Bury What We Cannot Take: A novel

by Kirstin Chen

  Seok Koon clasped Bee Kim’s shoulders, her eyes shining. “She won’t have packed more than a small bag, so we must have some new clothes made.”

  Bee Kim pressed her daughter-in-law’s hands. “Better to wait until she arrives. The girl grows like a weed.”

  Ah Liam poked his head into the sitting room and asked, “What’s going on?”

  Bee Kim and Seok Koon announced that the plan was finally in place. They took turns drawing the boy near, smoothing his hair, tripping over words as they raced to finish each other’s sentences and take control of the story.

  “For all we know,” Bee Kim said, “San San could be on her way here as we speak.”

  Her grandson looked slightly dazed. In a measured tone he said, “That’s wonderful news.”

  Bee Kim’s giddiness faded. She exchanged a look with her daughter-in-law. The boy was right; it was too early to celebrate. They mustn’t let themselves get carried away.

  “Now there’s nothing more to do than wait,” said Seok Koon.

  Bee Kim hobbled to her chair and motioned for Ah Liam to sit down, but he declined, explaining he had to get back to his homework. His summer school teachers were relentless. Zhai was right: Hong Kong schools were much more demanding than those on the islet.

  “He’s a good boy,” Bee Kim said.

  “They’re both good,” said Seok Koon.

  One day and then another passed with no response from Cook and San San. Seok Koon worried that her letter had been destroyed by the censors, or had somehow gone missing before it had even reached the islet. Bee Kim learned to calm her down by repeating in a soothing tone that the response would probably come the following day. She’d swiftly change the subject to San San’s arrival. How would the girl react to their new flat? What was the first thing she’d want to eat? What would they take her to see? The view from The Peak? The beach? The zoo, which was said to be world class? The two of them could while away hours in the sitting room, speculating, planning. In contrast, Ah Liam rarely asked for news of San San. He spent more and more time in his room, and once, when Bee Kim went to see if he wanted a snack, she found his door locked—by accident, he claimed.

  But there was no time to worry about him, for the following afternoon, a letter arrived. Bee Kim watched her daughter-in-law draw the letter opener across the top of the envelope with such haste, she pricked her finger and drew blood. She offered her handkerchief, but Seok Koon waved it away. She pulled out the letter, marring the onionskin-thin sheet with crimson dots.

  “What does it say?” Bee Kim asked.

  Seok Koon’s eyes raced across the sheet of paper. She let out a shrill cry and hurled it onto the Persian rug.

  Bee Kim’s knees cracked as she bent to retrieve it. She sped through the lines and then returned to the beginning, a tiny part of her believing that she could somehow will the characters to rearrange themselves into saying something new. But there was the same appalling message from Cook, doubtless written with the aid of a professional letter writer: It is with a heavy heart that I inform you that San San disappeared from her bedroom on the night of June 14th. Rest assured the police department of Drum Wave Islet is working tirelessly on the case.

  Bee Kim shook her head until her vision blurred. She closed her eyes and prepared to read the letter again. This time the message would be different.

  “Ma.” Seok Koon forced open her hand and took back the letter before helping her to her chair. “Cook is spouting lies. I knew we were wrong to trust him.”

  Bee Kim gazed into her daughter-in-law’s glinting eyes, trying to decipher if she truly believed what she’d said.

  “Look here,” Seok Koon went on. “The letter says San San disappeared weeks ago, which can’t be true. How could she have gone missing without anyone else noticing? Rose would have told me at once.”

  Bee Kim’s head reeled.

  “What, Ma? What is it?”

  She didn’t answer. Maybe she’d been wrong to hide the news of the execution. Maybe, if she’d told Seok Koon, she would have written to neighbors and friends to make sure others were watching out for the girl besides those wretched servants.

  Seok Koon knelt before her and seized her hands. “Do you know anything about this? What have you heard?”

  Somehow Bee Kim broke free of her grasp. If she’d doubted her daughter-in-law could have handled the news back then, this was an even worse time.

  “Answer me, Ma.”

