by Stephen Chan
Dear Father,
You will have received a white warrior. In the mornings, when it is hard to enter yourself, you will see a white horse. It waits for you. You can enter as it leads the way. All you have to do is count. Count as you breathe in four, and hold four, then out four, and every four full breaths like that the horse will lead you through the doors of one blue cavern. Count the breaths and count the caverns. There are 44 caverns. Lose yourself in the counting. The counting will ease the pain of entering yourself. The cancer seeks to prevent your entry, but the white horse can be counted through.
Take your time. If you lose count you will know the right number at which to pick up what is only a rhythm. When the white horse stops, you know you have arrived, Where there was a screen there stands the old Chinese doctor. You are on top of a great cliff. The horse has disappeared to the plain below. Together, you and the old doctor watch the white warrior mount his horse.
Ah, father, he wears no armour. Just a white Chinese robe, edged on the shoulders with black fur. His hair is tied in a high ponytail, and it is black like midnight. The warrior is crippled, and can swing his sword only in an arc below his shoulders. He cannot raise it above his shoulders. So he reaps with his sword as if it were a scythe. When he rides forth, cancer dies at his feet, is trodden under the hooves of the horse. Your soldiers follow behind and the white warrior drives cancer back to its encampments.
Amid the tumult, for this is bloody business now, you will hear the doctor sigh. You must not ask him about the white warrior. The warrior is his son whom he has not seen for years, and there is great sadness between them.
Father, the battleground will be a bloodied mess. Each struggle reduces your liver. But each struggle also drives back one more time the forces of cancer. When you are in pain, and your forces cannot hold, call out for the warrior. The warrior will always come. The army of cancer cannot touch him, for he comes from outside. Only when your last own soldier is killed, and the warrior stands alone, will he have to leave you, for then the time has come, and the good fight fought as well as humans can fight it. Until then, he will come across the bridge of the world. He is the best I can send – no helmet, no shield, no armour. This is love that fights for you, as naked as when I was born.
My Dear Son,
Even before your letter, I knew of the white warrior. One morning, after several mornings of not being able to enter, after several nights when I thought I would die from the pain, I finally managed to enter. I talked to my general, Cornelius, and he had been badly wounded. Almost all the officers of the high command had been wounded, and there were dead soldiers all around. But Cornelius said they had, at the most critical moment, received help. No one knew where he had come from, or how anyone could fight as well as the stranger.
I stood on the clifftop with the doctor, I had to look hard to see. My son, the white warrior looks just like you. But so very pale. Son, we have not the training, but we know what this is. Your mother wants to know that you are not crippling your soul in sending the white warrior.
7: The Empress Wu
Years ago, the spirit of Empress Wu rode back to Guangdung with Kwok Meil Wah. Faded now by centuries in which only historians remembered her, she had revived spectacularly but briefly with the Shaw Brothers’ filmed epic of her life – a Hong Kong attempt to produce an equivalent to Cleopatra, with the beauteous Lin Dai as Elizabeth Taylor. But that was two decades ago and her star had waned until Meil Wah had called on it during that tear-soaked ride from White Stone. Calling out for thunderbolts, Meil Wah exhumed from heaven the single queen who had ruined the Tang. Even in the twentieth century, Chinese called themselves Tang People – not just iron statues of galloping horses, but a dynasty of such verve-ridden accomplishment that it could only end, in the politically-incorrect Chinese mind, with the extravagant pogroms of history’s most beautiful woman. The Shaw Brothers had ensured, on the widest possible screen, that all could appreciate the burning of the stage sets stretched across three sound lots. The end of the Tang was as spectacular as any array of iron horse artefacts galloping across the dividing fires of time.
