The Water Beetles

by Michael Kaan

  Now here, hanging over the edge of a pot, there’s a half-dead sprig of the stuff I can’t identify. It smells like mint. I can reach over and pinch it off. Someone will see me leaning forward in the chair and come running, worried I will fall. I might as well crush the leaves, smell it, this mystery, a little thing that makes my mouth water.

  FIFTEEN

  Over the following week, I fell asleep later and later each night. During the day, when I was out walking or sitting in school, bored, I thought of all the usual things: Hong Kong, food, my old school, my mother and family. But during those sleepless nights, all I could think of was the execution.

  I don’t think I was alone. Wei-Ming talked a lot in her sleep and often woke in the night. Leuk talked, too, and I think he woke often but pretended to sleep, because his breathing sounded tense even though his eyes were closed.

  Each morning, I woke at the same moment. It was when my uncle got up to leave for the courthouse. I would start to wake when I heard him getting up and dressed, and by the time his door opened and he went to the kitchen for his breakfast, I was fully awake. He and my aunt spoke little. What I heard was the gentle clink of his spoon each time he set it down in the porridge bowl. I lay in bed and was fixated on the sound and image of the spoon: up, down, up, down, striking the edge of his bowl with gentle certainty, like a bell.

  The morning after the hangings, we stopped at the pond again to look for the turtles, but both Leuk and I thought the water smelled odd, and we decided not to stop by it anymore. Wei-Ming just stayed on the road. She said she didn’t want to be late, even though she hated school. Once in the village centre, we walked quickly through the square. There were no traces of what had taken place there.

  Yee-Lin knew something was wrong with us. She asked us what it was, but at first we wouldn’t tell her. Finally, one evening when our aunt and uncle were out visiting, Wei-Ming blurted out the whole story. We were sitting at the kitchen table, picking at our dinner, when she started to cry. When she got to the description of the platform, I grew afraid and told her to stop. But she wouldn’t listen. Then she described the hanging itself, though all she could say, over and over again, was, “And Chung-Man wouldn’t leave!”

  My dinner rose back up my throat, and I covered my mouth. I ran out the kitchen door and vomited. I leaned against the wall and took deep breaths, turning my face into the breeze. When I went back inside, Leuk had taken over and was recounting the event again, in more detail. Wei-Ming repeated that she wanted to go home.

  Yee-Lin sat silently for a while. She looked down at her plate and then uncomfortably at each of us. Finally she said we should clean up and go sit in the parlour. She lit the coals in the brazier and made tea, and then we all sat on the sofa together even though we barely fit on it. None of us spoke. I heard a low buzzing sound and a muffled voice. My aunt had left the radio on with the volume turned down. The voice, though incomprehensible, sounded agitated. Yee-Lin got up and shut the radio off. She sat back down and Wei-Ming put her head in her lap.

  Yee-Lin said, “I think we should leave.”

  Leuk and I took a few books from the school. Strictly speaking it was theft, though we had every intention of returning them someday. I felt badly only for Wei-Ming, who said everything at the school was boring and stupid; I was unable to find any books I thought she would like to keep her company.

  Yee-Lin made sure that our clothes were all clean. I think she was glad we were going, away from our aunt, who had begun to bicker with her, and from the tedium of her days. I know that she missed Sheung terribly.

  When we agreed that we should run away, the idea ought to have been shocking — disloyal, unappreciative, dangerous. But broken off from our true family, those little ceremonies of feeling fell away. I stood in the parlour doorway one evening and watched Wei-Ming read on the floor, Yee-Lin in a chair beside her. Opposite were my aunt and uncle, whom I barely knew. I envisioned them dead and shrouded, a voice intoning over their pallid forms beneath the flapping of funeral banners, and I felt nothing. And I thought to myself, I feel nothing.

  Our bags were packed. Leuk had bought a map from a bookstore and we located a village nearby called Lau Kwan. I was certain our aunt and uncle wouldn’t care. What would happen to the school fees? I assumed my uncle would keep them. It occurred to me that he might write to Sheung to say his wife was missing, and then what? It seemed I was the only one who thought of that. When Yee-Lin talked to us about leaving and what would happen next, life in Hong Kong seemed far from her thoughts. She said she knew it might be a while before she saw her husband again, and that she would rather be free than stuck with our aunt.

