Small Bodies of Water

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Small Bodies of Water Page 8

by Nina Mingya Powles


  I’d begun cataloguing the varying pinkness of the Shanghai sky with my phone. On days when my VPN app let me through, I posted square pictures of magenta clouds on Instagram and Facebook, watching the tiny red hearts of other people’s likes popping up from all the different time zones where my friends lived: mostly Aotearoa, but also Europe, Canada, America. I didn’t speak to anyone face to face for almost two months, while my phone buzzed and lit up with messages from far away.

  Towards the end of summer I responded to a WeChat job posting from a Shanghainese mother looking for an English tutor for her daughter. I took two subway trains across the city to meet with her at a McDonald’s, where she bought me a raspberry-flavoured ice slushy and admired my tattoo. Her daughter was shy, though she liked telling me in careful English about her favourite manga comics. I took the job, and at their kitchen table every week their Scottish Fold cat sat wide-eyed on the table between us, purring at me. I’d stay for dinner, and both mother and daughter together taught me how to use my fingers, knuckles, teeth and tongue to unpeel and eat tiny Shanghai freshwater crayfish, xiăo lóngxiā, little dragon shrimp. It was a labour-intensive process of picking, peeling and sucking sweet flesh out of each crimson shell.

  The long, achingly hot summer faded out with the promise of a trip to the picturesque southern city of Guilin with three of my classmates: Katrin, from Frankfurt, and Adi and Frances, also from Aotearoa. On the sixteen-hour overnight train – far cheaper than the bullet train – the others played cards while I kept watch for the snack cart, which was piled high with vacuum-packed dried sausages, preserved eggs, fresh fruit and endless styrofoam cups of instant noodles. The two characters of Guilin, together mean sweet osmanthus forest. In early autumn, the region lives up to its name: all the roads are coated in delicate white-and-yellow flowers. Guilin’s dramatic karst hills, and the Li River that curves between them, are depicted on the back of the Chinese twenty-yuan note. I had been to Guilin before, almost a decade earlier, on a school trip in eighth grade. I remember sitting with two of my best friends on the edge of a curved stone bridge, our feet dangling over the edge, watching dragonflies and drinking mango smoothies. At night the market streets were lined with fairy lights. The limestone hills fell away in darkness, then reappeared at sunrise like giants guarding the town, silhouetted against the blue dawn.

  The others wanted to climb one of the smaller limestone mountains, Lao Zhai Shan. I reluctantly agreed, knowing I’d be trailing along behind them. After half an hour up the winding track my body was aching. I focused my senses on my surroundings in order to keep placing one foot in front of the other. In the shade of the bamboo forest we were kept cool from the strong sun, and through the gaps in the trees I could see graves and burial mounds set into the hillside, much like the hillside cemeteries in Kota Kinabalu. I could see that the concrete graves had once been painted in pastel colours, peachy pink and baby blue, now faded. Bowls of oranges and chains of plastic white and yellow chrysanthemums had been left as offerings. I relaxed into the soft silence punctuated by our deep breathing and rustling leaves, a particular blending of sounds I hadn’t heard since being back home, walking the bush track up the hill above the sea.

  After an hour, the canopy of leaves began to clear. The sun warmed my face. The last section of the climb was too steep for any proper path. Instead, a series of rope and steel ladders were hammered into the side of the rock. I shut my eyes and followed my friends, not looking down but only straight in front of me, at the pale, scratched limestone rock.

  At the summit, out of breath, I turned to see the view. The Li River in miniature, a luminescent blue ribbon curving between jagged limestone slopes that seemed to go on forever. Between the mountains, smaller valleys had been carved into terraced rice fields. A buzz of insects filled the air along with our breathless laughter: yellow and blue-winged butterflies flitted between us, and giant wasps. I cut a peach into quarters for the four of us and Katrin presented a plastic bag filled with mandarins, bought from a streetside seller at the foot of Lao Zhai Shan. We peeled and feasted under the small wooden pagoda, letting the juice run down our wrists.

