The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  ‘Aii, so much bad luck,’ he said as he wiped his forehead with his good morning towel. ‘Na Na they capture already, now mother’s house catch fire. Na Na has that bear since Japanese Time. Now people know bear is there, someone will kill it for paws.’

  ‘Not bad luck, lah,’ Uncle Beng Woo said. ‘You hear what they say … fire only in the roof. Warning to Na Na, must be. Their way to say tell police nothing.’

  By now I was transfixed. A Chinese with a bear for a pet? Could that really be? I had my geese, of course, and English families in Gopeng Road had their dogs … but a bear?

  ‘Who is Na Na?’ I said.

  They looked at each other. Neither seemed to be ready to give me an answer. Mr Ho now wiped his face with his bare hand, gripping his forehead and sliding it all the way down to his chin, and sighed. Finally it was Uncle Beng Woo who spoke.

  ‘We know Na Na since Japanese Time. Very brave fighter. Special friend of Toh Kei.’

  ‘Na Na should be one to get Military Cross,’ Mr Ho said. ‘Na Na did more to rescue Larkin from Japanese than Toh Kei or Shorty Mak.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Uncle Beng Woo snapped. ‘Everyone knows it was Toh Kei who led them. Anyway, no one got a medal. No matter now, lah.’

  ‘Good he doesn’t get medal,’ Mr Ho said. ‘He no hero. Hero never surrender. Hero never let woman tell him to surrender.’

  ‘Aiyah! Still so bitter, you,’ Uncle Beng Woo said. ‘So what else for him to do, hah? Malaria nearly kill him. You should know. He hide in her clinic so many months. Cannot go on. Almost die. Must go to hospital.’

  ‘Others also,’ Mr Ho said. ‘I see so many, but they do not give up.’ He sighed again and gazed at the ceiling. ‘I never surrender. You never surrender.’

  ‘But that was Japanese Time, lah,’ Uncle Beng Woo said. ‘Japanese will torture us, spike our heads on pole near clock tower. Now it is English. Different now.’

  ‘Not so different,’ Mr Ho said. ‘They will still kill Toh Kei. They still want his head.’

  25

  The guerrillas delivered me in a car to a house on a large plot of ground on the other side of the railway in Silibin. Three of them accompanied me, fully armed, to ensure there was to be no ‘funny business’ from the Japanese. I was told that the Emperor had surrendered and ordered all his forces to lay down their arms, but nobody was prepared to trust the obedience of these particular forces, cut off as they were so far away from home. All three guerrillas pointed their automatic rifles conspicuously from the windows, even Comrade Ah Kow who drove with only one hand on the wheel.

  The house was that of Dr Williams, a Eurasian surgeon I had met on occasion at Batu Gajah Hospital when I was resident there. Ah Kow explained that all the hospitals were still in the hands of the Japanese, and until they were removed this house would be where I would recuperate. I heard Dr Williams tell Ah Kow that they should set about removing the Japanese as soon as possible as a hospital was the only place I should be. I was already quite aware myself that was the situation.

  It was during my stay with Dr Williams that I began to realise how well known my case had become during my captivity. A steady stream of visitors called on me, many with gifts of food, fruit and even money, which I had to refuse. My arrest and incarceration, the terrible treatment the Japanese had meted out to a woman, my refusal to yield to their brutality, all this had apparently spread far and wide through the jungle telegraph. A delegation of townfolk from Papan brought my baby to me. As I write this now tears fill my eyes just to remember that wonderful moment when I held my little Paris once more.

  A birthday party was held around my bed. In Papan they had made a cake from tapioca flour with a single candle. I still say it was the most delicious cake I have ever tasted. They had raised money to buy Paris a gift – a gold bracelet with a tiny padlock that they fastened around his ankle to lock him to this life and prevent evil spirits from taking him. They were full of questions about my experiences, but reluctant to talk about events in Papan. After my arrest the town was badly treated by the Japanese and they were keen to put all that behind them now that the war was over.

  I did not see the guerrillas again. I said to Dr Williams that they must have their hands full with the Japanese. His face screwed up with concern as he said that it was not Japanese that they were now dealing with, but collaborators, and that the situation was quite grim. He said it wasn’t only the guerrillas who had that agenda. He said there had been an informer in Papan, and that was the reason I was arrested. I told him about the bottles of quinine, and how they had traced one found in the guerrilla camp back to me. He said he did not think that was possible, unless I specifically marked the bottles. He fetched a couple of bottles from his own cabinet and showed me – they were identical. I could not recall the batch number, but he said that was no doubt merely support for the information they had received from the informer. I asked if he knew who this person was. He didn’t know, but he said that after the surrender of the Japanese became known and the guerrillas came down from the hills, the townfolk ‘took care of him’.

  He said he hoped the British would hurry up and return before the definition of ‘collaborator’ extended to ordinary people who had simply spent the war trying to get on with their lives. He told me that Toh Kei had inquired after me and was anxious that I should receive the best treatment possible. Who was Toh Kei, I asked, for that was a name I had not heard, either among the guerrillas before I was arrested or during the Japanese interrogation. He told me that was the name of the local guerrilla leader. I soon gathered that Toh Kei was the real name of the man I called Bintang.

