by Sandi Tan
A crew member intercepted me on the promenade. A stocky Chinese sailor so tanned he looked almost Indian.
“I have to meet my friend at the swimming pool,” I told him.
“Rubbish, the swimming pool is closed.”
“No, it’s not. That girl Rachel swims there every day.”
The sailor’s lip quivered. “Rachel? You saw Rachel?”
The sailor didn’t wait for me to answer. He grabbed the collar of my blouse and dragged me through a set of doors marked CREW ONLY and then down a long corridor rattling with noisy generators. The ship seemed to pitch more dramatically in that tight space. At the end of the way was a frosted glass door with the word ENGINEER painted in gold. It opened even before the sailor could knock. A lank, sinewy European in a crumpled, unbuttoned shirt stood on the threshold, his white hair in a mess.
“What is it now?”
“This one says she saw the girl. In the pool.”
The European’s pale blue eyes widened for a split second; then he nodded, almost subliminally, as if deciding on the terms of some internal pact. He unfurled his wrinkly hand in the direction of my face and I flinched, but all he did was flatten his palm against my forehead in a grandfatherly way. “No fever.”
He placed his thumbs below each of my eyes and gently pulled down my lower lids. “Normal.”
Squatting down until our gazes were level, he addressed me in halting Mandarin: “Where your people?”
“In the I-Ward, Mr. Rosen,” said the sailor.
“In that case, they’ll be back in their cabin shortly. The I-Ward is overcrowded. Too many first-time travelers. The Chinese can be very imaginative when it comes to ailments.” He shook his head, dispersing white hair across his balding pate. “This one’s probably no different. Take her back to her room to wait and make sure she doesn’t wander off again.”
The sailor pulled me gently out of the engineer’s office.
I resisted. I knew I had to register my outrage before it was too late. But where I found the courage for my outburst, I do not know:
“How come Rachel can go there but not me?” I shouted.
The engineer responded in a voice heavy with regret. “Rachel does whatever she pleases. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell the others about my daughter.”
With that, he shut his door. I heard a record squeal on—minor-key piano music full of clashing chords. But I had questions. Rachel was his daughter? He looked so old.
The sailor’s hand gripped mine as he walked me back, so I wouldn’t “wander off” as the engineer had so insultingly put it. Reaching third class, he slavishly repeated his overlord’s demand: “Don’t go around spreading rumors about the girl, you hear? Just stay in your room and be good.”
“Why?”
“Because we cannot afford chaos on board.”
“Why?”
“Are you playing games with me or do you really have no horse sense? Couldn’t you tell that Rachel isn’t like us?”
“Because she’s a European?”
The sailor sank down to his haunches and looked into my eyes. “No. Because she drowned in that pool ten years ago.”
So Rachel was a ghost! My flesh tingled with this secret, special knowledge. So Sister Yeung wasn’t the only one. Like that dead amah, Rachel hadn’t scared me or harmed me, and I remained untouched, unchanged. The only unhappy consequence of my sighting was that it had rendered the sailor and me into two very different animals, with nothing more in common. My maritime guardian sat on the lone chair in our cabin, staring out the porthole, halfheartedly whistling “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and playing with a loose thread on his shirt. I sensed he was now afraid of me, as if seeing ghosts instantly gave me some strange power. I couldn’t wait to hear what Odell might make of the news, since he, too, had clearly seen the little swimmer.
Finally the door clicked open and the sailor popped up from his perch. Father lurched back, startled to see a strange man in the cabin; I watched his guard go up. I was relieved to see Li, but he was still green-faced. He darted to the bunk, pushing me aside.
The sailor was only too happy to leave. He shot me a look of caution—Don’t tell—then slipped out the door.
Father waited till he was gone before uttering a word. “I didn’t want to wake you this morning. I took Li to the sick bay. The doctor says he has anemia.” Father’s face creased up. “Not enough nutrition. And there’s nothing they can do about it until we get to shore.”
“They have beef Stroganoff,” I offered, “in first class.”
