tapestry, a dark polished Kuan Yin gazes down with lidded eyes. Renouncing the world and seeing it all at once. Her eyebrows arch regally. She knows what I’ve done.
I listen to Ah Sun’s chant rise up into the smoke. As indecipherable to me as the red characters on pink paper, yet soothing somehow, comforting. I will shed my skin like a snake, like a seed from a pod, a silk moth chewing its way impatiently from its precious, spun cocoon, Ah Bing said. And when I spread my wings, I will not be gwaimui, white ghost girl, any more. I will be Red Guard, Viet Cong.
I watch the moths. I don’t want to think of the market any more. Of the pudgy man, his pasty face. I don’t want to think of the lychees, their weight, the police, the cleverness of Vietnamese girls, a boy screaming, Frankie’s words in the dark.
I want the blue dress of Kuan Yin. I want to float across the ocean on a pink lotus. My hair blows in the wind. I am far away. A bird brings me an amulet.
fifteen
In my mother’s room, the edges of the newspaper stick out under a pile of books. Heavy books about Miró, Prendergast, Chinese brush painting. If she’s hidden the paper, there is bad news she doesn’t want me to see.
My mother’s up early. It’s a water day. She’s leaning over the tub filling plastic buckets. Four hour
s of water every fourth day. Because one storm after another has drawn near the colony, only to veer off at the last minute. Typhoons Violet, Anita, Fran, Iris. I can count them on my fingers, name my mother’s plastic buckets after them – miniature pools spreading across the bathroom floor. The city left sweltering in unrelieved heat, pungent, stinking. A hundred degrees already this morning. At Pok Fu Lam Reservoir, we’ve watched the water level drop, red clay sides exposed like scars beneath banks of lush green jungle.
‘Baths tonight,’ my mother says without looking up.
I lift the books, pull the paper out. It sags in my hand with the damp. Black ink rubs off on my fingers. My mother could see the smudges if she looked.
LANTAU BOMB OUTRAGE. DASTARDLY ACT BY COMMUNISTS. Words set in bold, heavy print. Inescapable. WOMAN KILLED. BOY BADLY BURNED.
I shove the paper back under the books where my mother put it. If you hide, press the words down heavily enough, you can try to make them go away. You can pretend there is no Vietnam War. Your father is home.
My mother lifts a bucket from the tub. Water sloshes on to the green tiled floor, wetting her bare calves, soaking the ends of a pale cotton skirt she’s tucked behind her knees. Her face and neck drip with perspiration. Her muscles strain. She’s more beautiful than either Frankie or me.
Mummy, I want to whisper. I didn’t know what to do with the lychees of the pudgy man. I saw the market stall ripped apart. There was a pool of blood on the path. I try to speak, to whisper, but the words don’t come.
‘Kate, go fill the vases in the front patio,’ my mother says, still without looking at me. Filling the garden vases is our usual task, one Frankie and I enjoy because we can soak ourselves.
‘OK.’ Am I OK? My voice comes from somewhere far away, deep in the butcher stall, behind the swinging pig. Quavering, unfamiliar.
I want to tell my mother, to have her comfort me. But there’s a strained wariness in her voice that fends me off. She was cross with us for running off, scaring Ah Bing. But it tires her to punish us. That worse may have happened is not something she wants to consider. We should behave better.
On top of the art books, I run my hand along a pencil sketch of my mother’s. It’s a Chinese village set along a curved bay. On Lamma Island perhaps or Po Toi, sketched lightly as the junk chugs by. There’s a traditional row of whitewashed houses. Tiled roofs fishtail prettily in the sun. Quick lines depict the good-luck feng shui woods behind: bamboo, fan palms, lychee trees, an ancient banyan – valuable, lucky trees brought from China. This village is cheerful, clean, safe.
I think my mother doesn’t want to know about me if I’m bad. It’s why she doesn’t look. Instead, she enlists me, Kate, muimui. She needs my help. It’s my duty to help keep her world free from Red Guards in back alleys, from Viet Cong passing in the shadows, greasy buckets, snarling dogs. Also, if possible, from Frankie, Frankie’s increasing defiance, her disarray.
Frankie’s still asleep. But if I go out now, alone, fill the water vases, I’ll help maintain the balance of my mother’s world.
˜ ˜ ˜
I fill the vase with water from the garden hose. It’s a water day and my mother doesn’t ask me about the explosion at Lantau. She only asks me to fill the vase. Or maybe, it’s my fault. Maybe I turned away too quickly before she could speak. Because I’m scared she won’t be able to bear it. We need water for red cat’s tails, sweet jasmine, fleshy pink begonias. To keep the flowers alive through the week while people in squatter camps line up at public taps.
‘Maybe next time I’ll bring nice lychees for you,’ the pudgy man said.
Along the rim of the vase, the parched clay drinks in water, turning rich and dark. The spray from the hose tears at messy strands of web. A small black spider scurries to the vase’s dark mouth for safety. I watch cruelly as it’s swept down inside by the torrent. Up on the top floor, the taitais, our landlord’s mothers, boss each other heedlessly as they scrape a tin water tub across the tile veranda; their high voices wet and slurred because they haven’t put in their teeth yet – teeth they keep in mugs of water beside their beds.
