by Sandi Tan
He handed both of us identical sets of trinkets—a Buddhist bracelet with orange prayer beads, a Christian crucifix on a chain, a medallion of the multiarmed Hindu goddess Kali, and a slip of paper with an Islamic tract in Arabic. I smirked but caught Li lowering his eyes in submission. The boy did like his charms; I knew these would join the desiccated toffee disk on his nightstand.
“I don’t know what each of them means,” Father said, “but they have to be kept together at all times. That’s what the old woman who sold them to me said. I’m carrying a set myself.”
“Oh no,” I groaned with mock anguish. “We’re missing a Star of David!”
Father glared at me, then glanced around the apartment. “This is not a joke,” he hissed. “Do you want to get us all killed?”
The night watchman was right. The majority of the suicides on our floor were women. Most were either depressed taxi dancers, weary from hiring themselves out as dance-hall partners, or the neglected wives of opium-wracked rickshaw men. These unhappy souls somehow managed to sneak past the watchman and up to the open-air hallway of the eighth floor. Perhaps bribes were involved. The lazier singsong girls, however, rarely bothered to climb the whole way—they usually leapt off the fourth or fifth floor, and often survived. The ones who didn’t survive lived with us.
There were five ghosts in our apartment when we moved in, six by the end of the first month. The irony didn’t escape me that the dead dancers and prostitutes spoke to me, whereas their living counterparts, dolled up in rouge and sparkles, snubbed me as if I were the human equivalent of a bug—a girl who wore no makeup and loped around town in flat heels.
Over and over, the ghosts told the same stories: They fell for unreliable men and then—surprise, surprise—had their worst fears about them proven true. They moped around our apartment, repeating their pitiable sagas like defendants in a courtroom, proving yet again that death never consoled anyone with new wisdom, only regret. Frustratingly, I couldn’t talk back or shoo them away; the channel of communication was strictly one way. Needless to say, Father’s trinkets were worthless. Not that I would ever tell him. He was so much easier to get along with when he believed he was in control.
A few months after our return, in late 1937, the city opened an amusement park, like a miracle salve for everybody’s woes. Wonder World sat in the no-man’s-land between Chinatown and the docks and was the first social venue where the different races could mix freely, all in the name of fun and games—and, of course, vice. I tried in vain to remember what had been in that location before; Father thought it might have been a squatters’ colony, Li a scrap-metal yard, but neither could recall for sure. Wonder World’s presence was so pungently vibrant—a veritable lotus flower blooming in a muddy trough—that it wiped out all traces of what had come before.
Above its high vermilion walls, loudspeakers blared out its jumbled inventory: “Three cinemas! Two dance halls! Burlesque cabaret! Boxing ring! Silk underwear! Come and see live penguins! Come and taste our fish-ball soup! Beautiful Siamese girls! Beautiful Siamese cats! Two miles of games, three miles of food!”
The papers insisted that the honeymooning Charlie Chaplin had stopped by incognito—no mustache, no bowler—and on our first visit, a canny entrepreneur was already gaining from this unverified tidbit. He stood at the entrance, peddling souvenir cards in the Tramp’s silhouette. Li and I watched him sell twenty in just five minutes.
It was from the gate that we had to observe all the fun. As Li and I wouldn’t be allowed inside until we were eighteen, we gawked from the periphery as Father sauntered in, promising to return with presents. The sweet aroma of honeyed pork jerky wafting from within made us swoon. Salivating, we watched couples emerge dizzy with satisfaction, toting stuffed panda mascots the size of infants and drums of powdered milk—game prizes that seemed to suggest they should go home and instantly start making babies. We also saw drunken British sailors being shown the way out, but there would always be drunken sailors on the Black Isle.
When Father finally resurfaced after two hours, he smelled of cheap beer and even cheaper perfume. Not surprisingly, he was empty-handed.
“The ball-toss hoops are rigged,” he laughed, forcing a tone of outrage. “They’re all out of reach!”
Judging from the lipstick mark on his neck, the singsong girls were, alas, not.