  It was one in the morning, March 4, 1942. After Yee-Lin checked that our aunt and uncle were sleeping, she woke Wei-Ming. We stood in the room in our socks while Yee-Lin did a final check.

  “I put our shoes outside the front door,” she whispered.

  As I passed my aunt and uncle’s bedroom, I stopped to listen. I heard snoring and the creak of bedsprings echoing against the hard floor and walls.

  We just walked away from Tai Fo. There was no immediate danger, no calamity impelling us onto the road, and we didn’t run. It was a warm spring night, no rain falling, a soft breeze blowing, the plants around us hissing a single note as though in preparation for the dawn. Our shoes sounded light on the well-packed gravel, and the bag slung across my back felt lifted up by the darkness. Our plan was to reach Kukong, the wartime capital of Guangdong province. We couldn’t tell from Leuk’s map how far it was, and we hoped there would be a train.

  The moon was very bright and almost full. The land on either side of the road was clear, with no trees encumbering the light. I held Wei-Ming’s hand as we walked behind Leuk and Yee-Lin. From time to time Yee-Lin asked Leuk how he was doing, and every time he answered, “I’m fine.”

  Since our arrival in Tai Fo, I hadn’t thought much about the Japanese, and I worried now that they might be close. But there were no planes or tanks, and the sound of boots seemed unlikely on the open road that night.

  After an hour, we were tired. There was a hint of dawn over the hills, a slight greying of the sky. I had been keeping myself awake by listening to the constant calls of insects in the woods, and as the light changed, I noticed that their music grew quieter. We found a spot under a cluster of trees and made a small camp, improvising a tent out of two sheets taken from our aunt’s linen chest. Leuk tried to set it up using sticks and some twine he had brought, but we couldn’t do it in the dark, so we just draped the sheets over a low branch. Leuk and Wei-Ming lay down to sleep while Yee-Lin and I stayed up to keep watch, though for what I didn’t know. The air was free of menace and I felt more relaxed than I had since we left Hong Kong.

  Everything I knew seemed far away. My memory of the city was flattening, as if into the pages of a photo album; it seemed a colder place, cracking under the thunder of war, where the air was stricken by smoke and disembodied cries. I didn’t miss it, if I didn’t think too much about my family. I thought of Chow and the gun he had tucked into the back of his pants those last weeks in the house, and as I sat against the tree, watching over my siblings with nothing to keep me dry, I imagined he would be proud of me. I dwelled on that thought, the memory of his voice coming to me down the river and past the menace of the village: Well done, I heard him say, you did the right thing. It gave me a little solace, and I believed that it was true.

  In the morning, we ate. Yee-Lin had filled a tin with a kind of biscuit she made by grinding toasted rice and mixing it with sugar, pork fat, and dried soybeans. They were very good. We washed our hands and faces in a stream and continued down the road. The sunlight lifted the veil of secrecy we’d moved in. Wei-Ming asked how far we were from the next village.

  Leuk pulled out the map and looked at it. “Not far,” he replied, though I don’t know how he knew that. Soon we saw an old sign that read Lau Kwan. The paint around it was faded and the posts leaned to one side. Beyond it, in the middle of a
field off the road, sat the remains of several old houses, with squatting heaps of eroded stone and brick and broken roof tiles strewn around them.

  “Is this the village?” said Leuk, looking up from the map.

  “It isn’t a village anymore,” said Yee-Lin. We looked at the ruins, and I retraced the image of the fallen houses from the outlines of the broken walls. I imagined the simple dirt roads running between them to the collapsed well at the centre of the heaps. It seemed too overgrown and forgotten to have been a real place any time recently.

  “Let’s keep going,” said Wei-Ming. “Maybe the real town is after this.”

  Leuk pointed to another road that curved around a low hill.

