by Sandi Tan
The city began on the Island’s southern tip, and from this Victorian crucible civilization boomed. What I saw that first dawn was a typical frontier town, much like what I would later see in pictures of Bombay, Sydney, Johannesburg: a clique of European wedding cakes standing close together, frowning valiantly through the heat and dust at the endless circuit of zigzagging trolleybuses. Everything was overwhelming—the noise from horns, engines, cursing in a dozen languages; the smell of coal smoke, frying oil, sewer rot; and even the people, who were all sizes and shades. Most terrifying of all were the rogue taxicabs that flew over curbs, sluicing in front of man, beast, and automobile, honking all the way. The moment we stepped into the street, one of these wild jalopies, puffing putrid black smoke, came within a foot of ramming us down; at the last second, it swerved away, its Klaxon horn battering our eardrums. I held on to Father and Li, jumping, squealing, and weeping at every honk. Finally, Father flagged down the most sedate one of them to whisk us away.
I gaped out the window. Along the edge of the road, unruly with meandering snack carts and billboards selling Vicks cough mixture and Flying Horse bicycle tires, moved a grave procession of twenty or thirty men. They wore thick black robes and marched two by two, their hooded heads piously bent, their pace in keeping with some shared bereavement. As we slowly glided past them, I saw that under each of their overhanging cowls was a solemn, unyielding darkness.
“Why so quiet all of a sudden?” Father asked me, not unkindly.
“Those men,” I whispered, pointing.
He looked. “What men?”
I shuddered and let the subject drop. Unlike the ghosts I’d met before, these men unnerved me; they were too remote. Worse, there was now nobody I could tell, not even Sister Kwan, who, for all her shortcomings, at least believed me. Would these visions never end? I curled up into a ball and shut my treacherous eyes.
A different kind of dread fell upon me when we reached Chinatown and the knot of lanes known as Bullock Cart Water, so called because a station for working beasts used to stand there. I knew Shanghai was gone forever when the cab pulled up to our narrow four-story row house: Jet-black mildew covered its walls, pink patches of brick exposed like bare skin. We had come all this way, endured the long voyage, for this? What’s more, we had to lug our own cases—no servants ran out to help us. No Sister Kwan, no Sister Choon, not even chubby, grouchy Cricket.
Li fought back his tears as we lugged our possessions up steep, dark, creaking stairs to the third floor. It was a small but real comfort that I wasn’t alone in my dismay. I kept waiting for him to say something to Father, but he never did.
When we came to door 31A, its red paint flaking off where vandals had scratched a huge and ominous X, Father pulled me aside.
“Your brother’s not feeling well,” he said softly, slipping me a few coins. “Go downstairs and buy some baos. They will cheer him up.”
I knew pork buns were Li’s favorite, but where was I to find them? This wasn’t Shanghai. Did people even eat baos here? Nevertheless, I did as I was told. The longer I could delay facing the squalor of our apartment, the better. I ran all the way downstairs, taking care to avoid the festering mound of feces I’d spotted on the second-floor landing. A rat hissed at me from some unseen hole.
The shop on the ground floor of our row house was named House of Great Hope. It didn’t sell baos; what it had in its tall glass cabinets were male-potency elixirs made from deer antlers and cobra hearts. The sidewalk in front of the building had been commandeered by a wordless duo: a barber who cut hair in the open and a coffee man who used an old sock as his strainer. No baos. I ran down the street reading the signs—Long Last Incense, Great Eastern Fortune-Teller, Gold Star Herbalist. At the end of the pavement clustered five women with no faces. I rubbed my eyes, but it did no good; each still had a creamy blur in place of features. Though they looked Chinese in their white pajamas, their frenzied chatter was no dialect I’d ever heard. It was closer to shushing, the admonishments of stern librarians.
I turned back before any of them could spot me. But no sooner did I move away than something raced up behind me and tapped my shoulder. I shrieked.
It was not a ghost, just a man who seemed like one—a scrawny, white-haired Indian sadhu with gray-black skin and a pale smear of volcanic ash between his eyes. He was barefoot and wore no more than a muslin loincloth. Each time he waved his arms, he unleashed the reek of rotting meat.
