Dry Milk

by Huo Yan

  Dry Milk

  Huo Yan

  Dry Milk

  Translated by Duncan M. Campbell

  Published in 2019

  from the Writing and Society Research Centre

  at Western Sydney University

  by the Giramondo Publishing Company

  PO Box 752

  Artarmon NSW 1570 Australia

  www.giramondopublishing.com

  First published in China in Shanhua 2013

  Under the title Li Yuehan

  Copyright © Huo Yan 2013

  Translation copyright © Duncan M. Campbell 2019

  Designed by Harry Williamson

  Typeset by Andrew Davies in 11.25/15 pt Garamond 3

  Printed and bound by Ligare Book Printers

  Distributed in Australia by NewSouth Books

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

  ISBN: 978-1-925336-99-3

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

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  Dry Milk

  It was thirty years to the day since John Lee had first arrived in New Zealand. He thought he might shut up shop early to mark the anniversary.

  Just as his last would-be customer was about to enter the shop, he flipped over the sign in the front window to read CLOSED. Having beaten the customer to the door by a pace or two, John Lee locked it and ducked back out of sight. Lifting a corner of the blind, he watched as the man knocked agitatedly on the door as he peered into the shop, pressing his face hard against the glass pane so that it resembled an egg stuck to a wok, distorted beyond recognition. The man stayed this way for quite some time before he wandered off, swearing loudly.

  From his hiding place, John Lee let out a laugh – a strange sound, forced out through throat and nose. He congratulated himself on having made the right decision. Those Islanders would forever wander aimlessly around his shop, only to pick up some item or another and try to bargain with him over its price. Meanwhile, their fat arses would bump over the displays of goods as they wandered down the aisles. Everything seemed strange and new to them, and whilst they never really intended to buy anything, the burnt-toffee colour of their skins would soil everything they happened to pick up.

  John Lee cast a glance at the clock hanging from the clothes rack. Half past five. He would wait another half an hour, he decided. Come six p.m., the supermarkets started putting reduced-price stickers on all their fresh produce. He was going to have a big meal tonight, in celebration.

  As if she knew what was going through his mind, the woman began to salivate, drops falling from the corner of her mouth onto the wooden table he had just acquired.

  ‘Hungry? We’ll have a feast tonight.’ John Lee wiped away the saliva with his sleeve and patted her on the shoulder, his eyes fixed all the while on the ivory-coloured face of the plastic clock. As if speaking to himself, he continued: ‘Thirty years. How quickly they’ve passed.’

  As soon as six came around, John Lee locked the door of the shop and took out the keys to his car. It was a battered old Charade, bought second-hand, its body painted a grassy green colour. The car’s doors, which had to be unlocked by hand, were marked with a silver stripe. The vehicle sat so close to the ground that anyone of normal size had to bend low to get into it; John Lee pressed down hard on the woman’s head to get her into her seat. Squashed into the car with her legs bunched up under her chin, she looked most uncomfortable.

  John Lee helped her fasten her seatbelt, making sure she was well secured. Going around to the driver’s side of the car, he got in himself, taking a quick glance in the rear-view mirror at his HI JOHN baseball cap. It was a hat he wore all day every day, taking it off only when he went to bed. His spare grey hair poked out around its edges.

  In the supermarket the shop assistants were busy changing the price labels. John Lee shopped strictly according to price, always carefully comparing the price of every item as he placed it in his shopping trolley. He noticed several Islanders ogling items in the meat aisle, and then sweeping up the trays of beefsteak on special and putting them in their shopping baskets. John Lee panicked, knowing that if he didn’t act quickly they would lay their hands on all the cut-price meat, and his celebratory banquet would disappear down their throats rather than his.

  He grabbed several packets of beefsteak and thrust them into the woman’s hands. She hugged them to her breast, grinning at the Islanders, exposing the yellow flesh between her teeth. John Lee hated it when she smiled; her rotting teeth offered proof that she never remembered to brush them. He pulled her aside, hiding her behind him, his attention soon enough captured again by his quest for food. He grabbed the items he needed, shaking the packets determinedly before putting them down and selecting another. He was only ever satisfied when he managed to buy the cheapest products on sale.

  All the cashiers had Asian faces. He picked the most Chinese-looking girl.

  ‘Hello,’ he said in Mandarin.

  The cashier smiled and replied, in English: ‘Hello.’

  Unsure whether or not she had understood him, he tried again to address her in Mandarin.

  The girl swiped the items one by one as if she hadn’t heard him, her faced fixed in a polite smile. ‘$68.90,’ she announced in perfect English.

  The amount took John Lee by surprise. It was far more than he had anticipated. In English, he asked her to double-check the price of each of the items he had placed in his trolley. Behind him, a queue had formed, but the cashier patiently helped him go through the receipt item by item, and he realised that neither of the two packets of beefsteak he had grabbed had ‘special’ stickers attached to them. Both were sirloin steaks of the finest quality.

  For a moment he stood rooted to the spot.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Could you put the two packets of meat in separate bags, and can you let me have two rubbish bags as well?’