  I was in Dr Williams’ care for nearly two weeks before the British came for me. A medical officer arrived with an ambulance and finally transported me, together with my baby, to the hospital in Ipoh. We did not leave it for three months.

  I was told I was a ‘hero of the Empire’. A newspaper story at the time even went so far as to hail me as the ‘Edith Cavell of Malaya’. The British and the guerrillas at this particular time did not agree on much, but it appeared that my obstinacy, taken by them as heroism, was some form of common ground. It was from the British that I finally learned the actual name of my friend, Bintang. They told me that ‘Toh Kei’ was a kind of nickname he was using, and that he was actually Liew Ek Ching, a schoolteacher from Taiping. A schoolteacher! My husband and my mother had both been schoolteachers. Was that the reason I found myself somehow drawn to this character, or was it simply that he had been my liberator? I admit to having very confused emotions at this time, although I don’t suppose that is surprising after what I had been through. There was another hero of the resistance who went by a nom-de-guerre. Mak Chin Wah was now revelling in the name Shorty, which I had given him. Apparently he approved.

  Eventually, some time after I was finally released from hospital, there was a ceremony and I was awarded the British Empire Medal. A silver coin on a red ribbon, this was my memento for six months staring into the abyss. That, and numerous scars, a limp, and an irritating case of haemorrhoids, courtesy of Sergeant Sadist’s expertise with electricity.

  26

  PARIS

  The National Film Theatre had a screening of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. I had planned to go in any event, and thought Su-Lin might enjoy it. She had not seen it. She had never heard of Mr Ozu. She said she was interested in films as a child in Malaya but they had lost their appeal when she went to London as a student. Films were just one of the many extravagances of her childhood she could no longer afford when she left home, she said.

  We met at a bar tucked away under the Waterloo Bridge. In the twenty minutes or so that we had to spare before the film began she finished two glasses of red wine, while I warned her what to expect. I told her that Mr Ozu was one of the most influential of all film directors and my own personal favourite. She made a flippant remark about Bollywood and seemed surprised when I said I knew virtually nothing about Indian films. I am not enthusiastic for singing and dan
cing, I said, especially in organised collectives. Mr Ozu is the antithesis of that. His films are simple, reticent, slow to reveal. The camera never moves and the characters only when they have to. No drama, and certainly no melodrama – real family stories, about relationships between the generations. Especially about balance, which was what had set me thinking she would be interested in the first place. Everything has to be in balance, she had said to me in the gardens, which was quite what the gardens were. Mr Ozu is about seeking balance in the human soul and imbalance in the ego.

  She expressed surprise that I should be so taken with Japanese films after …

  She did not complete the sentence, allowing it to be submerged in another mouthful of wine, but I knew what she wanted to say. After what they had done to my mother. Tokyo Story, the film we were about to see, was made in 1953, I said, avoiding an answer to her uncompleted question. Mr Ozu began making films in the silent era, I went on, but his best came after the war. She said nothing for a moment, and I knew she was waiting for an explanation, even if she could not ask for it.

  In spite of everything, I told her, my mother did not hate the Japanese. The despair that engulfed her final years was not because of them. I never heard her say a bad word about them as a race of people, or even the individuals responsible for her suffering. I was too young to understand anything of it, and just when I had reached an age when I might have found myself curious, she was gone. The first time she told me anything of it was in the written document she left behind for me.

  Su-Lin inclined her head and appeared to be weighing up the matter. I told her that Mr Ozu had spent much of the war in Singapore, originally under orders to make propaganda films in Burma for the Japanese army, but the war started to go against them and that never happened. By then it was surrounded, cut off, with the Americans on one side and the British on the other, and he could not get back to Japan. He filled his days watching captured American films. Perhaps their influence was a reason his best came after the war. His favourite was Citizen Kane, I said, but Tokyo Story is a better film than Citizen Kane and was even based on another American film called Make Way for Tomorrow. She said she had seen none of them.

  I said he also spent his time in Singapore drinking too much. He was a drunk, I said, and people these days leave bottles of wine and whisky for him on his grave in Japan. I thought I was none too subtle about the remark, but she did not react.

  I told her that Mr Ozu never married or went to university or worked in a factory, and yet his films were all about married people, students and factory workers. She shrugged and said that one did not need to thrust one’s hand into a flame to know that it would be painful. She said she was no terrorist, and yet she knew enough about it through discovery to defend them in a court of law under rigorous examination. I said that I thought the whole point in the Tariq case was that they were not terrorists. Precisely, she said.

  I asked her if her experience of family life had been happy. She shrugged and said that it had been happy as a child in the early years, although there were disappointments as she grew up. That was fortunate in a way, she said, because it prepared her for the more acute disappointments of adulthood. I said that such experiences would determine how she reacted to the film. It was a reconstruction of family life, I said. It puts you inside the house. The camera angles are low to the ground, like a Japanese kneeling on a tatami mat. From there you will have a window on a real world, a balanced world.

  A real world, a balanced world, she repeated, and added that it sounded like a contradiction in terms.