I clutched the coins tightly but he didn’t want money. No, he fixed his magnetic, bloodshot eyes on me and shook his dirt-encrusted fist at the cosmos.
“Very dirty, this island…This island, very dirty.”
Having uttered this strange greeting, he nodded at me and ambled away at a leisurely pace, taking his fleas with him.
We shared apartment 31A with two other newcomer families, the Cantonese Wongs and the Hakka Koos—both half families, torn down the middle like ours. Each clan made do with a room of two bunk beds and a wardrobe. Ours had me nostalgic for the ship. There was just one window and it overlooked an alley favored by whistling, lip-smacking pimps. Luckily, there wasn’t any room here left for ghosts.
The common area was just wide enough for a table and a single bench, so the families ate in turn, which was just as well. The drab monotony of our dinners—rice, salt fish, pickled vegetables—was a constant source of shame. With these dismal dinners gurgling in our bellies, Li and I spent every dusk hiding from the black-skinned Tamil who went shirtless from door to door, chanting: “Karang guni…Karang guni…” We had talked ourselves into believing he was a jailer coming for naughty boys and girls. It was only after speaking to the Koos that we discovered our foolishness: karang guni meant “discards,” not “children.” He was only the dustman.
In that tight space, a tense, unspoken rivalry grew between the three fathers for jobs, schools, food. There were always unhappy looks whenever a child from one family was caught playing with one from another. After a while I realized why. We had entered a kind of limbo, a transitional period in which we were meant to form no ties, exchange no secrets; it was the loathsome interregnum we were never to speak of again once we settled into our real lives as respectable Islanders with our own private apartments. Already we never spoke of our passage on the ship. The collective amnesia Father, Li, and I feigned just had to keep on expanding.
And so our first weeks passed.
Mosquitoes sucked at our blood, geckoes shat in our food, and we fell asleep—even in the stony heart of Chinatown, with no sea view and nary a sprig of green—to the howls of wild dogs and the arias of ten thousand insects. Still, we dreamed.
Li and I were sent to free day schools run by missionaries—Oldham Boys for him, St. Anne’s for me—but contrary to literary cliché, we were not put to work weaving rugs, nor were we set upon with paddles and canes by mad, grinning nuns. We paid in prayer, yes, but lucky for us, the good brothers and sisters wanted first and foremost to turn the children of the Black Isle into learned little people—catechism came only after Chaucer, mass only after math.
St. Anne’s was a two-story Victorian box on Emerald Hill, just beyond the business district. Its founding donor was one Ignatius Wee, the rare philanthropist of Chinese descent who did not demand the place be named after him nor that a pair of snaggletoothed foo dogs flank the entryway. The only visible marker of Mr. Wee’s generosity was a plain brass plaque outside the staff room with the simple legend IGNATIUS WEE, PATRON. The somber gray building could have passed for a tourist landmark had it not been for its notorious former life as an asylum, a memory the nuns had done nothing to rub out.
On my first day there, I learned a new word, which, I suppose, boded well for my education.
“Guano,” announced Sister Enid Nesbit, the apple-cheeked and uncommonly kind headmistress, anticipating what must have been the question most asked of her. “That’s not frosting or candle wax. It’s just guano.”
We were standing outside in the midday sun. She wa
s pointing at the school’s roof, from which weird gray spears hung from the eaves like stalactites, blackening with each successive monsoon.
“Guano?” I asked meekly, every bit the new girl whose father was so underinformed as to enroll her in the middle of term.
“Guano is feces, or more specifically, bat feces.” Sister Nesbit beamed, almost house-proud. “There are pigeon droppings mixed in there, too, of course, but it is still mainly bats. We’ve loads of bats. You could almost say we’re quite—”
“Batty?”
She laughed. “Could be…though I was actually going to say we’re quite well fortified for a convent school, because guano makes for excellent gunpowder.”
Sister Nesbit, I would later learn, was the product of a Calcutta birth and fifty-odd years spent shuffling between the port towns of the empire, a history that helped explain her ability to turn every mishap or disgrace into an opportunity for learning.
