by Alison Wong
Alison Wong was born and raised in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, after her great grandparents on both sides migrated from China’s Guangdong province in the 1890s. She studied mathematics at Victoria University in Wellington, worked in IT, and spent several years in China. In 1996 she held a Reader’s Digest NZ Society of Authors Fellowship in the Stout Research Centre, and in 2002 the Robert Burns Fellowship at Otago University. Her poetry collection, Cup, was shortlisted for the Best First Book for Poetry at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and her poetry was selected for Best New Zealand Poems 2006 and 2007. She currently lives in Porirua, Wellington, with her son. As the Earth Turns Silver is her first novel.
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First published 2009 in New Zealand by Penguin Group (NZ)
This Picador edition published 2009 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
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Copyright © Alison Wong Family Trust 2009
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Wong, Alison, 1960–
As the earth turns silver/Alison Wong.
978 0 330 42488 2 (pbk.)
NZ823.3
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As the Earth Turns Silver
Alison Wong
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Wong Chung-shun, 1896 – Prologue
Part I: Wellíngton 1905–1909
A Shíllíng
Maoríland
Dreams of Sun Yat-sen
Oníons
A Fíne Example of a Brítísh Gentleman
A Bag of Peanuts
The Tríal
No Contínents or Seas
Rísíng to the Surface
Broken Bíscuíts
Apples
The Purlíeus of Haíníng Street
If the Wínd Changes
A Woman of Independent Means
The Unequal Yoke
Blue
Shadows
Líttle Hearts
Domíníon
200 Míllíon
The Líttle Orange Book
Wong Chung-yung – The Díabolo
The Shadow
Part II: Kwangtung, Chína to Wellíngton 1907–1915
Chung-yung’s Wife – Red Sílk
Chung-yung’s Wife – Tíle Kíln
Chung-shun’s Wife – The Dead
The Concubíne’s Story
Slíces of Crow
Vínegar
Slave Gírl
The Cable Car
Fíeld
Ghosts, Dreams
Stroke upon Stroke
A Thousand Míles
Lantern
Boílíng Water
Puppet Show
Better Than a Dog
As the Earth Turns Sílver
More Than Horses
Yellow Flowers Híll
A Chíldren’s Atlas
The Future of Humankínd
The New Freckled Wonder
Sílence
Wong Chung-yung – Melon Rídge
Longevíty
Whíte
The Photograph
Moon
Part III: Wellíngton (& Dunedín) 1914–1916
For Kíng and Country
The Leaden Casket
The Oath
The Líons
Tea
If the Tíme Has Not Come
Small Mercíes
Last Níght
One Fluíd Mark
The Send-off
Jasmíne
The Keeper
The Kíosk
Shadows
Moon Cake
Fíeld Over Heart
Part IV: Dunedín & Wellíngton 1918–1922
Black Blancmange
A Loose Collectíon of Bones
Bírds
The Watch
The Returníng
Píneapple
From the Art of Dyíng
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
For my father Henry Wong, who did not live to see this come to fruition, for my mother Doris Wong and the generations that came before, and for my son Jackson Forbes and the generations that come after.
Wong Chung-shun, 1896
Prologue
It is a lonely place where the Jesus-ghosts preach. They preach about love, about a god who died of love, yet in the street the people sneer and call out and spit, then on Sundays sing in the Jesus-house.
Their god is a white ghost. You see the pictures. He has pale skin and a big nose and a glow of moonlight round his long brown hair. He has many names, just as we Tongyan have many names. We have a milk name, an adult name, perhaps a scholar or chosen name. The Jesus-ghosts call their god Holy Ghost. Even they know he is a ghost. People are like their gods, just as they are like their animals. They even call him Father. We do not need to name them, these gweilo. Even they know they are ghosts.
Yung says, We do not need to recognise their words; we do not need to interpret the raised syllable. It is there in a flicker of the eyes, the slight curl of a lip, in the muscles of the face, the way they set against us. He says, The body has its own language, as fluid as poetry, as coarse as polemic.
Yung has a way with words. He says the language of the body can be used as a weapon.
Now that Yung is here, I do not have to pay a clansman. One of us can go to the market while the other keeps shop; one can sort bananas while the other trims vegetables. Now that he is here, I can save to bring out a wife. I can save the fare and the poll tax. It will take
a good many years.
When Yung first arrived we did not recognise each other. We had not seen each other for over ten years. He is eighteen now, and books have affected his brain. He dreams big, impossible dreams. He does not understand life, and he does not understand this land. He is full of too many feelings like wild animals caught and caged in a zoo. He likes to talk, and his words are quick, quicker than his understanding. He is very young – fifteen years younger. My brother is like a son, an only, foolish son.
