by Alison Wong
But now the Chinaman was coming towards him with a knife, cutting a slice of the very apple he’d touched, somehow placing it in his hand, walking back.
Robbie’s mouth was dry, his throat tight. His lips parted, and he heard footfalls, laughter as a man and a woman passed on the path outside. He closed his eyes, then opened them, dropped the apple slice, spat, and ground it into the linoleum. ‘Stay away from her,’ he said.
A wave of recognition passed over the Chinaman’s face. A cloud.
‘You hear what I said? Leave her fuckin’ alone!’
The Chinaman looked him directly in the eye, unflinching. People said they were easy targets, Chinks, they never resisted. But this one defied him.
Robbie could hear his voice rising as if from a distance, strangled and separate from his body. He was shaking. He was shouting, but all his words were small and tight.
Afterwards Robbie wondered why the John had given him the knife that night. He’d laid it down in front of him casually. An invitation. A dare.
He could see himself but couldn’t feel, every movement detached from his body. The way the knife fell into his hand, the way it plunged into the body, the way it thrust up. He was surprised at its ease: a bayonet slipping into a padded sack. As it went in, Robbie noticed the Chinaman’s eyes were suddenly round, which for a split second seemed ridiculous. The mouth opened in surprise, but no sound came out. He fell clutching his stomach, where a small patch of red stained the white apron.
Robbie looked at the knife, the stain of red on its pointed blade, the clean fit of the wooden handle, so that he knew of its presence only from a certain weight on his fingers. He watched a single drop of blood fall, heard the clatter of the knife on the white linoleum.
He could not move. There was a Chinaman lying at his feet, staring up at him wordlessly, the metallic smell of blood in his nostrils. He looked at his gloved hands, at these hands which were not his own. What to do. What to do. He walked to the front door, his legs heavy, every step taking an immeasurably long time, as if they were walking under water. He pulled the door to, but a corner of linoleum caught in the doorway. He wanted to scream, could hear himself screaming, but could not open his mouth. He pulled again, forced it hard, heard the spring lock click. The sound of footsteps upstairs. The woman. God, he didn’t want to . . . Robbery, it had to look like a robbery. Everyone knew Chinks had money. He grabbed some sticks of tobacco, stuffed them in his pockets, went to the till.
He stuffed the rolled notes, a couple of cylinders of coins into his pocket. Left the till open and ran. Out through the back of the shop. Out the back door.
Opposite the gate, windows from the bakery threw light across the alley. It was wide, wide enough for a baker’s cart, too wide and too bright – and was that Mr Paterson that walked past? The house on the other side was dark. Robbie ran blindly, banged his knee hard into the wooden fence, climbed over, heard coins fall to the stony ground, ran across the neighbour’s yard and vomited against the fence line. He ran down into Adelaide Road, walked across the street and headed towards the Basin.
A drunk staggered out of the Tramways Hotel. A couple walked arm in arm, she looking into his eyes, he laughing. In the darkness, no one seemed to notice.
Robbie looked at his hands, at the gloves his sister had knitted. He had to get rid of them. He didn’t want to touch them. He had to wash his hands.
Lightning streaked across the sky and lit the street, the Caledonian up on the corner. The sound of thunder and then the deluge. Robbie hunched into his coat and ran, bullets of rain hitting the footpath, flying up at his feet, water pouring over his hat, trickling down his neck. Already the gutters were flooding.
He didn’t hear a woman scream.
From the Art of Dyíng
There are many ways to kill yourself. Some do it quickly, leaving their bodies as a farewell gift, or perhaps an act of revenge. Others, over a whole lifetime, die quietly.
Katherine did not understand what happened. First she heard his cry – low, deep, like that of an animal – then she felt the silver fork, the piece of pineapple fly from her hand, Robbie running, running from the room, arms flailing.
Afterwards he looked out at her with hollow eyes, arms loose by his side. Everything so loose, barely held together, almost as if his body had forgotten the meaning of muscle, ligament, bone.
She found him in the afternoon. One overhanging branch, the one he’d sat on as a boy. He was wearing his blue and white striped pyjamas – the pyjamas she’d proudly bought him, the very latest in men’s nightwear – his bare feet a few inches from the ground.
