As the Earth Turns Silver

by Alison Wong

  And all he could think of was the bed he made for her under the destroyed tree, the intense warmth as he came down on her. As he entered.

  Better Than a Dog

  ‘How long have you been working for me, Katherine? I’ve never seen you looking so good.

  ‘Do you remember what you were like? A lost puppy. You were! And now look at you. Mr Newman was saying to me the other day, “That Katherine McKechnie, she’s lost ten years off that pretty face of hers.” He says I’ve done you a world of good.’

  Mrs Newman laughed. She put her pen down and clasped her hands in front of her. ‘So who is he, Katherine?

  ‘Come on, Katherine, I know that look – you’re like a blushing bride. I swear if I didn’t know better, you’d break into song as you typed my letters. You’re in love, Katherine. Who is he?

  ‘No, I haven’t heard any rumours. You’ve obviously been careful, but you used to be so punctual. No, I’m not concerned if now and then you’re five or ten minutes late. Though love can be injurious to one’s health if one doesn’t get enough sleep . . .

  ‘I’m not going to tell anyone, Katherine, not even Mr Newman. I understand the life of a widow with children is hardly conducive to romantic entanglements. What man wants a used chalice, as they say, let alone another man’s children?

  ‘Is he married? No?

  ‘Oh.

  ‘Well, you certainly are full of surprises.’

  Mrs Newman picked up her pen, wrote a few words. Crossed them out.

  ‘You should be careful . . .

  ‘Katherine. I have nothing against the Chinese. They’re a hardworking race, they keep pretty much to themselves, and they don’t deserve the vilification granted them in the newspapers. But—

  ‘Katherine, listen. What does your fellow Briton see, the one who struggles to put bread and dripping on the table? The Chinamen undercut us with prices that would put a decent working man in the poorhouse. They take work away from impoverished laundrywomen. They suck the country dry and then return to the Flowery Land with everything that is rightfully ours. That’s what people say, and you know it.

  ‘Katherine, don’t look at me like that, I’m only trying to open your eyes. At least you should be careful of your reputation.

  ‘Yes, I realise you’re being careful. Otherwise I’m sure I would have heard about this a long time ago . . .

  ‘But Katherine, make sure you’re doubly careful. You may be a widow, but your husband was a respected member of the community . . .’

  Mrs Newman burst into donkey-like laughter. She convulsed, ending in a loud snort. ‘Oh, Katherine you are a party! Of course I know women aren’t just appendages of their husbands! But, seriously Katherine, you must realise that it’s only the lowest class of women who consort with Chinamen. Those who have nothing to lose.

  ‘All right, so there might be a few respectable women who marry Chinamen. Ladies who play the piano at church and fall in love while working for the Lord among the heathen. These are the kind of women who answer the call of God to the darkest heart of Africa or China and die in childbirth or of some unspeakable tropical disease.

  ‘Katherine, listen to me. Did you know that if you marry an alien, you lose your British citizenship? No, I didn’t think so. A woman gets married and she might as well be an infant or a lunatic or an idiot. I wish I was joking. You marry a Chinaman and you lose the right to vote, you won’t get the old-age pension, Katherine, you lose everything. And if you’re thinking of living in sin, God forbid, you must have heard of the cases that have gone through the court? Doesn’t Truth love to report such cases? Low-class women living with Chinamen. I’ve heard it said that they’re better treated by the John than their drunken husbands, but Katherine, the police have picked up women from Haining Street and charged them with vagrancy and being without means of support. They’ve taken British children away from their mothers – despite the mothers protesting that the children are well cared for – because the house was frequented by Chinamen!

  ‘He doesn’t live in Haining Street? Katherine, it’s a matter of appearances. He’s a Chinaman. That makes him worse than a Jew and maybe a little better than a dog. Maybe. Do you think they’d pick up a woman who was living with a white man, even a drunkard, and charge her with vagrancy? Do you think they’d take away her children?

  ‘Katherine, I’m telling you this for your own good. Everything you do or don’t do has its consequences. Just make sure you are prepared for them.’

