by Yangsze Choo
There were congratulations from the other girls. My horse-faced neighbor sighed and shrugged. I wondered what I had done to offend her, but soon forgot in the excitement. There were other games as well, lantern decorating and singing, and by the end of the evening I could not remember when I had enjoyed myself so thoroughly in recent times. As we were leaving the Lim mansion, my father glanced at my bright face.
“Did you enjoy yourself?” he said.
“Yes, Father. Indeed, I did.”
He smiled sadly. “I forgot how quickly you’ve grown up. In my mind you’re still a little girl. I should have arranged for you to mix more after your cousins left for Penang.”
I did not like to see the shadow pass over his face again. Tonight he had seemed quite cheerful and appeared to have enjoyed the performance. I once overheard Amah telling the cook that when my mother died, part of my father died too. She had spoken, no doubt, in a slightly theatrical manner, but when I was younger I took her words literally. No wonder he sometimes drifted, as though the thin line that anchored him to the present was fraying away. When I was younger I often felt guilty when he seemed troubled. Of course, sons were better. Everyone said so. But I suspected that even if I had been a boy, I would not have been enough to console him for the loss of my mother.
Chapter 5
Thoughts of my parents put me in a melancholy mood before I went to bed. Amah always said too much thinking made me pale and peaky. Of course, she was perfectly capable in the next breath of scolding me for going into the sun and ruining my complexion. She never seemed bothered by her ability to embrace two opposing things at once. I sometimes wished that I had that blithe assurance. My father made the dry observation that Amah had no difficulty reconciling her viewpoints because she had learned everything as custom dictated, and that was both her bondage and her solace. I felt this was a little harsh. Amah did think about things—just not the same sorts that Father did. Her mind ricocheted between practicality and superstition. Somehow, I had managed to exist between both Amah’s world and Father’s, but what did I really think? These thoughts drifted through my mind until I fell into an uneasy slumber.
I was in an orchard of peach trees. The leaves were dazzlingly green and the fruit that hung from the branches was pink and white, gleaming like alabaster. The trees themselves were monotonously similar, as though they had been copied from a painting. This was unsurprising as there were no peach trees in Malaya, though I had seen them depicted in scrolls from China. With a mounting feeling of dread, I saw how they stretched ahead in all directions, each broad vista looking exactly the same. From behind the trees came the wavering sound of an opera aria, the same that had been sung that evening by the actors in the Lim mansion. The sound was muted and scratchy, as though heard from a great distance. There was no depth or liveliness to it. As the music announced his presence, Lim Tian Ching emerged from between the trees, a spray of peach blossoms in his hand.
“Li Lan, my dear!” he said. “May I present you with this floral token?”
He held the branch out to me but I was suddenly stricken with suffocation, as though the air had curdled.
“What? No word to greet me?” he asked. “You don’t know how impatiently I’ve been waiting to see you again. After all, the Double Seventh Festival is for lovers.”
Unwillingly, I found myself walking with him beneath the trees. He floated beside me with a curiously inhuman gait, and it was only by a great effort of will that I managed to halt.
“How do you even know me?” I asked.
“I saw you last year at the Dragon Boat Festival. You were down on the quay throwing rice dumplings into the water. How elegant, how graceful you were!”
Taken aback, I recalled that I had, indeed, gone with my father to celebrate that festival, which commemorated the suicide of a poet. In their grief, the common people threw dumplings into the water to persuade the fish not to eat his body.
Lim Tian Ching continued, “Oh, my dear, don’t frown so. It spoils your features. Really, I was very impressed by you. Of course, I’d seen my share of pretty girls,” he tittered, “but there was something about you that was different. So refined. That must come from your father. I heard he was a good-looking man before the smallpox.”
Taking my silence as assent, he continued with his grotesque flirtation. “I asked everyone who you were. They said you were the daughter of the Pan family. If circumstances hadn’t overtaken me”—and here he looked suitably melancholy—“I would have wooed you a long time ago. But don’t despair, now we have all the time in the world to make up for it.”
I shook my head.
“Li Lan, I’m a man of simple words,” he said. “Won’t you be my bride?”
“No!” It took all my strength to form the word.
He looked hurt. “Now, now,” he said. “Don’t be so hasty. I know that I should have approached you through your father. In fact, I asked my mother to do so for me, and to get an article of your clothing so we could meet like this.”
My thoughts flew to the ribbon that Madam Lim had requested from me. I gagged, my throat as dry as if it had been filled with kapok, the silky fibrous seed coverings that were used to stuff cushions and mattresses.
“I can’t marry you.”
He frowned. “I know, it is a little difficult with my being . . . ” He waved his hands as though he didn’t want to say it, then continued, “but it’s not a problem. Many lovers have managed to surmount this obstacle.”
“No!”
