by Linda Jaivin
‘I should leave you alone to read your letter.’ Disappointed, but suffering no loss of face, Mrs Jin made her exit, Mimi mewling and wriggling in the crook of her arm.
When I was younger, I wrote letters all the time. Everyone did. Handwritten letters of friendship, news, gossip, love, revelation. The choice of paper, the handwriting, the crossings out, the blots of ink, the places where one pen ran out and another was substituted (a ‘sorry!’ hovering like bird wings overhead), the little drawings that were the ancestors of emoticons, the insertions of photos and newspaper clippings, everything down to the choice of stamp offered a snapshot of the writer. The trumpet blare of social media seems so graceless and corporate by comparison. And yet all forms of personal correspondence, whether they arrive in an envelope at your door, ping into your email inbox or onto your Facebook wall, or even, as once was common, come typed in all capitals on a nearly expired ribbon from the telegraph office, have one thing in common: we receive them with bated excitement, for they light flares of possibility and hope that they will convey love, inheritance, a prize, the surprise reappearance of a long-lost friend, or some other news, preferably good, that will rock your world … that they will change your life. No matter how many times they fail to do this, or worse, deliver bad news, the uncanny, unreasonable light of optimism burns on.
One difference between electronic communication and the physical letter is that the former is too readily unwrapped, too quickly revealed. It’s the difference between the person who jumps up onto your bed naked with a ta da! and another who waits patiently, seductively in the dark for you to undress them. The end result might be spectacular, disappointing or something in-between, but the slower process allows you more time to anticipate and dream.
It had been a long time since I had received a proper letter. Inevitably, perhaps, my thoughts turned to the two shoeboxes crammed with letters from Q, his impatient blue-penned characters racing along the faint lines imprinted on the tissue-thin paper. Although we both lived in Beijing, we wrote to one another all the time. Writing letters was just what you did in the days before mobiles, when even landlines were uncommon here. Granted, a lot of his letters were little more than notes telling me to wait for him somewhere the following day, or informing me that he wouldn’t be able to make some appointment after all. I was so besotted, I kept them all. The shoeboxes were stashed in the bottom of the old camphor tea chest that was full of silk and counted as the only other piece of furniture in the room, aside from the bookshelves. I’d tied the letters up in ribbons, just like in some Victorian novel. With a jolt, I realised that this was the first time I’d thought of Q this morning. As usual, I wasn’t sure whether to feel guilty or congratulate myself.
I carefully tore open the envelope and unfolded the letter. I made space on the kangzhuo and smoothed it out. It was just a single page and was written mostly in Chinese, with the odd English phrase or couple of sentences woven in: the work, I assumed at first glance, of a Chinese person with a good grasp of English. The calligraphy was not quite native, however, and it was also not easy to decipher, though the dedication was clear enough:
‘Dearly respected Jia Peilin’ (my Chinese name), was followed by a request in Chinese for my ‘refined inspection’ of the letter’s contents. Fun, was my first thought. Elegant formulations and archaic courtesies were among the things I loved best about the Chinese language. Studying in Taiwan, where the old linguistic habits that had graced traditional Chinese life lived on, I’d come to regard them as part of the very marrow of China’s great civilisation.
The Beijing I was introduced to in 1980 was a city still smouldering in the physical and spiritual ruins wrought by three decades of Maoist extremism. It struck me then as the place where Chinese civilisation had gone to die. For a short while, I wondered if I’d made the right decision coming here. But I quickly settled into my new life and my job at the Foreign Languages Press, where I worked as a ‘foreign expert’, polishing the text of the English editions of propaganda magazines like China Reconstructs and the Beijing Review.
