The Rice Paper Diaries

by Francesca Rhydderch

  Elsa missed Nannon. She missed having someone to talk to, someone to tell her the baby would be fine this time. She wiped her eyes on a clean handkerchief and went to put it in the laundry for Lam. She went back to the terrace and sat in her usual place, watching the sun moving from one end of the sky to the other, counting the days.

  II

  Lin:

  Hong Kong, 1941

  1

  I arrived in Hong Kong at daybreak. I stood on deck and watched the sun split open over the harbour, spilling light like a silkworm pushing its way out of a cocoon.

  I was taken to the port office with the other girls. People came to collect them, but no one came for me. There were two men sitting behind a desk, one in a black uniform with gold brocade at the cuffs, the other in a linen suit. The man in uniform took off his white peaked cap and put it down next to his notebook; each time he asked me a question in English, the man in linen started translating it into Cantonese straightaway, too quickly, each voice drowning out the other, and I could make neither head nor tail of what was being said. If you had been there with me, Third Sister, I might have smiled inside, but you were far away and I was nervous.

  I’d had plenty of time to prepare my answers, sitting with the others, talking as the mountains glided by, until we got to the junction of the three rivers. No one knew then what would come next, and we were all quiet until we reached Victoria Harbour.

  I showed the men my piece of paper, and told them I had a sponsor coming to meet me, but they didn’t believe me.

  ‘Where is she?’ they asked.

  That question I couldn’t answer. Lam had said she would be here.

  ‘Perhaps she hasn’t yet finished work,’ I said.

  The man in uniform behind the desk laughed then, and lifted his pen, shaking drops of ink off the nib. It wasn’t a nice laugh.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked the Chinese man in the English suit.

  He said, ‘What is her job, that she is out walking the streets until dawn?’

  ‘She is a ta chup in a rich household, and now they need an amah to look after the baby, and she has sent for me.’

  They put me to sit on a bench in the corridor. While I waited, I watched the pieces of paper pinned to the cork board opposite flutter as people came in and out of the main door to the building, sending a hot draught of air up the stairwell. Each time the door opened, I could hear sounds from the harbour outside, crates being dragged down gangplanks, men’s voices shouting instructions, the chugging of engines, and heavy coils of rope being flung onto the jetty. When it was closed I could be quiet in myself again, my thoughts accompanied only by the mechanical humming that filled the air around me: not dragonflies, nor Mother singing to herself as she walks out into the fields when she wakes, but the rhythmical whirring of a fan hanging from the ceiling.

  They called me back into the office.

  ‘We will have to make other arrangements,’ they were saying, when Lam came into the room. She looked as if she had been in a rush to get here.

  ‘Mui mui,’ she said.

  Her face was gleaming with sweat and her plait was coming loose. She was wearing a red cheongsam with a slit up the side, and lipstick. So this was what she looked like now she was a Hong Kong girl. Maybe soon I would look like this too. The English man glanced at me as if he was thinking the same thing.

  ‘Your sister,’ he said through the interpreter. First Sister, I wanted to add.

  It was only once we were out on the street that Lam pulled me to her. She looked just as she always had, with a dimple to one side of her mouth when she smiled, but the expression in her eyes wasn’t the same as before, not as bright and cheeky.

  ‘It’s my day off,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you to the kongsi fong and then I have to go.’

  ‘Where?’ I said, but she pressed her shiny lips together and didn’t answer.

  I followed her. She hadn’t offered to take one of my bags, and my arms were dragged down as I walked behind. There were men pulling rickshaws, and women standing at open stalls pointing at fish darting about in shallow containers filled with water. People were all around me, the rising heat of the day coming off them. It wouldn’t have surprised me if I’d heard their hearts beating underneath their skin in time with the clip-clop of their clogs against the pavement. I saw men glancing at Lam as they passed us. She kept her head still and stared straight ahead, which only made them look again.

  ‘Keep up,’ she said to me.