  Her daughter-in-law’s voice sliced through her. What choice did she have? “I fear your friend is dead.”

  Seok Koon fell back on her seat, her face a white mask. “Where did you hear such a thing?”

  “They executed her and Chin Kong for attempting to flee.”

  “That’s impossible,” Seok Koon said. “Who would concoct such vile gossip?”

  “I’m sorry, Daughter-in-Law. I’m so sorry.” Bee Kim stared at the Persian rug until the red-and-navy pattern blurred into a dark mass.

  “No,” said Seok Koon. “I won’t believe any of these lies.”

  Bee Kim said, “I’ll phone Ah Zhai.”

  “For what? Haven’t you learned by now that he’s as powerless as the rest of us? We’re at the Party’s mercy. If only we’d accepted that from the start.”

  “Fine,” said Bee Kim. “Then what do you think we should do?”

  “How should I know?” Seok Koon roared back. “Haven’t I proven, once and for all, that I know absolutely nothing? That I’m not fit to be a mother?”

  Bee Kim didn’t refute her. She pounded her forehead with the heel of her palm to dislodge the images taking root—gruesome images, multiplying exponentially, of her granddaughter’s painfully thin body floating in the channel, or stashed behind a shrub, or hastily buried in the earth for any wild beast to happen upon and tear to shreds.

  28

  See you downstairs,” Gor said, strapping his erhu to his back.

  San San clipped the last of the wet laundry to the line. Ever since the visit from the Housing Registration Board, she and Gor had stopped rehearsing on the rooftop. They avoided being seen together in and around the tenement, and she came and went using only the dilapidated back stairs. She didn’t know if their precautions satisfied Auntie, who had grown too weak to speak up.

  “Goodbye, Ma,” Gor called. He paused, hoping for an answer, and when none came, he hung his head.

  Over the past week, Auntie’s health had deteriorated precipitously. She hadn’t kept down food in days. Her breathing was ragged and labored. Her hands and feet were ice cold. Gor never discussed his mother’s condition except to say, “When we have enough money, we’ll go back to the herbalist to buy the most potent thing he has.” By now San San doubted the herbalist’s expertise, but she kept that to herself. Every so often she forced Gor to take a break, and she took over massaging Auntie’s extremities. Sometimes, she simply sat with her in the tent, holding her hand.

  Gor disappeared into the stairwell. San San took up her accordion and went over to the tent. “Auntie?” she whispered. She peeked inside. Auntie’s ashen face and slack jaw made her pulse jump beneath her skin, but then Auntie let out a buzzing snore.

  “Goodbye, Auntie.” San San opened the door to the stairwell and listened to make sure no one was there before descending one flight and running through the corridor to the back stairs. She met Gor at the end of the lane, and together they set off.

  It was an ordinary summer morning, and yet pedestrians packed the streets. As she and Gor neared Commercial Square, a wall of people standing shoulder to shoulder blocked their path.

  “What’s going on?” Gor asked a petite, almost child-sized woman standing on a bench.

  “Parade,” she said.

  Above the chattering rose clashing cymbals, blaring horns. San San was too short to see over the other spectators, but Gor reported that three men wearing tall conical caps and paper robes were being led down the street by their leash-bound hands.

  San San asked wh
o they were and what crimes they’d committed, and Gor stashed their instruments beneath the bench and hoisted San San onto his shoulders so she could see for herself. From the characters scrawled in black ink across the men’s paper robes, she gleaned that they were doctors at the city hospital who’d committed counterrevolutionary acts. The doctors’ colleagues and staff filed behind them, shouting insults and sounding their instruments. The elderly doctor at the very front was clearly the guiltiest of them all, for his cap was a full head taller than the others. The nurse leading him down the road treated him with particular contempt, jerking his leash to make him bow low before the crowd.

  Right in front of San San and Gor, the nurse yanked the leash so suddenly that the doctor tripped on his own feet and sprawled onto the ground. The spectators clapped and jeered. Gor’s shoulders shook with laughter, and San San lost her balance. She would have crashed upon the pavement like the poor doctor if Gor hadn’t managed to catch her.