St. Anne’s had changed, too. When I returned to reenroll myself, I thought the old building had been torn down and replaced by a spotless, somewhat drab replica.
“It’s the same old pile, minus the guano,” beamed Sister O’Hara, the reading teacher I had once called a giraffe. “Sister Nesbit decided it was about time. A chunk of it fell off during the last Visitors Day and struck one of our donors on the noggin. You look disappointed. Don’t you like it?”
The truth was the old version had more character. Thankfully, the nuns were as welcoming as ever. Aside from their equine body odor, they were almost supernatural—none of them seemed to have aged. The spring-footed headmistress, Sister Nesbit, was delighted at the return of the prodigal daughter, as she called me, and ushered me straight to class. She had always treated me with kindness, and seeing that old familiar smile, I found myself quite moved.
Although I’d dreamt of my return, I hadn’t realized how starved I had been for knowledge until I reentered the school library. I devoured whatever I could lay my hands on. My new favorite was the saturnine Baudelaire, and I lingered in the stacks long past daylight hours, alone with books and ghosts.
There were far fewer of the latter at St. Anne’s now, perhaps because Sister Nesbit had installed bright lights throughout the building. The writhing maidens of the toilet were gone—as was poor Dora Conceição. The hanging girl, however, continued to convulse from the fan during assembly, but I now found her presence weirdly reassuring.
On weekends, I followed my guides Hugo, Balzac, and Maupassant. They led me away from our narrow rooms to salons and factories filled with conversation and smoke. In my reading, I discovered some of the qualities that made the French great romantic figures but quite deluded colonials: They were short-term thinkers, impetuous, vain, thoroughly at the mercy of immediate, especially sensual, pleasures. While I loved the French for their style, I thanked my stars we had the British, who at least parlayed their stoical love of dull duty into constructing roads and schools.
In 1940, when I turned eighteen, Sister Nesbit delivered the news I’d been most dreading. I had officially outgrown St. Anne’s, and unless I wanted to try for university—which I could not afford—it was time for me to leave. To soften the blow of my exile, she found me a position as governess to the Chew family, who lived in Monks Hill, a leafy neighborhood favored by bourgeois Peranakans. “See if you like teaching,” Sister Nesbit said, “and if you do, apply to the teacher’s college.”
The Chews offered me room and board (dank closet and seat at the family table next to my ten-year-old ward). Happy for any excuse to avoid my family and the chatterbox wraiths of the eighth floor, I immediately accepted, though I resented the idea of being an equatorial Jane Eyre. I believed, with no evidence, that I was destined for better.
For his part, Li worked as an errand boy for a large family in the west of the Island. Though his job horrified me—he was essentially what that boy Cricket had been for us in Shanghai—he seemed disturbingly contented. I supposed his master’s demands kept him too busy to feel anything more than passive numbness. Gone was his earlier spark. It was as if our up-country debacle had taught him it was hubris to dream or even desire. I felt that he ought to have been wanting more—and doing better. Doing what, however, I had no idea.
Hoping to enjoy what free time we had together, we steered clear of tricky subjects—Shanghai, the plantation, our uncertain future—and talked pleasantries. Going to the pictures suited us perfectly. On our days off, we would meet at the Rex, a salmon-pink Art Deco cinema near Little India, or at the Pavilion, which was more staid but had the crunchiest chili peanut
s in town. I loved how American movie characters always spoke their minds, completely uninhibited. Bogart, Cagney, Astaire, Rogers—we liked them all, but our favorites were the best talkers: Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Bringing Up Baby and Holiday we must have seen ten times, with undimmed pleasure.
After a while, I could detect in our voices traces of the luscious “transatlantic” diction spoken only on Hollywood soundstages. Li made a habit of tagging on “Say” and “Look” before he began a sentence, like a newsman pitching story ideas to his girl Friday. I never pointed this out to him in case he got self-conscious; I was just happy to know I wasn’t the only one mouthing along with our heroes in the dark.
