by Alison Wong
At 7.45, Mei-lin called them for breakfast. They washed their hands and came to the table.
‘It’s a good day,’ said Yung, as he sprinkled spring onion on his gruel. ‘Warm and not too windy.’ He slurped happily. ‘Today, I was thinking of doing something different.’
Every Sunday the men went down Haining Street to eat and drink and gossip with their village cousins and others from their county – with any Chinese, in fact: the accents might be different, sometimes even difficult to understand, but here in the New Gold Mountain they were all brothers. Mei-lin stayed home with Wai-wai, or sometimes took him to visit the few other women and children.
But sai yan, westerners, took outings on Sundays. In summer time they might go to the Basin Reserve or take the ferry to Days Bay or go for a swim along Oriental Parade. Even the women did it. Yung had seen some of them. There had been a crowd (mostly men) watching, enjoying the daring of the latest attire. Their costumes exposed their arms and shoulders, the tops of their chests and a V of flesh on their backs; they even exposed their thighs. Where the wet fabric covered them, it clung to every curve, leaving little for the imagination.
Mrs McKechnie had told him about the cable car, how there was a tram at the top and one at the bottom, how one slid up while the other slid down, passing in the middle, stopping at each station with a ring of the bell. She told him about the grand Kiosk at the top where the young gentlemen took the young ladies to have tea and cakes for sixpence.
‘It goes up the hill to Kelburne,’ Yung said, ‘and you look out at the hills and houses and the harbour. You can come back down on it again or walk through the botanical gardens. I think I’ll take a tram and then the cable car. I can take Wai-wai too. It won’t cost anything for him and he’ll love the engines.’
Shun raised his eyebrows. They’d never been on a tram, let alone the cable car. Trams cost a penny so they walked everywhere.
‘The cable car only costs a penny for a return ticket,’ Yung said. ‘Won’t it be fun, Wai-wai?’
Wai-wai began to plead louder and louder with his father. Shun always found it hard to say no to him, and he did not like the idea of his son knowing and experiencing more than him. He would go too. He looked across the kitchen table, through the wisps of steam rising from the bowls of gruel, and saw the disappointment on Mei-lin’s face.
Why not, he thought and smiled at her. ‘Wai-wai’s mother can come too.’
Mei-lin could feel the beginning of tears at the back of her eyes. She blinked, willed them away. She had never been on an outing, never ridden a tram or cable car. She looked across at the father of her son. It had been months and she had barely spoken to him.
That night, Shun woke with Mei-lin in his arms. Why hadn’t he done it earlier? He brushed the hair from her eyes, told her he would arrange an adoption. If they could not find a suitable boy in Melon Ridge, then they would look for a Wong from White Stone or Sand Head villages. They would find a number two son for his wife back in China.
Fíeld
It seemed the strangest question to ask after they’d known each other for so long, perhaps the hardest, because it seemed so intimate. If it had been anyone else, Katherine would have known – she knew the baker next door was George, even though she only ever called him Mr Paterson. Everyone knew. (George’s pies were famous in Newtown, in all of Wellington by the way people talked.) But no one knew the names of the Chinese. Occasionally someone might say Mr – Mr Wong or Mr Choy. But usually it was the Chinaman next door to Paterson’s or the John on the corner of Tory and Webb. They were all called John, the Chinese. And even if anyone bothered to find out, who could remember? Their names were like birds that never came in to land.
Katherine was afraid to ask. Afraid he would speak his name and it would hover close to her ear, her cheek, her tongue, then fly away from her. How could she ask him? Again and again. As if his name Was unimportant. As if he merely provided a service for which she paid and dismissed him.
He was wrapping turnips in a page of the Evening Post and she’d expected him to open his full, wide lips. Without realising, she had turned her face a little, still looking intently at his dark eyes, his mouth, straining her ears as if spreading a net. But instead he’d leaned in closer, held out his left hand for her to see. She did not understand, yet she’d looked into his palm, as if to read his life line, his heart line, the lines of the number of his children. And then he lifted his right index finger like a pen, and wrote stroke upon stroke on his hand.
‘Wong,’ he said, and started over, slowly, kindly, as if to a child. ‘My name has grass on top,’ he said, drawing a short horizontal line on his skin and then two small ones down through it. Then a longer horizontal line underneath.
A name, she thought, has a sound which disappears, and now also a physical presence, a shape on skin, an apparition.
‘The belly of my name is a field,’ he said, drawing a grid like a window dissected into four small panes. How strange, she thought, the way the Chinese draw windows, how they draw three sides of the frame, then the two bars within and only last the bottom sill, as if there is no need for closure unless there is something of importance to close. No, a field, she thought again, not a window on the future, but something more earthy. Now two strokes underneath, like two short legs dancing, holding his name up to the world.
