Small Bodies of Water

by Nina Mingya Powles

  I need to get under as fast as I can. If I go slow, I’ll think too much about the slippery uneven rocks and the rows of cars passing by the beach. The cold grips me roughly at first, then lusciously.

  8 November

  I bunch up my socks and tuck them into my boots beneath the driftwood bench. This broad stretch of Eastbourne Beach curves in a concave shape towards the harbour, jutting out into the wind, which blows in cold and fast. This is total exposure. The wind whips my hair around my neck. I know the waves are stronger than they look.

  In this weather, I am always looking for orca. Under pearl-grey clouds every shadow and crinkle on the surface looks like the shape of a marine mammal. I follow the dark shapes closely until my eyes hurt from the effort of focusing. The sea lifts me up and tosses me gently back against the shore as if to say hello, goodbye.

  In the afternoon, several friends send me messages with links to the same news article:

  Three orca have been spotted around Wellington Harbour. This morning, keen-eyed residents around Eastbourne, on the eastern shore of the harbour, could see the orca in the shallower waters closer to shore.

  12 November

  I am the only person in Days Bay. The sea is blue and sequinned like a mermaid’s tail. Standing in the morning sun in my yellow high-waisted bikini, painted all over with sunscreen, I feel suddenly bold and brash like the character Stanley from ‘At the Bay’, written by Katherine Mansfield in 1922 about this very spot. At first light Stanley plunges in triumphantly – ‘First man in as usual! He’d beaten them all again.’ First woman in, I dive and swoop in the crushed velvet surf. I come up swaying, shining. The sun’s tricked me into thinking I can’t feel the cold, but I know my limits. From the shore I look back to the waves, trying to regain my breath, shielding my eyes from the light.

  Later, in a bookshop, I hunt for a copy of Mansfield’s stories to reread ‘At the Bay’ while leaning against one of the shelves. In the voice of an omniscient narrator, Mansfield surveys the dawn making its way slowly across these misty hills above the bay. Then she turns her gaze to the sea itself: ‘Now the leaping, glittering sea was so bright it made one’s eyes ache to look at it.’

  15 November

  ‘Not knowing how long you’ll get to stay in the city you want to live in feels like travelling half blind, like sending a sound wave across a canyon,’ writes Sharlene Teo. The unknown looms at all times at the edges of my vision: the fragility of a passport, paperwork, post offices, the absurdity of trying to live somewhere so far from this shoreline. So, in this strange blank in-between moment in my life, I swim. I swim to get as close to this sea and sky as my body will let me.

  Lion’s Head Rock is surrounded by churning waves the colour of chocolate milk. Toby watches me wearily as I undress in the wind and drape my clothes over the driftwood. I dip down below the sand shelf and feel the sharp pull of the undertow. I have never been caught in a rip, but I wonder if at first it feels like this: the way the water moves rapidly beneath the surface, pulling my legs in a different direction to my arms, bending my knees backwards. When a wide wave rolls over the top of me I push my body up to meet it, letting it carry me back to the shore. The undercurrent signals to me I shouldn’t venture out further, though the cold is shimmering and spiky on my skin.

  Later, drying off in the garden, camellias and peach roses sway in the gale. I pick a wind-fallen pink camellia from the gravel path and place it inside the pages of my notebook, making a mental note to show my mum the next time I see her, whenever that may be.

  Tofu Heart

  I wake before dawn and feel around for my phone next to me. Half asleep, I scroll automatically through updates of lockdown life back home, which looks much the same as always: hot pink sunsets, home-baked hot cross buns, bright crescent moons above the sea at dusk. I am longing now more than ever to touch the sea, or even just to be within sight of the sea for a moment: for some small reminder that it’s still there, that I am still surrounded by water.

  My friend Rose has posted a picture of a bowl of fresh, homemade dòufu huā with yóutiáo fried dough sticks. I hold my finger down on the screen to stop the image from disappearing, a pang of hunger in my belly. I can see the tofu’s wobbly texture; I can feel the shape of the soft curds in my mouth. I think of that day I spent with Rose many summers ago in Wellington, swimming in the warm harbour, then walking up through town to our favourite noodle shop. We sat by the window sipping soy milk from little cartons.

