by Alison Wong
And that was when she made Katherine promise that she wouldn’t stand in her daughter’s way. But why would she? And even if she wanted to, how could she possibly stand before Mrs Newman’s onslaught?
‘Do you realise how exceptional your daughter is?’ Mrs Newman was saying. ‘Over the years I have taken a number of girls under my wing and I can assure you, Katherine, that I have never come across a child as unusually curious or intelligent as Edie. She’ll receive a university scholarship of course – that goes without saying. But that will only pay her fees and a small allowance, not enough to live on. Never mind, I’ll provide an additional allowance. Edie will never be happy as a wife and mother, dedicated only to domestic duty . . . Well, were you happy, Katherine?’
What a question. And who could afford to think of it? Certainly not the unhappy. And those who were happy never needed to think of it.
No, Mrs Newman continued, Edie would follow in the footsteps of Emily Siedeberg or Dr Agnes Bennett. She’d prove that Batchelor and King were wrong. She’d have the chance to choose her own destiny.
200 Míllíon
It was Mrs McKechnie who first told Yung of petitions for Lionel Terry’s release. She pointed out articles in the newspapers, letters to the editor. Soon every Chinese in Wellington, in the whole damned country, knew. Yung organised a counter-petition. He wrote the Chinese version and got Annie Wong to translate it into English.
‘This is the man who murdered one of us in Haining Street,’ he told Mei-lin. ‘He’ll do it again without hesitation.’
‘But I don’t know how to write,’ Mei-lin said. ‘I don’t even know how to sign my name.’ Her hand rested on her pregnant belly.
‘Make a mark like this,’ Yung said, drawing a cross on the back of his hand. ‘I’ll write your name beside it.’
‘Why ask her?’ Shun said, as he walked past carrying a box of oranges.
‘Shun Goh,’ Yung said, ‘does not Liang Ch’i-chao say if China’s 200 million men are joined by 200 million women, then what can stand in our way? We are few in this land. How much more do we need our women?’
Shun shrugged and carried the box into the shop.
Mei-lin took the pen and made a wavering cross on the petition. She smiled at Yung, who did not meet her eyes. Yung could see why his brother bought her.
How many Chinese women were there in this town? Fifteen? Maybe not even that. Even when you included Mei-lin and Annie Wong and Cousin Gok-nam’s wife and the babies and young girls.
There were hundred men’s women, dirty uncouth gweilo women who sold their services, and a few of the men went to them, or the women came directly to the men. But who wanted to share his woman?
As Yung trimmed sack after sack of cauliflowers and cabbages, he sighed. Sometimes when he looked at Mei-lin, when he heard the softness of her voice, when he lay at night alone, he felt an ache. Of desolation.
The Líttle Orange Book
‘So, do you play sport?’ Katherine asked as he weighed her carrots. She mimed running, kicking a ball, bowling, then laughed at her own clumsiness. Just as well Robbie had plenty of friends to play with. The speed of his bowling terrified her.
Mr Wong laughed too. He admired her lack of embarrassment – she was so . . . unlike Tongyan. ‘This Games, what do you call?’ he asked.
‘The Olympics,’ she said again. ‘Women are participating for the first time. Mrs Newman – my boss – she celebrated by giving me a glass of sherry and the rest of the day off.’
She giggled. (She didn’t usually drink.) ‘So, do you?’
He looked at her, puzzled.
‘Do you play sport? And don’t ask me to go through all that again!’
‘No horley foe of moose,’ he said, smiling.
She frowned.
He motioned for her to wait, went out the back of the shop and came back with a small orange book, Glossary of English Phrases with Chinese Translations, printed in Shanghai. He opened it and showed her.
Hoary foe of the Muse, the, she read. ‘The Time, who is generally represented as an old man with hoary hair . . .’ She burst out laughing, then saw the look on his face and stopped herself quickly. ‘Just say, I don’t have time,’ she said. ‘Keep it very simple.’
Now when she came into the shop he would ask her about this phrase or that and they would communicate with pidgin English, wild gestures, drawings on the unprinted edges of newspapers, even his loud Chinese that she never understood.
