by Alison Wong
As he pulled off her underwear he knew he could break her if he wasn’t careful. If he wanted.
*
Fish in water, that’s what they were – what they had been. But now he was cast out onto the wet streets with nothing left to draw him back in. He walked not knowing his destination, the act of walking having its own purpose, an act of meditation. Around the Basin, past cabbage trees shaking their black, spiky heads across the empty fields; up Buckle Street towards the barracks; right into Tory, past the bell-tower of Mount Cook School; left into Haining.
It was dark, quiet; some of the houses seemed unoccupied, their windows shuttered like black faces without eyes, the eyelids grown over. Shun stopped outside Number 34. He walked past the front door where Ah Wing lived in one small room, then into the narrow alley.
‘Hoi moon, he shouted at an upstairs window, open up, then waited by the side door. It was steel clad, with no latch, no doorknob.
A faint, familiar smell, sweet and earthy, drifted in the cool air.
Upstairs someone pulled a rope. Shun entered, and the piece of timber at the bottom of the door pivoted to relock it. Now he stood in a cubicle facing another steel-sheathed door.
‘Hoi moon.’
It unlocked and he walked along the hallway, up the stairs, through ever stronger fumes, his slippers flip-flapping on the wooden boards.
At the top the trapdoor was open, a metal cover lying beside it. Thick smoke and hot, fuggy air made Shun draw back and hold his breath. One side of Ah Keung’s mouth lifted in recognition but his eyes did not smile.
In the centre of the room a small lamp gave out the only light, its flame burning through the top of the bell-shaped glass. Two men gathered on grass mats around it, their bird-faces caught in sharp relief. One prepared his pipe, dipping a long needle into the flame; the other lay on his side, propped by a wooden pillow, shoulders and back hunched, sucking a bamboo pipe, drinking the smoke in one long pull. Against the far wall the shadows of three, maybe four other men lay on wooden benches.
Shun had smoked slices of crow two or three times, reluctantly, just after the accident when the pain in his leg had been too much to bear. Now all he wanted was release – for his tired muscles and his mind to be smoothed from within.
He watched Ah Keung dip a long hatpin into a sachet of dark toffee, turning it to coat the end. He warmed it over the flame and dipped it again, twirling and lifting the pin, twirling and lifting till the substance formed a cone-shaped bead. He roasted the bead till it started to bubble, then pressed it into the bowl of a bamboo pipe, pushing the pin through the hole, pulling it out.
Shun took the pipe. Ah foo yung, hibiscus, he thought; ah foo wing, take prisoner for ever. He lay down on a grass mat, his head and neck resting against a wooden pillow, put the bowl to the flame, the pipe to his mouth, his body curled like a drawn bow.
*
Close your eyes now and listen, for this is a story passed down through the ages, a once-upon-a-time story about a girl who longed for a husband, yet none could be found for her. Despairing, she sought lovers, but all drew back in horror, for her skin was deeply pockmarked.
At last unable to bear her loneliness any longer, she drank poison, and as she lay dying she called down a curse upon every man who had spurned her. ‘In my lifetime you scorned me,’ she said, ‘but in my death you shall give all that you have, and more, so shall you desire me.’
After her death each of the men succumbed to a curious sickness. Doctors searched far and wide for a cure but none could be found. Then one day a herbalist came upon an unusual plant growing by the girl’s graveside. It was tall, with flamboyant red flowers, each with four large petals. When the petals fell, they left a large green boll. The herbalist cut one of the bolls and collected the thick, milky liquid. He mixed it with rice wine and gave it to one of the men.
Instantly he recovered.
Each of the men drank the liquid. Pain and anxiety left their bodies and they were filled with a calm they had never known. Their senses sharpened, their minds opened, a beautiful woman with fine white skin beckoned to them.
Then disappeared.
The men became sick again. They longed for release but could not find it. And so they took the liquid again.
Their bodies settled, as if into sleep, their minds budded, branched and flowed. The woman called to them, and disappeared.
And so the men grew sick, their bodies, their minds wracked with desire and despair. Each time they drank the liquid, they became well, but each time the woman disappeared, they fell sicker than ever.
Vínegar
Shun came home two days later reeking of that sweet, suffocating smell, his pupils tiny dots in the dark of his eyes. Mei-lin held her breath. He was the same age as her father. She watched him climb the stairs and sleep for another day.
