by Alison Wong
I remember the mother of my son’s smooth white skin and tender hands. The tiny silk slippers embroidered with flowers that she wore each night in bed.
She wrote about my son – my Number Two Son – who was born after my return here. The resemblance is unmistakable. Look in the mirror, she said, and there you will see your son.
All I know is the letters, the envelopes coming back in my own handwriting, self-addressed, so that she cannot mistake this strange language: Wong Chung-yung, 100 Adelaide Road, Wellington, New Zealand. And inside her beautiful grass script (or sometimes his): Respectful Husband, The roof is leaking, please ask Elder Brother to send 20 man . . . The river has flooded again and the house has collapsed – should we rebuild with mud bricks or will you send money for fired ones which will not dissolve in water? . . . Cousin So-and-so has died and there are expenses . . . And sometimes there’d be the beginning line of a couplet, or a response to mine.
Now it is his writing that has come – a sheet of paper so thin I hold it to the light, almost read the black ink from the other side.
Excellent Father,
I am writing to tell you that Mother died of fever on the fourth day of the fourth month at two in the afternoon. She was sick for three days. I have arranged for her burial in the family plot on the eighth, as this is a favourable day according to the almanac. All the money will be used up to pay the monks and pall-bearers, and to buy the coffin, the bowls and chopsticks, the beef and fish and vegetables.
Your foolish son . . .
Every three months I have sent £5 home. I have educated my son and repaid our debt. I have saved £120 – £100 for the poll tax, almost the £22 for the ship (steerage class) – but now I have to repay funeral expenses, and prepare for his wedding . . .
How many years have we waited? And already she has been buried three weeks.
*
There are many hundreds of lychee trees in Melon Ridge. They cover the land across the river. They say the lychees are ho sik, the very best in China. Yes, there are hundreds of trees, but there is only one – half withered, half alive – that bears the gorgeous fruit, the fruit that is given to officials.
Longevíty
The boy was sitting at the kitchen table, chewing a pencil, staring at a sheet of figures. Yung had come through to set the kettle on the stove. ‘Wai-wai,’ he said.
His brother’s son looked up at him longingly, dreaming of footballs and slingshots and climbing trees like gweilo children, not gluing paper bags or stacking fruit or sitting at the table doing homework.
Yung smiled. ‘Here, I’ll show you a trick.’ He flourished his hands in the way of travelling tumblers and magicians, in the way he remembered of singers and performers at a market.
‘Hold your hands like this.’ He held his hands out alongside his nephew’s, his long fingers extended.
‘One times nine,’ he said, bending the smallest finger of his left hand down. ‘You see, bend the first finger and the answer is the number of fingers to the right. How many? That’s nine fingers to the right, so one times nine is nine.
‘Now, two times nine. Bend the second finger from the left. You have one finger to the left; this is the number of tens. And you have eight fingers to the right; this is the number of ones. That’s eighteen. So, two times nine is eighteen.
‘Three times nine. Bend the third finger and what do you have? Two fingers to the left and seven to the right. Yes, that’s twenty-seven. So, three times nine is twenty-seven.
‘Let me see you do four times nine. Yes. Three tens and six ones. Thirty-six. Keep going. Do this right up to ten times nine.
‘No, you can’t do this with the three times table.’ He laughed. He looked at the boy’s homework and remembered how young he was. ‘You can’t do this with any of the other times tables. That would make it too easy, wouldn’t it? And, of course, you can only do it up to ten.’
The kettle whistled on the stove. Yung opened the padded wicker basket on the bench, took out the porcelain teapot and poured in boiling water. ‘Nine is an important number,’ he said. ‘It means eternity. Long life. Like the long noodles we eat at New Year.’
He poured five cups of tea, gave one to Wai-wai. ‘Drink tea,’ he said. ‘It will clear your mind. Help you think.’
