The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  11

  SU-LIN

  Toh Kei. Anna Thumboo’s mysterious ‘Bintang’ was Toh Kei. I suppose I should have twigged when she had written about ‘the connection’ and their ‘private moments’, but it was a long time ago, all that. I had been reading about one of the most prominent influences in my life, reading about a time before I knew he even existed, before I was aware of anything much at all beyond perhaps my mother’s face. Who can say anything about the world they saw as a one year old?

  I was now watching the professor’s lips move but not hearing a word. All I really wanted to do was take myself back to my flat and his mother. And Toh Kei.

  He must have been rabbiting on for minutes before I began hearing him again. Something about archives and closing times. Collecting my thoughts, I said there was no need to concern himself about closing time as the V was open until late. He looked at me askance. It wasn’t the V he was talking about but the archives. The closing time of the National Archives and the restriction it put on his research. He had lost two precious days, apparently, as they were closed altogether on Sunday and Monday, and Saturday was filled with schoolchildren. His subject was difficult enough, hidden in the dusty depths by all accounts, where colonial records were … I lost track of what he was saying. His subject was the Malayan something, a something now long consigned to those shelves where paper fades, untouched, unwanted. Et cetera.

  He was so inert. Really, he had looks that could quite possibly have transported him to a successful career in Bollywood, and the deep-rooted sadness about him only added to the allure, but it was like there was a switch that needed to be flicked. He needed current. Had he been wearing a shapeless suit like this at Barnard’s Inn? Was his collar loose at the neck then, his polyester tie that little bit skew-whiff, a button carelessly unfastened? I must have been diverted by the unexpected revelation of his looks, which was not at all like me, and those startling green eyes he had inherited from his mother, eyes that could probably take him anywhere, but not as far as me, sitting right there in front of him now, because they repeatedly avoided contact. Surely he wasn’t as shifty as his eyes. His mother’s were reliably steady, as I recalled. The fact that he had chosen me to read this obviously precious document (albeit a photocopy – how many others had read it; were reading it?) stoked the fires of my vanity and added even further appeal, but the shy little boy who had his nose stuck in an atlas for an hour and said only two words … had grown, but hardly really grown up.

  The mention of the word ‘Papan’ had provoked an awkward moment for him. In an early life filled with so many painful memories, I wondered what the town’s role had been. He could talk of his tragic mother so freely, her questions of faith, even the despair of her final years, and yet Papan was somehow disquieting. Perhaps I was right the first time – it was indeed haunted.

  Papan was about ten miles from our house on Gopeng Road, although ten miles at that time in that part of the world that crossed a great divide between security and uncertainty. It meant negotiating a couple of checkpoints which, with their precarious merger of guns and highly strung Malay soldiers, I invariably found distressing as a child. Papan was a ‘black spot’, so designated by the authorities. In spite of my mother’s early anxiety about moving to Gopeng Road when I was five, it was in fact well out of harm’s way. A road with so many large houses, so many influential people, was always going to be out of harm’s way.

  I knew some of what had taken place in Papan during my childhood, and was now discovering much more from Professor Thumboo’s mother, and I wondered what had happened to him to now cause such a moment of unease. The most dramatic event for us along Gopeng Road in those days was the notorious garden dig by the even more notorious Mr Yew.

  His was the grand house next door to ours, across a wide lawn and through a row of angsana trees, with a long gravel drive and a balcony over the front door where he was in the habit of standing in his best three-piece English suit to receive visitors as they alighted from their cars below. Baron Yew, my father called him. Unlike our house on its stocky concrete piers, Mr Yew’s sat solidly on the ground, like the houses in my mother’s English magazines, and that was because the English built it for their District Officer before the Japanese Time. The District Officer did not survive the Japanese, Pa said, and it had a few owners after that, although I noticed that he avoided talking about those particular occupants.

