by Isabelle Li
‘No, Mum, I might break it. You should keep it in the chocolate box, together with the letter.’
Their eyes met briefly and quickly moved away.
The bell rang. Lights out. The audience applauded.
The young couple were separated after they had fallen in love. I started to cry. I tried to hold back my tears, but that caused uncontrollable shuddering of my shoulders. Uncle Cheng gave me a handkerchief in the dark, which I used to dry my eyes and blow my nose. I cried again when the young couple reunited, when they ran towards each other, swam and met in the middle of the river.
We walked Uncle Cheng to the bus stop.
‘Can I have my handkerchief back?’ he asked.
Crumpled in my hand was a square of light-green chiffon with embroidered pink flowers and dark green leaves. ‘It’s wet,’ I said.
My mother took it from me and folded it before giving it to Uncle Cheng. ‘You’ve kept it all these years.’
‘Yes. Those summer days …’
‘Cheng, remember to drink plenty of water, keep yourself hydrated. When your wife gets pregnant, you let me know.’
‘Look after your mum,’ Uncle Cheng said to me. He put his hands on my shoulders and kissed my forehead. My tears started to roll down again. It must have been the film still inside me.
We waved until the bus disappeared at the turn of the road and then we walked home while the evening set in.
My father was sitting at the writing desk. In front of him was the chocolate box.
‘If you want to have a good time, don’t involve the children,’ he said. His eyebrows twisted together, like dark clouds closing in before a storm.
‘You go and study in the small room,’ my mother said, shutting the door behind me.
My brother and sister were not back yet. I sat in front of the window, feeling the breeze through the flyscreen. Most of the lights were on in the building opposite. I heard the sound of chopping, stir-frying, and kitchen utensils clattering. The smell of food permeated the air.
I heard raised voices from the big room, and chairs moving; something dropped on the floor. The door was opened and slammed into the wall behind. My father came out. ‘Dad is having a meeting in the office, and won’t be back until tomorrow. Eat properly. Turn on the light if you read, and don’t sit idle.’
I heard him taking his bicycle and riding off, the broken bell rattling away, like white pebbles flickering under the moonlight.
I entered the big room. My mother was kneeling on the floor, gathering the ripped-up pieces of the letter. Already in her hand was the jade bracelet, broken.
She looked up. Her hair was messy and her face wet.
I knelt down and helped her to pick up the rest of the torn shreds.
Fountain of Gratitude
Watermelon
The Year of the Rooster, when I turned twelve, had not been good. My mother made me red boxer underpants and a red belt for good luck, but I started coughing soon after the New Year, and worms came out of my nostrils. She said that if I drank the herbal soup while it was hot, I would not taste the bitterness of the ox gallstone. I did, and I shuddered, tightening my body, grimacing as if I’d been plunged into icy water. She said it was the medicine taking effect—it was cooling me down.
In the spring I had a high fever for three days and lost my hearing on the left side. At first I could still hear the stars swirling, then they stopped. I lay on my right side. The muffled sounds told me the world was quietening down. My mother was stacking the dishes, my father calming the fire, my brother mumbling behind me, my sisters chatting on the other end of the brick bed. I fell asleep more easily now.
In the summer, my night vision started to fade. I could not see clearly without the lights on. One evening, when I was sitting cross-legged on the edge of the bed, listening to the crickets, Yin came to our house.
Her brother Tong stomped in first, dashing through the bead screen, hopping onto our bed and landing next to me. Then I heard the voices of my mother and my sisters, who were washing dishes in the courtyard. My mother brought in the kerosene lamp and held the bead screen for Yin while she stepped in.
She was in a white blouse and a blue skirt. She smelled of soap, not the type made from pig pancreas that my mother and my sisters used for washing clothes, but something lighter, clearer, like frost.
‘Brother Hua can’t see at night,’ Tong said.
Yin was holding a white suitcase with a red cross on it. She opened it on the bed and lifted out an instrument. She fitted one end of it around her head and neck and pressed the other end on my chest. ‘Breathe normally,’ she said.