The boy had his father’s strong, wide face but something of his mother’s intense, sad eyes. Yung patted him on the head. ‘As you grow up you will learn the nine considerations,’ he said. ‘How to be a good man. How to live a good, long life.’
He took a cup of tea to his brother, who was taking the trimmings out for the pig man from Lower Hutt. Shun Goh motioned to leave it inside.
He took a cup to Mei-lin, who was sewing a patch over the knee of Wai-wai’s trousers. He held the tea out to her with two hands.
She looked up at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said as she received the cup with both hands, and he saw the trace of a tear in her eyes.
He took his own cup into the shop, then a box of oranges. He pulled the fruit from their tissue, placing the soft paper into a bag to be used in the outhouse, then, two in each hand, he stacked the oranges row by glowing row on the wooden shelf. He could keep bringing in boxes, keep stacking them and stacking them till they spilled over and tumbled beyond the confines of wood and linoleum and glass – nine times ten, nine times twenty, nine times thirty – hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of glowing orbs burning in his liver . . . he could live and breathe and die forever beyond his ten fingers, beyond the colour of his skin, his small imagination . . .
He looked at the stack of oranges, their round dimpled skin, each so alike in their fieriness and yet, upon examination, so individual. He looked at the empty box and realised it was the simple things that counted – a single cup of tea held with both hands.
He tried to picture his own son, whom everyone said had grown in his image. What would he say to him? How would they speak?
He saw him pouring tea, praying before a shrine to his mother. He saw him kowtowing before her photograph, a bowl of oranges or mandarins, the white smoke of incense wrinkling the air.
Whíte
He made her angry. For telling her what to do. What not to do. For lying to her.
They had been in bed together when she told him about Donald, how he’d taken her life, how he’d used language and power against her. She’d thought he’d just hold her in his arms, stroke her hair. Instead he sat upright, stared straight into her eyes and told her Donald hadn’t stolen from her; she had given to him – freely.
‘You think I like boys saying Ching Chong Chinaman, push over apples all bruised. Beat Fong-man?’ Now he was angry. ‘Brother says, no trouble, don’t get trouble. Your Bible says, turn cheek. How many cheek I got? You give cheek, more cheek, no face left . . .’
He calmed down now, slowed his words, tried to put them together more carefully. ‘Katherine, you don’t belong to him. Language does not belong to him. You think bad but don’t know China. How many Chinese women under man’s foot? How many can read? How many man? English is your language. Your gift. Write your name on it. Language not good or bad. Your mouth good or bad. Donald is dead man. You alive . . .’
She yelled at him. She was sick of men, and not just men, telling her what to do. She burst into tears.
She knew he was right.
But now this . . .
He was wearing white. They were all wearing white, and she did not understand. This was how she first understood. That white was the colour of his wife. The colour of his new dead wife.
He’d never told her.
Did she ask?
But did not husbands live together with their wives, did they not share the marital bed? Did not his own brother have a wife here, had she not borne him a son? How many years had she known him, and when did he ever tell her – when did he ever say he had a wife?
She hit him. She was flailing her arms, her fists; she just wanted to hit him and hit him. But he grabbed hold of her, pulled her into his chest
and held her. And when she could not struggle any more, when she looked into his face, his dark, dark eyes, all she could see was a deep and abiding sadness.
The Photograph
Katherine asked to see.
‘What is the use,’ he said. ‘Nineteen years I have not seen her. Let bygones be.’ But she insisted.
Yung had one photograph. From before her disfigurement, from before the birth of their sons.
She had never told him, but when Cousin Gok-nam’s wife came out she said, ‘Such a pity, such beautiful eyes, such beautiful pale skin. Now people do not speak to her or serve her at the market. Of course, they don’t want the bad luck to rub off on them.’
Yung remembered looking at Cousin Gok-nam’s wife, at her squinty eyes and her dark, rough skin. He watched her take another slurp of tea and bite into a piece of Sister-in-law’s steamed sponge. She smiled and he saw the pale cake crumbs in her mouth, coating her yellow teeth. And he disliked her.
