by Peter Carey
"You will come to the herbalist's with me and I will make you a scholar of herbs. I will teach you to shoe a horse. I will teach you to make money. You will polish your boots like I show you. Why am I doing this for you, little Englishman?"
"Because you were an orphan, sir."
"Roll up," roared Goon Tse Ying. "Roll up, roll up. Look at them," he indicated the men playing mah-jong in the corner. "They are in gaol. They have locked themselves up in Wong's. They have made themselves prisoners. They give Wong all their money and Wong feeds them and buys what they need at the shops. They cannot speak English. They do not know what 'roll up' means. I say it and they smile. They nod at me. They think I am moon-touched, but they know I am rich. They respect me and think I am dangerous. I buy them presents because they are lonely and unhappy. Next week I will give poor Hing fifty pounds so he can have a bride come out from China. He does not know. You watch."
"Hing," he shouted in English. "Next month I give you fifty pounds."
Hing, sitting on a chair by the kitchen servery, looked up from his newspaper, took the sodden cigarette from his mouth and gave a stained smile.
"See," Goon Tse Ying said. "He does not know what I am saying. He does not know the meaning of 'fifty pounds' or 'roll up' either. Tell me, my pet Englishman, what is the meaning of 'roll up'?"
I didn't know.
"Pour me brandy, little Englishman, and eat your soup. It will warm your heart and make you forget this terrible country. Why am I kind to you?"
"Because you were an orphan, sir."
"No," Goon said quietly. His voice became soft, amber, vaporous as the brandy on his foreign breath. "It is to show I am not a barbarian like them."
In my confusion I thought he was referring to the Chinese.
"You will sleep here," Goon Tse Ying told me. "I have arranged with Wong. You will share a room with old Hing and his nephew. Hing will cook your meals. In the morning I will come and get you and we will sit at the herbalist's. He does not speak English but he is a good herbalist. I am helping him out for a while, to translate for him. He is a silly man to have bought the business with no English and I don't know what will happen to him when I leave."
My bedroom was on the other side of the muddy courtyard, a long lean-to made from corrugated iron with an earth floor. I could not shut my eyes. Hing coughed all night. His nephew snored. I cried in the dark, assailed by garlic and the sweet smell of Hing's evening pipe.
When, at last, I did sleep, I dreamed the Chinese came and ate my hands.
2
The herbalist was Mr Chin, the uncle of the Mr Chin to whom I would later sell my snakes. He was very handsome with his blue waving hair and his gold tooth but when he saw me his forehead scarred itself with a frown as messy as a bulldog's. Goon Tse Ying listened to what Mr Chin had to say and then he explained to me that I would not be permitted to sit in the consulting room. This was because all of Mr Chin's patients were English gentlemen and ladies and they would be embarrassed, Goon told me sternly, to repeat their complaints in front of a boy.
So I never learned the art of herbalism, nor, for that matter, did I master any of the five languages Goon had promised, although I did learn to count from one to ten in Hokein.
Goon was neither embarrassed nor apologetic about this setback. He announced that I was to return to the Eastern Markets and learn about vegetables. He himself had been a hawker in the Palmer River rush in Northern Queensland.
It is the nature of childhood to continually encounter things one does not understand, to be thrown here, to be put there, to offend without meaning to, to be praised without understanding why, and I do not remember being unduly unhappy to be sent to the Eastern Markets.
I remember the cold, the paraffin lamps in the early mornings, the chatter of Wong Li Ho, the spitting of Nick Wong. I remember the red-faced Scot with big ears who roared the virtues of his cabbages from dawn till afternoon, the gaunt women with red fingers protruding from their dirty mittens. I remember knocking my chilblains against boxes of cauliflowers. I remember bags of potatoes I could not lift. But most of all I remember that no one hit me and that when noon arrived I was permitted to depart and then I would walk up through the busy streets to Nicholson Street in Carlton and wait for Goon Tse Ying. When the last consultation was finished he would take me by the hand and escort me back to the cafe within whose walls, it seemed, there was contained everything in the world I would need to know.
