The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  TOH KEI FREED, GUNNED DOWN is what it said. ‘Gunned down’ was the term they preferred to use in the newspaper when bandits, or bad hats, which is what they customarily called criminals who were not communists, were shot.

  The photograph was of Toh Kei sprawled on the ground and gazing up to the sky, like he was searching for the Holy Ghost. There were other smaller photos of Mr Ho in my father’s old white shirt being held by police, and of the courthouse with a big X marked on the steps, but I was not in the mood to read about the SHOCKING EVENTS in the paper.

  Mei scanned the front page and turned to the inside, reading every word aloud. And then she squealed. ‘Mr Yew! Look!’ She spread the paper on the table.

  GOLD DIGGER YEW KILLED IN BATU GAJAH

  Mr Yew was not important, like a High Commissioner, and was neither a bandit nor a bad hat. He was an informer, my father said, and it seemed that in the language of the newspapers, when informers were assassinated by being gunned down, they were simply KILLED.

  As he drove us to Penang that morning, he told us what had happened to Mr Yew, and it was simply that Shorty Mak had caught up with him. He said Mr Yew had a sundry shop in Batu Gajah before the Japanese Time, but one day the Japanese took him in for questioning. They released him the next day, which was unusual as most people were questioned for weeks before they were lucky enough to be released, if they were released at all. Soon after that the Japanese rounded up lots of men all over Perak and these men were never seen again. As it turned out, they were the anti-Japanese spies that Mr Larkin had referred to in court, the ones that the British had been relying on to provide the intelligence required for their aborted invasion of Malaya.

  By the end of the Japanese Time Mr Yew not only had a sundry shop in Batu Gajah to his name, he had tin mines and was a rich man.

  Pa said the anti-Japanese army never forgot about Mr Yew, always suspected him of being the informer, but they lost track of him because he sold up everything and changed his name. He was known as Eu Siew Lam in those days, but became Albert Yew. When the story of him digging up his garden for Japanese gold appeared in the paper, it printed his full name, and Shorty Mak saw it.

  ‘Mr Yew was the reason the British could not come back to Malaya until after the Japanese surrender,’ Pa said. ‘It was just a matter of time before they found him.’

  Poor Mr Yew. He didn’t seem such a bad man. I liked his peculiar hats and his funny way of talking. He always made sure Kebun gave me food for my geese and allowed us to enjoy the fruit from his garden. So much work had he done and all he found was a heap of empty sake bottles.

  ‘Perhaps the judge was right,’ I said to Pa. ‘He said that if you dig for gold you have to dig deep. Poor Mr Yew just didn’t know that. He knew about digging up tin, but not about gold.’

  Mei asked Pa why he had not done something about Mr Yew if he knew who he was, but he said he thought Mr Yew was just a retired tin miner, like everyone else thought. ‘But all that you knew about him in the war and being an informer,’ Mei said, ‘none of that was in the paper.’

  ‘No,’ said Pa. ‘Mr Ho told me that part. Mr Ho has been charged with murder. Now there is someone else we have to help.’

  PART 3

  FINDINGS

  45

  SU-LIN

  Over our picnic in the Temple Gardens I had said to Paris that growing up means moving on, that you have to become what you are. He made light of the comment by accusing me of being a lover of Nietzsche, which is surely no bad thing. Perhaps he also recognised in me an unlikely character to be offering such advice. I know I grew up markedly in 1951, its events and its people leaving, as my father once said, their big marks. But how much had I really grown since that topsy-turvy year? Had my life’s pattern then been made, the girl delivering the woman, as the Jesuits would have it?

  Perhaps that is what Paris also recognised in me: a fellow traveller along the road to freedom from the influences of early dramas, two people yet to truly become what we are, seeking that elusive path to achieving it. Unable to move beyond our junk history.

  Ah Mun Cheir once told me that we have three souls when we die – one for the body, one to pass through the Ten Courts of Chinese Hell, and one for the ancestral tablet to be placed in either the clan temple or son’s family home. After the events outside the court, I was sure that Toh Kei’s first soul was in the hospital with the cold blood. The second, was it already in hell?