I was embarrassed by the speed of my heart racing and suddenly remembered the splashes of grease on the front of my shirt. She quickly pulled away.
‘Raise your head.’ She flipped over my upper eyelids with her thumb and her index finger, the other fingers resting on my eyebrow. Her hand was cold and she was hurting my eyeballs.
‘Vitamin A deficiency,’ she said and handed me a small bottle. ‘Take three capsules daily.’
She then took a cotton ball from the suitcase, which smelled of alcohol, wiped her hands and the end of the instrument that had touched my chest, and carefully packed it away.
My mother started to thank Yin profusely and offered her watermelon, which had been dropped into the well to cool, waiting for my father to hack after his chess game. Yin politely declined and told Tong to come home with her.
Tong was reluctant. He twisted his rectangular torso, kicked his chunky legs and made a sound like a purring cat.
‘You’ll miss the music program,’ Yin said and tried to drag Tong off the bed by pulling his singlet.
‘Tong, why don’t you go home now? I’ll make you a slingshot tomorrow,’ I said.
Tong hopped off the bed and skipped away, took part of the bead screen in his hands on his way out and swung it back. Yin followed. She turned around before reaching the door and said goodbye.
My mother walked her out and kept offering the watermelon. A dog barked on the street.
I took a deep breath in the darkness, as if I had forgotten to breathe while she was here. The smells of soap and the cleanser lingered in the house that night. I pressed my good ear to the pillow, but still I found it hard to sleep.
Blue Bicycle
Now I had to make the slingshot.
Tong was two years younger than me. His head looked like an enlarged egg painted with several black dots for the eyes, the eyebrows and the nostrils, two red dots for the upper and lower lips and two red patches for the cheeks. He wore a pair of small, round glasses as thick as the bottom of a beer bottle, which did not help much with his vision, but that had not stopped him from wanting to shoot birds.
He had always envied my slingshot, which was made from a V-shaped iron rod and a piece of oval-shaped ox skin, joined by two strings of ox ligaments.
I went to Big Guan to beg for the materials.
Guan was a giant. He had learned Iron Shirt Qigong when he was young, which made him bullet-proof when he was practising. In summer he liked to wear broad black pants, baring his torso. He often sat in front of his workshop in the shadow of the poplar tree, his belly overflowing from the cane armchair, a palm-leaf fan in one hand and a pair of tai chi handballs in the other. Sometimes he closed his eyes, nodding slightly, following the rhythm of his breathing, as if he was in deep thought. When it was our birthdays, he would mark our heights on his doorframe and write our names and ages next to the marks. He then used his one-foot iron ruler to measure, added the numbers in his head and told us exactly how tall we were.
Big Guan was fixing the chain of a blue bicycle which was turned upside down on a felt spread. It was the type for girls, without the reinforcing horizontal railing between the handlebars and the seat. A silver bell jingled at Big Guan’s movements.
Cicadas were singing their summer chorus in the white heat, with startling starts and abrupt finishes. Big Guan’s bald scalp was shining wit
h perspiration.
‘Whose bike is this?’ I asked.
‘Miss Eighth from the Grand House.’
My heart quickened. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘She knocked down a Big Nose Russian in front of the pawnshop.’ He laughed.
Laughter. My skin felt it before my eyes saw it. Yin was sitting sideways on the back seat, one hand holding on to her blue skirt and the other holding on to the cyclist’s waist. She asked him to slow down. He stopped right in front of the felt spread, one foot on the pavement, the other on the pedal—clean white sports shoes.
‘Uncle Guan, how’s my bike?’ Yin slid off.
‘All fixed, and I oiled it for you, Miss Eighth.’ Big Guan turned over the bicycle, and wiped the seat, the handlebar and the bell with a soft cloth.
‘She did it on purpose,’ the cyclist said. He was one of her cousins from the Grand House. ‘If she doesn’t like someone, she knocks them over.’
‘Hey, watch out!’ Yin waved her fist in the air.
‘Only if you catch me,’ the boy said and rode up the road.
‘Just you wait!’ Yin said. She turned to me before getting on to her bicycle. ‘How are your eyes?’
