The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  This was a view that came to me when I once overheard my father and mother discussing the bandits in the jungle. Although ‘discussing’ is not really the word for it. Whenever the subject of the bandits in the jungle arose, a more correct term for my mother’s contribution to the debate would be ‘agonising’. She was always finding reasons to worry over the situation and he was always saying something like, ‘It’s not as bad as all that, Lizzie.’

  My mother’s name was Ong Siew Hua and most people called her Ah Siew, but not my father. She had been schooled at the Light Street Convent in Penang, and in those days the nuns could not cope with names like Siew Hua so they ‘christened’ the girls with English names. The year Ma started school was the year the Duke of York married Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, and so the nuns named her for the new princess. Now only our father used it, although he shortened it to Lizzie, which was all right by my mother as she was never fussed about it in the first place. After Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon became Queen Elizabeth Pa used to say that our mother was Queen of Gopeng Road, which I recognised as one of his jokes because even I could see that our house was close to the smallest in Gopeng Road and certainly no Buckingham Palace. If anyone was the Queen of Gopeng Road, I thought, it would be Mrs Yew.

  That particular time they were discussing the bandit situation I heard Pa say that everyone in Malaya was a jungle fighter because everyone had to fight against the jungle to survive, but especially the tin miners and the rubber planters. ‘The jungle is the enemy,’ he said. Whenever Ma started worrying about the dangerous situation that surrounded us Pa would say something like this to make her feel better. ‘The jungle is the enemy, Lizzie, the people in it will pass.’ It was his way of saying that Malaya had always been a dangerous place and this latest emergency was just one more and nothing to get so upset about.

  I don’t think my mother ever really believed him, because things had been so terrible during the Japanese Time, and then everyone thought that it was all over and things would be better again when the English came back, and now they were terrible again and when would it ever end?

  That was the kind of thing she used to say: ‘When will it ever end?’ And then Pa would say, ‘It’s not as bad as all that, Lizzie,’ and eventually Ma would get over it until the next time she read a terrible story in the Straits Times.

  Which is all to say how I knew that Mr Yew was a jungle fighter, although not the only reason. When he was a real tin miner and not just a small one digging up his backyard, he would have been in command of huge ‘war machines’, which is what our father called the dredges that floated on the grey lakes that were the tin mines around Ipoh. They were bigger than a house, with long arms to fight against the jungle and dredge up the tin. To me they were simply monsters. The iron buckets that scooped up the floor of the lake were giant teeth that could mince up anything that got in their way – tin, jungle, and certainly people in the jungle. A tin dredge would be right at home in any of the Courts of Chinese Hell, such as afloat on the Lake of Blood. And Mr Yew had once been in charge of such beasts, which surely made him a more substantial character than my sisters were prepared to concede.

  Mr Yew took off his helmet and pulled a white handkerchief from his top pocket, unfolding it carefully so that I could see ‘YEW’ embroidered in red in the corner with his coat of arms. I always thought it was a strange thing to want to blow your nose on your own name, but this time he used it only to wipe his forehead.

  ‘Malaya so hot, lah,’ he said. ‘Ipoh too far from sea.’ And then his smile broadened. ‘Ipoh capital of Lake District. Just like England. Every town around Ipoh have nice big lake. Some, you know, I make.’ The smile became a laugh as he replaced his helmet and turned back to his house. ‘Fat goose good to eat. Missy don’t say boo to goose.’

  The Sungai Siput situation also caused me to miss a lesson with Mr Ho, but as it turned out I would have missed it in any event because he stopped coming to our house. My father told us that he was unwell, and until he recovered we were to be left to our own devices in our quest to ‘make perfect’. It was strange not to see him for so long. Apart from his visits for our lessons, my mother invariably invited him to our larger family gatherings. She said that he had no family and everybody should have a family, so Mr Ho was welcome to feel part of ours. Ma had a habit of adopting new ‘relatives’ in such a way, which was how I knew that while she may have been angry with us for much of the time, she had good reason to be and really had a kind heart. When you are eight years old you try desperately to avoid thinking ill of your mother.