  Although he was not guilty of the terrible events at Sungai Siput, were there other murders that meant he had to face the Chamber of Pounding? And if what Uncle Beng Woo once said was right, that Toh Kei had disobeyed his father, that was a sin against filial piety and so there was the Chamber of Ice to brave as well.

  I imagined him at the gates of hell, and sitting up high behind a big bench was the Jade Emperor wearing the biggest wig in heaven and drawing a line down the centre of a sheet of paper. On one side he wrote ‘Guilty’ and on the other ‘Not Guilty’, and then he said ‘Order as prayed’, and Toh Kei had to explain himself without any assistance from my father. Perhaps that was what Judge Pretheroe meant with his pretentious call to order. I thought about those three words – ‘Order as prayed’. If I really wanted to help Toh Kei, now must be the time to pray for him. I didn’t know any Latin to impress the Jade Emperor, but as he was Chinese and not English, I didn’t think that would count against me.

  One night soon after the trial, when I was alone in my room, I got down on my knees, knocked my forehead on the floor three times, and held my hands together.

  ‘A man is like a tree, and every one has his root. To understand a man you have to understand his root. We call this his radical, your lordship. Beneath it all, Toh Kei was a man who had a mind to make things better.’

  There was still the matter of his third soul, the one in the ancestral tablet. Ah Mun Cheir said clan temples were for honourable ancestors, the kind that became doctors and lawyers and legislative councillors, so I didn’t think Toh Kei would ever have a tablet in the Liew clan temple, even if he was once Britain’s most trusted warrior in Malaya, and he had left no sons, so where did his third soul go? And that was when I became certain there was a connection between Toh Kei and my little brother.

  A Chinese baby is never named after someone else. A Chinese baby has his own name, and that name should not even be spoken during the first month of a precious boy baby’s life for fear ghosts might hear it and spirit him away. Being traditional and having waited so long for a boy, my mother did not once mention our new brother’s name for that month, calling him only ‘Baby’. Pa did not hold to those old beliefs and told us his name would be Ka Wei, which means Clan Leader, because one day he would be the leader of the family. When I heard that I thought it was so close to Toh Kei and what it meant that it could not merely be one of my father’s coincidences. As far as I was concerned, because Ka Wei had been born just hours after Toh Kei died, the soul could simply have been passed on. It made perfect sense.

  I did not tell anyone about this, as I was afraid of the commotion it would cause if my mother heard such a thing. With Ka Wei’s arrival she had stopped being angry with us and even misplaced her rotans. I found out later that it was a complicated delivery and Ma would not be able to have any more children, not even a girl to inherit my doll and tea set, but as she had given my father his son, I think she was probably privately grateful she would not have to endure that any more.

  Over time I came to accept that Ka Wei was his own person and not the person I wanted him to be. Mr Ho must have experienced a similar process of grief. We had both wanted Toh Kei to be the Black Whirlwind, the mighty warrior who was loyal to the end, although Mr Ho had obviously wanted it even more than I. They had been teachers together at the same school before the Japanese Time, and Mr Ho had followed him from there into the mountains, by his side on the water margins of legend, fighting against the dark forces of the Japanese, not with axes but with Webley revolvers. As Mr Larkin said about th
ose times, perhaps they were the best years of Mr Ho’s life, too.

  Sometimes, thinking about Toh Kei in that way could fill my heart with sorrow and set me off crying, because that was when I truly realised he was gone. Everyone thought it was a reaction to the Shocking Event, although my father knew there was more to it. He would hear me sobbing in my room and he’d come in quietly and sit on my bed and stroke my back. Only once did he say something. The other times he simply comforted me until it passed. The time he spoke he said, ‘The Chinese say that a child’s life is like a piece of paper on which every passerby leaves a mark. Toh Kei left a big mark as he passed.’

