by Leigh Lyn
Remembering Niang’s stories of baby girl corpses floating in the village lake, I became convinced that parental love is not a given but is, in fact, as transient as the hairstyle one chooses. Some wear it long, and the idea of cutting it short would be inconceivable. Some like it shaved altogether. To some Chinese, children are means rather than ends; exchangeable, appreciated and evaluated for the return on their parents’ investment. Tradition has it that sons are valued for perpetuating the family’s name and lifeline while daughters can be aborted, even after birth.
Even though we were in Holland, the women in my family reminded me about the “Chinese” way. My aunts would talk about which country and what schools my brothers could go to study. Squinting at me from the corner of their eye, they would add, “Girls don’t go to universities.”
I had little to say to them. Even now, whenever I see my two aunts, they grumble about their babysitting times. “You never said no, never said yes; you walked off! Everyone wanted to see a movie, wanted to have fun, but no, you always just walked off!”
This anti-social streak I developed as the result of my silent resistance. Torn between the Chinese or Dutch culture, I never adopted either wholeheartedly. In the recollection of my childhood, I didn’t say much, except during extreme confrontations. I remember one particular unsettling event, which took place when I’d just started high school.
It was a cold, damp day. Although it hadn’t been raining, just walking through the field around the school ground for a short distance would turn your trousers dark and heavy from half-frozen dewdrops. A group of kids had gathered between the gym and the main classroom block. Shrill voices cut through the thin icy air. Two tiny kids I had never seen before stood in the middle of a commotion. The older one of the two had more freckles than his dark-olive face could contain. Unintimidated, he looked up at Jan and four of his mates, who were in my cohort. Standing next to Jan was a girl with a red patch on her forehead the size of an orange.
“Why don’t you tell your stupid girlfriend to watch out for balls in a ballfield?” the smaller boy shouted. Jan gave his mates a meaningful look. They stepped up and tightened the circle around the little scoundrels.
“Bring it on,” the littlest boy shouted.
At once, Jan’s friends moved in and a rain of fists landed on the little boys. The sight of those bullies beating up two little ones made me step forward and pull them back, one with each hand. A fist aimed at them hit my face. I stumbled but composed myself and told the little rascals to get the hell out of there. Was it my fire spitting eyes or my bleeding nose? Either way, my classmates backed off when I told them to go find someone their own size to pick on.
You may have the impression I get hit in the face often. In fact, I remember many instances of rolling over the playground or the classroom floor in fights. In my defense, it was all in the spirit of rectifying injustices, which I found intolerable even if they weren’t done to me. Or not that unjust. I was a martyr in the making, and bullies thought twice about pestering me. Unlike my little brother, Little Fly, who learned to run quite fast. I don’t remember helping him out though, because I couldn’t keep up, but Stevie did.
“One of them is my friend,” he said. “I gave him bubblegum to chase Little Fly. To train him up.”
At home, I took the constant nagging of how girls were not as valuable and less deserving silently, because protesting about fairness or human rights resulted in more criticism about my lack of virtues. I stopped talking as I sunk to the bottom of the yellow swamp where I was being conditioned to serve and attend to the “diamonds.” I vowed to prove them wrong, which I did by excelling and beating them as often as I could. I became competitive in my studies, in chess and in sports. They received victories on my behalf with deadly silences, which equaled songs of angels descending from heaven.
I once overheard Niang explain to her sisters why I was difficult. “Sixty-six, she was born in sixty-six, the year of the horse in the element of Fire, which makes her a Fire horse. Fire horses are by nature wild and passionate. If male—” Her eyes focused on Little Fly, who was nine months younger. “It’s one of the best horoscopes to have. If female—” Her eyes returned to rest on me. “Her obstinacies will bring doom to their family.” I never intended to bring doom to anyone; I just wasn’t prepared to surrender or buy into the superstitious crap.