  If I translate dòufu huā into English, it loses some of its taste and shape. The direct translation is tofu flower, and in Beijing they call it dòufunăo, tofu brain. In English you could call it ‘soft bean curd’ or even ‘jellied tofu’, as my dictionary app suggests. ‘Tofu pudding’ is the one translation that makes sense to me, owing to the dish’s custard-like texture.

  In Shanghai I lived down the road from a small eatery that served breakfast all day: spring onion oil noodles, deep-fried sesame balls, dòufu huā. I went there often on my own. Their chilli oil glowed fluorescent orange, the colour of a Shanghai summer night. Tender layers of tofu floated in the bowl in the shape of a wide open peony. I remember sitting inside by the window, my damp umbrella on the floor under the table, when another downpour came. Within minutes the gutters flooded again. And then it was all over, the street lit up by the reflections of traffic lights in shallow puddles.

  In March, one of my last meals before London went into lockdown was at Far East on Gerrard Street. I had been trying to get to Chinatown as often as possible; I’d heard from friends that the whole area had gone eerily quiet. Far East is a little cramped, cash only, and the only place I’ve found that serves hot dòujiang, soy milk and dòuhuā at all hours of the day.

  The air outside is sharp but no longer cold enough for my scarf and gloves, which I shove into the pockets of my coat. I’m served the biggest yóutiáo I’ve ever seen; I have to rip it in half with my hands before lifting the pieces with my chopsticks. I tuck my hair behind my ears before lifting the bowl of dòuhuā to my lips. The ends of my hair are coarse and splitting from the dry winter air. I think of my first winter in London, two years ago, when I ventured out to try and get to know the city, to try and summon the courage to eat out alone.

  Last week a white relative posted a racist meme in our family WhatsApp group. I was already exhausted from pandemic-related anxiety; I didn’t have the energy to respond. Some other family members scolded him privately, and later that night I typed out a brief reply: ‘This is not OK.’ There was no response, though the message was seen.

  I hadn’t written anything in my invisible document since the previous year, and I thought of opening it, but didn’t – rather than quickly noting down what happened and pushing it out of my mind, I felt strong enough this time to slowly consider the implications of the casual comment, and the uncomfortable fact that it came from within my own extended family. I still don’t know why they decided to take a screenshot from Facebook, save it to their phone, upload it to WhatsApp and hit ‘send’. I don’t know how a global pandemic seems to have given new confidence to those who privately, or unconsciously, find racism deeply amusing, and have never been forced to confront this fact about themselves. Moments when I stayed quiet, when I was younger and didn’t know what to say, still haunt me.

  The Cambridge dictionary definition of tofu reads: ‘a soft, pale food that has very little flavour but is high in protein, made from the seed of the soya plant’. I feel sad for the person who wrote this. Many people wrinkle their noses at the mention of bean curd and I get flustered when this happens. My cheeks grow hot, I wave my arms in lieu of words.

  Bean curd is one of my favourite names in English. It’s firm on the outside but soft in the middle, where the springy mouthfeel of bean blends with the warm liquid curd. In Mandarin, too, ‘dòufu’ is composed of soft sounds. But to say the word requires a gentle bite, the tip of your tongue touching the back of your teeth.

  Today I’m dreaming of a p
articular dish: jiācháng dòufu, home-style tofu, at Red Hill, a Sichuan restaurant on Manners Mall in Wellington. When I was at university we’d go there for the dumplings and the karaoke: Christina Aguilera’s first two albums interspersed with Mandarin pop. The deep-fried tofu cubes have a chewy skin that absorbs the black bean sauce.

  There’s a famous Hakka dish of braised tofu cubes stuffed with pork: niàng dòufu. Mum says Po Po used to make it a lot. I remember Po Po placing it in the centre of the table in one of her blue-rimmed serving dishes with slender fish painted on the sides. The tofu wobbled strangely under the warm lamp.

  In Mandarin class we studied Chinese funeral practices, which are numerous and still unfamiliar to me, since I’ve never attended a funeral of a Chinese family member of mine. The traditional vegetarian funeral banquet is sometimes called the dòufufàn, the tofu meal. We learned that tofu is often given as an offering because it’s soft enough to be swallowed by a ghost.

