The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  In spite of his assurance regarding the Japanese, he posted the two men along the road at the entrance to town. There was only one road in and out of Papan. The wound was to the knee, and it was obvious from the ugly colour and swelling that the bullet was still in there. Equally obviously, septicaemia had set in. With Shorty assisting me as well as he could, I applied anaesthetic and began probing immediately as I did not think there was any time to waste. I located the bullet buried between bone and tendon. Mercifully, there appeared to be no major damage, although removing it was delicate. After dressing the wound and giving him an injection for the septicaemia, it was a matter of the fellow convalescing until the infection and fever abated.

  It was clear to me that he could not be carried back into the jungle in the condition he was in. At the very least, while the tissue was repairing the dressing would need to be changed daily, and in hygienic surroundings, so there was only one thing for it. I fashioned a screen at the back of the upstairs room, and between us Shorty and I managed to carry him up the stairs and settle him down. I told Ah Ming he was a cousin from upcountry with a broken leg. I am sure she did not believe me, but she was a discreet girl, which was the way you had to be to survive in those days.

  Shorty then simply disappeared. I turned to ask him something and he was no longer there. I stayed with the patient that first night, muffling his groans, and thankful for the absence of close neighbours. Shorty had not told me who he was, although evidently one of the guerrillas. In fact, he had seemed reluctant to tell me anything about my patient at all. I gave him the name Bintang, for the red stars displayed on his grubby cap. Lying there in a fever, a frown permanently fixed to his forehead, he looked so vulnerable. It was hard to imagine him engaged in a gun battle with Japanese soldiers. The Japanese were so inhuman, and this man appeared anything but; like an overgrown sick child. I spent the night mopping his brow and offering comforting human touch to ease his disquiet, like the mother I had so recently become. Perhaps that was when the connection was made, although at the time I had no reason for such deliberations. I had no cause to think this man would be other than he presented at the time – a patient in need of critical care.

  He regained consciousness the next day, took a long look at me, and asked where he was in English. I had always imagined the guerrillas to be poorly educated men, but Bintang, later when he was sufficiently recovered, could engage in all manner of conversation, although it must be said we did avoid politics.

  The wound began to heal satisfactorily after the ‘operation’, but Bintang’s fever failed to adequately respond to treatment over a worrying number of days. He complained of headaches and shivering, and I noticed he was a little yellow ‘around the gills’, all of which convinced me I had a case of malaria on my hands. I gave him an injection of quinine and he responded rapidly. With two weeks of treatment, and being secreted quietly in my upstairs room, he was ready to return to duty in the jungle. After the first week, when he was recovering well, I found him to be surprisingly good company. He was a charming man, although careful not to tell me too much about himself, and certainly not his name. No one but Ah Ming knew he was there, not even Mrs Tay. At least, that is what I thought at the time. Events some months later suggested to me that my secret was actually rather common knowledge in the town, but I must say they carried off their feigned ignorance extremely well.

  Each night during Bintang’s two week stay the short one returned to check on the progress of his colleague, stealing into the back of the house without a sound, and invariably giving me a fright. One minute there was no one, the next he was standing there, and the next he was gone. I have never seen such stealth in a human being. Bintang told me that he descended from their camp in the hills, following ancient animal tracks. He was not specific about the camp, and I was certainly not curious to find out.

  They must have decided that I was to be trusted as even before Bintang left my care, Shorty began to show up with other cases for treatment – malaria mostly, but also beri-beri and the ubiquitous tropical ulcers. Most were merely boys, and indeed poorly educated. It was not difficult to determine that Shorty and Bintang were leaders among this group.

  Ah Ming asked me why I called my infirm cousin ‘Star’, and I thought it best to tell her she had misheard me. I said his name was Tang, and that was what I called the man, in our private moments, for the rest of our time together in the years ahead.