  We walked faster as the day brightened. A donkey cart came around the bend in the road. A crouching figure sat in the cart while a man walked beside the animal. The early morning dust hung low in the humid air, and as the cart drove near us, the soft creak of the axles groaned in time with the animal’s shuffle. An old woman crouched in the back, concealed under a broad hat against the sun, and her stooped husband walked ahead. He had a long walking stick in one hand and the other loosely held the donkey’s harness.

  We stopped and said good morning. The woman didn’t speak. The man nodded and looked at us curiously. Despite the curve in his back, he held his head and neck upright, as though to tighten his tanned, unwrinkled skin. His hair was cropped short and his white eyebrows bristled like straw.

  “Where are you going?” he said. He looked us over carefully and then addressed Yee-Lin. “Are you lost?”

  “We’re going to Lau Kwan,” said Yee-Lin. “We saw the old sign back there. Is it close?”

  Leuk stepped forward and held out his map. The old man looked at it for a moment and made a thoughtful hum.

  “We are leaving Lau Kwan,” he answered. “Why are you going there?”

  “We came from Tai Fo,” said Yee-Lin. “We want to get to Kukong eventually.”

  Leuk was still holding the map up for him. The old man reached over it slowly, his eyes fixed on my brother’s face, and touched his shoulders with the tips of his bony fingers.

  “Fold it up,” he said. He repeated the words, and Leuk put the map back in his bag.

  The old woman leaned forward and asked what was happening. I could tell from her question and the way she moved her head around that she was blind.

  “We’ll go soon,” he called back to her.

  She put her hand to her ear for a moment and shook her head in irritation.

  “We’re leaving Lau Kwan,” he repeated. “My brother is in a village just outside Tai Fo, where you came from. You should go back.”

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  He looked over Yee-Lin’s shoulder at me, then raised his hand to her face and waved it slowly in warning. “The Japanese,” he said. “Someone said they were coming. First from the north and, now that they’ve taken Hong Kong, from the south. Did you know they were there?”

  “We came from Hong Kong,” Yee-Lin said.

  “I thought so,” he said. “You sound like it. I don’t know why you want to go to Lau Kwan.”

  Yee-Lin glanced nervously at us. “We can’t go back,” she answered. “We want to go to Kukong.”

  The old man looked at her for a second. “Then avoid Lau Kwan. Take the ferry north if you can. Now, I need to hurry up.”

  We thanked him and he climbed into the cart. His wife was badgering him about the delay and I could tell she was nervous. Her husband picked up the reins and the donkey shuffled forward, no faster than a walking pace. As they pulled past us, I caught sight of the old woman’s clouded eyes. Most of their belongings were bundled up and piled at her knees, and she crouched forward and passed her hands lightly over them as though to make sure they were still there. Her bony hands ran and trembled over the packages like mice. I looked back a moment later and saw her still leaning forward in the cart.

  Though it was late morning and the sun shone, the road now felt colder. Wei-Ming took my wrist with her left hand. Her right hand was already in Yee-Lin’s.

  “Where are we going now?” she asked. “Where’s the ferry?”

  Yee-Lin told Leuk to get the map back out. He took it out of his bag and unfolded it slowly, as though the old man had cast a spell on it.

  “Where are we now?” asked Yee-Lin. She leaned over the map opposite Leuk and their index fingers ran over the creased paper until they agreed on a spot. We still knew nothing about the ferry’s route. The old man’s warning had unsettled us. We debated about the ferry but had no idea where it would take us.

  Wei-Ming pulled nervously on my hand and began to cry. “Don’t we know where we are? Are we lost? Maybe we should go home. I want to go home.” I tried to console her while Yee-Lin and Leuk started bickering about the road to the ferry. Wei-Ming stared at them fearfully and then asked me again if we were lost.

  I shouted at Yee-Lin and Leuk to stop. “Hey!” I shouted again when they didn’t listen. My sister-in-law scowled at me. “Just stop,” I said.

  She told me to be quiet and resumed arguing with Leuk, both of them pointing hopelessly at different points on the map, running their fingers up and down the river line to see where a ferry might go. Wei-Ming started to wail and Leuk took his eyes off the map long enough to tell her to be quiet.

