by Rory Maclean
‘My parents and husband are dead. My son is in California. I have no family in China, and only a forgetful old sister in Burma.’
‘I am no older than you.’
‘But you do forget.’ May stood up, straining her back with the sudden movement, and cursed her age. The stool toppled over.
‘Be careful not to step on the luncheon tray,’ cautioned Kwan, pointing at the atlas.
‘I’m finished with this game,’ May complained, sweeping their play-acting away with a sharp gesture. Her room did not order the world within, rather it tried to exclude the chaotic disorder without. ‘It’s late and time for bed.’
‘Look, madam,’ said Kwan, resuming her role in the hope of pacifying her sister. ‘You can see the coast through your window now. We will soon be arriving in California. You will see your son. Would you please be so kind as to fasten your safety belt and extinguish all cigarettes?’
‘I cannot see my son,’ May bristled, displeased and impatient. ‘I cannot go there because I must care for you, in the memory of parents you don’t even remember.’
‘I wish that you would show me a little human-heartedness,’ sighed Kwan, her eyes downcast, her spirit subdued.
‘I am tired of you, old woman. I have had enough of this place.’
The twins were as old as the century, or at least that is what their parents had said of Kwan. May, they used to say, was as young as the century. The girls had been born in the year 1900, in the age before the aeroplane’s invention, while the dowager Empree Tz’u Hsi still occupied Beijing’s peacock throne and Mao Tse-tung wore a topknot. Their father had been a herbalist, a dispenser of cures and spices in Lashio’s clay-tiled Chinese quarter. In a paper-lined sleeping chamber his first daughter had emerged from the womb with reluctance, carrying with her the burden of past lives. Her eyes had been closed as if in reflection. It had taken two firm slaps to start her breathing. Her father had named her Kwan, which means ‘together’, because she had not entered the world alone.
The second twin, on the other hand, had begun her life as she would continue it, wailing and kicking. The child had fixed her eyes on the open window and uttered a deafening, demanding cry. ‘This one will travel far,’ the midwife had predicted. Her father had called her May, which translates as ‘beautiful’, not only because she was the prettier of the two. When spoken aloud the name also suggested ‘the very last one’, or ‘enough’: a suitable pun for the father of twins. Within the first hour of their birth May had pushed her elder sister away from the more generous nipple. For the rest of their lives she would claim the better part of all things from Kwan.
Their father and mother had been trying for over a decade to have children. He was a methodical man and had tended to their infertility with dandelion tonic and lenitives of eucalyptus. Litres of ginseng infusion had been supped in tender anticipation each evening, only to be thrown out in the morning with the night water. They had applied pepper balms and poultices of almond. In one spendthrift moment he had even prepared himself a draught of ground tiger whiskers. But the remedies, like the prayers to their ancestors, had seemed to be wasted. It was only when they had stopped worrying about conception that his wife found she was with child. He had wanted a single son, but did not admonish her for bearing him two daughters instead. In truth he suspected that his over-generous dose of gingko leaf had been to blame.
It was the necessity of the time to put children to work almost as soon as they could walk. In the storeroom there was cardamom to weigh and acacia leaves to package. Small hands were suited to removing the tiny stones from the big, aromatic sacks of cloves. Kwan enjoyed being beside her father, and began her work with him at the age of four. As they sized and sorted chillies, she listened to him tell how he had come to Lashio. She never tired of hearing the tale of his escape over the Nan Ling Mountains and across the Yunnan Plateau. He had wished to travel without baggage, but Kwan’s mother had insisted on bringing the family portraits. To him the old photographs were an unnecessary burden. He did not want his wife to strain herself and had advised leaving them behind. The young couple had argued for the first and only time, and it shamed him to admit that he had raised his voice at her. But in the end it had made no difference. She had refused to leave China without the portraits.
‘And now I’m glad of it, my daughter,’ he confessed to Kwan, pausing to look up at the four pictures, ‘because they have brought good fortune. Their presence gives me the strength to work harder, and has blessed me with you and May. It was wrong of me to want to abandon them.’