  At home we use one single word to mean skin, rind and peel: pí, five strokes. It’s a word I’ve become so used to that it’s the one I reach for in certain contexts. Dumpling skin and dumpling wrapper don’t quite cut it, whereas pí touches on exactly what I mean to say, something halfway between the texture of skin and the practicality of wrappings. Sometimes, I only want to eat the skin. When I was little, I was so picky that I didn’t want to eat the inside of har gow – I would pierce a hole with my chop-stick in the shiny steamed dumpling and squeeze out the pink ball of shrimp, leaving it in the bottom of my rice bowl, and then I would chew on the silky har gow pí.

  I read an article in The Straits Times about eleven different types of mandarins, and I realise I’ve been eating them all my life without knowing their names, which are like musical notes: ponkan, lukan, kinno, mikan, mandelo, dekopon.

  Later, after I’d moved to London, my mother accepted a new job in Beijing. My parents packed up our house by the sea and set off in August. For them, the end of a Wellington winter turned into a Beijing autumn. I felt a new and acute sense of loss: a definitive end to a part of my life I’d been holding on to still. I saw the garden, the sad apple tree, the kōwhai and the giant red aloe that shields the house from sea salt and wind. The bedroom I painted purple when I was sixteen; the kitchen where we stacked cold oranges in a bowl by the window.

  I visited Beijing in deep winter. At the breakfast table at my parents’ apartment, we sat in silence as my mum peeled a giant mandarin onto a paper napkin and passed me the segments. The vesicles were so big I could feel them bursting one by one on my tongue. This is a type of mandarin I’ve never seen in Aotearoa. Cultivated in Korea and Japan, it’s known as hallabong in Korean and dekopon in Japanese. It has two names in Mandarin: which literally translates to unknowing of fire; and ugly orange, because of its strange shape. It is the size of a large apple with an unsightly little bump upon its crown. After the fruits are harvested in mid-winter, the ugly oranges are left for a month to let their sugar content soar, making them honey-sweet and lightly acidic, like raspberry lemonade.

  I study each of the characters, trying to unpuzzle them. The names circle in my head like nursery rhymes. bright fiery fruit; ugly fruit of deep winter. The best oranges grow in the coldest winters.

  The name is derived from another Japanese word for the fruit, shiranui, which is also the name of a type of atmospheric ghost light in Japanese folklore, seen at certain times of the year near the island of Kyushu. Shiranui is said to take the form of pale red lines of light, or sometimes a flickering ball of light, appearing in the sky above the sea at low tide just before dawn.

  I first tried one of these oranges three years ago. My first winter as a student in Shanghai was coming to an end, and so were the waves of homesickness that would pull me under without warning. In mid-March, the giant knobbly fruits appeared in large quantities at the fruit stand outside the campus gates. Each orange was individually wrapped in its own paper bag stamped with red Chinese characters that formed a border around the edge. They were three times as expensive as the baby mandarins I ate by the handful, which had kept me going through the wet winter. I bought just two to begin with – four yuan each. I peeled and ate one on the street under my umbrella. February had been the month of baby mandarins. March would be the month of ugly oranges.

  When I think of home, I see a lemon tree. The yellow fruits are beginning to bulge and fall. Throughout winter and spring, the house smells of citrus rinds. Here, nothing goes to waste. Mum collects mandarin peels and cut lemon skins and places them in a dish in the oven after cooking, so that as the oven cools, it gives off a bittersweet, hot-sugar scent. The rinds begin to dry out and curl in the warmth while the dog sleeps at our feet. Not far away, we can hear waves roaring in a southerly gale. Our skin smells of salt and oranges.

  Fara
way Love

  Is there really a London? and are you in it? or am I thinking of, and writing to, a wraith?

  Vita Sackville-West in a letter to

  Virginia Woolf, 4 February 1926

  Falling Blue

  The city is dark when I arrive and dark in the morning when I wake. Everything is grey, soft pieces of transparent blue coursing down the sky like sheets of cellophane. I am still caught in the haze of travel and my eyes can only focus on one thing at a time; the bare tree branches, frozen leaves coated in powdered sugar-frost, ice-crusted mud. Back home, the hills surrounding the harbour are always green except in September, when the kōwhai and gorse flowers bloom yellow at the same time. I’m not used to this much grey. London is not somewhere I thought I’d end up; I moved to be in the same place as the person I love, and other than them, I know no one here. To fight the lack of colour, I buy pink claw-hearted tulips from the flower market, ones that were grown somewhere far away. At the Vietnamese grocer on Kingsland Road, I buy a little kumquat tree and place it by the window. Within a few days the edges of its leaves begin to curl.