Away from the movie palace, I was far from a wisecracking ingénue. I made a terrible governess. Despite her mother’s assurances that she was “bright” and “forthright”—meaning, of course, spoiled and rude—I hated the Chew girl, whose Christian name was Rosalind. The antipathy was mutual. She kicked me twice and called me a witch.
I resigned, having lasted all of five weeks.
Father, of course, was furious, telling me, “Teaching is the only honest work you’ll find on this Island!” But quitting liberated my soul to new possibilities. At the tail end of 1940, I was glancing at a newspaper abandoned on the tram when a notice in an old-fashioned, genteel typeface caught my eye:
Nurse/Companion Sought for Ailing Gentlewoman. Good Pay.
It was through this fortuitous ad that I would ultimately meet the man who would transform my life.
The old woman lived in a hulking mock Tudor in the Tanglewood estate, painted completely white. As my taxi approached, I felt certain I’d seen it before, perhaps on Father’s infamous “bus” tour. Then I realized, with a mixed feeling, that this was the home of the philanthropist Ignatius Wee, patron of St. Anne’s. This was where my education at his school had led me: to be his maid.
The grounds were crowded with Indian gardeners tending to the sprawling lawn, by hand. Backs bent over the grass, they made me think of the gleaners in Millet’s painting, faceless and powerless. I might soon join their ranks—if I was lucky. It was a far cry from the plantation, where I was once boss. The thought of my decline filled me with anguish as I rang the doorbell.
An elderly Chinese butler led me into the foyer and vanished. I walked myself into the sitting room. The Wee family was Peranakan and possessed that tribe’s weakness for all things European. Indeed, someone had gone through considerable trouble doing up the Wees’ parlor in high Belle Époque style. Its puffy damask curtains and dragonfly-shaped Tiffany lamps verged on being over the top, but the slim-legged Viennese tables and chairs kept the room elegant—perhaps even too elegant for actual use. A mournful old crucifix (Peranakans tend to be Catholic) completed the scene with its bleeding Christ hovering above the ornamental fireplace, an eerie vision of suffering against all the opulence.
A gong went off, making me jump. It continued until I realized it was just a grandfather clock in the hallway chiming half past eleven. The sound only seemed excessively loud because it was deathly quiet inside the house. Had my client expired in the half day between my inquiry and my arrival?
I’d come prepared to endure a full interview. But the chief of the household staff, a delicate woman of thirty with aristocratic features, instantly smiled her approval when she entered the room and we exchanged our first words. She, too, was from Shanghai and eager to converse in our native tongue.
“Mrs. Wee is expecting you,” she said. So my client was still alive. Was she Mrs. Ignatius Wee? I wondered.
The Shanghainese filled me in quickly. The Wees were an old family by Island standards, meaning that they could be traced back almost fifty years—the ancestral patriarch had been an inventory clerk with the East India Company. His grandson, Ignatius Wee, had his hand in many businesses, including a rubber brokerage, and chaired the local Chinese chamber of commerce. Nobody else in the family worked.
“Yes, I know, it’s very quiet here,” she stage-whispered as she took me along the echoing hallway and up the stairs toward the boudoir, where the ailing Mrs. Wee rested. “They desperately need the laughter of children in this house. But children are afraid to visit. You can’t really blame them, can you?”
“What kind of illness does she have?”
“A tumor in her brain. It affects her vision.”
Mrs. Wee’s lair was the first room at the top of the stairs; it was as big as the downstairs parlor. The thick damask curtains were drawn, leaving it dark as night. I expected to find the old woman asleep. But a light clicked on and there she was—sitting upright in a wingback chair, awake and keen. She wasn’t old either, at most sixty.
“Come here.” Her voice was more forceful than I’d imagined.
I stepped forward.
“Closer,” she purred, stretching out her withered hand. “I’m not contagious.”
I obeyed, moving in until she could reach my face. She examined me with her fine, sinewy hands, her fingers running across my cheeks like tarantulas to massage my forehead and temples, her impervious eyes staring fixedly ahead. This was clearly a grande dame accustomed to having both looks and money; even with her infirmity, she was the most forceful woman I’d met—after Mother, of course.