He knew she was dead even before the letter arrived. It was the fourth day of the fourth month. Light was fading. Something fell upstairs. And when he went up, the sandalwood box lay on the floor – her letters scattered.
He knew there weren’t many ghosts here. They didn’t come to the door or meet him on the road on rainy nights. There were no stranger ghosts – they did not come across water. The only ghosts he saw were familiar.
Now he’d see her sitting there sometimes, watching him. She’d look at him through her pulled-back eye and say – nothing.
And so he burned paper money, paper clothes, and paper houses for her. He burned incense and laid out oranges so she would not go hungry.
He remembered her laughter when they lived alone in Canton. When he took her hands in his own, when she touched his cheek, her hands were the size of a child’s.
He did not remember her like this. They took the photograph after he came here, after she moved in with Father, Mother and Sister-in-law. She did not smile. She did not laugh. Photographs were so pale, so colourless. They were portraits of the dead.
It was so long ago. Were it not for this photograph, he would not remember her face, yet now she came at night and he knew her.
Sometimes as he lay with Katherine, she’d come and sit in the chair in the corner of the room. He did not tell Katherine why his penis went soft, why he turned and buried his face in her hair, why he held her. And held her.
*
Katherine did not know why she felt so desperate to see, so desperate not to. Photographs were so unreal, so black and white, so unsmiling. She took the photograph of his wife in her hands and realised how different their worlds were. What did she have in common with this woman, except that once she breathed too, once they both bore children.
She was pretty, Katherine thought, though her hairstyle was unattractive. Not just the way the hair was oiled and pulled back from the face so tightly, but the forehead itself, which was so impossibly deep and square. This could not be baldness – this was a young woman with only a thin, square helmet of hair.
‘What happened to her?’ Katherine asked, pointing at the forehead.
‘They . . .’ He was pulling, trying to show her.
‘They pluck it out?’
‘Yes, yes, when they get married.’
Katherine felt sickened. The woman lived and died – in the style of the severely married.
She stared at the photograph, wondering what the woman was thinking, gazing into the camera as if into the future, her long face captured in a perfect state of non-being. Her hands rested stiffly on her lap: bangles round her wrists, a ring on her finger, a white handkerchief. She sat in a huge wooden chair, her elbows turned out, barely touching the carved sides. It made her seem very small – a pale-skinned woman in loose silk. Across her chest, falling from the throat, silk thread butterflies fastened her tunic. And below the full silk trousers, impossibly small silk shoes.
His sister-in-law looked so different from this, with her long full skirts and bodice jackets, her unplucked hair pulled back so much more gently, wispy about the face.
‘She was beautiful,’ Katherine said as she passed the photograph back.
Yung looked across at her. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, she is.’
Moon
Katherine came to him in the most unexpected moments – even in the rolling ‘r’s of the man who bought two large parsnips and half a dozen carrots. ‘Rrrr . . .’ he said, ‘rrrr . . .’ as if speaking in code.
She came in the smell of lavender and vanilla. In the memory of pork pies.
It was she who had introduced him to them, understanding now the Chinese love of pork. ‘They’re very English,’ she’d told him as she gave him the brown paper bag. Kuch’s in Cuba Street made the best pork pies in town.
‘Kuch’s? Is this English name?’ he’d asked, and she only smiled.
He loved the plump pink filling ringed with gelatine, the rich short pastry as full as a moon. They were as close as he got to moon cakes all year round, as if every night might be when the moon was fullest, when family came together to eat and gaze at its brightness.
Now, lying awake at 2 a.m., he watched moonlight at the end of his bed. Suddenly he did not know where might be home.
But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white – then melts for ever . . .
Robert Burns, Tam o’Shanter
For Kíng and Country
No one talked about anything else, whether customers coming into the shop to buy a string of saveloys or Mac weighing up kidneys and gravy beef or Mrs Mac wrapping trotters in white paper. The notices were everywhere – posted on lamp posts, walls, windows.