“Will you stop?” Father was suddenly livid, his rage incommensurate with my words. His eyes flared. “I’ve no patience for your lies!”
“But I ate there!”
The back of Father’s hand came crashing across my face.
Father, who’d never scolded or struck any of us. Only four days in, and this journey was already changing us. My gentle father was turning into a brute, my athletic brother into a weakling, and I was left to fend for myself in this upside-down world.
I was the island, not this treacherous ship. I was the one floating by my lonesome in the vast ocean. My face burned from the slap, and again from my tears.
“Your brother is sick and here you are gleefully making up stories.” Father sat on the rickety chair and gazed out the porthole, just as the sailor had done. Was I so repellent that neither of them could bear to look at me? After a while, he glanced at me, surprised I was still standing where he’d left me. “All right. All right. Stop crying, will you?” He beckoned me over and pulled out a fraying handkerchief. When he daubed my cheeks with it, I smelled orange peel and naphthalene, the comforting scents of our old Shanghai. “Aiyah, I only have one handkerchief. Look how you’ve ruined it.”
I sucked back my tears, but this only produced jagged, hiccuplike sobs. Father clucked his tongue. “What am I to do with you?” We both turned to Li, who seemed to be asleep but not restfully so. Greenish veins were winding down his temples like tendrils. His lips were tinged blue. “What am I to do?”
I felt his despair. We should have stayed in China; we could have found a less drastic solution.
Suddenly and roughly, he grabbed my wrist. Another first. I relaxed, expecting an apologetic caress or at least an avuncular handshake. Instead, he snatched a paring knife from the nightstand and brought its tip perilously close to my open and vulnerable palm.
“Father…,” I pleaded. Hadn’t he hurt me enough?
“Don’t make this any harder for me. We have to do this for the greater good.”
He plunged the sharp blade into the fleshy ball of my palm and I shrieked in pain. Clamping me between his knees, he held me still—the man possessed more animal strength than I’d ever given him credit for. The blood streamed down my arm in two crimson ribbons, making his grip slippery, but this only tightened his resolve. He rose from the chair, and it fell back against the wall with a crack. Clutching my hand, he dragged me toward the lower bunk.
He placed my bleeding hand over Li’s mouth, pressing my cut against it until his lips pulled apart. I felt Li’s teeth rubbing against my wound but his eyes remained shut. Was he really asleep or just pretending? Seeing my blood smeared across his mouth like lipstick, I felt ill.
“Drink,” Father whispered to his beloved son, tears forming in his eyes, too crystalline and proud to fall.
Li drank.
Although I couldn’t know it then, the balance of power between my twin and myself—a delicate, unspoken understanding natural only to those who’ve shared a womb—had begun to shift. I was now Li’s benefactor; it was my blood that kept him alive.
Maybe because he sensed this unsettling change, Father watched me hawkishly. We went as a pair to the cafeteria for our meals, ferrying food back to Li, who stayed in the room to rest. To improve my circulation, we took solemn, repetitive hikes together on the sports deck, circling the smoke stacks until I memorized every crack and ding in the paint. Each time he caught m
e looking at a stairway or door, he chastised me with a painful squeeze of my arm or with a harrumph if others happened to be watching. Back in the cabin, I received a hard smack for every liberty-seeking glance. Escape proved futile.
Yet it wasn’t exactly escape that I craved. I was thinking about Odell. I had so many questions for him: Was he like me? Could he always see the dead? Was he ever frightened? Would I be? Part of me prayed that he would come back to third class and rescue me, but an even greater part dreaded him seeing me like this, kept under lock and key by an unworthy guardian.
Every morning, under Father’s supervision, I fed Li his cafeteria breakfast and lunch. Every night, again under Father’s watch, Li fed on me, reopening the gash on my palm by first peeling off the scab with his teeth, then sucking on the clot until life flowed afresh from my veins to his and we became one continuous artery.
When Li felt better one evening after his “dinner,” Father was able to take him outside for some fresh air. Once they were safely gone, I saw my chance and stepped into the dusk.
