Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

“Do you know anyone who lives there?”

  The jade man nodded. “Chungking is made up of hundreds of apartments. Each day tenants let rooms to tourists of modest means. Traffic to and fro is madness.”

  They drank tea at a small café in the alley of merchants. To their left was a tiny park for their eyes to rest upon. To their right, balconies climbing a wall.

  Keo glanced up. “There’s a woman on the eighth floor—” As he said it, she stepped out and hung up dishcloths “There! I need to talk to her.”

  The jade man gazed upwards, holding a cigarette between his third and fourth finger like a mandarin. He exhaled slowly. A wreath of smoke trembled and lingered.

  He studied Keo. “You are . . . a spy?”

  “A spy! I’m from the islands of Hawai‘i, a U.S. territory.”

  “Ah. American spy. Just now there is much tension in Kowloon. Important people here have fled Red China. Communist agents follow them. Maybe you follow the agents? Maybe she is hiding an agent in her room. Why else would you want a poor old Chinese woman?”

  The woman disappeared; Keo stirred his oolong tea and brooded. “You see, I think I know her.”

  The jade man saw his sorrow and looked away. There was so much wretchedness in the world, it made him weary. He wanted the well-dressed brown stranger to make him laugh, tell him a tale about caprice.

  He leaned forward languidly. “You have stood in this alley many times, neh? She has seen you. If she wanted to speak to you, she would make a sign.”

  “She may be running . . . out of shame.”

  The jade man smiled. “No one runs in Kowloon. No one is that free. Perhaps if she talks to you, she will die.”

  “No! I came to help her.”

  “Many things begin in charity . . . and end in death.”

  Keo rubbed his eyes, trying to be patient. “I’m not a spy. I’m looking for my fiancée, she may have been taken in the war, imprisoned. . . .”

  He mentioned the sex-slave camps.

  The jade man shredded the corpse of his cigarette.

  “I know of these women. Many are dead.” He blinked slowly. “What do you want, if this woman is your sweetheart? To assume her suffering?”

  “No matter what happened, I love her.”

  “And do you think that, after this, she could love you, or any man? Be near a man? Think, my friend, only think. Is it love you feel? Or is your pride too great to adjust itself to a normal woman? Must you have your martyr?”

  Keo gazed at him, remembering what war had done to his people. “How indulgent I must seem. Forgive me. I just can’t accept that she is dead. I don’t know how to live without her.”

  The jade man rose, bowing slightly. Then unaccountably he smiled. “I avoid sentiment as a rule. Ahhh, perhaps we Chinese are too fatalistic. Romantic love is a novelty to people of arranged marriages. Come and see me in a week.”

  That night Keo rode Star Ferry back and forth across Victoria Harbor. Fog hung like broth, yet he could see the lanterns of thousands of Chinese junks swaying in the wake of Coast Guard gunboats. Along the docks under street lamps woolly with moths, coolies lay sprawled and snoring in postures of death. Signs hung from their chests upon which were written the Chinese character for HUNGER. Smelling their wasted bodies, he was thrown back to Shanghai. A different city. Yet the same.

  He leaned from the ferry, the smell of sewage and petrol burning his nostrils. A bloated sheepdog floated by, glowing like phosphorus. Around it ragged strands of garbage formed a bouncing, watery calligraphy. The letters seemed to spell DEFEAT. DEFEAT. In that moment terror pressed against his loins. If Sunny had survived, and if he found her, could she bear him?

  That night in his modest hotel, he lay back on sheets smelling of cinnamon, letting a quietness come into him. He was tired, there was too much of the sooty world invading him. He turned on his side, remembering how she slept that way, her spine so vulnerable.

  . . . Is she sleeping now? Does she know peace? Is there somewhere a quiet room? And in that room, does she lie watching light touch partly open shutters? Do the hours console her? Does she recall that Paris winter, how we softly lashed each other in snow, and sweat, and sorrow. . . .

  HE SAT IN KING’S PARK WHERE THE JADE MAN HAD DIRECTED him, smelling the ripe smells of Kowloon. He heard the human din of uphill ladder-streets—tiny alleys where beggar-masters measured stubs, where men and pliers made dentist shops out of thin air, where blind hair-collectors dragged their fingers following itinerant barbers. In the distance, ten-foot sheets of noodles hung drying on lines between shanties. The clack of mah-jongg tiles on stone tables, hiss of fish frying in woks.