A Shíllíng
They had just turned into Tory Street, past Mount Cook Police Station, Chung-shun and his younger brother Chung-yung, on their way to Haining Street for soupy wontons and noodles. A late Sunday morning, the sun shining with the heat of ripening fruit, the wind for once not too vigorous. Yung whistled some folk ditty, oblivious to gweilo rules that made whistling, singing anything but hymns, and playing the piano on Sundays frowned upon. Shun merely frowned. His leg ached and made him lose all appreciation of the one day of the week when the shop was closed. He did not notice the calmness of the day, the lack of dust and grit swirling from the road to assail their eyes and coat their skin and clothes and hair. He did not notice the man approach them.
Yung saw the man coming. Even from a distance there was something strange about the way he walked, an ambling stiffness. As they got closer, Yung saw the man’s eyes focus upon him, saw his face spread into a toothless grin. He watched as the man walked up to them, stood too close (the stink of stale piss and unwashed clothes) and said through sunken cheeks, ‘Gif me a shilling.’
Yung held his breath and stepped back, looked the man over. He was a good four inches shorter and very thin, and there was something wrong with his eyes. His hands were hidden in the pockets of his dirty, oversized coat, and for a moment Yung considered whether he might be concealing a weapon.
‘What for?’ he asked.
Yung could see him thinking. ‘Haaaf yoou aaany muun-neee?’ the man said slowly, his face loose, his lips hollowing into his gums. ‘Muun-neeee.’
Yung smiled. ‘I haaf muuneee,’ he said. He slapped his pocket, rattling the coins.
The man pulled his hands out of his pockets, held up his fists. ‘Gif it to me or I’ll . . .’
Yung laughed. Muuneee.
He turned and walked back towards the police station. He hummed. He liked the solid red brick building, the black and white brickwork forming arches above the windows and doors, the imprints of arrows stamped into the bricks. If he didn’t think about the prisoners who’d made them, then he found it amusing, the way the bricks were placed so randomly, sometimes with the arrow facing inwards and hidden from sight, sometimes out, sometimes pointing to the left, sometimes to the right. They were like clues left behind at the scene of a crime, a scene that had been contaminated by reporters, curious onlookers, bumbling policemen.
He walked into the coolness of the building, across the geometric tiled floor, past the staircase, to the room where Constable Walters sat in the depths of the building. They knew each other well. The constable often passed by the shop on his nightly patrol and Yung would offer him a banana or a ripe pear, taking comfort from knowing the police were around.
Constable Walters rose from his desk, and as they came back out onto the street they saw the man hurry in the opposite direction and disappear down Frederick Street. The constable followed but soon lost him.
When he returned, red faced and breathing heavily, he asked what the man had looked like. Yung described a man in his forties, no, thirties (gweilo always look older than Tongyan), about this high – he motioned with his hand – light hair, no teeth . . . Shun described the man’s big red nose.
‘Shun Goh,’ Yung said, addressing him politely as elder brother, ‘all gweilo have big red noses.’ He turned back to the constable. ‘Nose just like you,’ he said, ‘and here . . .’ He touched the right side of his jaw, trying to describe a scar but not knowing the words. ‘He velly stupid,’ he added.
After the constable had gone, Shun berated his brother, throwing his hands in the air. Why tell the gweilo he had money la? Why shake his pockets? Was he mad? After he walked off the gweilo harassed him for money too!
Yung wanted to laugh but he had to show respect. He tried to explain – after all the man was harmless, a simpleton, no more – but Shun wasn’t listening. How come Yung was so stupid? Just two months ago Ah Chan was beaten up in the street. Didn’t he know how dangerous it was?
Yung closed his ears. Already he was dreaming up a couplet. About a man with no teeth and half a mind, about a confusion of arrows and no idea which way to go.
Maoríland
Sometimes under the weight, the shape, of his brother’s expectation, Yung felt death-weary.
He stood before the washtubs out the back of the shop and gazed at his red-stained hands. He pulled the last beetroot from the water, brought down the blade quickly, once, twice, watched the leaves with their fine red stalks, the long end of the root, thin as a wet rat’s tail, fall into the wooden box. Then he tossed the trimmed beetroot onto the others, carried the enamel basin to the wash-house and tipped them onto the purple-red mass in the copper. It would take half an hour for the water to come to the boil and then another hour, bleached worms, beetles, spiders slowly boiling on the surface of the red dirt water.
