The Water Beetles

by Michael Kaan

  In the afternoon, when Kei returned from work, he discovered us and joined in. He was thrilled to see Ming learning to swim. Kei was already a decent swimmer and he loved being in the water with his wife for the first time. He got out and ran around the riverbank looking for more driftwood, and Ming was pleased having two pieces to float on. When Leuk and I went back up to the house, Ming and Kei were still splashing around in the water, and she was laughing as I had never heard her laugh before.

  Yee-Lin took the three of us into the town for a late afternoon snack and we walked around the little square, but in the evening I was bored and wandered home. Kei and Ming were usually inside in the evenings; now the front room was empty. I wandered down to the river. It would be dark soon and too cool to swim, so I picked up a switch lying on the grass and zigzagged down the slope to the riverbank, whipping the grass and sending the clipped leaves into the air ahead of me.

  As I walked through a little stand of trees, I heard a splash. I thought it might be a bird fishing, so I crept closer to the river to get a look. Kei and Ming were standing close together in the water, and though she was facing me, her eyes were half closed. Her dress billowed around her in the slow current.

  He was moving up against her in the water and she clung to him with her mouth parted. Her lips, and her fingertips gripping his shoulders, were blue with cold. Blue like pale marble, like the veins beneath my wrist in the grey weeks of winter. Kei still wore his shirt, but it was open, and their white garments floated and bobbed like jellyfish around her. In the red sunset light they were an islet of pallor in the cold water. I watched until they were still.

  EIGHTEEN

  The following afternoon, Leuk and I again skipped school and decided to go swimming. Walking down the road back to the house, I noticed the laundry had been thrown loosely over the drying line and a few pieces had been blown onto the ground. I heard Kei and Ming laughing and splashing in the river, but as we approached, their voices were cut short by a man yelling.

  Mr. Lee was home a day early from his trip. He must have been angered to find the house empty. He stood on the riverbank, a cigarette ensnared in his right hand as he cursed. In his other hand he clutched a sheet that had fallen from the line, and he shook it. Leuk and I hid in the same trees where I had watched Kei and Ming the night before.

  Ming screamed an apology to her father-in-law. She smoothed her dress down against her legs as she stumbled up the bank. Kei leapt out of the water beside her. His shirt and pants were hanging over a branch, and he reached for them as his father turned on him.

  “What the hell is this? Who gave you permission?” He was shaking and his face turned dark with rage. Kei stumbled on the grass and tried to put his pants on, but he was soaking wet and slow to dress.

  Ming stammered a few more words of apology. Mr. Lee strode over and struck her on the face with his free hand and told her to shut up. She fell to the ground, and Kei, still shirtless, dropped to his knees with clasped hands and kowtowed to his father, begging forgiveness. A sudden gust shook the trees. Two of the sheets on the line billowed wildly in the air, and the yellow tarnish at their centres blazed like the banners of a diseased army. One smaller sheet came loose and blew towards the riverbank, sailing over the grass. It collapsed, one corner snagging on an exposed tree root while the rest sank into the water. The current drew it up along the river’s edge while the root held it fast. With a cry of rage, Mr. Lee ran down and seized his wife’s laundry from the water. He let it drag over the ground and then held it up in disbelief as he turned on his son.

  “Who did this? Who ruined your mother’s clothing?” Ming sobbed on the ground while Kei crouched like a dog. When he saw the sheet in his father’s hand, he got up on his knees with his clasped hands before him, and in a high-pitched, wailing voice he begged his father for mercy. He was only a few feet away from me.

  Mr. Lee threw the wet sheet on the ground. He went over to the garden and reached across to the trellis at the back where the beans ran up a slender framework. He pulled one of the long bamboo staves out of the ground, tearing most of the vines out in the process. Trampling the garden, he stomped back to his son and started thrashing his naked back with the bamboo.