  I wanted to ask how far we had left to walk, but I was afraid to speak out loud, knowing that my accent would give me away to these strangers, that even the sound of my own voice would make me homesick.

  ‘We’re here,’ she announced, turning round and taking one of the bags.

  She waved her arm towards a door propped open by a bicycle between a fruit seller’s and a laundry. The paint was peeling off the frame and the rush mat on the other side of the threshold was worn through.

  ‘Home,’ she said, smiling for the first time. ‘Come on.’

  I followed her, holding on tight to the handles of my bag. It was dark inside after the morning sunlight on the streets. There were walls all around, and air that had been inside for too long, and no windows. I blinked a few times, to get the dust and tears out of my eyes, held out an arm to the banister, and pulled my way up the steps without giving myself time to think about going back.

  Upstairs, there was a long window overlooking the street. The walls were covered with shelves loaded with bags like mine, clothes folded inside. Open-topped bamboo baskets were hooked up from the low ceiling. There were low, narrow cupboards of different shapes and sizes, all styles. They too were covered with objects: thermos flasks, bottles, and tins. Next to the door was a mirror with a wooden frame, surrounded by four small mirrors. There was a row of five beds against a far wall, each divided from the other by a partition made of poor wood, the kind that Father would sell to make a fire. They were slatted into bars, so that each bed had some light from the window as well as a small space all along one side and one end. There was an empty bed next to the window.

  ‘This is yours,’ Lam said, putting my bag down on the bare floor. I sat down on the bed and looked across to the building opposite, at a girl sitting on a bed next to an open window like mine, looking back at me. I breathed in the smell of shark’s fin soup coming up from the street, and remembered the bed I grew up in, with all of us sleeping together, bound up tight in heavy blankets in winter, each other’s sweat trickling along our limbs in summer, so familiar it felt like our own.

  Lam moved away to her own bed, closest to the door, a good distance from the noise and smell of the street, and put her handbag down on it. She went to the mirror to comb and plait her hair.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

  She smiled again, but she looked as if she was thinking of something else.

  ‘When will we go to work?’ I asked, knotting her hair carefully so the plait was neat but not too tight.

  ‘Not today.’

  She turned to the side and patted her hair to make sure it was smooth where I’d combed it back from her face. ‘It’s my day off, I told you. Tomorrow morning, you will come with me, and help me until Mrs Elsa is awake and ready to see you. Now, get some rest. I have to go out for a while, but I’ll bring you something to eat when I come back.’

  I didn’t ask her again where she was going. I sat back on my bed and looked down onto the street, at all the heads bobbing up and down, and at the corner of the harbour that I could see from here, through the steam coming up from the hawkers’ stalls selling hot noodles. The water would have been beautiful in the sun if I had been able to see it, but it was covered in junks and tugs all driving at each other to see who could get past first, until a liner nosed its way through, forcing them back.

  I thought of you, Third Sister, and my promise to write. I took a few cents from my purse and went down into the street. I was afraid, and wondered how I would find my way bac
k. I hoped I wouldn’t have to walk too far, and it must have been my day for good fortune after all, because I had only walked two blocks when I saw him, the letter-writer, with his stall set up on the pavement, a piece of canvas on two poles with scrawled-over pieces of paper tacked up behind him, and a small table across his knees. He saw me before I saw him. By the time I caught his eye he already had his hand held out to usher me to the stool that sat empty in front of him.

  I sat down and words deserted me. I didn’t know what to say, where to begin.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ he asked me gently, reaching for his pen. He had two pots on the table, one for brushes, one for pens. Sheaves of paper were rolled up underneath his chair, on a tray. He pulled out one of the smallest ones. He must be used to this. A girl off one of the ships from the Pearl River Delta, still smelling of the mulberries that grow on her parents’ poor smallholding. He knew what to expect. A few words, just to let the family know I’ve arrived. You too will have to pay someone to read it to you, after all.

