Bury What We Cannot Take: A novel

by Kirstin Chen

  The girl looked doubtfully at the bangle. “Thank you.”

  Bee Kim signaled to Mui Ah. “Help me in the sedan chair.”

  Her grandson appeared by the luggage, his damp hair plastered across his forehead. The sleeves of his lightweight blazer grazed his wrist bones, and Bee Kim’s chest tightened against the outpouring of tenderness she felt for the boy. For his sake, she would have given up ten times more.

  Seok Koon came rushing down the stairs and knelt before San San. Bee Kim willed her daughter-in-law to stay strong. Seok Koon pressed the girl’s head to her chest for a long while, and when they finally separated, San San blinked as though in a daze.

  Seok Koon managed to smile and say, “See you soon, Daughter.” Her eyes brimmed, but she did not cry.

  Ah Liam came over and wrapped an arm around San San and whispered something in her ear that brought a grin to her face. Bee Kim wanted to scoop them both up and speed down the hill. It didn’t make sense that they couldn’t take the girl with them. She stared at the wheelbarrow of luggage, wondering how it hadn’t occurred to her to at least attempt to hide her granddaughter in one of those cases. She closed her eyes and gripped her skull and waited for the madness to pass.

  Meanwhile, Seok Koon and Ah Liam boarded the second sedan chair. They were about to set off when there was a clattering of footsteps on cobblestone. A man and a woman rounded the corner and ran toward them.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Rose said breathlessly. She nodded at Bee Kim in greeting.

  Seok Koon jumped down from the sedan chair and embraced her friend.

  “We wanted to say goodbye,” Chin Kong said, mopping the perspiration from his brow with his handkerchief.

  Seok Koon shook Chin Kong’s hand and thanked him for all he’d done.

  Bee Kim scanned the windows of the first two floors of the villa for spying neighbors, but it was hard to see in the dim early-morning light. For heaven’s sake, the family was only supposed to be gone for two weeks.

  “Nonsense, it was nothing,” Rose said, wiping her eyes.

  In a low voice, Chin Kong added, “We only ask that you remember us later, when you’re in a position to offer help.”

  Bee Kim looked over in alarm. Her ears weren’t as sharp as they’d once been; she must have misheard. Chin Kong, the important doctor and Party member, was as red as they came. He had no reason to leave.

  But the stunned expression on her daughter-in-law’s face was unmistakable. “Anything you need,” Seok Koon stammered. “Anything at all.”

  “Don’t worry about San San,” Rose said, going over to the girl.

  San San let her piano teacher take her hand, and once again those crazed thoughts descended upon Bee Kim. If the girl had been an infant, she would have fed her rice liquor and bound her beneath her clothes. “All right then,” she called out. “We mustn’t miss the ferry.”

  Finally they were off.

  The tall wrought-iron gates—the finest in all of Drum Wave Islet—receded. Rose and Chin Kong waved. Cook and Mui Ah shouted, “May the heavens protect you.”

  Only San San, ghostly in her billowing nightgown, watched in silence. The knowing expression on the girl’s face slashed through Bee Kim, and she let out a moan. The front chair carrier stopped short, drawing curse words from his partner behind.

  “Madame, do you need to turn back?”

  Up ahead, the other sedan chair slowed.

  Seok Koon called, “Did you forget something, Ma?”

  Bee Kim shook her head. “Keep going. We mustn’t miss the boat.” For the rest of the way, she stared resolutely ahead.

  Down by the ferry docks her sedan chair landed with a thud. Lifting her eyes, Bee Kim saw that on this, her last morning on Drum Wave Islet, the sky was flat, colorless, dull. Somehow, over the years, without her noticing, the sky, too, had grown weary with age.

  At Xiamen harbor, they sent Ah Liam to flag two trishaws to take them and their luggage to the train station. Eight hours after boarding the train’s soft-seat car, they arrived in the village of Gongbei, whose sole distinguishing feature appeared to be a rudimentary customhouse separating the mainland from the peninsula of Macau. A stream that was more mud than water marked the border. Bee Kim searched in vain for a bridge before concluding she would have to tramp right through the yellow mud on her already aching bound feet.