  He asked if she was all right, but she couldn’t speak. The cackles and the taunts and those earsplitting horns wormed their way through her ears, deep into her skull, until the unbearable cacophony seemed to be emanating from inside of her.

  “Sio Beh, what’s come over you?”

  She swallowed hard, sure she was going to be sick, and then she was elbowing her way through the spectators, fleeing the parade.

  “Where are you going? Sio Beh, stop!”

  “Resolutely purge all counterrevolutionaries!” the doctors and nurses chanted. “Lenience to the enemy is cruelty to the people!”

  Somehow San San found herself inches away from the marchers. A pair of nurses held a banner that read: “Nurses of Drum Wave Islet Stand in Solidarity with People’s Hospital of Xiamen.” One of the nurses was young and pretty with dimples in her cheeks. San San regarded her for several moments before placing her: the head nurse at the maternity clinic across the courtyard from her home.

  When the tail end of the parade had trooped past, the crowd scattered, but San San followed the Drum Wave Islet nurses. They gathered beneath a banyan tree, and one of them passed out hard-boiled eggs, while another poured tea from a large thermos.

  Instead of collecting her meal with the others, the pretty head nurse edged to one side. With her colleagues distracted, she turned and walked quickly away.

  San San trailed her into People’s Park. She had so many questions for her, if only she could reveal her identity. Were the police still looking for her, or had they given up? Did the nurse ever talk to Cook and Mui Ah? Had anyone notified her ma of her disappearance? Did her ma’s letters still arrive every other day?

  At the center of the park was a pond covered with water lilies. A man sat on a stone bench facing the pond. The nurse stealthily approached the bench and clapped her hands over the man’s eyes. He leapt to his feet with a roar of delight. He was tall and clean-cut with black-rimmed spectacles. The nurse and her friend grinned and squeezed each other’s hands. Together they sat down on the bench, and the nurse laid her head on his shoulder, just for an instant, before looking around to make sure no one had seen. She didn’t notice San San, pretending to admire the lush pink blooms of an azalea bush.

  San San touched her boy-short hair. She inspected her calloused palms and dirt-caked fingernails, the torn seams of her tattered pajamas. Even if she were foolish enough to go up to the nurse and reveal her own name, the nurse would never believe she was the girl from Diamond Villa. She belonged to the slums now—like Gor, and like Auntie, wasting away in her rooftop tent. If the nurse could examine Auntie, would she be able to help her? Would she know doctors who could? In fact, this companion of hers looked rather doctorly.

  Someone tapped San San’s shoulder, and she whirled around.

  “There you are,” said Gor. He had his erhu on his back and her accordion strapped to his chest. “How did you end up all the way over here?”

  San San said, “Sorry, I couldn’t stand the racket.”

  He peered into her face. “You were acting so strange. I’m just glad I found you.”

  “I feel better,” she said. “Why don’t we play here?”

  Gor sized up their potential audience and agreed. They positioned themselves by the foot of the bridge spanning the pond and started in on “The Crescent Moon Rises.”

  A pair of elderly gentlemen smoking pipes stopped before them. One of them nodded approvingly when she and Gor perfectly struck the high notes.

  Next they launched into “Purple Bamboo Melody.” San San played the introduction on her accordion and Gor sang the opening line. It was then that the nurse and her companion wandered over, just as she’d wished.

  San San’s vague hopes for Auntie sharpened into a scheme. She lost track of her left hand and sounded a wrong note, drawing a look from Gor. She refocused on the music. Gor drew his bow across the strings in short, quick strokes, injecting an extra dose of playfulness into the song’s coda. Holding the final note, he muttered that they’d play “The Young Shepherdess” next, San San’s solo.

  She knew what she had to do. Gor lowered his instrument and joined the audience, and San San played her first line. When her vocal entrance neared, she filled her lungs, opened her mouth, released every muscle in her body, and fell to the ground. Her shoulder landed first, sending a bullet of pain straight through her center. Her accordion followed, the keys smashing into a deafening dissonant chord. With her eyes closed, she felt Gor’s rough palms on her shoulders, heard his voice, high and frantic, urging her to get up. She was sorry that the only way she could think of to help Auntie involved putting him through this.

