Small Bodies of Water

by Nina Mingya Powles

  Her words were partly meant with good intentions, but I don’t know how to carry them within my body. Possible responses circle around my head and I can’t sort through them all. Would she think of my mother as a Chinese? Does she think of me as half a Chinese? If yes, how did she think I would respond? If not, then what am I to her? Instead of asking these questions, I say nothing.

  Afterwards, in the car on the drive back to London, my friend pulls over beside a red letterbox – one of many features of the English landscape that seems toy-like, unreal – and presses his forehead against the steering wheel.

  When I was last at my own parents’ house, I read a book of theirs called A Field Guide to the Birds of China. On page 18, the beginning of a chapter titled ‘The Avian Year’, the rhythms of certain lines leapt out at me:

  China lies north of the equator

  And in the long days of the northern summer

  The birds are migrants descending in winter

  According to the ancient Chinese lunisolar calendar, which is an agricultural calendar, each lunar month can be divided into two jiéqi – solar terms. Each solar term can be divided into three micro-seasons. These micro-seasons mark a single event in the life cycle of plants and animals. This means there are seventy-two small seasons within one lunar year. Every five days brings a new season.

  When I first learned about the seventy-two seasons, I obsessively translated and wrote down the most poetic ones I could find. I discovered that I was born during the month of lined clothing, in the solar term of summer’s arrival, in the season of the untangling of deer antlers. My mum was born during the season of wild geese flying north.

  Twelfth Lunar Month

  southern summer solstice ~ season of pōhutukawa flowers

  ‘If you spend too much time in China, you might end up looking like this.’ The woman places one finger at the outer corner of each of her eyes and pulls. She laughs. She’s not addressing me, but the people standing next to me. Cold breath leaves my body. I feel the urge to run to my dog, Toby, who is waiting for us in the back of the car, to hold his soft ears and press him close to my face. I resist this urge.

  David and I are back in Aotearoa for Christmas after a year in London. We’ve just come in from a walk on the beach and my dry lips taste like salt. The skin around my ankles is rough with sand and the hem of my dress is wet, heavy. We are almost within swimming distance of the great island that guards the shore, Kāpiti. Once the settlement of the Māori chief Te Rauparaha, then a whaling station, now a protected bird sanctuary, Kāpiti lies off the coast of the lower North Island. I’ve known it since I was small; on our weekends spent on Waikanae Beach, the island loomed over me. Dad always told me that in the ridged shape of the island you could see the silhouette of a sleeping man. With one eye shut, I used to stand on the beach and trace the outline of its shape with my finger. The island is a witness to what has occurred, is still occurring. The island is my witness.

  It’s January, midsummer up on the coast. In the northern hemisphere it’s midwinter, the season of wild geese flying north. It hasn’t rained in two weeks and the edges of roses are beginning to scorch. Back in London, before we left for the holidays, I planted spring bulbs (daffodil, iris, hyacinth) in plastic containers and placed them in a line along the windowsill. I sent pictures of my not-yet-blooms to Mum, who replied to say she couldn’t wait to grow some water hyacinths for the coming Chinese New Year.

  Twelfth Lunar Month

  deep winter ~ season of bulbs in the snow

  Is my otherness becoming more or less visible? Sometimes more – other mixed-race women and women of colour occasionally approach me at work, kindly curious, wanting to know. ‘You’re mixed, aren’t you?’ they ask gently. Sometimes less – in a room full of white people they count me as one of their own, turning me into an invisible witness to their casual racism.

  I began to realise the importance of keeping a record. I couldn’t carry all the details in my body any longer. I needed somewhere to put them down, so I opened a new Google Doc and gave it the title ‘INVISIBLE DOCUMENT’, as if a spell of invisibility might help to lessen the weight of it. The pages were full of incoherent notes, sensations and images collected in the hours and days after something like this happened – an offhand comment from a family friend, racist jokes overheard on a train. I have never been a victim of racist violence or direct harassment; the things I was recording didn’t feel important in the wider picture of systemic racism and colonialism that my birth country of Aotearoa, and my adopted country of England, are founded upon. But I knew I should record them. I knew the words themselves were another form of violence, casual and sprinkled with laughter, traded between white people who roam exclusively in white spaces – in the form of in-jokes, teasing and outdated slang that serve no purpose other than to alienate and to control: coloured, Oriental.