In truth, I had not paid much heed to the discolored walls. Instead my eyes were transfixed by what I saw through the windows: waxen European women, clearly not students or teachers, staring out of the classrooms like dress shop dummies. They did have faces, or at least partially—gray-rimmed eyes and smudged noses, no mouths—and they were naked, their bare breasts varying in shape and sag.
There were so many of them. My school was a gallery of dead women.
Sister Nesbit was oblivious, but my arms were covered in gooseflesh. I was ashamed for these women, yet also terrified, and tried to conceal my nerves with excessive smiling.
“I can tell you’re going to do very well here,” Sister Nesbit said, all maternal encouragement as she led me inside the building whose darkness her bright attitude had scant prepared me for.
What saved me was the nuns’ generosity of spirit, which forced me to put on a brave front, day after day. Was I terrified of the mouthless, naked specters that crisscrossed the classrooms? Of course I was. Did I dread morning assembly at Shaw Hall, with the long-haired schoolgirl dangling from the ceiling fan, shaking out her final spasms inches from Sister Nesbit’s wimple? I felt sick every time. I even grew numb whenever the nuns spoke of “the Holy Ghost” in prayer.
The most dreadful room in the building was also the one impossible to avoid: the toilet. Windowless, pungent in the extreme, and lit by a lone bare bulb, it had five mossy stalls, each fitted with an oval hollow in the tiled floor that always became clogged by noon. A low bank of sinks lined one wall, their mirrors cracked and smeared with dark, unwashable stains that looked suspiciously like old blood. One didn’t need a special gift to know that unspeakable things had happened here. The first time I stepped into the gloomy room, I saw four naked European women lying on the grimy white tiles, their bluish, milky rib cages marred by cuts and bruises, their eyes staring at me. The stalls were worse—each had its own phantom guardian crouching behind the door. Every time I entered, I thought of the sadhu’s words—very dirty.
I yearned to tell Sister Nesbit that her school was swarming with horrors. Yet how could I crush the nuns’ illusions with my righteous testimony? Ghosts would have proved false the efficacy of prayer, a practice they were working so hard to instill in their two hundred impressionable young wards; ghosts would have attacked the core of the missionaries’ idealism, that the dark Isle was worth illuminating. This was assuming, of course, that the sisters took my warnings seriously at all. Surely I could close my eyes and hold my tongue long enough to absorb a few years of verbs, adverbs, and long division, skills that would help me transcend the narrow rooms of Father’s world?
The alternative was clear: hard child labor, Bullock Cart Water forever. Damnation.
I don’t know what Li’s scholastic life was like in those days, but it couldn’t have been much grander. I watched him grow into a quiet boy plagued with bouts of exhaustion, chained to a thrice-weekly regimen of boiled pig’s blood to curb his anemia. On his good days, he played sports with his mates—soccer, rugby, rounders, badminton—and this meant that we grew into very different people. I devoured books, whereas he read nothing at all. We increasingly had nothing to talk about. We continued to sleep back to sticky back like a two-headed beast: he with the gold toffee disk tucked into his hand and me making tense, tight fists. I suppose we each, in our own way, were praying for a better future.
Everywhere in our neighborhood, however, steps were constantly being taken to protect the past, which, to most, meant the dead. The zealous staged street operas in Teochew and Cantonese to distract their ghost relatives from mischief, burned “hell money” to support their netherworldly spending, and placed six-inch blocks in entryways to prevent the unwelcome ones from supposedly gliding in—not that any of these measures made a bit of difference, as I often felt like telling them.
“Don’t you stare at me,” Father barked at me one afternoon when I returned to find him nailing a small, hexagonal mirror above our room door. “I bought this from the Taoist temple down the road. Better safe than sorry, don’t you think?”
To my dismay, our father had become superstitious. Once so modern, he now absorbed the old-fashioned panic around him. He grew gray and gaunt, losing most of his hair and a quarter of his body weight. To hide his sunken chest, he developed a pronounced hunch: A bone that looked like a baby’s elbow jutted out of his upper back, just below the neck. The old stork was turning into a camel. His fearfulness meant that I had to act bravely at home, as I did at school, to spare him additional worry. Naturally, I never mentioned the eyeless old man who had begun appearing every night at the foot of his bed.