Satisfied with her tactile inspection, she turned to me. “I’m not blind. Not completely, anyway.” She said this defiantly, as if I would think less of her if she was. “Your forehead is quite high and slightly protruding.”
I held my breath.
“It is an auspicious forehead,” she declared. “And you have a Phoenix Pearl. If you don’t know what that is, and I suspect you don’t because you have done nothing to accentuate it, it is the swelling at the tip of your lips, just below the nose. It’s considered very lucky to have one—if you’re in the market for a husband. It more than makes up for your nose, which, though symmetrical, is too angular. Do you have any moles?”
“I’m not sure.” Her directness perturbed me. I’d never been appraised like a leg of mutton before. “There’s a tiny spot in the middle of my left cheek.”
“Where? Let me see.” She meant let her touch. I leaned forward and she felt for the spot. “Ah.”
I froze.
“This is a mixed blessing. It means you will achieve some kind of social prominence. But you will care too much about this, and it will cause you much pain when it is taken away from you.” She shook her head gravely. “Although you seem strong and confident on the outside, you have a fatal weakness: You derive your sense of worth from how others perceive you. You crave approval; you want to be adored. Therefore any loss of love or attention affects you aversely—even dangerously.”
“You can tell all this from just one little spot?”
“My readings are never wrong. And besides,” she added, softening, “I have that very same mole myself.”
Indeed she did. But hers was larger, older, uglier. There was a strained silence. I had no idea how to respond; anything I said could be construed as a rejection or an insult. I decided to make myself useful instead.
“Would you like me to read to you, Mrs. Wee?”
“No, no. I don’t care for stories.” She waved her hand, and I suddenly realized that the Shanghainese had been standing in the room with us all this while. “Cancel the other appointments,” she told the girl. “I’m too tired to be choosy. This one will do.”
At once, the curtains were pulled apart by the Shanghainese, flooding the room with harsh tropical daylight. Mrs. Wee stared at me, studying my features, and I shivered when I saw her face. She was a dead ringer for Mother. Prettier and more weathered perhaps, yet the resemblance was unmistakable. At least, from my fading memory.
“You can start today.” It wasn’t a question or even a request.
“What would you like me to do?” My voice wobbled.
“I would like you to go to bed.”
“Now, madam?” It was not even noon.
“I know it’s not your accustomed be
dtime, but while you are working for us, it shall be. Your responsibility is to watch me sleep. Tonight and every night, until…well, until I no longer require your services.” Now she was finished. “Little Girl will show you to your quarters.”
The Shanghainese nodded and we departed.
“Why does she call you Little Girl?” I whispered to my compatriot as we descended the creaking stairway.
“I came here when I was seventeen, but because I was so malnourished, Mrs. Wee always insisted I was twelve.” She laughed, a little wistfully. “I don’t think she even knows my real name.”
“Is she from Shanghai, too?”
“Oh no. Her family’s been in the Nanyang for at least three generations. Why?”
“She looks a lot like somebody I used to know.”
Little Girl smiled ruefully. “Of course she does. Everybody here looks like somebody back home.”
She led me through the sweltering, cramped kitchen that had as its centerpiece an enormous stove with eight burners, two of which were actively boiling pots of bone stock. Four porcelain cups and an elaborate glass-tube contraption for brewing coffee sat on the counter waiting to be rinsed. A pair of pigtailed apprentice cooks squatted over day-old newspapers, grimly peeling a hillock of live, wriggling prawns while a wireless hissed out Cantonese madrigals of old China. The girls shuffled aside on their wooden clogs to let us pass, but neither looked up. Even though I was sure they couldn’t understand Shanghainese, I waited for them to be out of earshot before I asked my guide the question that had perplexed me most:
“Why does Mrs. Wee want me to watch her sleep?”
“She’s terrified of being alone at night, not that she’ll ever admit it. That tumor affecting her eyes? It makes her see things that aren’t there.” Little Girl stopped walking and lowered her voice some more. “She thinks she sees ghosts. It’s that old wives’ tale, you know, about those close to death being able to see the other side. You must think she’s a little unusual, not to say crazy, but—”