Small Bodies of Water

by Nina Mingya Powles

  6. How often she describes the moon in her Shanghai stories: all within a few pages of a novella titled ‘The Golden Cangue’, the moon is ‘a red gold basin’, ‘high and full like a white sun’, ‘that abnormal moon that made one’s body hairs stand on end all over’.

  7. She is right. Here, the moon is abnormal. I can’t remember what it looks like through clear, unpolluted air. Walking back to my room at night, I looked up and the colour of the moon stopped my breath. I tried to take a picture with my phone but it never came out: a pale blur. Everything was in a haze, a sunken dreamworld seen through pink stained glass. It felt like everything around me could have collapsed at the slightest touch. Light, sound, the air that separated you and me.

  8. I often recorded observations in my notebook on the flora and fauna of Shanghai, in waking and in dreams: white yúlàn magnolias (the designated official flower of the city) with their dark leathery leaves, plane trees planted by the French, ginkgo trees turning yellow in autumn, plum blossoms, and the azaleas, enormous clouds of magenta and pale pink in courtyards and city gardens.

  9. The women in her stories are not always likeable. They are selfish, bored, cruel, petty, trapped in stuffy apartments and unhappy marriages. Shanghai can trap its inhabitants easily, with spring rain that pours unendingly, summer humidity that smothers, drains. One night in June my electricity ran out at 3 a.m., shutting off my air conditioning. I got out of bed and lay on the tiled floor, damp hair fanned out above my head, fingers spread wide, not touching any part of my body. Every few minutes I shifted onto a cooler part of the floor that my skin had not yet touched. I drifted in and out of sleep. A colloquial word for humid is mèn which can also mean bored, depressed or tightly sealed. The character is made up of a heart inside a door

  10. I think of the women in Chang’s city, their curled hair frizzing in the heat, a halo of light around their heads. They sit by the window in dark bedrooms and hotel rooms, awake while everyone else is asleep, in silk cheongsam and cotton slippers with peonies embroidered on the toes. City of dimly lit windows and half-open doors. City of smoke moving through still air. City full of trapped hearts.

  11. The phrase New Woman was coined in the 1910s by radical intellectuals who saw the inferior status of Chinese women as a symbol of the nation’s outdated traditions. The New Woman of their dreams was well educated, independent, free-spirited. Chang herself may have fallen into this category, but many women she writes about do not. In her novella Love in a Fallen City, the protagonist Liusu tells her husband: ‘If you were killed, my story would be over. But if I were killed, you’d still have a lot of story left!’

  12. A blurred photograph depicts a funeral procession moving down a wide city street. A young woman’s portrait held high above the crowd, her face bordered by large chrysanthemums. I can’t make out any expressions except for the woman’s in the portrait: her head dipped forwards, her eyes cast down, lips painted, studio lights gleaming on her shiny, pinned-back hair. She wears a white dress with a high collar. People stand overlooking the street from the rooftops, their arms waving in the air.

  13. Ruan Lingyu was an actress who died from an overdose of sleeping pills on the 8th of March, 1935, aged twenty-four. It was one month after the premiere of the silent film New Women, directed by Cai Chusheng, in which Ruan starred as a single mother who dreams of being a writer but is eventually forced into prostitution to support her child. A crowd of 300,000 marched in the streets of Shanghai for her funeral. A caption below the photograph on her Wikipedia page reads: ‘The flowers at Ruan’s funeral were reported in the press to be as high as the buildings.’

  14. When I walk alone through the city at night I am surrounded by this glow, but I’m not sure it’s real. I could reach out and touch you but I’m not sure you are real.

  15. What was Chang herself like? I don’t know, but I think she understood this moment when the dream and the real begin to blur. She understood how the sky in Shanghai contains many different colours at once: ‘At the horizon the morning colours were a layer of green, a layer of yellow, and a layer of red like a watermelon cut open.’ Reading her stories in translation is like trying to see her from a great distance. Or through a thick pane of glass. I am standing outside, peering into rooms where her ghost has been.

  16. As autumn deepened I expected to see your face on the street or in the subway station. After you left I thought I might feel sad that this possibility could no longer exist. Instead after a while the outlines of trees looked sharper, like a fog had lifted.