“What do you mean, no?” He sounded peevish. “We’ll have a grand wedding. And afterward we’ll be together.” He stopped and smiled. It was a terrible, fatuous smile. Air was being crushed out of my rib cage. The peach trees swam together in a haze of green and pink. Dimly I heard Lim Tian Ching shouting, but I forced myself awake with every ounce of willpower until I sat up in bed, trembling and sweating.
I wanted to vomit, to spit up the bile of that unwholesome encounter. I, who had been so carefully schooled by my father not to believe in spirits, confessed to myself in the dead of night that Amah was right. The ghost of Lim Tian Ching had passed through my dreams. His unwelcome presence had violated the recesses of my soul. I was so terrified that I curled up on my bed and wrapped the covers around myself, despite the sweltering heat, until dawn came.
That morning, I lay abed for a long time, wondering if I was going mad. There was a lunatic who sometimes wandered our street, his emaciated body barely clothed in rags. He muttered to himself constantly; the pupils of his eyes constricted till he resembled a crazed bird. I had given him a few coins before. Sometimes he pocketed them, other times he licked them or cast them away. Amah said he conversed with the dead. Was I destined to become like him? Yet I had never heard of madness in our family, only whispers of the sad collapse of our house. True, Amah and Old Wong, our cook, had odd dislikes, such as the main staircase of our house. But I had grown up with their superstitions and was used to them. I had never yet heard talk of madness. Yet I felt oppressed by shadows. It seemed to me that the dead were all around us. Of course this was foolish. Life was followed by death in the endless cycle of rebirth, if one believed the Buddhists. We were all nominally Buddhist I supposed, although my father, as a strict Confucianist, reserved a certain contempt toward them. I told myself that it was a dream, nothing more.
Downstairs, Amah clucked over me but seemed to think that my lassitude stemmed from too much excitement the night before. I
felt obliged to be cheerful as she quizzed me about the festivities. At length, I asked her about Yan Hong.
“The daughter of the Second Wife?” said Amah. “She’s the one whose marriage was a love match, though it was a big scandal. I heard it from the servants. And luckily the young man came from a good family although they had no money of course.”
“How did she manage to marry him?”
“Aiya! The oldest way of course. She got pregnant. How they managed it I don’t know, but they blamed her mother for it. They said that was why Second Wife died.”
“I thought it was malaria.”
“Well, that was what they said. But if you ask me, it sounds like she was so ashamed that she lost the will to live. And after she died they felt guilty, so the marriage went ahead. The boy went to Hong Kong after the marriage to study and she had the first child at home. When he returned, she had the other two.”
So Yan Hong’s mother had bought her daughter’s happiness with her life. It was a sad story but also explained the age gap between her children. I thought back to last night. Yan Hong had seemed cheerful, busy, and fulfilled. How I had envied her fortunate marriage. Nothing was as it seemed, after all.
I spent the afternoon lying on a rattan daybed downstairs. The tiled floor in the study remained cool even during the burning heat of the day. I could not imagine how the coolies managed to work the tin mines. The mortality rate was very high but still they came by the boatload from China, along with Indians who disembarked from Madras and Chennai to work the rubber and coffee plantations. I had often wondered what it would be like to set sail from here to other lands. Tian Bai had done so, and I would have liked to go east to see the Moluccas, and then onward to Hong Kong and even Japan. But such voyages were not for me.
I was ruminating over this when a parcel arrived from the Lim household. “What is it?” I asked when Amah brought it in. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. I picked it up with both hands and frowned. After my frightening dream the night before, I felt suspicious of anything that came from that family. But it turned out to be a length of batik, beautifully printed with floral motifs of indigo and pale pink. There was a note enclosed from Yan Hong.
You forgot to collect your prize for winning the needle-threading competition. I hope to see you again. Best wishes, etc., etc.
“Very nice,” said Amah approvingly.
For her, the best part of the evening had been the fact that I had won the competition. I had been forced to tell it several times for her benefit and had even overheard her boasting about it to our cook, Old Wong. I had never done well in the feminine arts and I suspected that Amah felt bad about it. “Reading, reading!” she would grunt, and snatch away whatever book I had. “Spoil your eyes, you will!” I once pointed out to her that needlework would have done the same thing, but she never listened to me. This piece of cloth was the best thing I could have brought home, short of a marriage proposal.
Although I didn’t want to admit it, I was pleased too. I shook out the cloth and something shiny fell out of the folds.
“What’s that?” asked Amah. Her sharp eyes never missed anything.
“It’s a pocket watch.”
“Was it part of your prize?” It was a brass men’s watch with a round face and delicate hands. “That’s very strange. It doesn’t even look new. And why would Yan Hong give you a watch? It’s so unlucky.”
