by Sandi Tan
With only the two goldfish watching, I worked Father’s implements the way I’d seen him do it: grinding the ink stick on the stone with a few drops of water to produce liquid ink, then dipping the brush tip lightly in the black puddle. On a fresh sheet of paper, I wrote in huge letters:
I know who you are.
I can see you.
I want to help.
I fanned the note dry, folded it up carefully, and ran upstairs with it tucked in my pajama pants. Should Sister Yeung appear again that night, I would be ready. If she could see my toes, she would certainly see my message.
That night, as soon as Li’s breathing grew steady and regular, and—more tellingly—his fist loosened around his butterscotch talisman, I placed the note flat over my feet, words in full view. I tried to stay alert and wait for the ghost, but to my great frustration fell asleep.
Sometime during the moonless night, I woke. The air had again become very chilly; Sister Yeung must surely be close. My hunch was confirmed by the dark silhouette in the far side of the room, a humanoid form moving slowly closer to me. I wriggled my fingers and toes to make sure I hadn’t been turned into a statue again. I was free—Sister Yeung had decided to have mercy on me. As she approached even closer, I saw her white tunic and black slacks.
“Sister Yeung,” I whispered. “I understand you. I want to help you.”
A thin arm reached down and lifted my note. I held my breath. With a rude crunch, her hands balled up my offer.
“Hey!” I whispered violently, trying to keep my voice down.
The amah took another step closer—Sister Kwan. Betrayed again! She came to my side and I expected a slap, but instead she pressed a small mirrored amulet into my hand.
“You mustn’t encourage her, child. Protect yourself with this.”
I didn’t want her stupid charm. I threw it on the floor. She picked it up and placed it back in my hand.
“Don’t let her touch you again. Keep this to repel her. It’s for your own good.”
“No!” This time I hurled it across the room. Sister Kwan clucked her tongue and after a fruitless search for the thing in the dark, gave up. Before leaving, she said to me, “Sister Yeung could be very dangerous. Prior to drowning herself, there was an incident…” Here she paused dramatically.
“What incident?” I hissed.
“She tried to take you with her.”
“She tried to kidnap me?”
“Worse.”
I understood her meaning perfectly. But was Sister Kwan just trying to scare me?
After she left, the room was once again silent. The chill returned. I could feel my legs begin to stiffen. Oh, why had I tossed away that amulet? It hadn’t even occurred to me that Sister Yeung could have meant any harm until Sister Kwan put the idea in my head. I watched as my breath again cooled into white spirals. My entire body was paralyzed, but this time my head remained unaffected—I could move my lips and my eyes. A small improvement. I could sense Sister Yeung’s approach.
In a matter of seconds, she became whole. She came toward me exactly as she had the previous night—there was not the slightest variation. This time, however, I was free to scream for help. Yet, as before, I felt no desire to do so. The fear Sister Kwan had tried to instill in me was needless, even hateful. There was something very sad yet strangely calming about Sister Yeung’s ghost as she gazed at me with those passive, unblinking eyes.
“Sister Yeung,” I said quietly. “I know you. I want to help you.”
Again, Sister Yeung reached with both hands for my feet, her movement and expression an exact facsimile of the night before. When she squeezed my toes, I again felt nothing. But this time, I paid closer attention. Her fingertips were shriveled and as tiny as a child’s, smaller even than mine. I had heard about poor children hired by silk factories to fish out silkworm cocoons from boiling tubs with their bare hands—the job left them with stunted fingers. Sister Yeung had those fingers. Looking at her face creased with time’s unstoppable passing, I had a flash of recognition: She would never be young again. I began to weep.
“Sister Yeung, can you hear me?”
“One day…,” she started to say. “One day…”
Her body seemed to melt away, and once again, I was alone in the dark.