  This Rain

  I do not see her at first. I walk right past her in the gallery towards other corridors and other rooms. On my way out, my bones are slower, heavier, and she is still there. I glance at the painting without seeing anything at all: an empty canvas of pale rectangles. I take note of her name in my mind – Agnes Martin.

  It is my fourth day in the city. The darkness is interrupted occasionally by bright white lines at certain times of day. A pulsing warmth comes from them that I cannot touch. I watch each morning but they don’t always come. It is surreal to be here, suddenly in the middle of winter. I spend my days wandering the neighbourhood and searching for jobs online. Once before in my life it had been necessary to teach myself how to be alone in an unfamiliar city. I begin to feel now, acutely, that this is another one of those times. I go out into the cold, I cover my face, I cover my eyes.

  Rain Study

  I send out several job applications each day. I write the same thing again and again – ‘thank you for taking the time to consider my application’. I have never felt so far from the sea. I put on my coat and scarf and walk to the churchyard, where hyacinths and daffodils raise their bright faces above a layer of snow. On the iciest day, I take cover again inside the white halls of the Tate. Again I pass the white painting by Agnes Martin, which I notice is titled Faraway Love. The words make me pause and look closer. At first glance, the artwork looks like nothing but a bright square of white. No one is looking at it – instead, everyone is walking past towards the flaming orange Rothko at the end of the corridor.

  Stepping closer, I can see that it’s covered in faint gridlines that look like they’ve been traced in sharp pencil. I step away again and it’s as if the surface of the painting has changed, like a shock wave has rippled through it, and it has rearranged itself back into its original composition. The pale squares offer light and warmth. On another day, in another season, perhaps they’ll give off a different element: wind, rain. The more I look at it, the more it looks like the bottom of the deep end of the swimming pool surrounded by concrete that’s too hot to walk on with bare feet. I shut my eyes and lower myself in.

  Morning

  I am the best at being alone when cooking and eating a soft-boiled egg. Each of us has inherited a different way of timing the boiling of an egg, like cooking rice.

  In this blue kitchen I still don’t know my way around, I repeat the same set of steps each morning. I fill the smallest pot with tap water and set it on the stove. I take a cold white egg from the fridge, close my fingers around it, slip it in. I watch for tiny bubbles forming on the surface of the shell. When the egg begins to tremble, I get the toast on. When the toast pops, the egg is done. I lift it out with a teaspoon and tip it in an egg cup, like my mother used to do for me, except that this egg cup is not mine. This egg cup is made of cream-coloured china covered in a blue chequered pattern, with a red line around the rim. I tap twice on the egg with the back of my spoon to crack the top, then scoop it clean off. I dip the tip of the spoon inside to break the membrane of the hot yolk. Outside the window, blue dissolves into skimmed milk. A writer friend once asked me: ‘What are your rituals?’ I wasn’t sure then, but now I know.

  Untitled (Study for ‘The Egg’)

  There are many other women who cook and eat their boiled eggs alone, like I do. In an early short story by Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’, Rosabel’s simple meal of a scone and a boiled egg becomes a kind of symbol of her aloneness in London. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the narrator has a boiled egg in her white room each morning:

  The shell of the egg is smooth but also grained; small pebbles of calcium are defined by the sunlight, like craters on the moon [. . .] The egg is glowing now, as if it had an energy of its own. To look at the egg gives me intense pleasure.

  Apart from her body, the egg is the only other object in the room. She imagines placing the warm egg between her breasts. The egg is a lunar landscape; an empty desert; it is the moon illuminated by the sun. Its shape is the shape of her body: earlier in the text she describes her form as ‘a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping’.

