The deaf boy’s body is beautiful. It’s lean, thin, unformed, like mine. I’d like to tell him this, tell him I love him. That no one else will be able to give me the things I want.
I still haven’t learned to say these things.
forty-three
Ah Bing feeds the stray cats. Dozens of them come every evening to the front steps of our new apartment. This is in Rome where we moved just as McKenna once suggested. She lays out saucers of the day’s leftovers: pasta, mushrooms, rice, meat. They’ll eat anything. She tends to them the way she tends the hungry ghosts. The cats are thin and scrawny. We call them by what is defective or missing: No Eye, Stub Tail, Bad Skin.
Ah Bing doesn’t like Italy. She’s only come to look after me. There are no other amahs, no Chinese supermarkets. She stocks up on ginger, dried oysters, black beans when we visit America. Or when she goes home to visit the temple at Mui Wo. She cooks me soup with ginger and lettuce. Her only friend is the Italian gardener. He doesn’t understand a word she says but he listens, entranced by her operatic style, her repertoire.
˜ ˜ ˜
As I grow older, the stories I tell myself narrow to one: it’s the shadowy image of a Viet Cong, slipping back into the jungly, wet undergrowth at the back of a beach. Pushing palmy leaves aside, he pulls his loose black trousers up above the brackish water. I see where his skin is scarred, bitten. His gun’s slung across his back. He’s stuck leaves in his helmet. Leeches bleed his ankles.
Each time I follow, I go further back, wade through the murky tangle of mangrove swamp up into thick forest where vines choke oaks and chestnuts, wide palm leaves and sharp grasses grow out of rotted wood. The Viet Cong is always just ahead. Quiet. Barefoot.
One day, we emerge blinking among long straight rows of red trees cut into the forest, a rubber plantation. He moves fast now because it’s dangerous here, exposed. It’s like walking in an optical illusion because the way the trees grow you can see for miles ahead and behind but nothing at all to either side. A sniper could hide there, waiting. Still, I’m a good shot and I’m ready, alert. I’ll be able to show him that.
Finally, the Viet Cong slows his pace. I stop to catch my breath. We’ve arrived in true highland jungle, where we can no longer see the sun, just the green iridescence of triple canopy, like being underwater. Here there is only the phosphorescence of rotting leaves to guide our way. The smell of hot tiger breath on my neck makes me shiver.
After all these years, this is all I want: a wooden stool, a bowl of rice, an army canteen, a secret comrade, the whooping cry of wild gibbons.
I would like to thank Les Plesko for his inspired and
happily irreverent editing; Felicity Rubinstein for believing
the book could be published; and all those at Atlantic Books.
I would also like to thank my parents for taking me to Hong Kong.
White Ghost Girls Page 13
