Three Wogs

by Alexander Theroux

  There came a pause.

  “Remember.”

  “Yes?”

  “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

  The door slammed. Mrs. Proby relocked the door, popped a Valium tablet into her mouth, and washed the cups and saucers, having pulled on some long pink rubber gloves lined in yellow. She thought of Fu Manchu’s fingernails. She paused, her hands quiet in the water, and looked behind her. Then she shambled into the living room and stretched herself out in a crumpled way on the sofa. The dog shifted. Mrs. Proby blinked in the dark room, unhappy and on edge for the yellow cross-hatched illusions and patterns thrown on the ceiling by the passing autos outside.

  II

  Came morning. The shade was cranked up slowly in the main window of Mr. Yunnum Fun’s market and revealed, there on the doited and chewed shelves, merchandise that had been around for years: boxes of Keemun black tea, Shatto rice sticks, Ma Ling loquats, cans of Fish-Bali soup, shrimp paste, Panax Ginseng bars, swatches of dried silver fish strung together like tobacco leaves, Lychee nuts, Chun Lee ham, bottles and packets of herbs, bean curd, Cantonese sea slugs, ropes of onions, and rolled fig. A small red sign, painted in the Chinese hand, with letters formed of sharp shapes and slivers, hung on a jar filled with a mixed array of back scratchers and joss sticks. A faded print of the embalmed Sun Yat-Sen leaned against the jar, together with a yellowed photograph, edged in black, of an old Chinese man leaning on a cane and staring directly into the camera that had caught for eternity his ancient, platelike face and the white hair on his chin, which grew thin and sparse and long, like wisps on the penis of a goat. It was dated, in crayon, Peking 1903.

  Mr. Fun appeared, swept the doorway, and withdrew.

  The proximity of store-to-dwelling places and neighbor-to-neighbor never really bothered Yunnum Fun, for composed within easy reach of his memory—a memory decidedly acute—was the village of Fowping, southeast of Peking, within the Shansi Province, in Inner Mongolia, from which he had emigrated some thirty-five years before. The small village was a diffused but heavily populated nest of boxes, in one of which Yunnum Fun’s father worked as a tailor; houses collapsed onto each other, fluted with bamboo and sandalwood, a jumble of misapplied and colorless boards designated by the ineluctable press of destitution as living quarters.

  Soon after the 1922 Civil War broke out between the rival Tuchuns, Yunnum Fun hiked, biked, and less often rode the thousands of miles through the provinces of Honan, Hupeh, Hunan, and Kwang-tung into Hong Kong. Those days were difficult, merciless. Before the long journey had been made, a domestic tragedy had exerted itself but which became, of necessity, secondary to the pain of travel, where the speed of rush and change delimited the possibilities of chronic remorse. Yunnum Fun’s father got tired of his wife one day and hit her square on the head with the stave of a wheel, fatally despatching her in an instant. They were packed and ready for the trip that afternoon, during which trip Yunnum Fun was tutored in the lessons his father had generously and wisely passed along to him, notwithstanding the first and most important lesson: that women are simply different means to the same end. The boy had listened.

  Once in Hong Kong, Yunnum Fun’s father walked his son to the crowded dock, handed him a yellow felt sack of coins and a letter, and pointed off toward a rusty steamship, toward the sea, toward England and the West. He added the bit of advice that became his last words: “Your how is not necessarily my how, nor is ours theirs.”

  At the very minute he walked onto the boat, Yunnum Fun scampered down into the steerage toilet, peeped about to make certain he was alone, and opened his father’s letter of instructions. It read as follows:

  Obstructions for You

  At the water edge, notice all look-alikes who mong fish, own porkshop, and will do you mercilessly foot-kicks. These are George.

  May you deign never to be purveyingly twitched aside by George and his festive brickbats. Fearsome, you hear me?, is the grunting cow who lies in weight to piss on you head under his characterless island moon which rains on his hair and even on Illustrious Bearer of The Royal Umbrella. His wood is fill of thief’s, who will twist your cobblers just for comedy.

  You are illegible bachelor. So do write and never wrong. In forty ways does a Woming Object accost a man; bewife none and wise up. It is only to recall Mother Shandilee and Her Bargain.

  Queen of George is Elizabun. Not stealing is a wisely compromise, my hopeless son who flings himself beyond correspondence and my one lantern. Soho is a filthy rotten shame who will pouch your money.