One day, I asked the son of a Chinese colleague, a tall, rather dishy boy around my age called Lian, to go for a stroll. We ended up, rather romantically I thought, in the deserted grounds of an old Daoist temple that had been made into a factory in the 1950s, ruined and abandoned. Whatever statuary there had once been had long ago been stolen or smashed to pieces. Wild grasses pushed up the broken paving stones and colonised the roof tiles. A breeze blew up, and the cracked ceramic bells hanging from the eaves of the temple began to ring. Maybe I was just young and so everything was imbued with magic, but I still remember the tingling enchantment of that sound. The two of us stood there gazing up at the bells; I stole a look at Lian and saw the fringe of his scarf dancing in the wind.
I made some reference to Laozi’s Dao De Jing.
‘Dao De what?’ He looked at me as if I was speaking Greek.
Every university student and hippy in the Western world had a copy of the Dao De Jing on their bookshelf at the time, except usually in English translation and spelled Tao Te Ching. Who didn’t know the Dao De Jing? I was convinced he was pulling my leg. He thought I was pulling his when I answered, a little too smart-arsedly, that it was only one of the foundations of China’s traditional culture. I’d forgotten for a moment that Mao had denied his generation their heritage.
The day fell into an even greater shambles when I invited Lian to lunch at the Peking Hotel. We’d ended up around Tiananmen. Back then, there were very few places you could go for a decent meal where you didn’t need grain or meat ration tickets to order, where the floor wasn’t a slippery bed of spittle and bones, and where the service, if not exactly friendly, wasn’t completely indifferent: the restaurant in the Peking Hotel was one. The meal I ordered, modest by Taiwan or Hong Kong standards, was served in the old Beijing way: small tasting dishes, sort of tapas-sized, of boiled peanuts with celery, stir-fried cabbage with mushroom, dry-fried chilli beef, scrambled eggs stir-fried with tomatoes, shredded pork with garlic shoots, and tofu. I only remember the details because of what happened next. We were still eating when Lian suddenly jack-knifed in his seat, bent double with stomach cramps. He could barely breathe for the pain. I was alarmed and confused. If the food had been off, then I should have been feeling the effects too, but I was fine.
It transpired that in all his twenty-three years, he had never eaten that much protein in one meal. My younger Beijing friends today can scarcely believe this story when I tell them. They love going to one or another of Beijing’s many Argentinean grills where, just for starters, costumed waiters deposit what seems like half a cow on your table. They all know the Dao De Jing, whether they’ve read it or not, and between Ma Weidu and bloggers on Ming dynasty history, even the least academically minded among them appear to have acquired some grasp of tradition.
Back then, however, sometimes it seemed that all that remained in Beijing of that grand, ancient, rich culture were some denuded, clapped-out temples and the stubbornly tenacious, courteous pronoun nin, a kind of Chinese vous that came so instinctually to the people of Beijing that I wouldn’t be surprised if one day scientists find there’s a gene for it.
As I scanned the letter, my eyes lit on the phrase , lingzun – your honourable father. Every hair on the back of my neck stood up. I was either on the verge of being brutally conned, or the miraculous, to which Graham Greene was admonishing me to pay attention, was coming at me now in spades. You see, my correspondent said that if I was who he thought I was, then he had something that would answer certain questions about my family background; questions which, he was quite sure, would have haunted me as surely as the answers had haunted him. This, I quickly realised, was that letter, the one for which we wait our entire life.
I don’t like to talk about my family history. It sounds too much like the plot of a third-rate Victorian melodrama, ridiculously contrived and overblown with mystery. At the very least, and to return to that unavoidable word
, you could say my background was very fuza. In fact, it’s possible that if I were a character in a novel and, by some trick, also the reader of that novel, I would not believe in my own existence. But as the cliché has it, truth really is stranger than fiction.
My mother, Alma, was seventeen when she arrived in Sydney on the MV Georgic from England. Her family back in Darlington, disgraced by their unmarried daughter’s condition, had dispatched her to Australia to stay with distant cousins who lived near Terrigal on the Central Coast of New South Wales. She arrived heavily pregnant and much undone by the sea voyage from England as well as a mounting fever and whatever heartache my father had inflicted on her before running off, never to be seen or heard from again. I was born on her eighteenth birthday. She had barely given me suckle when she passed away. Apparently her death was my fault. Upon my otherwise unexceptional and relatively speedy departure from her young and supple womb, it transpired that I’d left a hair on the placental bed; it entered her bloodstream, triggering an allergic reaction that led to cardio-respiratory collapse. Hairs on my pillow are just one of the things that make me feel guilty to this day.