  John Lee took as long as he could over paying, as if to slow down the speed with which the money left his pocket. He took three twenty-dollar notes from his calf-leather wallet: three waterproof notes that made no sound as they were being counted. Then, with a dull crash, he emptied out his loose change on the checkout counter. With the checkout girl, he counted the coins one by one until they reached the required amount. Some of the expectations he’d had for his banquet began to return. The amount he had paid for his groceries was enough to pay for a good meal at a Chinese restaurant. He experienced a slight surge of satisfaction as he departed the supermarket without so much as a ‘thank you’ to the cashier, having thrown a glare in the direction of the Islanders queued up behind him.

  His house was a short drive away. After going around a corner or two, John Lee parked the car halfway up the slope of the hill where their house was the only one. It was an old house, built over a hundred years earlier.

  Having parked, he opened the boot of the car and took out the three plastic bags of shopping, placing them on the golden leaves that littered the pavement. Only once he had done so did he tell the woman to get out of the car, locking the doors and yanking on the handles repeatedly to be sure they couldn’t be opened.

  The house was like a small warehouse, crammed with things he had scavenged from around the place. A health inspector had called by once, pointing out to him how easily a house such as this could catch fire. He’d paid the warning no heed, telling her that he didn’t smoke, that there were no open fireplaces in the house, and that soon enough everything he had piled up there would be taken to his shop to be sold. As he said this, he had cast the softly spoken inspector, whose name wa
s Lucy, a look that implied: ‘This is my business. Nothing to do with you.’ She stood up and straightened the pleats on her skirt. ‘In that case, Mr Lee, I’ll be going. I hope you have a good day.’

  Mumbling to himself in Mandarin, John Lee saw her out: ‘I’d be a lot happier if you lot would just pay out more in welfare benefits and bother less with finding fault with everyone else.’

  Lucy frowned, and shook his hand in farewell, before getting into her little Mercedes-Benz.

  Later on, at a Chinese community reception, he happened to encounter her again. She was speaking with the staff of the Chinese Consulate in fluent Mandarin. Looking in his direction, she raised her wine glass to him, the glass refracting the hint of a smile that remained on her face for a moment.

  John Lee’s kitchen window looked out over the seashore. Between the shore and the house lay a neglected garden in the midst of which stood, among a mass of vegetation, a wooden sign with the year carved into it. The scene gave him some sense of satisfaction, though if someone were to offer him money to renovate he would no doubt have felt better about his lot in life. The fact that the woman was an imbecile served to make his sense of grievance pointless, and so all he did was complain endlessly about the weather.

  To do justice to the sirloin, John Lee decided to try to cook a Western meal. For the past thirty years, he had stuck with Chinese cooking. The woman had no interest whatsoever in food as long as she could fill her belly. For a long time he had taken pains over the cooking, but now he had lost interest and his efforts often amounted merely to buying readymade meals from the supermarket that appealled only to Chinese workers.

  John Lee marinated the meat for a while, sprinkling it with a mix of sauces. A previous tenant had left the condiments behind when they moved out; John Lee had fished them out of the rubbish bin and lined them up in the kitchen cupboard.

  The house had three bedrooms. John Lee and the woman slept in the largest of these, with the other two let out to international students. Since the departure of his last tenant, both rooms had stood empty for six months, reducing his income by a good two thousand dollars a month. For this entire period, he had not once offered her even a smile; nobody, it seemed, was willing to live with an imbecile.

  John Lee had cut off the house’s internet connection and locked the rooms, fearing the woman would make a mess of them. She had taken to peeling the wallpaper with her fingers and throwing the pieces over herself, like confetti, an act she had learned from a television program in which a flower girl scattered petals over a bride. Since then, envious, she had been scratching at the wallpaper. Time and again, John Lee had been forced to stop her from swallowing pieces of wallpaper. He tried painting the rooms, but then he ran out of the light-green paint he had been using, and left the bedrooms as they were. The woman ignored the painted green walls completely, and then, before long, forgot her confetti obsession altogether.

  Dressed in an apron, John Lee felt himself ridiculous. Thirty years ago, he had gone to visit his relatives, one by one, slapping his passport down on the table for them to see. ‘Take a look,’ he had said. ‘I’m leaving.’ The ambition that drove him on then had by now disappeared completely, as if doused in cold water.

  He placed the marinated steak in the oven and set the dial to ‘economical roast’. He stir-fried several dishes of cheap vegetables, bought just before the grocery stalls shut up shop. John Lee would snort with contempt whenever he saw vegetables being sold at full price.

  John Lee shut the woman in the house all day watching television, never allowing her to go out of her own accord. She would tiptoe about without making a sound, always seeming as if she were about to creep up on him and try to scare him. She would squat on a stool watching historical operas on the Chinese channel, wearing a raffia cape around her shoulders that he had picked up second-hand, as if she were trying to imitate the swirling sleeves of the imperial concubines she was watching. Through the kitchen door, the continuous swish-swishing of the cape set his mind at ease.