  8

  SU-LIN

  Eventually Professor Thumboo called me in my chambers in the middle of the day when I had my feet up, surrounded by legal pink ribbon, relaxing with what I considered to be a well-earned cup of tea. He asked me if I had been reading his mother’s papers. Of course, I replied, and said I was finding it most interesting. It was like piecing together an old jigsaw, I said.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if you find what she had to say about faith as interesting as I do.’

  I had to think for a minute to what he was referring.

  ‘Without faith there can be no possible purpose,’ he said helpfully, ‘and these few years have stripped me of faith.’

  He recited it so casually that I initially thought he was telling me of his own condition, but the words did carry a familiar ring. ‘Ah, yes,’ I eventually said. ‘That was quite a few pages back.’

  ‘She has written a tragedy, don’t you think?’

  ‘Those times were inclined to tragedy,’ I said.

  ‘I would welcome your opinion when you are finished.’

  ‘My opinion? You mean … as a lawyer? A legal opinion?’

  ‘Oh … just as a human being, I think. Can I call you again in a few days?’

  ‘Of course. Would you care to give me your …’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Tan.’

  And he hung up.

  I stared at the telephone for a moment. My opinion as a human being? My opinion on his mother’s … ‘tragedy’? My opinion on a purpose to life?

  Here I was, besieged by pink ribbon demanding of me an opinion, as a servant of the law, the law that its servants know is sovereign and categorical, and all I could think about now was an opinion on … what? A question of faith? How ill equipped I was to offer such a thing. How ill prepared.

  I grew up with a respect for – indeed, a faith in – ‘the law’ that I now fancy verged sometimes on obsessive. As my mother inculcated in us a respect for our cultural heritage, so our father passed on by a form of osmosis an appreciation for what Anna Thumboo would perhaps have said was recht. The law for my father, as I observed often, was not always and not only to be found in the countless lines of case law, precedents and considered judgments that filled the pages of his law books. On occasion it was to be discovered in the space between the lines, between the laws. The heavy volumes that bound his office were not necessarily the boundaries for his mind, which was frequently given to the guidance of a reliable and well-maintained moral compass. He never said such a thing to me himself, of course, because the law should be strictly binding to its servants – sovereign, obligatory, categorical. Like all good lessons in life, the best teacher is experience, the second best is witness, and the least effective is instruction.

  The categorical view of the law was imparted to me years later through semesters of instruction, of study of such books as were in my father’s office. However, it was perhaps during the year of my pupillage in chambers where I learned through witness and experience, and began to appreciate the law’s personality, both noble and devious.

  ‘The law’, in such experience, also meant the ability to recite grace in Latin, to take notes from a pupil master while he languished unabashed in his bath, to follow him around his Primrose Hill garden with pen poised as he attended to the pruning of his roses, to ensure that the rooms of Sir Mildly Eccentric QC were well stocked with lapsang souchong tea from the Twinings store on the Strand (and only the Twinings store on the Strand). ‘The law’ was the cut and thrust of the robing room boys’ club, the give and take of a s
enior clerk with too much sway, the funk and despair of the cells below the Redhill Magistrates Court. The law was learning to stand your ground against conservative masculine forces quite at home in a chambers that dated back to the Great Fire, with conventions to match.

  The law was often, as Dickens said, an ass, but it was also at times a swift thoroughbred, a dependable hack, a sturdy Clydesdale, a smart polo pony or a bucking bronco. The law was not merely what was laid down in books and statutes and precedents. The law could be what you made of it. Which brings me back to my father.

  When I was a child he was in the habit of calling me Tow See, which means black bean, and I suppose it was because I was smaller than my sisters and somewhat darker in complexion. To everyone else I was Su, or Su Lin, or even Ah Su, in the Chinese manner. Neither of my sisters had nicknames. He never did tell me for certain, but when I was very young, whenever I asked him about it, he would place my little finger in his mouth and say it was simply because black bean was his favourite noodle sauce – one taste and he wanted to eat the whole plate. And then he would gobble-gobble-gobble all the way up my arm and I would shriek and he would plant a big kiss on my forehead when he got there. That was the only explanation he ever offered.

