by Stephen Chan
He watched a plane fly overhead. He waited for the cars at the intersection. He looked up at the art gallery clock. What time might it be, and what night winds did son ride if somewhere in the lost wide world son flew? He hummed a line from a Chinese opera. It was like a prayer. When all the girls of all the world have come down all the steps of all the nights and all their fingers have worn all the rings of all the young men of the world, a phoenix with tail like jewels will fly, and all the fathers of all the men will die.
3: Rangitoto
Years later, Teresa still thought of White Stone. Divorced, the workaholic proprietor of two shops selling leather clothes, she dreamt of looking out over Rangitoto, the volcanic cone in Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour. ‘Sparkling Waters’ was what Waitemata meant. She did not know what Rangitoto meant. She satisfied herself with the second most expensive option in Auckland and lived in Rangitoto Street – no view, but in the heart of padded respectability. She inhabited a vast house of shining wooden floors, and a great St Bernard dog commandeered the floor by set square metres as the sun moved across it every day.
After White Stone, she had taken to displaying portraits of her mother as a girl, her mother’s mother (whom Teresa had never known), her very much older husband (who had also died long ago), and the backdrops to the portraits were always book-lined studies, the only painted backdrop the studio had. The Kwoks, by contrast, lived in a series of sheds. No one in the family had ever acquired a book-lined study – except the oldest son, but he lived an impossible life. One of his succession of wives had sorted out and catalogued the entire history of family photos. There was only one of Teresa as a child. Father had sold his camera before she was born, as everything was mortgaged for capital as he slowly, stutteringly, began the construction of a minor business legend. Even then, the camera had been an only luxury in a desperately poor young manhood and when, from his arranged marriage to Kwok Meil Wah, a son promptly appeared, the camera recorded every smile and every walk by the white university tower. The motto was in Latin. For all her father knew, it read ‘impossible to enter’. He had not been educated, wrote out contracts of sale with the most colourful grammar, but looked at the university as a great excluding fortress – the dividing line between refugee/migrant and blood of the country. One day, he would say as he wheeled young son past, taking photos of his first steps on the forecourt of the tower, you will enter these doors. The Chinese word for door looked just like the oaken porticoes of the colonial representation of gothic. One day you will enter here. He used to tell Teresa of the similarity in graduations. In European universities, the graduate would wear a special cap and gown. When you became greatly learned, a doctor, they gave you a scarlet gown. In China, he would say, ever since the time of Confucius, it was possible to change class by one route only. Otherwise, a peasant was always a peasant. China is full of legends where the boy child – sometimes the disguised girl child – of a poor family, always of a very poor family, sometimes of a piteously poor widow, would make the trip to the imperial capital and there, in a great tower, would attempt state exams. If he passed, and only a handful from all over China passed, he would be made a junior minister, married to a daughter from one of the emperor’s numerous concubines, and return (briefly) to his village, robed in red, a scholar’s cap with tassels on his head, mounted on a white horse, and extract family/widowed mother from poverty. Look at my son, the mother would say, he studied every night and worked to support me every day. Now this is the consummation promised for virtue. If the scholar came home only to a widowed mother, they would go and burn incense at the father’s grave and the red-cloaked scholar would weep tears of filial piety.
Such a father’s dream, thought Teresa, only her brother had really done it, gone off and taken not one but two doctorates, then, after nearly crippling himself in a karate accident, disdained the academy for the life of an international official mediating in the world’s forgotten and usually useless conflicts. Teresa laughed. In the films, the scholar was usually thin and physically useless. The daughters of the concubines must have dreaded each year’s exams. Often, taking mother to her new home in the capital, they would be attacked by warlord brigands. Then it would be weedy scholar’s true love from the village, the heartlost beauty of the paddyfields, following secretly behind, who would rescue them with heroic Kung Fu spinning kicks, take a fatal thrust, and die in her worthless scholar’s puny arms. Brother was always beset by the competing loves of women too. At least he was able to kick ass for himself – rather, he could do so with his good left leg. The right was a Byronic reassemblage of bones with pins and, on a good day, carried him convincingly in unknowing company.