  ‘Between Canton and Dongguan,’ I whispered, the words catching in my throat despite my best intentions, and somehow, just saying the names attached to my birthplace brought my story out all in a rush, like the rivers that run downstream towards the South China Sea. Once I had begun I found it easy to keep going, and although I had only given him a little money, the letter-writer kept going too, until I saw that his knuckles had turned into swollen yellow bulbs like lychees, and he let the pen drop from his grip.

  I picked it up from the pavement and put it on the table.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said getting up. ‘It’s just that there is so much to say.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, handing me the letter in its envelope. ‘Only a cent a time. Make sure you come back and see me again.’ He smiled as he handed it to me.

  I didn’t tell him I wasn’t even sure that I would find my way back to his stall again. To me the street signs and shop hoardings were meaningless scribbles, just like the letter I’d paid him to write. But I was sorry to leave. He had taken something of me and put it down on paper to keep always, and if I’d been able to read it, I wonder if I might have hung onto that letter for myself.

  2

  I don’t know much yet, but the English words my new mistress uses are starting to take root, flowering into whole sentences about Mari’s naps, her walks, and what clothes she should wear.

  When Mari wakes up and has just been changed, she likes to have five minutes in my arms to come to, stretching her hands around her, feeling her way like a blind man, running her fingers over my cheeks and lips. I pretend to snap at her fingers, playing shadow puppets on the wall. She smiles for the first time, full of delight at herself for being able to show her pleasure. She reminds me of you, Third Sister, so calm and trusting. And holding her reminds me of myself at seven years old, sitting on the threshold, waiting for Mother and Father to come back from the fields, rocking you in a shawl our grandmother made years ago for First Sister, the winter after the bad summer that only our parents can remember. Mother always cried when she talked about that summer, although not in front of you.

  After lunch, Mrs Elsa will call out from the living room, ‘Ah Lin. Are you ready to take Mari out?’

  ‘What?’ I say. She speaks so quickly; sometimes it is difficult to follow what she is saying. It is a shame Captain Jones is hardly ever home. He speaks our language, because of his customs work. He tells me he learned it from the pirates he has to chase, although I don’t think he is serious. He is funny, always joking, even if supper is running late or Lam has broken an ornament when she’s been dusting, her mind on other things. ‘It was only some old tat from Wan Chai market,’ he will say, patting Mrs Elsa’s arm, making her laugh too.

  ‘Time for Mari’s walk, dear,’ she’ll say again, coming into the nursery and stroking the top of Mari’s head.

  Mari’s life is like a quartered orange, cut into segments of feed, wash, change, sleep. Looking after her is easy; when it is time for the next task, there is a shift in the air between us. She turns her head in the cot and gurgles at me, or waves her arms, as if she is trying to get up on her own, without help. Soon she gets stronger; when I feed her she puts out one hand, tapping rhythmically on the bottle as if she would like to feed herself. She keeps her eyes fixed on mine.

  Today was different from our usual routine, although things started out as they always did. The road wound crookedly down the hill, making a shape against the Peak like a bonsai tree that I could see in miniature from Wan Chai on my days off. It seemed so far away, then, the apartment and the captain and Mrs Elsa. And Mari, waking up in her darkened room wondering where I was, I was sure, and crying for me, and me not coming because I always went back to the kongsi fong on the days I wasn’t working, as I was supposed to.

  I held on tightly to the curved steel handle of the pram, and pulled my weight away from it to stop it rolling too quickly down the hill. I was happy, because taking Mari for a walk for an hour or two was as good as a day off to me – no, better, because I was away from the apartment, and all the jobs I was supposed to do, one after the next, but I still had Mari with me. It was the middle of the afternoon and the air still quivered with heat. I adjusted the shade over Mari’s face, keeping one hand firmly on the pram. There were mosquitoes hanging in clouds under the trees, and butterflies dancing black and orange among them. I turned the final corner, and made my way along a back street to the botanical gardens.

  It was Lam who had sent me there first.

  ‘All the girls from home go there,’ she’d said.

  ‘That sounds lively.’

  ‘If you have nothing else to do, I suppose.’

