My mother ignores these threats. She’s not interested in the smart Gurkha soldiers who man the border, the shadowy figures of PLA far in the distance. Instead she paints the watery chequer-board of fields, ducks bobbing like toy boats. She paints the volcanic peaks of Sai Kung Peninsula, curving like the conical hats of Hoklo fishermen. The steep sway-backed summit of Ma On Shan, Horse Saddle Mountain, Hong Kong’s highest peak. She paints the city’s colonial buildings: St John’s, the Helena May, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, the octagonal cow barns at Dairy Farm. She paints the aqua blue of Miss Tipley’s swimming pool, the fragile sprays of St John’s lily cascading down the rocky cliff behind.
My mother’s paintings are light, pretty, airy. Quickly done. She doesn’t make a show of painting. You wouldn’t notice that she does it. Charming, Miss Tipley says, picturesque. She shies away from bright colours. Hardly uses them. She rarely paints people, although I keep a pencil sketch she drew of Ah Bing squatting. Concentric circles of rounded shoulders, rounded thighs, wide face, a round bun on the top of a round head. Ah Bing’s body, egg-shaped, solid, primal.
And I remember a fanciful painting of the long veranda at the Repulse Bay Hotel, with curved palms, dots of pink bougainvillea. The small figure at the end is my father. He’s sitting back in a rattan chair reading the newspaper, a tiny drink set on the balustrade next to his crossed feet. With only a few brush-strokes, she manages to make him look jaunty, debonair, a man of action at ease, a successful China trader maybe, the proprietor of a rubber plantation. Someone he would like to have been, in another life. A husband she would like to have maybe, one she could bring drinks to and make comfortable.
As soon as she could, my mother escaped her father’s tightly run, claustrophobic ministry to go to art school in New York. She met my father at a boat party on Long Island Sound. He was already working for a New York tabloid, regularly getting his photographs on the front page. He was lively and glamorous. They married a year later at my father’s farm in Vermont. My mother was twenty. Quietly, she added an extra wedding vow: promising herself that her own marriage would be happier and more serene than her parents’ rigid and fretful wedlock.
My mother’s paintings are nostalgic, suggestive. They conjure a mythical past, an alternative present, one my father would be happy to indulge in if it wasn’t for the war. A world she’d like us, her children, to believe in too.
Her China is a land of Karst Mountains where Taoist hermits bent over gnarly canes climb for ever to high temples swathed in mists, where soft-spoken scholars drink tea in pavilions, recite their verses in melodious Mandarin instead of the crude, guttural Cantonese of Hong Kong. It’s ethereal, ancient, the land of the Forbidden City. Not this other China gone mad, slamming its doors to the West, cutting off pigtails, sending bodies downriver.
Her Hong Kong resembles nineteenth-century China trade paintings where pith-helmeted sahibs ride on rattan chairs and silent natives pass in quaint straw hats. They are not unlike the playful sketches of George Chinnery, an Irishman, who depicted the faded charm of nearby Macau. There are no fleshy periwinkles in her paintings, no seaborne garbage. There are no cuts and scratches that sting in the saltwater. No smell of dried fish. No body floating up in the sea.
There’s nothing to show she understands us, Frankie and me, that she loves us anyway. There are no imperfections.
˜ ˜ ˜
It’s my mother’s ability to transform her surroundings that explains why we stay in Hong Kong. Why we don’t desert the colony for ‘home leave’ or ‘summer hols’ like most other expatriates, jetting off from Kai Tak on Cathay Pacific, BOAC, TWA – even the Chief of Police. And the beleaguered Governor, waylaid in Japan with the flu, leaving his number two, the Deputy Colonial Secretary, in charge.
‘Marianne, you simply can’t stay in Hong Kong with all the trouble, dear. Everyone’s leaving. Besides, it’s simply too hot,’ British wives advise my mother at cocktail parties, coddling her with the arrogance of a nation more experienced in colonial life. They underestimate my mother’s will, her ability to simply shut out the Red Guards, bombs, water shortages, invasion. Stuff them under books. Pretend they don’t exist. It’s why we aren’t sitting around my father’s farm in Vermont barbecuing hamburgers, drinking iced tea.
There’s another reason, of course. She’s afraid my father might leave. He might become so intoxicated with the war that he forgets us. There are plenty of diplomats, photographers, hacks, McKenna for instance, who’ve left their wives, fallen in love with Vietnamese women, or just with the war itself. Or with the country, green as a parrot’s wing. Husbands, fathers who don’t come home any more. Or come home in body bags.