She looked fretful. We Chinese did not like to give or receive certain gifts for superstitious reasons: knives, because they could sever a relationship; handkerchiefs, for they portended weeping; and clocks, as they were thought to measure out the days of your life. If any of these were presented, the recipient usually paid a token amount to symbolize that it was a purchase and not a gift. My heart was beating so loudly, however, that I was afraid that Amah would hear it. I was almost certain that I had seen this watch before.
“It could have slipped in by accident,” I said.
“Careless!” she said. “If it isn’t your property you shouldn’t keep it.”
“I’ll ask Yan Hong if I see her again.”
I left Amah shaking her head and escaped to my room, where I examined my find. Amah was right; it was not a new watch. There were scratches on the brass case and the chain was missing. The more I looked at it, however, the more certain I was that it was the same watch that Tian Bai had been repairing the first time we met.
In the novels that I read, the heroines were continually exclaiming over some love token they exchanged, whether it was a hairpin, inkstone, or more daringly, a tiny shoe from a bound-foot girl. I had always discounted them as ridiculous. But now, as I cupped the watch in my hands, the soft ticking was like the heartbeat of a small bird. I slipped it into the pocket of my dress. This unexpected gift filled me with secret delight for the rest of the day, and my spirits only began to sink as dusk fell and I remembered my dreams. After dinner, I lingered so late in the kitchen that Old Wong shooed me out with his dustpan.
I was on the point of going to Amah’s room for comfort and gossip when I remembered that this was her evening off. Once in a while she would go out to visit her friends and play mahjong. When I was very small, I sometimes tagged along to this fascinating parallel world of amahs, where much gossip and information exchanged hands. We slipped in through back doors to the servants’ quarters and listened until, lulled by the conversation, I fell asleep and Amah carried me home on her back. I’m sure my father never knew about these excursions. Now as I climbed the stairs, I wished that I could sleep like a child again, safe in a warm circle of friends. As it was, I opened the windows. The night was cooling and the air smelled like rain. Somberly I climbed into bed. I was afraid.
Chapter 6
My fears were well founded, for this marked the beginning of many nights when it felt as though all I did was dream. Despite my resistance, I couldn’t help falling asleep. Pricking my fingers with needles, biting my tongue, or even standing and pacing were of no use to me at all. Night after night, I found myself in that strange world I had come to associate with Lim Tian Ching. Once I attended a grand feast where I was the only guest at a long table laden with heaps of oranges, bowls of rice, boiled and quartered chickens, and pyramids of mangoes. Displayed like funeral offerings, the food had a distasteful quality to it, despite its splendor.
Another time I found myself in a stable filled with horses. Some were dappled, others white, brown, or black. Despite their varied coloring, they were all exactly the same size and had the same ears and tail. Each stood in its stall, ears pricked forward and eyes fixed obediently ahead. When they moved, there was no sound other than the loud rustling of paper. As I walked farther into the shadowy building, there were carriages, phaetons, and sedan chairs, all gleaming with polish and lacquer. But the most fearful sight was a rickshaw equipped with a man standing silently between the poles, his grip frozen on the shafts as he stared blankly ahead. Though I passed my hand before his eyes, he didn’t blink. I shrank back, seized by the sudden fear that he would snatch at my wrist. From his attitude of readiness, I suspected that he would respond to a command. Perhaps the horses were the same way if one chose to ride them, though I dared not try. This shadowy world filled me with unease; my skin prickled, morbid fancies filled my mind, and my spirits sank until I barely had the energy to keep moving.
The greatest mercy was that Lim Tian Ching did not appear in these dreams. I was alone as I wandered through vast halls, echoing courtyards, and landscaped gardens. There was an enormous kitchen filled with pots and pans and heaps of food piled on the tables, an
d even a scholar’s study, complete with reams of paper and graduated sets of wolf-hair writing brushes. When I examined the books and scrolls, however, they were blank inside. Everything was staged as though for a grand performance; and though nothing ever seemed to happen, I felt a constant knot of tension in my stomach.
Occasionally, I came across servants of the same type as the rickshaw puller. Sometimes they moved involuntarily with a sharp rustling sound, which alarmed me. The houses and landscapes were cheerless despite their grandeur, and I found the puppet servants grotesque and frightening. I was thankful that I didn’t meet Lim Tian Ching, though I suspected he was somewhere around. Sometimes I sensed his presence in the next room or behind a copse of trees. Then I would hurry along, my heart beating faster and an inner voice shrieking to wake up.
I didn’t tell anyone about the dreams, though many times I was on the verge of going into my father’s study to unburden myself. I realized, however, that he was unlikely to believe me. He would soothe what he considered childish fears and tell me not to worry about such things. After all, if he who had longed for my mother so much was unable to see her, or grasp any essence of her spirit, why then surely the afterlife must not exist. It was a repository of folk beliefs. He was a devout Confucianist, and Confucius had specifically spoken against such things. I knew him too well to expect him to change his mind on the basis of a few dreams. Instead, he would blame himself for ever mentioning that unlucky marriage proposal to me.