White Ghost Girls

by ALICE GREENWAY

  ˜ ˜ ˜

  My father tells us bedtime stories of Mao, of Ho Chi Minh, of General Giap, the brilliant commander of the Vietnamese who beat the French at Dien Bien Phu. Of Claire Lee Chennault and the Flying Tigers, a daring band of American pilots who helped the Chinese fight Japan in World War II. He tells us stories of Genghis Khan, the Mongol emperor. And Marco Polo, the great Venetian explorer who travelled the famed Silk Road to China.

  He tells us these stories. But he doesn’t say how he hurt his back. A crash at Phu Bai, I overheard him tell Lewis, a friend who works for the State Department in Saigon. Viet Cong bullets came right up through the floor past his feet, made the helicopter fall and spin. Phu Bai had been a French base, my father reminded Lewis.

  I ask my father what he thought of when his helicopter was hit. Did he think he was going to die?

  ‘I thought of your mother,’ he said. ‘I thought of the first time she came to visit the farm in Vermont. She was sitting on the porch swing. She was wearing sandals and eating a crab sandwich.’

  seven

  ‘Let us pray in the words our Father taught us.’ There is a shuffling, coughing, as worshippers slip from wicker benches to kneel. Following my mother’s example, I mouth the Our Father. On earth as it is in heaven. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.

  When my mother prays, she clasps the pew in front, buries her face deep in the back of her hands, eyes closed. Next to her, I kneel, upright, awkward, self-conscious. I’m embarrassed by my mother’s submission, her humility almost too full, too sweet. Our Father is as foreign to me as Kuan Yin. More so because he doesn’t sit familiarly on Ah Bing’s bedroom dresser, partaking hungrily of our pyramidal offerings of oranges and lychees. He won’t be bribed by prayers of joss and gifts of wrapped candies.

  On the far side of my mother, Frankie ducks her head and winks at me. It doesn’t bother her that she can’t pray. She’s a fully-fledged heathen. She’d rather be diving off the junk right now. She won’t kneel because it hurts her knees.

  I turn away, look up into the high-beamed ceiling, painted blue, where wooden fans drop down from the ends of long, slender poles, spin and shudder like boat propellers. It’s like looking up through water.

  St John’s Cathedral is cool and serene after the hot car ride. Its cane pews, delicate and pretty. Green sunlight, filtered through palms, orchids, bamboo, banyans, streams in through tall arched shutters. From inside, you can hear the muffled whine of work trucks, shifting into low gear as they ascend Garden Road from the Central Business District. Through an open window, I see a flash of a white cockatoo flying up to the Botanical Gardens, a Victorian arboretum and zoo set into the hillside above.

  Up in the transept, a stained-glass window shows Jesus standing tall in a storm-tossed boat on the Sea of Galilee. His disciples cower beneath him. Jesus looks sad, I think, like Mao. It will take a miracle to make them believe.

  On either side, two smaller windows form a triptych honouring British and Chinese sailors who died during World War II. In one, a British seaman stands to attention before a merchant steamer and a navy gunboat. In the other, a Chinese fisherwoman stands barefoot, two junks sail behind. The fisherwoman’s sleeves are rolled up. In her hands, she holds a net. Her bare feet spread warm into the hot, gritty sand.

  Frankie wiggles her tongue from side to side, lolls it out of one side of her mouth, rolls her eyes back into their sockets so you can see only the whites. I frown, scared the minister will see her. The congregation’s small. We huddle in groups of twos and threes, occupying only a fraction of the pews.

  What does my mother pray for? For the body drowned in the sea? To keep my father safe from Viet Cong? Does she pray for us, for the souls of her heathen children? To keep us safe from Mao, Red Guards? To make us more god-fearing, more obedient? Stop us changing so fast? To stop Frankie’s antics?

  In the church vestibule, there’s an old photograph. It shows men in pressed white suits and pith helmets convening for prayer in a mat shed on the Royal Parade Ground. Behind them, grand Victorian buildings and wooden godowns line the waterfront, testifying to the fact that the China traders built their headquarters and safely stored their opium before stopping to build a church.

  Hats, umbrellas, tight bodices, laced-up boots, sedan chairs, verandas, potted palms, exotic birds in rattan cages, English voices, cool drinks, silent servants: St John’s belongs to the Hong Kong of old photographs, China trade paintings. I feel my mother wrap herself in it, the charm and comforts of the colonial era. She seeks it out when she needs to, reassures herself with its authority, its restrictions, its firm distinction between East and West. A throwback to her father’s discipline. It’s what draws her here as well as God.