  She couldn’t fret for long because a mean-looking guard with a ruddy face and a thick neck barked through a bullhorn for all of them to line up and hold out their exit permits. Two younger guards trooped down the line in opposite directions, and Bee Kim panicked as the flimsy document was seized from her. What was to prevent them from tearing her family’s permits to shreds, or dropping them in the stream, or claiming they’d never handed them over in the first place? She touched her grandson’s arm, uncertain if she was requesting assurance or attempting to assure him, and he lifted his elbow for her hand to slip through.

  Near the end of the line, one of the young guards addressed a man in a Western suit.

  “Don’t lie to me,” the boy warned the much older man.

  “It’s the truth,” the man pleaded.

  The boy held the exit permit high in the air and ripped it in half.

  Bee Kim and Ah Liam gasped in unison. She tightened her grip on his arm. A baby wailed and its mother tried desperately to hush it.

  “You can’t do that,” the man sputtered. “I have permission to leave. Get me your superior.”

  The mean-looking guard strode over, crumpled the two halves of the man’s exit permit in his large hand, and threw the paper ball onto the ground. The two young guards seized the man under his arms and half walked, half dragged him into the customhouse.

  Even as Bee Kim clung to her grandson, she dared not look at him or Seok Koon. Instead she studied the intricate embroidery on her diminutive shoes. How absurd they appeared next to Ah Liam’s sturdy, dirt-caked canvas pair, like a toy version trying to pass for the real thing. A few paces away, the baby whimpered but didn’t cry.

  After hauling away their luggage for inspection, the head guard ordered them to turn over their money. Her daughter-in-law dutifully held open her wallet, and at the sight of the thick stack of bills, Bee Kim tensed. The guard plucked out the stack and counted the bills, pausing every so often to look from Seok Koon to Ah Liam to Bee Kim. She pulled her sleeves over her fingers to hide her rings, and scanned her grandson and daughter-in-law for things that might catch the guard’s eye. Her grandson’s wrist bones peeking out of his too-small jacket looked so defenseless, so fragile. When the guard was done counting, Bee Kim feared what he would say, but all he did was hand the bills to one of the younger guards and move down the line.

  More time passed. Even leaning on her cane and on Ah Liam’s arm, Bee Kim’s thighs and calves ached desperately. Each time she shifted her weight, a searing pain shot down her shins to her feet. Finally their exit permits were returned to them, and another couple, a young man and woman, were dragged away. Ah Liam leaned in and opened his mouth, but Bee Kim warned him with her eyes to stay silent.

  The head guard raised his bullhorn to his face. “You’ve all been cleared to exit China. Collect your luggage and go.”

  Bee Kim’s exhale whooshed through the air. She hugged her grandson tightly and whispered, “Almost there.”

  Seok Koon and Ah Liam each took one of Bee Kim’s arms and helped her down the steep bank and across the stream. With every slippery step, the mud sucked at her shoes, threatening to swallow them whole. More able-bodied passengers scrambled past, kicking up dirt in all directions. At the city walls, Bee Kim fell against the smooth, dark stones to wait while her daughter-in-law and grandson fetched the luggage. Each time they passed the guards, she held her breath and prayed.

  At last they stepped through the city gates, and Bee Kim was dismayed to be greeted by another checkpoint. But this time, the Portuguese guard merely stamped their permits and waved them along to await the final leg of the journey. />
  Inside a small, clean waiting room with windows overlooking the water, Bee Kim explained to Ah Liam that all that remained was for them to be spirited into Hong Kong in the hold of a cruise ship.

  When the boy looked shocked, Bee Kim hurried to add, “Everyone does it this way.” She waved a hand at the other passengers in the room. “Even high-level cadres. You saw how difficult it was for your ma to get our exit permits? It’s ten times harder to get an entry permit for Hong Kong.”

  “What if they catch us?”

  “This isn’t China,” she said. “In Hong Kong, they want to help us, not arrest us.” She pointed to a nearby rack of colorful glossy magazines and newspapers and urged her grandson to take one. “There, the press is free to publish whatever they want.”

  Her grandson went to the rack and examined a newspaper called the Sing Tao Daily. Bee Kim turned to her daughter-in-law. “It will be good for him to see the way people live outside our China.”