The next day, in the rickshaw to school, I refused to let Sister Kwan touch me. Her thumb was wrapped in a much bigger bandage than needed, exaggerating the injury sustained at the chopping board. Each time she tried to grab my hand, I let out a piercing scream. Finally, the rickshaw man told her to leave me be because I was attracting too many stares. He didn’t want the police or, worse, the Republican Army after us.
“Did you keep the amulet I gave you?” Sister Kwan tried to make conversation, casting herself again as the concerned guardian.
I ignored her.
“It was blessed at my temple by a very powerful priest. He has ended droughts.”
I stared out at the row of street carts next to the crowded tram stop, all of them hawking breakfast crullers and hot soybean milk to commuters in a hurry. The grease smelled delicious. I wished we could stop.
“She always liked you, you know. Sister Yeung. You were her favorite. That’s why we were all so shocked about what she tried to do to you.”
Lies. All lies.
“I suppose she was afraid to go alone,” she continued. “She was probably lonely.”
“Everybody’s lonely,” I snapped back.
That night I was ready with a new note for Sister Yeung.
You are a good person.
I want to be your friend.
Even if she couldn’t hear me, she still might be able to see the note.
Hoping for a new outcome this time, I threw myself onto the floor as soon as I felt the onset of the cold, leaving the note where my feet would have been. I wanted to see if Sister Yeung would behave any differently.
She came, moving forward exactly as she’d done before. When she stretched out her silkworm-factory fingers, I thought she would pick up the note; instead her hands passed right through the paper, as if it were liquid. She squeezed the spot where my toes would have been and didn’t seem to register the note. She appeared to be operating in a completely different plane, not seeing things that were there and seeing things that were not. It felt as if I were watching a film loop—her actions were completely identical to the previous nights. I had to break her routine.
“Sister Yeung!” I whispered. She didn’t turn but instead continued to gaze at the dent on the bed where I would have lain. “I’m here, Sister Yeung. Over here!”
As if in response to my words, she started to speak, without turning her face:
“One day…one day these little feet will grow big…” Her voice quickly began to wither into echoes, as if coming from deep down a well. “And they will carry you far, far away from all of us.”
“Sister Yeung!” I tried again from the floor. No reaction. “Please!”
The moment she vanished, I was flushed with grief and shame. How did she know? How could she have known?
Sister Yeung had unmasked me, voiced my most personal, most private secret—a fantasy I’d never shared with anyone. Yes, I had thought frequently of escape. Yes, I had dreamt about fleeing my family. I wanted my hands to be free.
I wept quietly at the foot of the bed for a while before crawling back in. Li stirred but miraculously did not wake. The butterscotch medallion sat in his palm like some magical tram fare. When dawn broke, my pillow was soaked with tears. Sister Yeung never returned. She must have found what she had come for.
Soon I, too, got what I was longing for.
That Mother and Father were moody was nothing new. Had we been any richer, or any poorer, they might have given in to the silken promises of the opium den; that they did not, I remain eternally grateful. But where once the two of them sank into what the amahs termed the Sulks, each moping around in a private gloom of their own, they now openly banged heads—an unthinkable mov
e for Father, who had spent his entire life dodging conflict.
“Things will work themselves out. You’ll see!” Father would say.
“That’s all you ever do. Defer, delay, deny!” This was Mother’s usual retort.
Whenever these clashes grew too intense, a quaint old propriety kicked in; they clamped down and reconvened in their bedroom with boiling tumblers of tea. There, with the door closed, they lobbed accusations at each other until the acrimony wore them both down and a blackened silence took over.
Our fate was sealed by two other events happening in quick succession. First, Father lost his job. His spineless principal, under pressure from a growing cadre of antibourgeois parents, decided that the teaching of poetry to twelve-year-olds was a waste of resources. Then the stock exchange crashed in New York, which meant that our stock exchange, too, was crushed in the ensuing depression.
Things had not worked out according to Father’s lazy faith in goodness happening to the good. By default, Mother, that well of negativity, won.
We were called in to a family caucus.