  ‘Hong Kong is facing sinister times,’ the minister’s voice resounds as we whisper amens, rise up from our knees. Frankie giggles. He is a large and red-faced Welshman with a black beard that prickles the side of your face if you let him embrace you.

  ‘Businesses have pulled out. People have left. Sometimes we feel like Daniel, a small colony, a mere pimple on the mighty continent, standing up against the Babylonian force of China.’

  At the word pimple, Frankie snickers. I feel her look my way, drawing out her audience, her prey, her devotee. My mother furrows her brow slightly. She hears Frankie but won’t respond.

  ‘Despite the heroic restraint of our police, there has been violence, even death.’

  I’m already flustered, trying my best not to notice Frankie’s increasingly contorted face, when the minister’s sermon is interrupted by the whoop of distant gibbons.

  Up close to their cage at the Botanical Gardens, the gibbons’ call is deafening. In the church, their cries reverberate louder and louder, low booming howls that accelerate into high-pitched shrieks. Whooop. Whoooop. Whooooop. Ach-ach-ach-ach-ach-ach. I can almost see the sleek black monkeys, stretching their long nimble arms from rope to rope, swinging across their cage, air sacs swelling huge under black fur.

  The minister forges on though his face beats even redder than before. His complexion makes him look like the posters of Chinese guardians pasted on the doors of temples, the ones with bulging eyes, whiskery faces, who carry long spears and hatchets.

  I look to my mother and then I’m caught. For while my mother remains still, politely facing forward, attentive, willing to pretend, believe even that the monkeys don’t exist, Frankie stares straight at me. Grinning wildly, she locks me with her gaze, raises her elbow to scratch her armpit monkey-style.

  Up in the gardens next to the gibbons is a smaller, grubbier cage housing a troupe of oversexed, blue-bottomed baboons. Each time we visit, they are invariably mating, the male’s pelvis thrusting with astonishing, relentless speed, his small hands clutching the female’s fur. Now, when Frankie jerks her head up and down, eyes popping, I see at once what she’s mimicking. I stare at her, transfixed. Visions of Jesus, Mao, Ho Chi Minh spin in my head. She purses her lips.

  Dear God, I pray at last. Don’t let Frankie whoop. Please don’t let Frankie whoop. But it’s too late. Frankie joins the chorus of gibbons. Her whoops, whisper-like at first, inaudible, then louder, full-throated. Whipping around, my mother grabs Frankie by her upper arm and marches us out. Women stare, turn around. I feel the eyes of someone I recognize. Down the cool, tiled aisle, Frankie’s body is stiff, resistant, like a convict, as my mother pushes her ahead. The minister momentarily silenced. Through the big wooden doors.

  Outside, where no one can see, my mother, rigid, shaking, slaps Frankie hard across the face. Frankie, still a monkey, whoops one last time, then spits.

  Dear God, dear Kuan Yin, don’t let my mother cry.

  ˜ ˜ ˜

  ‘It’s not Frankie’s fault. It was the monkeys. I don’t think many people heard her over their noise.’ I try to console my mother, make amends.

  It’s hard for her here, all alone, far away from home, without my father. It’s all right for us. It’s what we’re used to now
, the heat, the jungle, the loneliness. I wish I could help my mother. I wish we could be the way she wants us.

  eight

  The Chinese boy is deaf. His name is Fish. He sits at the edge of the pool, across from me, drawing his feet through the water. His feet are thin and brown. He has long toes, pronounced bones.

  We know the deaf boy from school. He’s in Frankie’s class and is one of the few Chinese students. He has a special tutor who comes each day to help him with his speech and lip-reading. She’s from Aberdeen, in Scotland, and has long, red hair and wears earrings and necklaces, unlike the other teachers.

  Down at the end of the garden our mothers chat under the shade of a pink awning – Miss Tipley’s Sunday lunch party. A pressed white cloth covers the long table; pink, orange, yellow paper-like ranunculi float in glass bowls; blue-and-white china place-settings, glinting silver, pale green wineglasses.

  ‘Miss Tipley’s mo daofu,’ Frankie spouts, surfacing from the water like a whale. Ah Bing told us that word, grinding tofu. ‘Miss Innis’s her lover.’ Grinning, she sinks down again, exhaling a stream of bubbles.

