The Water Beetles

by Michael Kaan

  “Kaan has created a narrator who reveals his dramatic tale with such anguish and ironic restraint that truth-revealing consequences — the prickly truths of being inescapably human — are driven deeper into a reader’s heart. A work most deserving of serious attention.”

  — Wayson Choy, author of The Jade Peony

  “Twelve-year-old Chung-Man transports the reader from the halcyon days of upper-class life in pre-war Hong Kong into the brutality of the Japanese occupation where cruelty has no limits. Written in clean, elegant prose, The Water Beetles is a powerful and gripping account of a young boy’s coming of age during that most harrowing of times. A most impressive debut.”

  — Judy Fong Bates, author of The Year of Finding Memory

  In December 1941, the Empire of Japan invades Hong Kong. For the Leung family, the invasion is the end of a life of luxury and security. In the face of the advancing Japanese army the Leungs, no longer secure in their mansion, are dragged into a spiral of violence, repression, and starvation. The youngest boy, Chung-Man, escapes with his siblings, and together they travel deep into the countryside. But safety in this new world is tenuous and fleeting. Thrown into unfamiliar territory, he finds friendship and encounters betrayal when he is taken captive and imprisoned.

  Although Chung-Man survives the war, he cannot escape it. Under the scarred shadow of his past, he drifts to America and adulthood, until he finally glimpses a route through his troubled and divided self.

  Based loosely on the diaries and stories of the author’s father, this engrossing story of adventure and survival captures the horror of war with unsettling and unerring grace.

  Copyright © 2017 by Michael Kaan.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Bethany Gibson.

  Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.

  Cover photograph “Breeziness,” by Visoot Uthairam, 500px.com.

  Incidental illustrations by Dover (lotus); seamartini, istock.com (beetle)

  Printed in Canada.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kaan, Michael, author

  The water beetles / Michael Kaan.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-966-2 (paperback).--ISBN 978-0-86492-967-9 (epub).--ISBN 978-0-86492-968-6 (mobi)

  I. Title.

  PS8621.A263W38 2017 C813’.6 C2016-907039-5

  C2016-907040-9

  We acknowledge the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  To the memories of my father, , and my grandmother, .

  And to R, M, and G.

  I even learnt German, after a fashion, so that I could read what the Germans themselves had said about the bombings and their lives in the ruined cities. To my astonishment, however, I soon found the search for such accounts invariably proved fruitless.

  — W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

  Guangdong Province, Summer 1942

  I’m watching the beetle. Not the beetle I wish I was, but the bigger one who wants to kill it. Mine is golden-green, small and easy to spot. Just behind it is the larger one with a shiny, deep-black carapace, so black it seems to drink the light right from my eyes. The big one hasn’t struck mine yet, it’s only watching, and it tastes the air ahead to see when it should act. I can see it will strike and win, and the beetle I wish I was will die. Like everyone else, it is at war, which means its every move is inevitable and prescribed.

  I don’t know why I chose this beetle. I was just resting in the shade. I was trying to forget. Then I saw my beetle’s stubby horns and the crisp gold-green wings that might take it anywhere, so I wanted to become it. I wanted to escape. But now the other beetle is crawling up the stalk, and I see how small mine is, how short its horns are, and how terrible the big one is. I still love the colour of its wings. And if I still love this beetle, even when I can see that it will die, I wonder if I’m just unlucky — or worse, foolish.

  The people we’re walking with talk a lot about foolishness. There’s the folly of not listening and of not watching. There’s the folly of speaking at the wrong time, and the folly of eating too slowly. If something goes wrong — and so much has — people get angry and shout at others and call them stupid, and then they fight, we fight. Sometimes I hear laughter or feel the slow peace of boredom, but it never lasts long. Beyond walking, hiding, and eating, no one really knows what to do. We are somewhere, and we are lost.

  The road we’re on seems endless, and the world alongside it a long descent into oblivion: whole villages abandoned or burned, fields of grain left behind to rot or feed the birds, temples smashed and insulted. I fix my eyes ahead so I won’t see the bodies lying by the road, though in my mind I hear them wailing beneath their drapery of flies, begging to be recognized and buried. So many of the adults walking with us are parents who’ve lost their children, and yet they turn on us and shout at us for nothing. Often the wind blows, and it smells tender with greenery or rain, and other times it carries the stench of smoke and bloated flesh. People get angry if they think someone’s been foolish, like when my little sister tripped and dropped her bowl. It rattled terribly in the dark. But anyone who looks around will see only one thing: bad luck — bad luck and terrible deeds. And no one wants to talk about that.

  We’re stopped because it’s another hot day, and even the Japanese soldiers forcing us to march agree we should rest. We’ve stopped by a dense bamboo grove. Despite the soldiers’ warnings to stay visible, I want to be alone, so I’m lying close to the grove’s edge. If I lie on my back and look up, I can see only a small patch of sky, the bamboo stalks are so dense. I can also see the two beetles climbing up a stalk. The little green-and-yellow one that is me, with one leg hooked into the crook of the stem, doesn’t seem to care that he’s being followed.