  Whether: foggy is always. Worship his stray cat as he does; trust him and you impute doghood to a goat. Pummel your unworthy self who pongs because of bad breath before this Woming Object who is Queen of George on the grass and give mouth-warning: ‘O Boy, O Boy!’ She is aweful.

  To thine own self be true, or your little ass will fall off. Don’t oblige noblesse same as jackals. Last was he who laughed with the other side of his face. An evil word are shits, hoor, peepee, titties, and up yours. Impinge that passport on wretched ankle or on fat of leg, to never let go even when bitten.

  His Rothman cigarette, Est. 1890, is yum-yum. A golden earring dance below your dirty ear.

  Then he ate it.

  The young Yunnum Fun eventually arrived in England, and, simple and steady as a plumb bob, he applied himself steadfastly and directly to the job at hand, cutting cloth, hemstitching, and sewing in the small tailor shop which he had rented in Crouch End, an enterprise remarkable, people thought, for its ability to survive, since, upon entering the shop, one was struck by the meagre components in evidence that kept the operation a going concern: a wire, headless dummy, a flatiron, and one bolt of gabardine. As the years passed, he saved his money, avoided ridicule, dodged flung objects, and watched. Yunnum Fun always watched. But, as has been pointed out, the situation which finds the human race incommodiously jammed cheek-to-jowl, shack-to-shingle, bothered no one less than the small ageless merchant, émigré, exile.

  War came and the shop closed down. It had been sold, in point of fact, to a chinless, fat-legged whore with a brain quotient lower than a Gobi rainfall and lemur-like eyes that seemed interested solely in that not uncommon syzygy of money and barbarities, and, though she claimed she was going to redo the shop as a flat-cum-study—in pursuit of a college degree (physiology, doubtless)—that very night she painted the doorbell a mandarin-red and slipped a card underneath, which read: Dana, Model, Interested in Driving Post. In any case, Yunnum Fun disappeared. Rumour had it that he had been shuffled aboard an airliner to the Shanghai-Bund, that he was working as a ponce on Old Compton Street, that he was trafficking in opium and spying for the Chinese Reds. It was assumed he had passed into insolvency, if not oblivion, leaving neither an address nor a successor. The opening of a new market proved he was not insolvent. He had money. But he had no successor. He had never married. Mr. Yunnum Fun would never marry.

  Though the methods of abuse are often different, abuse itself is not. Yunnum Fun was quite inured to the fact that a goodly number of Englishmen (“thrice-wretched blighters,” he silently agreed to himself) resented him; however, he was resigned generally to that strict ontology which makes of all Chinese in a foreign country a simple cartoon of one dimension. Occasionally, teenagers from the East End, sitting opposite him in the Underground, would push alternate arms into alternate sleeves, buck their teeth, and say “whoosh, whoosh.” Often, couples and customers would come into the store and, to amuse each other, would intentionally confuse, muffling a giggle, the letters L and R. And others would pass him in the street, mime a shuffle and toss off a remark or two, so that after a period of years Yunnum Fun found that he was easily able to combine and permute a series of about two hundred laundry jokes, none of which he found comic, all of which he heard. The solution to all these problems, on the other hand, was not beyond him: he would wipe away these people as a dishwasher, drying a dish, wipes it and turns it upside-down.

  Undemonstrative
, long-suffering, silent, Yunnum Fun recapitulated the patience of the unwanted and little-cared-for expatriate in a strange land, a patience, however, canalized through insignificance and not through virtue. The acts of the patiently insignificant are not necessarily the gifts of the virtuously patient. Yunnum Fun’s patience, if not virtuous, was neither infinite. A normal can be changed into a hysterical individual, for example, simply by tiring him, and Mrs. Proby had tired Yunnum Fun for three long years now. And because of her, for three long years, Yunnum Fun often found himself bumping around his shop in the dark late at night, drooling, shouting, and almost blind from the powerful bottles of samshoo he had drunk as a refuge from his tribulations. Yunnum Fun loathed the English, and he intensely disliked women. But Mrs. Proby was for him a special case, a thing that made a difference, the one exception: for Mrs. Proby he abhorred. This was his sole dissipation.