The ship had entered an equatorial zone of dead calm in the South China Sea, an area that was known as the Doldrums because nothing there ever stirred. The air stayed warm and sticky day and night without variation. It was notorious for driving sailors mad with restlessness. But not just sailors. I felt the suffocating humidity burrowing deep into my pores like a pox that was impossible to scratch off.
Running breathlessly along the twilit promenade, I was instantly drenched. Sweat trickled down my chest and legs like tickly snakes. Every door to first class was now locked. My boundary crossing must have provoked these measures. I cursed the engineer. Why so much fuss over one little ghost girl? Why the fear?
Halfway down the walkway, I climbed up a ladder to the next deck, panting from the extra weight the Doldrums seemed to have piled onto me. Up there, my path lit by the most halfhearted moonlight imaginable, I faced a grim mechanical wasteland—spigots, the elbows of unfriendly pipes, the yawning mouths of massive ventilators.
Suddenly the floor shook with a low, vibrating blast, and my ears, bones, everything shattered. The call of Satan’s own trumpeter. I fell to the ground, plugging my ears. Eventually the noise ceased. Nerves still ringing, knees still soft, I ventured forth.
I looked out at the water. It was alit. Not with jellyfish this time but with undulating flecks of gold. Reflections! Adjusting my eyes, I glimpsed on the horizon a swath of land. Its modest hillocks were packed with the silhouettes of curious giraffes, their long necks bending to one side. Electric lights were ablaze on some kind of dock.
It had been days since I had seen anything but water, and even this unpromising atoll romanced me. It loomed closer and closer with each passing second. The giraffes turned out not to be animals after all but tropical palms, their trunks yielding to a nonexistent breeze. Firefly dots of light flickered in the blackness beyond, like a hundred children waving mirrors from dark windows.
“They’ll forget you,” said a child’s voice. It echoed strangely, as if it had come from yards away or from some forlorn corner of my mind. “They always forget you.”
But no more than five feet behind me, amidst the knots and necks of pipes, stood a girl in a red swimsuit. Rachel, of course. Again, I felt no fear. Water flowed from her nostrils and mouth and cascaded down her waxen, silvery skin. Her eyes were bloodshot and her cheeks, possibly once rosy, were sallow. Here was a sweet girl made plain by chlorine and death, nothing at all like the carefree little Europeans I’d seen in Shanghai. She sighed with an old person’s sobriety and turned to leave.
“Wait!” I cried. “Who’s going to forget me?”
The look on her face sent a spear of ice through me: She had the eyes of the kitten in the park, soon after its fear had stilled, the eyes of one who had seen enough to not place any faith in human beings. Somehow I had already failed her.
From deep within its belly, the ship released another plangent, metallic wail. I felt subterranean brakes groaning into place and was thrown against a standing pipe. When I picked myself up, Rachel was gone. All that remained was a puddle where she had stood and the unmistakable scent of the swimming pool.
Cold panic tore through me. They’ll forget you. I dashed toward our cabin.
How long had I been gone? Hours? Third class was deserted. Nobody was in the cafeteria, not even the old codgers who usually sat around playing checkers and smoking Red Lion cigarettes. The reek of tobacco breath still hung in the air, telling me they couldn’t have strayed far—but where to? Down the entire third-class corridor, cabin doors had been left gaping, indecent, and through each I peered uneasily into unmade bunks, evidence of hasty departures. My legs wobbled as I approached ours.
Our room was empty; all our things were gone. Father and Li had abandoned me.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror: I was in pajamas, and embarrassing ones at that—pink flannel imprinted with bouncing rabbits, the left shoulder seam splitting, the underarms salty with perspiration. I had no idea where Father intended for us to lodge, no address, no names of distant relatives who might be standing on the pier in their grass skirts.
My legs were betraying me also. They now threatened to buckle. With a final surge of energy, I climbed to the top bunk and curled up against the hideous green wall, hoping the vines would emerge from it to fold me in, enmesh me in leaves and lichen until everything, everything, was over. But I couldn’t keep my eyes closed; tears were pushing their way out.