Kwan felt their forebears’ sepia gaze upon her back as she sorted and cleaned. She kept her young head bowed, only looking up from her labours when dusk had gathered around the storeroom’s front door.
For her part May managed to ensure that an unjust proportion of her work fell to her sister. She avoided preparing ginger remedies, because the syrup was bad for her skin, and never bundled fu ling mushrooms, as the spores always seemed to irritate her eyes. It wasn’t that May was lazy, but that she simply wished to be somewhere else. Every Friday morning she hurried ahead of her father down to the marketplace. While he met the herb traders from Hsipaw and Siakwan, she stared away beyond the lime groves, reaching out along the trade road towards another place. Her steps were always heavy on the return journey home. She had a restless spirit that would not be contained.
The twins had been born, as the Confucians say, into interesting times. Their century had begun in an age of waning Chinese influence. The Middle Kingdom had yielded to foreign territorial demands and lost Ili to Russia, the Ryukyu Islands to Japan and control of Korea. France had made Annam its protectorate and the Manchu Dynasty was enfeebled by rebellion. For the ordinary Hunanese peasant, life was hard and cruel. Men toiled or starved, women were sold like slaves into wedlock. The twins’ father had brought his wife out of China to escape servitude and injustice. He had settled within Lashio’s city gate, willing to integrate himself into Burmese society. But the community had excluded him, though not to the extent of exempting him from the arbitrary tax imposed on immigrants by the Assistant Township Officer. If he failed to pay tribute in this way his trading licence and residence permit might be rescinded. It was bad luck to be both Chinese and poor. The young family was forced to live apart from their neighbours. They had nothing to do with the British colonists. Yet, in spite of having left their mother country, events over the border continued to shape their lives more than decisions made in Rangoon.
Before Kwan and May reached their twelfth year, China – and two thousand years of Ch’ing monarchy – were overthrown by Sun Yat-sen’s revolution. The turbulent decades that followed were marked by famine, invasion and war. Fear and uncertainty dominated people’s lives. The twins’ aunt in Anhwei province was killed in rioting. An uncle died when the Kuomintang seized Beijing. Survival came to depend to an even greater extent on self-reliance. Their father impressed upon Kwan that money alone ensured security. To earn it she devoted herself to helping him. The same events led May to realise that, with the advent of modern modes of transportation, people were more able to travel to places which offered greater opportunities for success.
In the year that Mao lead the disastrous ‘Autumn Harvest Uprising’ the twins’ mother passed away. She lay down one evening complaining of a headache. Their father lit a burner by her bedside and ministered a smudge of moxa leaves. The remedy induced a sleep from which she never awoke. As the Communists and the Nationalist Kuomintang swept in on each other in civil war, their father too turned in on himself. In all his life he had never missed a day of work. His regulated schedule had given him a sense of control. But with the death of his wife, he no longer reserved the week’s first day for the sorting of medicinal herbs, the second and third days for pounding cardamom and preparing volatile oils. His discipline faltered and the tight structure of his hours began to unravel. Age came on him as a deep tiredness, with a sudden confusion over dates. The absurdities of his failing memo
ry both irritated and amused him.
‘Never in my life have I seen so much ku sheng,’ he raged, considering three costly packets of bitter root. ‘Who told you to buy it, first daughter?’ He himself was responsible, so he added in a softer tone, ‘Please take pity on your old father.’
He began to repeat himself, to mix poppy seeds with sweet gan cao liquorice, to prescribe hot chilli compresses instead of soothing camphor rubs to arthritic widows. He cursed his forgetfulness, growing fearful of his waning faculties. All day long he shuffled the order papers around and around his desk like mah-jong tiles or playing cards, lost in a losing game of Patience.
‘My daughter,’ he told Kwan during the sleepless nights, ‘you must remember to order the swallows under the eaves. Do not pay more than two rupees.’ Then he cried, ‘Are all the baskets becoming unwound?’