The nuns in the orphanage had raised Dad to be a religious man who taught us how to pray. Out of respect for him rather than what he believed in, Niang accepted his values and never propagated her own ones unless we were at my Uncle Hua’s. There we lived with several of her sisters, who grabbed every opportunity to drum their values in my obstinate head and instill sense into me. This persisted throughout our refugee days until the twentieth of July, ‘73, the day after our visas came out. I remember the date because Bruce Lee died that same day. My dad, the chef, and his sous wouldn’t shut up about it. That’s how Stevie caught the Bruce Lee bug. At seven, he hadn’t heard of Bruce Lee, until he died and our father took us to see his films in Haarlem. “The Big Boss” was the first ever movie I remember seeing in Holland with Dutch subtitles. Not that Stevie needed those to imitate the yelps and Wing Chun moves.
At last, we could roam the streets again, venture into the fields and play in the forests. Only when I stepped outside our house was I in Holland where the sky hung low and I could see the sun touch the horizon. In Holland, silence did not mean submission and gender mattered little; in the streets and fields of Holland, I found a refuge from home.
Two years after setting foot in Holland, we went to school at last. It was in this charming brown brick art-deco building with a large play yard surrounded by tall conifers. The first day, we arrived early to meet our teachers. To kill time, Juffrouw Niemeyer gave me a small red waterspout and asked me to water the plants on the windowsill for her. I had never done that before, but not to worry. Twenty kids were on the other side of the window pane directing me as I went from plant to plant, shouting at the top of their lungs when I’d watered a plant too much.
If I had to sum Haarlem up in one word, it would be “benign.” Because we were the only foreigners at the school and exotic in their colorful eyes, kids loved to befriend us. My parents worked seven days a week, fourteen hours a day. Within two years, during which they let us loose in a fascinatingly different world, they had saved up enough to venture something bigger. And we said goodbye to Haarlem.
I once told Dr. Wen that the values Chinese tradition perpetuate sickened me, as did the theatrical way the Red Brigades tried to get rid of them. I even pronounced my episode diminutive compared with that collective psychosis they call the Cultural Revolution.
“Can we reflect on what you are doing right now? You are externalizing your issues in a world you choose to see from this perspective because it supports your standpoint. What would you make of that?”
Dr. Wen had been suggesting that since day one.
“But it is true,” I said. “Why, are you suggesting I should internalize the wrongs of society and carry it as my personal cross because that will cure me of my ‘madness’?”
Dr. Wen needed no time to come back from that. “There are 1.3 billion people in this country; most of them are perfectly sane, because they have adopted the right attitude.”
“On the surface they might appear stable.” I should have known better, but I said it anyway. “On the inside, they are frantic and perpetually on their guard to avoid being the next victims targeted by the psychopaths in charge. If you want me to look the other way, like a sane person would because it will keep me out of trouble, tell me. Don’t imply it will cure me. Call me stupid or stubborn, Doc, which is not the same as mad.”
Exhausted, Dr. Wen looked at me. “I thought we dealt with this already. It’s time to get rid of this chip on your shoulder, Lin. I want you to focus on what is happening between you and me; focus on the here and now.” Exhausted, the white-haired shrink looked at me. “Stop pinning the imperf
ections of society on me and your mother. I want you to find a way to change your life for the better.”
I believed the old man. I saw sincerity in his tired eyes. That might stem from his confidence that the right mélange of drugs could reduce me to the mindless, pedicured professional with a fat bank account that blindness and deafness brings forth. But he had a point. My arguments were getting old, and so were his answers. Noticing the fatigue on the doctor’s wrinkled face, I decided to cut him some slack and saved my cynicism for the next session.
Chapter 19
We moved to a town near Holland’s Western border with Germany called Zwolle. It had large open fields where we caught bugs and built obstacle runs for our bicycles. Upon invitation, I joined five of my new classmates’ secret club in a forest just outside the town and fell out of a tree. My newfound friends stared at my arm, which was folded in a frightening direction. I examined the odd knob poking out on the spot where my elbow had been. The strange thing was, it didn’t even hurt that much. I told them it was nothing and rode my bike two miles back into town.