Meil Wah imagined the snarl of breath and steam from the white horses, saw briefly the empress in her gold chariot, then saw her materialise in the hotel suite, in the shape of Teresa but ordering cocktails to reduce the pain of her next oblivion. ‘If we play thunder bolts against the sky,’ said Meil Wah. ‘If we laser the night, then we could make destruction rain upon White Stone,’ replied the Empress Wu. All night, the two planned the light shows of erasure, the rubbing out of memory, the deletion of tape, and the high cocktails invented a life in which all could be shot anew, recorded over, and a walk through a village, the maintenance of an empire, could be edited and refined, taken by angles, and never present the inconvenience of discovery and destruction.
In the morning, Teresa entered her mother’s suite. Curtains had not closed all night and sun streamed through the wide sky-framing windows. Two cocktail glasses and many miniature paper umbrellas littered the marble veneer table. Stretched across the couch was her mother with a grin of such satisfaction that it was ridiculous to suppose she was asleep – but she was far away, playing in the high morning, racing the chariots, commandeering the lychee orchards of heaven, seducing under the branches of red fruit some boy who would become mayor of an unimportant village, while she would become the Empress of the World. Ah, the heaven-play of those who are cloud-born and lychee-fed, of those who can command the thunderbolts and have access to the moon’s herd of white horses, can call each of them by name, and ride them like something earned, like something deserved, ride them across untouched acres of sky like compensation.
Teresa called up for coffee. It arrived in two vase-shaped pots. She poured it into Ming-play cups. A few dynasties after the Tang, she thought, disapproving of a China with its own absurd Chinoiserie. She balanced the hot, almost translucent cup on her mother’s forehead. The moxibustion of coffee, giggled Teresa, and waited for Meil Wah’s eyes to re-enter her only twentieth-century body. ‘Come in from way out there, mother,’ she sang, like a parent to her child, but the child was way out there and came in, not deeply, enough to flutter lashes, with the grumbly reluctance of a spoilt princess. ‘At least that’s wiped your hideous grin,’ said Teresa. ‘Now, take a gulp, deep gulp, swallow it down. Come on, two more gulps, three seconds between each gulp, and you’ll see the brave world has been cured.’
‘Don’t want this brave world,’ but drank the coffee anyway… held the telephone a long way from her mouth and ordered pineapple slices, a very English bacon and eggs for two, with cream cakes for breakfast dessert, and more coffee. ‘What was that poem? The one he wrote..?’ ‘Which poem?’ ‘No, no – it’s coming to me now.’
Arden, dressed in imperial
armour, snarling angry breath from iron
chariots. Arden choosing thrones on tours
of the empire. Dispensing damnations to
princes in black robes.
‘Ah, Teresa, for a while last night I toured the empire and put the world to rights. There was no more pain or suffering. Lions lay down with lambs. Men beat their swords into plowshares. I conjured up a great abyss to swallow all the unrighteous, and I restored the family tree with fresh plaques of oak.’
‘And you sent shafts of light into the sky,’ said Teresa, ‘and light chimed in the hebrides of heaven.’
‘Just so, just so… Don’t mock… The day will come when we must find some space inside each of us for this cosmic clutter.’
‘Just dreams, mother, just dreams. You’ve just had a dream.’
‘Perhaps life is best lived, perhaps saved, as a dream. Don’t deny the perpetual dream manifesto which both liberates and trains the soul.’
8: Mangere
At a time when his soul was still complete, the Patient Heart landed in New Zealand. Tired, slightly ill (his plane had been tossed through a remarkable storm which had lit the night sky), hungover, still unshaven,
and cursing the grey of morning, he called up a taxi and deposited himself in the back seat like a heap of soiled baggage.
Drove off from the uncompleted terminal, through the half-used suburb of Mangere. Thought of the flight approaching New Zealand, when the stewardess re-emerged into his life by waking him – waking him by the unusual method of gently closing his snoring mouth with two incredibly white fingers – and pointing out to him the picture on the screen, a long white cloud lit from above by the newest risen sun of all time. Ah, New Zealand, he said. As they flew down the ridge of the land, cloud would break and there would be lit bays and green hills and the stolen lands that made up the young state shone like a reclaimed duvet of innocence. But when the plane came under the cloud, the grey engaged him like a furious reality and he would not eat his breakfast. Now he looked ahead through the video screen – land scooped into view – and now he looked out his window, and land passed him by, and the light outside was paler than the light within the last jet of his ten-year exile.