If you consider them, the possibilities are frightening. Better turn the other way, see the world through feathery boughs, dots of pink bougainvillea, headlands that recede one into another, junk sails like tattered butterflies. It’s a means of survival. If you can manage it.
eighteen
The smell of drying fish is strong and sharp. It reaches you as you come up from the beach, before you walk into the village. Rows and rows of small fish, laid out on rattan mats in the hot sun.
An old woman peers at us from inside a darkened doorway, sitting behind a raised portal built to keep out bad spirits. Half-naked children run before us like heralds, shouting, ‘Gwailo. Gwailo.’ White ghosts. White ghosts. Scrawny chickens peck underfoot, unbothered. A mangy chow rushes at us from the shade of a banyan, teeth bared. Whiny Cantonese love songs trickle from a transistor radio. ‘Gwailo. Gwailo,’ the children cry. The dog snarls.
The village consists of two rows of whitewashed houses made of mud brick. Inside, the houses are cool and dark with no windows. They have curving green-tiled roofs. Beyond the hot courtyards spread with fish are fields of vegetables, neatly tended, reeking of human night soil. There is a central man-made pond, an ancient pump for watering. Plastic bags tied on sticks keep the birds off.
Frankie and I walk through, stepping warily as we pass the dog. Just off the path beyond the village, we dip through the broken door of a ruined church, its glass windows shattered, walls streaked green with mould. An iron cross rusts over a crumbling door. Inside it’s quiet. The roof‘s fallen in, the aisles are filled with rubble. Jasmine and honeysuckle clamber over the once ornate blue-and-white plaster altar, smelling wanton, seductive.
The children don’t follow us here. They skip off, back to the village. Perhaps they’re afraid of our gwailo God, of the stories their parents tell of a tall, gaunt priest striding forth in funereal white robes, cursing their earth gods and kitchen gods, scowling at their joss sticks. Father Simeon Volunteri, my father tells us, was a nineteenth-century Italian missionary from Milan. He built the church, his heart set on taming the Sai Kung pirates.
Abandoned places are our territory, ours for entering, taking. We’re archaeologists, hermit crabs, Viet Cong scouts, Volunteri’s followers. Saying nothing, we shuffle along the aisle, searching for some relic, some Italian talisman. An olive-wood cross. A piece of wild boarskin. The church exudes a silence, a reverence for Volunteri, his passion, as if breathing a final sigh before submitting to the more ancient rhythms of the village, the tangled vines of jungle.
How he raged when he saw the pirates, returning home with crates of opium, silver, tea, taken from European ships. When he refused to cook rice, free meals, a tactic his mission in China had used, his converts stopped coming. He stormed around their small Tin Hau Temple. I imagine he went mad. Disappeared into the jungle. How could he survive, a lone white man with his mission, his desire? Even if he learned Chinese, he would never know all its secrets.
Frankie motions for me to crouch quickly under the arched window. We’ve run ahead. We’ll hide here while the others go by, wait for my father, who’s home. ‘On R&R,’ he calls it. Peering out through a splintered shutter that hangs on a rusty hinge, through bits of gold and blue glass, we hear Trung, the Chinese wife of his colleague Lewis, explaining how the villagers
ferment the dried fish, send it to a small bottling factory in Sai Kung village. Beside her, our mother, High Auntie – a tall New Yorker nicknamed by Ah Bing – and Humphries, an English friend, listen eagerly, anxious to learn the secrets of the Sai Kung pirates subdued through the city’s appetite for fishpaste.
Frankie pushes my shoulder down. Our father, striding in front of the others, bears down on us. He’s exposed himself to enemy fire, I think, although he almost got by without us noticing. Hiding behind the broken shutter, I see without a doubt that he’s the key target. You can tell from his step, he’s commander of the troops, father of the flock. But before either of us can take aim, he stops at our window. He’s seen us. Our father, thin, gaunt, distracted, his eyes blazing, wild like Volunteri, about to expose us. What will he say?
I’ll surrender, emerge arms-up out of my foxhole, confess my sins, proclaim my everlasting devotion even without the rice bowls. I love you, Dad. Love me. Forgive me. But Frankie’s hand holds me back. It seems he hasn’t found us after all. He’s merely stopped here to tear a branch from a bush. Secretly, we watch him struggle because the branch won’t give. It only tears along wet strands of fibre without breaking.