  It’s Qīng Míng today, Tomb-Sweeping Festival, but many families all over the world cannot gather to mourn their dead.

  To make dòuhuā at home you need just three ingredients: water, soybeans and a coagulant, most commonly gypsum powder, which sets the soy milk into tofu. According to Andrea Nguyen, the author of Asian Tofu, gypsum produces ‘loftier curds’. Normally I’d look on eBay, but I feel guilty buying non-essential things online during lockdown, so I opt for one of Nguyen’s suggested alternatives: lemon juice.

  In the back of my mind I feel a grinding pressure to write, to create, to make good use of this time. But my body feels worn down, my nerves softened and tenderised.

  I have never held a soybean in my palm until today. It is round, smooth and a creamy pale gold in colour. Huáng dòu – yellow bean.

  On the eighteenth day of lockdown, I put one cup of soybeans in a bowl to soak overnight. Soaking is one of the most magical and satisfying processes in cooking, and one I’ve rarely had the time and patience for until now. In the morning the yellow beans were swollen, splitting cleanly in half when I squeezed them between my fingers. While they simmered gently for forty minutes, the kitchen filling up with steam, I rolled out the dough for spring onion pancakes – something crisp to dip into my dòuhuā.

  To transform dòujiang into dòuhuā (from milk into flower), a few teaspoons of lemon juice is all it takes. The recipe instructs me to cover the pot and wait one hour for the dòuhuā to set, but I can’t stop myself from peeking. Eventually the skimmed surface of the milk begins to change: shimmering, wobbling. Sitting on the kitchen floor waiting for my phone timer to buzz, I scroll through Twitter, where I see images of people in Beijing standing metres apart holding yellow chrysanthemums in their hands, their heads bowed.

  There’s a Chinese proverb: It means, literally, knife mouth, tofu heart. In other words, sharp-tongued but soft-hearted.

  My dòuhuā’s curds are not lofty, nor do they float in perfect petalled layers. But they have set a little, which is something. The taste is more sour than regular tofu. There’s still that beany richness on my tongue.

  I ladle the soupy pudding into a rice bowl and sprinkle it with dark brown sugar and a little fresh ginger – my lazy version of ‘ginger-infused sugar syrup’, which I’ve run out of energy to make. Today, I need something sweet and soft. I take a picture and post it in the family chat.

  Against a backdrop of misty mountains and pomelo trees, a young woman with braided hair uses a scythe to harvest soybeans from the fields near her home. This is Li Ziqi, the Chinese YouTube celebrity whose soothing, ethereally beautiful videos of cooking meals with fresh ingredients from her garden have garnered her many millions of followers. Her on-screen garden, located in the mountains of rural Sichuan Province, is like a dreamworld. Impossibly lush, it sparkles and pulses with life like a scene from a Ghibli movie, in high-definition. Magnolia trees with pink blooms, red chillies, crimson climbing roses, glistening lime and lemon trees. The changing colours of her garden show the altered passage of time: her soybeans are sown on Qīng Míng, in the middle of spring, and harvested at the autumn equinox.

  In lockdown, the patterns of each day blur into the next. I watch these videos obsessively in between hours of writing and working from home. Outside, it rains like I’ve never known it to rain in London before: violent downpours that last only minutes, followed by warm, drizzling rain. The soft sounds of Li Ziqi’s garden begin to blend with the sounds of my blue kitchen, which is the place where I’ve managed to hold on to some sense of normalcy: raindrops on the windows, soy milk simmering on the stove, the kettle boiling on the counter. All the blossoms have fallen, and the plums and apricots in the allotments by the park are beginning to soften.

  Wellington, 1996

  Begin in a small room with banana-coloured walls. Begin by drawing hearts and stars on a sheet of paper, not listening to the teacher’s sing-song voice. All around you on the walls are bright posters with pictures of animals, colours, fruits.

  Begin with the soothing language of apple juice, rice cakes and steamed dim sum. Begin with a handful of words in dialect – Hakka and Cantonese sprinkled with English.

