Certainty

by Madeleine Thien

  She was twelve years old the day, the moment, the city became altered for her. When she herself suddenly became clear.

  The evening of the accident, her father had the radio on. From where she stood, sweeping the entrance to the restaurant, she heard the first chiming notes, a clang of cymbals. Inside the restaurant, an elderly man, his voice scratchy with age, began to sing. The diners clapped, calling encouragement, joining their voices with his.

  It was twilight. She stood outside listening, the broom in her hand. A crowd of people had gathered on the sidewalk, looking up at the apartment building across the street. When she craned her neck back and lifted her eyes, she saw a boy pacing back and forth on the flat roof. A flash of colour slid across the sky, a kite high above him. The wind picked it up and twisted it round, a dragon with a long and flickering tail, spiralling.

  She saw the edge of the roof, the boy walking without seeing it. Her throat caught.

  It happened in the space of a second. The boy, head tilted up, watched the progress of his kite. He stepped backwards into air. Someone beside her screamed, and then she heard only silence. For a moment as he fell, his body unfurled, hands darting out, legs kicking away.

  The crowd surged forward, and she began to run, reaching her arms out as if she could catch him. A few steps away, in front of her, the boy hit the sidewalk.

  Voices cried out, a screaming that rose in volume, the sound travelling over her. The side of his head was badly crushed, his legs twisted grotesquely beneath him. The boy’s eyes were open, but she did not think he could see. People moved towards him, stopping when they saw blood staining the ground.

  Seconds passed. Around her, nobody moved.

  The air was thick. She had to push against it, fighting the sickness that rose in her chest. She forced herself to go and kneel beside him. Gently, she placed one hand on his forehead, and then carefully she took his hand.

  Behind her, someone asked, “Is he still breathing?”

  Clara nodded but she didn’t look up. “Call an ambulance.”

  Footsteps hurried away. She heard a girl sobbing, calling for her parents, but nobody answered. The parents were not there, someone said, they had gone this morning to Hong Kong Island. At the sound of the girl’s voice, something changed in the boy’s expression, and Clara knew that he was looking at her, seeing her face. He was younger than she, perhaps ten years old. She held his hand tighter. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. His hair was matted and glistening, the blood still running out. She told him that this was only the beginning of a long walk, an important journey. He blinked up at her, seeming to understand, seeming to trust her. She said that she would stay with him for as long as she could.

  The noise of the siren came to her then, a sound enveloping her like heat. The medics, a blur of white, surged forward. She saw them remove the boy’s hand from hers, and then someone placed their hands on her shoulders, pulling her gradually away.

  When the ambulance had disappeared, she found herself alone, the bystanders gaping at the pool of blood, her stained clothes. She saw her father, the panicked expression on his face, as he made his way to where she stood. She began to walk in the direction that the ambulance had gone, but her father reached out, caught her hand, held her still.

  Two nights later, he sat with her in a corner of the restaurant. He told her that the boy, in the presence of his parents and his sister, had died a few hours ago.

  She nodded but said nothing.

  “What are you thinking, Ching Yun?”

  Around them, chairs scraped, voices rose and fell. “We all stood and watched it happen,” she said, at last. “If I had thought to call out to him, I could have stopped it. If I had only tried to reach him.”

  He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. Then he said that what she believed was false. The boy had been too far up, he had been lost in a world of his own.

  She shook her head and pushed her chair back, standing up. Her father let her go. She went outside into the cool evening air. On the sidewalk, she smelled tobacco smoke and looked up to see the mechanics next door sitting on crates, cigarettes pinched between their lips. Fluorescent signs arced over the street, glowing bridges of colour. From the dwellings above, raucous laughter tumbled down. She heard the clatter of mahjong tiles, a chorus of radios.

  She kept walking, across the street, up the stairs of the apartment building, until, finally, she reached the rooftop. This morning, she had learned from the boy’s sister that this had been his favourite place. He always wanted to be alone, his sister said, flying his kites, and when he was older, he wanted to find work on the merchant ships, to travel from port to port, seeing the world.