As the others approach, my father’s determination grows awkward, almost desperate as he tugs and wrenches at the stubborn leaves. Finally, he remembers the jackknife he keeps in his pocket, tied to his belt loop with a shoelace. He extracts the blade and cuts the fleshy branch. The others bottle up behind him on the path but he doesn’t make way. Puzzled, they wait as he hacks the branch into pieces, sticks the foliage into his straw hat and smiles.
‘Michael!’ High Auntie titters. He strides past us, smiling. Safe now. Camouflaged. He’s Viet Cong.
‘If we were American soldiers, we could have killed him,’ I say.
nineteen
Why do I think of killing my father? Because he walks past us in the abandoned church and doesn’t see us. He doesn’t see how Frankie sits too close to Humphries in the darkening light. Doesn’t notice how she laughs too loud, edges over too close. How Humphries’ hand brushes the tops of her thighs as he reaches for more barbecued ribs. I watch closely. But no one’s watching me.
It’s getting dark, the last glow of sun that makes people’s faces look as if they were in firelight. Lewis, Trung, High Auntie, a contingent of the crowd that appears when my father’s home. Friends suddenly willing to take off days on end though they don’t see us the rest of the time, or maybe my mother doesn’t ask them. Always a group because my father needs an audience, bodyguards, to protect him from us, his family. It’s only when he’s away that we’re alone.
Frankie and Humphries sit up on the rail of the junk, a little outside the magic circle. The plates on their laps hide the way Humphries’ knuckles press into the flesh of her thigh. Humphries is a grown-up, twice Frankie’s age. He has tight, curly hair, a neat moustache that gives him a rakish look. An infectious laugh. Behind them, hills, some startlingly sharp, volcanic, darken into abstract shapes. Stars emerge in the still-light sky.
My father’s voice is low, excitable, fresh from the war. ‘Elizabeth’s radio station wanted background noises. We sat round at the Caravelle. Salzman did incoming. McKenna, machine gun. Simon, cicadas at night. We joined forces for the jungle: insects, frogs, bursts of gunfire. I did gibbons. There are hordes of gibbons in the Central Highlands. Salzman the whack of a Huey’s propeller blades.’ When he speaks, we lean closer, stop talking. He’s the one who’s seen it, up close, taken photographs. The war we read about in the newspaper. And we want to see it too, smell it, hear it, feel it. The bodies, the guns, the sickly red globs of burning napalm, the whack of a Huey’s blades, earth-shattering explosions of seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs. And Saigon too, the Caravelle, the Continental, Cercle Sportif, the farcical press briefings at Army headquarters – ‘five o’clock follies’ – where US colonels spin webs of numbers and acronyms. The notorious bars on Tu Do Street, pretty girls, Frankie’s and my age, the city’s throb of rot, corruption, poverty and enchantment. We want that too. Because it’s where life is right now, and death. Not up on the railing where Frankie crassly opens her legs so her skin touches Humphries.
Only my mother looks away from him, aloof, a little sad. The more stories he tells, the harder it is to reach him.
‘There was a boy I photographed at the Red Cross Amputee Centre in Saigon,’ my father says. ‘He was lying on a board cot in a sweltering tin shed reading, of all things, Catcher in the Rye.
‘I wanted to ask him how he’d been hurt and how long he’d been waiting for an artificial leg. They have to wait months and months. But before I could speak, he starts asking me about the relationship between Holden Caulfield and Phoebe. Had I read The Great Gatsby? How did I think Hemingway would have treated the fighting at Ia Drang? We must have talked for an hour. But when I developed the picture, I realized I hadn’t even written down the boy’s name, nor his age. McKenna was furious because Time wanted to use the photo, as a half-page spread.’
Frankie wants to attract Humphries, make him put his hands on her skin, up the leg of her shorts, show her she’s noticed, desirable. She wants him to unbutton her shorts, touch her where the pudgy man failed to.
‘How are the Americans going to handle Ky in the September elections?’ Humphries asks, leaning forward and removing his knuckles from Frankie’s thigh as if they had merely rested there by mistake. ‘He’s been a disaster as Prime Minister. When Buddhist monks pour out into the streets to demonstrate, it’s a real embarrassment for the US, isn’t it? Makes it look as if South Vietnam itself is in a state of civil war.’