  The greenery reminds me of our grounds back home, of the beds and potted plants that the gardener used to touch so carefully with his tools. It reminds me of the gardens at school and in the city parks, and other things that I worry are gone or I may never see again. At the moment I’m surrounded by plants, the wild and the farmed exploding next to each other in the light. There’s nothing gentle about cultivated plants — they dig and drink, and push upward as hard as the wild ones. But I prefer the gardens to this. I prefer my memories to what is happening now. We have a garden on the roof of our house where my brother and I used to play a lot, before it became unsafe to be up there. It has a chicken coop and a vegetable plot, or at least it did when I left.

  My older brother, Leuk, and I were up there one day last summer, playing marbles under an orange tree. We scratched a circle in the fine gravel and shot the marbles across it. Thick white clouds sailed quickly over us all day, casting the gravel in and out of shadow. The marbles darkened and brightened, and then a different shadow broke the light. I looked up, just as one of the first planes flew overhead.

  The air is very dry today, and the ground is hard against my back, wicking off the sweat through my thin shirt.

  “Chung-Man, what are you looking at?”

  I roll my head over with a jerk, feeling a pebble scrape against the side of
my head. Wei-Ming, my little sister, looks at me with a clutch of flowers in one hand.

  “Go back to the others. I just want to lie here.”

  “We have to go soon. Yee-Lin said so.”

  “I don’t care what she says.”

  This upsets her a lot. When you are a child yourself, you have no sense of how young children really are. My sister is eight.

  “We have to go.” She starts to cry.

  I look up at the bamboo stalks again for a second and sit up. I catch a last glimpse of my beetle, just a dark shape. Shouting in Japanese erupts close by.

  I take Wei-Ming’s hand and we walk through the grove back to the road. My brother Leuk and a girl named Ling are sitting in the shade on the opposite side. In the middle of the road where the sun pours down, her calm face washed in sweat, stands my sister-in-law Yee-Lin. All five of us are exhausted and starving.

  “Chung-Man,” she says patiently. “We need to go.”

  Wei-Ming looks up at me again and pulls me towards the road.

  “Can’t we just stay in the shade?”

  “No. You know they won’t let us. Come on.” She gestures to all of us and we draw ourselves into the sun. All around us the others are doing the same, drifting out of the grove as though they’d been caught hiding. A farmer strikes the papery sides of a water buffalo that the Japanese have allowed him to keep, and it rises slowly, looking sideways into the trees through the stricken wetness of its eyes.

  The soldiers shout at everyone. We get back into a line and they walk down it, whipping bamboo switches through the air. In the heat their shirts cling to their skin and their gun barrels shine like wet teeth. We start walking and quickly catch up with the rest of the prisoners. People have slung bags across their backs and some have filled their canteens from a well in a nearby field. A man and his wife shout at each other. They argue about whether the water is poisonous and then about who should taste it first.

  Yee-Lin walks ahead, behind her Leuk holds Wei-Ming’s hand, and Ling and I walk behind them. Despite the heat, the five of us cluster together. Among the many dozens of us who are captives, there may be pity but there’s very little trust, and once we’re all exposed again to the sun, other people’s grief becomes a burden. A minute after we start marching again, I realize how exhausted I am. I ache from my feet to my scalp.

  But I am here, every day, cinching and re-cinching my belt while I try to keep my load balanced. What else can I do? More than anything, I know that I must watch my little sister, and keep my head as clear as possible, and I must listen very well, even to my older brother. I match his step, I time my breath with his to keep us close, and I think of how this last fragment of my family, this vestige, has yet to come apart.

  ONE

  Hong Kong, Spring 1935

  Rainwater ran downhill through the stone gutters of Wong Nai Chung Road, scattering into trickles that clouded with debris before vanishing through the gutter’s cracks.

  Leuk and I liked to play by the gutter when it rained. We picked up leaves and twigs and dropped them into the rushing water, higher up the street, and watched them sail down the gutter like little boats. When we were very young, we had to run to keep up with them. We played this game even as we grew taller, strolling alongside the little vessels. But then we started to get bored with it, even to find it a little embarrassing, and we gave up racing. That was just before the war, when many things ended.

  In April 1935, I was five and Leuk had just turned seven. We could always play in the gardens or the front courtyard of the house, but if we wanted to go out to the street and throw leaves into the gutter, someone had to open the gates for us. If it wasn’t raining and he wasn’t busy cleaning the cars, that was Chow, our driver. On rainy days one of the maids had to let us out.

  I should say that maid isn’t really the right word. There were two women who took care of us the most, and they both called our mother “older sister.” The younger of them had a long, graceful face like a peeled almond, and her hair was always neatly tied back. I often thought she could read my thoughts, because she had a way of tilting her head and catching my eye when I was tempted to be naughty. That happened a lot, at least when I was very young. She was younger than my mother and came from the same village near Foshan. Her name was Ah-Tseng, and whenever she opened the gate for us, she would say, “Don’t get your shoes wet!” She was my favourite.