There was nothing under the tree. Only grass, fallen twigs, dandelions that had yet to grow a heady stalk and burst into bloom. No overtoppled chair or box, nothing he could have stepped off into another world. And Katherine realised he had climbed the trunk, his fingers and toes wrapped over the wooden battens. That he’d sat on the branch as he tied the rope, first one end, then the other. How long had he sat there while she typed letters on monogrammed paper and filed newspaper reports into folders? What had he thought as he overlooked the garden: the honeysuckle he’d started to train up the white trellis, the roses whose young leaves were just beginning to sprout?
She did not want to look at his face, the length of his neck, the way his head hung to one side as if looking away, unable to meet her gaze. He used to poke out his tongue as a boy, when he was thinking deeply, when he was tying his shoelaces or even skimming a stone. She hoped he had flown, the way a cicada flies from its transparent skin, leaving a ghostly memory while its true self sits in summer trees, driving the world crazy with its singing.
He had been good at driving her crazy. Perhaps that was his role, the role of any child. To challenge his mother and father. And find them wanting . . .
*
Mrs Newman takes off her reading glasses. There is tenderness in her eyes – a soft, clouded sky – that Katherine has never noticed before. Her lip trembles. ‘It gets easier,’ she says.
She gazes into her lenses, places them carefully back over her eyes, looks down at the newspaper.
*
Grief comes softly behind her. She does not know whose face he will wear. She might be typing a letter or washing a white bowl or looking out from the top of a double-decker tram. She might be at a show at His Majesty’s, surrounded by laughter and gilt-edged conversation. And grief will come and touch her arm with his hand. She will turn and there he will be. He will wrap his arms round her neck. He will ask her to embrace him.
Author’s Note
The major characters in this novel are fictional and their stories are works of the imagination; however, some of the minor characters are true historical figures. The most prominent of these is (Edward) Lionel Terry who murdered Joe Kum-yung in Haining Street, Wellington, on 24 September 1905. His interactions with the McKechnie family are fictional but his views, poetry, publications, trial and subsequent incarceration in mental institutions, as well as his popularity, are factual. During various periods at Seacliff Mental Hospital near Dunedin he enjoyed great personal freedom and during others he was subjected to solitary confinement because of his escapes and poor behaviour. He died still incarcerated at Seacliff on 20 August 1952, aged 80 years. Note: some of the ‘facts’ about Terry as related in the novel, e.g. his education at Eton and Oxford, are not actually true but are what was believed and reported in newspapers of the time.
Dr Agnes Bennett was raised in Australia and England but first came to prominence in New Zealand where she was a popular and respected pioneer of women in medicine and a staunch supporter of female education and rights. Her life’s philosophy was to give rather than receive and to ‘choose the leaden casket’. Drs Frederick Truby King and Ferdinand Batchelor were also major medical figures, Dr King being most famous in New Zealand not as lecturer of Mental Diseases at the Otago Medical School or Medical Superintendent of Seacliff but as founder of the Plunket Society supporting mothers and infants. (Eliz
abeth) Grace Neill was a leading nurse, public servant and social reformer, and Kate Sheppard and Lily Atkinson were at the forefront campaigning for women’s suffrage in New Zealand.
Mary Anne (Annie) Wong came to Wellington from Melbourne to marry the Anglican Chinese Missioner, Daniel Wong. He died within a few years but she remained in Wellington working alongside subsequent Missioners before retiring to Hong Kong in the 1930s.
Yue Jackson (surname Yue), son of a Chinese father and Scottish mother, lived in New Zealand and China. For many years he was the English Secretary at the Chinese Consulate in Wellington. Consul Kwei Chih and the incident recounted in ‘If the Time Has Not Come’, as well as Kwei Chih’s son’s reaction, did happen, though all other local names are fictionalised.
All political figures, whether New Zealand or Chinese, are real. The only exception is Alexander Newman, husband of the fictional Margaret Newman.
Sir Robert Stout did preside, as Chief Justice, over Lionel Terry’s trial. He was a member of the Anti-Chinese League and was, like many leading figures of the day, anti-Chinese. Interestingly, his wife Anna Paterson Stout, a prominent woman of her day, was sympathetic to the Chinese.
Although Chinese New Zealanders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did have friends and supporters, the anti-Chinese legislation outlined in this novel is historically accurate, as is the general climate of racism and sometime violence. The shooting in Naseby and the murder of Ham Sing-tong in Tapanui are true examples. My paternal great-grandfather, Wong Wei-jung (Wong Way Ching) was brutally murdered in Wellington in 1914. The case was never solved.
