Small Bodies of Water

by Nina Mingya Powles

  We walk through dark rooms with gold writing on the walls and stand together in front of the moving picture of Epang Palace with its jade rooftops and white herons and blue clouds drifting across the screen. The clouds and the birds look familiar. ‘They look just like the birds that used to visit your garden in K.K.,’ I say to her and she nods, ‘mmm!’ in agreement. ‘Are they still there?’ I ask. She smiles.

  I have a real memory of visiting Xi’an with my parents and Po Po and Gong Gong and my cousins and Aunty Bin and Uncle Boon when I was twelve or thirteen, but I don’t remember much apart from rows upon rows of empty-eyed heads and horses arranged in formation in a massive pit of dirt. What I remember is the blinding heat – it was mid-July and thirty-nine degrees by mid-morning, which sounded both dramatic and scientific, and which I repeated matter-of-factly to my friends afterwards: ‘it was thirty-nine degrees by mid-morning.’ Our Converse sneakers kicked up clouds of hot dust that settled on our damp skin. All we wanted was ice cream and air conditioning, and when we finally found it Po Po came and sat with us while the other grown-ups went to explore yet another ancient emperor’s ancient tomb.

  In the dream Po Po leads me into a small room off to one side, filled with a purplish and red light. The walls are covered in a pattern of objects and faces I recognise. I want to reach out and touch them: blue butterflies, a mooncake, a pink peony, a warrior queen, a monkey king, kung fu fighters floating on invisible treetops. I turn to show Po Po this wall covered in what seems to be a repeating pattern of some of my earliest childhood memories, but I find her sitting on a chair, her hands on her knees, her eyes fixed on the screen ahead, where an old-fashioned projector flips images of familiar objects onto the wall. They are objects from another time, things that Po Po might have owned when she was a little girl in China, before she escaped to Malaysia: a faded teacup, a chipped soup spoon, a child’s pair of blue silk slippers.

  I ask her, ‘well, what did you think?’ over our bowls of roast duck rice noodles at KC Café, where we are sitting at a table by the window. Po Po normally orders off the secret Chinese-only menu but today we want roast duck. A dry, sweeping northerly wind whistles along the thin pane of glass on our left, causing it to vibrate. I understand that this dream is not earthquake-proof. ‘Chīfàn ba, chīfàn,’ she replies wearily, not quite smiling but her eyes glinting as she holds her chopsticks in one hand and spoon in the other. She dips her chopsticks into the bowl, swirls, lifts the translucent noodles onto her spoon to form a perfect bite-sized noodle mountain, and begins to eat.

  In the Archive of Waterfalls

  1. cloud-forest white

  This is the closest I’ve been to the summit of the mountain. I’m surrounded by clouds so thick that my parents’ outlines grow hazy as they step ahead of me towards the lookout. Beyond them, I can make out the faint edges of a rocky landscape. Tree branches curl out of the whiteness. Here, there’s almost no difference between precipitation and cloud, between liquid and air. I walk into the mist and it dampens my skin.

  The rainforest looms all around us, vines and pitcher plants spilling over the road. Up here, rain falls persistently all year round. A layer of low cloud touches the treetops, creating a forest canopy heavy with water. Moisture condenses on the leaves and drips down onto everything that lives below, nourishing the wet undergrowth. This type of tropical montane forest is also known as cloud forest, water forest or mossy forest, named for the epiphytes that flourish here: mosses, orchids, algae and ferns, all organisms that feed and grow off the surfaces of other plants.

  We are about halfway up Mount Kinabalu, the highest peak in the Malay Archipelago. This is one of the highest points accessible by road, a starting point for climbers to begin their slow ascent to the summit. In the distance, small waterfalls flow from steep heights down into the valleys below like strips of white ribbon stitched onto a dark backdrop. From where I stand, I can see thick clouds of mist at the point where water flows over a rocky cliff edge, altering the speed and shape of the moving body of water, turning a narrow stream into a waterfall. The place where the waterfall begins is somewhere out of sight, high above the cloudline. As the car winds its way up towards the mountain, I trace the thin silvery lines with my eyes until they disappear.