  As the Earth Turns Sílver

  What was it? He wanted to know why she held back. Why she did not respond to his kisses.

  She did not know what to say. She could hear Mrs Newman’s words but could not tell him. ‘The children know I come out at night,’ she said.

  For a moment there was silence. Then he drew her to him, kissed her hair. ‘Come,’ he said, taking her by the hand, leading her out from the cover of trees, back through the College grounds, down to the city.

  It was a clear night. A full moon. She was afraid with such bright moonlight even at ghost hour, as he called it, when the living slept and only the dead walked the streets. What if someone saw them?

  But he was wearing a hat, he said. If someone came, he would look down or away. She could do the talking. No one would see he was Chinese.

  She asked where they were going. She was anxious about leaving the children for too long. And what about the police? Didn’t they patrol the streets at night? What if a constable stopped them? But he put his finger to her lips and led her down the promenade – the path through gardens and trees – between Cambridge and Kent Terraces. They walked through stillness, through shadow and moonlit brightness, the statue of Queen Victoria looming ever closer before them. Katherine stopped and placed her hand on the granite pedestal, looked up at the great bronze figure. She looked old, hard, and yet she’d loved her Albert.

  ‘Come,’ he said again, and they walked past the Zealandia Hotel, past the City Destructor chimneys, to the silent boats, the empty baths, the sweep of the harbour along Oriental Parade.

  He laughed at the name; told her this was his street, not Adelaide Road, not Haining Street, not Frederick or Taranaki or Tory. He told her to look at the moon and street lights reflected in black water. Had she ever seen it like this at night? The most beautiful street in Wellington. This Chinese street where no Chinese lived.

  He came from behind and held her in his arms, told her to look again at earth and sky and water. Could she see how the world turned silver? People died, he told her, because they were afraid. They did not go out at night on dangerous water. They did not see the earth as it turned overnight to silver.

  She gazed at the ripples of light on blackness. But people died in dangerous water. She turned to face him, told him it didn’t even have to be dangerous. Her husband fell drunk into the harbour one night. They pulled him out in the morning.

  He was silent for a while. Then he told her there were two ways to die. One was . . . he looked at her, uncertain how to express it in English.

  ‘Inevitable?’ she said. ‘It comes to everyone?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes’. The corners of his mouth lifted. But then he looked at her intently. The other way, he said, this inside death, was not . . . inevitable. People took it in their hands, they held it and would not let go. Some people did this and did not know. Some people knew what they were doing.

  He kissed her eyelid. Told her they were born for dangerous water.

  She looked up at him. Shivered.

  ‘You’re cold,’ he said. He put his coat over her shoulders, and they turned and walked back along the harbour, past the bereft boats, back towards the city and home.

  More Than Horses

  ‘She’s taking your soul away.’

  Yung looked up from the tub where he was washing excess soil from the potatoes. He did not reply.

  ‘Nothing good can come from this. You should stop it now.’ When his brother still gave no response, Shun said, �
�If a woman is married to a rooster, she is married to him all her life.’

  In his mind, Yung completed the proverb: If a woman is married to a dog, she is married to him all her life; if she is married to a washing stick, she must carry it all her life. He kept scrubbing the potatoes. ‘In the New Gold Mountain,’ he said, ‘a virtuous woman is widowed and may marry again.’

  His brother spat into the cabbage trimmings. ‘And what luck is this, to take a dead man’s wife? You want the bad luck too?’ He waved the trimming knife in his hand. ‘You think the piss on the door’s a coincidence?’

  Yung did not look up.

  ‘I don’t know what you see in her. Your wife was a beauty.’

  Yung remembered his wife’s pale, clear skin, her small hands with their long fingers, the way she walked on her tiny feet like a light wind blowing through willow. Now his memories were like a dream, or perhaps a vision of what might have been. This he remembered: his wife laughed like bamboo yielding, like its leaves rustling in the wind. Her figure was slender and her feet like tender bamboo shoots. And yet what he’d treasured most was talking with her. Sometimes she argued with him. About poetry. He chuckled, remembering her furrowed brow, the intensity in a woman who was usually so compliant. He preferred Tu Fu, but she loved Li Po because there was so much space, she said, so much room for the spirit and the imagination. Like a chapter from A Floating Life, they had a game where they composed couplets, one after the other, until their rhymes degenerated from works of beauty into foolishness and laughter.