  No matter what our experience of family life is, I said, we all face the sadness of time passing.

  I just wanted to prepare her for it.

  27

  SU-LIN

  Of all the film industries in the world with which Paris should be so enamoured, surely the Japanese must be the most unlikely. In spite of what he said before we went into the cinema about his mother’s commendable absolution of the nation and its people, I was not convinced. It had to be because of that, I thought, not in spite of it. Because he was trying to understand, to come to a point where he could make sense of that entire insane episode in history that was the Second World War, and his own, his father’s, and most especially his mother’s tragic part in it. Until some semblance of a meaning is found, how is it possible to forget, let alone forgive?

  He did his best to convince me about his favourite director (whom he insisted on referring to as ‘Mister’) and his film, but it was hard going for me. Hard going because for the entire two hours I found myself so preoccupied with analysing Paris that there was little time for the film itself. It just seemed so obvious why he was attached to it. He had never experienced family life. No father, a bitter (it appeared then, in spite of his denials) mother, no parents at all from such a young age, and what came after that I was yet to discover. No wonder he was curious about my own comparatively normal early experience.

  And here was a film about family life. Real family life, just as he said it would be. It had me recalling a film I had seen a lifetime ago and half a world away. In fact, the last film I had seen with Paris Thumboo. This Happy Breed, it was called, about an English family. I had not seen it since I was a child, but I thought at the time that was real family life for that family also, and I recall that it was in colour. This black and white Japanese story was more real, if such a thing is possible, because it never seemed to be happy for a moment. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Tolstoy famously said, and this one was without the drama one expects of such a situation in a film. In this there was no drama at all. No plot, no heroes, no villains, just the sadness of time passing, as he said. And passing so slowly.

  This colourless Tokyo story was a melancholy story, and that was what I now realised I could see in those compelling green eyes of his – melancholy. ‘Isn’t life disappointing,’ one of the characters said in the film, and I am sure that if I had turned my head to Paris at that moment, I would have seen him nodding grimly.

  He said the camera angles were low, from the perspective of a Japanese kneeling on a mat. It takes you into the room, he said. Yes, it did do that. But I was sure that for him it was the appropriate angle because it was also a child’s perspective. A child who was in the room with those adults, watching events unfold, trying to come to terms with what ‘home’ and ‘family’ could possibly mean.

  My father was very busy over the weeks before the trial began, buried among his law books in the study and scratching away in exercise books. Those exercise books were the same type as we used at school, but his fountain pen was a special one our mother gave him when he first became Uncle Raja’s partner, which was before I was born. She bought it duty-free in Penang, yet another triumph of wisdom over dogma, obviously. I was not allowed to touch that pen, not that I had many opportunities as it was usually clipped inside his shirt pocket, the little blue diamond on its cap glinting and tempting me. If I found it lying on his desk I could take the opportunity to look at it, circling around the desk to study its luminous hooped barrel from different angles, its two-tone nib, its golden arrow clip.

  It was a Parker Vacumatic, which was a word I could not find in any dictionary, and so was well aware that this was something special, even if the blue diamond on the cap was not really a diamond at all. Pa told me it was just blue enamel in the shape of a diamond. He said the people who made Parker pens called it a diamond to make the pen seem more precious, because diamonds were the most valuable stone in the world. I said that didn’t seem honest, but he said it was just a harmless trick and everybody knew that it wasn’t really a diamond – the Parker people and the people who bought their pens. He had said all that to me some time before, but now I knew that he called it a harmless trick because they were words a little girl could comprehend. Now I was eight, with a far wider vocabulary, and I knew what the diamond that was actually just enamel really was: propaganda.

  Because he was so busy my father always had th
ings on his mind. In his office he spent more time than ever gazing at the white wall, sometimes for what seemed an age. I told him what I had learned about Na Na being Toh Kei’s special friend. He asked me where I had heard such a thing and I said Uncle Beng Woo told me, and then watched as he took out his Parker Vacumatic and wrote a note. I asked him who wanted to put Toh Kei’s head on a spike by the clock tower. Who could do such a horrible thing, I asked, Mr Davies or the judge? Pa said nobody wanted to do anything of the sort. He waited for Uncle Beng Woo to return to the office and went outside with him. When they came back Uncle Beng Woo was red in the face and Pa said I was not to go with him on his rounds any more.

  As we were driving home that night I asked him what Uncle Beng Woo had done wrong. ‘He talks too much,’ Pa said. I asked him if Uncle Beng Woo had told him about the fire and the bear. ‘Mr Ho said it was Na Na’s bear,’ I said. Pa said nothing so I came straight out with what was really puzzling me: ‘Why does Na Na have a bear?’

  ‘Na Na found the bear in the jungle when it was a cub,’ he said. ‘Poachers had killed its mother.’

  ‘Did the poachers kill the bear’s mother for its paws?’

  ‘Could be,’ he said, and I noticed that although he was looking straight ahead at the road and there were no obstacles in our path, no wayward bicycles or slow bullock carts, either of which could sometimes cause his mood to change temporarily, his face closed up into a frown.