In the muddy courtyard, amidst indignant hens, he not only taught me how to fight with my feet but also how to skin a crow by putting a nick in its neck, inserting a bamboo rod between skin and flesh, and blowing. Both of these skills were useful to me in later life. He took me to the kitchen and showed me how to make soup from the crow. He sat me on his knee while Hing butchered a pig and showed me how every part of it could be used for food.
He took me to the front office to instruct me in abacus, but, finding Wong busy with it, demonstrated the pressure points of the body instead, showing me how these could be used to immobilize an opponent. While Wong entered the single men's wages into his ledger, Goon Tse Ying taught me to stand in such a way that I would appear bigger than I was, or, conversely, how to appear smaller. Wong did not complain once. There was such clutter in this dark front room, such a tangle of rope and canvas, incense for jossing, shoes for horses, even a monkey foetus in a bottle of green liquid whose purpose I never discovered, such a disorder of goods, such a tangle of raffia, that the presence of a noisy rich man and a quiet sharp-faced boy did nothing extra to distract him from the wonderful order of his ledgers.
In the dark passage, looked upon by the alien visage of the King of England, Goon taught me the different accents of this King's language and how to use each one. He also instructed me in the importance of clean shoes and how a pair of very shiny shoes can give the appearance of great wealth even if the rest of one's clothes are nothing but rags.
And in the steamy dining room, with rain combing the brick-damp air outside, he taught me history and geography.
"Roll up," he called to the other Chinese. "Look at them, they grin, they do not know. If they were at Lambing Flat they would be dead men. They would hear the English calling to each other: roll up, roll up, and they would go on with their work. What is Lambing Flat, little Englishman?"
"I don't know."
"Of course you don't know. Lambing Flat is near Young in New South Wales. It was a big rush. I was there. We were all there. Roll up, roll up, that is what the English miners called to each other. May you never hear it. May you die never having heard the English come in their horses and carts. They carried the English flag, an ugly thing. They had a band. They had pipes and drums and they came in their thousands. They did not like the Chinese, little Englishman, because we were clever. They sold us their old mines. They thought they would cheat us, but we made money. They drew a line across the diggings and said we must not cross it. Still we made money. We worked hard, even us children. My father was sick. He had ulcers on his feet, and still he worked. My mother worked too, alongside the men. Her feet had been bound. They were tiny pretty things, but she carried rocks in baskets and helped make the big water race. But the Englishmen thought it was all their country and all their gold and they played their band and came out to get us. They drove the Chinese down the river bank. They had axe handles and picks. They ran over my uncle Han in a cart and broke his leg and they broke my father's head open with a water pipe. You will meet people who say that none of this happened. They will say they gave John Chinaman a fright, but they are liars. Roll up, roll up," he bellowed, "roll up. Kill John Chinaman," he roared at the Wongs, the Wongs' giggling children, the dark-eyed single men with no backsides in their English trousers. "My father's brains," he whispered while the thin hair lifted in the draught from the courtyard, "like in the pig Hing cut up. Pour me brandy. What would you do?"
"I would run," I said.
"My uncle Han ran. They had horses and carts. They ran their
wheel across him."
"I would hide."
"They would burn down your tent."
"I would fight them."
"There were too many. What would you do?"
I was caught in the terror of Lambing Flat which I imagined to be a great wilderness of rocks as sharp as needles. I had no trouble imagining the terror, the bands of men with my father's merciless eyes.
It was quiet for a moment in Wong's. Hing's mah-jong tiles stood in an unbroken wall.
"Do you know what to do?" he whispered.
"No."
"You disappear," Goon Tse Ying hissed, his great hand totally enclosing his glass. "Completely."
In the courtyard, old Mrs Wong wrung the neck of a Rhode Island Red and in the dining room Hing spat and broke open the wall of mah-jong tiles. I could not take my eyes from the glass that peeked through the fingers of Goon's hand. I did not doubt he could disappear.