  Lam didn’t seem to like anything any more, apart from her fortnightly holiday. She worked thirteen days in a row on the promise of a day off. She would begin her fortnight with her head down and her eyes bleary. She would find it difficult to smile, even at Mrs Elsa, and she didn’t exchange two words with me. She never told me what she did or where she went; she just left her things at the kongsi fong and abandoned me there in the dingy half-light, and I didn’t see her until she woke me the next morning for us to start our journey up to work for five. Sleepy myself, I would always forget to ask Lam about her day’s holiday until we were at the apartment, standing straight in our clean white tunics and black lawn trousers, waiting for Mrs Elsa to come and inspect us and give us our instructions for the day. By then it would be too late, and the day’s work would press in on us without restraint.

  In the afternoons, though, everything would open up around me again as I made my way down the hill with the pram. The botanical gardens were filled with the sound of laughter. The spaces on the grass under the biggest trees were always taken by other girls dressed in black and white uniforms like me, and rows of perambulators parked in the shade to keep them cool. Crawling around on the grass with the water lilies spread out lazily in the shallow pond behind them were small white buds of babies – grouped together in some places, and spread out singly in others.

  ‘Hello Lin,’ said the girl next to me. She wore her plait rolled into a chignon on the back of her head and when she smiled she showed her full cheekbones.

  We took our babies out of their prams and passed them round, each admiring the other’s, as that was the polite thing to do.

  ‘Celia has another tooth!’ said one, holding up a stocky baby with blonde hair.

  ‘My daughter has three – look!’ said another. She is from Sam Sui. That is why she is always determined to better everyone else, Mother would say. ‘My daughter’ is what we all call our babies. Even though they’re not our babies. We understand what is meant by it.

  ‘My daughter is still too little for teeth,’ I said, holding up Mari for inspection. I knew it didn’t matter that Mari had nothing to show yet – no teeth, no funny crawl on her bottom, no first words, in Cantonese or English. My daughter has the prettiest eyes and the sweetest disposition. She never cries.

  W
e put our babies back in their prams and started to leave the park in twos and threes. When I looked back there was no one left apart from a tired coolie who had taken our place on the bench in the shade. He had a shaved head and wore nothing but a pair of shorts; across his back you could see where sweat mixed with fish salt had dried on his skin. He was eating rice from a bowl, holding it up with one hand to catch every grain, his head tilted right back.

  I waited at the gates for Wang. I hoped that I wasn’t late. I had forgotten to ask one of the others if it was four o’clock yet, and I knew Mrs Elsa would need help to get ready to go out for dinner. I had kept Mari out of the pram and strapped her to my back to carry her the length of the park. I sang to her as we waited. She chuckled in my ear, then fell asleep, her breathing slowing and deepening, resting her head against the back of my neck.

  I was about to take her out of the straps and put her in the pram when Wang pulled up in the car. He parked up close to the kerb, ready to lift the pram straight into the boot without trouble. Mrs Elsa was sitting in the back. She moved over towards me as I loosened the ties, her hands held out ready to take Mari. I sat back against the leather seat.

  ‘I hope I’m not late, Mrs Jones,’ I said.

  ‘No, not at all, Ah Lin.’ She held Mari close to her in her lap. She wasn’t smiling the way she usually did. ‘I’m not going out now, in any case.’

  ‘Poor you. Poor Mr Tommy.’ I wished I had more English. I didn’t like having to search for the right words.

  ‘Oh, Mr Tommy’s still going out,’ she said. ‘It’s just me that’s staying at home.’

  I should have been enjoying my ride in this grand car, but the seat was slippery and Ah Wang drove too fast. And I didn’t like Mrs Elsa’s sad expression. It made me feel as if I didn’t know what to do next.

  We were just about to turn onto our cul-de-sac when I saw Lam, walking with a man. A white man, in a soldier’s uniform. The smile on her face made her seem like a young girl again. I glanced over at Mrs Elsa, but she was looking at Mari, stroking the single strands of hair on her forehead.