White Ghost Girls

by ALICE GREENWAY

  twenty-four

  We’re out for dinner at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. Frankie flirts with Pym, a large, loud, British detective who laughs and looks at her with surprise. Frankie insists on wearing blue jeans, a tie-dyed shirt. I’m wearing a stretchy skirt and a blue-and-white striped T-shirt. My mother wears short ivory trousers and a pale green silk shirt with a high collar and Chinese buttons.

  Tables with pressed linen cloths are set on the tiled veranda outside. Up on the stone railing, a small replica of Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid looks across water dark and slick with diesel oil. The lights from the restaurant illuminate plastic bags and discarded chicken bones floating on the waves. A plane approaches Kai Tak Airport across the harbour.

  ‘Thai Airways. The eight o’clock flight from Bangkok,’ my father notes. A dog howls from the mass of junks and sampans that crowd into Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter beyond the row of gleaming white yachts. Pym stands up to check the plane’s tail colours. My father’s right, of course. He knows all the flights, in and out.

  Pym would take Frankie up on her offer if he wanted. But after dinner, he heads to the main bar, a big echoey room where sailing trophies line the walls. No children allowed, a sign says. That includes Frankie and me. The women hang back too, lingering over teas and coffees, breathing in the damp, malodorous air of the harbour, talking about amahs and parties, someone who’s left his wife. My mother sits back. She’s quieter than the others. Prettier too.

  Through the door, I can see Pym demonstrating a new seltzer-maker, spraying it lewdly while the Chinese barman stands to one side smiling. My father is telling stories. Tonight, there’s a movie: The Mudlark, which is why my parents have brought us. The movie’s about to begin but now I can’t find Frankie. I see that Humphries isn’t around either.

  I walk alone to the chart room, where the movie’s showing, sit by myself in the dark halfway up towards the screen. It’s a story of an orphan named Wheeler who lives by scavenging the muddy banks of the Thames. One day, he comes across a dead seaman and finds, in the sailor’s pocket, a medallion with an image of Queen Victoria. Taking to heart the words, Mother of all England, he sets off across the grey, cold streets of London to find her. When he slips down a coal chute into Windsor Castle, his face becomes black – he’s a savage.

  It’s that other world, the West, the world I come from. I know its stories, its heroes and heroines, and yet I know I’m different too. I’m more like the wild man that frightens them: Queequeg, Man Friday, a cannibal. The girl pirate in High Wind in Jamaica. If they took me back now, I’d be Ram Dass, the Indian servant poking his head out of the London skylight for a glimpse of the sky, not the little Princess who sees him. I’d be like Wheeler, a scavenger, only they wouldn’t be able to wash the coal dust off my face.

  Where is Frankie? I wait for her. What will I say if my mother comes in and she’s not here?

  ~ ~ ~

  ‘Humphries took me down to the bowling room,’ Frankie tells me in the dark. We’re lying in our beds. The metal-framed windows, open wide, admit the low mating calls of frogs, the high-pitched shrieking of cicadas. The ceiling fan chops the hot air above us. I’ve been out with a flashlight, to find them congregated around Ah Fu’s ornamental pond: big lumpy bullfrogs with swelling throats, three-quarters submerged in the still brown water, striped paddy frogs and smaller peeping tree frogs. Their sticky toes cling to the porcelain figurines Ah Fu has arranged in the crevices of the pond’s miniature mountain. In a jagged cave, the Eight Immortal Fairies; on a cliff, the Taoist Lao Tzu riding a water buffalo; on a low outcrop, bearded Confucius.

  Frankie lies with her pyjama top open. Her breasts splay provocatively to either side. Not mangosteens, I think, more like papayas, overripe, rotting. I pull the thin sheet over my hot body to hide myself from her.

  ‘He unzipped his trousers and put my hands on his penis. I rubbed them back and forth,’ Frankie informs me. ‘Ugh. He got all stiff and then his sperm squirted out down his leg.’

  He must have had to wash it off, I think. If his trousers were wet, he must have had to pretend he’d spilled a drink. Or, if he was nimble, he could have sprayed himself on purpose with Pym’s seltzer-maker. Frankie laughs. I’m quiet. Humphries is younger than my father but much older than us. I know he shouldn’t do this.

  Are they true, the things she tells me? Or is she just trying to shock me? Did she really bite the pockmarked man?

  ‘Did he do anything else?’

  ‘No!’ Frankie spits back, as if I’d insulted her. ‘What do you think I am?’