She watched him write his Christian name (but what does that mean, the word Christian?). ‘Chung,’ he was saying, and she was lost, somewhere after the symbol for China, the centre of all things, and three strokes of a heart beating. ‘Faithful,’ he was saying, ‘loyal,’ and she thought about faith, about loyalty and what might be true. ‘Yung,’ he was saying, ‘courageous,’ and she thought about courage, about what she had always been afraid to do, what she’d always been afraid to be.
She thought about how his surname came first, how his family had the ultimate priority. Katherine came first for her. Not McKechnie, which was only her husband’s name; not even Lachlan, her father’s name. Only Katherine. Whatever she could count on for herself.
She watched his finger move across the skin – this strange intimacy of language – and asked him without thinking for a Chinese name, an opening into his language, a window into his world.
Ghosts, Dreams
It was 4.30 when she came in on her way home from work. She said he looked tired. He remembered smiling weakly. He’d been up at six to go to the market, spent all day unloading the cart, washing and trimming vegetables. Another six hours to go, bringing in the cauliflowers, cabbages, onions, shutting the shop, tidying up.
She was surprised. Did he always have to work such long hours? What about his brother? Of course they took turns: he finished early on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, at about seven when they had dinner and his brother took over. And what did he do then? He might have said that he went down Tongyangai and met up with friends like Fong-man, occasionally played a game of dominoes or cards, mostly drank tea and argued about politics, but then he looked at her again and remembered Haining Street was a swear word in English, something like bastard or whore, a place that gweilo used at night to frighten their children. He remembered she knew nothing of China, or Sun Yat-sen and the Revolution, and maybe – probably – she didn’t care. He felt a nervous laugh rising in his throat.
‘Do you like knitting?’ she asked. ‘I hear that sea captains enjoy knitting. It’s supposed to be good when there’s nothing else to do.’
‘Nitting?’
She mimed some kind of action with her hands, but he didn’t understand.
‘Don’t worry, just kidding.’ She saw his bewilderment. ‘Joking. I was only joking.’
He saw the twinkle in her eyes. He was still curious – what was this nitting she joked about, and what was the other word, did she say kidding? – but he did not ask again. Sometimes he’d sidetrack her with his questions and they’d forget what they’d been talking about. Sometimes he was too plain tired.
‘So what do you d
o when you’re not working?’ she asked again.
‘I walk,’ he said. Already he’d forgotten the new words. Instead he was swallowed by night, the rocking of one foot in front of the other, everything full of shadow and half-light – moon, star, lamplight – the streets emptied of people and filled with ghosts, dreams, strange possibilities.
‘I like walking too,’ she said, and he was surprised, and didn’t know what he’d told her and what he’d only thought, because there was always a gap between thought and its expression, especially in another language. ‘It’s a good time to think,’ he heard her say, and he looked up from the cauliflower he’d chosen because it was the biggest and freshest and whitest, and he asked her where she liked to walk.
‘Sometimes we walk to Oriental Parade or even down to the beach at Island Bay. If it’s fine, that is. The children like to play in the water.
‘Robbie kicks a ball or if there are other boys down there he’ll join them for cricket . . . Edie makes elaborate – big – sandcastles . . . Sometimes we just go to the Basin. It’s so much closer . . .’
She sighed. ‘Sometimes I think I need time to myself. Away from Mrs Newman telling me what to do. Away from the children . . .’ She smiled.
He nodded. He needed time away from the shop too. Away from his brother. But perhaps he had too much time. Alone.
There was silence, just the crinkling and rustling of newspaper. As he handed the wrapped cauliflower to her, the small bag of Brussels sprouts, he told her about the place at the Basin, under the cabbage trees, where he liked to lie down and think and look at the night sky.
The next evening, Thursday, he did not go down Haining Street or Frederick or Taranaki. He walked to the Basin. There was no one under the pine or cabbage trees. He walked a circuit, then another, and another. Then he lay down under a tree and looked up at the moonless sky, at the stars shining out of darkness.
It was different here. The stars made unrecognisable pictures; they told other stories.
He could feel the damp coming through his clothes from the grass underneath, even from the air. His mother would scold. Cold-to-death, she’d call. Rice bucket, is that all you can do? Eat rice and nothing else? Your brother can’t read but is he so stupid?
Yung laughed and gazed at the stars, which glowed larger and more wondrously fuzzy because of myopia.
He thought about how far away they were. He thought about the cowherd and spinning-maid, of whom the heavens disapproved because passion interfered with their work – two lovers whom the Jade Emperor turned into stars, whose paths crossed only once every year, on the seventh day of the seventh month.
He sighed. Who could understand women and their complicated thinking – especially a foreign woman. He could feel the damp moving through his clothes, through his skin, even through his flesh to the marrow at the heart of his bones, when he heard her voice.
‘Hello,’ she called from a distance.
He lifted his head and saw her silhouette. ‘Hello,’ he said, and realising that she might not be sure whether it was him, he stood up and tipped his hat in the manner of a gweilo to a lady. ‘Mrs McKechnie,’ he said.
