The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  There were other times when our age difference did not seem to matter, and these were the occasions for traditional family gatherings, especially during the Chinese festivals. For us, growing up in British Malaya was to be influenced by many cultures, but to be a child of two – China and England. China had never observed a seven-day week. A day of rest at such a regular interval was a luxury a nation of struggling people could ill afford. The traditional Chinese calendar followed the phases of the moon, and it was the annual festival days in that calendar that afforded our ancestors their precious little time off. In Malaya, however, these were rarely observed as holidays. Of them all, an English convent school recognised just one Chinese festival, the one for the new lunar year, but at home each of them meant a celebration of some kind. The seventh night of the seventh month is Chut Cheir Tarn, the Seven Sisters Festival, a kind of Chinese Valentine’s Day, a night for mothers to show daughters how to ensure a happy marriage is in their stars.

  Our mother observed it in her own peremptory manner, which is why I don’t recall a Seven Sisters night like the one that year. As she was away in Penang, Ah Mun Cheir, a true fundamentalist, stepped in, and the rituals were thoroughly revealed to us for the first time.

  After dinner my father settled onto the sofa with his newspaper, which was a time we had learned long before to leave him alone. When I was very little and already full of questions and curiosity, I used to stand in front of him and his great broadsheet paper spread out in front of his chest and fire off all the questions I had been saving up for the whole day. ‘Pa, why this, Pa, how that, Pa, who, what, where …?’ He would spread his knees a little, just enough for me to walk between them, and then close them against my ears and hold me there until I stopped asking questions. All the while he simply kept on reading his paper as though nothing was really happening, as though I wasn’t whining and everyone else in the room wasn’t holding their sides.

  So that night we left our father to his newspaper and followed Ah Mun Cheir outside. She took a mahjong table out to the front veranda and covered it with red paper. For the next half hour we followed her instructions and created a shrine for the seven daughters of the Jade Emperor in Heaven. We lit candles, burned joss sticks and made offerings of fruit, flowers and tea. On a bamboo tray we placed tiny paper cutouts that Ah Mun Cheir had fashioned for us – seven hair combs, seven mirrors, seven dresses and seven pairs of shoes, to which we added seven little boxes of face powder – surely everything a princess would need. Ah Mun Cheir sprinkled Florida Water over our offerings, which made the shrine smell like the hot towels in a Chinese restaurant, and then put a match to the lot, sending it up in smoke to the heavens.

  Later, she gave us a cigarette tin filled with tiny sprouting plants. We took turns plucking the leaves, dropping them in a bowl of water and eagerly watching as they arranged themselves into some form of imagery that would reveal the kind of husband that awaited us some day. As hard as we tried, the best we could make out in those miniature leaves was a pair of glasses. Were we all destined to marry men who wore glasses? Mei, being the eldest and nearest to marrying age, actually appeared to be taking this prospect quite seriously.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Pa called to her from his chair. ‘You’ll be seventeen soon, and do you know what the Chinese say about a girl of seventeen? Every girl is beautiful at seventeen, is what they say. You will have your pick, whenever you’re ready.’

  He always seemed to know what we were thinking, even if we didn’t tell him.

  ‘Do you want to hear the story now?’ he said. And of course, that was exactly what we were thinking.

  He put his paper aside and we sat next to him on the sofa to hear the story of the cowherd and the spinning maid. Every year on this night Pa told us this story, and even Mei and Li, who already fancied themselves as teenagers, sat enthralled as ever by the romantic fairy tale.

  The cowherd and the spinning maid are star constellations separated by the Milky Way, but in our father’s story they were two lovers kept apart by the Jade Emperor. The spinning maid was the Emperor’s seventh daughter who spent her days weaving the clouds that filled the heavens. One day, when she laid eyes on the handsome young cowherd for the first time, she put her spinning aside, leaving the sky bereft of clouds. Her father was furious that she could overlook her duties in this way and said he would permit them to meet but once a year – on the seventh day of the seventh month, when the stars in the Milky Way lined up to form a sparkling bridge between them.