  What are you? Who are you? Who am I? It’s what I’m trying to figure out. Maybe Frankie is seeking her revenge for what the pudgy man did to her in the butcher shop. Maybe she wants to hurt Humphries, get him in trouble.

  ‘How did Humphries clean it off?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ says Frankie. ‘It’s his mess. Girls don’t come like that.’

  I do care. It’s important to me. If I’m Frankie’s alibi, her confidante, her bodyguard, it’s up to me to make sure she doesn’t get caught. To keep watch. It’s my job to clean up after her. Why does she have to tell me these things?

  twenty-five

  Ah Bing hates men. When my father walks into the kitchen, she scoffs, ‘Nobody here!’ He gets himself a bowl of nuts and goes out quickly. It’s impressive how easy it is for her to intimidate him. When she was a girl, only four years old, her father died. Left her mother with five children to feed. If he hadn’t died, her mother would never have sent her away. Twice, her mother sent her away to live with another family. Both times, she ran home.

  In China, there were ducks on the pond. When she was small, she’d run down and chase them. Raanc. Raanc. They flew off to the other side. In China, Auntie had a big pig, black and hairy. Her brothers poked it with a stick. It squealed.

  Her brothers, po! They were other no-good men. Opium Kuan, Opium Dum, she calls them. Smoking made them weak and thin like old ladies. She should have known how they’d turn out from the way they poked Auntie’s pig. Later, they sold the clothes off their children’s backs to pay for their pipes. Then when they had taken everything, they left their wives, her sisters-in-law, and disappeared. She heard they went to Hong Kong. They might as well be dead for all she cares.

  ˜ ˜ ˜

  The needle pricks her finger as she pushes it through the shirt she’s sewing. The material’s from one of my mother’s discarded dresses. Piles of our unwanted, outgrown clothes under Ah Bing’s bed. She keeps them all because she knows what we don’t know. How there are naked children, neglected children. Children who’ve never had a new pair of pyjamas, who are sent away, mistreated by families who don’t love them. Like orphans, they are never given the best food. If the Japanese come, or the Communists, I tell her, we could live for weeks on the things under her bed.

  Men, po! They’re lazy and stupid. Look at your father. He has a good job. He takes photographs for an American magazine. But he can’t even cook an egg, iron a shirt. If he wants something he always asks, ‘Where’s Marianne? Where’s Marianne?’

  Remember the last time he kept shivering? ‘Ah Bing, do you know where my sweater is? It’s so cold.’ So cold in this heat? He is too thin, thin as if he’s been smoking. But he hasn’t. White men don’t smoke opium. He’s cold because of the war. The war in Vietnam.

  She left China before the Japanese came. But they caught up with her in Singapore. She had to leave her missee’s house. Her friends told her it wasn’t safe. They said the Japanese would cut off her head if they found her working for a foreigner. ‘Don’t go. Don’t go,’ her missee pleaded. ‘Wait till my husband gets back.’ Her missee held back her wages to try to make Ah Bing stay. If the Japanese bombed, they could hide under a table. Then Kuan Yin came to her in a dream. Told her to go. When she returned a week later, the house was gone, bombed. She never saw her missee again. She never got her last month’s wages.

  In Vietnam, it’s Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Cong.
In China, it’s Mao, the Red Guards.

  Auntie’s pig squealed when they cut its throat but the Red Guards were only young, they didn’t know how to slaughter a pig. It broke loose from them and ran around the garden, splattering blood everywhere. Auntie screamed until they hit her. Uncle turned his head. He couldn’t do anything. They had tied his hands behind his back.

  ‘Nobody here! Go away.’ She is nobody because her mother sent her away. The Red Guards took her temple. Go away. Get your own sweater. Your own bowl of nuts. Bad things happen. Why do you want to go to Vietnam to find them?

  ˜ ˜ ˜

  Ah Bing’s got a filthy tongue. My mother doesn’t know half the things she says. ‘Diu ke lo si,’ go have sex with your old teacher. The common curse is ‘lo mo’, with your mother, but Ah Bing switches it around because she doesn’t like men. This is just a light-hearted, everyday curse, the way we say, ‘Damn’ or ‘Christ’. When she’s really cross, she says, ‘Ham ga chang,’ may all your descendants and ancestors be obliterated. She calls Frankie and me ‘houh hoi’, little whores.