  One afternoon around that time I accompanied Uncle Beng Woo on one of his regular errands from my father’s office, this one his rounds of the various banks. After he was done he said he had finished for the day and thought he might call on Mr Ho to see how he was feeling. He said he was sure it would be all right for me to come, seeing as I knew him myself. We took a trishaw to Theatre Street and I followed Uncle Beng Woo through the clutter of the Great Wall Picture Framing Shop, past samples, calendars and racks of timber, and up a dark and steep staircase. Mr Ho met us in shorts, buttoning up the front of a white shirt that was too big for him because it used to be my father’s.

  Pa was very particular about his shirts. They had to be white and English cotton and with the hunting horn inside the collar, and as soon as they acquired a yellowish tinge to them, he wouldn’t wear them any more. My mother said that was just a waste of a good shirt, that all it needed was a bit of bleach, but Pa was most insistent. And so Ma, who said she simply could not understand such wastefulness, gave Pa’s old shirts to Mr Ho, who was most grateful for them, didn’t mind the bleach, and as a mark of respect to Pa, wore one every time he visited our house. I had not realised until then, though, that his respect extended to days when he was not visiting our house, merely convalescing in his own.

  In his dark little room and in his white shirt, now bleached once again into brightness, Mr Ho looked grey in the face and coughed quietly into his hand. In spite of his ill health, he was pleased to see us and rolled up his mattress so we could sit on the wooden bench that was his bed. The room was thick with the smell of Chinese herbs, the kind that Ah Mun Cheir boiled up whenever one of us was taken ill. He lit a small spirit stove and boiled a pot of water. As soon as heat hit the aluminium the smell of herbs intensified. There were two pears in a bowl on the table. He picked one up and inspected it carefully before cutting it into uniform wedges for us to share.

  Next to the spirit stove was a round mirror with chipped silverplate, an enamel basin, a ‘good morning’ towel, his tub of pomade and a mug holding his tooth powder and tongue scraper. A couple of cigarette tins were filled with little knick-knacks. His bigger knick-knacks, which appeared to be mostly boxes of old books, were stacked under his bed. All these things I noticed because before then Mr Ho had been merely my Chinese tutor, but when I saw him that day in his dark cubicle, looking sick but still fussing over us no less than if we were paying a visit to a Chinese mansion, I began to see who Mr Ho really was, and the dignity he possessed.

  It was only my second visit to his room, but I well remembered the painting of the green lady on his wall. He had a fine looking Chinese tea set and poured in a continuous stream into three little fine china cups from a clay teapot. He saw me looking at the lady.

  ‘You like my picture?’ he said. I didn’t know how to tell him that actually I found it most unsettling, so I just nodded. ‘Painted by my friend, Vladimir Tretchikoff. Strange name, hah? Russian name, that one.’

  It was a name strange enough for me to recognise it. ‘You used to work with him and Uncle Hung Jeuk,’ I said.

  ‘Uncle Hung Jeuk?’ Mr Ho coughed. ‘Who is that?’

  ‘Uncle Humphrey.’

  Mr Ho nodded. ‘Humphrey Wilmot. Yes, three of us together. How you know?’

  ‘Uncle Hung Jeuk told me. He said you made propaganda together.’ Mr Ho and Uncle Beng Woo looked at each other and raised their eyebrows.

  I h
ad a question for Mr Ho boiling up inside me and, in this room, away from the Confucian discipline of our lessons, I simply blurted it out before even thinking.

  ‘Why are you sick?’

  ‘Oh … body too weak these days,’ he said. ‘War no good, leave me weak.’

  It was true that he looked thinner and I thought that perhaps it was because my father’s old shirt now hung off him like a sheet.

  Uncle Beng Woo sipped his tea and pointed to a Chinese calendar on the wall. ‘So old that calendar. Downstairs so many calendars, why no new one for you?’

  Mr Ho coughed and shook his head. ‘No need, lah. No need for calendar, only like calligraphy. This one hahng shee, walking style. Very good.’

  On the calendar’s headboard there was one large character flowingly brushed in black with two red seals. ‘Calligraphy?’ said Uncle Beng Woo. ‘How can? Hung is the only word.’

  ‘Wilmot get it made for me,’ Mr Ho said. ‘Special order. He said we sow the seed, now this emergency is our harvest. Malaya’s harvest. I keep it to remind me how little he understand.’

  I didn’t recognise the character, but I did know what Hung meant as my father had told me himself. ‘That’s the name of Confucius,’ I said proudly. ‘Uncle Hung Jeuk knows all about Confucius, so he must mean that we should follow him.’ Both men were looking at me curiously, so I thought I should explain. ‘We can learn from the old masters, whatever we are doing.’