  Mrs McKechnie – Katherine’s skin was freckled and her mouth large. She wore large black boots like other western women and did not sway as she walked. She knew nothing of Chinese poetry, and sometimes even simple communication was fraught with misunderstanding.

  Once in the early days when he delivered her vegetables, she’d offered him a cup of tea and he, being polite, declined, as is the custom. But she had taken him at his word and did not offer again, and then again. In hindsight he realised this was not rudeness, or even a lack of generosity. It was the foreigner’s way. He had to bite his lip and receive quickly, or not at all.

  Yung looked across at his brother, who had a little wife to share his bed each night. He looked down at the dark, brown water. His hands were cold, the skin ingrained with dirt like the patterns on bamboo, like the ripples of waves on sand.

  Mrs McKechnie. Yes, she bore a dead man’s name; yes, she was a big-nosed, red-haired foreigner; and yet the words of Po Lo came to him now: ‘To find a good horse,’ he said, ‘you look at its shape, you look at its muscle and bone, but to find a great horse, you forget all these things.’

  Shun had never read Lieh Tzu, and at times like now he envied, no, resented his brother’s learning – learning that he, by hard toil, had paid for. But Yung didn’t look up, didn’t see his brother’s anger. He continued oblivious. ‘When you look at a horse,’ he said, ‘there are more important things than horses.’

  Shun sighed. It was never easy to talk to his brother. To admonish or advise him. Yung always quoted from the classics or some revolutionary like Liang Ch’ichao or Sung Chiao-jen or Sun Yat-sen, or else he came out with brilliant, sickening words of his own.

  Shun tried again. ‘Look at Yue Jackson,’ he said. ‘Do you think it is easy for him? Do you think the gweilo treat him like one of their own? Do you think it was easy for him in China? Or for his mother?’

  Yung thought about the English Secretary at the Consulate, the son of a Scottish mother and a Sei Yap father. He would see him at community meetings or when they met new arrivals off the ships. And these days he would see him each Sunday afternoon at the Consulate.

  Yung had had difficulty choosing which class to go to: with his brother to the English class taught by Yue Jackson or the Chinese class taught by Consul Kwei. Of course he wanted to improve his English, but now did he not have Katherine? Really, what he longed for was his own language. His own literature, history, philosophy – to have Consul Kwei write the first line of a couplet so that he could complete it.

  Yung looked at his older brother, the strands of black hair now mixed with white, his tired, bloodshot eyes. Shun Goh did not understand poetry. Yes, he wanted the overthrow of the Manchus too, just like every patriotic Chinese, but he did not love to play with words or ideas, to play with life.

  Yung thought about the paleness of Yue Jackson’s skin, the lightness of his hair, his Chinese eyes – and wondered what a child borne with Katherine would be like. A child falling between two worlds. A child belonging nowhere . . .

  When Shun saw he could not persuade his brother, he told him to bring Katherine back at night. It was dangerous to wander about late.

  ‘Remember Joe Kum-yung,’ he said. ‘Winter is coming. What if you get pneumonia? Do you expect me to hire that Cousin Gok-nam? Useless ghost! Do we have to have his wife making trouble in this house? What if you die of cold? What will I say to Mother and Father?

  ‘Tell her to come here at night. Take her to your room. I don’t want to see her.’

  Yellow Flowers Híll

  Sometimes as he waited Yung imagined entering her bedroom, watching her let down and brush her hair, the long, slow strokes through red-brown waves. He imagined lying between her sheets, surrounded by the smell of her, his face upon her pillow. Sometimes an ache grew from the centre of his being – a shiver of pain that threatened to overwhelm him.