I steered hand-free by leaning my body left or right while my free hand supported my disjointed arm which felt numb and I remember thinking what a beautiful afternoon it was. I was too absorbed in finding my way back home and elated about the adventure to feel any pain. Once home, my brothers marveled at my arm and poked it when I wasn’t paying attention, which clicked it back into its proper place. I was nervous approaching dinner time, which was always at 8.30pm at our restaurant, a stone’s throw away from our apartment.
“Don’t look at Lemon’s left elbow,” Stevie told my parents the second we walked through the door. By then, it had swollen to the size of a large orange. After the expected reproach, Niang made calls.
“A bonesetter… Yes,” Niang affirmed. “No, I don’t think it’s broken. Yes, please, can you ask around for me?” An hour and a dozen calls later, the phone rang.
“Yes?… Fantastic. So, it’s your cook’s friend’s cousin? From Sha Tau Kwok? That’s where we’re from! Great, thank your cook so much for me. Sunday’s Yum Cha is on me!”
My mother beamed like she’d won the lottery. I was put in the car and driven by my dad to a town an hour away. We waited for my mother’s acquaintance’s cook’s friend’s cousin to finish his shift at ten. At half past ten, he sat me down in a wooden chair and rubbed my elbow with a herbal potion that reeked of rust mixed with dog piss. He worked my arm like a baker worked dough. He kneaded it, folded it, and pounded it for half an hour, yanking it at intervals of five seconds for another half an hour. This went on until my arm glowed red hot and had inflated to the size of a grapefruit. I bit my lip during the ordeal and sat through it without a shriek even though, in my head, I died a million deaths. I was both too proud and too shy to show it. Until this day, my mother loved telling me, “If it weren’t for the bonesetter I found, you would be a cripple and have arthritis by now.”
I was thankful I was not a cripple. My dad never asked for any certificates or credentials. The Chinese bonesetter could have been a rogue who had only interned with a bonesetter. Or maybe he fancied himself one after he saw it done on TV. When the ordeal was over, I got up to go, but no such luck. The bonesetter invited my dad to stay and watch him practice Shen Gong, which is a branch of martial arts practiced by gods, no less.
The bonesetter took off his shirt and shoes, closed his eyes and chanted a string of mantras until he was trembling uncontrollably. He squatted low and waved big circles in the air with both his arms. His eyes were white from focusing on the back of his own skull as he did a set of ferocious moves.
“He summoned a warrior god to possess his body,” his friend explained to Dad. “The Warrior God’s doing all this!”
The bonesetter uttered a loud scream, picked up a big chopper knife that was lying on an adjacent table and hacked it into his own chest. Dad said I fainted right there and then. The bonesetter, on the other hand, was fine and helped him carry me to the car.
“Would Freud have bashed his head against the wall had he been born Chinese?” I asked Dr. Wen another time. “The absurd beliefs in Chinese culture are flabbergasting.”
“I think he would have had a ball,” Dr. Wen mused.
“It’s bizarre,” I said. “I once argued with Niang about the Bone Almanac. She insists that the weight of one’s skeleton can be determined by the analysis of one’s name and swears by it to predict small, large and cosmic events.”
“That was the way your mother was brought up,” Dr. Wen said.
“Tell me what Freud would have said to change her ways,” I said.
“I’m not Freud but, according to him, poets discovered the subconscious way before he did. And the Chinese have nurtured the intuition rather than the intellect for thousands of years. All those poet-magistrates wrote poems rather than legislation. So, Freud would have seen merit in Chinese culture.”
“I suppose it wasn’t all bad, but didn’t Mao burn all the books and fill the void with sterile propaganda for decades?”
“China’s culture goes back thousands of years. That’s long enough for it to get under people’s skin and into their DNA. It’s difficult to change cultural beliefs that go back that far.”
“Yeah well, Niang, she abandoned them too at one stage, but now she’s force-feeding ignorant nonsense to my girls.”
“Cultural perspectives are not ignorant, my dear child. That’s an eschewed perspective that places you outside its collective congruity.” Dr. Wen sighed. “It estranges you.”