  Our father was a modern man and had little time for Chinese superstitions, which sometimes led to a disagreement with our mother, but the cowherd and the spinning maid was one custom that he was happy to indulge us with every year. Pa’s own father raised his sons to be Western, sending them to English language schools in Malaya and overseas to English universities, and it certainly wasn’t he who planted this old story in Pa’s heart. It was the father before him, Pa’s grandfather, who came out from China to be a tin mine coolie and made a new life in Malaya. Pa said his grandfather used to tell him this story every year because there were no girls to tell it to. He said that whenever his grandfather told it his voice would quiver. It was this night, the old man told him, that caused the most heartache between wives left in China and husbands who had crossed the sea to find their fortune.

  We never did find out for certain, but Mei always said that Pa’s grandfather left a wife behind in China, a wife he never saw again, and the three of us would sit there in wonder and think about the cowherd and the spinning maid, but even more about our great-grandfather and his wife, who did not even have so much as a once-a-year sparkling bridge of stars between them.

  We were sitting there like that, lost in our sad and romantic thoughts, when the phone rang in the study. That phone was for important calls and Pa closed the door behind him. While we sat on the couch and waited for the rest of the story, Mei picked up his paper and suddenly squealed.

  ‘Look! Pa’s picture!’

  She pointed at a small photo, the same one I had seen in his passport. Defending counsel K. C. Tan, said the caption. Way above it, right across the front page, was a bold headline: CT TOH KEI: MURDER CHARGE.

  In that paper I learned for the first time Toh Kei’s real name, and for the second time that he may be a murderer.

  Communist Party of Malaya Military Central Committee member and Commander of the CPM’s Perak Regiment, Liew Ek Ching, will stand trial for murder, it was announced in Ipoh today.

  More commonly known by his alias, Toh Kei, Liew has been charged with the murders of John Nicholson, 50, manager of Essex Estate in Sungai Supit, and David Goodwin, 21, his assistant. The murders of Nicholson and Goodwin in June 1948 provoked the declaration of the State of Emergency in Malaya.

  Liew, born in Taiping, is the most senior CPM commander yet captured by the Security Forces. He has been linked to many atrocities on rubber estates, tin mines and outlying villages in Perak during the three years of the Emergency.

  A leader of the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army guerrillas during World War 2, Liew was decorated with the Burma Star and the 1939–45 Star.

  Ironically, Liew was also said to be due to receive the Military Cross for heroism during the war when the Emergency was declared. The award was subsequently withdrawn.

  Pa’s name was only mentioned once more further down, in the last paragraph.

  Ipoh lawyer and partner in the firm Rajaratnam and Tan, K. C. Tan, has been appointed to defend Liew in the Ipoh Assizes. Tan successfully defended the CT Chin Ah Kow last year.

  Pa himself emerged from his study. Now I knew who had been on the phone, and it was not business. From the warmth of the smile on his face I could see that he had been speaking with our mother. Before any of us had a chance to speak about his front-page fame, he told us to settle down.

  ‘Don’t make any plans for next weekend,’ he said. ‘We’re going to Penang for Hungry Ghosts.’

  Seven Sisters wasn’t really mu
ch as Chinese festivals go, but the Feast for the Hungry Ghosts was different. Chinese believe that people who die without a proper burial and without descendants to worship and make offerings at their grave to feed their souls, enter the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. On one night of the year, the fifteenth of the seventh month, these angry beings return to earth to be fed, roaming the streets with their insatiable appetite and looking for wayward children to steal. Families gather around feast tables and offer food to appease the lost souls and then, like all the best festivals, there is a family feast. Although it was wise to avoid being on the road during Hungry Ghosts, at our grandmother’s house it was one of the best times of the year, with a feast of Penang specialities like jiu hu char, nasi ulam, choon piah and achar to look forward to.

  This was news almost as exciting as the front page of the Straits Times. And then, as we were jabbering away with anticipation of this good news, the phone rang again.

  ‘Hullo, Humphrey,’ I heard Pa say through the open door. ‘Yes, I’ve seen it … captured, indeed! … I saw that too. Ironically, they even said. We must have a sympathetic editor at the Straits Times.’