Alma died without ever having revealed the name or identity of my father to anyone. Her scandalised parents back in England either knew nothing or pretended to know nothing about my father other than that he was very much older than she. There were rumours that he was ‘foreign’. No one, however, seemed to know for certain where he’d come from. They knew even less about where he might have gone, if he was still alive, or even what his name had been. My mother had apparently insisted that he was a ‘prince’. His behaviour would seem to indicate otherwise.
Her parents, my maternal grandparents, died not long after she did, of shame or in a motorcar accident, depending on who’s telling the story – Auntie Elsie (shame) or Uncle Jack (accident). So I never met them. I regretted this deeply not just because I was denied the only pair of grandparents I could have possibly known, but also because of what they could have told me about her. About us. Auntie Elsie and Uncle Jack – that’s what I call the cousins who raised me – always claimed to know little about her until she turned up on their doorstep in her swollen despondency.
Once, when I was about eleven, I woke up in the middle of a hot summer night to the murmur of conversation outside my window. Impelled by some intuition or impulse, I tiptoed to the window in my bare feet, carefully avoiding Mouse, the squeaky floorboard. Cigarette smoke and the smell of a burning mosquito coil hit my nostrils the second I pressed my nose to the flyscreen, and I had to stifle the urge to sneeze. Elsie and Jack were sitting on the veranda in their creaky wicker chairs, their backs to me. The street was quiet. Sheldon, our lazy old cat, was lying at the top of the steps, his tail twitching with dreams. Jack was in a singlet, a cigarette dangling loosely between fingers wrapped around a beer. Elsie, in her loose and faded blue cotton housedress, fanned herself with a copy of Women’s Weekly. In her other hand she held a tall glass of gin and tonic, which she’d once explained was fizzy drink for adults. (For the longest time I had understood it to be a kind of iced tea called jee-en.) Her own cigarette lay self-smoking in the ashtray on the arm of her chair. I was thinking I should go back to bed when I heard her speak my mother’s name. Alma. This was such a rare occurrence that I clamped a hand over my mouth, certain that if I didn’t, I’d squeak like Mouse.
From early childhood I was a prodigious reader. I quickly exhausted Elsie and Jack’s collection of books and took to spending a lot of my spare time in the local library, reading down at the beach or in a shady corner of a paddock I shared with a retired palomino horse called Shilo. At the time I was in the middle of a passionate Dickens phase. His stories about orphans enthralled me and at the same time left me consumed with terrifying (if obscurely thrilling) fantasies of being abandoned to an orphanage, a poorhouse or some local Fagin. I’d landed on Elsie and Jack as a newborn when their own children were already adults. Although they raised me as if I were their own daughter, and never gave any sign that they would give me up, I somehow figured out early on that I must have been quite a burden. As a result I did my best to be a good girl, grateful, helpful around the house and conspicuously obedient – even if secretly I fancied myself a cross between Pip from Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Dr Seuss’s anarchic Cat in the Hat. Mostly the Cat in the Hat. I’ve always been one of those people who seem far simpler – and possibly nicer, sweeter, better – than I am, a misconception that has often worked to my advantage.
‘… was always wild,’ my aunt was saying of Alma. ‘Apparently.’
My eyes widened.
