To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  Old man. For that’s what I am. With my skinny arms and legs, and a belly like a stone trapped under my skin…

  Lam Fan taps me gently on the knee. “Are you listening, Robert Lam?”

  —

  “Long, long ago, in ancient China,” she says, checking to see that at last she has my ear, “there was an illustrious gentleman, known not only for his superhuman qualities—for he had fought for his emperor and had won many battles—but also for his virtues. This man, Lo Bing, had made a humble but satisfying marriage in his village, and had built his small house there: this despite the wars he had won for his mandarin, and despite his many rewards and honours. He could have lived anywhere in China, in any style he wished, but he had chosen to remain loyal to the place and station of his birth.

  “But when we meet him, the height of his glory has passed and Lo Bing has grown older. Having reached this point in his life, he has wearied of all his accomplishments. Even the loving kindness of his peasant wife and of his children no longer means much to him. He walks by himself along the seashore, watching the birds. He sits by himself on a rock and thinks, ‘Is this all there is? Is it enough to have done so much, and then to have stopped? What do I want out of life?’ As he questions himself, he feels the soft wind that blows from sea to land brush his skin like a shiver of panic.

  “One evening, although it is growing dark, he cannot bring himself to go home. He knows exactly what he would find if he did: his wife waiting with his dinner of rice and fish, his children, hungry but not touching their food without him; the earth floor of his simple house swept clean; a straw mattress to lie down on, and his wife, thin and brown from years of hard work, lying stiff as a dried-out branch beside him.

  “ ‘I am as I always have been,’ he tells himself. ‘It is the others who have changed. I have given them everything yet they treat me with indifference. I owe them nothing.’

  “He stares hard into the distance, while crows return to their rookery on a nearby island, and the moon rises like the tip of a young girl’s fingernail in the sky above him.

  “ ‘Maybe it’s not too late,’ he thinks at last. ‘They are wrong if they think I am finished. Maybe it is up to Lo Bing to help himself.’ So thinking, he falls into even deeper contemplation: it is clear that things cannot go on as they are. The story of his life must go back to its beginning: for he doesn’t like at all what he senses coming.

  “For the next two months Lo Bing spends every waking moment building a boat. He works outdoors in all weathers until it is finished. No one helps him, in fact they laugh behind his back to see the old man building a boat for nothing. But at length he slides it into the water, hoists the sails, and, trusting to the tides and all the gods he knows, he sets a course for the horizon.

  “Already he feels much better, having left his old life behind him. The wind and sunshine cheer him, rain doesn’t bother him. ‘One thing I know,’ he cries out loud, ‘I am now a new man!’

  “Oh, it was long, long ago,” says Fan. “There were no lighthouses to warn him of rocky coastlines, no radio beacons or channel markers, no engines to power him in dangerous storms. There were times, certainly, when he feared he would lose his life to his wish to adventure, and when his hands grew numb on the fragile rudder.

  “But fortune was on his side, and at last, and against all odds, he sailed smoothly into a foreign harbour. There was a crescent of beach on which to land his boat; there were grasses and wildflowers perfuming the headlands; flocks of sheep and goats stopped feeding to watch him. As did a phalanx of men carrying weapons.

  “Lo Bing stepped onto the shore with his robes gathered over his arm. He sat down to wait for the armoured men. He faced the ocean and said his prayers.

  “ ‘Welcome!’ cried the men, who had marched right up to him. ‘We have been watching for your arrival. Our priests said you would come.’ They placed a garland of flowers around his neck and made him their leader.

  “Truly it happened that way. The world did not end for Lo Bing, not as he’d feared. In fact he began to make a name for himself in this new land exactly as he had done before. Once more he led men into battle and was victorious. Once more he was given titles and riches and the rights to a kingdom. Although this time, instead of refusing, he accepted them as his due. He married again, a woman related to the king of that country, and they had several children.