  Miss Tipley’s a China scholar, a local figure; ‘a relic’, my father calls her, although she giggles girlishly when he photographs her. I imagine them: Miss Tipley with her grey hair, dishevelled clothes, the loud presumptuousness of her well-schooled English voice, kissing the reserved, much younger Miss Innis. Would Miss Innis take off her thick glasses, whisper to the older, more experienced woman? Would she let Miss Tipley’s face draw close to hers, dissolve in a blur?

  The deaf boy’s toes, trickling back and forth through the cool water, make my face grow hot. It’s as if Frankie’s words taint me, expose me, allow his toes to caress me, brush my lips. I feel him look at me. He will ask, are you mo daofu or would you like to touch me? I pull the towel around my shoulders, look down into the water.

  The deaf boy laughs. He says he knows about Miss Tipley. His mother knew her when she was a girl in Shanghai. She called Miss Tipley ‘Uncle’. The Chinese were very open about it. He says Penelope always lived like a man, independent, self-sufficient.

  The deaf boy calls Miss Tipley and Miss Innis by their first names, Penelope and Jane, something our mother doesn’t let us do. The titles Miss, Mrs, Mr, draw a boundary between them and us, mark us safely as children. The deaf boy’s mother insists we call her Jen, although our mother would prefer us to say Mrs Tse.

  ‘Come on, then, if you know everything,’ Frankie taunts. Hoisting herself up over the edge of the pool, she stands behind him, dripping. She has to wait for him to remove the microphones from his ears and unhook a small, boxy amplifier that hangs around his neck. She grabs his shoulders so that he can’t get away, slaps her wet chest against his bare back and shoves. ‘Save me, Kate,’ the deaf boy pleads before they both tumble over the side. In the water, he’s smooth and sleek as an otter and, it surprises me, he’s faster than Frankie.

  The deaf boy can take us on: two American girls who stake out the pool like sirens. Maybe because he’s deaf, he won’t have to lash himself to the mast to avoid our cries. He’s strong even though he’s thin, unbalanced. His bones stick out. Even though he has to speak slowly and carefully to make us understand the slur of his words. His voice warbles as if it’s coming through water.

  English voices cascade across the garden, loud, commanding, authoritative. The wife of the Chancellor of Hong Kong University is here, as well as the wife of the taipan of Jardine Matheson, one of the oldest China trade companies. She’s the woman I recognized in church. We were introduced before we escaped to the pool. Jen and our mother are the only non-English. Ours, the daughter of a prohibitionist New Jersey minister. His, the daughter of a wealthy Shanghai businessman. If Miss Tipley’s mo daofu, that’s why my mother responds so tartly when we ask why Miss Innis lives with her. ‘Miss Innis is a secretary,’ my mother says.

  Miss Tipley’s house, her garden, her pool perch at the top of the world like a bird’s nest high in the jungle of the Peak. Hong Kong throbs beneath us. Its packed apartment blocks, its busy harbour streaked with boats and white wakes, are framed by a balustrade dotted with potted pink coral plants. And across the water, Kowloon with its quarried hills, planes landing regularly on the runways at Kai Tak. Ferns and St John’s lily drip down the mould-streaked rocky cliff out of which the flat garden was carved.

  I wonder if the deaf boy knows that Chinese were forbidden to live on the Peak before World War II. The English enacted a law to prevent overcrowding and outbreaks of cholera and tuberculosis and other diseases that raged in the Chinese city. But also to protect themselves from too intimate contact with his race. Miss Tipley showed me photographs of Chinese sedan-chair bearers carrying English men and women up and down the steep slope. Even after the Peak Tram cable car was built, coolies, forbidden to ride it, struggled up slippery, wet tracks carrying loads of ice, coal and food. The colonials sat like gods on Mount Olympus. In winter, these houses literally disappear in shrouds of mist and cloud; their walls streak with wet, their books and clothes rot with mould. I wonder if the deaf boy thinks of these things.

  Miss Tipley laughs loudly across the garden, a voice that commands as fluently in Mandarin as in Cantonese. Miss Tipley’s Zeus, not Hera. She invites whom she likes. She doesn’t need the title wife. In 1949, she was thrown out of Shanghai by the Communists. Foreign scholars, missionaries, traders, teachers, all, she was not the only one sent packing to Hong Kong. Flotsam and jetsam, unwanted, undesired. Even though she’d lived in China for more than a decade. A hundred years earlier, the British forced their way into China, prying open its ports, off-loading their poisonous Indian-grown opium, seizing Hong Kong, Miss Tipley said. Now Mao had thrown them out. We can only peer at China across the watery landscape of fish and duck farms at Lok Ma Chau, or search for it in the hard eyes of Chinese soldiers who man the fenced border in Macau.