  “Idiot! Disloyal son!” he shouted, and after a moment the welts on Kei’s back opened and his blood began to flow. The bamboo switch soaked it up like a paintbrush. Kei knelt face down on the grass and begged for mercy, screaming the same apologies over and over. Ming got up and ran over to her husband, her hands outstretched and mouth open in horror, though she managed nothing more than a wail.

  Mr. Lee stopped for a moment, holding the bloody stick inches from his son’s skin. He looked at her, and on his face there was a look of discovery and triumph, as though being surrounded by offenders could only increase the rightness of his grievance. He turned and grabbed Ming’s wet hair and dragged her forward until she fell face down. As she fell, her arms flew out and she pulled down one of Mrs. Lee’s stained sheets. Mr. Lee lowered the stick onto Ming’s back and legs, and she screamed louder than Kei as she clawed the brownish bedsheet beneath her. Kei begged his father to stop.

  After Wei-Ming had gone to bed that night, we told Yee-Lin what we had seen, and she sat at the kitchen table and cried. I told her I felt bad for Kei and Ming, too, but she looked at me and said she was only crying because the story made her feel alone.

  The next day, Leuk and I were kicking rocks along a street near Mr. Lee’s shop. We stayed clear of it until we saw him leave the shop for home, where Ming would serve him lunch after cleaning up his wife. We walked into the shop and found Kei in the storeroom. He was lifting boxes from the floor up onto the shelves, moving slowly and wincing as he raised his arms. He wore a dark striped shirt to mask the blood still seeping through. Leuk approached him.

  “Kei, are you all right?”

  He turned around to look at us. His face was grey and tight, and his eyes were sunken beneath dark circles. “Please go,” he said quietly. “I need to move these boxes.”

  I looked at the boxes. The storeroom was half empty, and I wondered if he’d been told to move them because of the pain it would cause. I pointed to his back.

  “You’re still bleeding a little. Did you bandage your back?”

  “He said not to. Please go.”

  It was very quiet in the shop and the street outside. Other children were in school and most adults would be eating lunch. Leuk shuffled uneasily on the sawdust-strewn floor and it was like the roar of a rock slide.

  “We — When you get better, maybe we can swim again,” said Leuk.

  Kei closed his eyes hard for a moment and shook. He put one arm out to lean against a wall, and then grimaced and put it back down to his side. I felt embarrassed for him, but I also wondered if he wanted to be watched, however shameful it might be.

  In October 2003, I travelled to Seattle to meet Leuk. We planned to spend a few days there before driving down the coast together. It took a while to arrange, because he was never much of a traveller, and there was a long exchange of letters before I convinced him to come. When he finally agreed to go, he wrote that he would also like to see the coast and the famous forests along the Pacific. In one of his letters he reminded me that once, in 1963, he had taken a ship all the way from Hong Kong to Italy through the Suez Canal and back. Despite having enjoyed it, he’d taken no trips longer than an hour or two since, usually by land or sea.

  I booked a hotel in Seattle with a view of the harbour, and we settled into a routine of breakfasting in the hotel before taking walks along the water and down some of the nearby streets. He seemed to be enjoying himself. We went to a museum and took a bus tour of the city, and while he was interested and even took a few pictures with his old camera, he seemed content to let all kinds of sights go by while we conversed. After two days of this, I also preferred just to talk.

  One Saturday afternoon, after a morning touring the old military base at Magnuson Park, we had a late lunch at a restaurant ne
ar the hotel. It was warm for October, and we sat at one of the last outdoor tables in our windbreakers. We both found the options on the menu baffling and unappealing, and while the diners at other tables tucked into huge and overly garnished platters, we ordered the same nursing-home lunch of soup and sandwich. There we sat, munching and slurping, each of us tugging on our windbreaker as we noticed the day was not as warm as it had seemed when we were walking. We retreated into this slight discomfort and disappointment before paying the bill and heading for the public walkway along the pier. There were many people out.

  Leuk was very pensive; maybe it was the hint of fall odours in the air, or the effect of a dull meal. He leaned over the railing and looked into the water. He adjusted his sunglasses and looked at me.