  ‘If you don’t go to sleep, I’ll throw you in the river,’ Ah Bing says when my mother goes out. In China, they drown unwanted girls. ‘If you don’t sleep, a bad man will come. Bad men like young girls like you. They don’t like old ladies. What use would they have for old ladies?’

  There’s another threat, more oblique: ‘If you don’t go to sleep, I’ll take you to the Chinese kitchen.’ The Chinese kitchen is at the temple in Lantau. It’s a long, thin room built against the bare stone of the hillside with strips of plastic roofing discoloured by mould. At night, the women chop vegetables under a bare light bulb. Strong-smelling mushrooms, ginger, thin slices of water chestnut. A dark soup boils on a kerosene burner. White squares of tofu sizzle in peanut oil. Strings of keys, plastic bags dangle on hooks. Cockroaches scuttle underfoot.

  In the dark, I dream I wander through, ghostlike, looking for something. What is there here that would scare us? At the back of the kitchen, a tiger chained to the stone. The tiger is orange, whiskery like the picture on jars of tiger balm. It skulks near the wall, then whips around, lean and hungry. While the women don’t see me, he does or maybe it’s my scent he smells. He’s waiting, ready, nostrils flared. Maybe this is the fortune Ah Sun sang for me. My punishment.

  Ah Bing threatens us out of kindness. It’s her way of showing affection. Of trying to guard us. She knows our parents can’t look after us. Our father’s away. Our mother’s too naïve; she doesn’t know all the bad things that can happen. It’s our own fault too because we’re houh hoi. Just being girls makes us suspect.

  twenty-six

  ‘Katie-ah, will you thread the needle for me? You have good eyes. You’re a young girl. Clever girl. You can read and write. You’re not a stupid old woman like me.’ I sit on Ah Bing’s bed, lick the thread as I’ve seen her do and poke it through the narrow eye.

  ‘When I was a girl your age, my mother took me to the fortune-teller. She said when I married, my husband would die.’ Looking at Ah Bing, I imagine the old fortune-teller, thin, mean, hunched with disappointments. How frightened Ah Bing must have been when the old woman snatched at her hand, forced open her white palm, stroking it with dark, gnarled fingers. The fortune-teller felt Ah Bing’s disgust, her defiant nature, her wilfulness. She looked into Ah Bing’s eyes and wreaked her revenge. The only way to avoid her curse is for Ah Bing to marry an old man. ‘A man as old as me,’ she said.

  ‘A few years later, I was fifteen, my aunt took me to the Kuan Yin house. My aunt said, “Look at all your sisters, how hard they have to work with babies on their backs.” I told my mother, “I’m not marrying, I’m staying at the Kuan Yin house.” My mother was angry. She was angry with my aunt. She said I would become a hungry ghost; I would have no children to look after me, to worship me when I die.’

  ‘Didn’t you want children?’ I ask.

  ‘Po! Having babies is hard and sore. If you die, your spirit will sit in a pool of blood. You cannot get out until your child marries. What if your child dies? You are stuck there for ever.’ Ah Bing tosses her head, incredulous of my ignorance, my naïveté. ‘If your husband isn’t good, your children won’t be good either,’ she says to prove her point, because most likely he won’t be.

  She stops talking, sews faster. I look down, waiting for her anger to subside, then ask how she persuaded her mother to let her go.

  ‘My mother saw I wouldn’t change my mind. She gave me thirty pounds of rice. She paid the Kuan Yin house four dollars a month for food. I had food but no clothes. I had to find a job to buy these things.’

  Ah Bing smiles when she talks of her temple in China. The way she breathes in, I imagine the women laughing and teasing, the way they do at Lantau. The brief moment of quiet as they sit, start to shovel dinners of rice or congee into their mouths. The sun setting over rice paddies. ‘Each morning, we woke at four to chant prayers to Kuan Yin,’ Ah Bing says. ‘It was my duty to clean the altar, sweep the tile floors. After these chores, I went to work. I and another girl, we travelled across the river to work at a factory making clay roof tiles. Filling wood moulds with red river mud. That was before I went to Singapore, then came here to Hong Kong.’

  Ah Bing likes it when I sit and listen to her. Frankie’s not interested. While Ah Bing regards my father with suspicion, she always gives me the benefit of the doubt, even if I am houh hoi. In the morning, she lets me light her joss sticks. I bow three times. When my mother’s out, Frankie and I eat lunch with her in her back room, rice in lettuce and ginger broth, served with dried oysters, salty black beans. We laugh about my parents, her friends at the temple, the way my father refused to wear clean shirts the last time he came home. ‘Men smell bad,’ Ah Bing says.