  From my goose pen there was a good view of Mr Yew’s back garden, which stretched so far down to the wilds beyond that it did not require a back fence. Our own little garden had some coconut palms along the boundaries, but at Baron Yew’s huge trees reached up to the clouds as if they were attempting an escape from the jungle. Encouraged as I was by the latest Cherry Ames adventure, I always imagined mysterious things happening at Mr Yew’s. Such a big house for just one man and his wife, such an expansive garden for no purpose other than to look at it occasionally. It was the nurse-detective in me bursting to sally forth, the girl with a ready eye for curious goings-on. And then, one afternoon when I went down to feed my geese, there was indeed something curious beyond the fence to fire my imagination.

  It was bulky and white, billowing in the breeze, very new and certainly out of place. My father saw me looking and, rather than telling me to mind my own business, he was even moved to take a closer look himself. I asked him what it could be. A circus tent, he said. Is Mr Yew having a circus? Perhaps he is, he said.

  This was exciting news, but I could see the tent was not as big as the circus tents that rose up on the Padang at New Year, and it was square, not round as they tended to be. I couldn’t see any elephants or tigers, no clowns or acrobats. It was tied down tight and I certainly could not see inside. I watched for ages to see what would happen at Mr Yew’s circus, but nothing did.

  I told Mei and Li about it and they laughed, so I said it must be true because Pa told me. Pa’s just joking with you, they said. It’s not a circus tent, there’s just some digging going on there. I didn’t see any diggers, I said, and they said they had already stopped before I got home. Probably digging a garden, they said, which made me lose interest for a while in Mr Yew’s tent. But only for a while, because I soon found that a goose can be even more curious than a young girl with an inquiring mind.

  Every morning I checked my geese for an egg, and every few days there would be one. I would then race it in to Ah Mun Cheir, an egg as big as a tennis ball, for her to whip up into an omelette for my father’s breakfast. He ate it with plenty of black pepper and soy sauce and red chilli. Our own breakfast was usually a soft-boiled chicken egg, so soft even the white was runny, but when Pa had a goose egg omelette he would eat about half of it and then say, ‘Too much for me,’ and push the plate over and that would serve as my breakfast as well. Mei and Li only liked their eggs soft-boiled, so no goose eggs for them. Soft-boiling an egg as big as a tennis ball was beyond even Ah Mun Cheir.

  Having goose eggs for Pa’s breakfast now and then was well and good, but a goose is an unpredictable bird. When they are around anything can happen, and one day it did. Whenever they heard me coming they would start honking and keep it up until I talked to them. They even appeared to be listening to what I said. If I spoke in English they would immediately resume their honking, so I fancied them to be Cantonese geese. I was allowed to feed them any food scraps except rice, because rice was never thrown out in our house. We had to eat every last grain in our bowls. Every grain you leave means a pockmark on your husband’s face, our mother assured us regularly, which never failed to conjure up unwelcome visions of the grotesque faces awaiting us when the time came.

  In those days vivid images like that would set me wandering off. Tow See, are you daydreaming again, Pa would say, and I’d reply that I wasn’t dreaming because my eyes were open. Ah Mun Cheir only had to talk about ghosts, which she did far too often for my liking, and off my mind would go, uncontrollable. At my great-grandfather’s funeral, when I was just six, a group of Mahayan
ese nuns arrived to assist with the mourning, and the first thing they did was to unfurl a great scroll by the coffin for everyone to see. It was covered with gruesome cameos that made my skin tingle to the point that I felt I had just walked under a machang tree, a mistake that never failed to result in a nasty rash. Once I set eyes on that scroll I found it impossible to turn away. The object of my compulsion was the Ten Courts of Chinese Hell, and they depicted in most graphic terms the truly horrifying punishments meted out to those required to pay for their sins in the earthly world. There was a Lake of Blood, a Pool of Filth, a Hot Suffocation Hall – places so dreadful that I did not dare talk about them because I was afraid that if I did they would then lodge themselves in my mind and I would never be able to remove them. The problem was, even though I did not talk about them, images of people having their limbs pulled off or their hearts gouged or their heads minced, continued to lurk somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain and would not always be denied.