He went back and cleaned the tubs, tipped in half a sack of carrots, covered them with water, then took the broom and pushed it under then up through the vegetables, sweeping, tumbling them clean in the ever murkier liquid. He could feel a layer of sweat forming on his brow, the dampness of his white singlet, his shirt, under his arms. He loosened his grip, relaxed his arms for a moment, then pushed down again. Once he’d had tender hands, hands that knew only the calligrapher’s brush, the grinding of ink stick with water. They were still soft, pale, not cracked and brown like his elder brother’s, but now calluses had formed on his palms, on the fleshy pads below his fingers. He remembered the first time he’d done this, the rhythmic push and pull of wood and bristle, the sting of his skin rubbing, folding in on itself.
He pulled the plugs, watched the rushing, sucking waters, stepped back as the pipes drained onto the concrete pad. He picked out the cleaned carrots, dropped them into a bamboo basket, tipped the rest of the sack into the tubs and filled them again with water. How many years had he been here boiling beetroot, washing carrots, and trimming cabbages and cauliflowers? Eight? Nine? Almost ten years.
Standing on the deck of the Wakatipu as it heaved into port, he had been astonished by the landscape. Dusty clay and rock where men had hacked a footing. Where they had tried to anchor themselves, their wooden shacks and macadam roads from Antarctic southerlies. Hills thick with bush and curling foliage falling to the bays. Ships loaded with coal or logs from the West Coast or human cargo from Sydney. Wellington: a town built of wood and dust and wind.
Shun Goh told him gweilo gave this land a strange, mystical name. The name of the dark-skinned people, the people of the land. He said Maoris were dying. In fifty years they would be wiped out, the way a white handkerchief wipes sweat from the face. They would become a story passed from mother to son, like the giant birds they’d heard of. Fierce birds that could not fly. Moa, the people said, like a lament . . . Maori . . . their absence a desolation.
In those early days Yung thought he saw a Maori, but the man selling rabbits door to door turned out to be Assyrian. And the man selling vegetables was Hindoo. This is what all the dark-skinned people were – Assyrian or Hindoo – the ones who lived in Haining Street.
Over months, years, he did see Maoris, their status and appearance as varied as gweilo. When the gweilo Duke and Duchess visited, Tongyan adorned a huge arch with flags outside Chow Fong’s shop in Manners Street. Chinese Citizens Welcome, it said. Everyone lined up along the route: gweilo, Tongyan, Maoris.
‘Who these Maolis?’ Yung asked Mrs Paterson from the bakery next door, referring to the proud people in their finest gweilo top hats, pressed black
suits and gold watch chains he saw welcome gweilo royalty, the groups of them he sometimes saw near Parliament.
‘They’re from up north,’ Mrs Paterson said. ‘They come to petition the government.’
‘What is petition?’ Yung asked.
‘They want their land back,’ she said, and then asked about the price of potatoes.
Sometimes Yung saw Maori fishermen or hawkers of sweet potato and watercress. They dressed in old ghost clothes and heavy boots, or wrapped an army blanket fastened with rope or a belt around the waist, sometimes even a blanket around their shoulders. But whatever their standing they never called out names or pulled his braid. They smiled, cigarette in hand, as if to a brother.
The first time Yung saw them he turned to Shun, looking for a sign. But his brother did not smile back. ‘Be careful,’ he said. Have a small heart. Yung looked at the tobacco-stained teeth, the blue-green markings etched all over the dark faces. One of the men was young, perhaps his own age, and he had a straggly beard that partially obscured his tattoos. Yung looked him in the eye and smiled, just the corners of his mouth, then followed his brother, unsure of what he should do.
Yung pushed the broom down into brown water. Almost a decade, and he’d barely spoken to a Maori. Proudly tipped his hat to an old woman perhaps – the way he’d seen ghost-men meet, greet and pass their women – or to Maori men he’d smiled a hello. Only once one had come into the shop.
The man’s face was fully tattooed and he’d held himself so very erect and with such dignity in his top hat and pressed black suit, a white handkerchief neatly folded in his jacket pocket, that Yung had been at a loss for words. Yung could imagine him waving from a shiny black motorcar as crowds lined the parade.
The man had nodded his head slightly. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’
The man smiled, flashing a gold tooth. He looked at the strawberries and grapes.
He only wants the best fruit, Yung thought. The most expensive. ‘Stlawbelly go lotten. No good,’ he said. ‘Glape best quality. Velly sweet.’ He walked over, selected the best cluster – each grape plump, juicy, purple-black. ‘Please tly,’ he said, offering it up.