  A large bleeding pig with human legs floated past him. Keo looked again. A delivery man wearing the disemboweled pig over his head, so its body dripped blood down his churning legs. Nearby, an old man on a bench rocked something squidlike in a baby carriage. The thing sat up, bulbous head glowing, its long-lashed slit eyes blinking slowly. A slithery tentacle suckered the air. Keo thought it waved. A woman passed with wooden legs whose shoes were pointed backwards. He felt he was sitting in a nightmare.

  A ghost sat down beside him, asking for a cigarette. The man was white from head to foot. Eyebrows, hair, fingernails, clothes, sandals, even the crevices of his ears, the hairs in his nose. Only the whites of his eyes were yellow. He blew his nose in his hand, expelling white powder.

  Keo had heard of the Flour Ghosts, refugees fleeing Red China. Kept as prisoners in Walled City kennels by greedy Kowloon landlords, they earned rice meals by making white-flour noodles day and night. Half-starved and diseased when they reached Kowloon, within weeks their lungs were mildewed, hung with flour. Most suffocated to death. Keo gave the Flour Ghost his cigarettes and several dollars. The man bowed repeatedly and tottered off, leaving the smell of incipient rot.

  Then all receded. Keo froze as the woman from Chungking Mansion sat down beside him.

  She spoke in cautious English. “Mr. Ten, the jade man, asked me to come.”

  “Forgive me,” he said. “You looked so much like . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I am not your sweetheart. But I find it interesting. I was . . . one of them.”

  He was silent, wanting to lie down at her feet. Then he said, “I know what happened. To all of you.”

  “You can never know. But how did you select me from all of Kowloon?”

  “I was searching. I . . . saw something in your face. There’s so much I don’t understand.”

  She sighed. “. . . I was sixteen and very poor. Japanese scouts came to my school in South Korea, 1941. I volunteered to go with them to Osaka, to work in a steel factory and send money home. I never saw Osaka. They shipped forty of us to Okinawa, then Saipan. We were used as sex slaves until Japan surrendered. After two years in hospital for syphilis, and tuberculosis, I finally went home. People spat on me. Father locked the door. Now, I am here in Kowloon.”

  “How do you live?”

  “Military assistance from your government. I brew my nightly potions on a hot plate. I crush my powders, mix my ointments. Without medication I will die.”

  In the sun’s surgical glare, her hair was like white spiders, her skin entirely bleached of color. She wore dark glasses. Her dress and shoes extremely neat. There were her hands, and there were her feet, all in their proper locations. Yet she moved cautiously, like a mechanical doll carefully reconstructed. Not so much a woman as the memory of a woman.

  “And, are you all alone? No husband? No companion?”

  Her face hardened into fissured rock. Something went through her like fire.

  She inhaled, moving away from him. “I came to see you for your sweetheart. I hope she is at peace.”

  Carefully he pulled out a wrinkled snapshot. Sunny, in loafers and bobby socks.

  “Did you ever hear the name Sun-ja Sung?”

  She looked at the snapshot and shook her head. “They erased our names, gave us Japanese names. They erased everything. In t
hat way we were left alive, yet perfectly disposed of.”

  Keo leaned forward slightly. “I don’t think I understand.”

  “Shame is more deadly than a bullet. A soldier rapes. The woman won’t speak of it. Ever. That’s why we do not talk about P-girl prisons, ‘comfort stations.’ There were hundreds of thousands of women used, maybe millions. Who will ever know the number? Yet Jap soldiers got off free. Not one convicted of rape during the war trials. Where were the victims? The witnesses? We were too ashamed. That’s what was so brilliant about it, you see.”

  “I am so sorry. Is there something I can do?”

  “Leave us. Leave us alone. We have nothing left for you.”

  She walked into the day, a woman not thirty, looking sixty. He wanted to call after her to be brave, to not lose heart. He wanted to promise that in time she would mend. All he could do was sit there, praying God would grant her the precious ability to forget.

  That night he stared at the snapshot, imagining Sunny prematurely old. Or dead. If she had died, somewhere there must have been a singing out, for she had been so out of the ordinary, so filled with wonderment at living. She had been the bright torch of a burning match glowing in his hand. And when the hand began to close, dimming the brightness, choking the flame, she had reeled away from him into chaos.