‘Please collect talking,’ he said. ‘I want talking ploper English.’ And he gave her such an earnest look, then such a mischievous grin, she laughed.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Speak slowly and try to say rrrr. Prrroper English. I want to speak prrroper English.’
‘I want to speak ploper English.’
‘Prrroper English.’
‘Plroper English.’
‘That’s getting better. You need to prrractice. Say it over and over till you get it rrright. Prrractice makes perrrfect.’
‘Plactice makes perfect.’ He grinned. ‘Look,’ he said, opening his little orange book. ‘Take at one’s word. Yes?’
Katherine nodded, her eyes slipping to the opposite page. Take a shine to – To take a fancy or liking to (S.); then there were strange markings she couldn’t read, she presumed they were Chinese, and then the example: The coachman said he had taken quite a shine to the cook.
Katherine blushed. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you can say that.’
He worked hard. Katherine could see it. Hear it. He remembered the phrases she taught him; his accent became less pronounced. When he took his time he could almost say, Ernest Rutherford, Roderick the rat catcher, practice makes perfect.
She noticed that when he moved across the shop floor she could not hear his footfalls, just the slightest ruffle of his clothing and her own shoes clipping the linoleum. His eyes were dark, so dark that after a time she found she could see her own reflection. This was unsettling, seeing herself in the eyes of another.
One day when she walked into the shop and Mr Wong, the elder, came out to serve her, she realised with dismay how disappointed she was. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Wong,’ she said, trying to smile, and at that moment she discovered she did not know their names, that she had no way to distinguish them except as young Mr Wong; tall Mr Wong; Mr Wong with the western hairstyle; Mr Wong and the little orange book; talking, laughing Mr Wong . . .
And then he came out also, carrying a box of spring carrots still with their leaves attached, and suddenly she could not help but smile.
‘Dang ngor lei la. Lei tau ha la,’ he said to his brother, and she did not understand a word, but the elder Mr Wong gave her a strange look and went back inside.
She chose three bananas, half a cauliflower and a small bag of potatoes. He smiled and picked out a bunch of carrots, told her they were very good, very fresh. He wrapped them with the leaves exposed and held them out to her with both hands. ‘No money,’ he said.
‘Better to say, No charge,’ she said. ‘No money means you have no money, not that I don’t need to pay.’
She took the carrots, feeling as if the feathery tops spilling out of the newspaper were spring blooms. Why was she so light-headed? He was a Chinaman. A sallow-faced, squinty-eyed foreigner. The dregs of society. Heavens, he didn’t even make it into society. And yet when she was with him she forgot who he was. After all, he had a strong, almost European nose. He was tall. He didn’t really look Chinese.
Wong Chung-yung
The Díabolo
My heart is a string of firecrackers. It explodes at random: a mixed bag of Tom Thumbs, Double Happys, Mighty Cannons. Sky rockets whiz and flare, sparklers, Jumping Jacks head over heels. Not even Spring Festival, yet I hold all of this within me. I press my lips in a crooked smile, try to stop a songburst, a whoop, a torrent of blessings and curses.
I cannot understand this.
All for a devil woman. A devil woman.
Her nose is too big, and her breasts,
and her feet. She doesn’t walk like a woman. She has red devil hair. And yet she has kind, sad, beautiful blue-green eyes and full, luscious lips – and she calls me by name. Mr Wong, she says, as if I am a man and not a Chinaman.
Firecrackers are to frighten away devils. But she walks into the shop, and these explosions go off inside me, and she does not run away.
Today she comes with her daughter. I show them the best apples. ‘Red Delicious nice and red but what is taste? No taste la! Red Delicious soft, like old wet cake. But Jonathan, crisp and juicy. Good taste. Try some la, please try.’
I cut off slices and wait for them to smile, to nod in agreement. She turns and calls to her son. Only then do I see him. He loiters by the doorway and does not want to come in. She insists. Taste apple, she tells him. Come and choose fruit.