  It was around this time that I also started to keep a garden diary. I tried to imagine a garden of my own, here in London. On my small balcony, I began with three cardinal seasonings of Chinese cooking: garlic, ginger and spring onions. Later, I chose fragrant plants and shrubs that reminded me of home: rosemary, lavender, jasmine, the kōwhai tree. Like the writer Alexander Chee with his rose garden in Brooklyn – ‘The first sunlight hitting my windows at seven-thirty and touching the ground in the back around eight’ – I studied the movement of sunlight across my north-facing garden. I began to learn by heart the shifting patterns of light and shade. Now I had two diaries at the same time: one full of difficult words, gaps and silences; one full of nourishment, roots, sun and rain.

  2/5/18

  As soon as the days started getting longer, our back deck has transformed. I’ve been tracking sunlight: warm morning light from about six thirty a.m. until ten, then again in the afternoon, from about four o’clock until about seven. Whereas in winter it’s dark, damp, cold, coated in moss.

  I keep finding forgotten flowers inside forgotten books. I found a purple crocus pressed between the pages of my copy of A Cruelty Special to Our Species by the Korean Canadian poet Emily Jungmin Yoon. Crocuses bloom in late winter through to early spring, so I must have picked the flower then, and put it in the book for safekeeping. Its petals have turned translucent, rendering the poem ‘Bell Theory’ visible through the flower itself:

  How to say azalea. How to say forsythia.

  Say instead golden bells. Say I’m in ESL. In

  French class

  a boy whose last name is Kring called me belle.

  Called me by my Korean name, pronouncing it

  wrong.

  Called it loudly, called attention to my alien.

  The speaker of the poem begins accumulating half rhymes, small chiming bells: lie, lie, library, azalea, library. I’m reminded of a line from another poem by Rachael Allen: ‘Women’s bodies collect materials the way metals accrue in organs.’ I begin collecting the names of flora that sways in the background of my memories: azalea, magnolia, hydrangea, jasmine.

  I am split between northern and summer hemispheres, and so my own seventy-two seasons are different. I observe my little garden passing through the micro-seasons. Season of sunflower seedlings, season of wet jasmine, season of cabbage butterflies alighting on brassica leaves. But what does it mean to attempt to put roots down in a country that forever finds you alien, an outsider, exotically mixed?

  Lunar New Year

  the beginning of spring ~ season of glasshouse orchids

  ‘On which side, your mother or your father?’ He asks the question aggressively, without preamble. The man, a friend of a friend, stands in the doorway of my blue kitchen, his body taking up the entire frame. He leans over me and I can see pores in the damp skin of his nose. He smiles down at me in a way that looks like he’s baring his teeth.

  Behind me, steam rises from the pot of boiling water where the jiăozi I made for our New Year dinner are cooking. When they begin to rise to the surface, it means they’re ready. It’s one of those cooking tech
niques I can’t remember learning, one my mum must have taught me at some point, just like she taught me how to put my forefinger in the pot of uncooked rice and pour cold water up to the second knuckle. I turn away from him to lift them quickly from the pot and answer quietly, ‘on my mum’s side’. Steam coats the walls and my skin.

  In late February, David takes me to go see the orchids at Kew. Every winter Kew Gardens holds its annual orchid festival in the glasshouses; each year a different tropical country is chosen as the theme. This year it’s Thailand. Up close, the orchids look more like animals than flowers. Pink mouths, violet tendrils, yellow tongues pressed up against the steamed glass. Their ancestors once grew wild in the rainforests of Southeast Asia. There are curtains of climbing fluorescent blooms above a koi pond and a floating fibreglass Buddha surrounded by tea candles. I’m not sure if the display is meant to remind me of home, or if it’s specifically designed to make English people feel like they’ve stepped into an exotic jungle. It can’t quite be both.

  When we exit the make-believe rainforest and re-enter wintry daylight, I see that the lake by the glasshouse is frozen. The fountain is encrusted in ice. In the gift shop I buy a dark purple orchid for £4 from the sale table, even though I know that means it’s probably half dead.