  Thirty minutes passed before he dared to take the steak out of the oven. He never ate anything that hadn’t been thoroughly cooked; only barbarians ate food that was raw or cold. The juices that had seeped from the steak sizzled in the tinfoil. His gloved right hand slipped a bit as he took the steak out, and the oven tray splattered juice over the glove. With his left hand he quickly tried to brush it off, and in so doing grazed the tray. He pulled his bare hand back in a flash, letting out a groan at his scalded finger.

  He swore and ran the cold tap, putting his hand under the water as a translucent white blister began to rise on the finger. He sucked in a deep breath, attempting to settle himself.

  Even the slightest sense of celebration was gone. Outside the day had turned grey and there was a feeling of rain in the air. The leaves in the trees rustled in the wind and began to fall to the ground.

  ‘Its about to rain again,’ he thought. He hated the rain. This winter it had rained for more than a week nonstop and he had started to feel unwell, his body cold and dry but his face always clammy. Along with the sound of wind and rain, an overwhelming sense of loneliness had infiltrated his life.

  He opened the door into the sitting room and called out for the woman to join him, and soon the two of them sat face to face across the long thin wooden table. The furniture in the house was old and gave off a smell of mildew, but, after thirty years here, that smell brought a small sense of comfort to him.

  John Lee thought for a moment. He still hadn’t opened the bottle of red wine. He poured her a glass of juice and clinked glasses with her.

  ‘Tonight we’re celebrating. Thirty years.’

  The woman had no head for numbers. She wore a high-necked red cardigan embroidered with a white cat with eyes made from black plastic beads, its colour worn and the beads hanging loosely off her front. She cut her steak laboriously, the sauce all the while dripping onto her clothes as she ate – but she didn’t notice, and as she chewed a look of happiness spread across her face.

  He resented how easily she found pleasure. But for his own impatient desire to change the circumstances of his life, he would never have married her. Their marriage had been the basis on which he had been granted the right to migrate to New Zealand. Her parents had been underground party members who, under attack during the Cultural Revolution, had gassed themselves in their apartment. Their daughter was the only member of the family who had been saved but the carbon dioxide had left her in her current state. Once the Cultural Revolution was over, it was discovered that she had distant relatives living in New Zealand, and a change in government policy dictated that she be sent overseas. Having heard rumours of this development, John Lee – Li Yong as he was then known – took himself off to see the official in charge of her fate.

  ‘I’m willing to marry her. And look after her,’ he had told him.

  ‘You sure about this?’

  ‘Yep,’ he replied, staring at his feet as the sweat from his neck dripped onto the leather shoes he had borrowed for the occasion. He nodded slightly.

  ‘According to due process, we need to solicit the views of all those concerned,’ the official said, as he turned to look at the woman. ‘Comrade Wang Lina, are you willing to become man and wife with Comrade Li Yong?’

  Sitting on a stool in the corner, fiddling with the eyes of the cat on her brand new red cardigan, she had seemed to understand what she had been asked, for she had nodded her head vigorously.

  John Lee’s store was closed on Sundays. He had bought it, a second-hand shop filled with junk, a decade earlier. When he had first arrived in New Zealand he had tried his hand at a variety of jobs before he was finally able to become his own boss.

  The shop was a small one, piled high with so many things that in order to pass down the aisle one had to turn sideways. John Lee would sit the woman at the counter. Whenever anyone turned up in the shop, she uttered a strange noise. New customers would be taken aback by the sound, but over time, they got used t
o it and would always buy something before they left. John Lee discovered that human kindness could be turned to commercial advantage. He placed a glass jar on the counter beside her and made up a sign that read: ‘HELP THE MENTALLY DISABLED: PLEASE GIVE GENEROUSLY.’ Taking out two crumpled ten-dollar notes from his pocket, he placed these in the jar, along with some coins. At the end of every day he would count the money in the jar, sometimes finding that as much as twenty dollars had been donated. At such times he would give the woman a peck on the cheek, as if to reward her, his dry lips brushing her withered skin.

  As a result of a nightmare he had once had, John Lee made a point of driving past his shop every day of the week. In the dream, his shop had been sealed up with strips of paper written on in black ink. A crowd had gathered in front of the store and, when he pushed his way through the crowd and put his face hard up against the glass, the interior was in blackened chaos, as though a fire had passed through. He smashed the window with his fist and cut his arm, but in his dream he felt no pain. He shouted: ‘I need to get in, I’m the owner of this shop.’ All of a sudden, several powerfully built Islanders took him by the shoulders, shouting at him as they did so: ‘We’ll soon be in charge of the shop.’ John Lee swore at them in Mandarin in the most obscene terms, but they seemed unmoved and shoved him out of the crowd. The Westerners standing around laughed, their faces exhibiting the uncaring expressions that had become so familiar to him.

  His eyes had opened suddenly and he found the woman was lying on top of him, her face pressed close to his, her breath stale. The details of the nightmare flashed through his mind.

  He rushed to the garage and started up his car. When he arrived at the shop, he discovered everything was safe and sound. It was a weekend and there weren’t many people around. The sun shone brightly off the sign – SEA DRAGON ANTIQUE SHOP – blinding him for a moment through his tears.