  “But gradually, as time passed, he tasted the same old poison. ‘They are whispering about me,’ he said to himself. ‘My wife doesn’t think I am worthy of her. My children show me little respect. They think I am old, finished.’ Disconsolately, feeling unappreciated, he began to haunt the shoreline, looking out at the watery regions from whence he had come. Day after day he sat there until the twilight shadows lengthened.

  “But now something happens. A sail is sighted, and a ship tacks in through the harbour entrance: a ship Lo Bing doesn’t recognize. He gets to his feet and lifts his hand to his eyes. He thinks, ‘This must be what I’m waiting for. A ship that will bring me a message. Once more I shall be saved from those who do not value me enough.’

  “At first it seems that this indeed will happen. For in the ship are Lo Bing’s grown-up children and his long forgotten wife. But while he had had his new beginning, his wars and victories and second family, his second chance, they had been suffering. Without Lo Bing they had had to make their way alone. Thrown out of their village, angry, having suffered years of cold and hunger on account of his desertion, the children had sworn to find Lo Bing and to kill him.

  “ ‘My children, my dears, how I’ve missed you!’ Lo Bing greeted them, holding out his arms once they’d told him who they were. But even as he moved to embrace them, the knives were out. In short order Lo Bing’s castoff wife stood with her foot on his neck as he lay on the sand, and as one by one his children stabbed him.

  “They burned his bones on the beach and thanked the gods for their intervention. For it was only by chance that they had been able to find him.”

  “And so,” concludes Lam Fan as twilight spreads from island to island in Clayoquot Sound, “it is a story with a happy ending.”

  I moisten my lips to speak. My voice comes out in a croak. “But not for Lo Bing,” I say to my stepmother.

  “No,” she replies thoughtfully, “not a happy ending for him.”

  —

  Someone is camping on the little island near us. A fire has sprung up on the shoreline. Perhaps it is the Indian boy I had seen an hour or so earlier manoeuvring a herring skiff against the current. Having engine trouble.

  My face feels cold. My skin is rubbery and coated with a fine white powder as I climb out of the pool. My feet are dead weights at the end of my legs, and I have to use my arms to pull myself up the face of the ravine.

  “That was a terrible story, Fan,” I say once I’ve put on my clothes and have had a few minutes to rest.

  My stepmother, standing like a sentinel at the top of the cliff, silks puffing out around her like wings in the freshening wind, turns and says, “It is what happens to you if you refuse to change.”

  “Yes,” I say. “You grow old and die.”

  “Yes,” she agrees.

  “And what if you do change, Fan? What happens then?”

  She shrugs, but I can tell from the tilt of her head in the dark that she is smiling as she says, “You grow old, Robert Lam…

  “And die,” I finish for her. “Do you think that’s all?”

  “I don’t know,” she says thoughtfully. “Let me think about it.” We stand together. The two of us. Lam Fan, a ghost, and Robert Lam, washed clean by a west-coast hot spring. While the wind plays music on our shivering bones, and the sun sinks into the ocean. The fire on the shore only fifty yards distant suddenly goes out.

  “How are you feeling?” asks my stepmother.

  “Exhausted. Empty. But I’m not in pain.”

  “Back to the Rose, then?”

  “Back to the Rose,” I say. Wonderin
g how we’ll find our way in the dark, but not much caring.

  My mother woke up at night in Oung Moi Toy’s old bed in the lepers’ house on D’Arcy Island. (For there was nowhere else to put her.) She had been washed and dressed in an old pair of long johns. Her hair had been brushed and braided. A fire burned in the stove, and the bed was heaped with blankets. She moved, and felt the pain begin, but she didn’t know why, for she wasn’t fully awake yet, still sorting through the puzzle of those last conscious moments.

  Before she could solve it and give intelligible shape to the frightening sensations that ran through her body, before the full horror of what had been done took form in her mind, a friend stepped into the lamplight.

  A friend who had been watching over her, who, ignoring his own wounds and bloodstains, had come to look after her. Who brought her hot soup and tea he’d prepared himself. Who made her sit up and open her mouth. So that before she could think what to say, or begin to ask questions or weep, she was swallowing, spoonful by spoonful, the nourishment she needed to recover.