  When I was little, I conducted raindrop races from the back seat of the car during long journeys. I’d pick two fat drops falling side by side and trace their progress with my fingertip as they slid down the glass. I stuck my face right up to the window, eagerly awaiting the moment at the end of the race when one raindrop would touch the other and, as if by magic, the two would become one: a tiny waterfall pouring into the crack between the car door and the glass.

  We aren’t climbers today, only day trippers. We’re on a drive organised by Michael, one of Mum’s old friends from school. Our itinerary whenever we’re in Kota Kinabalu is always dictated by activities planned by my mother’s former classmates: an array of chatty aunties and uncles who greet me like we really are family. Michael passes us paper bags of nuts to feed the mountain squirrels. I glance around: no mountain squirrels to be found in the surrounding rocks and trees, which are eerily quiet in the mist. But someone rustles their paper bag and sure enough, small creatures begin to emerge like little long-tailed ghosts. They hop and dangle between the branches of the trees on the other side of the railings as if performing for us tourists.

  On the way back home, we take a detour into the mountain foothills to see the Rafflesia, the largest flower in the world. Rafflesia flowers for only one week of its nine-month life cycle, and only during the rainy season. It begins blooming at night, which also marks the beginning of its death. Almost as soon as it blooms the flower starts to decompose, giving off the rotting scent that earns the plant its other name: corpse flower. The smell attracts the insects that will disperse its pollen.

  We traipse single file down a raised walkway beneath the dripping canopy. Dad taps my shoulder and points to a mound on the forest floor beside the walkway. I step closer: what looks like a chunk of darkened flesh is really a giant flower, peach-pink, shiny and unreal like a sci-fi movie prop made of plaster. There’s no stench but I detect a sulphurous scent, bittersweet, like liquorice and old cheese. I can just make out the sponge-like skin of its petals, rippling and porous, more reptile than flower.

  2. National Geographic yellow

  We spent so many Christmases at the old house in Kota Kinabalu when we were small. On days when it rained non-stop and we couldn’t go to the pool on the hill overlooking the valley, we’d rummage through the boxes and shelves of old books, magazines and photographs that sat untouched in all the upstairs rooms. Mum unearthed an ancient Monopoly set, one she and my aunt remembered playing when they were kids. My cousin Sara brushed the dust off the box and set it on the floor between us. We sat cross-legged in the bedroom that used to belong to my mum, one of two rooms in the old house that has air-conditioning. The humming AC unit blew icy wind down on our necks as we gently opened the cardboard box, which had begun to fall apart at the edges. Inside, though, all the pieces were still there: the little red dice, the pink and yellow slips of paper money which we stacked in neat piles on the floor. We played all afternoon and for hours the next day while the sound of geckoes chirping and dogs barking floated in the air.

  When we’d finally had too many days in a row of Monopoly, we lay on the cool varnished floor and flipped through Gong Gong’s huge stacks of old National Geographics. Gong Gong has a lifelong subscription; every month they keep on coming, fifty years since his first issue. The pages of the oldest copies felt rough and papery, not glossy like those from the last two decades. The signature yellow of their spines had faded to a pale buttery colour. Inside, the pictures were dreamlike and super-saturated: bright blue skies above a sparkling fjord, an erupting volcano covered in fiery lava, a glowing city seen from space.

  We turned to the bottom shelf, where Gong Gong kept copies of the books he had published himself. I can see the cover in my min
d: a school of colourful fish, gold and silver and mottled red, all swimming towards the book’s spine, underneath a title in bold lettering: The Fresh-Water Fishes of North Borneo by Robert Inger and Chin Phui Kong. I pulled it from the shelf and held it on my lap, along with a stack of other books with titles like Marine Invertebrates of Malaysia and A Field Guide to Shells and Molluscs of Borneo. I loved the way these books resembled shopping catalogues, every picture of every species neatly hand-drawn in black-and-white lines, named and labelled underneath. I turned straight to the six or so pages of thick glossy paper in the very middle of the book, where fish with fluorescent yellow spines and blue flowing tails shone in colour photographs.

  Chin Phui Kong is Gong Gong, my grandfather, an ichthyologist – a marine biologist who specialises in fish. He was born in Sandakan, Sabah, in 1923. His father and grandfather migrated together to Malaysia from Guangdong in southern China before he was born. He went to secondary school in China, where in 1944 he was recruited to join the army to fight in the resistance movement against the Japanese alongside the British and the Kuomintang as part of Force 136. After the war, he went back to China to study marine biology at Xiamen University, then worked at the Sabah Fisheries Department in Malaysia for the rest of his career.