  Whenever we returned home from a funeral, thankfully not so many times before I was eight, Ah Mun Cheir made us walk over the basin of fire before we could go inside the house. She put burning charcoal in an old enamel basin, tossed in some chips of sandalwood, and then we had to walk through the aromatic smoke to cleanse ourselves and chase away any ghosts that might have attached themselves to us at the funeral. She then carried the basin right through the house, waving the smoke into the corners of every room. Usually I thought this was a nuisance when all I wanted to do was get myself inside and out of the sun, but after my great-grandfather’s funeral, and after the appearance of the Mahayanese nuns and their horrible scroll, I was ready to jump over that basin as many times as Ah Mun Cheir wanted.

  My morning visits to the goose pen to look for an egg gave me an excuse to take a good look at the goings-on in Mr Yew’s garden. Every few days I noticed the tent had moved a little, leaving a muddy square in the grass where it had been, but it was always roped down tight. Whatever was going on inside that tent was going on while we were at school. Sometimes when we left in the morning we would see rough Chinese men with dark skin appear at Mr Yew’s front gate, but they would be gone before we arrived home. By then all there was to see was Mr Yew’s gardener cutting the grass or trimming the bushes. It was as though whatever they were doing in that tent was timed to be done when we were not around to see, which just made me all the more curious. And that is when a goose’s curiosity got us into trouble.

  One morning on my way to the pen, I peered through the fence and saw two of my geese nibbling on Mr Yew’s grass. I ran to the back of the garage and saw that the chicken wire was loose and all three had escaped. I peered again through the fence and could still see just the two, but the tent flap seemed to be a little looser than usual. At that early hour there was never anyone around Mr Yew’s garden and I figured I could gather my geese without being seen.

  Generally, Chinese children did not take risks. There were always English children in Gopeng Road with skinned knees, bruised shins, even an occasional broken limb, but you never saw a Chinese child with anything more than an ear infection or such. The adventures of the Famous Five or the Secret Seven certainly stimulated our imaginations, but Chinese children were taught by their mothers to spend their lives being cautious. Don’t fall down, we were constantly told. Don’t break that, don’t get lost, don’t, don’t, don’t. As though falling down, breaking things or getting lost was always our plan. I did not plan on getting caught, and that was the trouble – I did not have a plan of any sort when I did something very unusual and climbed over the fence.

  Of course, the chance that my third goose was in the tent was fairly remote when there was the entire expanse of the garden for her to roam at will, but geese are curious birds. I had to squeeze myself into the tent by sliding over damp grass, and when I stood up my back was covered in mud, because just inside the tent there were mounds of it. Stacked to one side were bamboo baskets and Chinese hoes, and in the middle was a big hole about as deep as I was tall.

  The honking started before I took a single step. She was in the middle of the hole, flapping her wings and stamping her feet. I asked her to be quiet in Cantonese and even in English, but nothing worked. I jumped into the hole and tried to pick her up. She just ran away from me, flapping her wings, honking and waddling. Outside I could hear the other two joining the chorus. I fell over and got my front covered in mud as well, and then I noticed that suddenly the inside of the tent had brightened. I looked up, and standing on the edge of the hole was Mr Yew in striped pyjamas, his gardener in a sarong, and Ah Ping Cheir, his old black-and-white amah, holding a broom above her head. Even though her face glowed with rice face powder, from her dark look I could see that she did not have it in mind to use that broom for sweeping.

  As it turned out, Mr Yew was not at all angry. In fact, he seemed quite amused at the sight of a muddy urchin running around in circles after a wayward goose. Ah Ping Cheir muttered under her breath all the way back to the house, and Kebun the gardener cleaned up my mess. I never knew his real name. Kebun is simply Malay for garden, and all Indian gardeners were called Kebun. He rounded up my geese, even fixed the chicken wire, and brought over a pile of grass cuttings, which they took to as readily as any food scrap. Apart from Mr Yew’s maid, the only person upset by the whole business was my father, who was very quiet that morning.