Until he had woken and washed the stink from his skin, his hair, his mouth, until she had erased the stench from his clothes and bedclothes in boiling soapy water, she took a quilt and slept on the floor, holding Wai-wai in her arms.
Afterwards, she returned to his bed, but always retired early, turning her back to the door when she heard him climb the stairs, never turning, even onto her back, until she heard his deepening breath, his slide into oblivion.
Sunday, as soon as they’d finished breakfast and cleaned the shop, Shun went with Yung to Haining Street as usual. He did not stop with his brother to drink tea. Instead he walked to Ah Chong’s.
He smelled the roast pork even as he walked down the alley to the backyard. He asked for a lean cut of rump and inspected it carefully. Was the skin crispy? Was there just the right lacing of tender fat and meat? He walked to other kitchens and bought dim sum, home -made noodles and little custard tarts. He went straight home.
Mei-lin held Wai-wai across her body, looked at her favourite foods – and refused to eat them.
That night Shun engaged his brother in a game of cards, half-heartedly arguing about imperialist powers, the imminent fall of the Dynasty, the hope of the new Republic. Yung quoted Liang Ch’i-chao: ‘If you want to keep the old complete, you have to make something new every day.’ But Shun didn’t understand. He didn’t care. The world had become a moving picture, voiceless, devoid of colour, a series of unnatural movements punctuated by the sound of a frenzied piano.
He watched as days and nights passed before him. He watched the mother of his son, watched the silence settle over them.
They argued again. Only once. ‘No one sends a baby home without his mother,’ Mei-lin said, ‘even with another woman. What about dysentery? And even when the ship arrives, how long does it take to get back to the village? What about bandits? What about floods? What about famine?’
He avoided her eyes.
‘What’s wrong with you? Are you mad? Or are you a coward?’
He almost hit her, but the look on her face stopped him. The hard, steady gaze, the set of her mouth against him.
‘All day she eats vinegar,’ Mei-lin said. ‘She’s a tiger. Why are you doing this? What hold has she got over you?’
*
It was a long time ago, before Shun and his wife were born or even conceived. It had been raining for weeks. Shun’s father heard cries from the swollen river. He dropped his shoulder pole and did not notice the vegetables scatter. He leapt into the water and pulled the drowning man onto the riverbank.
Afterwards, the man pledged his first daughter.
Shun was fourteen, his wife three years older, when they met on their wedding day. After the whole roast pig and the wine and firecrackers, he lifted her red head-dress. And looked away.
Her face was wide. It was pocked and dimpled, her mouth like a twist on a steamed cha siu bun. He went to bed with her and pretended to sleep.
She worked hard. She collected water from the river. She scrubbed the barrel toilet clean. On special occasions she cooked his, his parents’ favourite foods – crispy-skinned chicken, steamed whole fish, sweet soup of snow-ear fungus.<
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She was like a bossy older sister. As noisy and annoying as a devil.
He grew up. He made up ghost stories that she always believed. He learned to laugh at her.
He drank, closed his ears and eyes – and went to bed with her.
She bore daughters and wailed when the second and third were taken from her. Her mouth set fast in her crooked face; her eyes hardened to small pieces of obsidian.
She complained. She raged. She spilled pepper.
Shun left for the New Gold Mountain.
When he came back, he barely recognised her. Her skin was dark and wrinkled like poor man’s leather. Her back had the beginnings of a stoop. Only the twist of her mouth was familiar, her obsidian eyes.
How could she object to a concubine? She had not produced a son. She offered her maid. A child she could control, completely.
And then she saw Mei-lin, saw his utter bewitchment. ‘Give me a son,’ she pleaded. ‘Give me a son.’
He looked at her and shook his head in disbelief. How could she even hope to conceive?
How he pitied her.
In darkness he lay, desperately thinking of Mei-lin. But when he touched her coarse skin, smelt the foul breath of her rotted teeth – the years of spitting sugar cane – his penis softened.
*
Shun woke. He gazed in half-light at Mei-lin’s hair against the pillow, the paleness of her skin, her rosebud lips.
He lay on his side of the bed and felt old, shrivelled. His ch’i was drying up, his flesh turning to bone.