“I see myself as an outlier rather than an outcast… Besides, I’m not talking about the collective, I’m talking about Niang. She should know better,” I said. “She was there when Dad taught us to pray.”
Looking exhausted, Dr. Wen deflected the topic. “Tell me about school.”
Zwolle was where my brothers and I stopped moving around as one entity because they put us in different grades. Perception has it that Chinese parents are demanding about academic performance. But my parents had no expectations for me and grade school in Holland was a relaxed business with no homework. Notwithstanding, the education system was on track. Kids were subject to an aptitude test at the end of grade school to decide which of the four tiers of secondary they should be placed in. I was surprised when my parents came home from parent consultation one evening and my father said, with a smile, “You did great.”
They assigned me to the highest tier, although I was the antithesis of a good student. Mr. Archer, the most memorable of my high-school teachers, could attest to that. He was a lovely, tortured man, chubby with hanging cheeks and greasy shoulder-length hair. He taught Latin, a subject seldom elected, and only eight kids, including me, picked it.
“Latin is a dead language,” Mr. Archer explained during the first class, “which means, no one speaks it.”
“The Pope does,” someone contradicted him.
“It is the official language at the Vatican, but no one speaks it for real.”
Seeing eight blank faces in front of him, he continued, “When no one speaks a language, it dies.”
The textbook’s theme was Pompeii, and we dissected words, nouns, and the most excruciating verbs in texts about the different ways people died after Vesuvius erupted. There were pictures of plaster-casts of men, women, children, babies, and animals caught in every dying position imaginable. Each lesson depicted the last day of someone’s life. Because the group was so small, it was taught in our tiny school library. Sometimes, I would reach behind me and grab a book from the shelf and read it under the table while, above it, the dying continued and Latin nouns, verbs, and adjectives were regurgitated. One day, Mr. Archer spotted me and asked me to put the book back.
Feeling slighted since I wasn’t cheating or horsing around, I climbed on top of the tables grouped in the middle of the space; I walked over the tabletops, planting my feet in-between the notebooks and pencil bags to the opposite edge of the grouped tables; I got on my knees, put th
e book back on the shelf, got up and walked back the same way I came.
Once I was back in my seat, Mr. Archer, having decided not to reward my ‘attention-seeking’ behavior with attention, said, “I appreciate it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I grinned, having enjoyed the stunt immensely.
I guessed Mr. Archer’s supernatural tolerance had something to do with my knack for guessing Latin’s inane and illogical verbs without having to invest any time.
“I don’t know how you do this.” Mr. Archer would roll his little eyes when he dropped my paper marked with an A-star on my table.
Not surprisingly, I was not popular at school outside my small group of proteges, but I was not unpopular either. We were outliers who, not obliged to live up to any reputation, had the pleasure and the liberty to speak our mind and do as we liked.
When it was time to leave home for university, I declined the unconditional offer to study medicine. Being young and impressionable, that was my response after receiving Niang’s advice how, for women, family was more important than career. The fact that they had no objection if I chose Edinburgh U, where my uncle Mel had helped me apply for architecture as a back-up, suggested the issue was about their sons being outshone. Alas, Edinburgh—whose great distance away from my parents was the premium attraction—made me a conditional offer requiring an average of 85% for all 6 of my subjects. This was because the offer came in the middle of the graduation year and I hadn’t been working hard for the first set of school exams. Hence, I had to get close to one hundred percent in the nationwide exams to hike up that score.
My odds were bad. I painted my room and everything in it a spectral blue like a pot of paint had exploded. For a month I studied twelve hours a day, dripped melted wax on my hands and sharpened knives to keep myself awake. Fast forward to the end, I got full scores in all subjects but Dutch. The principal wrote me a reference letter saying I was in the 99.99 percentile despite the 2% I was short—so I was in. I arrived in Scotland in late September, just in time to catch the last week of sunshine. The medieval stone town of Edinburgh was basking in a golden glow, promising the onset of a fairytale.