  Pa stretched his leg over to the door and nudged it shut with his foot.

  The two festivals that always meant a family visit to Por-Por’s house in Penang were Christmas and Chinese New Year, the biggest festivals of the two cultures that shaped us. If we were children of those cultures, our father had fully matured into them. He had been to St Michael’s Institution, Ipoh’s biggest English school for boys, had studied law in London and first practised it in Shanghai when recruited by the Nationalist Chinese government direct from college, which was before he met our mother. He told me stories of tea parties on Kentish summer lawns and tea pavilions in Soochow lake gardens, and then it was Ma’s turn to harrumph. But he never talked about St Michael’s. Going to Penang meant driving right through the middle of town, right by the school, but Pa always avoided it and took the long way around. St Michael’s might only be a five minute walk across the Padang from his office, its white pointy gables and red roof clearly visible from his front door, but it was a place to be avoided, and it wasn’t until later that year that I finally figured out why.

  The roadblocks started even before we were beyond Ipoh’s houses and it was more than an hour before we were passing through Sungai Siput. Around that town were more soldiers than I had ever seen assembled around the flag on the Padang. Down the road ahead of us the cone of Lion Hill loomed over the countryside like a Chinese hat.

  ‘I know what Sungai Siput means,’ I said to Pa, but he was too busy avoiding the traffic to answer.

  ‘We’ll be stopping here on the way back,’ he eventually said. ‘A little business. Won’t take very long.’

  Stopping in Sungai Siput? All I could think about then was what a teacher had once erroneously said the name meant – River of Death – and my mind began to wander. Erroneous or not, River of Death sounded to me like it could be one of the Ten Courts of Chinese Hell, like the Lake of Blood or the Pool of Filth. I began to imagine a wide river, as wide as the Perak, but instead of being brown it was black, and instead of just a few fallen tree branches or clumps of river weed floating past, it was full of bloated bodies floating face down. I was glad when we left Sungai Siput in our wake.

  It was late in the afternoon by the time we finally drove off the ferry onto the island of Penang, and as we passed through Por-Por’s gates Pa sounded the horn. Ah Thye Cheir, Por-Por’s maid, scurried down the steps to open our doors. Then Por-Por appeared, frowning and nodding, which was her default face to the world, no matter how she was actually feeling. And then Ma, walking carefully with a stick. She had a smile on her face that was wider than Por-Por’s widest front step – certainly not her default face – and I could see already that this was going to be a very different couple of days in Penang.

  The first thing we did was give her a whole box of Brand’s Essence of Chicken, and she listened as we told her that this was what she needed, not once dismissing us with an impatient wave of the hand. Her tummy had grown so much and she even allowed us to put our ears to it to hear the baby’s heart. Our mother seemed to be a different person in Penang.

  That evening was like so many at home in Ipoh, with our parents sitting on the veranda for their whisky sundowner, Ma in a planter’s chair with her feet up, Pa holding her hand, and we three girls sitting at their feet. Ah Thye Cheir made us fresh lime juice with soda water, and we listened to the English programs on the radio. Ma’s favourite was on, Go Gay with Melody and Song, and we had to sit quietly and not say a word, just enjoy the music, which wasn’t an easy thing to do when you were that young and restless. When it was over Pa finally turned it off.

  ‘There’ll be no playing in the water for you this time,’ Ma said, but there was no stern face – this was no punishment she was enforcing. ‘No digging for siput, no beach at all. In fact, you are not to even go out of the house by yourselves. Do you know how easy it is for a ghost to drown a little girl?’

  Pa leaned forward in his chair and grabbed me around the middle, which made all of us squeal. ‘Or to steal one away!’ he said.