  ‘Katie-ah, you my tummy come,’ she tells me. I belong to her. I’m her favourite. I’m the daughter she might have had. A girl she might have been if she’d had more chances, if she could read and write, if her mother hadn’t sent her away. Ah Bing also has things I long for: the serenity of her temple, its simplicity, solitude, her independence. I want to travel across the river each day to fill wood moulds with red river mud.

  twenty-seven

  The deaf boy splashes up to where I am sitting at the sea’s edge. The waves wash over us. It makes me uncomfortable how close he sits, the way he examines my mouth, although I know he’s lip-reading. He’s got something in his hand.

  Smiling, he uncurls his fingers for me to see. A small purple shell. He flattens his palm, waits for the creature inside to emerge.

  I wish the snail would hurry up. I wish the deaf boy would go away, swim back to the junk where our mothers sit, eating lunch. I don’t want the others to see us. I don’t want Frankie to make any suggestive comments. Or to notice how he pays more attention to me. The deaf boy seeks me out. I don’t ask him to. He doesn’t know about me. He doesn’t know about the lychees.

  ‘Janthina globosa, purple sea snail,’ he says quietly, looking down. The snail’s name, like a foreign country, a whole world, with caves and Buddha to be discovered. Its own stories.

  ‘They live out at sea so they’re unusual to find.’ His voice is nasal and slurred. ‘They float and feed on hydrozoa, which are like tiny jellyfish.’ I look at the deaf boy’s hands.

  ˜ ˜ ˜

  This is what I know about the deaf boy. He’s Chinese. His mother is from Shanghai. His father is Cantonese. His father left because he’s an artist. He couldn’t paint with a baby, a deaf baby wailing, crying, throwing inarticulate tantrums. My mother says it’s unusual for a Hong Kong Chinese to be a painter. The deaf boy’s father paints with traditional ink and brush but his compositions are ‘abstract and bold’ with ‘gashes and shrieks of colour’, words my mother used. His paintings are different from hers. They are loud, angry, ugly, like the quarried hills of Kowloon. Hers are gentle, quiet, idyllic landscapes, bearing no signs of human destruction.

  This is something else I know. The deaf boy collects s
hells, starfish skeletons, dried sea urchins, the chalky bone of cuttlefish. He keeps them on shelves in his room. He collects rocks, snakeskins, beetle carcasses, the brilliant blue feathers of kingfishers, broken bits of green turtle eggs he found after the villagers dug them up from Sham Wan Beach. In his room are books called Flora Hongkongensis, Rambles in Hong Kong, Walden Pond, Silent Spring. At night, he goes out, he catches snakes and frogs, geckos. He catches crickets, stick bugs, silkworms, a praying mantis. He loves animals, I think, the way my father loves the war in Vietnam.

  Jen said her husband would have left anyway. Their boy being deaf only made him stay longer. She said it was her fault too. ‘I couldn’t look after my husband as well,’ she said. I remember when she said that because it surprised me. I thought you had to take care of everyone. I didn’t know you could choose. Maybe that’s why my mother can’t look after us. Why she’s sending Frankie to boarding school. She chooses our father. She loves him more.

  ˜ ˜ ˜

  The snail’s belly licks the deaf boy’s palm, it slithers down the side of his thumb. I move my hand against his, hold still until the snail climbs across. Its dark body carries with it a spiral temple, a hiding place, a retreat, secrets. The deaf boy keeps his hands against mine. The sand swirls around the backs of our legs. Frankie swims out from the junk.

  The deaf boy wants to touch me. Even if it’s only the sides of our hands, the first contact between our skins, bones. If he likes me more than Frankie, it’s because I’m quiet, secretive. I have to be sought out. I interest him. I’m like the snail, a foreign country. Janthina globosa, Saigon, Pleiku, the Mekong, Hue.

  twenty-eight

  Earlier that summer, my father takes us out on the junk to watch the dragon-boat races at Stanley. Each team comes from a different fishing village: Stanley, Aberdeen, Tai Tam, Po Toi. Muscular rowers churn sea and air into a frothy white. Paddles thrash as the long, slim boats skim the sea. Painted dragon-head prows leap, neck and neck, mouths open, eyes bulging, whiskers quivering. Midshipmen pound drums in rhythms like heartbeats, to urge the rowers on.