At the bow, I hear Ah Bing cackle loudly. One of the crew chides her for her bossiness. Self-appointed expert on the ways of gwailos, she lords it over the foredeck. Delivers a stream of directions as the three men squat around the small stove, cooking ribs and fish and oily bok choi. More ginger, too much oil, she scolds them, even though she herself is a terrible cook. They’re too wasteful, they’ll burn the fish. The gwailos won’t like it if it’s overdone.
Ah Bing never eats with us when our parents are home. Her manners are coarse. She shovels food into her mouth instead of picking it up with chopsticks. She talks through mouthfuls of food. We’ll eat like her given half a chance. We’ll sidle up to older men so our bare thighs touch their thick legs. Because our father doesn’t see us. We’re invisible. Heathens. Gwaimuis, little white ghosts. Houh hoi, whores. Humphries’ legs look pale and hairy next to Frankie’s. He wears blue cotton shorts. My father’s legs are sinewy, slightly bowed, burned red-brown. His shorts are khaki, British military.
‘Come closer, Katenick,’ my father urges me gently. Perhaps he knows I want to kill him. I’m a threat, a Viet Cong plant, an unpredictable pawn like Prime Minister Ky. Only he’ll offer a truce, subdue me.
‘You won’t mind if I eat this piece of gristle, will you?’ He picks the last rib from my plate. It’s his excuse but I know better. What he really wants is my attention; he’s asking for my unquestioned devotion, my faith. He’s Volunteri. And even as I move along the bench, I forgive him, offer up my food. Because now I’m closest of all. I smell the war. The way he takes the rib from my plate without even waiting for an answer shows how close we are. I know he likes the gristly bits best. I know how he wants to be loved. I’m his daughter. It’s Frankie’s fault if she wants to rub her thighs against Humphries on the railing, not his. Not my mother’s.
As I edge closer to him, Frankie clambers noisily over the railing, her feet touching the water, splashing it. ‘There’s no moon tonight. Let’s see if there’s phosphorescence.’ Dramatically she lets her legs slip and she falls, clasping first at the rail, then at Humphries, which is her purpose really. She’s punishing him for removing his hand. Or she’s trying to distract our father from me. Look at me, Dad. I’m the one clawing Humphries. I’m the one who needs you.
Humphries smiles down at her, a big girl, not quite a girl but not a woman either, hanging f
rom his belt. Trying to pull him in on top of her. Everyone laughs, except my mother who leans forward, straightening the serving plates.
Then Humphries curtly removes Frankie’s hands and drops her into the water. What does she expect? What could he possibly do with her in front of everyone? The girl’s trouble.
‘Pig!’ Frankie splutters as she comes up for air. Her legs thrash trails of light in the water. My father chews the gristly fat of my rib.
˜ ˜ ˜
Later in the night, Frankie throws her heavy leg over my thighs and whispers hot in my ear. We’re lying on mattresses spread out over the floor of the cabin. Rattan sides are rolled up on either side to let in the sea breeze.
‘He put his hand right up near my crotch,’ Frankie breathes incredulously. ‘It’s so gross. Don’t you think so?’
I hide in the dark. Don’t say anything, hope she won’t make me. How can she act so prudish when I saw her rub her leg against him, clutch at him as she fell over the side? Doesn’t she know what will happen? Didn’t she tell me how the pudgy man tried to touch her? How the other man held a knife to her throat?
‘He probably would have touched it if I hadn’t jumped overboard.’ Jumped! Is that how she expects me to see it? Frankie, the chaste maiden, throwing herself overboard to escape the arms of a lecherous villain? Not to see how Humphries dropped her in the water, her legs and arms flailing indecorously?
I roll over, angry with my older sister for not admitting what we know. For making me see too much, then asking me to pretend it didn’t happen. I open my eyes. Suddenly I remember what I wanted to tell my father. Why I wanted to kill him. It’s my story trapped inside me. The body rising from the sea. The man with his pink tongue, his fleshy hands. The bag of lychees, too heavy. I’m scared of the pudgy man, scared of the woman who died, the burned boy. And now I want to kill my father because he surrounds himself with so many people and adventures and stories that I will never reach him, never be able to tell him what happened to Frankie and me. And life is the war. It’s not Lantau, not the butcher stall. Because much worse things happen there – in Vietnam.
White Ghost Girls Page 7