  This friend was Ng Chung, who along with Sim Lee had saved her life. And he, surprising himself by the sureness with which he made decisions and knew what to do, as he fed her began to speak. Not about what they’d just been through—for that was all too evident, and would not bear discussion, at least not yet—particularly as when he and Sim Lee had returned to bury Moi Toy’s body they hadn’t been able to find it—but about himself. He wanted to tell her a story to add to the one she was telling herself. So that as she remembered Oung Moi Toy and the rape, she’d not be alone with it. So that if there was suffering, it was not only she who had suffered, but those in the story as well; it was all mankind. For there is comfort in that. And so he told her his story, the only one he knew by heart, the story of his life.

  —

  Cooking smells, mud smells, excrement; the River Pei-ho curving northwest towards Peking; a stone bridge arched over the river, and houses built across it; people gazing down from their wooden balconies at a bamboo raft drifting by with waterfowl strung up on its decks, the birds upside down, like arrows. These were some of Ng Chung’s earliest memories of the city in which he was born, a city of a hundred thousand people, Tientsin.

  Ng Chung, aged six, in the year following that in which a Hong Kong baker, Lam Fan’s father, had attempted to change the course of history with arsenic, paddled his feet in the waters of the Pei-ho, waters in which people were washing their clothes and bathing, and in which foreign ships, British and French, were floating. For they had come to negotiate a treaty with the Chinese, and had destroyed the Taku forts at the river’s mouth. And they had spread their armies over the plains outside the city, and camped on the city’s defensive walls, and put up white tents, and pastured their horses, mules and gun carriages.

  In a temple by the river, a temple called Supreme Felicity, near where Ng Chung was wading, British officers propped shaving minors against the gods on the altars. Soon, although the child could not know this, they would be bringing more gunboats, and legalized opium, and missionaries and traders, “cutting ruthlessly and recklessly through that glancing and startled river, which until the last few weeks, no stranger keel had ever furrowed,” as one observer would put it.

  But in the meantime, a small boy watched the foreigners from the corners of his eyes, and trailed a bamboo stick through the Pei-ho River, stirring up reflections of the red-roofed temple and its arches, and the dark-green foliage of its terraced gardens.

  Then, drying his bare feet in the air, he continued on his way, foraging for fuel to take to his mother. He gathered tufts of grasses, dry cotton stalks, whatever he could find in that flat, arid countryside.

  That morning, or another very like it, it was difficult after all these years to remember exactly when it was, he had come across a man pushing a wheelbarrow to which a pig was tied. The pig squealed and cried, but its limbs, weakened by the home-brewed drink it had been fed, would not co-operate, and it lay in the barrow, helpless. The boy followed these two for more than an hour, in lanes and out, past mud and straw houses, through the market, until the man, sweating and wishing to rest, stopped at the outer rim of a circle of spectators. The boy watched the man for a minute or two as he emptied the bottle of liquor he carried into the pig and himself, then the child pushed his way in from the outside of the circle to its centre.

  There, in the middle of a ring, was a kneeling prisoner; and even as the boy poked his head round the stomach of the man in front of him, the executioner raised his axe, the axe flew down, and the prisoner’s head was cut from his body.

  This sequence—the river, the invasion of the foreigners, and the rhythmic spurt of blood blotting the dust of the public market—had all run together in Ng Chung’s memory. So that as soon as he thought the word “river,” he knew he would come to it: the jerking limbs and the staring head yards apart. This was his childhood, and some of what he wanted to tell my mother. That all parts of the sequence had equal value: the feeling of the cool water against his boyish legs; the smooth white skin and vivid uniforms of the foreign soldiers; the pig’s intimation of its fate, and its pathetic cries for help; plus the shock of the blow that severed a criminal’s neck. He wanted to tell her that the end of any memory, even such a memory as his, was not an end at all.