  Pa never did get a chance to help Mr Ho. He died in prison before a trial could even be arranged. ‘Not too much elephant meat,’ Uncle Beng Woo said to me then. ‘Too much bitterness.’ I thought about all those afternoons Mr Ho had spent helping me to understand Chinese language, culture and history by teaching me the Three Character Classic. The first verse, the one he had suddenly explained to me the day he felt I had finally mastered two hundred characters, says, ‘Men at their birth are naturally good, their natures are similar, their habits become different.’ The Mr Ho I knew then was naturally good. Somewhere along the line his habits became different. He became an angry spirit, Ma said, and once your spirit is angry it takes a powerful force to change it. If anyone would know about such things, I thought, it would be my mother, who was so powerfully changed herself by the arrival of little Ka Wei.

  Mr Ho left another mark on me. He said that the radical is the part of the word that helps you to understand it, and I have never forgotten that. Sometimes I think he didn’t really mean to say ‘word’. Sometimes his English could just let him down. What I think he meant to say was the radical was the part of the world that helps you to understand it.

  For Mr Ho, Toh Kei was that radical. When Toh Kei gave it all up, the guns and the fighting and the struggle, when he decided he just wanted to be an ordinary man with an ordinary home and family, Mr Ho simply did not understand any more, and his disappointment must have overwhelmed him.

  That was one lesson I learned from Mr Ho that was not drummed into me by saying it a hundred times. It was a lesson I had to think about, had to work hard to understand, as he had charged me to do. When I did I came to the realisation that I had a radical, too. A root from which I grew.

  The heart radical is a part of all words to do with the emotions in Chinese – grief, disappointment and, of course, love – and in Chinese the abstract heart and the abstract mind are inseparable. Like Toh Kei, my father had a mind to make things better. He made me better that year, because striving to be like him, to look for the best in other people, was to strive to be the best person I could be myself.

  One day even the heart.

  That was the poetry that was lurking for me in the Chinese characters Mr Ho taught me. And the poetry in my father.

  Soon after the monsoon season passed, Mr Larkin became Uncle John. Pa said he would have made a good Commissioner of Police to replace Mr Gregg, who was recalled to London soon after the trial, but his last act with those eyes that could see in the dark was to catch the High Commissioner’s butler, who was a communist spy and had passed on the information that led to the ambush of Sir Henry Gurney. Uncle John was awarded another medal for that. He did not get any medals for his appearance at Toh Kei’s trial, even though Pa said that was the bravest act of his career. It seemed to me that what he did in court that day was pro bono – he did it just because it was right, and he would not have wanted any medal.

  That year was the worst of the Emergency. It took another nine, but eventually the British managed to get on top in the struggle against the communists because, as Uncle Hung Jeuk always said, it was simply inevitable when there were a hundred thousand men fighting just a few thousand in the jungle. And as he also said, the tuans had to give Malaya back to its people. Our family lived through all that. My father continued to fight for causes he believed in, to stand up to authority when he thought it needed standing up to, and then became part of the authority himself when he was made a judge in the new independent Malaysia. The Toh Kei trial was the first time I saw him in court, but certainly not the last. Whenever I saw him up there behind his big bench, now with the Malaysian coat of arms above him on the wall, I understood the truth in the saying that the past is a foreign country, because he certainly did do things differently. I never heard him say anything pompous like ‘order as prayed’, never saw him get angry with a lawyer, never felt that, even in his judge’s wig, he ever stopped being the radical of the days when he wore the barrister’s style that he had worked so hard for. The one he presented to me when I received my own call to the Bar and became a coincidence like Dr Mrs Thumboo.

  Sahm Ji Ging, my Three Character Classic geese, never did end up as part of a New Year feast. We kept them for years and we all learned to enjoy their eggs for breakfast. And I never completed the Three Character Classic. Like my sisters I lost interest about halfway, so I never learned what Mr Ho said was the Eternal Truth that was in it. I came close, though. Not to the thousand or more words, but to a truth that I thought was as eternal as any other. I learned it, like most things I learned then, from my father.