Slave Gírl
Mei-lin felt the hand on her arm and turned. Wai-wai had crept up behind her as she sat on an apple box, darning a sock and waiting for customers, and now his face pushed into her belly. She put down the needle and picked him up. He snuggled into her, his tiny fingers holding her breast, sniffing her skin just as she too would bury her face in him, breathe him in. ‘Ho dak yi,’ he whispered, adorable, good-to-kiss. Then more loudly, ‘You good-for-nothing slave girl!’
Mei-lin laughed. She had whispered endearments to him, then called out loudly, ‘Good-for-nothing slave girl!’ so the spirits would believe he was just a worthless girl and wouldn’t steal him away. And he had remembered every word she had spoken, the exact tone, the love and the desperation, and had echoed them back to her. The words bubbled in her liver, warm and light, until she realised what he’d said, a baby speaking without comprehension. She held him close, felt the smoothness of his skin against her face, smelt his milk-drunk smell. But now he was struggling, wanting to go and play with apple boxes and newspapers, with the cricket his father had placed with fruit peelings in a glass preserving jar. She let him down and watched him toddle away.
Every week in rotation, whenever the father of her son could spare her in the shop, she went calling. On another woman’s kitchen; on greengrocery, laundry, Chinese grocery. She’d drink tea and gossip about affairs back home – who had borne a son or who only a daughter, whose house had been swept away in the floods or whose rice harvest had been plundered by bandits. And as they ate and drank and talked, she’d remember the instructions of the father of her son.
‘What hope do we have,’ she’d say, ‘unless we are free from Imperial corruption. The new Emperor is only three years old and the Regent is weak and dominated by foreign powers. Why do you think the gweilo treat us with such contempt? Do they treat the dwarves from the east like this? No, Japan is counted among the imperialist powers, just as hungry for our land and our blood.’
She’d pause, trying again to remember the way his brother put it, because Yung knew better how to present an argument; because if she thought too long about the father of her son, his words, his face, his hands, she wanted to spit, she wanted to scream, she wanted to . . .
‘Our motherland needs us,’ she’d say. ‘But what can we do? We have to overthrow the Dowager. We aren’t Manchus, we’re people of the Tong dynasty, not the Ch’ing. We must bring China into the modern age. Speak to your husbands. Persuade them to give to the founding of the Republic. Persuade them to be generous. Sun Yat-sen is one of us. He speaks our language. He has lived overseas. He has trained overseas. He knows our plight. He alone knows how to make China strong again. Only then will we lift our heads high and meet the barbarians eye to eye.’
And so Mei-lin supported the work of Yung – and of the father of her son. And the cause of Tongyan and women, because in modern China she hoped women would also be educated, just like the wife of Sun Yat-sen and her sisters. Think of the women of the French Revolution who dared to seize their own destinies, Yung had said. Mei-lin remembered every word of the brother of the father of her son, a man who showed her respect by speaking to her openly, intelligently about the cause.
Most of the women Mei-lin visited, and their husbands, treated her with respect. They knew she worked hard, that she earned her right to be here. Not like the wives left behind who had maids and remittance money. Here every woman worked night and day. And she as much as any of them. Only some of his family looked down on her.
Not three months before, when she’d visited Cousin Gok-nam’s wife (because Cousin Gok-nam had so far pledged only £5), the stupid woman had jabbered about the planned trip home.
‘Now don’t you be worried about Wai-wai, it’s for his own good, you don’t want him to grow up like the gweilo la? Aaaiyaa. Big Mother will spoil him rotten, she’ll love him to death, he’s such a lovely boy, and don’t you worry, I’ll look after him on the voyage like one of my own and when he comes back you won’t know him, he’ll be so grown up and clever, just like his uncle . . .’
Mei-lin wanted to slap her. This woman knew exactly how she felt about Big Mother, about Wai-wai leaving, and yet here she was rubbing her face in it.
‘What would you know?’ she said, looking hard at her cousin. ‘It’s not as if you have any sons.’
‘Aaaiyaa. Big Mother has her right la, after all you are only a . . .’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘I hear he paid 500 man for you, quite a sum considering your father was . . . you’re lucky you’re pretty, otherwise you could have ended up a slave girl sleeping on the floor in some rich man’s house la, and then what do you think they would have done to you, if not the master, then the sons and the men servants . . .’