  Mr Ho poured more hot water into the pot and weighed his words. ‘Eye, ear, hand, only after that the brain.’ He swirled the pot and refilled the cups. ‘Because this word your eye has not seen, your hand has not practised, your ear has not learned, so your brain has been deceived.’

  He spread some paper across the bench and quickly wrote the word from the calendar. ‘This word Hung … it means turmoil, everything all shaken up, top becomes bottom, bottom becomes top.’ Underneath it he wrote a second character. ‘This word also Hung, name of Hung Fu Ji. You see how different they are?’

  It was true, they were completely different. ‘Lesson for today,’ he said. ‘Most Chinese characters have two parts. Most important part is the radical. Radical means root. Chinese words are like trees. Must have root.’ He circled a part of the first character. ‘This word Hung has water radical here. Water swirls, hard to control … so this word mean turmoil.’ And then he circled a part of the other character. ‘This word Hung sound same but look different. This one has child radical. So this word a family name, like Hung Fu Ji. You understand now?’

  ‘I … I think so …’ I didn’t want to admit to him that I was struggling.

  Mr Ho looked at me impatiently and suppressed a cough. He picked up a slice of pear. ‘What fruit is this?’

  ‘Pear,’ I said.

  ‘Pear in Cantonese is leih.’ He quickly wrote another character on the paper. ‘You see? Leih.’ He then circled a part of the character. ‘This one has tree radical. All fruit have tree radical. Bridge also has tree radical because all bridge once made of wood. Building same thing. You see now?’

  ‘How many radicals are there?’ I asked.

  ‘More than two hundred you must learn.’

  More than two hundred! It had taken me so long to master two hundred characters, and I knew there were many more. Now he was telling me there was all this to learn on top of that. He must have seen my dismay.

  He tapped the table with his finger to concentrate my attention, as though he were beating time for yet another recitation of the Three Character Classic. ‘Most important to study radicals to understand Chinese,’ he said methodically. ‘Must know radicals to find words in dictionary. No alphabet in Chinese, you know. Not easy to do, but also not impossible. Must work hard to understand Chinese. Can you work hard?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said with as much resolve as I could muster.

  ‘Then you must remember this – the radical is the part of the word that help you to understand it.’

  This was a breakthrough in my appreciation of written Chinese and, as I was now beginning to realise, told me far more about the language than anything I had managed to yet grasp from the endless repetition of the Three Character Classic. As I was coming to grips with this insight, and already preparing to venture a question that might clarify even further, Uncle Beng Woo snorted loudly with contempt.

  ‘So … Wilmot says we have sowed the seeds of our own turmoil, ah?’

  Mr Ho shrugged and folded up his paper. ‘Perhaps he is right. Perhaps inevitable, lah.’

  ‘Not to me,’ Uncle Beng Woo said. ‘I was fighting to stop turmoil. When Japanese left, it stopped. Why start all over again? You start all over again. No point, lah. Even you see that now.’

  It was only a small gesture, a flick of the eyes, a momentary frown at Uncle Beng Woo, but Mr Ho stopped the conversation dead in its tracks. Uncle Beng Woo glanced at me with an equally fleeting startled look before quickly occupying himself with the study of his teacup.

  Both men now sipped their tea and said nothing.

  ‘Uncle Beng Woo,’ I said, ‘Uncle Hung Jeuk said I should ask you about when you were in the jungle. Were you a bandit once?’

  ‘Aiyah! Not bandit!’ Uncle Beng Woo said. ‘Fighting Japanese. Long time ago now.’

  ‘Not so long,’ Mr Ho said. ‘Even for you only six years.’

  ‘Young then,’ Uncle Beng Woo said. ‘Now old and useless.’

  ‘How old not matter. We swore oath. Oath is for life.’

  ‘Oath only to fight Japanese, lah. Not to be communist. We had freedom to fight for. Now we are free. Now they are just communists.’

  ‘Free?’ Mr Ho coughed. ‘We are not free. We have foreign masters.’

  ‘We Chinese are used to that,’ Uncle Beng Woo said. ‘Manchus, they rule China for hundreds of years. No matter. As long as they are not cruel, not barbaric like Japanese.’