"I will teach you too, little Englishman. It will do two things of great merit. The first of these things is to make you safe, and I do this for goodness, because I care for you, because you have no father to help you. But I do it also to show you the terror of we Chinese at Lambing Flat. Because it is only possible to disappear by feeling the terror. So I tell you now that I am giving you this gift as revenge. Are you old enough to understand what I am saying to you?"
"I am ten."
"Why am I telling you?"
"So I can feel the terror." I shivered.
"It is a magician's gift," Goon Tse Ying said. "It is both good and evil. It is because I love and hate you. Will you accept it?"
"I am only ten," I pleaded.
"It is old enough," Goon Tse Ying announced. "We will start tomorrow."
3
Goon Tse Ying was as hard to grasp as a raging sea with waves driving one way and tides pulling the other. He could be loud, play the fool like old Mr Chan at his ugly daughter's pre-wedding feast, going from table to table with his brandy bottle and loudly, raucously even, assuming the role that was expected of him, so that an Englishman, not understanding, would wish to know the name of the old man who was disgracing himself in so un-Chinese a manner. Likewise, if Goon's gravelling laugh and thumping brandy glass on Wong's scrubbed table made him appear impatient or foolish, or even mad, there was also a very cautious and serious part to his character that did not reveal itself while he was playing the rich benefactor. He had many responsibilities which he honoured ungrudgingly. These responsibilities meant that he could not always keep the promises he made to me.
His enthusiasm would have me learn all languages, understand the subtleties of astrology, sex one-day-old chicks and use an abacus. He made me many promises about things which he seemed to forget about entirely. As for the business of disappearing, it could not, he told me, be begun on the next day at all. I had not inquired. But when he brought up the subject it was as a reprimand.
"Not today, little Englishman, and not tomorrow. If you rush at a thing like this you will get nowhere. There are preparations to undertake. Nick Wong must have someone to replace the little work you do for him. There is equipment I need. I must find someone else to translate for Mr Chin whose English is worse than it was a week ago. I also have a marriage to arrange for myself. There are three things," he said, no longer an Englishman, "which are unfilial. And to have no posterity is the greatest of them. What does unfilial mean?"
I did not know.
"Learn," he said, his mouth full of noodles. "What hope is there for you if you know less than a Chinaman? Next week", he said, ladling soup into his bowl, "I will teach you to disappear."
But it was not next week, it was two days later, and Goon Tse Ying shook me awake in my bed at three in the morning. "Come," he hissed, "be quiet. Do not wake old Hing."
He took me to the kitchen where he already had the big wood oven crackling. He fed me a bowl of pork porridge with an egg in it. I broke the yolk and stirred it into the porridge, and, looking up, found him staring at me intently. The flames from the open door of the firebox made his face appear slightly sinister. It accentuated all the foreign features his perfect English and his tailored suits cloaked so densely. "You are learning already," he said, still staring at me. "For now you feel warm and content. You enjoy your porridge. But by tonight you will know terror. You will know the cold of the terror and the warm of the porridge. Now shine your boots and we will go."
He had a good horse and a smart sulky waiting outside. Drugged by the warm porridge in my stomach and the horse sweat and leather in my nostrils, rugged in a thick blanket, I went to sleep. When I awoke I found the dawn already gone and the sulky bouncing along a narrow gravel road through one of those flat featureless landscapes where it is the lot of sheep and their gaolers to spend their lives. Here and there were failed dams and along the fence lines, new plantations of cypress pines which might one day break the wind which now flattened the dun-coloured grasses. It was crow country.
We came to a small depression in the road where a slow creek dribbled its way over rusty rocks. A few eucalypts, spared the new settler's axe, clung to the top of the eroded banks.
Goon reined in the sweating mare and surveyed this scene with satisfaction. "This is a good place to learn," he announced. "There are rocks, a river, ugly trees. It is a terrible place." He rubbed his hands together. "Go and play while I get ready."
I put aside my rug and reluctantly abandoned the comforting smells of the expensive sulky which had evoked memories of days when I had a father beside me and a cannon behind me.
"Play by the creek," Goon instructed.