  17. The Aotearoa poet Robin Hyde was twenty-seven when she visited Shanghai in 1938. She wrote about tasting ‘what must be the best chocolate cakes in the world’ at a café in the French Concession. I imagine Robin Hyde and Eileen Chang crossing paths unknowingly sometime in 1938. Browsing in the same bookstore, smoking in a corner of the same dance hall, crossing the same street somewhere in the International Settlement where Chang lived. Their eyes meet for a moment.

  18. In every city, large or small, each person has their own secret map. Reading about the history of Shanghai online, I came across a link: Map of Haunted Places in Shanghai. Little red stars mark locations in and around the former French Concession. The Paramount Ballroom, where a young woman was shot and killed on the dance floor in 1941. Chang frequented the Paramount; it was the centre of Shanghai nightlife in the 1930s. The building is still standing. People say they have seen the shadow of a woman in the fourth-floor ballroom, dancing in slow circles by herself.

  19. Places you showed me: the tiny ramen bar, the grimy ultraviolet underground club, the Chongqing hotpot restaurant where I waited outside in the rain while you went in to return something your ex-girlfriend had left at your apartment. Afterwards, I couldn’t avoid passing by these places, but when I walked past I sped up. Especially at night, when there was a risk of dreams pouring in.

  20. In Shanghai, Robin Hyde dreamed of back home: ‘Almost every night, lying in the padded quilt, I dreamed about New Zealand, dreams so sharp and vivid that when I woke up, it seemed the black-tiled houses were a fairytale.’ Back home in Wellington for a few weeks in summer, those first few nights in my childhood bedroom, I dreamed of plane trees, rain-soaked streets, a night sky that was never dark.

  21. In the preface to her collection of short stories, Romances, Chang wrote: ‘Our entire civilisation – with all its magnificence, and its insignificance – will someday belong to the past. If the word I use most often is “desolate” it’s because I feel, in the back of my mind, this staggering threat.’

  22. It was the middle of winter, and you and I were standing on the corner of Nanjing Xi Lu. From there, I could see the place where she lived, when she was the same age I was then. I walked away when I couldn’t stand being near you any longer, knowing that if you touched me again I might burn up in the cold air. I never told you anything important about myself but if you had asked, if you had paused to listen, I would have said: my dreams take place in the rainy season. As I walked away towards the crossing, where marigolds blaze in the middle of the street, my ears were ringing with the chaos of passing traffic, a plane overhead, all of it rolling into the sound of a breaking wave.

  23. I can never show anyone my map of Shanghai, not because it’s a secret, but because it is so huge and sprawling. The park where there’s always an old man playing his saxophone in the pagoda, the pink neon light installation on the side of an abandoned building that I found once somewhere near Huaihai Zhong Lu and never found again, the bookshop café where I used to write – where you can pay ten yuan to send a postcard to your future self. They put it in a box to be posted on your preferred date, which can be months or years or decades from now.

  24. ‘I’m looking for the first day of spring on the lunar calendar,’ says a character named Shijun in Chang’s novel Half a Lifelong Romance, while alone in a room with the woman he is beginning to fall in love with. Shijun flicks through the calendar on the wall, one of those old Chinese paper calendars like th
e one on the wall of the dumpling restaurant where I often went for lunch. Weeks’ worth of discarded pages lay crumpled on the floor, each printed in jade green ink. I took one, folded it, tucked it in my pocket.

  25. A postcard you can get in any souvenir shop: a black-and-white photograph of a young woman with shiny hair pinned back in victory curls. She’s a movie star, a pin-up girl on cigarette packets and posters for stockings and perfume and magazines, the girl they called New Woman. She is looking directly into my eyes, her lips almost turning into a smirk. I turned the postcard over, looking for her name, but there wasn’t one. I sat down at one of the café tables and began to write. It was the first day of spring.