  My mother, who had no time for such games herself, said it was his nickname for an old girlfriend who had dark skin like mine. And so I learned that fathers were not serious all the time, and mothers were deadly serious about the past.

  Pa certainly appeared to be serious when he told us that things would have to change with our mother away in Penang. He said there would now be extra duties for us as the maids would be too busy to carry out all their normal tasks. We had two maids, Ah Mun Cheir, the old one, and Ah Chee Cheir, the young one. We were taught to address servants by their name with the suffix ‘Cheir’, which means ‘older sister’. It was rude to call anyone older than yourself just by their name, even servants. They were responsible for most of the work around the house, although we were also expected to do our share. Pa said he would tell us our new duties when he had decided what they were, which we all understood to mean that he would tell us when Ma had told him over the phone from Penang. In the meantime, he said, he would continue to take us to school in the morning, but for the afternoon our routines would change. Ah Mun Cheir had too many other duties now that would prevent her waiting for us at the school gate and bringing us home on the bus. Now Uncle Beng Woo, the clerk whom I often accompanied on his afternoon round of errands from the office, would pick us up in Pa’s car.

  The routine was this: As I was the youngest and finished school earliest, Uncle Beng Woo would deliver me to the office where lunch would be sent up from Wing Kee coffee shop. Mei and Li were to stay at school and do their homework in the library, where they were to eat the previous night’s leftovers for their lunch. They were then to wait at the back gate of the school, the one guarded by soldiers, until Uncle Beng Woo arrived to pick them up. My sisters said nothing, just glowered at me. I was to get coffee shop noodles, most probably with shredded chicken and pork fat, while all they had to look forward to was cold leftovers.

  In Pa’s instructions I could hear our mother’s voice – wait inside the gate, don’t leave until Uncle Beng Woo arrives, stay near the soldiers. Ma was obsessed with those unexpected occurrences, like a car parked in the wrong place or a man standing around aimlessly. After Sungai Siput, as the years of the Emergency came and went, her concern only grew. When bandits raided another school near Ipoh earlier in the year she would not let us go back to ours for weeks. We had to copy our lessons from friends until the authorities agreed to assign those armed soldiers to guard the gates every day.

  No one was actually hurt in the school raid. Two men in green uniforms burst into a classroom waving their guns in the air, tied the teacher to her chair and shouted fiery speeches at the terrified students before burning all their identity cards and disappearing out of town on the back of motorbikes. The teacher was alive only because she was Chinese, Ma said. If she had been English they would have shot her in front of the girls, or worse. Or worse, I thought. What could be worse? That was months before and no one believed the bandits would ever be so bold again … except our mother. They are not bandits, she said, they are terrorists. Why do they call them bandits? What did they steal? They are terrorists!

  But now I knew they were CTs.

  The afternoons our Chinese tutor came to the house would continue as normal, Pa told us, even in the absence of our mother’s authoritarian eye. We had a tutor because at home we generally spoke English. Our parents had been to English schools in Penang and Ipoh and now we were doing the same. Penang was a Hokkien town and Ipoh was Cantonese, which meant our parents did not grow up speaking the dialect other Chinese in Ipoh spoke, so English just became easier for all of us, our family lingua franca. Pa said English would also get us further in the world than Cantonese or Hokkien, although Ma was not so certain. She made sure that we learned to speak proper Cantonese and to write Chinese by learning from Mr Ho, who spoke it as well as a Hong Kong native, according to our mother, and there could be no higher approval than that.