  A noise from far off made us stop, a low droning sound that we all knew, a single plane flying low. I looked for a place to hide, and seeing the fields on one side and the sparse woods on the other, and the light colour of the gravel road against the greenery, I knew we could be seen. We looked up as the dull-grey wings soared overhead, pale against the sky but for the red symbol of the sun.

  I grabbed Wei-Ming by the hand and we headed for the trees to our right. We stood around the trunk of a large tree and looked into the canopy. I remember the fullness of its leaves that day, the silence the tree itself seemed to impose, as though the heavy wood beneath the bark could soak up every sound we made.

  Another five planes followed the first in formation. They ignored us and soared northward, towards Lau Kwan.

  We hid under the tree for several minutes after the planes had passed. I took the map from Leuk’s hand and tried to smooth the creases. I found the fork in the road towards the river. The water angled gently northwest and reached Kukong at the upper corner of the map.

  “This road can’t be far,” I said. “Look how far it is from Tai Fo. We should be there within an hour. We should do what the old man said.”

  “I don’t think we have any other choice,” Yee-Lin said.

  We picked up our bags, and Leuk strapped Wei-Ming’s things onto her back so she could hold Yee-Lin’s hand while we walked. The side road came up sooner than we thought it would, and at the corner was an old sign indicating the way to the dock and ferry.

  Walking got easier as the road sloped down towards the water. The gravel was coarser here and our shoes sang loudly over the stones. Leuk stopped and put his hand to his ear.

  “Stop making so much noise!” he said. “Listen.”

  We halted and looked at him. A rumble came from far away, not of engines or thunder but something deeper. The sound rose and fell. I couldn’t tell if it was a single wavering sound or a sequence of rumbles. The noise stopped and then resumed.

  “Bombs,” he said, and he took his hand away from his ear. “Is that what it is? It’s hard to tell. If it is, it’s far away.”

  I didn’t doubt what it was. Only minutes ago the planes had flown over us towards the town. I didn’t want Wei-Ming to worry.

  “It sounds like bombing,” Leuk repeated.

  I glared at him. Wei-Ming clung to Yee-Lin and whimpered again, and there was nothing to gain by terrifying her. I was frightened too, and Leuk’s casual tone made me want to punch him.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said loudly. “Those are trucks on the main road, that’s all. Bombs are a lot louder. Weren’t you paying attention when we heard them in Hong Kong? Come on.”
I stomped ahead and took Wei-Ming’s other hand, and the three of us kept going without Leuk. He caught up, but I ignored him still and smiled at Wei-Ming. I told her we were going on another boat ride.

  Leuk started to speak, but Yee-Lin told him to be quiet. Finally he seemed to get it.

  The road turned and we caught our first sight of the water and a large dock below. Wei-Ming’s face brightened and I felt better. Lau Kwan was a large town with lots of people, and I didn’t care about any of them.

  SIXTEEN

  No, I didn’t care about the people in Lau Kwan, a town I’d never seen before and that might at any moment be strafed by Japanese bullets. All I had to think about was myself and three members of my family, and the packs we carried, and the map, and the cookie tin, and my tarnished belt buckle.

  The road to the river was all dried mud carved by cartwheels and hooves, and our shoes scuffed over the ridges. Wei-Ming held my hand and stumbled over the ruts, so I took her backpack and carried it along with my own. She stepped carefully into the patches of sunlight that filtered through the heavy vegetation, and I played along with her until we reached the water.

  Back at Tai Fo, the docks were large and built of stone, with deep steps rising up from the water to the town. The dock here was of stained timber slung here and there with oily ropes. It leaned into the river and was the colour of earth where the river darkened the soil. It extended from the water onto a simple platform, where we put our bags down. We got out our water bottles and snacks, sat on the outer side of the dock, and took our shoes off. Wei-Ming sat between Leuk and me and nibbled a rice cookie. A small cluster of the sugary dried grains fell from her snack, and a fish came up and ate them.