Through the early 1930s, even during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the sneak attacks culminating in the occupation of Shanghai, Mother stayed in touch. At first I would rip open her letters the moment they arrived, savoring any news of the twins, but I soon found that to read Mother’s letters was to be driven mad with frustration. The little ones were very well, she always wrote without variation, and she was very well, too. No mention was ever made of the checkpoints that were reportedly making daily life so impossible or of the nighttime gun battles between the Republican army and the Japanese military that we heard so much about on the wireless. I learned more about occupied Shanghai from the mass boycott of Japanese brothels in Chinatown than from anything Mother cared to share.
She always signed off, “Yours sincerely, Mother.” No love, no kisses, just cordial sincerity, as if she’d been forced to pen these missives at gunpoint when what she really wanted to do was go out and dance on the beach. I had a theory that she was being held captive by the Japanese, but when I shared this with Father, he laughed so hard—and so acridly—that I thought the throbbing vein on his forehead would burst.
Not that Father, I suspect, ever painted her the full picture from our side. He wrote home every other month and sent along whatever money he could save, but steady work kept eluding him; not one of his clerking positions had lasted longer than two months. Most of the Chinese bosses were from Guangdong Province or Fujian, few of whom spoke English and none of whom had the patience to penetrate Father’s Shanghainese-fattened Mandarin. The lingua franca of the street was in fact Malay. Even the European towkays (bosses, in the Island vernacular) had to pick up a few words of it to make themselves understood to the help.
Father resisted learning. But it wasn’t all his fault; bad luck kept his spirits down. The Depression had left this part of the world tattered and raw. Walking to and from St. Anne’s, I saw rickshaw coolies squatting in the shade, some without fares for days. Beside them were construction workers (many of them Chinese women), wharf laborers, beggars, all stooping together in what at first appeared to be silent solidarity but, at a second glance, was clearly bewilderment so deep as to have rendered every single one of them speechless. Only their children had the enterprise to beg, filling the district with their ubiquitous cry: “No mother, no father, no supper, no soda!”
After school, I often sat on a stone bench in the traffic island dividing Spring Street, t
he main artery of Chinatown. This island was tiny: just a small, raised slab with barely enough room for the bench, a hibiscus bush, and the pedestal where Mr. Singh, the Sikh policeman, stood directing traffic with oversized canvas sleeves fastened to his arms like wings. It was here, watching the throngs in cars, trams, buses, and on foot, that I received my practical education.
The Chinese, who made up a little more than half of the populace, came in a wide variety, from slave to millionaire. The ones known as Peranakans, whose families had been in the Nanyang for generations and proudly spoke no Chinese at all, fared the best. The rich ones swanned into Chinatown in big cars, trailed by uniformed servants, eager to distinguish themselves from the newcomers. The indigenous Malays mostly worked as drivers and laborers or led self-sustaining lives as fishermen; though most were poor, their lives were still in general not as dire as those of the South Indian Untouchables who took the worst jobs: hauling stone and removing night soil. The karang guni men were of this caste. Then there were Parsee, Arab, and Jewish shop merchants. These fluid types weathered the hard times better than most because they maintained family everywhere and did business with everyone. I found them admirable, if always a little sly.
Looking down on us all were the Europeans, who rarely stepped into Chinatown except on ghoulish excursions to see the death houses of Sago Lane, where old amahs rented bunks and waited to die. From the gin-soaked specimens I saw, I concluded that the Island’s Europeans were of a much coarser grade than those of Shanghai. Perhaps this was because they felt they owned the place rather than tenanted it, as in China.
But the heartening thing about the Black Isle was that, aside from the colonials, everybody mixed. Even in Chinatown, you would find a Taoist temple devoted to the goddess of mercy, a Hindu temple with stone buffalos stacked in a gaudy pyramid, an Anglican church with services in three languages, and a boxy run-of-the-mill mosque, all on the same street. Around the corner, there might be a synagogue, a kramat—the tomb of an Islamic holy man—and an Armenian church standing cheek by jowl.