  So different here, the harbour. Very peaceful. Do you miss Hong Kong?

  Always and never, I suppose.

  This harbour’s quieter, like it used to be back home. Do you remember? All that time we used to spend down there. We used to run past the old hospital on Village Road, near the club.

  Yes, I sure do, I said, I remember those places. My throat felt dry.

  And then something wasn’t right. Something in Leuk’s last words stuck in my ear, a jumbled fragment recomposing itself into a cruel jab — remember, home, time, hospital. The ground swayed and I thought at first it was an earthquake, but when I looked at my brother I knew I was alone in feeling it. My heart knocked violently inside my chest and my skin burned in extremes of heat and cold. I watched the expression on my brother’s face change with a terrifying slowness. I broke into a sweat and stumbled against the railing, reaching out in confusion to grab it. My left hand missed, but my right hand caught it, though I still stumbled and fell to the ground. I was aware of looking ridiculous as I let out a shout and my hand slipped from the railing. A tropical dampness, a shock of hot, cadaverous stench, stung my nostrils, and my stomach heaved.

  A young man ran over to help and knelt down to lift me up. He called me sir. I felt his hands on my arm and shoulder, but as his grip tightened to lift me, my vision blurred and I saw only a dark-haired figure coming down towards me. I reached up and struck him on the face and shouted at him in Cantonese, and I felt his glasses fly off his face. They clattered over the concrete walk. I yelled at him again to go away.

  I remember shouting something else, something about leaving, and two other people came and helped me over to a bench. All I remember next is Leuk sitting beside me with one hand on my back. He was telling me to sit still. I pieced the last few moments together and put my head in my hands. Pedestrians on the pier stared at me and I heard an ambulance approaching. A waitress from the restaurant ran over with the medics and, thinking I couldn’t speak English, translated their questions to me into Cantonese. I told them I didn’t know what had happened, though it would have been more honest to say that I didn’t understand.

  Standing by the railing with her mother, a little girl, maybe about seven, looked at me gravely while holding a gold balloon. She wasn’t concerned for me, I felt, but I imagined that behind the downward turn of her mouth and her knitted brow was her dismay at being exposed to such a thing, to my shameful decline and humiliation. I tried to smile at her. My face was wet and I wiped it with a handkerchief, and then I reassured the medics one more time and waved them off. Leuk thanked the waitress for me.

  I sat with my brother while the gawkers moved on. From the bench I watched a cluster of young birch trees sway and rustle in the October air, and I calmed myself by timing my breath to match their motion, until I imagined my exhalations echoed their dry and leafy murmur. I got back on my feet.

  Let’s go on that drive, I said to Leuk, and we made our way back to the car. That evening and the next day, I would show him the old Pacific forests, and we would drive in silence inside those primitive monuments that bristled darkly against the fortress of the ocean.

  NINETEEN

  Most of the men in Wah Ying seemed violent like Mr. Lee. Fights were common. One day there was a traditional festival in the town centre, which meant a little music with plenty of firecrackers and lots of alcohol. The women of the village had prepared huge open tables of food — mostly noodles, vegetables, and some fish. The men who could escape from work lined up on benches at the tables, where they ate and drank greedily. It wasn’t like any festival I’d ever been to in Hong Kong. Within a couple of hours the musicians and the children’s snack tables disappeared, and the festival was just a ramble of men drinking rice or millet liquor from earthenware jars. A large pile of these sat under some trees in the square, but before long most of the men couldn’t walk there to restock their tables.

  There were two large families who made up most of Wah Ying — Lee and Cheung — and when they were drunk, it was easier to see how they were related. The Cheung men in particular turned a frightening shade of deep ruby, and their faces bloated from the alcohol, as though their heads were giant, engorged tics. The Lee men’s faces turned blotchy, and they got sick faster. The gravel paths of the square and the tables where they sat quickly became smeared with vomit that stank in the island’s warm spring air.