  The other one was Ah-Ming, who was the same age as our mother. I think this was why she saw it as her job to discipline us when my mother wasn’t around. As I look back, I have more sympathy for her. She often went around with a rolled-up newspaper tucked into her belt, a useful tool for swatting both flies and children, and she had no problem using it for both in quick succession. More than once I corrected myself when she raised that instrument at me, not because it really hurt, but because I saw the fresh innards of a dead fly stuck to the end.

  In Kuala Lumpur, where I live now, in 2015, maids are foreigners and their employers mostly ignore them. They don’t pay these women extra at the Lunar New Year, or talk to them in the kitchen, and they never ask them about their families back home. I have a maid — that’s the right word — in my flat now, a Filipino girl, and I rarely know what to say to her. Once I was watching her unpack the shopping, and when she took out a chicken, I started telling her about the time my brother was two and ate a pile of chicken shit in the garden. I was laughing, but she looked as though I was ordering her to give me a bath, so I stopped. Life now is so different, manners are so obscure — I sometimes find it strange to see myself living in the present. Once in a while, out of politeness or real interest, younger people ask me about my life and what it was like before the war. They may even have read about the war. My usual response is to throw out anecdotes, some intriguing pictures of a life in a vanished world — trams, games, newsreels, colonial pomp — and it’s usually enough. Once in a while I meet people who recognize what those pictures really are: a bluff. And they’re also perceptive enough not to ask any further.

  The old house on Wong Nai Chung Road was directly across from the racetrack and the Jockey Club, where my father and mother were members. The racehorses were kept not on the grounds of the Club itself, but in stalls on a road a short walk away. This road was linked to the main road by a short ramp, a sloping path that was too narrow for cars, and Leuk and I used to run down there sometimes in the mornings or evenings to see the horses being moved in single file to and from the racetrack. When they were being led to the track, we’d follow them there, though we stopped short of the entrance to the Club. Our father had warned us all that we were to be seen arriving at the Club only by car, never on foot. So Leuk and I bypassed the Club gates and continued down the road, following its gentle slope downhill. We always stopped at a certain corner from which we could see, just a block away where the road narrowed almost to a dead end, an old ruined house half concealed by vines, trees, and the intersecting poles of laundry that extended from the windows and balconies of neighbouring buildings.

  One warm spring evening, Leuk and I were inside, sitting in the main-floor library, which looked even gloomier than usual because of the brilliant sunset coming through the narrow windows. Leuk had just learned from our father that in the fall he would be going to boarding school. This put him into a desperate, distracted mood. He told me he didn’t want to go away and was afraid of being a boarder. We had two older brothers — Sheung and Tang, aged fifteen and sixteen — who were in their final years of boarding school, but we rarely saw them and knew little about what went on there. Leuk had pulled a dozen or so books off the shelf and kept stacking them into a tower and then knocking them down. At first I thought this was funny, but then the noise started bothering me and I was worried Ah-Ming or our mother would hear and get angry with us. I kept telling Leuk to stop, but he ignored me. I didn’t understand then that he was afraid.

  I looked at the clock on the mantelpiece: it was seven-thirty. I kicked the heap of books away b
efore Leuk could strike it down again, and told him the time and said we should go upstairs. We went up the stairs to the second floor, where my father’s study sat at the front of the house, with a view of the Jockey Club. The door was shut. We took off our shoes and I looked around to see if our mother was near. All we could hear was her voice far off on the third floor, talking to our baby sister Wei-Ming, and from our father’s office came a faint sound of ticking.

  We crept up to the study door and Leuk put his eye to the large keyhole, while I lowered my ear to the jamb. I closed my eyes and whispered almost inaudibly.

  “I can hear it ticking.”

  “Me too.” Leuk pressed his face harder against the lock plate, until his forehead bumped against the door handle with a faint click. We both jumped back and sat on either side of the door, ready to run, though there was no sign our father had heard the noise. A moment later I said it was my turn.

  I put my eye to the keyhole. On the metal plate I smelled the tang of polished brass and the garlic from Leuk’s dinner breath. Inside the study, the evening light washed through sheer curtains with a bluish hue, and all the surfaces of the room, polished wood and glass, glowed with the end of day. The large mahogany desk sat empty beneath the windows. On a small table nearby stood the machine. It had a heavy brass base topped with a glass dome nearly a foot high, and inside it whirred an elaborate mechanism like the innards of a clock. Wires ran from the base to an electrical socket in the wall. On the opposite side of the base, a roll of narrow paper hung on a little frame. The gears turned and the paper slid through an opening, and a small printer clattered information onto the paper before it emerged on the other side. Through the door jamb I heard the machine firing sharply like a miniature gun. Leuk and I just called it the machine, though years later when I saw one in a history book I finally learned the English term, stock ticker.