  “Stop shaking her,” a commanding voice said. “Stand back, all of you. Give her air.”

  When the crowd kept closing in, shouting advice, the same voice said, “Let me through, I’m a nurse.”

  The nurse knelt over San San. She pressed her ear to her chest and felt her pulse. She held an index finger under her nose and gauged the strength of her breathing.

  “Is my little sister going to be all right?” Gor asked. The quaver in his voice was unmistakable, which only made San San more determined to see her plan through.

  “She’s breathing fine,” the nurse said.

  San San fluttered her eyelashes and asked weakly, “What happened?”

  “You fainted,” said the nurse. “It could be dehydration, or low blood sugar, or maybe anemia.”

  The crowd thinned, disappointed, perhaps, by the anticlimactic outcome.

  San San opened her eyes fully. The nurse was leaning in so close, she spied a smudge of pink lipstick on her front tooth. Beside the nurse was Gor, his face pale and streaked with tears. Meanwhile, the few remaining onlookers offered their own medical theories. She’d probably drunk bad water, or consumed too many warming foods in this hot weather.

  “Do you think you can stand?” asked the nurse.

  San San said, “I think so.” She didn’t want to appear too ill, for fear of being deposited at the hospital.

  The nurse gripped San San’s left arm and told Gor to take her right one, badly bruised from the fall. San San winced convincingly as they lifted her to her feet.

  Gor told the nurse he could get San San home; they only lived a few blocks away.

  Upon hearing this, San San listed to one side, saying, “I feel a little dizzy.”

  Immediately the nurse offered to walk them home. Before they set off, the nurse sent her companion to the pharmacy at the People’s Hospital to obtain a few nourishing herbs.

  Together the three of them climbed the tenement’s back stairs, which were so narrow the nurse had to let go of San San’s arm and walk behind them.

  “I feel much better,” San San said when they reached the rooftop.

  Auntie’s hacking cough greeted them.

  “Who’s that?” asked the nurse.

  “That’s my ma,” said Gor. “She’s not well.”

  “What’s the matter with her?”

  “A mass in her lung.”

&
nbsp; “Son?” Auntie wheezed. “Home so early?”

  The nurse listened intently to the proceeding string of coughs and said, “Would you mind if I took a look?”

  Gor went to inform Auntie she had a visitor, and San San hid her glee. “They say there’s no cure,” she said, hoping the nurse would contradict her.

  “That may well be true, but we can try to make her more comfortable.”

  San San remembered that she, too, was supposed to be sick. She limped over to her straw mat, unfurled it, and lay down.

  Midway through the nurse’s examination, her companion arrived with a package from the pharmacy. The nurse told Gor to boil water for San San’s medicine, and he went to light the stove.

  Curled up on her mat, San San heard the nurse say to Auntie, “You’re so fortunate to have such good children to take care of each other—and you.”

  Auntie’s pain must have clouded her thoughts, for she replied, “The girl’s not mine. She’s an orphan. Her family died of tuberculosis.”

  San San sat up.

  “An orphan, you say?” said the nurse.

  Should she cry out, kick over the water pail, anything to interrupt this dangerous conversation? But maybe she was overreacting. The nurse may very well have assumed that Auntie had cleared everything with the Housing Registration Board.

  The nurse said, “That’s good of you to take her in.”

  Now San San was glad she hadn’t interrupted; she waited for Auntie’s response.

  “I did it for my boy. He’d be all alone otherwise.”

  Gor approached with a steaming cup. The strain must have shown on San San’s face because he crouched beside her and said, “The nurse said you have nothing to worry about. You’ll be well in no time.”

  San San took a small sip of the bitter brew.

  Upon concluding Auntie’s examination, the nurse crawled out of the tent and came over to them. San San’s hand trembled, shaking the cup and scalding her tongue.

  “I know it tastes bad,” said the nurse, “but it will make you strong.”

  San San took another sip, keeping her face lowered over the cup.