‘Better.’
‘Remember to take the capsules.’ She rode off to chase her cousin. Her slim back moved left and right to go uphill, her blue skirt floated, and her shiny shoes and white stockings circled in front of my eyes.
‘So, what’s up?’ Big Guan asked.
‘Nothing.’ I did not want to talk to him anymore.
I walked away.
I gave my own slingshot to Tong.
Yellow Radio
My eyes recovered.
My mother gave me a basket of eggs to take to the Grand House. She said for a drop of kindness, I should repay with a fountain of gratitude.
The Grand House was the last in our street, ours the third last, and between us the widow’s house. As I walked by, I sensed that two large eyes flashed like a wild beast hidden behind trees. The widow’s son, Chun, was looking out from inside their doorway.
They came from the countryside and spoke with a loud voice and an odd accent. I had been keeping an eye on Chun. When we were playing as a group, he was alone. He had a catcher made of an iron hoop the size of his head at the end of a bamboo stick. When the morning dew was still sparkling in the grass, he wandered around the neighbourhood to search for spider webs, and used his hoop to swipe through them. When he had gathered enough webs, he used his tool to catch dragonflies.
I crossed my eyes and sneered. Chun withdrew into the darkness. Blue smoke rose from the lopsided chimney and I heard the widow coughing.
I quickened my step on the black brick pavement, alongside the red brick walls of the Grand House. I had put on my brother’s shirt, which had a very tight collar. I would have run, but couldn’t, because of the eggs.
The front of the Grand House was in a cul-de-sac. One side had a black wooden gate dotted with golden nails; the other side, a marble screen with carved dragons. Two stone lions sat on either side of the entrance. On top of the gate hung a black wooden board inscribed with four golden characters: ‘Accumulating Fortune, Extending Grace.’
The gate was closed. The doorman was squatting in the shade near the side entrance, eating pancake and shallots. He nodded to me, chewing.
I walked through the front courtyard, up the stairs, through the inner gate passageway, down the stairs, through the main courtyard, up another set of stairs, and along the verandah until, just past a refrigerator, I reached the wooden screen engraved with pine trees and cranes.
Inside the large family room, Tong and his three younger brothers were sitting around the Eight Immortals table, eating sunflower seeds, throwing the husks into a tin pan in the middle. There were gaps of a year or eighteen months between them, but they looked like quadruplets. On seeing me, they all spoke at once. ‘Brother Hua, have some—freshly roasted in five spices.’ ‘Can you tell us more stories from Journey to the West?’ ‘Or The Three Kingdoms!’
‘Stop eating those sunflower seeds. You won’t have an appetite for dinner.’ Mrs Fifth came in. As the head of a Catholic kindergarten, she was said to have magical power over crying children. She had delicate white skin and wore long-sleeved dresses even on the hottest days, and opened up a painted parasol whenever the sun was out. She was dressed in pomegranate red today, her hair tied back into a bun and the loose hair pinned down by two golden butterflies. In her arms was Yin’s younger sister, Wen, sucking her thumb.
‘Hua, you are welcome to stay for dinner with us.’
‘Mrs Fifth, my mother asked me to bring you some eggs. Yin cured my night blindness.’
‘Did she? How did she do that?’ Mrs Fifth smiled, showing her large white teeth with none missing.
‘Sis gave him some capsules,’ Tong said.
‘What kind of capsules?’
‘Don’t know.’ His last word was hardly audible. None of them listened to their mother; all were still busy cracking sunflower seeds.
‘Sis, Sis …’ Wen saw Yin and started to wriggle. Mrs Fifth let her down and she toddled towards the back of the room.
Yin came in, put down her book, picked up Wen and kissed her on the neck. Wen giggled, putting her face against Yin’s.
‘What did you give Hua?’ Mrs Fifth pressed on.
‘Vitamin A.’
‘That’s fine. Do not give others medicine carelessly. Taking the wrong medicine may cost a person’s life.’