Father, decided our matriarch, was to redeem himself in the Nanyang—the South Seas—a band of tropical islands that were seemingly immune to the ups and downs on Wall Street because its assets were material. Real, as opposed to the intangible, theoretical realm of stocks and bonds. The world would never stop needing tin, rubber, palm oil, tobacco. Mother’s reasoning was that even if Father had to take on humiliating work in the plantations, at least we knew nobody there who could gossip.
He was to remit money home to us at the end of every month. And if the situation looked steady in the longer term, he could send for us, as many of our compatriots had done with their families. A few had even been known to thrive in the heat and dust.
Father mulled this over and emerged with a counterproposal: “I will take Li with me. No boy should be without his father.”
Rather than argue, Mother conceded instantly—here Li probably got his answer about whether Mother loved him—but under one condition: “Ling. Take Ling, too.”
“Twins should never be separated,” she said. “They’re two halves, yin and yang. They can never be a whole person unless they remain together.”
Imagine Mother, chief debunker of ghost stories and myths, coming up with a theory like that!
Inwardly I was scared but thrilled; outwardly I pulled long faces. Li, too, bemoaned his impending exile. But for the first time since our day in Paradis, I saw some of the old spring in his step. I caught him whispering to himself, half excited, half fearful: “I’m going to be an Overseas Chinese.”
Overseas Chinese. As in “Mr. So-and-So is an Overseas Chinese, which accounts for his poor taste in suits” or “Mrs. So-and-So is an Overseas Chinese, so you can’t expect her to know how to fry eels.” I’d been raised to think of the Overseas Chinese as a separate race, an underclass of lost souls deprived of basic things—sometimes an eye, sometimes an ear, but mostly proper manners and the ability to speak Mandarin like they meant it. They were the banished tribe, the wanderers, the deserters, the outcasts. Different, set apart, marked for life.
I had to put away my biases. For I, too, was about to become one of them.
The night before we set sail, there was a mournful air about the house, a feeling of missed opportunity too late to be salvaged. We played gramophone records by Shanghainese divas warbling about lost love in a minor key while the amahs stuffed clothes into two crowded trunks reeking of mothballs.
Mother sat on the couch with Li lying across her lap, both completely lax, almost comatose, both sets of hooded eyes staring into the distance while she massaged his little hands. Nobody spoke. The twins must have intuited our impending separation because they chased me around the downstairs, clinging to my sides like barnacles. Each time I pulled free, I got no more than three steps before having to surrender again. I lay flat on my back on the rug with both of them sinking their warm, heavy heads into my armpits, feigning sleep. I didn’t want to look at them. I couldn’t bear it. I let their heads fall to the floor and then crept away, only to have them catch me once more.
Through the door, I could see Father slumped at his desk, drunk on plum wine. The family photographs stared back at him. He picked up the frames in turn and whispered the name of each child as he encountered their image. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he’d mistaken Xiaowen for Bao-Bao. He didn’t touch the one of Mother seated alone; perhaps he had forgotten how much wheedling and how many vials of tranquilizers it had taken him to get her out of the house and into the studio. Or perhaps he did remember but was now suddenly sentimental about it. I wriggled out of the twins’ embrace and went to him.
“Why don’t we take these pictures with us?” I said.
“We can’t.” He rubbed his thumbs over the one group portrait, all of us standing, somewhat stunned, before a painted sunset. “These are the only pictures your mother has of us. It would be like robbing her of her memory.”
But by not taking them, I wanted to say, we would be robbed of ours.
Then I realized. Better to forget.
I HEAR HER VOICE IN MY HEAD as I make myself a pot of pu-erh tea. I hear his, too, of course—but his I’ve been hosting in my conscience for years, as constant as the beating of my own heart.
I want your story, she said. I need it.
The dense black leaves unfurl with the help of a spoon, but, like memories, they are old and stubborn. After a few quick stabs, they turn the water into ink. Medicinal ink that tastes of rot and regret.
But where is my inquisitor? I’m impatient. If I tell her my story, I will not have lived in vain, my deeds vanished without a trace.