Mangere, an airport set in rural land like Narita. Only there were no Japanese farmers to fight the slow reclamation of harbour mudflats, the nationalisation of surrounding pasture, and the flightpath was over the peripheries of poverty that marked Auckland, as an unknowing schizophrenic is marked by his own ignorance. That moment as you reel from one state to another, enter the state of comfort, and wonder what you had just left behind. Mangere could be passed through like that, and speedily forgotten. One day, coming to the planes again, it would grin at you like a true land recovered. Only the Patient Heart was not thinking of a return to the terminal depressions and outrage of his past, but of a step towards requiting them, and he asked the driver to not leap through Mangere but, in the shadow of the squat green Mangere Mountain, to stop at what was called a lawn cemetery. It was acres larger now, but he knew the spot from a map in his mind and, as the taxi waited, some part of him was there long before his body ambled over, and – he remembered afterwards – his body was wearing an olive trenchcoat and his arms were huddling the cold body and the wind blew his matted hair, and he was the criminal from the outer reaches come at last to visit the grave of his grandparents, of the Dragon Lady who had died largely unmourned in his absence, and her long-suffering husband who had taken his exit some years before. Together now, and the grave wore photographs of the two when they were young and almost settled refugees, confronting a future forever on a strange half-used periphery.
He bowed three times. He had refused to do this after his grandfather’s death. Some antique ceremony from the outlands his young, modernising mind sought to leave behind. Now he bowed, and it was a gesture, not a belief – he had gone beyond the refugee culture that claimed to know it was Chinese – but the words he heard himself speak were heart-true, though bleak as the sky.
Grandparents, thank you for inviting me to visit you despite all the years that have passed. And you, grandmother, thank you, for I boycotted even the sight of you for years before my departure, anxious to live in the new world and repudiate those who drew me close to the old. Thank you, for I knew it was you both who mobilised ancestors to watch over me at every roadblock of every warlord rebel in every part of Africa. Ah, how I felt the charred descendant of that antique Chinese admiral who sailed to Africa and stayed, taking his Ming dinner set with him, and scattering the cups along the shores of Dar es Salaam as he watched his junks sail away forever. You drew me close, but not close enough. Couldn’t reach out at all in New Zealand and, from Africa, could reach only as far as Okinawa – part Japanese, part native, part Chinese. If we’re lucky we discover, do we not, half our past – and we need to reinvent the rest.
He bowed again, repeating the gesture like good manners. Went back along the boulevard of graves to his taxi, meter still running, and left to start to find one of his parents – that one not in China, constructing a cosmic endgame for history’s tricks of going walkabout with its wooden plaques; that one beginning the endgame to his life, unknowingly but somehow always deliberately setting out his array of light-meters, and framing the blue sky, untarnished in its intensity, for a perpetual sun-ridden matinée.
WHITE WARRIOR
1: The girl of the moon
Many years in the future, when he was lamenting the loss of his eighth truly significant woman, he fell to writing again. Her name was Marja, Finnish Marja, pronounced Marr-ya, with a rolled second ‘r’ and an inflected ‘i’ before the ‘y’. No one could say it properly, so all his friends called her Maria, and she answered their insufficiency. Finnish Marja would smile as she was addressed as English Maria. The eighth woman. All his life there had been a girl of the moon, someone to cry over in the high night of her increasing absences; then there would be an elegant older woman, who would drive her own sports car and be good to him in bed, and who would want him totally; then there could be a wife of capacious gifts, an academic of great strength, who would eventually leave him. Then the cycle would be repeated – and he had gone through two complete cycles now, calling out the names of the moon girls in his married sleep, and with the advent of the third cycle there came certainly the sports car-driving woman, an aristocrat this time, and a moon girl of such astonishing beauty he prayed with all his heart that the cycles would stop and she, at last, would be the moon girl made wife, the eighth and last of the traumatic pageant of beauty. And anyway, for him, eight was a holy number, written without beginning or end as two seamless circles that fed each other. Feed me, Marja, he would whisper, pronunciation correct, under the moons of a long and only briefly answered year.