  But Seok Koon didn’t respond. She stared out the window with her arms wrapped around herself.

  “It’s only a little bit longer now,” Bee Kim said gingerly, because acknowledging what was truly on her daughter-in-law’s mind would release a torrent of her own.

  Seok Koon stared into the distance. “This was a mistake. I must turn back.”

  Bee Kim loosened one of the arms folded across Seok Koon’s chest and pinned it to the armrest of her chair. “You can’t.”

  Seok Koon twisted to face Bee Kim. “They have to let me back across. There’s no rule against going the opposite way.”

  “Listen to me, Daughter-in-Law. San San’s permit will come through, and if it doesn’t, Zhai will know what to do.” Words she’d repeated to herself throughout this daylong journey.

  “All those people turned away with no explanation.”

  “That won’t happen to San San.”

  Seok Koon’s voice rose. “How can you be so sure?”

  Ah Liam glanced up from his newspaper.

  “There, there,” Bee Kim said in a soothing tone. “We made it, didn’t we? She will, too.”

  “But what if those despicable guards take her away?”

  Bee Kim threw up her hands. What did Seok Koon want from her? Of course nothing was certain. The girl might never get her exit permit. The girl might make it all the way here, only to get turned back on a technicality, or because the guard was in a bad mood. The girl could fall ill tomorrow. People died in all sorts of freak accidents. Her own sister had died that way when she was only six. Bee Kim, too, yearned to cry and lament and let loose her frustrations, but she wasn’t doing that, was she? No, she was focused on getting them to safety.

  Seok Koon’s tearful gaze bore down on Bee Kim, pleading for things she had no right to ask for and Bee Kim had no right to give.

  7

  The ship was supposed to have docked two hours ago. Ah Zhai paced the perimeter of the crowded arrival hall, chain-smoking cigarettes, stepping over sleeping vagrants, ignoring vendors hawking steamed meat buns and unshelled peanuts and sheets of dried cuttlefish on wooden skewers. In the sticky late-afternoon heat, his cream linen suit jacket felt as stifling as bandages. Above his head, a row of ceiling fans revolved so sluggishly he could see the thick layer of dust coating each blade. He removed his straw fedora and fanned his face, but there was little relief.

  A pair of young women—sisters from the looks of it—hurried through the hall hand in hand. They were fashionably dressed in fitted cheongsams, one the shade of a ripe peach, and the other, the pale green of those sugared almonds Lulu lately craved. Ah Zhai’s gaze lingered on the women, appreciating their sheer buoyancy on this oppressively hot day. Such garments had been banned in new China. He’d seen pictures in the paper of city ladies dressed like cadres in dull, shapeless uniforms, with severely bobbed hair. He hoped Seok Koon hadn’t cut her hair, and then immediately reprimanded himself for allowing so superficial a thought to enter his mind. Six years had passed since he’d last seen his mother and wife and children. Six long years during which his guilt had accumulated, drop by indiscernible drop, until one day, not long ago, he’d looked down at the rising water and discovered he was about to drown.

  Eight years earlier, when Ah Zhai first broached the topic of moving the family to Hong Kong, his father had adamantly refused. He’d put his whole life into his factories; he wasn’t going to simply hand them over to the communists. Ah Zhai could tell Seok Koon disagreed, but she would never have defied her father-in-law. So Ah Zhai didn’t push. Besides, his father had a point: it was too early to tell what the new ruling party was up to. Ah Zhai returned to Hong Kong and promptly purchased the townhouse so Lulu would have room to entertain. Two years later, the communists imposed restrictions so stringent, they essentially sealed the borders. And two years after that, his father was dead.

  Across the arrival hall, people stirred. A cruise ship approached, as shiny and imposing as one of the new harbor-view hotels. Ah Zhai hung back and let the hordes surge past, envying every wide-eyed, open-faced man and woman who was no doubt meeting a legitimate passenger and not a refugee stowed below deck.