Teresa moved. Dog wanted her piece of floor. She looked at the portraits and dreamed of a perfectly-shaped mountain of peace, the return of brother and the satisfaction of her restless parents. For something had changed after the journey to White Stone, as if mother now knew that half of adult life had ended and, as her children drifted variously into marriages and divorces, that such aspects of life, maybe most of life itself, was a series of charades that sought to re-enact or recapture some primal grasp of acceptance in the world on one’s own terms – even one’s compromised terms, but terms in which one had made a stand of sorts, over which one had had a say. Love me, leave me, accept me, go away, come back, come back more gently, why can’t the vision of you be as the vision of you before?
It could never be as before, thought Teresa. Otherwise the planes would fly faster, the horses gallop more rapidly, rejecting the true nagging knowledge that they were returning their wearied riders to only an impression of their origin. If I could see Rangitoto, she thought, I would know that any journey was symmetrical, a dance around a perfect cone; any stop was like the last departure; and it would all be washed by sparkling waters; and paradise would be the certain regularity of knowledge, a time that passed well anchored.
If brother were here, she thought, he would offer one of his alarmingly technical philosophical discourses, which simply said he did not know, but he would say so like a gentle cone, brother spinning words around himself like a smooth trouble-free volcano. He would grow green trees on lava slopes and all his jumbly conditionals would be said in a soft speech like the thigh of his latest lady in his latest dream. He, at least, went happily from vision to uxorious vision, but Teresa had long vowed she would never even dream of marrying again. Dog followed a progression of assured, sunlight squares on the floor. One heart, one square, one life, thought Teresa, no great hairy dog she, but one firm arrow in the world, centred, fastened, targeted and certain till the end of time.
4: The black sheep
How high is the water. How high is the water. A description, not a question. Looking towards Chelsea as the train crossed the bridge, thinking of homes, seeking a houseboat, moored, a damp but light-filled destination. Instead of this dream, he thought, half-asleep, he knew, he was flying far from Chelsea. He was over seas not a single river. He was loving impossible women in his sleep, ignored by the stewardess. Not entirely. She brought him alternate sakés and coffees, touched his shoulder or stroked his wrist with a smile every time. It was she who now hunted, teased him. But he knew, beyond this pleasantry, she was withholding name, hotel number, access and possibility from his unshaven economy-class person. Not a true want of his would be addressed by her. He let the parade of his sleep-bound women sweep to his mother. Now she was, dressed in red, Empress of China, queen of the Tang, and she tossed thunderbolts with either wrist. A particular bolt carried off the stewardess. She rode it standing but was brought to him. A second bolt stripped her naked and he admired the vision. Now, if mothers could really do this… if they would really do this…
Kwok Meil Wah was riding the taxi back to Guangdung. Ten million stars shone for her alone. She threw not a thunderbolt at the sky. But if I were Empress of China, she thought, the destruction of the past would be forbidden. But the past was problematic. There had been an Empress Wu, whose stormy reign had deca
yed the Tang. It never recovered its full glory. So, looking forward to the future, they had given son a name of complex half-syllables, a poem that shimmered like an abbreviated dance. Happy Occasion at a Grand Court, they had called him – in their refugee poverty still thinking of grand courts. Just plain ‘Happy’ if you make a brutally succinct translation. Son liked neither the pomposity of the first, nor the plebeian brevity of the second. He searched the jumbled assemblage of half-characters composed into his name and selected just one of them. Sometimes it meant ‘heart’, sometimes it meant ‘patience’, so he called himself ‘Patient Heart’ when he had to give a name to the Chinese society of New Zealand. Otherwise he was happy enough with his European name, which meant ‘prince’. His parents had made sure. Meil Wah chuckled beneath the Chinese stars.