  Mr Ho’s grey features were now scrunched up into a scowl. It was the first time I had ever seen real emotion on his face, as though here in his own home he was a different person to the disciplined teacher who visited our home.

  ‘We Chinese fought so long against Manchus,’ he said. ‘You want us to be surrender devils now? Gwai lo just say everyone against them is communist so they can use force and say it is not about freedom. But everyone is not communist. I am not communist any more, but I want freedom.’

  ‘Freedom again!’ Uncle Beng Woo said loudly. ‘When we fought Japanese we had three stars on our caps. Bintang tiga! One star for each race, lah. What do they have on their caps now? Bintang satu! One star, because everything only for Chinese now. No wonder the British cannot trust the Chinese!’

  By the end of his outburst Uncle Beng Woo was shouting. He slumped back in his chair.

  The anger faded from Mr Ho’s face. ‘Swear oath is for life,’ he said quietly. ‘Loyalty is for life.’ He coughed quietly again into his hand and calmly poured more tea, as though the argument had not even happened.

  I had never seen friends so angry with each other before. The whole situation needed some sort of explanation. ‘Why aren’t you fighting with those men now?’ I said to Mr Ho.

  ‘Too sick,’ he said. ‘Nothing good to eat all those years in jungle, now too sick. Too much elephant meat. Not good. Poison my blood.’

  ‘Eh, better than rat meat,’ said Uncle Beng Woo. ‘Elephant heart good to eat. One heart feed whole platoon.’

  ‘Rest like rubber,’ Mr Ho said, curling up his mouth in distaste. ‘Intestines tough like car tyre. Poison my blood.’

  ‘Were there gorillas with you in the jungle?’ I asked.

  Mr Ho coughed louder than ever and put down his teacup. ‘What gorillas?’

  ‘Uncle Hung Jeuk said there were gorillas with you in the jungle.’

  ‘She means guerrillas, lah,’ Uncle Beng Woo said. ‘Like rebels. Gwai lo call us that.’

  ‘Yes, gwai lo think we are monkeys,’ Mr Ho said, and both men laughed.

  Uncle Beng Woo stopped laughing
and twitched his nose. ‘I smell smoke,’ he said.

  I couldn’t see any smoke, but now that my nose had accustomed itself to the odour of medicinal herbs, I could certainly detect something new in the air. Out in the street I heard firecrackers. Yes, it was a burning smell, although I wouldn’t have thought it was from firecrackers. This time I was sure the sound itself was firecrackers – I knew what guns sounded like now. The two men went to the window and looked up at the sky through the airwell.

  ‘Must be fire,’ Uncle Beng Woo said.

  We went outside and saw black smoke swirling around the rooftops. Half a dozen houses away it poured from the roof above a tailor shop. A small crowd was gathering in the street, shouting and pointing. A man was letting off firecrackers along the five-foot way to scare off the fire demon.

  ‘Na Na’s house,’ Mr Ho said, and they hurried down to join the onlookers.

  A man hobbled from the front door, his arms around a spluttering grey-haired woman. An old man followed, bare-chested and holding a cloth to his face. They looked really upset and threw their arms around wildly, and only calmed down when two more men emerged from the shop, one pulling on a chain that was fastened to the leg of a big, black and reluctant dog, and the other coaxing the animal out the door from behind as best he could. At least, I thought it was a dog, but as they got it out onto the street and it sent people scattering, I could see it was heavier and had a much bigger head than any dog I had seen before.

  ‘Na Na’s bear,’ Mr Ho said as the clang of a fire engine rose above the shouts of the crowd, the snap of the firecrackers and the wail of the frightened animal.

  If it had been a serious fire the whole of Theatre Street could have gone up in smoke as the shophouses were all joined. But the firemen had it out within minutes and the smoke and the show were soon over. The old couple used fruit to coax their bear back into the shop, and the people in the crowd returned to their business.

  Mr Ho had been quite distressed during the incident and spent most of it trying to pacify the bear, although his persistent coughing just added to its alarm. Now he held onto Uncle Beng Woo’s shoulder and shuffled back to his room. The grey had darkened around his eyes and his whole face glistened with sweat. Uncle Beng Woo sat him down and gave him a glass of warm water, patting him on the shoulder as he drank it down. He coughed hard and hoicked into a little spittoon.