  At odd unpredictable moments, the pressure of his miseries, released, sent him hurling in long comic bounces from wall to wall, Yunnum Fun all the while hissing like a mattoid: cross-eyed, lunatic, and occasionally spitting jets of water or pitching spoons through the cobwebs. He repeatedly kicked the stuffings from his sofa. He delivered thundering ritualistic blows at imaginary objects. And more than once he drew huge dirigible-like faces of Mrs. Proby on wide sheets of rice paper, charcoaling each line with infinite care, and then, clipping each sheet to a wire strung out for the purpose, he repeatedly drove his mop handle crashing through it to the accompaniment of bloodcurdling, almost insane screeches and wild charges. Yunnum Fun saw the ultimate battlefield as the earth, the two opposing armies male and female. It had been predicted, he believed, that sometime, perhaps in the Year of the Limping Cassowary, the whole complex of secretive and mutually warring human bureaucracies—in which marriage was only a necessarily incomplete and pathetic localized attempt to negotiate truces—would give way to an open declaration of full-scale attack, and the two sexes would separately but simultaneously marshall together a planet-wide schema to rid the world of each other, no longer now filthy little satraps biting each other’s hands for inconsequential reasons (as had been the case all the way from post-diluvian history down to the incorrigible present) but vast monosexual armies creeping through each other’s ribs and making inroads into each other’s hearts to detonate explosions there that would fill the sea with a blood that would seep right down to the very abyssal benthic ooze until eternity rolled over. Yunnum Fun knew precisely where he would fight, whom he would fight, and why.

  The market this morning was, as was its proprietor, quiet. For one thing, business had been off these last weeks; for another, this was a business mercurial at best. The urge for Chinese food is always unpredictable: famous for no occasion, standard fare for no holiday, and the constant as to demand is either whim, the needy plebiscite of instantly famished drunks, or pregnancy. Any supply-demand ratio, borne of such flux, could do nothing but annoy and create, even in the genetically silent, a hysteria etched in and bordered by a quietude that could only be termed pathological. Too, Yunnum Fun had enjoyed little or no sleep the night previous, kept awake until the wee hours by a general thumping around from the flat above and the sporadic but frequent nasal preparations, bellowed in the name of song, of a repetitious and cacophonic “God Save the Queen.” Then, later, there came the screams. Periodically during the night, Yunnum Fun was ripped from his sleep by sharp, piercing sounds and ravenings which simulated the anomaly of a high dog whistle crossed with a sonic boom, culminating each time in a sinusoidal shriek at a range of about C″″; paradoxically enough, however, Yunnum Fun took malicious pleasure in Mrs. Proby’s distress, even at the cost of a night’s sleep, for onto her he had telescoped a revenge informed by years and years of scorn and obloquy. Mr. Fun lay on his mattress of stuffed dry cornshucks, his face pointed due north, and snorted with glee and disgust. But he was tired in the morning. And the morning was grey.

  The door of the little market jumped open to the sound of a dull clack from a thick copper bell attached by a string to the top. Mrs. Proby, breasts high, strode in in a tableau somewhat reminiscent of Napoleon crossing the Beresina. She stopped before the counter. They exchanged quick glances: half stare, half glower. Yunnum Fun moaned inaudibly and dug his fist into a barrel of raw oatmeal. Mrs. Proby lighted a cigarette and tapped her foot.

  “Runner beans,” she announced. “A pound and a half, if you please.” She raised her eyebrows and drilled the R.

  “No runner beans,” Mr. Fun beamed. “Only rima beans today.” He was delighted and his eyes glinted warfare over the barbican of his cheeks.

  “Ducky,” Mrs. Proby offered. She huffed, spat out a ball of smoke, and shifted position.

  “No, only rima beans,” Yunnum Fun joyfully repeated in antiphonal fashion. His mouth was hanging open as if to suggest imbecility, but there was a touch of the demoniacal grin as his tongue rested pointlessly on his lower lip. A proper twit, Mrs. Proby thought to herself. She opened her handbag.

  “Very well then. I need some herbs.” She took out a small scrap of paper and read aloud in a proclamatory way but with a pronunciation one might use when talking to a four-year-old. “I want ravensleek, dwarfdwostle, pennyroyal, and marjoram.” She coughed and added, “In your elevenpence ha’penny tins.” She handed him the paper with a swipe of her hand.

  “Enveropes.” He bowed patronizingly.