  The deaf boy swims over to the side of the pool where I sit. Water drips from his hair. I see light brown flecks in the dark of his irises. The bones of his shoulders. His skin.

  I am grateful to the deaf boy because he isn’t shocked by Frankie’s pronouncements. Or with the way she lets the thin, wet cotton of her shirt cling tightly to her dark nipples. He wears the microphones in his ears to help him imbibe the song of sirens. He says they don’t do much but at least they let people know he can’t hear them. If Frankie wanted to whoop like a monkey, he’d be only too pleased.

  ‘Aren’t you coming swimming?’ he asks.

  ‘Watch this!’ Frankie shouts. She springs a neat back-flip off the diving board. Her waves splash. Her shirt floats up. I jump in after. Underwater, I close my eyes. I try to imagine how the deaf boy hears. Sounds are muffled and faraway. The deaf boy pains me.

  nine

  My father sends Frankie and me a photo from Saigon. It doesn’t show soldiers or dead bodies. It’s a photo of himself, holding up a duck.

  The photo was taken just outside my father’s Bureau in Saigon. He holds the duck at arm’s length for us to see. My father wears a pressed, white, short-sleeved shirt. Civilian clothes. His skin looks dark against the white. The duck is white too. The photo is black and white. He’s put it in a green leather frame.

  Behind my father, you can see a pillared gate, a nineteenth-century wrought-iron railing topped with angled spikes and loose rolls of barbed wire. Bureau, it’s a French word like Bureau de Poste stamped on the brown envelopes he sends. The French built the stately, two-storeyed villa which Time magazine now uses; the spikes and barbed wire are American. Inside the gate is a tall tamarind tree. The tree is dark in the photo, dark and comforting like my father’s skin.

  My father’s office is on Han Thuyen Street. Time Bureau, 11 Han Thuyen, Saigon. The address is typed out in leather tags attached to his camera cases. It’s written on the packages of film my mother sends on to Saigon. From Han Thuyen, he can walk to his room at the Continental Palace Hotel. I trace the route my father takes, run my fingers along th
e map on the wall of his darkroom. I follow how he turns right at the cathedral, walks halfway down towards the river. It’s an old French map so the names are outdated: Rue Latique instead of Han Thuyen; Rue Catinat renamed Tu Do or Freedom Street. The map shows Le Palais Continental, L’Opéra across the square.

  My father found the duck at the Chinese market in Cholon. She was packed into a bamboo cage with her brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, my father says, all awaiting their fate in Saigon’s restaurants. As he walked by, she stuck her head out between the narrow bars, stretched her long neck along the ground and spoke, quite plainly, in English.

  She was a famed courtesan of the Nguyen dynasty, she said, who was turned into a duck by a jealous sorceress. The Nguyen emperors ruled Vietnam for four hundred years before the French and Americans came.

  Thach, the magazine’s Vietnamese stringer, says my father paid three times too much. He had allowed himself to be swindled by a Chinese, proved himself another guileless ngu’ò’i M, American. The duck isn’t fit for a soup.

  McKenna, my father’s bureau chief, kicks her when he gets the chance, but not too hard. She’s a convenient diversion, a live creature to swear at, to chase from the room when the editors, sitting on their asses in New York, have skewed McKenna’s stories, edited out his most passionate prose, misled the American public once again. Or when the telex has jammed. Or when he’s sent my father to photograph the wrong story. ‘Sorry, Michael, I know you’ve just spent two days getting up to Con Thien. I know the convoy was ambushed. But the big story’s at Dak To just now. So get the hell down there.’ My father names his pet Saigon Duck.

  ˜ ˜ ˜

  I hear my father tell these stories at dinner parties. The sounds of cutlery, glasses clinking, my mother bringing food, talking, laughter, trickle down the hall to Frankie and me as we sit in bed, reading. My father laughs because he’s safe, for ten days, which is how long he comes home. Unless there’s another major assault and he gets called back early. Sometimes he can’t leave because Ton Son Nhut Airport in Saigon is being shelled. Then my mother drives him to Kai Tak every day to check on flights. He paces up and down the veranda, swearing and gesticulating, angry because someone else might get the pictures before he can.