  You try to keep up with everyone else. You can never remember the hand signs quickly enough. Seven press your thumb and two fingers together in the shape of a bird! Eight hold your thumb to the sky, point out your finger! Nine curve your finger in the shape of a worm!

  Begin with six basic radicals which are the foundations of many Chinese characters: person, knife, mouth, roof, heart, water. The last one, water, is written as It’s known as or three drops of water.

  The first words were carved in shell and bone. Oracle bone script ( literally shell-bone script) was the language of pyromancy – divination by fire. Fortune tellers inscribed questions for the gods on pieces of ox bone and turtle shell. They heated the fragments over a flame until the fragments cracked from the heat. Their answers lay in the pattern of splits and fissures in burnt bone.

  In these earliest confirmed examples of Chinese script, which date back three thousand years to the late Shang dynasty, there are two forms of language at play: one in the familiar pictographic symbols that resemble the hànzi we know today, and one in the cracks between the lines of text.

  The oracle bone ideograms are very early versions of today’s Chinese characters, but many have still not yet been deciphered. The shapes look ancient but familiar, a little crooked and spindly like my own handwriting as a child. One closely resembles its modern counterpart: a circle with a dot in the centre, a sun

  Shanghai, 2006

  Every weekend during the long hot summer, you walk fifteen minutes down the road to the language school housed in an apartment complex on the corner of Anfu Lu and Wulumuqi Lu. The plane trees’ wide leaves tremble above the footpath.

  The July heat makes the air feel pressurised, combustible. It presses against your skin until you get to the windowless room, where icy air-conditioned wind blows down your neck. Today, for your second lesson, your Mandarin tutor is teaching you how to write your name for the first time. She helps you break each character down into four separate parts. Sun, moon. Tooth, bird. You connect each shape together awkwardly. Your fingers feel clumsy, pressing down too hard on the thin gridded paper.

  You can never remember the correct stroke order, and drawing them doesn’t come naturally to you. Your characters are childlike, ungraceful. They slant too far to the right just like your English handwriting does. There’s something your body still needs to learn, or unlearn.

  You write them over and over again until all the curves and lines begin to blur together. Bird, sun, tooth, moon.

  Nǚshū – women’s script – is a writing system that was used by women in rural Hunan Province up until the early 1900s. I first stumbled across a mention of Nǚshū online in 2017, when I was studying in Shanghai. The symbols partly resembled characters I knew, but tilted and stretched into strange, slender shapes. Their curved strokes made them look like long-legged pond-skimming insects, as if ali
ve, about to lift up off the page in flight.

  Unlike Chinese, a logographic script where each character represents a word or part of a word, Nǚshū is a syllabic script – each character is a single syllable spoken aloud.

  Women and girls wrote to each other in Nǚshū, often embroidering the words onto blankets, clothing and little clothbound booklets. The last person known to be fully proficient in Nǚshū, a woman named Yang Huanyi, passed away in 2004.

  Writers and scholars have been fascinated by Nǚshū ever since it came to light. I became obsessed. The idea of a script devised by women exclusively for other women felt mythical, mystical. When they came of age, girls would be taught Nǚshū by their aunts, and they would be assigned a lăotóng a sworn sister of the same age, with whom they’d sign a pact of sisterhood. I pictured girls and women writing notes to each other by firelight, or threading songs and stories from their lives onto hand-woven cloth.

  In Lisa See’s historical novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, the two main characters, named Lily and Snow Flower, are sworn sisters who write letters to each other in Nǚshū on paper fans. The 2011 film adaptation directed by Wayne Wang (who also directed The Joy Luck Club) inserted a parallel narrative of two women living in contemporary Shanghai, one of whom is Snow Flower’s great-great-granddaughter. Inspired by the story of their ancestors’ friendship, one night they sign a pact on the cover of their favourite Faye Wong album.

  Journalist and academic Ilaria Maria Sala, who has studied Nǚshū for many decades, has spoken out against the way Nǚshū has been sensationalised in popular culture as a secret language of women’s suffering and pain. Sala’s fieldwork in Hunan revealed to her that Nǚshū was much more complex; it was both the language of rituals and the lang uage of everyday life. Rather than a secret spoken language between women, it merely transcribed the local Jiangyong dialect, and it wasn’t kept secret from men.