  9:57 PM

  do you have any orchid care tips?

  what should I do once the flowers are

  drooping?

  Mum 10:40 PM

  Prob means they are ready to drop!

  Main thing is to resist repotting them.

  Only a little water. Do not put in direct

  sunlight – too hot; avoid windowsills.

  But still lots of light.

  First Lunar Month

  rainwater ~ season of cold mandarins

  Who was the first New Zealand Chinese woman writer? If one like me existed prior to the mid-twentieth century, their name has not been remembered. ‘We had no artistic or literary role models,’ poet and novelist Alison Wong writes in her essay ‘Pure Brightness’. Chinese immigrants first arrived in Aotearoa in the 1850s from war-torn southern China, settling in the gold fields of Otago. It was uncommon for wives to immigrate alongside their husbands, and as a result the earliest Chinese communities in Aotearoa were almost entirely male. Following growing anti-Chinese prejudice from organisations such as the Anti-Chinese League and the White New Zealand League, in 1881 the government passed the Chinese Immigration Act, introducing a £10 ‘poll tax’ on the head of every Chinese person wishing to enter the country. In 1896, the poll tax was increased to £100. It was not until 1934 that this was lifted, allowing Chinese to settle as refugees fleeing the Sino-Japanese War. In 2002, the New Zealand government offered a formal apology to the Chinese community for the harm caused by the Chinese Immigration Act.

  Wong describes the sinking of the SS Ventnor off the coast of Hokianga in 1902, a ship carrying the exhumed bones of 499 Chinese people to be brought back to China for reburial in their ancestral villages. Chinese associations regularly organised for remains to be sent back to China for burial; or for those buried in Aotearoa who had no descendants there, they took on annual Tomb-Sweeping Festival customs to honour the dead. Wong recounts a gathering that took place in April 2013 on the beach in Hokianga to commemorate the tragedy:

  We bow three times before apples, mandarins, almond biscuits, roast pork, baak jaam gai with feet and legs and head, red paper folded in the beak. We scatter rice tea wine; burn paper money gold; eat pork and baak jaam gai, an unwrapped sweet on the tongue. Electric fire crackers bang bang bang over the sand.

  How many hungry ghosts can the sea hold? Like Alison Wong, long-ago sea voyages are a part of my ancestry. From England to Aotearoa on one side; from the Hakka regions of southern China to Malaysia to Aotearoa on the other. When I ask Mum what we know about Po Po’s early life, I get a series of tentative facts. She was (likely) born near Hong Kong and fled war as a young girl with her family by boat to the Malayan Peninsula. Her father, my great-grandfather, (probably) didn’t make the boat or (possibly) died on the journey.

  Wong’s poem ‘The River Bears Our Name’ contains two places that are in my bones. It is the first time I have encountered my two homes together in a single poem. I can feel it unfurling somewhere deep inside me, as if it has always been there.

  As the sun eases red over Pauatahanui

  You stand alone at the Huangpu River

  Layers of dust catch in our throat

  The water is brown with years of misuse

  You stand alone at the Huangpu River

  Your card lies still open on the table beside me

  The water is brown with years of misuse

  I write out your name stroke upon stroke

  In moments of grief we offer up flowers, fruit, poems. Whenever we drove from the airport round the coast of Kota Kinabalu to my grandparents’ house in Likas Bay, we would pass the great blue mosque and the Chinese cemeteries up in the hills, their colourful gravestones cascading down the hillside. On the graves nearest the side of the road, I could see plastic flowers and wisps of smoke rising from burning joss.

  After she died, Mum cleared out Po Po’s kitchen. When we next saw each other, months later, she gave me a box of her kitchen things: ivory chopsticks with the words engraved on the handles, floral-patterned melamine trays we had picked for her at Daiso, enamel mixing bowls and an indigo blue pot with a matching lid. I select the blue pot as a new home for my orchid from Kew Gardens.

  Second Lunar Month

  the awakening of insects ~ season of first magnolias

  ‘Lots of the Chinese students at my school seem to be scared of dogs.’

  ‘That’s because they eat them.’