There’s another reason I want her here—and quick. Unlike the fearless child I was, I am now afraid to be alone. I’m shaking. My remembering has forced open a whole city of graves. In speaking their names, I’ve surrounded myself with ghosts. Mother, Father, Li, Sister Kwan…I see them as clear as day. And this has only been the beginning, the innocent days of childhood.
Please let my savior arrive before I reach the darker depths.
These memories, once unleashed, can be held back no more. I gulp my tea.
Hurry, Professor!
3
The Doldrums
THERE WERE AWKWARD GOOD-BYES at the dock with Sister Kwan and our rickshaw man, the latter whose calloused hands I shook for the first and last time. They were standing in for Mother—the woman could not transcend her phobia, not even for our departure. Blotting out my sorrow at this maternal absence, I gawked at the leviathan that would soon remove me from the unhappy pit that was old China.
The boat was enormous. Li elbowed me for calling it a boat. “It’s a ship,” he barked. He’d even heard a smartly dressed gent refer to it as a floating island. I conceded the point—this was no mere boat. The vessel had a trio of towering smokestacks in brick red and black, each larger than our entire house. All three leaned back ever so gracefully like ladies having their hair done. There were seven stories of living space, under which were storage vaults and boiler rooms, deep in its bowels.
As passengers embarked, a group of painters with harnesses around their waists were being hoisted up along its side, having just stenciled on the ship’s new name, the SS Prosperity. Father explained that the vessel used to sail the transatlantic route exclusively, but the Depression had forced it to pick up business in the South China Sea. Its real name was being kept a secret. But what of names? Europe’s loss was our gain.
I shuddered with glee as we stepped aboard and saw the long, lifeboat-lined boulevards on either sides of the sun deck. I could already picture Li and myself racing up and down them. Sister Kwan wasn’t here to rein us in with her iron claws; Mother wasn’t here to mutter. And since Father never willingly touched us, our hands were now completely free! Just to find our living quarters, Father had to study the map and lead us through labyrinthine stairways, elevator lobbies, mahogany-paneled landings lined with chrome hand
rails, and, most strikingly, a high-ceilinged dining room with peacock wallpaper and crisp white linens. Floating island? This was a floating city!
Then I saw our room. The three of us entered a dark little vacuum not much larger than Father’s study. Eight feet by eight feet, if that. Against the near wall were two narrow bunk beds, the kind even coolies might complain about. Father said he’d take the lower one; Li and I were to share the one above. Seeing our dismay, he began to pace the room. The wallpaper was a sickly green, with an interlocking vine motif. Most depressing of all, there was only a single porthole that we were all to share—a miserable disk of sooty, unwashed glass through which we were to get our sightseeing done, presumably while seated at the one careworn chair perched in its shadow. Six days and six nights we had to spend in this cell. I tried not to think it was a portent of things to come, the plummeting tenor of our new life amidst the natives and grass huts of the Nanyang.
“Is there a mistake?” Li finally said.
Father shook his head. “This is what we paid for. Third class on this ship is equivalent to first class on the kind of ship people normally take on this voyage. So we should think of ourselves as being in first. We should feel fortunate.”
“What about first class on this ship?” Li grew impatient. “Can’t we go there?”
“Only third class is open. The rest of the ship is closed.”
“Mother wouldn’t approve.”
“Your mother isn’t here, is she?” Li kept quiet. Father continued, stating what I would come to think of as his life philosophy: “Boundaries are made for good reason. They set different people apart, and this is how we keep the peace.”
The horn sounded its low signal. As the SS Prosperity pulled out of the harbor, I thought about all the beauty spots of China I’d never get to see now that I was about to become an Overseas Chinese. The Ming emperor tombs outside Beijing. The poet Du Fu’s thatched cottage in Chengdu. The scholars’ rock gardens of Suzhou. These places would soon sound as foreign and fictional to me as the Jade Rabbit’s home on the moon.