The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  WHO I AM

  Anna De Brujn Thumboo

  2

  PARIS

  I would have preferred to spend the evening with her than my college hosts. They were enthusiastic about the venue, a basement below a wine bar (‘Colourful,’ they assured me, although it was hard to find any in the dark clubby atmosphere of the place), and I was obligated after they so generously allowed me a platform for my broadside against junk history. Fried seafood, red wine and cigar smoke made it a most unpleasant evening, and I found myself wondering where Su-Lin might have been heading off to when I was so brusquely whisked away. Surely there were more pleasant places than this in Fleet Street, places where one might find at least one woman to offer a civilising influence. Especially a woman such as her.

  I have observed that Chinese women are blessed when it comes to ageing gracefully. I seem to recall reading that they have extra subcutaneous fat, which would account for the relatively few facial lines, although not the slim waist, nor the way the hair greys so slowly and selectively, single strand by single strand. There was an unmistakable air of dignity around her, and disdaining to dye the hair did but top it off.

  Her father passed on some time in the seventies, I remember, after he had retired from the Bench. I was on an overseas sabbatical at the time and missed the funeral. I did not even hear of it until receiving a letter from Uncle Beng Woo more than a month after the event. Uncle Beng Woo was still working in the Judge’s former offices at Rajaratnam and Tan. He also said in the letter that he would now finally retire. ‘Gave up,’ is how Aunty put it, and she was proved right, as he also died just a few months later.

  I did not recognise her, but that only stands to reason when we were so young. I barely remember her at all, to tell the truth. If it had not been for the regular visits of her father I would probably have never heard much about her. My mother always asked after her. She was concerned that the events outside the courthouse after the trial would traumatise such a young girl, but according to Judge Tan, she coped with it. I remember him saying that. ‘She’s coping,’ he said whenever my mother asked, and left it at that. I remember it because I thought what she saw, and as close as she was to it (quite literally within arm’s length), would certainly be more than I could have coped with.

  It was only my second night in London and I had weeks of work ahead of me in the archives. I had intended my nights in Mrs Carter’s lodgings in Kew to be like most others during such infrequent visits, taking advantage of the archives’ online services on my laptop to follow threads hopefully unearthed in their reading rooms. There are few acquaintances I have in London, and they are professional associates more than friends, and I had planned my four weeks to a rather rigid timetable. My monograph was on the subject of the failure of the Malayan Union (1946–1948), the short-lived federation of the Malay States and Straits Settlements that the British imposed on what had been British Malaya after the war. It was a dry subject, my speciality, and I anticipated a dry month. Should the weather so oblige mattered little as I expected to be purely indoors. Now, however, a small ray of sun had emerged.

  If I was asked why I should have brought with me my mother’s own monograph, her rechtvaardiging, as she called it herself, I probably could not provide a satisfactory answer. There were aspects to it I had always intended to investigate, details of events rather than the disclosures and admissions that are the heart of it, and I think it was merely that I thought I may find a little time to explore them at Kew. Even that does not bear scrutiny, as I have always known that such exploration could really only be conducted in Tokyo, and was therefore doomed to be futile. Be all that as it may, however, I had packed the document into my suitcase.

  When I was fetched back to my Kew lodgings I fished it out. It was a copy, naturally, not the original, which was under lock and key in my Kuala Lumpur bank. I had showed it to only one other person before then. It was 1956, just weeks after my mother died. Judge Tan, or Mr Tan as he was then, brought it to the house in a thick sealed envelope with my name on it. I recognised my mother’s handwriting immediately. He said he did not know what was in it, but that she had charged him specifically with the responsibility of delivering it into my hands. He did not wait to find out himself.

  I opened it in private and did not know what to make of it. As she herself said on the first page, I was only twelve and too young to understand what she wrote. It began with references to ‘ledgers’ and ‘debits’, and I assumed at first it was something to do with accounting for an inheritance. It quickly moved on to questions of ‘faith’, and I could hear her voice in those words. Faith was a subject often on her lips as she weakened during the final months when the disease tightened its relentless terminal grip. Faith and despair, two words that seemed to be inseparable for her.

  The person I showed it to was Uncle Beng Woo. My mother had left it up to me to decide whether others should see it, and I thought he may be able to help with my interpretations. How wrong I was. He read the first page, quickly scanned the second, and then sealed it up again in its envelope and told me he could not help me. He said I should lock it away until I was old enough to work it out for myself. He never said another word about it, not even to ask if I had indeed locked it away. ‘Don’t talk about bad things,’ I imagine is what he thought, although he did not actually express it to me.

  When I left his house to take up my scholarship to Newcastle I secured it in a safe deposit box, and there it has stayed for nearly forty years, moving only from one box to another, one city to another, as I did. During those years I read it perhaps a hundred times in the security of a bank’s private viewing room. Every time I had reason to access the box I read it. The bank officers must have wondered what I was doing in there for so long. Much of it had become committed to memory, especially the most graphic sections that dealt with her treatment at the hands of the Japanese. The sections after that were where I found the most difficulty, even when I was well beyond any age of reason my mother may have imagined for me. These were the pages in which she tried to explain her feelings for the guerrilla leader who, it was obvious to me, was at the heart of all the trouble.