As his concentration deserted him, his conversation slipped into an irrational babble. At first Kwan assumed that he was talking sense – he had been lucid and informed before their mother’s death. She tried to make logical connections. But none existed outside his mind. ‘When did you come back?’ he would ask her, even though she had not been away. ‘I never asked for coriander.’
‘Please let him die so his pain may end,’ Kwan wished to herself.
‘Please let him die so my imprisonment can end,’ begged May aloud. The second daughter felt trapped by her father’s illness. She imagined the days of her youth slipping through her fingers like the bushels of sesame and soya, measured but unsavoured. His age seemed to deny her her youth.
Kwan held their father’s hand and felt it as cold as stone. Using his herbal textbook, she diagnosed a deficiency of qi and blood. His movements became slow and he began to have difficulty with his speech. There was a puffiness under his eyes. Camomile infusions did not relieve his headaches. The neighbourhood doctor could not cure the scarlet rash which appeared on his neck and face. One week later he was dead.
May married in the spring of the year that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists encircled the Red Army in Kiangsi province. As Mao broke through the siege and began the ch’ang cheng, or long march, she tried to extend her own horizons by taking Liu Wei, son of the railway booking agent, as her husband. Wei was a bachelor with good prospects, and with a seductive knowledge. He knew by heart the times of the Mandalay trains, the schedule of Irrawaddy ferries, even the date of the next sailing of the Canadian Pacific Empress from Hong Kong to Vancouver. The arrival time of the London mail plane and the ports of call of Japanese freighters slipped off his tongue. During their engagement May was allowed to sit with him in the booking office, which acted as a sort of travel agency for the town. It was there, while Wei consigned bales of cotton and sacks of rice to the morning train, that she first began to conjure up her fanciful journeys. She pored over his timetables and freight-rate guides, travelling in her mind from Mu-sé to Kunming, then on to Kowloon, Saigon and Colombo. Wei saw no harm in his fiancée’s imaginary travels, and it flattered him to be able to impress her with his grasp of the routes of Indian Ocean steamers and European railways. But he had no desire to travel to the exotic destinations himself. His interest in transportation was that it made good business. He was due to inherit his father’s position, and the web of land and sea routes that wrapped itself around the world comforted him with an illusion of certainties.
The morning after the wedding Wei made an offering to his ancestors’ shrine and wished for a son. May lay in their bed unclothed, planning a trip to Shanghai, dreaming of taking a honeymoon across the Pacific to America. She drew her fine black hair back from her face, exposing her slender neck, and laughed. Her heart was free. She felt herself no longer tethered to Lashio by duty and convention. She hoped that marriage would thrust her out into the unknown, but instead it tied her back to the familiar. Nine months later she gave birth to a baby boy.
The world war came and went, taking away first the British and then the Japanese, razing Mandalay and driving the Shan into their fight for independence. But the conflicts did not touch May. Over the years, whenever a stranger arrived on the station platform, waiting for a bus or train, she would appear beside him, her son on her hip, and without shame quiz him on the details of his home city. In such a manner she came to know the names of the good hotels of Tokyo and the dosshouses of Taipei. She learned to be wary of the crafty rickshaw drivers of Soochow and, without ever leaving the landlocked Shan State, became an authority on ocean-going steamship lines. Neighbours who were considering fleeing sought her advice on the comparative advantages of life in Malaya and Siam. Her knowledge grew to include an understanding of trade routes, exchange rates and tariffs. She entertained her son with elaborate adventure stories of air travel by Empire flying boat and German Zeppelin, even though the only aircraft she had ever seen had passed high over the town as a distant, silver speck. She became an authority on international travel, containing the globe with railroad schedules, though like her sister she never ventured further afield than the town gate.