She remembered, however, the rough nature of Chinese society in New Zealand. Almost all refugee stock. Son could not abide them. Strange that he was now happiest amongst the warring tribesmen of the world. But he could escape them if need be – possessor of the eternal plane ticket, the patient heart could fly away, before they imploded beneath the weight of their parochialisms. When he was young, planes, like universities, seemed like the dreams of far horizons. Thus trapped, he grew a species of shy but surly good manners – always distant, almost always judgemental, pretending he could no longer speak Chinese, acculturating in New Zealand with zeal, until one day he had successfully lost all refugee language, began coming top of his class at school, and was henceforth coached by cherishing teachers, all women, towards the distant academy.
One winter, the young Chinese pianist Fou Ts’ong toured New Zealand. The local Chinese community was awe-struck – a celebrity on the terms imposed not only by Europeans but the strange demands of European culture. The rough burghers of oriental Auckland sought a means of entertaining Fou during his sojourn from the artistic metropoles of the world. Finally, they packed him off to dinner with the younger brother of Meil Wah’s husband. He was an electric guitarist. It was the closest to Fou’s world they could find, but the young aspiring rock star knew nothing about Débussy, Chopin or Schubert, all the composers whose work Fou would interpret with such solemn tenderness. The dinner was unbearably stilted, and the patient heart wore a smirk that basically said, I told you so, and I’m getting out of this hole you call the life of the Chinese. Fou is Chinese, but the wide world is in his soul and plane tickets are in his hands. Fou had, however, thought Meil Wah, delivered her one extravagant courtesy – said she looked like a portrait of Empress Wu – and her young mother’s heart loved the strange pianist and his chivalry, and chimed briefly like the girl’s it had been before arranged marriage, children because birth control had been unknown to her and her husband, before the years of servitude to her in-laws and the hardships of setting up a struggling business of their own. Her unmortgaged heart seized the pianist, and that silent wilful drinking of him sought to replace her stolen youth, and this was a part still in her as she thundered, and rattled, back to Guangdung.
Meanwhile, the patient heart was still measuring water levels for the houseboat of his imagination. He was singing softly on the plane, had requisitioned a tripartite service – saké, coffee, then champagne – and the stewardess, by now marvelling at his capacity, and seeming to see for the first time the compacted scar tissue and bruising on his arms, wondered what sort of man, mad or criminal, she now served. ‘There’ll be tattoos on his back next,’ she thought, and she recognised his melody. He also was recognising his melody and was thinking of the New Zealand artist Ralph Hotere and a painting that made ‘melody’ grow into ‘malady’, and how he had always wanted the chain of painted words to grow into ‘my lady’ and then, like each of his drinks, he could fasten the world with definitions to do with song, sickness and sex, and it was all reverie on the edge of self-absorbed drunkenness, but he recognised his own song, saw she recognised the song, so he beckoned her to come and sang it to her, a Tim Hardin song which he sang to prefigure his return after ten years away to New Zealand. ‘Here I am back home again, I’m here to rest, don’t ask me where I’ve been, just know that I’ve been West. I’m the family’s unknown boy, (here, he had forgotten the words but had invented his own) long black locks of raven hair, all the girls with their faces bare see the shine in the black sheep boy. Now if you love me, just let me live in peace, and please understand that the black sheep can wear a golden fleece…’ An unashamed sentimentalist, thought the stewardess, but she wiped the tears his nostalgia, tiredness and guilt had brought to his right eye, kissed the air near his face, and told him gently to sleep. She took away his cups and glasses. He saw a sunrise in the virtual reality of his well-dreamt London river.