  The heart. That was what she was trying to explain, to justify, to account for. There is no accounting for the heart. I did not know that at twelve, but I certainly know that now, and I am sure that is where the questions of faith and despair arose for my mother at the end.

  Again, if I was asked why I should now decide that Su-Lin, a woman I had not seen for half a century, should be the first person in all that time to whom I chose to show the paper, I could not adequately answer. Perhaps it was what she said about her father. So easily she said it: ‘My father would have helped her.’ Her father did more for my mother than could ever be reasonably expected, although it was done privately, clandestinely. It was the only way then, and even I was aware of that. Perhaps Su-Lin knew nothing of it. It was that coalescence of perspectives, I suppose – someone so close to the events then, but so removed ever since. That was the practical reason for sending it. The more abstract reason was that there was simply something in her manner, in her thoughtfulness, and most surely in her eyes.

  3

  SU-LIN

  I spent the evening after Professor Thumboo’s talk with a takeaway lasagne in my Queensway flat, and didn’t even finish it. I fed some George Shearing into the CD player and allowed my mind to wander. ‘You’re daydreaming again, Tow See,’ I heard my father say. ‘But it’s night time, Pa, and I’m awake,’ I said to his portrait on the wall. There was nobody else but him to hear me say it. History was on my mind. Not the junk history of the professor’s talk, but the weighty past. The year I met Paris and his mother. The supertanker history of 1951.

  I have heard that your childhood can come back to you in vivid detail late in life and I found myself wondering whether sixty-one years was indeed ‘late’ in my own. The consolation, I told myself, was that I had always been able to summon up my early years in vivid detail,
even as far back as when I was five. If I had been older than that in 1948 I may have fancied that was the year when it all began, but vivid detail or not, I was too young to be fully aware. As it was, I was mindful enough even then to appreciate that the world had changed, and not for the better, when on the day of my fifth birthday half a dozen Chinese men, men said to be afflicted with cold blood, did something so terrible it put them on the front pages for days and into my backstory forever. They cycled up to the office of a remote rubber estate in Sungai Siput one morning, politely greeted the English manager, tied him and his young English assistant to their chairs, and shot them both dead. They then got straight back on their bicycles and calmly rode off into the jungle and into my life, until the trouble they started that day was finally declared to be finished, twelve long years later.

  The Jesuits say it takes but seven years to shape a life.

  Even though I was so young and really understood nothing about what had happened at the time (other than that my birthday was quickly forgotten), I could not help but be aware of the changes taking place around me. Now when my father had to make one of his regular drives outstation to the prison in Taiping or to see a client in a village, my mother would not move beyond reach of the telephone until he called to tell her he had arrived safely. When he came home late in the evening she would be cross with us until he did, and then her wrath would fall on him, because anything could have happened, why didn’t he call, and didn’t he know there was a curfew? How could he be so reckless? When I played in the garden at the front of our house I watched long convoys of army trucks and armoured cars passing, the rattle of their engines and the cheers of their English soldiers disturbing the peace of quiet old Gopeng Road.

  Soldiers were everywhere: at the market searching hawkers, at the roadblocks searching cars, at the barbed wire fences searching people. I may have been only five, but I was Chinese and so they even searched me. I saw men carrying guns on the street, buses burning on backroads and derailed trains on the Pathé News at the cinema. The Pathé News kept me informed regularly of the ‘evils of communism’. I had no idea what that meant, but I knew I had to be very careful, because everything was now, as I often overheard, ‘touch and go’.

  I took all this for granted for a few years, until I was eight and interested in reading what I could in my father’s newspaper every day. Perhaps it was that instinct, honed over five thousand years, of a Chinese girl to be alert to her situation lest she find herself at the mercy of it. I read a story one evening that year about a little English girl who was shot through the eye when her father drove his car into an ambush. That was something I could not take for granted. There were no pictures of the girl, but my imagination hardly needed one. The minute I read that story an image took root in my mind of a little girl with yellow hair, pink cheeks, button nose and round eyes – all the features I so wished to have myself because they were the face of my prized Princess Anne doll. Except the girl my mind conjured up for me had only one round eye. The other one was a black hole that disappeared into the depths of her skull and oozed scarlet blood. Even after all this time I still have no difficulty recalling that image; I still experience the same brief shudder that grips my shoulders and sends a tingle down to the tips of my fingers. After so long – more than fifty years – how could that be so?

  Because every night for weeks I went to bed with her. And every night she turned into a moving image, the central character in a short scene that played over and over in my head until sleep finally and mercifully drew the curtain. I saw her sitting in the seat next to her father, just the way I did when my own father was going somewhere with me, only me, and not our entire family. I loved those times, the two of us sitting up the front there where I could ask my questions, and he could give me answers, as often as not by telling a story, explaining to me how the world was. My father was precious to me, more precious than Princess Anne, and these were the times I felt most precious to him. I imagined the little English girl felt the same about her father.