  When the man seated across from me says this, a white-hot cloud of light billows up from the centre of the room, or from the centre of me. In the split second after his words settle on my skin, I could choose to breathe or not breathe. I could speak or not speak. The plate on my lap holding a warm chocolate brownie tips forward. Melted vanilla ice cream dribbles over onto the dark blue fabric of my skirt.

  ‘That was racist,’ I say into the air, into the circle. My voice is calm. For a moment my voice is present among the others’ voices, and then it isn’t anymore. If anyone else in the room has heard me, they don’t make a sign. The room cannot hold on to my words for too long or else it might go up in flames. The room cannot hold on to me.

  Over the course of the following day I feel sick and shaky. I have no appetite, except for wanting to chew on something rich and soft, like a Cadbury caramel egg. Unable to sleep, I get up in the middle of the night and cut a blood orange, tearing the dark red flesh from the pith with my teeth. Outside, the wind stings my eyes. The first magnolia petals are starting to fly off the trees.

  On my way home from work, I buy a houseplant that opens its pink-veined leaves during the day and closes them at night, furling in on itself, making its limbs smaller in the dark. I learn that when plants do this it is called nyctinasty. It’s a circadian rhythmic movement in response to the onset of darkness. The plant’s light receptors in its skin, called phytochromes, cause the petals or foliage to curl inwards, as if asleep. Crocuses do this; as do lotuses, hibiscus, tulips and poppies. The exact reason for nyctinastic movement hasn’t yet been determined, but it could be the plant’s way of protecting itself from night-time predators, or conserving energy, or both. I watch my plant closely. It is a Calathea ornata, native to Colombia and Venezuela, part of a family of plants called prayer plants because of the way their leaves and leaflets rise up at dusk as if in prayer.

  My anger has nowhere to go. It silently opens and closes inside me.

  Second Lunar Month

  spring equinox ~ season of white lilies

  On the day of the Christchurch terrorist attack, because I’m so far away and don’t know what else to do, I cut the last two daffodils still alive and bring them with me to place in front of New Zealand House in the middle of London, where pil
es of flowers and cards and little flags have accumulated on either side of the glass doors: small mountains of grief.

  On my way to the vigil at the New Zealand War Memorial that evening, I see flowers everywhere. A man on the train has a single white iris poking out of the pocket of his jeans. I’m holding a bunch of violet-coloured sweet peas that I bought at the flower stall near Embankment right after work. As I often do when I’m on the train at rush hour, I think about what it would be like if something catastrophic happened just then. All the petals would fly up into the air and stay there, suspended, like in a movie. I step off the train at Hyde Park station and almost collide with a girl on the platform cradling a giant bouquet of white lilies in her arms. They dwarf her, giving the impression that she is wearing a cloud of lilies. In that moment, I understand that if I follow her she’ll take me exactly where I need to be.

  London commuters stare at us and our armfuls of flowers as we carve a sweet-scented path through the crowded station entrance, walking against the current of the city to join the others. We find them standing huddled on the grass around more valleys of flowers, arms around each other, singing quietly, cheeks lit by electric candles flickering in the loud night.

  Fourth Lunar Month

  pure brightness ~ season of koru ferns

  Mum and Dad’s seaside garden in Wellington is made up of plants inherited from the house’s previous owners and ones added by Mum over the years. It’s beautiful in a patchwork sort of way, the product of several families’ hopes and dreams layered on top of each other. We had been left a giant aloe facing the sea, its red tentacles rising towards the sun; an old pōhutukawa that’d been chopped back too far; dark purple hydrangeas; a slender apple tree; an unruly and abundant feijoa, and a golden kōwhai. By the gate, one or two spring onions burst forth from the earth every spring – we don’t know how long ago they were planted there, but we always snip them with scissors to put in our soup noodles. There was a withering wisteria above the deck that couldn’t withstand the gale, which Dad replaced with a bougainvillea that occasionally spits mouthfuls of magenta blooms. On weekends Mum is on her knees in the wet grass, composting and potting up new succulents, collecting fallen feijoas and lemons. While Dad is out walking the dog, Mum follows him on to the beach to collect shell fragments from the shore, spreading them between the plants to create a bed of seashells.