I hold open the brown paper bag and let her daughter choose four, five, six apples, weighing them on the scales. ‘One and threepence,’ I say, adding one more apple to the bag, swinging it round, twisting the corners like cat’s ears.
‘Robbie,’ she is calling. And at last he comes, holding a diabolo his father gave him. ‘This was a craze,’ she says, ‘everyone played it.’ But she doesn’t know how.
‘We play in China,’ I say. ‘Uncle bring from Peking.’ And I’m crazy, going crazy – I show her.
I flick the string and send the wooden reel spinning into the air.
When I was a boy I could throw the diabolo high, do a cartwheel, a somersault or a backward flip, and then I’d catch it again. But now my body moves this much more slowly. I can still throw it in the air and catch it behind me, I know I can. But this shop is small and the ceiling low: the reel would plummet – a bird struck by stone.
The boy stares at me with a curled lip, a lip you could rest an oil bottle on. He holds one hand in his pocket, and now I know what it is. I have seen this boy. With his fatboy friend. They run behind horses and scoop up horse shit with iron shovels. ‘Penny a bucket! Penny a bucket!’ they shout. ‘Do yer garden good!’ I know this boy. I know what he hides in his pocket.
A grey day, brown dust, the gust of a northerly. Fraser’s milk cart, the tired old horse pulling the steel urns. The rock came out of nowhere. The houses across the street, the horses, and kicked-up, blown-up dust. My beautiful window with the best polished fruit: the apples turned to show the reddest cheeks, the oranges, bananas and pears. My shatter-webbed window, my gorgeous fruit, sliced with glass. I ran out and there he was, smirking, running away, slingshot in his hand.
‘Thank you, Mr Wong,’ she says. ‘Say thank you, Edie, Robbie.’
The girl hesitates, says thank you. I give the diabolo to her.
Mrs McKechnie. Kind-heart, bad-luck woman. Mother of a redhead, bad-heart boy. Wife of a dead man.
The Shadow
Edie was sure Robbie had taken her teddy bear. Where had he hidden it? Had he ripped off his head like the porcelain doll Nana gave her? Not that she particularly cared for Minnie, apart from as the recipient of imaginary lifesaving operations. When Robbie fractured her skull there was no blood or white or grey matter, no interesting convolutions of the frontal lobe, only shards of painted china and a disappointing hollowness.
But Teddy was different. Everybody who was anybody had their own teddy. Even Mrs Newman had one – she took him to the opera. Mrs Newman told her he was named for the US President.
While Robbie was out with Billy, Edie searched his room. Under his bed amid dirty shoes, cricket balls, wickets, marbles, a football and dead spider, she found three very smelly socks in varying shades of brown and black, which she picked up between the tips of her thumb and forefinger and placed under his pillow. She washed her hands, came back and searched his wardrobe. At the back, under cricket pads, gloves, a slingshot, train set and old jersey, she found a cardboard box marked in large black capitals:
R. D. MCKECHNIE
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
KEEP OUT!
Inside were two slim soft-covered booklets – The Shadow and God or Mammon? – and a collection of tracts, home-made cards and letters:
Sunnyside Lunatic Asylum,
29 August 1909
Dear Robbie, – Thanks for yours of the 19 August. I remember your father well and was sad to hear of his passing. I still recall his hospitality and excellent conversation. You must not let this loss set you back, as would be the case of lesser mortals. Your father was a true Briton and you would do well to follow his example.
I enclose my books and a card which I have made for your instruction.
With every good wish,
Yours as ever,
Lionel Terry.
The Shadow had a watercolour on its cover, all black and grey and off-whites. In the top left corner, a man with mad, pinprick eyes flew in the air, holding a scimitar high over his head, ready to sweep down from the clouds and strike. Below, only spires, domed roofs and crosses were visible. Inside were the words:
To
my Brother Britons
I Dedicate this Work
L. T.
July, 1904
then a prayer, an introduction which continued for eleven pages, and a long rhyming poem full of words like vile traducer, plague-fraught offal of the earth and stinking swamp of black iniquity.