  And then I imagined an explosion and a flash of fire and the car rolled over and the little girl was lying in the middle of the road and she saw men in green appear from nowhere and they were holding guns and the barrels of the guns were spitting flame and they spat the flame into the car where her precious father was and they did not stop until they ran out of flame and then one of them turned and walked up to her and took a pistol from his holster and smiled at her and then the pistol which was so far away from her came closer and closer and closer until all she could see through one eye was the black hole at the end of its barrel that disappeared into the depths of that pistol and then flame spat from it and into her eye and into her skull and that was the last thing she ever saw.

  The little girl knew what was going to happen; she could not have avoided knowing. People who have survived such terrible events themselves say that it all unfolds in slow motion, that it seems to be going on forever, but the scene in my head happened so fast. And then it happened again, over and over, like film in a loop. Was it slow motion for that little girl? Did she have what seemed like forever to consider what was about to happen to her? What if it were me? If it happened to a little English girl it could certainly happen to a little Chinese girl.

  I had to struggle then to stop the little blonde girl in my uncontrollable scene from becoming a little Chinese girl, one with black hair, flat nose and narrow eyes, like me. For years I had been wrestling with some horrifying images I had once seen of the Ten Courts of Chinese Hell, but those images were of grown men and women and only happened after they died. I had never considered until then that something as awful as that could happen to a little girl. One who was simply sitting in the front of the car with her father.

  There were about three years between those two dreadful events, the men at the rubber estate and the little girl with one eye, and before she finally brought it home to me, I spent much of those ever so impressionable years trying to understand what had happened to make everyone so different. It was not just the people in the streets and markets and shops with their nervous looks and short tempers. It was at school, in the playground, at home. In fact, it was especially noticeable at home. Why had my father stopped playing games with us every night? Why was my mother on edge every day? What did the servants now whisper about so much?

  Sungai Siput, I used to hear, and that seemed to be the problem with everything.

  I heard those two words so often that one day at school I asked my teacher what they meant. River of death, she said. The next time I heard my father mention Sungai Siput to my mother, I piped up gleefully to announce that I knew what they were talking about.

  ‘River of death,’ I said proudly.

  My mother exploded into a rage and whacked me with a rotan and sent me to my room. Pa came up later, but I still had not stopped crying.

  ‘It doesn’t mean that,’ he said. ‘Remember the little shellfish we dig for on the beach in Penang? That’s what a siput is. It just means a river of those little shellfish. If your teacher told that to you, then she must have just been upset.’

  It was plain to me that everyone was upset by Sungai Siput.

  In many conversations Sungai Siput and cold blood just seemed to naturally go together, usually in a whisper and with a shake of the head. Occasionally, people were even taken by a short but uncontrollable shiver. I had recently learned in school about cold blood and warm blood, and how we humans had the warm type and only snakes and lizards and such had the cold type. Perhaps it was a snake that really killed the men at the rubber estate, I fancied, because surely a human being couldn’t. Or perhaps it was a rat, because I had also heard the men with guns described as mountain rats. I wanted it to be a rat. I wanted it to be anything but a human being.

  But eventually it became clear that it was not rats, or snakes, even though snakes often killed people in Malaya – it was all down to a particular breed of human being called bandits. How I came to know this was because when
ever anyone whose opinion I actually trusted, such as Uncle Hung Jeuk or Uncle Raja – who were lawyers like my father and so knew about these things – whenever they talked about it they talked about bandits. And cold blood.

  One other alternative occurred to me. After filtering all this information through a budding young brain as I lay in my small bed one night staring at the ceiling, trying to ignore the reverberating nocturnal chorus of insects and cold-blooded amphibians in the forest behind our house, I wondered whether the bandits might perhaps not be Chinese at all, but actually some sort of devil men, like a ghost. The Malays believed the jungle was so filled with ghosts that they would not even enter into it before repeating an incantation that they came in peace. What if they were right? I hoped they were right. They had been in the country a lot longer than the Chinese, and if anything had cold blood it would be a ghost, surely.

  I considered all these possibilities because, being Chinese myself, I could not countenance the thought that it was people like me behind all this trouble.

  Soon I came to understand that the ‘trouble’ actually had a name. The Emergency, it was called. These days it is just another forgotten war, but back then it was the reason behind just about anything in that part of the world. If it had simply been called a war I suppose I would have caught on earlier. Everyone, even a child, understood what a war was in those days. As it was, I had to look up the word in my father’s dictionary. What I found was causing all this anxiety was ‘an unexpected occurrence requiring immediate action’, which as an explanation was quite unsatisfactory and created its own problems to a young girl still learning to read. And so ‘the Emergency’ just became another of those things I took for granted, part of the daily routine. After all, it wasn’t a war.