  One day, when he was again trying to explain the Emergency that dragged on after Toh Kei’s death, he told me something similar to what he used to say to my mother when she was upset by the situation. It was like he was saying, ‘It’s not as bad as all that, Tow See,’ but what he really said was better than that because it was not just to make me feel better, it was to make me think.

  ‘Not all communists are terrorists,’ he said to me, ‘and not all terrorists are communists. Not all men are like Shorty Mak and not all men are like Toh Kei. Nothing is all bad or all good. It’s like the symbol of yin and yang. Even in the blackest part there is a spot of white, and in the whitest there is a spot of black, and that is the way the world is.’

  He was right, of course. Even though I was only eight years old, I understood that was the way the world was, and he was the part that helped me to understand it.

  So here I am – fifty-three years from the year that so affected me. I have done my best to move on from its influence, but it is that year’s events, and their aftermath, that I can still feel binding me. Just eight years old and I knew what I wanted to be. The trouble is, that was all I wanted. I gave up my dolls and my tea sets for study, and I began by studying my father. But it was also the time I felt he stopped watching me, that he ceased thinking of me as his little girl and began to see me as just a daughter. And that was when the yearning began.

  Because I was so confident in the closeness of the relationship I had with him, closer than either of my sisters, I was acutely sensitive to any change. Surely there can be no greater change in a family than the arrival of a baby, and in a Chinese family that is magnified greatly with the arrival of the first son. It was not only my mother who was so powerfully affected by the presence in our midst of little Ka Wei, and I can only describe the sensation that gradually washed over me as a form of abandonment. Of course, my father did no such thing. The differences were far more subtle than that, but the trust that I had in the relationship was compromised when I could only but constantly compare the love apportioned to me, and that so lavished on the only son. My yearning was for a return to what I once had.

  That was when I really buried my head in my plans to ‘move on, become what I am’. I was going to be a lawyer, and I can see now that was the extent of it. I can also see that, while moving on, part of me never did – the part that was, even now, still yearning.

  46

  I do not need to detail the circumstances of the trial or what occurred following it. The newspapers dealt with all that at length; word for word, in fact. I am also sure I do not need to explain the effect that it had on me. Grief is lost love, and my life was overtaken by that loss from then until now. The rest of my life filled with it, my every waking moment no more than a single tho
ught away from it and its devastating influence. Mr Tan said in his final address that the heavens would fall, and that part of his speech echoes for me daily. The heavens fell, leaving me with little but a hell on earth mitigated only by the presence of my darling boy.

  One thing the newspapers did not report was the identity of the man who took Toh Kei from me. Yes, his name was given as Ho Chun Wing, but what they failed to understand was that he had another name; in fact, the only one I knew him by – Minum. That Minum could have done such a thing, committed such a betrayal, only intensified my grief. I have heard that before he himself died in prison while awaiting his own trial, he fell back on his religion. Whether that was for forgiveness or understanding I am not to know, but how could I react to that bit of news except with cynicism? The folk tales of faith, the magic spells of prayers and chants were suggested as comfort to me on occasion over recent years, and I know such advice was offered with good intention, but so many others wished me to hell that the weight of numbers against me in heaven, even if there were such a place, would have my lone voice overwhelmed.

  So now I am soon to discover the great truth – that we are, or are not, merely simple accretions of matter and energy, our emotions and our spirits strictly ephemeral. I would be happy to find it if I could somehow leave such knowledge to my son, to give him the key to a fulfilling life that proved to be beyond me but for a short time. No such legacy is possible. All I have to leave him is the dubious wisdom I have managed to muster over a mere forty years of life. I have made arrangements for him to be supported by Mr K. C. Tan, who has provided assistance for me in all ways, in spite of my circumstances and the bitterness publicly directed at me, and for a place in the home of his clerk, Mr Beng Woo. However, it is the dubious wisdom that I urge him to consider as my legacy.