‘I know, Mum,’ Yin said. She looked like a replica of her mother, with dark wavy hair and fair skin. Her phoenix eyes protruded slightly behind her spectacles, giving her a more studious look. But now she was making faces at her little sister by sticking her tongue out.
Mr Fifth came in. I often saw him from a distance, wearing a suit, coming and going in a glass carriage. He was tall and bulky, bald. The quadruplets all looked like him.
Mr Fifth took off his white jacket and bow tie, and handed them to the housemaid. ‘Call everyone to come in. Children, I have some news. Hua, you stay.’ He had red blotches all over his face. Mrs Fifth brought him a jug of water and he poured it down his throat, dribbling so much that she had to wipe his chin.
Everyone was excited except Aunty Chen, Yin’s nanny, who came to sit next to the window, sewing lace onto the collar of a white blouse. Yin went to sit next to her and rested her head on her shoulder. Wen climbed onto Yin’s lap, sucking her thumb placidly.
Mr Fifth walked over to the dark-red shelf that had a photograph of him in a long robe and a square hat, holding a tube in front of his chest, standing next to an elderly foreigner, with part of a foreign building behind them. He reached out to the ivory-yellow radio in the middle of the shelf, rolled the tuner and adjusted the antenna. Soon we heard the brisk voice of a woman.
‘Today the Japanese Emperor announced Japan’s surrender.’
This was followed by a man’s voice speaking in Japanese, with a lot of background noise. She then said the Americans had dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. The National Revolutionary Army had resisted the Japanese invasion with their best troops, and she gave some horrendous statistics of death and casualties.
Everyone in the room began cheering. The kitchen was told to add extra dishes. The housemaid brought bowls and plates, as we all squeezed in around the Eight Immortals table.
Mr Fifth took out a bottle of red wine and poured barely enough to cover the bottom of a large shining glass. He had a sip and asked if any of his sons would like a taste. Despite Mrs Fifth’s objection, the quadruplets passed around the glass and their four faces instantly turned crimson. Mrs Fifth said they had inherited her alcohol intolerance.
The dishes were mainly vegetable and bean curd, in abundant quantity. I had to slow down because everyone else ate with no sense of urgency, especially Yin, who was feeding Wen.
Mr Fifth asked what I was doing over the school holidays. I told him I had read Mérimée’s Colomba and Carmen, w
hich I’d found in their ping-pong room. He was impressed. The quadruplets announced to Mr Fifth that I had told them the stories. Mr Fifth advised them to learn from me and read more.
After dinner we had sweetened plums. Cousin Cheng, the boy I’d seen at the bicycle shop with Yin, came in with a saxophone. He and Yin, on the piano, played a foreign tune called ‘Greensleeves’. Yin sat with a straight back, leaning slightly forward to read the music. Occasionally she freed one hand to push up her spectacles.
Cheng teased Yin for not learning to play the piano properly from the ‘woodpecker’. The joke caused hysterical laughter from the quadruplets, and a series of impersonations of Yin’s officious White Russian piano teacher bobbing her head.
It was time to leave. I walked out by myself, up and down the flights of stairs, through the passageways, out of the side entrance, and past an old man on night shift, the end of his pipe smouldering, an acidic smell in the air.
The street was empty. I walked along the pavement, passing by the widow’s house. For a moment I thought I saw Big Guan inside the door, but it was only shadows moving under the moonlight.
I came home and told my mother I had had dinner and showed her the basket of tomatoes and the packet of sweetened plums I had been given.
I went to bed, looking into the darkness of the ceiling, hearing my father snoring to my left, my brother grinding his teeth to my right and one of my sisters chuckling in her dream on the other side of the bed.
I forgot to tell my family the war was over and we were free.
Jade in Dust
I played with the quadruplets. We enacted the stories from Journey to the West, taking turns to be the Monkey King, the master, the other three disciples and the monster. We also played episodes from The Three Kingdoms. We went out onto the street to hide, ambush and fight over pretended mountain passes. Other kids joined in. I let them play the pawns.
Chun came. His pants were too short for him and his shirt was patched up. His dark eyes shone earnestly beneath his thick eyebrows.