  In a poem by Kim Seon-U, ‘Time for Boiling Eggs’ (translated into English by Emily Jungmin Yoon), the speaker cooks a boiled egg for her mother, who no longer recognises her:

  (Mom likes them soft-boiled) Fill the pot with water, place the eggs in, and turn on the gas Inside the pure chewy whites, the yolk, a universe that was about to become life (We eat, feed, and are eaten)

  The Egg and Untitled (Study for ‘The Egg’) are two drawings by Agnes Martin that examine the symmetry of the egg. They are small compared to her paintings, about the size of an A4 sheet of paper. In The Egg, an oval shape is composed entirely of fine horizontal lines that begin to disappear and blur into each other when you look at the drawing from far away. There are subtle variations in the weight of each line, creating a gentle illusion of movement, as if the egg was slowly spinning on its axis. For Untitled, Martin places the egg over a grid, cutting it in half lengthways. Then she cuts a line across the top, exactly where you would slice the top off with a spoon.

  With My Back to the World

  Agnes Martin left New York City in 1967, when she was fifty-five, and went to live alone in the desert. She lived alone all her life, though she had several relationships with women. She suffered aural hallucinations due to schizophrenia, and underwent electroconvulsive therapy for it.

  In New Mexico she built herself a studio out of brick and earth. The soft-hued paintings of her years spent surrounded by this landscape and nothing else are defined by bands of colour overlaid with faint grids and lines, surreal in their geometric perfection, but also like a dream that takes place in the desert. Faraway Love, the first painting of hers that I saw, was painted in 1999, when she was eighty-seven. As with poems, my responses to artworks are instinctive and come from somewhere inside my body. I can only write about art in terms of intimacy, or a lack of it. In the gallery, I took notes from the little squares of text next to each painting and I sketched the lines that separated her fields of peach and fields of blue. As the London winter brightened into spring, I began to write again.

  Martin is very soft-spoken in a recorded interview from 1989, of which a five-minute excerpt can be listened to on the Archives of American Art website. A loud static fills the spaces between her words. The static is made up of soft blue and grey wavering lines that never touch.

  On a Clear Day

  It is possible to become intimate with a city by eating out alone in the winter. I order rice noodles with roast duck on the second floor of a restaurant in Chinatown, where the only other person alone is an off-duty chef counting his cigarettes onto the table. Siu ngo laai fan, a Cantonese phrase Mum taught me how to say once while we waited in an airport food co
urt, though I could never get all the tones right. Later, on the top floor of Foyles on Charing Cross Road where everyone else also looks like an unemployed writer newly arrived in London, I spread cold clotted cream and raspberry jam on my overpriced scone.

  In the Vietnamese restaurants on Kingsland Road in east London, we – all of us women in our twenties and thirties, all of us slurping phở in the middle of the day – warm our cheeks in the steam that rises from our bowls and coats the windows, shielding us from the gaze of passers-by. We don’t speak to each other, or to anyone else. We wrap scarves around our faces and step out into the melting snow.

  Tender Gardens

  Seventh Lunar Month

  light summer ~ season of scorched hydrangeas

  ‘The Chinese were in fact very friendly, very nice to each other. Not what you’d expect.’

  In the white-gold kitchen, the lights above the table are glinting. Pink and purple sweet peas in a vase on the table flutter in a breeze coming in from the open window. I feel my friend’s body become tense next to mine. I look out the window, because I can’t look at him or anyone else. The heads of blue hydrangeas are swelling and pulsing in the manicured garden. Lily pads tremble on the surface of the hot, brown pond. Dusk is beginning to fall.

  I am staying with a close friend and his parents in southern England during the summer. Over breakfast, I had asked his mother about the flowers in her garden: hydrangea, peony, azalea, nasturtium. There are flowers I recognise but don’t know the names of; she points to each one and tells me their names, giving me the vocabulary to write about plants with precision for the first time. Azalea, clematis, dahlia, allium. I recognise that in doing so she is giving me a gift. She notices trees and flowers wherever she goes; she knows all their names. Two years ago, in spring, she visited Hong Kong – her first time in Asia. Hong Kong was so much greener than expected. ‘So much green.’

 

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