  Gong Gong loves golf, watching the news, Tiger beer, and talking to anyone in great detail about freshwater fishes. He is cheerful and quiet, and can speak Hakka, Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay and English. He’s ninety-seven now and I last saw him three years ago. My plans this year to visit him were scuppered, with all borders closed and all flights cancelled, and it’s getting harder for him to speak on the phone, especially in English, although Mum explains to him a little about my writing projects. Each week he tells her what he’s seen on the news, repeats his astonishment that there are people in America still voting for Trump.

  I knew little about Gong Gong’s time in the army until 2015, when he and several other former soldiers from Force 136 were awarded medals for their bravery from the government of Taiwan. I had searched his name online one day, looking for a picture of one of his fisheries books, when I came across an oral history interview with Gong Gong that I didn’t know existed, recorded in 2005 and archived online on the website of the National Archives of Singapore. Since I mostly only hear him speaking English and Hakka, it was the first time I’d ever really listened to him speaking Mandarin at length. To my surprise, I could understand most of the first few minutes of the recording. ‘Wŏ de zŭfù, dàgài shì 1901 nián, chàbùduō yībăi nián qián, dào nàbiān qù, dào Shāndăgēn qù,’ Gong Gong says. It was about 1901, almost one hundred years ago, that my grandfather came to Sandakan. When the interview turns to the specifics of his military training and service, I can’t quite follow, but I keep listening anyway. His voice is soft and melodic.

  Every night at the old house, Gong Gong watched TV until after we all went to bed. We waved goodnight to him one by one, each of us falling asleep to the faint murmurs of the Cantonese news and the whirring ceiling fan. I slept in the room next door, where bookshelves held endless piles of Mum’s old schoolbooks and comics, the paper on the spines beginning to peel off at the edges: Wuthering Heights, Sense and Sensibility, Asterix, Peanuts and The Famous Five. Above and below were rows of Gong Gong’s glass vials and jars, where tiny fish specimens were suspended in pale gold liquid. I could never look at them too closely. In the dark I thought I could feel their little silver eyes on me. Just before dawn, when the call to prayer from the blue mosque echoed over Likas Bay, I watched shades of deep blue light reflecting off the glass jars and the slender fish with their pearlescent scales. The prayer’s floating melody seemed to falter in moments, suddenly far away, then returning again, high and clear, perhaps carried closer to us on the ocean wind. Meanwhile, the house began to slowly wake: lamps flickering on, footsteps shuffling, the sound of the kettle being set to boil.

  3. unripe-mango green

  As we got older, our visits to Kota Kinabalu became less frequent. Gong Gong didn’t speak to us much, because we were kids; we didn’t speak to him because he was old. Po Po spoke to us, with a mix of Hakka and a little bit of English, though mostly Hakka. Sara could understand Hakka, although she couldn’t speak it, but I couldn’t understand it at all. We didn’t speak back.

  Back then I never thought to try and talk to Gong Gong and Po Po properly, beyond the warm chit-chat of ‘how are you?’ and ‘you’ve grown so tall!’ and ‘there’s been so much rain’. I think it’s because Po Po and Gong Gong had simply always been there, always the same, always in the same house with the same yellow flame tree by the door, their warm, wrinkled palms held against my cheeks. Always the same smells in the old house, always the same light. The house was like an untouchable archive of our early childhood – and my mother and aunt and uncle’s childhoods – that would simply always be there.

  In the years before Po Po died, I started to realise she knew much more English than I thought. She preferred Hakka, of course, and Hakka was the language of the household. So we stayed quiet – or we shut ourselves in the upstairs bedrooms with our Game Boys and Harry Potter books and CD players while the grown-ups downstairs chatted loudly in a foreign language, the language of the living room, the language of the dining table.

  But in the kitchen, and in the back garden outside the kitchen window, language was less crucial. We sat on the concrete watching Po Po take the washing off the line, little green fruits swaying in the branches of the mango tree as the clouds darkened and the wind picked up. We sat cross-legged facing the long grass, Jackie the guard dog watching us wearily from where she sat curled by the front door. We watched the grass closely for lizards and threw crispy dried peas at each other, trying to catch them in our melamine cups. The white egret landed silently at the far end of the yard.

