The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  And then it all changed once more when I was eight and learned about the one-eyed girl, which caused me to reassess. In Malaya in those days, you had to get used to many things, and one of the most routine was change.

  For a while I had fancied that I would one day take up nursing, just like Cherry Ames, the mystery-solving American nurse from the series of books for girls that were my English language favourites. That inspiration was only encouraged when Enid Blyton caught my attention and I discovered Mary-Lou in her Malory Towers stories. Of all the girls in the school of that name, she became a success when accepted for training at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Great Ormond Street Hospital. Imagine that. Which is precisely what I did for quite some time in that year of 1951. But that was only the early months, and before the events surrounding the trial redirected all my aspirations.

  Even my mother, who had lived through the Depression and the defeat of the British and the Japanese occupation, often said of the year of the one-eyed girl that it was a ‘topsy-turvy year’. Not because of the girl – it was understood that such incidents were never to be mentioned in our house – but because of all the other things that happened. For us the months of the summer monsoon, especially, were a season of extraordinary events, including my breakthrough with the Three Character Classic, the mysterious search for hidden Japanese gold, and the trial that changed all our lives forever. That trial was the most extraordinary of all.

  The Chinese believe that the Kitchen God, who hears everything, reports on the household to the heavenly Jade Emperor at the end of every year. To get into his good books it is necessary to clean his shrine and make sugary offerings so he will speak sweetly of the family. If a bad report is feared his lips should be smeared with wine to get him drunk and make him forget. That year there was no need for sugar or wine. That year what my father did during the trial spoke for itself and the Jade Emperor finally rewarded him with the most precious of all gifts.

  The Kitchen God, however, had only second-hand knowledge of most of that year’s event. If as a family we had not talked about it so often around the kitchen table he would never have known much of what happened at all, because most of it took place away from the kitchen, even away from our house. Sometimes far away, such as the week we spent in Penang when we had to return home without our mother. Leaving her behind like that was simply unprecedented; a turn of events that had me worried all the way on the long journey home to Ipoh.

  Every time we were stopped at a roadblock on that journey, when a soldier pointed his gun through the window, as was their habit, I had to hide my face in my hands because I could not bear to watch how his finger trembled on the trigger. If he was as nervous as I, which they always certainly appeared to be, it would not take much for a slip to happen and disaster overtake us. I was nervous because I was afraid he would ask where our mother was, and why we had left her behind in Penang. It seemed to me such a terrible thing to do and I was sure it must be against the law. If it was not, then why did the police usually count the number of government-issued identity cards in the car on the way up and tally it against the number on the way back? Was this going to be one of those times? If it was we were surely doomed, but I had not been taking notice on the way up. My father was a lawyer and all I could do was hope that he knew what he was doing.

  In the event not one soldier asked us where she was or let his finger slip, and we made it safely through all fourteen roadblocks between Penang and our home.

  Pa told us we had to leave her behind because she was not well. I had seen her for myself being sick in Por-Por’s bathroom, so if anyone asked me, I had decided to tell them about that. He tried to make light of it by saying that she was just putting her feet up for a while. I did not understand the implications of that, but I knew the situation was serious. Por-Por, my grandmother, said if Ma did not have peace and quiet she could lose another baby, and that would be a tragedy because it might be a boy again, and so Ma stayed there with her own mother, where there was to be no excitement, no climbing on the bed, no noise. ‘Ting ngah yee!’ as my mother would say. No silliness! What was the difference, I said to my sisters. Around our mother there was never any excitement, any climbing, any noise other than her own raised voice. But I still thought there had to be a law against just leaving her behind.

  That day there were more army trucks and Land Rovers filled with soldiers than I had ever seen before. My father thought so, too. ‘More military vehicles on the road than since the Japanese Time,’ he said.

  In Malaya people called the time when there was war all around the world ‘the Japanese Time’, because in Malaya it was not the rest of the world that mattered, only the Japanese, which was a regular source of wonder for me.

  ‘What else was it like in the Japanese Time, Pa?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer me, which was most unusual for him, because he was always ready to enlighten a young inquiring mind. It was as though he had not even heard the question.

  ‘We’ll come up and see Ma as often as we can,’ he said. ‘We can bring her foods to help her get well.’

  ‘Like polygonatum and beef soup,’ my sister Mei said. She was fourteen and had no trouble with such words. ‘I looked it up in a book, and that is what Ma needs in her condition.’ She thought some more about it for a moment before adding, ‘As well as chicken livers.’

  Pa nodded and appeared to be impressed. ‘Well, I don’t know what poly-what-you-said is, but I’ll look into it,’ he said. ‘Maybe just a box of essence of chicken to start.’

  Mei was clearly satisfied with that as she sank smugly back into the car seat, especially as it appeared she knew a word our father didn’t.

  ‘What is Ma sick of?’ I said to Pa.

  Li, my number-two sister, gave me a withering look. ‘You,’ she said.

  But I was fairly certain that this time it was a baby she was sick of, and not me for once.