The woman killed at Lantau was like the taitais. Her teeth flew out as the oilcan exploded. They landed on the path as her body crashed backward into piles of eggplants, ginger, mango, long beans. A boy screamed. The stall blew inward. There was a pool of blood. Dentists can identify dead bodies by their teeth. Sometimes the US Army sends soldiers’ teeth back to America for identification. Teeth, a dog-tag, bones, a watch, a pair of glasses, a photograph found in a dead man’s pocket in Vietnam. But they don’t know who killed him.
The boy’s face is covered with scars, raw and ridged, red like the sides of the reservoir. His face is ruined, like the deaf boy’s ears. I shut my eyes, imagine I’m walking over to his hospital bed. I see the deaf boy lying there. I run my white fingertips along his scars, wish I could heal them with the magic power of Kuan Yin. ‘No! No!’ the deaf boy cries. My fingers sting because his skin is so tender.
I’m grateful for the vase with its brown, cracked glaze, large and rounded like a woman’s body. Grateful because it smells like earth and it takes a long time to fill. I’m crying and I don’t want my mother to see me, or Frankie, and I don’t want Ah Bing to see, so I stand with my back to the house, crying and filling the water jug. Filling my mother’s body.
At the bottom of the patio wall, big black ants carry the shiny green carcass of a beetle, bite it into pieces to fit through a small crack. Thirsty dragon- and damsel-flies dart back and forth drinking water from the spray. If I stand very still, one will land on my arm, kiss me with blue iridescent wings, bulgy black eyes, lick the sweat from my skin; I can hardly feel it. Would a dragonfly hurt if my skin were burned?
˜ ˜ ˜
When Frankie wakes up she wants a bath. She already used the final bucket of water last night. Now there is more, she wants to bathe again. ‘Pak tuali,’ ridiculous, Ah Bing objects. My mother asks her to wait for the evening. That’s when we usually take turns sharing our bathwater. But Frankie insists.
I know why. It’s because she wants to wash it off, the hands of those men, the smell of raw meat, the blown-up stall. Although she doesn’t tell our mother this; she doesn’t tell her anything. When it’s evening, I refuse to bathe in the same water. I won’t touch it.
sixteen
Frankie washes off the fingers of the pudgy man, soaps her mangosteen bosoms, shampoos the smell of meat that clings to her hair.
‘He put his hands up my shirt, squeezed my tits,’ Frankie says.
The pockmarked man laughed. He held her wrists in one big hand, smothering her mouth with the other. He chuckled while the pudgy man pulled at her waist, writhed against her, grinding his black trousers hard against her thigh.
‘The fat man tried to put his hands down my shorts. He tried to touch my vulva, my pubic hair. But my belt was too tight. His fat hand got stuck.’ Frankie pauses. Snorts.
‘When he fumbled with my buckle, I stamped hard on his foot. At the same time I bit the pockmarked man. I bit so hard, my teeth went right through his skin. I tasted his blood.’ She pauses again, not as if she’s remembering the taste of blood but as if she’s imagining it. Then looks at me as if daring me to challenge her.
‘The pimply man swore. He threw me against the dead pig. Next moment, he was kneeling beside me, holding the butcher’s knife to my throat.’
I sit on an upturned bucket as she washes. If I lean back against the green-tiled wall, Frankie’s body disappears. Then I only see her head, her wet hair dripping over her shoulders, her wild eyes.
Frankie soaps her wrists, her mouth, the insides of her thighs. Yesterday she threw up in the gutter. Yet now she’s almost gloating.
‘They could have killed me, Kate. Done anything. Instead there was a loud explosion. The fat man shouted and they both ran out.’
It pleases Frankie to say she bit the pockmarked man, drew blood. It shows she’s brave, a fighter. The sordidness too pleases
her, the smell of meat. Proof that my mother’s world is somehow blinkered. The thumbprint bruise on her inner wrist, perfectly formed like an inkstain. Why doesn’t my mother see that?
At night, Frankie pulls down her pyjamas to show me where her outer thigh is turning purple-brown. It’s where the pudgy man writhed against her, she says. A war wound. War excites her. She likes pulling down her pyjamas, being seen.
seventeen
I need to tell you about my mother’s paintings. She paints watercolours of Hong Kong. Landscapes mostly: islands, hillsides, villages, flowers.
She paints the view from the veranda of our house, the sweeping feathery boughs of flame of the forest trees, the sea beyond with junks like wind-borne butterflies. Further out, the receding headlands of Lamma Island, each a paler shade of grey-blue, disappearing into the misty mirage of ancient ink and brush scrolls.
Flame of the forest from Madagascar, bauhinias from India, frangipani from Hawaii, jacarandas and eucalyptus from Australia: my mother paints the shady, flowering, sweet-smelling trees the early settlers brought with them to beautify the barren, dragon-backed hills of Hong Kong. ‘Aren’t the flame trees gorgeous?’ my father says. From our apartment, we look through them to the sea.
My mother paints the terraced rice paddies and vegetable fields in the New Territories, the fish and duck farms near the border at Lok Ma Chau. Sometimes we drive there, up to the hilltop British post, to peer across into China. We train our binoculars, hoping for a glimpse of the Man Po, Chinese Militia, or soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. We fend off hawkers selling fans, hats, slides, grasshoppers made of straw, Mao’s Red Books.
At the beginning of July, the Man Po crossed the border at Sha Tau Kok and killed five New Territories policemen. There were rumours of invasion, panicked reports that thousands of PLA troops were massing at the border. Even the cynical McKenna suggested we might leave. Mao could take the colony with a phone call, my father’s friends say. China could flood the city with refugees or strangle it by slowly cutting off its piped water supply.
White Ghost Girls Page 6