  Below, the ground was neon, an electric river. In the distance, Kowloon Harbour was a series of tiny lights surrounded by a flood of dark, a breath away from Hong Kong Island. In her mind, she could fill in the emptiness, temples clouded by the smoke of burning joss sticks, streets reaching up like ladders, composed entirely of stone steps. At the summit, she imagined children setting their kites aloft.

  Farther away were countries she had never set foot in, but which filtered through her imagination. Britain and China, India and America. For the first time in her life, she wanted to be anywhere but where she stood. She wanted to come to all things with the clarity in which she had seen the boy, and in which she had been seen by him.

  When Clara was nineteen years old, her father took her aside to that same table. He set an envelope in front of her, the letter that she had been waiting for, an answer from the University of Melbourne. Her hands shook as she read the lines, then handed the sheet of paper back to him. Her father leapt to his feet, shouting the news to everyone in the restaurant. The cooks came out from behind the glass, her mother and sisters rushed to embrace her.

  On that day, she gave herself an English name, as many young women were choosing to do, on their departure from Hong Kong. Leung Ching Yun, Clearest Spring, the name of her childhood slipped away from her, into the past. She wrote her new name out in the letter she sent to the University of Melbourne. Clara Leung.

  As a young woman, when describing Matthew to friends, she would often speak of fate, of how she and Matthew had crossed paths on the narrow, snow-covered walkways of the university, of their chance meetings as they hurried from one class to another. They had the same group of friends, expatriate Asians in Melbourne, from as far away as Malaya, North Borneo, Thailand and Hong Kong.

  She and Matthew had stood out from the group – the men mostly enrolled in science programs, the women taking classes at the secretarial college. She studied literature, hoping one day to be a schoolteacher. Matthew had started a degree in civil engineering, but a year shy of completion, he had given in to his longing and transferred to the history department.

  She can still see him as he was then, a young man of twenty-three, his hair carefully combed, his expression serious. The first time Matthew came to the boarding house where she lived, he carried a bouquet of flowers in each hand. I couldn’t decide, he had told her, his eyes pensive. I couldn’t choose. He was wearing his usual clothes, slacks, a white shirt and a sports jacket. They spent the day in the kitchen, trying to recreate the dishes of their childhoods: laksas, dumplings, fragrant breads. Eleanor Henley, Clara’s landlady, was in charge of the turntable. She played Elvis and Slim Dusty, “A Pub with No Beer.” Eleanor watching Clara and Matthew with a knowing, motherly smile.

  Standing over the stove, he asked about her family, about Kowloon. Clara described the restaurant, the crowded rooms where she and her sisters had amused themselves, dressing up in their parents’ finery. Each week, her mother would light sticks of incense and pour wine into tiny porcelain cups. She held whispered conversations with the ancestors, urging them to drink freely, to live well.

  From the time of her adolescence, she told Matthew, she had known she would leave Hong Kong, she would go into the world beyond. Too many books, her mother had said, chiding her, too many idle dreams. And y
et her parents had not tried to dissuade her.

  At one point, when Eleanor turned her back, he whispered in her ear. Would she follow him anywhere, to Malaya, to Britain, to Canada? He looked at her as if afraid she might vanish from the room, vanish into thin air.

  “Just ask,” she said, teasing. “Ask and you’ll know.”

  The night she saw her first snowfall, they were sitting together in a restaurant, winter coats buttoned up against the chill. She and Matthew watched the twirl of snowflakes through the plate glass windows, sparks of white carried sideways by the wind. He began to tell Clara about his father. During the war, he said, his father had worked for the Japanese occupation forces, and in September of 1945 he had been murdered by the men he worked with. Hidden in the trees, he had seen his father’s death, watched as the body was thrown inside a truck, and the truck driven away. He spoke quickly, as if fearing the words themselves could cut him, as if he were hurrying along a narrow ledge.