Kwan did not marry; she mourned. To come to terms with her loss she tried to forget her parents, unpicking their memory and casting them out of her mind. She gave away their clothes and burnt their bedding. The few mementoes of their lives – her father’s abridged Beng Cao Gang Mu text, her mother’s tortoiseshell comb, the handful of family photographs – were consigned to a tightly lidded basket at the back of the godown. Her waking hours were filled with work alone. She coped with the vagaries of business: the disruption of the kaoliang supply due to fighting in Hunan, the plague of frogs which devastated the Szechwan tung-oil harvest. Her labour kept her distress at bay, and ensured the continuing prosperity of the family’s spice business. But because she feared the pain of remembering, because of her refusal to acknowledge the memorial that death had erected in her heart, she felt only emptiness.
The hard work took its toll. Time and profit margins smothered the spark of youth. The years of industry in the dim storehouse dulled Kwan’s clear brown eyes. A walnut virus affected her hearing. Her lustrous skin turned paper dry as if withered by the barrels of sea salt that aired in the yard. She became anxious about her dependency on smell, even though it, alone of all her senses, remained unaffected by age. She feared that if her nose failed her, unscrupulous dealers would sell her bitter tamarind and scentless saffron. She worried that her customers would desert her and that the business would fail, making a farce of her father’s devotion, leaving her with nothing. Her fears affected her sleep and, in the toss and turn of her nights, she became aware of her dreams.
One morning on the edge of dawn a sweet perfume wafted through her mind. In her dream she rose up to chase after it, running barefoot through her mother’s old lavender garden, following the fragrance towards the storehouse. The aroma inside the building was so heady that at first she did not notice she was not alone. Then Kwan saw her parents standing in the dark room, throwing up into the air the precious stocks of vanilla and roselle leaf.
‘Within,’ her father shouted, digging his hands into a basket of jasmine, ‘and without.’ He cast the white petals out of the door.
‘Within,’ said her mother, opening a container of galangal root.
‘And without,’ cried her father, tossing it away with the turmeric.
Even in her sleep Kwan knew that her parents were dead, or at least for ever apart from her. Denial had been the only way in which she could cope with the loss. Yet in her dream they stood before her, scattering spices and herbs on the hard earth floor, emptying out all that was contained.
‘Within and without,’ repeated her father as they passed through the door, a balmy trail suspended in the air behind them. Kwan called out their names. She asked them to stay with her. But they could not, or would not, hear. Her father spread the flowers and leaves to the wind. Her mother turned and waved. Her parents vanished down the lane. Kwan awoke to the sound of her own crying.
She was too distraught to go to her desk that morning. Instead she
left the storehouse locked and hurried out to find her sister. May was not at home, and Wei directed her to the station. ‘Where else would she be at this time? He sighed over his breakfast bao-sii bun.
‘What, if not the family,’ Kwan asked herself as she rushed along the Namtu Road, ‘entwines the ties of the heart? To whom does the child owe her birth?’ By the time she reached the station, she had worked herself into an agitated state.
‘I’ve seen them,’ Kwan cried out, breathless, across the rails. May stood across the platform waiting for the departure of the Mandalay No. 132 Down train. ‘I dreamed of them.’ Kwan skirted the last carriage and led May towards a bench. ‘Our parents came to me, talked to me.’ She wept again as she recounted her dream. ‘Do you understand, sister?’
‘What are you talking about?’ said May, trying to stem the flood of Kwan’s tears. The train’s departure had distracted her.
‘We owe everything to them.’
‘Within, without?’ repeated May, catching the story between the gasps of breath. ‘Those are the words you heard?’
‘Yes. They were telling me to remember that they are within us, even when we are without them.’
May shook her head. ‘It means that we should leave this place. It’s a warning.’
‘No, sister.’ Kwan had a habit of looking doubtful when she did not understand, but now there was wild certainty in her eyes. ‘We are contained by their love.’
‘They’re telling us that we are not contained,’ insisted May. ‘We have always been outside this place.’
‘I was wrong to deny their memory.’
‘Sister, you spend too much time alone.’
‘We have never honoured our parents,’ said Kwan. ‘The man and woman who gave us life’
‘Take a husband and have children. It is not too late.’
‘I have no need.’