  KE KNE JACARANDA

  Jacaranda Man

  HE CAME BACK RAW. HE SAT ALONE IN DESOTO’S CANOE, THINKING of ways to kill himself. Weeks passed, a month of nightmares, of jumping awake in oily sweats. And then, a midnight humming, his fingers tapping, restless. A phantom trumpet like a smart, stiff pet. He went back to blowing horn. The only way he understood anything at all.

  By the early 1950s he was sitting in with big-name bands passing through Honolulu en route to Asia—the Dorsey Brothers, Ellington, Count Basie. Listening to trumpeters like Harry “Sweets” Edison and Roy Eldridge reminded Keo he wasn’t genius, he was only very good. But folks still called him Hula Man, he was still worldly in their eyes. There were rumors he had lost his sweetheart in the war. Some said he had been a spy.

  He was forty-two, though he looked younger. But he seemed older—slowed down in person, in conversation. Yet when he blew his horn, folks closed their eyes and listened. The war was still fresh within them, everyone knew pain. Keo still knew how to ride that pain in ways they connected to, in spite of critics who said his trumpeting had gone soft, he had gone soft, his jazz wasn’t pioneering anymore.

  Bebop was becoming the new jazz, advanced by musicians who loved contrast and paradox, even if it sounded ugly. Bebop was mental and jagged, a dizzying alchemy of shock and clamor. Those who followed it looked on Keo and his generation as men to be respected but not imitated. Listening to the new sounds, sometimes he was tempted to stride over the boundary into bop, but it wasn’t in him. His trumpet was a diving board, the thing he sprang off of in order to soar, transcend the given formulas. He wasn’t built to snarl and rage, blowing desperate, gritty measures of what Oogh called jazz du jour.

  Sometimes when he played, he let go in a way that was magisterial. He didn’t have to take huge chances, didn’t have to reach that far. There was sorrow and lostness in his trumpeting, crowds grew quiet, looking down. He kept on blowing, bleeding up the scales into the highest registers. One night, playing “There Are Such Things,” his sound was so pure, it erased the audience. It was like a blade of light lifting him until he hung suspended.

  Though he was older now, he was still larger than anyone playing in Honolulu at that time. Young horn men still came, wanting secrets, shortcuts. All he gave them was riddles.

  “Be careful who you give your music to. There are things you can’t take back.”

  Some nights he stared into mirrors, gauging the years, the wear and tear. He was still an enigmatic man, full lips and nose distinctly Polynesian, not quite handsome, not quite plain. He had fleshed out again, but swimming kept his body fit, so that he was muscular in a slender way. Dark skin unlined, curly black hair now faintly threaded gray.

  And he was still a gentle man, courteous to the point of old-fashionedness. Still an impeccable dresser, his suits and shirts custom-made by Malia Designs. Women were drawn to him because there was something intensely physical about him. Not just the callused, slightly gangsterish lip, but also a suggestion of barely reined-in temper, seductive and menacing. A potent energy, a bottled storm, that exploded only when he played.

  Malia felt women were attracted to his aloofness, his distance. The only time he relaxed and showed his softer side was with her child.

  “Except for family, you’re not really attached to anyone,” she said.

  “I try to be.”

  “You pretend to be. But you’re not.”

  Now and then he went with women from the clubs, even women he paid. But sometimes when he lay down with them, within minutes he had to get up, get dressed, get out of there. He wanted to scream, to strike the woman because she wasn’t Sunny. Then he would take off, traveling again, not even sure what country he was passing through. He wasn’t searching anymore, he was just going.

  ONE NIGHT IN 1954 A STRANGER ENTERED THE SWING CLUB and sat in the back, in shadow. At first no one noticed him, but eventually people turned, for the man had a distinctly bluish tint to his face and hands. He looked out at the crowd defiantly, flushed patches on his cheeks like ink stains, lips faintly violet.

  Though he was tall, he had the expression of an aging jockey, his gaze extremely concentrated. And there was something about the eyes, round when they should have been slanted. An Asian trying to look Caucasian? Rather, the eyes were square, box-shaped, pinched back by scars. The man moved carefully, like someone surgically rearranged.