  The blurred lights of the passing cars slipped across their table. “And afterwards,” she said, softly. “How did you go on?”

  “We left Sandakan, my mother and I. We took the steamer to Tawau, in the south. It was sudden. There was no time even to find his body, to bury it properly. Later on, in Tawau, my mother remarried. Her new husband had children of his own. She went on.” There was fatigue in his voice, but no anger.

  “Sandakan was all that I had known. Everything I loved was there. The year I turned eighteen, I went back by myself. But people remembered my father. They knew what he had done during the war. They remembered things I hadn’t known at the time. I came to see that there was no place for me there, that what I wanted had disappeared long ago.”

  His words trailed off, and he looked up at her, his eyes blank, as if he had lost his place. There was a cup of coffee on the table in front of him and he reached for it, holding it in his hands.

  “So you left Sandakan,” she said, wanting to help him, to prod him forward. “And you came here.”

  In his eyes, she saw uncertainty, and then a decision slowly taking shape. She waited, saying nothing.

  “There was someone I had known there from that earlier time. A girl, Ani. Her parents had died during the war, but she still lived there, in Sandakan. We saw each other again.”

  His voice changed when he spoke her name, a detachment that Clara heard as something more. For a time, he said, he had believed he would remain there, with her. But this was not to be. Instead, he left, coming here, to Melbourne. “That was five years ago.” His voice was distant, as if a lifetime lay between the heartbreak he had experienced and the man he was now. “After a while, I wrote to her, but there was no response. It was as if she had disappeared.” Finally, from his uncle in Sandakan, he learned that she was living in Jakarta. She had a child now.

  His hands lay on the table, and he pressed them together, as if to contain some other question, to hold his memories still.

  “There are things in my life that I hoped would turn out differently. Things that I thought I was capable of changing. But isn’t it this way for everyone?” He met her eyes. “The war was a rift, a scar. Going back only opened up the memory, but there was no solace. I only saw the terrible waste of it, the things I couldn’t change.” He said that when they graduated the following spring, he would not return to North Borneo. Australia was closed to Asian immigrants, but he had decided to apply to Canada. After graduation, would she marry him? Would she go with him to Canada?

  She was twenty-one years old, and in her mind the choice was clear; she must commit herself, or pass by this opening forever. “Yes,” she said, believing herself strong enough, in love enough, to ground him and keep him safe. Around them, the restaurant dimmed and flickered, the passing cars, the snow. His childhood in Sandakan twisted like a wire in his body, but when she took his hand, it was a gesture that held a promise. I will take a share of your grief. If you trust me, I will carry it within my own heart.

  In the cemetery, the leaves shimmer in the noon heat. On the far side of the grounds, an interment is taking place. A gathering of people, a gathering of flowers. A bulldozer sits a few metres away, waiting to compact the earth.

  When she arrives at the marker, Ansel is there before her. He is leaning against the stone, his hands in his pockets. He talks to Gail, to himself. This conversation that never ceases.

  She shows him the book she has brought with her, Journey to the West, the pages yellowed and brittle. For a little while, they reminisce about childhood belongings, and as they talk he turns the pages, studying the rows of Chinese characters. “It’s a puzzle,” he says. “Like standing on the lawn in front of someone’s house and wondering what it’s like inside.”

  She is reminded of their first conversation after Gail died, when he came to her, distraught, saying that Gail had telephoned him, that he should have gone to her in Prince George. She thought then, as she does now, that the deepest pain comes from knowing that you are powerless, incapable of protecting the ones you love. A sudden death leaves so few answers. She and Matthew and Ansel are clutching at air, they are suspended in time. Her daughter was in the midst of life, she had so much more to ask, to say. Clara thinks of Ansel as a son. One day, he will meet someone else, he will fall in love and marry, it is inevitable. And what of her daughter? Gail will fade into the past, a memory, a ghost in his mind. There is no other way. One cannot live in the past.