  Six years ago, just after my first poetry pamphlet was published, we spent Christmas in Kota Kinabalu. It’s strange to occupy a space as an adult where you feel like you’ll perpetually be a child. Everything seems smaller than it should be. Sitting at the table, Mum motioned for me to give Po Po the copy of my book that I’d brought for her. On the inside cover I’d messily written my name for her in Chinese. She smiled and gazed at the cover, tracing the letters of the title with her forefinger, mouthing the words to me. Then she opened the book and flicked through the pages, murmuring occasional words: flower, cloud, New Zealand.

  My inner geography of the house and its surroundings is hazy, informed purely by childhood memories. I couldn’t draw you a map of the place, or tell you exactly how far it is to the sea; only that in the car I always knew once we reached the mosque on the corner we weren’t far from home. My markers of the boundaries of this place were the blue coastline, the swimming pool on the hill, and the mountain. Recently, I felt a strong urge to go back and painstakingly redraw the lines of this landscape that lives in my memory before the physical traces disappeared altogether. The pieces repeat in my head like a spell. A kitchen, a swimming pool, a mountain.

  4. granite grey

  The mountain is hidden behind clouds for many hours of the day, but it’s always there. I could sometimes see it in the mornings before the mist descended, its strange granite peaks like crooked teeth touching the sky.

  It is made of molten rock pushed up through the earth’s crust ten million years ago. Its granite core is igneous rock, crystallised magma. And the mountain is still slowly rising, uplifting at a rate of 5mm per year, thought to be caused by a slow process of subduction in the earth’s crust. One hundred thousand years ago, during the Ice Age, Mount Kinabalu was coated in sheets of ice. Glaciers cut deep channels in the rock, carving out valleys and ravines.

  Today, Mount Kinabalu stands at an elevation of 4,095 metres and is home to an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 plant species, with a high concentration found only on the mountain and nowhere else, including the Bornean black shrew, the Bornean ferret-badger, and the green Bornean spiderhunter bird. The World Wildlife Fund classifies Kinab
alu’s montane alpine forests as ‘globally outstanding’ because of its rich biodiversity; the only other Indo-Pacific ecoregion granted this status is the Eastern Himalayan broadleaf forests. There are approximately seven hundred and fifty orchid species found on the mountain; among them, the rare and sought-after Rothchild’s slipper orchid, Paphiopedilum rothschildianum, which grows only at high elevations.

  Kinabalu National Park was established in 1964, but this didn’t stop rapid deforestation encroaching onto parts of Kinabalu’s rainforests in the 1980s and ’90s, mostly for logging and palm oil production. In 2000 the park was designated a World Heritage Site, and tourism boomed. Strict regulations and expensive climbing permits were introduced and, as a result, the indigenous Kadazan and Dusun people lost the ability to freely access their sacred ancestral mountain. Only in 2010 did Sabah Parks allocate one day a year for local Dusun people to undertake an annual pilgrimage to climb the mountain and perform traditional rituals to honour the dead.

  The first European settlers and explorers gazed up at the mountain in awe. On a scientific expedition with the Royal Society in 1961, the botanist E.J.H. Corner wrote of Mount Kinabalu’s impressive peaks: ‘Castellated, clouded, then sunlit and glittering with refreshed streams, the mountain presides over the landscapes of western North Borneo, beckoning the adventurer.’ The mountain’s history is inseparable from Borneo’s history of European trade and colonisation, which began in the late 1700s with attempts by the Dutch to settle parts of Borneo. In 1812, the British East India Company attempted to seize control of ports but failed, and the project was deemed too expensive and risky – the island and its surrounding waters were too hostile, too wild. But in 1842, land in Sarawak was given to the British adventurer James Brookes, who established ‘the Raj of Sarawak’, his own monarchy and independent state. Brookes acquired further land for the British, clearing the way for the formation of British North Borneo in 1888, a new British protectorate administered by the North Borneo Chartered Company. Between 1880 and 1900, the British encouraged immigration of Hakka labourers from Guangdong to North Borneo to help boost economic growth. Among these labourers was Gong Gong’s grandfather, who immigrated in 1901.