Long before three o’clock, shops started closing. Mac and Mrs Mackenzie, Robbie and the butcher boys were lucky to get onto an overcrowded tram, which travelled ever more slowly through the city, caught up in the streams of people moving through the streets to Parliament. Robbie wanted to get as close to the action as possible. He squeezed his way through – treading on toes, getting elbowed in the ribs and subjected to the odd curse – until finally he found Billy, slick in his trammie uniform, not five rows back from the vestibule. When the Governor, Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition appeared, they joined twelve thousand voices as they broke into cheers.
The Governor stepped forward and silence fell, an expectation that made Robbie shiver, that prickled his skin, a living, growing, invisible organism cloaking the crowd.
‘It’s war,’ Billy whispered. ‘It’s got to be war.’
They listened as the Governor read His Majesty’s statement, then his own reply. ‘Fellow subjects,’ he continued as the applause subsided. ‘Since I sent out that notice to you this morning, I have received another telegram: WAR HAS BROKEN OUT WITH GERMANY.’
Something wound tight in Rob’s gut loosened and leapt from his mouth. He was shaking, his voice joining Billy’s, the crowd’s, in thunderous cheering. They cheered for the King, they cheered for the Governor, they sang God Save the King, thousands upon thousands of voices in unison. Robbie and Billy stood, arms about each other’s shoulders, swaying. Robbie felt tears at the back of his eyes. He shook himself and sang louder, his voice rasping, cracking.
The Governor said he would send the following reply: ‘The Empire will stand united, calm, resolute, trusting in God.’
When the applause died away, the Prime Minister came forward: ‘. . . we shall be called upon to make sacrifices . . . but I am confident that those sacrifices will be met individually and willingly and in a manner worthy of the occasion and the highest traditions of the great race and Empire to which we belong . . . Keep cool, stand fast, do your duty to country and Empire.’
‘We will do that!’ Robbie called out. Heads turned and he blushed.
The Prime Minister looked him in the eye. ‘I’m sure you will,’ he said.
Billy thumped Robbi
e on the back. ‘Always liked being the centre of attention, eh.’
At any other time he might have laughed and punched him back – after all, hadn’t it always been Billy who stole the limelight? – but now the colour had drained from Robbie’s face. The Leader of the Opposition started speaking, but Robbie hardly heard anything. All he could see was the Prime Minister’s face looking into his own, his words echoing in his mind.
‘There’s no way they’ll think you’re twenty,’ Billy laughed.
Robbie swore and threw a right hook, which Billy only just managed to duck.
‘I’ll never get a chance,’ he told his mother later, his whole body slumped in misery. ‘Everyone says it’ll all be over by Christmas.’
‘Thank God if it is,’ she said. ‘You’re only sixteen, Robbie . . .’
‘Mum! I’m nearly seventeen!’ He could tell she was going to say something but then she looked into his eyes and stopped.
‘No one knows how long it’ll go for,’ she said at last. ‘Mrs Newman read in the Dominion that the bankers think it’ll be over in six months. They say Germany hasn’t got the money for any longer. But some commander in Europe thinks it’ll take a good three years, God help us.’
At the Buckle Street Drill Hall the officer smiled. ‘We’re taking the Territorials first, young man, and we don’t take ’em before twenty.’
Robbie scowled. Why didn’t he have Billy’s deep voice, his strong physique?
He started shaving morning and night. He drank twice as much milk: two glasses at breakfast, two when he got home, another two before bed. He hung from his doorway till his fingers went stiff and he almost couldn’t feel the pain, till his vertebrae (and arm sockets) stretched and clicked and loosened and he felt longer, taller. And even as he lay in bed at night he practised, training his tenor voice to turn deeper, like a tunneller digging deeper, now deeper into the dark hillside.