Stroke upon Stroke
He’d looked into her eyes as he told her about moonlight, starlight, the place under the cabbage trees at the Basin. Katherine blushed and left the shop quickly.
But she couldn’t stop thinking. As she cooked dinner, as she sent the children to bed. She couldn’t sleep.
The next day she gazed at the black typewriter keys and thought of his hair, his eyes, the gentle, husky sound of his voice. What had Mrs Newman just said? What was she supposed to be doing?
She passed by the shop on the way home, saw his brother stacking pumpkins. Did not go in.
Her stomach felt tight. At dinner, she could not eat.
‘Are you all right, Mum?’ Edie asked.
‘What? Yes, I’m fine. Just got a stomach-ache.’ She put down her fork.
‘Brussels sprouts give me stomach-ache too,’ Robbie said, pushing his plate away.
Katherine could see him looking at her, waiting for her to argue with him, waiting for her to make him eat, but for once she said nothing.
The children went to bed and the house fell silent.
Katherine opened a book and closed it. She picked up her knitting and put it down again. She looked in at the children. Came back downstairs and paced from room to room. Not a sound from upstairs. Not a sound.
She put on her coat and walked out the back door.
It was a new moon; she could barely make out his silhouette under the cabbage trees. ‘Mrs McKechnie,’ he said, as if he’d been waiting.
How did he know it was her? How could he be waiting?
She was suddenly afraid. She’d made a terrible mistake with Donald. And now, what in God’s name was she doing?
He stood up and walked towards her, and she didn’t know what to say. She had to say something.
‘You haven’t given me a name,’ she blurted out. ‘I asked you over a month ago and you still haven’t given me a name.’ She wanted to cry. What a stupid thing to say. As if she’d come all this way – as if she’d left her children asleep in bed – just because he’d forgotten. What had come over her? It had been a stupid, stupid thing to ask of him, even then. And now . . .
A tram rattled past, turning out of Adelaide Road, into Rugby and along Sussex; another travelled along Kent Terrace. A drunk called out as he stumbled out of the Caledonian, the clip-clop of a horse-cart, the ragged sound of a motorcar.
What was he saying? Was he laughing? Not his usual gravelly laugh but something quieter, more hesitant.
The leaves of a cabbage tree shook above them.
Her face felt hot. She was shaking. She wanted to run, but her legs felt weak, as if her bones had softened, as if she were falling. ‘I . . . I have to go . . .’ she whispered.
But then he moved closer, took her in his arms as if to still her shaking.
He turned her hand and slowly traced onto her palm with his finger. She could hardly see, only movements of darkness within darkness, but she could smell ginger and aniseed, the smell of a man’s fresh sweat, and she could feel the shape of her name, the sensation of skin against skin.
‘Lai,’ he said. ‘This is Chinese family name, not name we give foreigners, not name like English. You put this name with word for bright and this is sun come out of night. You have all these colours.’ She could hear his breathing, feel her own short breaths. ‘Bik-yuk,’ he was saying. ‘This is Christian name. It means jade.’ And he was writing again, stroking her palm with her name. ‘Bik,’ he was saying. ‘This is word for king and this is white. Under is rock. Yuk. This is three jades,’ he was drawing horizontal lines, ‘and this string hold them together. Many woman have name like beautiful or flower but you are pure and clear . . .’
She heard a tram swing through her silence into Adelaide Road, felt him touch her hair, her cheek, brush her lips, which parted and left a line of moisture on his fingers.
A Thousand Míles
You take one step, two, you open your eyes – and you’ve travelled a thousand miles.
What is she doing?
She avoided him for days. There were no more vegetables. No bananas or oranges to give the children for their lunches. She wondered about walking further, finding a different fruiterer.
She walked past without turning to look. She could still feel his fingers, his lips . . . She wanted to scream. She wanted the earth to swallow her . . .
She walked but could not enter another greengrocery. She walked. And turned back.
She entered and felt his eyes move over her face, down her body.
‘I need vegetables – and fruit,’ she said, her voice quivering. ‘For the children.’ She had no strength. She could not choose.
He unhooked a bundle of bananas from above the window, selected oranges and carrots, cauliflower and onions. Potatoes. As he gave them to her, his fingers brushed across her hand.
‘Tonight,’ he said softly. ‘Where no one see us.’
Lantern
Katherine sent the children to bed at nine o’clock. Edie seemed to fall almost immediately into sleep, her face as clear and calm as the moon. Robbie complained. He was twelve, after all, and not a child. Surely he could stay up till at least 9.30. She let him read for fifteen minutes only, then came and turned off the light and went back downstairs. There was mending to do. A sock of Robbie’s where his big hungry toe had eaten its way through the wool, a pair of trousers that had split at the knee. He was so hard on his clothes – running around kicking balls, climbing trees, forgetting to cut his toenails; these were only a couple of months old.