Romanisation of the Chinese in this novel was problematic as, although my characters are Cantonese and only spoke Cantonese, many famous Chinese names, places and terms are only recognised by the general reader in Mandarin, either in the pinyin system used in modern China or the older Wade-Giles system. There are many different, often non-standard methods for romanising Cantonese and the common spellings in New Zealand are very different from those used elsewhere.
Because pinyin did not exist at the time of the novel, I have generally used the familiar Wade-Giles Mandarin romanisation for famous historical figures and places or whichever form they were most famously known by, but generally used Cantonese for everyone else. Sun Yat-sen was Cantonese and therefore recognised by the Cantonese romanisation of his name, and the province is most readily recognised as Kwangtung.
According to Chinese custom, surnames are listed first, though when Chinese entered western countries like New Zealand, government officials often mistook parts of given names as surnames and what with varied methods of romanisation, many Chinese ended up with erroneously recorded surnames which survive to this day.
I have hyphenated the two given names to make it clearer which are surnames and which are the given names. However, people were often called by one of their given names, eg, Wong Chung-yung was referred to as Yung by his elder brother. As the position in the family is so important, Yung referred to his brother as Shun Goh, Goh being the term for elder brother. Cantonese also often refer to people by Ah plus either their surname or a given name.
I have used the standard spelling used by New Zealand newspapers for Consul Kwei Chih. The Chinese ‘violin’, erh-hu; the Goddess of Mercy, Kuan Yin; and the woman warrior, Mu-lan, are all romanised in Mandarin, but most other Chinese words, including units of measure and money, are romanised in Cantonese. I am indebted to Janet Chan of Picador Asia for her help with Cantonese romanisation.
Most of the early Chinese in New Zealand came from three main counties in Kwangtung (Guangdong) in southern China: Tseng Sing (known as Jungseng in New Zealand, Zengcheng in pinyin or Tseng-ch’eng in Wade-Giles); Pun Yu (Poonyu, Pan Yu or P’anyü); and Sei Yap (Seyip, Siyi or Ssu-i).
By the turn of the twentieth century, Wellington had arguably become the major centre for Chinese in New Zealand. Media and popular portrayals of the Chinese at the time generally focussed on Haining Street and were usually sensationalist, negative and highly inaccurate. The Chinese community was centred on Haining Street and neighbouring Taranaki, Tory and Frederick Streets though many Chinese also lived above their businesses scattered throughout the city.
Note: the spelling of the Wellington suburb Kelburne did not change to its present day Kelburn until 1917.
This novel is not my family’s story nor that of any particular Chinese New Zealand family, though my family did come from Melon Ridge ( Gwa Liang or Gwa Ling, Gualing or Kua-ling) and Tile Kiln ( Nga Yiel or Nga Yiu, Yayao or Ya-yao) villages in Tseng Sing county, and some of the incidents in the novel were inspired or informed by true experiences. This includes the sizeable amount of money raised by patriotic Chinese New Zealanders to support Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution, and my maternal great-grandfather’s (Wong Kwok-min, Huang Guomin or Hung Kuo-min, also known as Wong Hum) involvement.
Although I have endeavoured to be historically and culturally accurate, there are many different and even conflicting views. There were also instances where I was unable to find out the ‘truth’. At the end of the day this is a work of fiction, not of history.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for assistance provided by the Robert Burns Fellowship, the Willi Fels Memorial Trust, a project grant from Creative New Zealand, a Reader’s–Digest New Zealand Society of Authors Stout Research Centre Fellowship and a New Zealand Founders Society Annual Research Award.
I am indebted to Jane Parkin for her sensitive and perceptive editing and Judith Lukin-Amundsen for her invaluable reading; my publishers, Geoff Walker and the team at Penguin New Zealand, and Rod Morrison, Daniel Watts, Janet Chan and the teams at Picador in Australia and Hong Kong; as well as my agent, Toby Eady, and Jamie Coleman of Toby Eady Associates. Thanks to Keely O’Shannessy for her fabulous cover, Mary Egan for beautiful internal design and Alan Knowles for his author photo.
Special thanks to Roger Steele, Christine Roberts and Roger Whelan of Steele Roberts who provided support and encouragement throughout the years.