  Before we left for school I told Mei and Li what I had seen. They were disappointed I had not at least unearthed a dead body, as the Famous Five would certainly have managed. I had heard that Mr Yew used to be a tin miner. He must be digging a tin mine, I said. Even with that Mei and Li were not interested. Our father maintained his uncharacteristic silence in the car, but just as we got to the school gates he started to laugh. Not a loud laugh, not the sort that made his shoulders bounce up and down, more a sort of a snigger. This must be a lesson to you all, he said as we were getting out. Now you know what comes of sticking your beaks into other people’s business. And then his laugh got a little louder and he never said anything more about it.

  Our family name is Tan, which is Hokkien, but with the Chinese you are what you speak. Because we were from Ipoh, a Cantonese town where every Chinese we knew, including our maids, spoke that dialect, we also grew up with it. And so we were identified as Cantonese, which is all very well since we had been in Malaya for three generations. It had been nearly a hundred years since any of our ancestors were natives of Fujian where the Hokkiens came from. If those ancestors could have heard us babbling on around the kitchen table in our harsh Malayan Cantonese mixed with English and Malay, they would have thought we were foreign barbarians. My father’s name was Tan Kay Chuan. He was called K. C. Tan, or Casey to Westerners. There was an English family near us in Gopeng Road whose children used to call their parents by their given names. Fred and Barbara, they called them, which stunned me into jaw-dropped silence every time I heard it. If we had called our parents anything but Pa and Ma we would have got the rotan. Confucius was very clear about honouring parents. And after the goose incident it was also clear that I had brought dishonour to my father.

  I knew he was disappointed in me, and I was even disappointed in myself. I had caused him to lose face with our neighbour. I was determined to make it up by showing him that I really could be a help, and I thought that the Toh Kei situation, whatever it may be, was my opportunity. I paid careful attention whenever I heard the name, and I heard it often as it was now occupying more of my father’s time than any other matter. That was how I knew he had gone to see him at Taiping prison. A couple of days after that I was delivered to the office at my normal time, but Pa was not there. Uncle Beng Woo said he was at an important conference at the courthouse. When he came back, I thought, that would be my opportunity.

  I had heard him say to Uncle Hung Jeuk that on Thursday he was going to a conference with Mr Davies. I knew where Mr Davies’ office was, because I often helped to deliver papers to it at the courthouse. Unlike Uncle Hung Jeuk, Mr D
avies had been to our house, as our mother did not appear to object in the slightest to him and Mrs Davies coming. And now it was Thursday and Pa was with Mr Davies to discuss the matter of Toh Kei, of that I was certain.

  ‘Is Mr Davies going to help Toh Kei too?’ I said to him.

  He frowned and didn’t say anything for a moment, and I began to worry if perhaps I had overstepped the mark again. But then one corner of his mouth curled up and I could see that he had finally put my behaviour with the geese behind him.

  ‘No, Tow See,’ he said. ‘It’s not Mr Davies’ job to help Toh Kei. It’s his job to help the judge, when the time comes.’ He sat down and placed his hands on the desk and considered me. ‘Well … what do you say to that?’

  I was slowly managing to connect all these matters together. ‘Then it’s the judge that wants to hang Toh Kei,’ I said.

  Pa slowly shook his head. ‘Sometimes it seems like everyone wants to hang Toh Kei, but no, not the judge. Not yet at least. Not until we have a trial and Mr Davies convinces him that is fair.’

  ‘Is Mr Davies fair?’

  ‘Mr Davies is a good man, and yes, he’s fair. But it’s not his job to be fair. His job is to convince the judge to see things his way, and mine is to get him to see things my way, and then the judge decides what’s fair. That’s how the law works.’

  I was eight years old and had little idea of right and wrong in abstract terms, but I knew that if you did something wrong then some form of punishment resulted, and if you got punished without doing anything wrong then it was unfair, and these were absolutes and the way the law worked. The idea that it could be more complex than that was yet to enter my head, and I assumed that it must have had something to do with the Latin mysteries which, according to my understanding, could only be revealed in England. If so, my father would understand and this was valuable early learning for me as he was well beyond eight years old when he went there.