Small Bodies of Water

by Nina Mingya Powles

  MEI & SATSUKI

  At the beginning of the most memorable scene in My Neighbour Totoro (1988), a single raindrop causes ripples in a stream, marking the beginning of a storm. As the afternoon darkens, Satsuki and her sister Mei take shelter under a shrine, next to a bush of blue hydrangeas. Later, rain still falling, they wait for their father at the bus stop. In the glow of a street light, the enormous forest spirit Totoro meets Mei and Satsuki for the first time. Raindrops fall noisily from the canopy of ferns, pattering the top of Totoro’s umbrella, and he bounces with delight at the sound. The girls stare at the spirit, wide-eyed. Yellow chrysanthemums and irises shine in the dark. The flowers make me think of Chihiro in Spirited Away, the way she sprints through fields of dark pink azaleas and purple hydrangeas, their leaves brushing against her shoulders. Like Chihiro’s parents in Spirited Away, Satsuki and Mei’s mother and father are absent for most of the movie. Forest shrines provide brief glimpses of the spirit realm; a world that feels both ancient and strangely close, hidden in plain sight, especially once night has fallen. The friendly spirits lie just beyond a veil of rain, or across a stream, or in the tops of trees. ‘It was a dream but it wasn’t a dream!’ Satsuki chants over and over again in the morning.

  DIÀNMŬ

  This notebook is A5-sized with a patchy black and white design on the front, similar to those classic American exercise books of the ’80s and ’90s. It’s a thin paperback with shapes and pictures taped to the cover: drawings of constellations, brightly patterned origami paper. The pages are cream-coloured and ruled, with the words BOSHI PAPER on the corner of each page.

  I still have four notebooks from the year and a half I spent studying in Shanghai. The very first one, which was smaller and had a pale yellow cover, seems to have been lost somewhere between Shanghai, Wellington and London. The black and white notebook, the one closest to falling apart, spans September to December 2016. Inside I’ve taped boarding passes, a dried ginkgo leaf, a movie ticket, overexposed Instax Polaroids and a ticket for a music festival in Shanghai called ‘Concrete & Grass’. There was a thunderstorm on the first night of that festival, which fell on the same night as Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, In my notebook, the next day, I wrote notes on the lightning: we had been watching a K-pop boy band perform their latest Mandarin single when the purple clouds split open with blue light and the stage lights flickered pink and gold. The crowd of mostly teenage girls gasped and screamed every time the lightning came. When the rain started, it drowned out the band – we scattered, running for cover, laughing and reaching for each other in the storm.

  The goddess of lightning is Diànmŭ, lightning mother. She was born a human girl. Hers is one of few stories I remember learning at Chinese school when I was little, though the details have faded. I can still remember a picture of her from a book of stories: she is tall and lithe, wearing a blue flowing gown, carrying a shining mirror in each hand. One day the god of thunder, Léi Gōng, spies a young girl throwing a bowl of rice into a ditch. He thinks she is wasting valuable food, and consequently strikes her dead. The Jade Emperor, the First God, witnesses Léi Gōng’s error – the girl had only been throwing away rice husks, the remains of fresh rice that she had given to her mother. The Jade Emperor brings her back to life and transforms her into a goddess – to be a wife to the god of thunder who had killed her, to light up the sky before the thunder.

  PONYO

  Ponyo was released by Studio Ghibli in 2008 and was billed as a movie for kids, but in typical Miyazaki fashion, it’s punctuated by unsettlingly strange moments. Drawing on Japanese folklore as well as Hans Christian Andersen’s story of ‘The Little Mermaid’, Ponyo is half goldfish, half girl. In her fishlike form, Ponyo befriends a little boy named Sōsuke who lives in a seaside town, and who keeps her in a plastic bucket of seawater. In her attempt to finally become human, Ponyo releases so much volatile magic that she unleashes a tsunami and a typhoon upon the town. What begins as a downpour turns into catastrophic floods. Huge, curling waves take on the form of giant fish as they crash over roads and break against the clifftops. Ponyo runs along the tops of the waves in her red dress, searching for her friend Sōsuke.

  But the most interesting character to me in Ponyo is Lisa, Sōsuke’s mother. She is not just a mother figure; there’s a complex background story alluded to in her relationship with Kōichi – Sōsuke’s father, who is away at sea – and in her working life as a carer. One of the only trustworthy, caring parents in the Miyazaki canon, where parents don’t normally exist at all, she is tough but kind, grumpy but joyful. Her glowing cottage on the hill above the sea is a place of warmth, but also longing, as when Kōichi phones to say he won’t be coming home.