I was not ready for the lesson. I tugged up my socks to cover my knees and shivered. I walked slowly down to the creek. I was cold. My chilblains itched. I did not like the sound of the crows. I lifted up the rocks and looked for beetles or mud-eyes to torment.
Goon Tse Ying had many voices, but I did not recognize the curdled cry that shortly reached my ears.
Goon Tse Ying, dressed in his formal three-piece suit, his watch chain flashing in the winter sun, came bounding towards me waving an axe handle.
"Roll up," he screamed, "roll up."
The terrible Chinaman leapt from crumbling bank to gnarled root, from root to scoured clay. His face was hideous. The axe handle belted me across the shoulders and sent me sprawling.
I lay across the rocks blubbering, as broken as the beetles I had sought to injure.
"Now, you see," said Goon, standing over me. "It is not so easy. Get up. I did not hit you so hard."
I got up, bawling loudly. "I want my daddy."
"You have no daddy, little Englishman. You have only me. Now pay attention and I will show you how to stand so that you will disappear."
It was a terrible day. I learned to stand in the way he showed me, quite the opposite to what you'd expect for, rather than make me less conspicuous, it seemed to make me more so. I teetered on one leg, with one foot raised and resting on my knee. I stretched one hand in the air as if waving for attention. It did not work. He hit me time and time again. I wept. I begged. I tried to run away, but he caught me effortlessly.
"I will run you down," he bellowed as he chased. "You will go beneath my wheel."
But that night, as I nursed my wounds, he was kind to me. He stroked my head and told me stories about China to which he must return before his death. "To have amassed great wealth," he said, "and not return home is comparable to walking in magnificent clothes at night." He rubbed a cold camphor ointment on my bruises. He wrapped me in a blanket and made a soup heavy with duck. He fed me milk and brandy and put me to bed in the tent.
But on the next morning his great face had transformed. The skin was tight and waxy and the bones beneath it seemed as hard and cold as marble. The camp fire was cold and he showed no inclination to light it. He had rubbed grease in his hair.
"I have no time to play games," he told me, kicking at the dead ashes as if to deny the warmth of the night before. "I am buying a business in Grafton from a man I do
not trust. You are slow and stupid. You are too English. You do not believe harm will come to you. Well, I give you my word that if you do not disappear this morning, first time, I will kill you. I do not have time to play games. I am thirty-seven years old and soon I must get married."
If you had seen him you would not have doubted him. He did not look at me. He took out his gold watch and spat on it. He rubbed its glass with a white handkerchief. Then he held it to his small flat ear and listened to it. It was obvious my death had no interest to him.
"Go and play by the creek," he said.
I did not beseech him. I did not cry. I walked down to the creek.
He did not come immediately. He squatted on his haunches and sang "Waltzing Matilda" in a wavering falsetto. I loathe the song to this day.
I did not look at him. When he had finished the song I heard him clear his throat and spit.
"No Chinese," he yelled.
I stood as I was taught. I held my shaking arm high. I teetered on my foot. Urine ran down my leg. I heard the swish of the axe handle. I began to quiver. My whole body began to hum like a tuning fork. My bones vibrated. I was a steel bridge marched on by an army. I was a glass held before a famous soprano.
I disappeared and the world disappeared from me. I did not escape from fear, but went to the place where fear lives. I existed like waves from a tuning fork in chloroformed air. I could not see Goon Tse Ying. I was nowhere.
I cannot tell how long I was like this, but finally the world came back to me and Goon Tse Ying was squatting a little way away from me grinning.
"Now," he said, "we will have a feast and I will teach you to eat chicken's innards."
4
I know for a fact that there are easier methods of disappearing than facing a Chinaman with an axe handle. It is no more difficult to learn than driving a car and does not require real danger for its accomplishment. The terror can be summoned up in the mind, and one does not need to adopt the peculiar stance of Goon Tse Ying: all that is needed is to tense the muscles in a certain way so that they begin to quiver. His odd method of standing helped produce this state but I was a resourceful young chap and soon found I could do it even while lying down in my bed.