  Penang was a hundred miles and a ferry ride from Ipoh as it was an island, surrounded by the waters at the northern entrance to the Malacca Strait. Ipoh, although inland on the Malay Peninsula, was surrounded by mines as it was the centre of the Malayan tin industry. It was never meant to be the centre of anything. The English had not planned it that way, but the Chinese were always doing things the English had not planned on. In the nineteenth century some of them came up the river looking for the next big Malayan tin field, stopped when they saw a very tall ipoh tree, which was ‘a good sign’, as they said, and started digging. Why it could be a good sign was something certainly not clear to me. The ipoh, after all, was so poisonous its sap was used by aborigines for their blowpipe darts, which every child knew, so it struck me as a strange definition of ‘good’. In any event, the Chinese kept digging all around that tree until they found more tin than anywhere else in the world.

  Where there weren’t tin mines around Ipoh there was jungle, interrupted only by rubber estates. You did not have to go far out of town before you were surrounded by rows of rubber trees lined up like the soldiers on the Padang when they raised the British flag every morning. Some of the estates were way off the main road, carved from the jungle itself, such as the one at Sungai Siput.

  We lived along Gopeng Road, and we moved there the very same week that the Emergency was declared. My mother said it was a bad time to be moving so far out of town. There was a right time and a wrong time to do anything as far as my mother was concerned, and for once there was a genuine practical reason for it. Usually it was all to do with geomancy, numerology or some other aspect of the complex Chinese belief system. My father was given to calling it superstition, although not usually within earshot of Ma.

  Our house was like a poor relation around there, just a black and white bungalow hemmed in by mansions with gardens as big as public parks where the wealthy mine owners, managers and traders lived. My father was not the only lawyer in the street, just the only one whose clients did not include wealthy mine owners, managers and traders. It was not really as far out
of town as my mother said. Only ten minutes away was Pa’s office in Hale Street, which was right next to the Padang in the middle of town, and one of a row of terrace buildings with timber shutters to keep the storms out of the top floor and iron bars to keep thieves out of the bottom. There was a wild shrub growing out of cracks under the roof, and I kept my eye on that shrub because it appeared to me that the jungle was getting ready to reclaim Ipoh. Hale Street was called Lut Si Kai by the Chinese, which means Lawyer Street, and it only went as far as the courthouse. Short but important, my father used to say, just like Abraham Hale himself. He was the first Inspector of Mines, and nothing was more important in Ipoh than the mines.

  The lawyers were at the courthouse end of the street, and at the other end there was a cluster of Chinese hotels, which inevitably meant there was also a cluster of trishaw men. They lived by taking turns to sleep on shared beds above dark shophouses between the hotels, and Pa said when I was walking past these shops I was not to dawdle, which was another word I had to look up. He said the trishaw men had been there longer than the courthouse, the lawyers or any of the dawdle shops, and before the Japanese Time they were rickshaw pullers, but the Japanese made them change their rickshaws for trishaws. The only improvement the Japanese made to Ipoh in three and a half years, he said.

  I didn’t know much about the Japanese because their time was up when I was yet to develop a memory faculty, but everyone in the country, no matter how young, was fully aware of the terrible things they had done. There was a Japanese song that children in Malaya could sing at the drop of a hat. Shina no yoru, Yume no yoru … Whenever I was taken to a wedding at the Jubilee Cabaret, as soon as the songstress came to that number, everyone would suddenly stop what they were doing and pour onto the dance floor, which sometimes made me wonder if the Japanese had been so bad after all. If they had really been so bad why did everyone love that song when all it did was remind them of the Japanese Time? My mother once explained that it was a romantic song about dreamy nights in China, although when she said that my father gave a sort of harrumph and said there was nothing romantic about the Japanese or anything they did in China or anywhere else.

  The front room at Pa’s office seemed to be forever filled with anxious men; men waiting for justice is the way he was given to describe them. You hardly ever saw a woman there, which is why I noticed the Indian lady who came to see him a few days after we returned from Penang. There was a window next to his desk that gave him a view of a plain white wall and he used to stare at that wall when he was thinking hard. The way I understood it then, hard thinking was a matter of turning stones over. Leave no stone unturned, Pa used to say, and that year he certainly turned a lot of them. He was staring out that window when the Indian lady sat down at his desk and Pa told me to practise my Chinese quietly and not disturb them. I didn’t think any noise I made could be as disturbing as the storm that was pounding on the roof, but I did as I was told and practised away at the Three Character Classic.

  I didn’t hear much above that storm, but I heard them say ‘toh kei’ so many times it was something else that managed to lodge in my mind. I could hear they were talking in English, which is why I mistook it for an English expression of some sort, although just what it could be was puzzling. I wrote the words in English in my book – ‘toe kay’ – but still it made no sense.

  The lady was not dressed like most Indian women. She didn’t wear a sari, just the same sort of printed cotton frock as was the customary wardrobe of my mother and her friends, but she certainly was not Chinese, and so it took me some time before I considered that perhaps the expression might be Chinese. I had already learned enough Chinese to find two characters that sounded like toe and kay, two characters that when placed together in such a way meant ‘all give’, although why two grown people would repeat such a thing so often was beyond me. Between them, and while the storm continued to obscure most of their conversation, I must have heard them repeat it dozens of times. I was always alert to new words, and my father’s office was a rich vein of them in many different languages and dialects; even the languages of lost civilisations, such as Latin.