Two further reveries of the patient heart
1: Lusaka 1983
‘Named for a high-flyer,’ he explained. ‘One who could, with ease, fling himself into space. These twenty-two stories wouldn’t bother him. Not even the top of the Eiffel Tower. I’ve been there, and imagined the cool air on which a man could ride. But perhaps, after all, not here. Not where the atmosphere seems baked, and a man’s blue glide would seem ostentatious. Overseas, you know, they do it all the time. Everybody. They all have the chance to leap the bar. Here, they say No Leaping, as the bars are in short supply. You may leap as soon as the spare parts are imported. But only if you are literate enough to fill in the forms, triplicate, and patient enough to await the reply of the Ministry of Bars. Comrade, you think I am drunk. And making bad puns about the time it takes to get a simple gin and tonic in this place. You think all this talk of dancing on the zephyrs is just hot air, eh? Your silly friend, Dædalus Mumba, highly inflated with his very recent overseas education, restraining himself from bursting into French, but starting to get annoying all the same. Ah, but no, for half a song, a decent song, not the crap they play tonight, I would step out into the night’s embrace, and sail like a man of virtue. Ah yes, virtue. And who else, in this stage-set from yesterday’s megabucks disaster movie, could do that? If fire breaks out, who would carry you on stairs like starry cushions to the ground floor? And what a joke that would be. You can see the mad scramble. A whole building with no sprinklers. The fire engines can reach only the fourth floor. How many ministers and members of the Central Committee would love Dædalus Mumba then? Rescue our high-living and very spoilt sons and daughters, Dædalus, please! And then Lusaka would see an amazing sight, eh? In the style of angels, I’d ferry these gyrating brats. But, instead of delivering them straight, bypass the anxious arms of their overstuffed parents, set them down perhaps in the dustiest shanty, from that distance watch the tall tower consumed by fire, and Studio 22, the disco in the skies, puff up like a cherry. Ha, and we’d all sit there, awaiting the flotilla of their parents’ Mercedes, and the greetings of the shanty-dwellers, roused at midnight, demanding water, salt, sugar, soap, cooking oil. Whatever else is short right now. A return to subsidies on the mealie meal. A stand against the IMF. Even the import and re-distribution of new leather belts so that, very co-operatively, they would have something to tighten. Preferably around the midriffs of those coming for sons and daughters. See the fat squeezed over, like melting lard, splashing inside imported shirts. And, oh yes, do you think we’re finally getting some service in this place?
2: The contingent
Of all things, he had been a Commonwealth Scholar in New Zealand. She fingered one of the books he had brought back, had carried on his travels. He wasn’t carrying it now, so he’d have to come back again to claim the book, claim her. An old book, published in 1973, the New Zealand poet Murray Edmond, and the characters of the book were the same characters he had known. A painter named Gordon, who wore Chairman Mao dungarees. Kathryn, clearly Italian, occupation unknown, who read other people’s newspapers, smoked people’s cigarettes. And there was a nice line:
The sun is coming up
& 3000 jets are in the air.
Ah, she thought, no jets of sun in the Oxford winter. Just the same low sky. Dreaming s
pires could almost puncture sky if clouds came down, oh, perhaps… measuring from her window, another inch or two. Well, she felt simply desolate. Ten days since sun last appeared. And it hadn’t even rained properly. Just this greyness and some mediocre drizzle. Sky, we’d like some dramatics, please. If you can’t manage a thunderstorm, we’d like you to retire to Ireland. We want either sun, or the certainty of wearing raincoats or not. We, who are simply desolate, do not wish to feel simple – caught in your drizzles.
Anyway, it was now time to go out. She’d wear her coat, half-wondered whether she should sail out on her bike, umbrella held aloft in the Amsterdam style. Not that she needed to be present at the lab. The gels would not yet be dried. But, after lunch, Rosa’s friends would telephone, and the contingent of them, New Zealand exiles, assorted Africanists, even some Africans, would gossip and, since this was the item of the week, would invariably discuss Walker’s proposal to Dianna. Lists of incompatibility. He was using her. She was using him. He might think she’s made in heaven, but it can’t last. And I’m sure, Dianna thought, cycling away, I’m pretty devastating in bed.
Walker Lee-Tembo occupied one of those underground pedigrees, known not at all to the general public – not, anyway, to Dianna’s parents – but known to a specialist group, its admirers and its acolytes. He probably wasn’t known, thought Dianna, but his distinctions are. And they probably aren’t even distinctions. Just offshoots of his glamour, and his glamour, which probably centred on nothing more than his smile, had carried him into many affections. Many people, by virtue of having imparted a kindness or admiration to him, thought they held rights to him. Now these people, drawn from the various stations of Walker’s life, manufacturers of his legend, readers of his single short book, saw their nurtured young man proposing an impossible match.