  The ship dropped its gangplank, and the real passengers streamed out, cheerful and relaxed. Ah Zhai combed their faces for outliers, for those who looked harrowed or fatigued. His son was almost thirteen, his daughter nine. The latest photographs he had were several months old. He wondered if his son, small for his age, had grown at least as tall as his mother, if his daughter’s masculine features—narrow eyes and an angular jaw inherited, they said, from his mother’s dead sister—had softened with maturity. These children he barely knew. All these years, San San and Ah Liam’s absence had been a dull, constant ache in his side—something that went unnoticed for long stretches of time, but, when pointed out, caused pangs of worry and regret.

  A few paces away, a man hoisted a toddler high into the air, and the toddler burst into tears. A Western couple embraced so fiercely that Ah Zhai had to look away. “How old-fashioned you are,” Lulu would have said with a clattering, bell-like laugh. These past weeks, aside from a few minor—and understandable—outbursts, she’d been thoughtful and generous, helping him prepare for his family’s arrival. “Nothing will change, bunny,” he’d vowed again the night before as they clung to each other in bed.

  The stream of passengers thinned along with the crowd in the arrival hall. So many things could have gone wrong: Their permits had been stolen. They’d missed the boat, or train, or ferry. The border guards had turned them back, or worse, imprisoned them for some unknown offense. What a mistake to embark upon this foolhardy plan. Ah Zhai cursed himself for acting too late, or perhaps he’d been too hasty?

  In the years following his father’s death, the Party’s moods had grown increasingly erratic and extreme, culminating in the torture and subsequent death of Uncle Thomas, his father’s lifelong friend. This, coupled with the additional pressure the Ongs were facing, which Seok Koon hadn’t been able to elaborate upon in her letter, had strengthened Ah Zhai’s resolve to get his family across the border at any cost. But what if he’d miscalculated? What if he’d picked the wrong moment to act?

  Someone tapped his shoulder. Ah Zhai turned to find a uniformed crewman clutching the most recent photograph of himself that he’d sent his family.

  “Mr. Ong?” The crewman held up the photograph to Ah Zhai’s face.

  He followed the man to the far side of the hall, where a trio in rumpled, mud-stained clothing cowered in the corner with their luggage.

  “Ma,” Ah Zhai said, his voice breaking.

  He embraced his mother, eager to prolong the moment before he had to face his wife and son. His mother’s shoulder blades shifted against his arms; she was even frailer than he remembered. He pressed his lips to her thinning crown of hair, breathed in the musky scent of her scalp, and felt his doubts fade.

  “Take off your hat, Son,” his mother said. “Let me see your face. My, you’ve lost weight.”

  “It�
��s stress,” said Ah Zhai, running a hand through his hair. “That, and old age.”

  His wife hung back, holding on to the boy, who still only came up to her nose.

  Ah Zhai must have pictured this reunion at least a hundred times. His wife would be shy at first. She would blush and duck her head to hide her smile, as she had fourteen years earlier, when she’d spotted him waiting by the conservatory gate on a scorching afternoon, much like this one.

  But the weather was the only constant, for he could find no traces of the cheerful, soft-spoken schoolgirl in the woman standing beyond arm’s reach. Her brow was pinched, her lips strained into a smile that was almost a grimace. Her once lustrous hair hung in two heavy wings by her chin. He wanted to hold her, not from desire, but from pity.

  In the end, his hands remained by his sides. “My wife,” he said.

  “My husband.”

  “I hope the journey wasn’t too difficult.”

  “It was fine.”

  His wife told the boy to greet his father, but Ah Liam stood there with his mouth agape.

  “Don’t you remember me?” Ah Zhai asked, clapping his son on the back.

  The boy edged away from him, his eyes on his mother.

  Ah Zhai hid his dismay by asking, “And where’s the little one?”

  Ah Liam kept staring at Seok Koon. “You said he was too ill to get out of bed.”

  So they hadn’t told the boy. Ah Zhai would have done the same thing. “Where’s the little one?” he asked again, but his wife and mother were fixated on the boy.

  “Son, it was the only way for us to leave,” Seok Koon said.

  Bee Kim said, “You saw what happened during that inspection. We lied to keep you safe.”

  “Where’s my daughter?” Ah Zhai asked.

  Abruptly all three of them turned. There was a flash of terror in his wife’s eyes. “They made us leave her behind.”

  Ah Zhai raised his voice as though the problem was that she’d misheard the question. “What are you talking about? Where is she?”