  He begins to walk among the headstones, stepping into a garden planted nearby, giving her some time alone.

  From the bag she has brought with her, Clara takes out a small stack of paper squares, each one decorated at the centre with a piece of gold foil. These joss sheets are part of an old Chinese ritual, one her parents practised, and their parents before them. When she was a child, she would watch the women gathered together, their hands deftly rolling each sheet into a cylinder, puffing it out slightly with a breath of air, then tucking the ends together. These paper objects, shaped like small boats, represent pieces of gold and silver, precious ingots once used in Old China. One or two women, the most skilled, created more complex objects, a two-dimensional dress, a house, a wristwatch, even shoes, folded to lie flat. When the women set the offerings alight, the rising smoke would carry their gifts into the afterlife, where their ancestors, penniless, would gather them up and use these riches to pay their way through the land of the dead.

  The ritual occupies her hands as she releases her mind, sets it down beside the idea of her daughter. The remembrance of her presence in the room, her heart beating quietly and in its own solitude – the physical form of the girl that she misses.

  Occasionally, Matthew accompanies her here. He tends the flowers that he planted, in defiance of cemetery regulations. Now stonecrop and aster form a border around the marker, a brush of mauve and blue. Unlike Clara, her husband finds no comfort in being here. Since Gail’s death, his whole body has begun to curve forward, his gait has slowed to a shuffle. In six months, he has aged a decade. She knows that he is still looking for some other form of consolation. All his life, he has struggled to accept what cannot be changed, to hold fast to a core truth within himself. Judgment, goodness. The thread that would bind the two, and show him the way forward.

  When they married in 1960, the wedding was lavish, a banquet thrown by her father in a fine hotel in Hong Kong. Clara’s parents gave them an antique wedding chest, made from rosewood, carved with a scene of ladies seated under cherry blossoms. Matthew’s mother had sent them a gift of money and a letter saying that she could not come, that her husband had been ill and she had to remain in Tawau to look after work in the plantation.

  At night, when everyone had gone to sleep, Clara remained awake beside the rosewood chest, running her hands along the grooves in the wood. Her feelings for Matthew seemed to her like a fever, a lightness in her body. A lifetime, she had told herself. In front of us stretches a lifetime.

  While they waited for their application to be assessed by the Canadian e
mbassy, they lived with her parents, Matthew helping her father in the restaurant while Clara worked as a teacher’s assistant in the school where she herself had once studied. Two years later, their immigration papers were finally approved. That night, they had closed the door to their bedroom, lain down beside one another. “I was afraid to get my hopes up,” he said. Weeks later, in the lounge at Kai Tek airport, her parents and sisters gathered around and embraced her. She remembers, still, the scent of their hair, their perfume. To them, Melbourne had seemed the end of the world. Canada was unimaginable.

  The morning she and Matthew arrived in Vancouver, the sky was overcast, the light diffused. Their plane descended towards the coastline, lowering through the clouds. The Pacific Ocean gave way to little islands, ribbons of land before the continent appeared before them. Clara was eight weeks pregnant and she had named her baby already – Gail, a gale wind, a strong wind – certain that she was carrying a daughter. She stared out the window, amazed at the blanket of trees, the city perched on the shelf of land.

  They found an apartment near Main Street, a tiny one-bedroom overlooking East Broadway. While they waited for their furniture to arrive by steamer from Hong Kong, they slept on a thin piece of foam. Matthew would put his ear to her stomach, listening for movements of their child. He touched her stomach as if it were a precious glass, fragile and mysterious.

  At first, the change in their lives, the adventure, carried them through the months. They used all their savings for the down payment on a home, a two-storey on Keefer Street. She felt as if they were adding details to a picture, bringing home a chesterfield one day, a second-hand coffee table the next. They measured the windows for curtains, which she sewed and embroidered by hand. At the second-hand shops downtown, she bought books and lined the shelves with them, adding them to the ones they had brought with them from Melbourne and Hong Kong.