  For even as he had watched and begun to cry, the relatives of the executed man rushed forward with needles and thread: it was their job to join the head and body of the dead man back together, for his spirit needed help if it was to be whole in the afterworld.

  This was the way of the world, he said to her. So that when she remembered her sadness—whatever it might be—she must also remember the shade of trees, the fall of light on a wall, the poems of Nap Sing.

  They sat together in silence. And then he drew for her a further picture of his city, with its crowded streets and scenes of poverty; its sedan chairs carrying nobles and carts transporting vegetables; its street scribes and barbers and village chiropodists; its rows of caged criminals and men being strangled on tall wooden crosses.

  It was a brutal world, but not so different from the one she’d been born to that she couldn’t see the truth of it. And be glad it was not hers.

  (“Being thankful for small blessings, Fan?” I ask.

  “No,” she answers, stretching her muscles and settling down for the night as we ride at anchor in Refuge Cove, “for big ones. She does not carry the burden of sorrow that Ng Chung does.”)

  —

  Ng Chung’s family were cotton weavers. His mother and two sisters worked day and night at the loom and spinning wheel. The mother turned the spinning wheel with a pointed stick that she rolled with her foot, and walked, when she walked, with a limp, because the muscles in the leg that rolled the stick were overdeveloped. There was not much demand for the coarse cotton cloth they produced, and eventually, when their mother could no longer feed all of them, the youngest sister was sent to the missionaries’ orphanage. The older sister got work in a rattan factory where there were no windows, and where she sat on cold stone flags gathering up palm fronds and slowly going blind. The father had died years before in an accident, drowned when he had fallen from a freight barge into the Pei-ho.

  For Ng Chung there was hunger and cold in winter and never-ending hard work. In summer instead of cold there was thirst. He carried mud from canals to the cotton farmers; he helped with ploughing and planting and tending; and once the cotton flowers had ripened, he picked them and cleaned them of their seeds and husks. When he was older, he laboured on the barges of the Pei-ho as his father had.

  Time passed, as it does. Treaties were signed with foreign governments. More missionaries came, and more of the traders grew rich. The empire was crumbling, and the emperor departed on a permanent hunting trip north. Even the empress dowager had no answers. And so, as the people grew poorer and the foreigners made money, the people began to ask, each time more loudly, “Whose fault is it? What can be done? How shall we st
op it?”

  Then some children, including Ng Chung’s younger sister, died in the Christian orphanage. The nuns of St. Vincent and St. Paul continued to walk through the city in their long black habits as if nothing had happened, and the priests kept on burning the Chinese gods of their converts. Pamphlets were printed: the Christians ate dead babies, the pamphlets said; the children who had died had been tortured, and the nuns earned their livelihoods as prostitutes.

  All this the people believed. Because they could not blame the emperor or empress for the pillage of their country. Because there had to be a way to end their sufferings. There had to be a pattern to their lives.

  “What shall we do when even our children are taken from us?” the pamphlets said. “Without children there is no future. Why should we let this new god, this Christ, destroy our civilization, when he has only made his appearance since the second year of the Emperor Ai Ti of the Han dynasty? Why should we?”

  —

  What happened next was all too easy to forecast. Under a hard blue summer sky the Tientsin mob gathered. They banged on gongs and waved the swords and sticks they’d kept hidden for years in the rafters of their houses. When the priests came out of the church, they were murdered. When the nuns were found in the orphanage they were raped, their eyes gouged out, their breasts cut off, and their bodies fed to the flames that soon consumed the orphanage buildings.

  Then the crowd fell silent, and all of them, including Ng Chung, who had waved a stick and sword with the others and had cheered the deaths of the missionaries, went home to wait for things to get better.

  But what happened next? Children went on dying in the epidemic. Foreign gunboats returned to the river. The workers remained as hungry as ever. In fact all that the uprising managed to accomplish was the execution in the marketplace of eighteen Chinese citizens to satisfy the anger of the European governments.

  Heads severed from bodies, then stitched back together.

  —