Footsteps down the corridor. I jerked up. “Father?”
A face appeared in the doorway—not Father. It was the tanned sailor. “There you are!” He sighed. “Come, hurry.” He came directly to the bunk and seized me, flopping me over his shoulder as if I were a pig to market.
Over the shaky gangway from ship to land, I glimpsed a strip of dark water, teeming with what looked like luminous, fluctuating tulips. Baby jellyfish, still uncertain, still unformed.
Incense, the pious kind Mother despised, laced the air on land. But as soon as we entered the covered terminus, a dilapidated pavilion with wrought-iron pillars, all I smelled was rank body odor. Although electric ceiling fans buzzed far above our heads, it felt as though we’d entered an enormous oven. A teeming oven in which each person had distilled his or her entire life into a single trunk and consequently guarded it with unnatural and often undue hostility.
“Welcome home,” the sailor whispered in my ear as he set my jellied feet down on solid ground in the middle of thousands of people I’d never met. “Your father and brother are waiting for you under the big clock.”
He nudged me in the right direction. I couldn’t see them, but the pale yellow clock face loomed like a moon above the flurry of sticky elbows and sweat-mottled backs. The moon clock had but one arm. What a terrible place this was that even the port terminal clock would be missing an arm! Presently I realized my mistake: The minute hand was tucked behind its brother.
It was midnight.
4
Dirty Island
THE BLACK ISLE was the largest in a chain of some thirty or forty islands scattered along the equator, the smallest of which sprouted no more than a fishing shack and a cluster of palms. East to west it spanned fifty miles, north to south a hundred fifty.
Far from being the center of things, however, the Island—as it was called by the locals—sat like a dull guest in the northwestern corner of the Archipelago, itself an unpromising clutch of crumbs with only the pull of the earth holding it in place. This arrangement seemed entirely provisional, and you got the sense from looking at the map that even the Isle might someday wear thin gravity’s welcome and simply float away.
Yet the Black Isle’s place was as solid as Gibraltar. The British East India Company had owned and operated the Island since the early 1800s, running it as a city-state, much like Florence or Venice at their peak, albeit with Anglo-Saxon stoicism instead of Latinate bravura.
It was the shiny opal in the empire’s Far Eastern
crown—Britain’s only territory with a deep natural harbor and the right climate for the cultivation of such planter favorites as rubber, tobacco, and nutmeg. And being equidistant between India and China, the Island made an ideal stop for British ships ferrying opium. But as to the portentous timbre of its name, the mighty colonizers could not be blamed. It was a literal translation of the native Malay Pulau Hitam (Island Black), perhaps a bitter wink at its shadowy history as a pirate’s lair before the coming of the European.
It was this dark aspect that we saw on the night of our arrival at the tail end of 1929, dreaming of a better life.
The entryway into the Isle was flanked by a series of greeters, starting with poker-faced Chinese guards who divided up the thronging new arrivals. Those Chinese men who spoke fluent English and wore spectacles were pulled from the queue and directed to a separate, less busy area.
“Special treatment!” Father sputtered. He pulled out his comb to neaten his oily, unwashed hair, but then struck me with it instead. “Why did you run off without telling me? If I didn’t have to go looking for you, I would have cleaned up!”
Years later, I realized that our queue had been the lucky one. Because they looked educated, those well-groomed men were interrogated about that scourge of Eurasia, Bolshevism, and were given cavity probes for tell-tale proclivities. Those who gave the slightest cause for suspicion were promptly thrown back on the boat.
At a second checkpoint stood a corpulent British inspector whose sole duty it was to shake hands with us newcomers. This was no friendly gesture, however; he was on the lookout for smooth hands. Smooth hands, too, raised red flags. Father, with his fey, scholarly mien, fell into this category, but fortunately for him, his bedraggled tagalongs (me in torn pajamas, Li of the green face) allowed him to pass through unmolested.
We slept on hardwood benches in the terminal building until morning. At daybreak, packed and smelling like sardines, we were carted off in rickety buses and dropped off en masse at the main depot in the center of the city.