  “Envelopes, then,” she snapped, waved her arm, and looked at the ceiling. Yunnum Fun stood still for a moment and shook some refuse from his ear with a little finger. Mrs. Proby stamped her foot; a hum of urgency in her throat ceased with a long draw of the cigarette. She tapped off an ash into an empty Chinese bowl of blue cloisonné enamel at her elbow. Yunnum Fun saw her. She saw Yunnum Fun see her. Yunnum Fun saw her see him see her.

  Tish, tish, deario, thought Mrs. Proby, tish, tish.

  Mr. Fun shuffled toward the basement door, threw an amused three-quarter profile at Mrs. Proby, and disappeared downstairs. Mrs. Proby ran her thumb disdainfully over the glass counter and grimaced. She scanned the shelves of dried Lang Yen nuts, jars of dried chicken, cucumber soup, glue rice, grilled eels, plum sauce, mashed and red beans, sesame oil, sugar, snap bars, lotus seeds, and Chinese pumpkin. She peered at curious labels. She picked up a dented and nigrescent tin of soybean oil. “Dogfood,” she said. Then she focused on a small glass frame behind the counter, within which sat, evidently as a keepsake or some sort of commemoration, a small brown yuan—a coin with a square hole directly in its center. As quickly as she had seen it, she suffered a sudden gestalt: what if it had been her ear? The queasy thought unnerved her. What if he tried to jam a chopstick into her tympanum like Fu Manchu did to that poor old lady in the film? Who would know? Mrs. Cullinane? How? Who would really care? All very well to say Mrs. Cullinane, Mrs. Proby thought; she shivered and stared vacantly out of the fly-specked window. She puffed her cigarette, twice, three times. It tasted sour. And why wouldn’t it, she thought, as she looked at the tip of red ash; she had smoked almost two packs all night, fretting, worrying, alive to the horrific, if self-induced, revelation that Mr. Yunnum Fun might have at any moment crept upstairs and clapped his mousy hands on her neck, snapped a clothespin on her nostrils, or tried to pull out her tongue. She had heard that the Chinese were notorious for stealing cats and dogs, sewing them up in sacks, and then serving them up as delicacies in posh nightspots around Frith Street and Leicester Square. Maybe they did the same thing to human beings, she considered. Her leg jumped. She threw the door open, snapped the butt of the cigarette into the street, and slammed the door again; the bell clacked twice. Mrs. Proby turned only to see Yunnum Fun, breathless from having just pounced up from downstairs, peeping querulously over a pile of soda crackers. “Bloody wog,” Mrs. Proby muttered to herself, splitting a gingerstick between her fingers.

  She felt that was him all over: ducking about, slipping around, and generally smooth as oil. It had become a patriotism, part of her war, a very sense of dut
y, that she make clear to him he would never intimidate her or take advantage of her native wherewithal. The cost was high: worry and nerve ends exposed. But in such cases she reflected on Nelson, Churchill, or the Duke of Wellington. Her outrage took precedence over worry and fought misalliance; homogeneity determined her crusade—at once, a life-style and a sore-point, a hobby-horse and golden rule. A subtle Asiatic, she could never forget, was a horse of a different colour, a Greek bearing gifts, a fly in the ointment, and an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Scratch a coloured man, she often told Mrs. Cullinane, and find a pickthanks. “My bubble’s not for bursting,” she said aloud.

  Mr. Yunnum Fun shuffled upstairs and spread before him on the counter four envelopes covered with odd inscriptions like marks on a Tarot pack. He looked at Mrs. Proby with nunlike calm. “Herbs here: ravensreek, marjolam, dwarfdwostre, and pennyloyal. Erevenpence ha’penny, each, each. Three bob ten in altogether, thank you, please, very.” Mrs. Proby reached into her handbag, flipped open her purse, and pulled out a ten-shilling note, thrusting it across the counter. She took her change, turned aside, and counted it, adding, “Spices go for tenpence ha’penny at the Tesco.”

  It would have been the Inn of the Seventh Paradise of Dragons, he thought, to flay her alive with his rattan cane until the Carp of the English Ocean tipped over the raincloud with its tail for the last time. Yunnum Fun wanted to take her English coins and notes and pack them one after the other into her craven mouth until she was fat as a goose. He remembered his father had told him, once, of the rascally Wong chieftain who had fleeced the people from Pui’pui of all their money and how, as a punishment, he had been tied into a chair and force-fed diced pearls, gold leaf, and hundreds of coins, until he dropped doomed, heavy, expensive.