  The Plum Rains

  CHIHIRO

  In the 2001 animated film Spirited Away, ten-year-old Chihiro stumbles upon a curved bridge above a dry riverbed. Above her, dark clouds begin to spread over the blue sky, threatening rain. As day turns into night, the real world turns into a strange, luminous fantasy realm. Frightened, Chihiro tries to run back the way she came but finds a vast body of water blocking her path. ‘I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming,’ she repeats to herself. Her body begins to lose its solid form; she is slowly turning transparent. Half ghost, half girl. The river is visible through her skin.

  From this moment on, Spirited Away is a film that steadily fills with water: a flooded river, a drenched bathhouse, a train speeding across the sea. Water becomes a boundary between the real world and the spirit world. And as it often does in Hayao Miyazaki’s films, rainfall marks a moment of transformation. On her first night working at the spirits’ bathhouse, Chihiro is almost fully part of the spirit world. Her clothes have changed from a T-shirt and shorts to a more traditional coral-red tunic, tied at the waist with a red strip of fabric. We see her silhouette through a screen door while red lanterns light up one by one in the pouring rain. Blue hydrangeas shine wetly in the glow of Chihiro’s room. She slides open the door into the rain and finds herself face to face with a spirit.

  MÉI YŬ

  méi yŭ, plum rain. Late spring to early summer in eastern China is the season of the plum rains, traditionally marking the period when plums ripen and turn yellow. The plum rains are caused by a weather front in the lower troposphere of the sky, where two bodies of air of different densities combine over eastern Asia: the moisture-heavy air over the Pacific Ocean, and cooler air that forms over continental land masses. This causes high humidity and persistent heavy rainfall over eastern China, Japan and Taiwan between April and July every year. In 2020, Shanghai experienced the longest plum rain season on record. The phrase is the title of a poem by Tang poet Du Fu. Many translations of this poem exist, but I decide to look up the original. I attempt my own imperfect translation of the second and third lines: ‘the fourth month ripens yellow plums / the clear river flows on.’

  For many nights in a row in Shanghai, the rain turned the city luminescent. I was falling into something – not love, but hunger – and my anxiety slipped out of my control. It took hold of my relationship to food and eating in a way it had never done before. One of my Mandarin teacher’s favourite example sentences that she used to test our grammar: eat two meals a day if you want to be beautiful. The perfect sentence for us to memorise, evenly balanced into two clauses: one imperative, one conditional. The weight of this sentence – and the light cadence with which we repeated it in unison in class – rattled inside my head. I took the words apart one by one.

  I got into the habit of listing in my head all the things I’d eaten in a day. So I brought my notebook with me when I went out to eat alone, and wrote down the colours of the sky instead: blood orange, dark violet, strawberry ice cream pink, hot magenta.

  It rained all night the first time I went to his apartment. I lay on my side, his spine curving in front of me in the dark as he moved. Briefly I saw between his shoulder blades the outline of a circle in ink, or perhaps two small circles overlapping. I wanted to trace my finger along the deep blue line. He turned onto his back and it was gone. In shadow, the shapes of our bodies were blurred. I suddenly remembered the circles the next day while on the subway home (line ten: the lilac-coloured line with shiny lilac-coloured seats in all the carriages) holding my wet umbrella between my knees where it dripped onto my sandals and the floor of the train. The vision came back the same way a forgotten dream can return hours later, days later, in a brief flash of colour.

  Places in the city where reality feels altered: empty subway platforms; the floodlit streets of campus at night; the café with wet plastic vines curled around the doorway where we stood side by side, about to step out into the rain.

  SAN

  San is first glimpsed through clouds of thick mist and rain, riding on the back of a white wolf, sprinting down the mountainside. At the foot of the mountain, on the banks of a flooded river, Prince Ashitaka and San cross paths for the first time. One of the most iconic stills from the film is when their eyes meet across the river, San’s cheeks smeared with the blood of her wounded wolf. In the same moment, a ghostly tree spirit appears.

  All of Miyazaki’s films have their own vivid landscapes. Most are concerned with imminent environmental destruction of some kind. Princess Mononoke (1997) has its own entire ecosystem, made up of emerald-green trees, rivers, mountain valleys, forest sprites, bewitched animals, a glowing lake set deep among the trees. The forest is being cut down and cleared away by humans, and the spirits begin to revolt.