  He understood about her children. The judgements of gweilo society. Yet deep within he recognised her shame. And he felt the heat of it move through his face and take his whole body.

  What had brought them together? What did they share?

  They had walked at night and gazed at the bright flare in the sky. She’d told him the same comet appeared in 1066, just before a battle he’d never heard of. ‘Some people say they signal the end of the world,’ she said, hunching into her coat.

  He gazed at her profile as they passed under a street lamp, the illumination of her nose, cheek, the fullness of her lips, the drift into darkness, the slow drift back into light.

  Yes, he thought. Not the word itself, because there is nothing as simple as a universal yes or no in Chinese, in their stead a multiplicity of expressions, each turned to its purpose. Yes, Chinese astrologers also believed this – that a comet foretold disaster – and yet there was another meaning.

  ‘What is this?’ he asked. It was 1 a.m. and there he was standing in a pale pool of lamplight, as if gripping something in his hands, making short pushing, pulling motions in front of him, from side to side.

  Katherine frowned. ‘You mean sweeping?’ she asked. ‘With a broom?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He was smiling now. He pointed at the patch of brightness in the sky, like the straw head of a broom set on fire. ‘Broom stars,’ he said. ‘We call broom stars.’

  He wanted, tried to tell her, that a comet in the south swept away the old and introduced a new order. He wanted to tell her many things. But sometimes in English the words caught in his throat, thickened on his tongue.

  They were lying in his bed, her face tucked into his shoulder, when Katherine asked why the long face.

  ‘Long face?’ He was puzzled.

  ‘Sad,’ she said. ‘Why are you so sad?’

  He did not know what to say. He stroked the hair from her face. How could he tell her about Hung-seng? How could he even begin to explain?

  They had played on the bank near the bend of the stream, just outside the entrance to the village – Hung-seng and Yung and the other children. There were banana palms, and trees they climbed, sunlight filtering through the branches. They gathered seed pods that fell to the ground, crushed them with stone and dipped the ends of long grass stalks into the sticky liquid. They caught dragonflies, waiting for them to come in to land, creeping up and touching the wings – there – with the sticky ends. He and Hung-seng and the others.

  Hung-seng was four years younger. A village cousin, like a little brother. Yung had shown him how to ski
p stones in the stream. At low tide they waded into the mud and lifted broken crockery, trying to catch shrimp before they darted away. They caught crickets for fighting and kept them in tobacco tins that old men brought back from the New Gold Mountain. How different the vision of a child – a small street back then seemed large; a man not ten years older than Yung had seemed old.

  After his marriage, Yung moved to Canton, then on to the New Gold Mountain. He and Hung-seng wrote. They exchanged poetry, debated how best to modernise China. Hung-seng, with a growing number of young people, went to Japan for study. And stayed. He met Sun Yat-sen and helped found the People’s Newspaper, the journal of Sun’s Alliance Society. He sent Yung every edition. And despite the rivalry, he also sent Liang Ch’i-chao’s New People’s Miscellany. ‘So that we can have informed debate,’ he’d written. ‘Liang may be conservative, but he also wants reform. I think he’s right that we should study the strengths of other nations and so create a new culture.’

  And then Hung-seng returned to Canton. His letters suggested something was planned. Nothing specific.

  The letters stopped. Until today, when a letter had come from Hung-seng’s brother. Hung-seng had been one of over a hundred killed in a failed uprising. The government had left the bodies in the street. As warning. Days later his brother risked his life to help gather up the dead. They found seventy-two and buried them together at Yellow Flowers Hill.

  Hung-seng was never found.

  Yung looked at Katherine, her long copper hair swept over his pillow, and didn’t know what to tell her. How could he speak of foreign domination – Manchu, British, French, German, Russian, Japanese – the struggle for liberty – with a foreigner?

  ‘My friend died,’ he said at last. ‘He was like my brother.’

  When she asked how, he stared up at the ceiling. The pansies, violas, polyanthus he’d stolen from night-time gardens and placed in a bowl on the dresser cast flickering shadows on the pale plaster sky as the candle burned down.