  After the Indian lady left I showed my two characters to my father. He looked at them, and then at me, and frowned. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘they sound right, but they’re not the same.’

  So they were Chinese after all. I was going to leave it at that as I could see he was busy, but he considered me for a moment before rocking back in his chair.

  ‘Toh Kei is a man’s name,’ he said. ‘If you have to find a meaning for it, then it means Wonderful Leader.’ And then he shook his head slowly. ‘How could a man like Trotsky be anyone’s idea of a wonderful leader in this part of the world?’

  That storm was the first of the summer monsoon that year, a year when the Jade Emperor gave Pa the gift of a new baby for the first time since I was born. It seemed to me that when that happened he stopped thinking of me as his little girl and began to see me as just another daughter, which proved to be both a blessing and a curse as the years passed. With all the extraordinary events of that year it may sound strange that I could be so sure about something so intangible, but I was too young to be sure about any of the other things, and I was always sure about my father.

  4

  PARIS

  I wrote her a note. Something needed to be said by way of explanation for the sudden appearance of the rechtvaardiging on her desk. It needed to be as abstract as my reasons for sending it. A practical explanation would be absurd. What did I want from her? I could not even answer that question myself, so functionality was to be avoided. I think now that what drove me was a yearning to finally share it with someone. I know now that I had been looking for such a person for years, but had been too close to the whole matter to recognise that simple truth.

  I know it now because it was she who helped me recognise it.

  But that is to leap forward too far. When I wrote the note I could see none of that. ‘Recycled water,’ I wrote, and attached it to the ninety-six pages of my mother’s testament. The Gospel According to My Mother, as I had called it on occasion, although only to myself. Years of instruction at the hands of the La Salle Brothers left me with a clear appreciation for the consequences of blasphemy.

  I organised a courier from the National Archives the next day. It was a Friday. Perhaps she would find time to have a look at it over the weekend. How presumptuous was I to think that? I knew nothing about this woman other than that she was a lawyer. At least, that was what her card said, and the fact that her address was at King’s Bench Walk, which even I knew was somewhere to be found among the arcane temples, courts and inns of the legal district labyrinth. All she had offered of herself apart from that was that she had followed in her father’s footsteps to London and stayed. I knew one other thing about her, and that was that she had a sense of humour. She had laughed at my old ‘junk history’ joke. I had repeated it so often that I had stopped even thinking of it as a joke. Most people who heard it did not even start to think it so. Puns are held to be a low form of wit, a view I fail to share, as did Shakespeare; and most historians are held to be dry, a view I find to be self-evident. But Ms Tan’s eyes twinkled when I said it.

  A twinkle in the eye. Such an enchanting characteristic, I always find. It is an appreciation I seem to have learned from my mother.

  5

  WHO I AM

  Anna De Brujn Thumboo

  Ipoh, March 4, 1956

  It occurs to me that I could just as readily have titled this paper ‘Who I Am Not’, as the ledger appears to be favouring the debit side of my reputation these days. Or should that be ‘Whom’? I try to be correct in English, but I do not always succeed. No matter what people think of me, be it good or ill, and I have had more than my share of both, I have always had purpose to what I do. However, these last few years I have found myself continually examining what purpose there is. What purpose to life itself. I do not mean merely my own, I mean ‘life’. Without faith
there can be no possible purpose, and these few years have stripped me of faith. Now that I have such a short time left, that lack of purpose, lack of faith, is not welcome. Soon I will or will not meet my maker, and discover whether faith is ill founded, as I now believe, or if I have been deceived yet again.

  Digestion is the latest of my faculties to succumb to the onset of the disease that will send me on my posthumous voyage of discovery. I find it now requiring greater effort to eat, even greater to hold down. Food was never important to me, especially after learning to do without during the Japanese time, and even more especially during my incarceration, but now I find doing without is sapping what little strength I have left. All I really require at this point is that I retain enough of it to finish these pages.

  So where should I begin this testimony, this explanation, this justification? Already I am struggling to explain myself. I resort to the Dutch: this rechtvaardiging, because it begins with what is ‘right’, and that is what I seek to address. So much has been written about me that is wrong. Just as I did not deserve the label of ‘hero’ before, I do not deserve to be a ‘villain’ now. As I have already said, I was merely a woman with purpose. The labels have been the work of others. The rewards I did not seek then, and the condemnation I do not deserve now.

  I write this primarily for my son, Paris. Whether others choose to read it is up to them, and whether they get the opportunity I leave to him. He is only twelve as I write, too young to understand what I have to say, but it seems I am not to be afforded a more suitable occasion. Perhaps it is my lack of faith that has delivered such a fate.

  Although I struggle to know where to begin, I have no such quandary with how to finish, as that will be for him alone – my self-determined son – to eventually discover. In the end there is no right or wrong, only a secret to share with him – the lesson of a lifetime cut short.