When he was a child, just learning memory, the moon meant something entirely different. Instead of pretty pretty moon, the repetitive coo of New Zealand mothers, he got pretty light light, since he was, he remembered he was told, Chinese. And he was called Happy Occasion at a Grand Court. Since, later, he learned that his father’s name meant Red Emperor, he was happy enough to be an occasion of any sort in his palace of dreams. There was a palace of dreams in Parnell, Auckland, on a hill that overlooked the harbour cranes, and his combined first memory was of poverty. Then his father would carry him out of the poverty-ridden shop, into the life of the sky, and they would watch richer sunsets than he ever saw again, and the cranes would burn, and the moon like an impossible goddess would rise from her land of snow and seep into the heavens till it filled his sky. Poverty, sunset, sky: this was the Parnell of his soul.
There was a Parnell of his heart, and this was green. Green, because behind the shop, beyond a crescent that sloped away, a great domain of trees had jumped to giant life – taller, grown faster than in England – and these acres were called, presciently, the Domain. In the middle of the Domain, on a hill he would clearly see, there was a huge white museum, and it was called – simply, rather than presciently this time, since it looked like a Roman temple, and later he imagined it was a Roman temple – the Museum; and his father said all the past is contained in the Museum, and that was why, he thought, birds sang in the green Domain, to honour the past in the white Museum.
But the green was in his heart because that was where his parents taught him love and laughter – even though they were poor and the world they had escaped grew older than belief. They taught him all the polite paths through the green – what they themselves were learning. Later, as a young man, he taught himself the hidden trails among the great trees, skipping over the heartfelt roots of heaven every night, as he cried tear-blind for the first moon girl of his canopy-obscuring life.
There was a Parnell of the body, and the body’s early mind, and this was brown; brown because of the two brown panels that faced his cardigan as he grew, and among the first things that he knew was how much had been left behind, and how existence was a loss that could never be reclaimed. Living was to build a bridge over the chasm of perpetual loss, and the stronger you built the bridge, the deeper you dug the chasm.
Among the second things that he knew was that they were better-off than other people who were browner. Each
bright morning a Maori boy would pass the shop and his father would sell him, discounted, bruised fruit. Down the road there was another shop, and it was smaller, dingier, somehow irremediably poorer, and the couple who eked out their precarious margins in that compressed space were Indians.
But what he loved as he learnt to know was the clatter of the passing trams, how trams had to stop if their magic masts disconnected from the wires overhead. There would be a blue flash sometimes as mast disconnected but then, in the laws of exact chances, laws that govern how you jump precisely, it would bounce back to its energy-feeding connection. The blue flash was the immutable law of life. Sometimes you had to, for no reason but having to, make a jump – and all freedom that the world allowed was contained in that blue flash, and then you were anchored again, and that was that, and being anchored was brown, but the blue was a momentary transfiguration of all the child’s prayers he said, from his shop front, to the universal non-refugee sky.
For what reasons are moon girls sent to the earth and cross that bridge of light? For years he has asked that question. They are sent to discipline the wants of youth, and the remembered wants of youth. They are sent to accept as gifts the completed hearts of chosen men – for these men cannot choose, and their bodies learn to live with space in place of heart, and the space is called want, and want pulses to the timetable of the moon, and the timetable is the strictest tempo in the world of months and tides and wolves and hearts. And because want cannot replace the heart’s own full beat, the body loves the moon girl as it slowly dies.