Fiona Kidman gave excellent structural advice on an early draft, and Toni Atkinson, Gilbert Wong, Eva Wong Ng, and members of the various incarnations of my writing groups – including Caren Wilton, Raewyn Brockway, Lynn Davidson, Johanna Knox, Claire Baylis, Sarah Laing, Kate Camp, Catherine Chidgey, Virginia Fenton, Alex Gillespie, Jay Linden, Michael Gilchrist, Peter Hall-Jones, Naomi O’Connor and Jan Farr – gave feedback and/or encouragement. Thanks to Kate who found the Chinese proverb which inspired the novel title and chapter, As the Earth Turns Silver. I have no idea whether this is a true Chinese proverb.
Dianne and Peter Beatson provided their wonderful Foxton writing retreat where much progress was made and Siggy Woolloff and her staff at Aunt Daisy’s Boathouse Café gave coffee, sanity and a writing refuge overlooking the water.
James Brown, Catherine Chidgey, Justin Paton, Chris Price and Lawrence Jones, as editors of Sport, Landfall and Nurse to the Imagination: 50 Years of the Robert Burns Fellowship, published draft extracts.
Linda Cound gave me her ‘little orange book’ and Forbes Williams assisted with research and discussions about narrative.
The residents, associates, secretaries and the directors – Allan Thomas, Vincent O’Sullivan and Lydia Wevers – of the Stout Research Centre, the staff of the Chinese section of the Department of Asian Languages at Victoria University of Wellington, and many people associated with the English and History Departments of the University of Otago, made me welcome and helped along the way. Other institutions which helped with research were the library, anatomy museum and medical library at the University of Otago; the New Zealand Dictionary Centre; the Alexander Turnbull Library, Oral History Archive, Manuscripts, Music and Reference at the National Library of New Zealand; Wellington City Archive; Wellington Public Library; Porirua Public Library; Pataka Porirua Museum; Te Papa Museum of New Zealand; Otago Settlers Museum; Porirua Police Museum; Olveston; Larnach Castle; Archives Research Centre of th
e Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand; First Church of Otago; Hocken Library; and Anderson Park in Invercargill, where the Ashford table was found.
Many individuals helped with historical, Chinese, military and other research. In particular, Nigel Murphy, James Ng, Eva Wong Ng, Brian Moloughney, Duncan Campbell, Helen Leach, Graham Stewart, Tom Brooking, Aaron Fox, Pat Fox and Edmon Wong, all went way beyond the call of duty.
Thanks also to Jane Malthus, John Stenhouse, Dorothy Page, Barbara Brookes, Howard Baldwin, Alison Hercus, Lynley Hood, David Hood, Bill Keane, Michael Kelly, Helen McCracken, Jenny Gibson, Chris Cochran, Chris Jones, Trevor Garrett, Sophie Giddens, Sylvia Carlyle, Russell Klein, John Earles, Geoffrey Rice, Anne-Marie Brady, Mervyn Thompson, Liz Bryce, Chris House, Hardwicke Knight, Richard Hill, Bronwyn Dalley, Clarence Aasen, Pauline Keating, John McKinnon, Eirlys Hunter, Alistair McLean, Jean Ellis, Joan Henderson, Harry Ricketts, Selwyn Graves, Kirsten Wong, George Wong, Lynette Shum, Bill Wong, Kai Wong, Dan Chan, Ray Wong Tong, Percy and Alice Chew Lee, Nancy Wong, Ng Li Fe Oui, Anita King, Tsan Yew Wong, Yuk Fung Chong, Maurice and Margaret Meechang, Chan Wai Yung Wong, Margaret Wong, Roy Law, Thomas Keong, Bai Limin, Li Kangying, Jing-Bao Nie, Manying Ip and Timothy Woo.
Diana Davies, Steve Yanko, Jo McMullan, Raewyn Brockway and Dr James Ng helped with medical details, and Dr James Walshe and Dr Charles Moore, specifically, with psychiatric history. Philip Simpson, Phil Garnock-Jones and Bill Sykes provided information about plants in early Wellington and New Zealand. Ngahuia Te Awakotuku, Morrie Love and Maui Solomon gave advice about Maori in the early twentieth century, and Dianne Bardsley provided invaluable guidance on early New Zealand English.
Damien Wilkins, Bill Manhire, Adrienne Jansen and Andrew Johnston encouraged me in the early days of my writing. Even earlier, my high school English teacher Peter Exeter opened my eyes with Owls Do Cry and was the first to believe in me and inspire me with literature.