  Leuk and I stayed away from the men at the tables. We had no interest in most of the festival, except for some coloured paper flags that had been hung around the square between the trees. Leuk had found a box of matches by one of the extinguished cooking stations, so we decided to burn the flags. Our first thought was to pull them down and set them alight in the middle of the square, but then we decided it would be more fun to set fire to them while they hung in the trees.

  Leuk knelt down and I climbed on his shoulders with the matchbox between my teeth. As I crouched to stay balanced, I lit a match and held it near the flags, but the flame wouldn’t catch. I lit a second match but dropped it, and the stick landed next to Leuk’s foot, where it continued burning. He carefully put one foot out to step on it, and I wobbled on his shoulders and gripped the tree.

  “Stop it,” I shouted.

  “It’s okay,” he said, “I just don’t want to cause a fire.” He seemed to have forgotten why we were doing this in the first place. He stuck his foot out again and brought it down hard on the matchstick.

  I fell. My hands skimmed the smooth bark of the tree as I went down, right next to the jars of liquor. I landed on the ground, and as I tried to right myself, my knee caught the handle of a jug, and a pyramid of four vessels collapsed and smashed on the gravel. The liquor sprayed my clothes and face. For a moment the scent of vomit that hugged the ground dissipated and I could smell only alcohol. My eyes burned.

  One of the men, a Cheung by the look of him, thrust a wavering finger at me. He shouted at me in a hoarse voice, but none of the other men paid him any attention. He rose with difficulty from the bench and came towards us. I was still getting up and reeling from the sting of alcohol. He pointed at me and struggled to say something, his lips curling as he grunted hoarsely like an old dog. Leuk took me by the arm and pulled me away. I looked back at the man staring at the broken jars, swaying on bowed legs. He put one arm against the tree and released a stream of vomit down its trunk.

  We started to run towards home, but I knew I wasn’t done. We stopped at a street corner.

  “Let’s go back,” I said. I wanted to see the flags burn.

  Leuk’s face ran with sweat and his shirt clung to his chest. I showed him I still had the matches, and he laughed. Then he put his arms out and started staggering around like a drunk. He leaned over and pretended to throw up on the grass. He was very loud and disgusting, and I laughed hysterically. When I could breathe again, I did the same, and soon we were trying to outdo each other with our impressions of the worst vomiting sounds we could make. We settled on the version we thought best and rehearsed it for several minutes.

  A door swung open and an old woman shouted at us to shut the hell up. She had a big piece of firewood in one hand and threatened to beat us with it. When we didn’t stop, she took a few steps forward and waved the wood in
the air. It was still smoking at one end. We snorted and waved at her and ran back to the square.

  When we returned, it was a different scene from the one we’d left. Many of the men were gone and some of the remaining ones were passed out on the tables or ground. Several others were fighting, though they seemed too drunk to really harm each other. They swung wide punches at each other’s heads or stomachs while a couple grappled on the ground.

  Gunfire erupted behind us. I hadn’t heard shots fired since Hong Kong, and Leuk and I dropped to the ground, expecting to hear the roar of trucks and tanks coming down the road. A few of the men ran in zigzags between the houses. As the shots continued, I noticed rifle barrels sticking out through narrow slots cut in the houses’ walls. The men took shots at each other through these, though I don’t know how they could distinguish who was who or even aim properly.

  We hid behind a tree and waited and watched. The men fighting in the street separated quickly when the first shots sounded and retreated to their houses, where I assumed they too would start shooting each other. One of the men, drunk and now limping after a fight, took a bullet in the neck as he searched for his house. He clutched his neck and staggered sideways as the blood coursed through his fingers and down his forearm. From one of the houses came uproarious laughter, followed by more shots.

  One of the last men in the street staggered over to us. “You little bastards,” he shouted, “you broke the wine jars.” He pushed his sleeves up his arms and said he would beat us. He could barely walk straight but kept coming.