A card read:
Many fools have many moods,
And follies great and small,
But the fools who swallow foreign foods,
Are the biggest fools of all!
Another:
The patriot is governed by his brain, the traitor by his stomach.
Edie put the cards, letters, everything back in the box in exactly the same order. Replaced the box in the wardrobe.
That night she found Teddy. He was in the top drawer of her dresser, one of her own stockings pulled over his head.
Oi Harn Goong, the founding ancestor of the Wong clan in Melon Ridge, named the village ‘hoping his new home would endow him with prolific offspring like proverbial melons on the vines’.
Edmon Wong, Zengcheng New Zealanders
Ridge: (agriculture) one of a set of raised strips separated by furrows; (gardening) raised hotbed for melons, etc.
The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary, Second Edition
Chung-yung’s Wife
Red Sílk
My father was a shipbuilder, and his father before him. They built the large riverboats that plied the Pearl River with their cargoes of salt, and the seafaring junks that sailed from Canton to Amoy and Formosa. Father had three hundred men who worked in his yards, and we lived in a red-columned mansion in the eastern hills of Canton.
Father was an enlightened man. Although I was only a daughter, he made sure I was educated, almost like a son. We had a private tutor who taught us calligraphy, painting and poetry. I read the Five Classics, the Four Books, the Book of Filial Piety. And I dreamed of Mu-lan, the daughter who dressed as a man and saved her father from battle.
But I never wore the clothes of a man. I could not go out like my brothers to watch the street theatre, or sit in tea-houses with pearl-faced women – the red dust of their cheeks, their lips painted rosebud vermilion. Sometimes I’d go out in a sedan chair and watch the world from behind its curtains, but mostly I stayed at home, reading The Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, or doing needlework.
I was a good girl, respectable. Until I was fifteen, no one outside of the family knew of my existence. Then Father’s elder sister arranged my marriage. She inquired after all the good families with eligible sons. There was the eldest son of Magistrate Chew, but although his father was known as a fair man, the son was renowned for his foul temper and lack of respect for the ancestors. There was the second son of the Lees, the wealthiest family in Canton – ah, but he was a spendthrift and a gambler. There was the third son of the Kwoks, who had a thriving silk business, but he was born with not enough breath – they say he had beautiful blue-white skin, a gentle man waiting to expire.
It was then that my a
unt heard of my husband. A man from the neighbouring village of my father. A man whose older brother lived in the New Gold Mountain and had made enough money to send for him. His name was Wong Chung-yung. He was eighteen, and being a Gold Mountain man he had prospects. I did not know whether he was tall or handsome or kind, or whether he could quote from the classics or write a good couplet, but there did not seem to be any history of madness or of leprosy or tuberculosis – or of excessive opium or gambling. And our horoscopes were favourable: there would be plenty of sons and a life of good fortune.
Mother was First Wife. She gave birth to two sons and me, the only daughter. No one spoke of these things, but I know Mother did not want Father – it was she who found Second Wife for him. Over the years there followed a third wife, and then the fourth. Fourth Wife was barely older than I was, uneducated but wily. She had large phoenix eyes and fine white skin, paled with the application of crushed pearl cream. She was, after all, educated in pleasing men.
Mother could order Second, Third or Fourth Wife to do her bidding, and I had precedence over all their daughters. This is the way things are: the first has power; the last has none – unless by stealth and deception. Fourth Wife fed Second Wife opium-laced dumplings, and she died – though nothing, of course, was proven.
Now I would become a wife also. Unlike Mother, I hoped there would be no others.
*
On the day selected according to the almanac, Father and Eldest Brother carried me to the sedan chair. As we came outside, a chaperone hired from my father’s village opened an umbrella; another threw a handful of rice to feed and distract the spirits. Everything was red – red silk, red satin and brocade – red as happiness and the mark on a bed sheet. They took me to my husband’s house to the pounding of gongs, hoping not to meet any pregnant cats or dogs, or indeed any four-legged things. I heard my husband outside the sedan chair – he kicked in the door and carried me inside.