‘Bitch! I may not be a wife, but I’ve given him a son. What have you done la? Why do you think he wants to go back? He’ll leave you behind to serve his mother and father, and how do you think they’ll treat you? If your mother-in-law beats you, who will pity you? It really won’t matter if you live or die. Regardless, he’ll tell the authorities you died in China and he’ll bring out another wife. A younger and prettier wife. One who will give him a son.’
Mei-lin hadn’t gone back, and neither had Cousin Gok-nam’s wife come visiting. Usually she came at least once a week, to chatter about who was going home or who had won money playing fantan or pakapoo, and to eat Mei-lin’s steamed white sponge, which had a reputation as the best in Wellington. Shun had asked Mei-lin once or twice whether she’d spoken to her. Cousin Gok-nam still hadn’t given more money.
But suddenly it didn’t matter. Cousin Gok-nam had lost everything playing pakapoo and now he couldn’t go back home, let alone give to the Revolution. When Shun told her, Mei-lin excused herself quickly and ran upstairs. She closed the door to their room and burst out laughing. She threw herself on the bed and wiped tears from her eyes, her body shaking and shaking as if something very hard, bound tight inside her, had suddenly sprung free.
*
A small, slimy hand touched her wrist. ‘Eat la, eat la.’ Wai-wai was pushing a soggy, half-eaten biscuit at her, wet crumbs stuck to his lips, right cheek, chin, pieces stuck to his shirt.
Mei-lin smiled. Was that the biscuit she’d given him yesterday? Where had the rascal hidden it? ‘Thank you, good boy.’ She pushed the crumbling biscuit back at him. ‘Eat la,’ she said softly, wiping the back of her hand across the corner of her eye, gathering him up in her arms.
The
Cable Car
Sundays were always a luxury: the day of the week when everyone slept at least half an hour longer. Mei-lin rose at six. Lit the coal range and boiled the water, opened the tin of Oolong tea and sniffed the dark smoky leaves. She loved that smell, the almost muskiness of it. After her father had gambled everything away, before he had sold her, there had been no tea, only cups of hot water. She put a scant teaspoon into the porcelain teapot, added boiling water, watched the leaves expand and unfurl, the lighter twigs floating on the surface of the colouring water. She put on the lid and replaced the pot in its padded wicker basket. Then she started on the rice gruel. She washed the rice, added pork bones marinated and roasted in garlic, ginger, rice wine, sugar and soy, put the pot on the range, two-thirds filled it with water, added several more slices of ginger, and tilted the lid just a little so it wouldn’t boil over.
The brothers rose at 6.30. Jo san, early morning, they said to each other as they met on the stairs. They drank their tea, then Shun scrubbed out the shop with soda, soap and hot water. He wiped the shelving and benches, the cash register and the scales. He scrubbed the floor. He brought the soft ripe fruit in from the window and replaced it with the freshest, the rosiest fruit. And once, he paused for a moment, looking out through the glass at the empty street, at the dark shop windows – Mackenzie’s Butchery, Wilson’s Drapery, Krupp’s Pharmacy – at the clear blue sky.
Out the back, Yung arranged a line of upright apple boxes. He lit a kerosene lamp, then went into the banana ripening room. He stared for a moment in the semi-darkness, breathing in the gas, then came out again, blinking at the brightness, carrying a case of bananas which he placed on top of an apple box. He brought in three empty banana cases from the stack outside the back door and placed them on either side of the full one. Then he sorted the bananas into three groups – green, semi-ripe, ripe – carefully arranging them in the appropriate case. As he worked he sang arias from Cantonese operas, folk songs, ditties he made up as he went along, bringing case after case out of the gaseous twilight of the banana room. When he had brought out and sorted all the bananas, he put the unripe ones back, the semi-ripe closest to the door, then took the ripe ones into the shop. Any spotty or overripe fruit on the shelves – apples or pears with smooth depressions of brown rot, or bananas blighted with freckles or bruises rising though the yellow skin – he put into the marked-down bins for stewing or baking or frying. Salad bananas. He didn’t understand English – the language, like the people, kept changing the rules. They cooked a banana and called it salad; they ate raw lettuce and called it salad. He shook his head and smiled. On special occasions, when he boiled lettuce and poured oyster sauce-flavoured mushrooms on top, did this make it salad also?