  He listened, attentive, to the band, wincing when the sax man stumbled on “Thou Swell,” smiling when Keo stood to solo. When he took off with a thumping, skidding version of “Muskrat Ramble,” the crowd woke up. Keo kept at it, bursting into improvisations until, on his nineteenth chorus, he ran out of gas. The band settled into “Georgia,” gentling down the roaring crowd. The blue-faced man just smiled.

  Afterwards, lights up, crowds moving toward the exits, he made his way to the dressing rooms. Keo looked up, startled: in bright light, the man’s face frightened him.

  “Hula Man . . .” Yet the voice was familiar.

  Keo slowly stood up. “I know that voice.”

  The man stepped forward almost shyly. “Endo Matsuharu. Paris, 1939. You coached me on saxophone.”

  He couldn’t place him. He shook his head.

  “I was at the Sorbonne. My uncle was the consul, Yasunari Seiko. He helped you get out of Paris.”

  Keo shouted, then threw his arms round Matsuharu, clapping him on the back repeatedly.

  “Oh, man, he saved my life! He . . .” Keo pulled him to a chair and sat him down. “I remember now. You and I, we used to practise near Sacré Coeur at dawn.”

  He pumped Matsuharu’s hands, then opened a bottle of rum and poured them shots. “To Paris.”

  Matsuharu drank, then sat there.

  Keo filled his glass again. “What happened to you after that?”

  “The war. Uncle could have fixed it so I sat behind a desk. But . . . it was a matter of honor. Anyway, we lost.”

  “Everybody lost,” Keo said.

  Matsuharu smiled. “You haven’t changed much, Keo.”

  “Fifteen years? I changed. But you, where were you all these years? Do you still play?”

  “Sax is my life. It’s all I do, though not very well. I’ve played small clubs in Portland, San Francisco. Kind of rough—folks still sensitive to Japanese.”

  His voice was so well modulated, Keo felt if he closed his eyes, he could be talking to a college professor. He remembered Endo had been a serious student at the Sorbonne. Studying to be a lawyer.

  “. . . So I thought I’d try Honolulu. Look you up. You’re pretty famous now.”

  Keo laughed softly. “Only in Honolulu. Although I seem to need
to drift—Hong Kong, Bangkok—playing second-rate clubs. Did you hear that guy on sax tonight? He’s tone deaf, I swear. I need to form my own group. Maybe that will keep me home.”

  Matsuharu’s eyes wandered, taking in the room.

  Keo apologized. “Man, I’m running at the mouth. I can’t believe it’s you. Say, look, are you hungry? Let’s get some chow, start catching up.”

  On the way down Bishop Street, he pointed out landmarks, Aloha Tower finally whitewashed of camouflage, ‘Iolani Palace minus the tanks. They settled in at Chico’s, where night folks gathered, and ordered kimchee and beer and big steaming bowls of saimin. Keo stirred shoyu and mustard in small circles, felt his pores open from broth clouds. Through steam and floating char siu, the man’s blue face came at him in a dream.

  “How did you do?” Matsuharu asked. “I mean, the war?”

  He sighed, put down his chopsticks. “I survived. Your uncle got me to Shanghai a few months before Pearl Harbor. I was looking for my sweetheart. Do you remember Sunny?”

  The name meant nothing to him. He shook his head.

  “Sun-ja Uanoe Sung. Hawaiian-Korean, from Honolulu. She left Paris looking for her sister in Shanghai. I found her there, but couldn’t get them out in time.”

  He looked down for a while. “I played clubs there, Ciro’s, the Argentina. Got arrested, interned in a camp. Red Cross brought me home a skeleton. Malaria, this, that. I spent the war entertaining troops at home. Same thing with Korea.”

  “Your family?” Matsuharu asked.

  “We lost my younger brother. Italy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What about you, your family?” Keo asked.

  He went away for a while, gazing out at nothing. “All dead. Even Uncle Yasunari. The firebombs in Tokyo . . . fifteen miles of dust.”

  Keo hung his head. “God damn all wars.”

  “God? If he exists, he must be an angry child.”

  “But you.” Keo studied him. “You made it through all right?”

  Matsuharu plunged ahead, wanting it over with. “I served in the South Pacific. Lieutenant at a huge supply base for the army, navy, air force. Then came surrender, the war trials. I was sentenced to six years. Two on Manus Island. Four in Tokyo Prison . . .”