  I saw my mother laugh, and just for a moment I wished that we could stay in Penang forever, hungry ghosts on the prowl or not. To see her laugh made all three of us happy, as she did that so rarely around us. Mei used to say that it was our own fault, that Ma was angry because we had all been born girls. They had been married for fifteen years and still our father did not have a son. That didn’t seem to matter too much to him, but to our mother it was a failure as a Chinese wife. Mei said that it was easier for Ma to live with if she put some of the blame on us rather than bear the whole thing herself. When it was put like that I was only too willing to bear my own share if it helped. If being scolded or whacked with a rotan was a way of saying to my mother that I understood her pain, then I would accept it. But seeing her laugh, seeing her happy in our company, meant no one had to bear anything for a while.

  The sky above the palms that lined the road outside was glowing with the setting sun. ‘Who says the sun never sets on the British Empire?’ Pa said as he finished his whisky. I assumed it was meant to be amusing, but the smile disappeared from our mother’s lips.

  ‘If it sets on Malaya, what’s going to happen to us?’ she said.

  Pa shrugged. ‘There is no empire any more. Now it’s a commonwealth. It suits the British to have a Chinese state inside their commonwealth, so we can be it.’

  Ma shook her head. ‘There’s trouble everywhere, even here. A union leader was sent to jail last month for threatening an employer. A few days ago that employer was shot dead in the street. In Penang!’

  ‘You say Penang as though things like that never happen here,’ Pa said. ‘People have been getting shot in the streets of Penang for a hundred years.’

  ‘They were just gangs, triads, fighting over their miserable territory. These are communists!’

  ‘Don’t get so upset. Just because he was a union leader doesn’t make him a communist. By that logic, the Labour government in London itself is communist.’

  My mother’s laugh, my father’s play, were gone. Communists had invaded our peaceful and happy veranda and taken my special Penang away. I wanted it back.

  ‘Can I listen to the baby’s heart again, Ma?’

  But Ah Thye Cheir appeared to tell us that dinner was ready and I had to wait until the next day before I got it back.

  Most of that day we spent around Por-Por’s kitchen table. Once, when the grandfather I never met was still alive and she lived in a grander house, it had been her dining table, but in this house the kitchen was the only room big enough to take it. It had a marble top on a massive nam wood pedestal with inlaid mother-of-pearl, and around it all the women and girls, aunts, cousins and maids, sat peeling, slicing, dicing, shelling, squeezing and preparing a meal for seventeen members of our family, as well as unknown numbers of hungry ghosts. My job was usually tailing bean sprou
ts and shelling peanuts, but this time, perhaps because my mother was confined to her bed, Por-Por decided it was time to move me up the food chain: I was to be taught how to slice.

  I watched her slice as fine as hair the leaves of lime, basil, turmeric, pepper, mint and those of half a dozen other trees and shrubs with names I could never remember for the nasi ulam. I helped her slice yambean, shallots and chillies for the choonpiah. And then we sliced beans, carrots, cucumbers, cabbage, cauliflower and pineapple for the achar. The older you were the more complex the tasks: crabmeat was picked, prawns shelled, tamarind squeezed.

  Kitchen tables were like campfires in Malaya, where women of the tribe shared gossip, tall tales and family stories – often all the same thing – and passed them on to daughters. Por-Por’s stories were the best, probably because we knew them so well. Her beauty contest story was our favourite.

  ‘Por-Por, tell us about the lily-feet.’

  Por-Por never missed a beat, frowning and slicing as the story unfolded for us, the same as always, perfectly prepared and delicious.

  ‘In China in the old days, women and girls all have lily-feet. Feet smaller than hands. Not like us today with duck’s feet. In the old days, without lily-feet, no husband. In the old days, without lily-feet, can only marry a duck.’

  ‘Quack! Quack!’ we honked on cue, and laughed like clowns.

  ‘In the old days, in the villages, they have beauty contest. Not like us today with swimsuit and ball gown. In the old days they have beauty contest for feet. They line up, woman and girl. Only feet can be seen. Curtain cover everything else, so no one can tell who owns feet, how old in years, how beautiful in face, how fair in skin, how bright in eye, how slim in waist, how long in leg. Only can see how beautiful in foot. My Por-Por have smallest feet in all Kwantung. She always win. Even when she old lady, old like me, they lift up curtain and no one can believe. Such old lady, they say. So beautiful still.’