She rattled the ice in her jee-en tea and took a sip. I had to strain to catch what they were saying next. Although they had no reason to believe I was awake, they lowered their voices. That’s when I caught a mysterious reference to a ‘Miss Edgy Nation’. It confused me. I’d never heard them mention this oddly named person before. After that their voices dropped further to whispers. Try as I might, I couldn’t hear anything else. Eventually I crept back to my bed and lost myself in a tangled jungle of dreams. In the morning, I remembered Miss Nation, but couldn’t make head or tail of the reference and didn’t dare ask. I puzzled on it for years. When I was a few years older and reading something for a school project on colonial history, I came upon a new word and pursued it to the dictionary, pronouncing it aloud. Miscegenation. ‘Interbreeding between different races’. Something about it resonated in my mind. When the penny dropped, I raced into the bathroom to study myself in the mirror. Bingo.
Elsie picked at something on the front of her housedress. ‘Rumour,’ she said. ‘Rumour and scuttlebutt.’
Jack backed her up, though he couldn’t look me in the eye either. ‘Lots of English people have dark hair and eyes like yours,’ he assured me.
‘But you told me my mother was fair,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ Elsie chimed in. ‘She was. But these things can skip a generation. And your father may well have been, I don’t know, black Irish.’ It was the first time I ever heard them pronounce the word ‘Irish’ as if it wasn’t a disease. As for my amber colouring, they insisted, not unreasonably, that everyone growing up in Australia absorbed some of that honeyed sunshine into their skin.
They had no idea that from the start I loved the idea of miscegenation. It was story. It was mystery. It had a literal touch of the exotic and an outlaw air. Everything I had come to crave. And now it became an intriguing clue to my identity, this miscegenation, and I privately revelled in the whiff of scandal that now joined the two exquisitely carved jade bracelets that had come with my mother and made up the sum total of her legacy to me.
Perhaps it was the absence of facts about my background that made fiction the basis of my ever-replenishing Magic Pudding-like imagination. Along with Dickens I chewed my way through Ray Bradbury, Mark Twain, Isaac Asimov and so much Victoriana that every time I developed a cough I grew hopeful that it might be consumption. But in the end, these marvellous tales left me even more bereft. For all my childish fears, the truth was that I never had to ask for more like Oliver Twist or steal for a living like the Artful Dodger. Auntie Elsie and Uncle Jack raised me with a kind of bewildered, generous love. Their grown-up children always spoiled me when they came to visit. But what I really wanted was to be marooned on a desert island, to raft the Mississippi, to travel on spaceships, spend a weekend in a country house with Jeeves, discover madwomen in an attic (if I couldn’t be the madwoman myself), and to have at least a shot at circumnavigating the globe in eighty days. I pretended to get lost in the bush. Once I saw a shark’s fin glide past my surf mat. Another time, I surprised a possum in the process of turning on the tap in our kitchen sink. But there were no great adventures. Although Fahrenheit 451 gave me recurring nightmares from which I awoke with a start, groping for my books, my early life was as smooth and unremarkable as a linoleum bench. I had a head full of stories but none of my own.
When adventure did come to me later in life, I
discovered that there was no turning that last page. True adventure is a book that is never finished. Or to put it another way, it never finishes with you.
I even secretly envied the kids at school who got teased for being descended from convicts, or for being the children of wogs or for having Aboriginal ancestry, though at the time that last was something that many people kept quiet. Perverse prayers are often answered where normal ones fail and, before long, when I was still in my early teens, people began to notice I didn’t quite look like everyone else. A few kids started to tease me for looking Chinese – Ching Chong Chinaman, born in a jar, christened in a teapot, that sort of thing. The only real-life Chinese person I knew was Jacob Woo. His parents ran the Dragon Inn, the mandatory local Chinese restaurant. Jacob may have been a fourth-generation Australian, as he reminded people at every opportunity, but he was also a dag with a dumb, hiccupping laugh and thick glasses more often than not held together with sticky tape, usually the result of some sporting accident. I was already nerdy enough with my bookworm ways; I didn’t want to be associated with Jacob to boot. When a friend’s grandmother told her to wash her hands after handling coins because ‘they might have been up a Chinaman’s bum’, that rather sealed the deal. I denied all charges and began actively searching out a more acceptable alternative history.