  Writer Nina Li Coomes focuses on Miyazaki’s heroines as bodies in constant flux, crossing between worlds and between the borders of girlhood and womanhood. Coomes considers these characters through the lens of her own mixed-race heritage. I find myself doing the same. San, a human girl raised by wolves, lives with spirits in the forest and tries to protect them. She is not a wolf, but nor does she see herself as fully human – Coomes asks: ‘Is San a wolf? Is she a girl? Is she neither, or both, or something in between?’ There is so much shape-shifting; so many doors, bridges and portals that lead Miyazaki’s heroines into new dimensions. The borders of the real and unreal are blurred, as are the characters who cross them. I think of Chihiro’s arms and hands turning ghostly as she stands by the river, and that first image of San and her wolves emerging out of the mist and rain like apparitions.

  Soon after I left Shanghai, after my language course ended, I had a vivid dream: a white temple set into the slopes of a valley, surrounded by lush green forest and fields, a narrow river coursing below. The sky is gleaming blue but darkening with clouds. A pack of white wolves guards the temple. They look up at the sky. A soft rain dampens their faces.

  MONSOON

  I was sitting in the lounge with Mum and Gong Gong. The wooden clock on the bookcase chimed half past four, and the sky in the window darkened as if something was passing across the sun. Gong Gong stood up to switch on the lights and turn down the humming ceiling fan that blew warm wind onto my skin. There was some kind of cooking programme on TV – a woman teaching her viewers how to make sticky green cakes flavoured with pandan leaves. The lights glowed in the new darkness. Then a cool wind rushing in through the open patio doors signalled the beginning of the downpour: rain hammering the ceiling, shaking the roof and walls of the old house. Gong Gong didn’t look up from the TV, but Mum and I went to the open door. We knew we had minutes until it would be over. Silver torrents of water poured down onto the back garden, drenching the long grasses and the small, shaking mango tree. I was standing in the doorway where raindrops caught my cheeks and arms, where the rain looked like a veil separating me from the garden. I breathed the wet air in. Then the air brightened and everything was quiet except for the TV in the background, flies hitting the windows, rainwater trickling down from the eaves.

  Every afternoon is the same during Borneo’s rainy season, which falls between October and February. At around four o’clock, the rain comes down hard and fast. This is a different kind of rain to Shanghai’s slow, relentless plum rains: these monsoons are sudden, euphoric, surreal.


  Borneo’s tropical climate means that temperatures stay between roughly 27 and 34 degrees Celsius most days, with little seasonal change apart from rainfall. A 2012 report on the impact of climate change in Borneo noted that based on projections of a 2-degree increase in global temperatures, Borneo will be severely affected by climate change through increased risk of floods, forest fires and sea level rise. This 2-degree increase is a very low estimate; as of December 2019, Climate Action Tracker classifies projected temperature increases of up to 2.8 degrees as ‘optimistic’. A projected warming of 4.1–4.8 degrees by the end of 2100 is now considered our absolute ‘baseline’ trajectory.

  It’s only possible to romanticise the rain if, like me, you did not grow up in a region prone to flooding. I’ve visited Kota Kinabalu for years and have often splashed around in this rain, but I have never experienced a flood. Throughout May and June 2020, flash flooding in Kota Kinabalu led over a thousand people to evacuate to relief centres. In her essay ‘Everything Anyone Has Ever Said About the Pool’, Australian writer Ellena Savage states that low-income women and girls are much more likely to die by drowning in flood regions than men and boys. ‘Swimming education is not a neutral thing,’ she reminds us.

  I’d been visiting Kota Kinabalu during my mid-semester break. My parents joined me there, along with my aunts and uncles and cousins. Life in Shanghai at that time felt too intense, unreal: a fluorescent city made up of longing, hunger, continuous dizzying rain. Back with the joyful chaos of my extended family, we ate together each night. There was always a combination of Cantonese dim sum and Malay favourites on the table: satay, spicy char kuay teow, fried fish, egg tarts, siu mai and bao. All of us crowded round on stools and chairs, the mosquito coils giving off a chemical scent from under the table, and I slowly regained something of my old relationship to food – food as a connective force, a source of strength and joy.