  Further to this formal tutoring, our father also liked to pass on a little of the language himself, such as the time I pointed to a sign in a coffee shop that said ‘Special for Today’, and had four Chinese characters written underneath, and I asked him what they meant. He said, ‘Special for today. Why are you asking me when it says it in English right there above it?’ And I said, ‘But what do they really mean?’ On my mind was the time he explained to me that each Chinese character could have many different meanings, but when put together with other characters they meant one thing in particular. Such as when the characters for ‘opportunity’ and ‘danger’ were placed together they meant ‘crisis’, and that helped me to understand that a crisis was not necessarily a bad thing. Pa said the four Special for Today characters literally meant ‘unusual different this sky’.

  ‘Imagine that,’ he said. ‘This sky means today. Isn’t that beautiful?’ And I agreed that it was.

  I loved getting to the bottom of words like that because when I did I could discover the beauty hidden by hundreds of years of use and common modification. Beauty was lurking in Chinese, my father often said. Poetry was waiting for me to find if I just dug deeper.

  Such poetry, such beauty, was not to be found at our English convent, where Chinese was banned altogether. If we were caught speaking it, just a word of it, we were fined five cents. We were told that the money collected was donated to the orphans, which was all very well, but five cents was half my daily lunch money, so I was always careful with my vocabulary. Anything Chinese was somehow inferior and to be ignored at our school. We received no instruction about its customs, its culture, its philosophy, even though most of the teachers themselves were Chinese. And so, for all this, our mother arranged two sessions a week with Mr Ho.

  He was a retired teacher from the Chinese school who lived in a tiny room in Theatre Street above a picture framing shop. I had only been there once when Ma first made the arrangement with him. Everything he owned was under his rudimentary bed, stuffed into rattan baskets and cardboard boxes. A rather lurid painting of an Asian woman with thick permed hair and green skin provided the single element of cheer in the room, although the expression on the face itself was not exactly cheerful. Visiting Mr Ho then was the first time I began to realise how privileged I was. This educated man lived in such a tiny box, sharing half a shophouse with so many other people, while we had a whole house just for one family.

  When he came to our home Mr Ho drilled into us rhythm and balance as, to the tap of his pencil, we chanted the text of the Three Character Classic, the Sahm Ji Ging. Every verse is three characters and we had to learn a new verse every week, the way Chinese children had been taught for hundreds of years. That is, we had to be able to recite them in Cantonese and to write them in pencil inside little printed squares. Until I had mastered two hundred words, Mr Ho said, I did
not need to know what they meant. Not necessary for me to understand, he said, merely to learn. And then he would raise his eyes to the ceiling and repeat what I came to understand was his tutor mantra: First the eye, then the ear, then the hand. Only after that the brain. Maybe one day even the heart.

  I was not ready to understand the eternal truth, he would say, which is where I came to suspect the poetry that my father promised might be lurking.

  By mastering the Three Character Classic, our mother assured us, we would learn not only our Chinese language, but also the fundamentals of Chinese culture and history. Learning it by rote would introduce us to the classic texts and the illustrious dynasties, and guide us in exemplary behaviour.

  Mei had already had her fill of Chinese culture. When you are a teenager, she said, there is more to life. She had a picture of Dirk Bogarde on her wall, all dressed up in an airforce uniform from his latest film, which I did not understand at all as he had no connection whatsoever with our family or anyone we knew, but I had five years to work out if she was right about life as a teenager. In the meantime, I struggled with my writing practice.

  ‘Should be no trouble for you,’ Mr Ho said in my first lesson. ‘Your mother is an Ong.’ I knew my mother’s family name but as we were not allowed to ask Mr Ho any questions I didn’t know what was so special about it. I had been taking his lessons for a year before he finally told me why I should be a natural.

  ‘Ong in Hokkien same as Wang in Mandarin,’ he said. ‘The greatest of all calligraphers was Wang Hsi-chih.’ He wrote the character to show me. ‘Ong, Wang, Wong, all the same character. Wang Hsi-chih changed calligraphy forever … flow of water, vigour of dragon.’ He told me my writing would improve if I watched geese like my ancestor. ‘You should keep geese like Wang Hsi-chih.’