  After speeding her tiny car up the hill in the wind and the waves unleashed by Ponyo’s magic, Lisa bundles Sōsuke and Ponyo in her arms, carrying them towards home. Once safely inside, she flicks on the spare electric torches, spoons honey into mugs of hot water, and puts the kettle on for two bowls of instant ramen. In the dark she opens the curtains and gazes out the windows at the wild sea, unafraid.

  We Are All Dreaming of Swimming Pools

  I think about loving swimming the way you love somebody. How a kiss happens, gravitational.

  Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies

  5, Niagara Falls, Ontario

  The orca glides from one end of the deep pool to the other. Upbeat music plays on the loudspeakers. A pony-tailed woman wearing a full-body wetsuit stands on a platform, a white bucket placed by her feet. The music swells; the crowd leans forward on their seats. I imagine what it would be like to be in that pool, too, swimming swiftly alongside the whales under the stadium lights, perfectly at home in the aquamarine water. My mother raises her camera.

  6, New York City

  Half dream, half memory. The bottom and all four sides of the small pool are covered in silvery white tiles. Standing in the shallow end I can feel their ridged edges with my feet. I have my purple plastic goggles with iridescent gold lenses – when I put them on everything is like an underwater sunset. Outside the wide window, a city skyline glistens with heat. After swimming, I eat dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and French fries served on a blue picnic plate.

  7, Sabah Golf Club, Kota Kinabalu

  After our swim, we dry off in the shade next to the pool with our ice creams. Our favourite is the Häagen-Dazs one with chocolate ice cream coated in a milk chocolate shell. Wasps flit around my hair, attracted by the sugar, and Dad swats them away. From up here, we can see dark clouds passing swiftly from above the rainforest towards the town, and I can feel the afternoon heat becoming thicker, sweeter. Mum motions for me to move closer to her under the pool umbrella, getting ready for the downpour.

  8, Thorndon, Wellington

  Pink nylon, ice-white tiles. An unheated school pool is a lesson in how to breathe. Oak leaves and cracked acorns swirl on the surface of the water as we grope frantically for each other. Chipped fingernails, scraped knees. One, two! Breathe, kick! Mrs Ongley’s fists are in the air. Anna’s nosebleed brings the swimming lesson to a sudden end. Girls gasp and sneer at the little trail of blood droplets on the concrete.

  9, Lower Hutt, Wellington

  A hazy memory: an indoor swimming pool with high ceilings and a pink water slide spiralling down into the deep end. Every half hour, mechanised waves gently roll the water from one end to another, making our hips sway.

  10, Thorndon, Wellington

  I dream again of a heated pool filled with deep layers of memory. We huddle by the ladder in our regulation white swim caps and navy swimsuits, a dusting of talcum powder on our collarbones, our arms crossed tightly over our chests. My suit is coming undone at the left shoulder strap even though my mother’s sewn it up twice. I grip it self-consciously, worried the last threads will snap. The navy nylon is too small for me now, digging in at the hips. I can’t stand having my body out of the water, exposed to the wind, to other girls’ stares.

  14, Xuhui District, Shanghai

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sp; My first two-piece, at fourteen: a black halter top tied behind the neck, with white, blue and pink polka dots, the Roxy logo embroidered on the matching briefs. I take my iPod, a bottle of water, a towel and a pack of Oreos down to the pool next to the car park. All summer, the cool, chlorinated water is a blessing. I float on my back under the corrugated plastic roof, which collapsed last winter under the weight of sudden snow. The lifeguard plays games on his phone while I do my slow strokes, alone. The heat can’t touch me: a girl swimming is a body of water.

  16, Jinqiao, Shanghai

  It’s too hot to be outside without some part of your body touching the water. The pool at the compound where my friend Jessie lives is in the shape of a heart, with dark blue tiles on the bottom and creamy white edges. We sit on the side of the pool, our toes dangling in the water, eating mini burritos wrapped in foil that Jessie’s mom made for us even though we said we weren’t hungry. I chew on the straw of a juice box. The white sun is behind the clouds but still the plastic lounge chairs feel hot to the touch. When boys from the year above us show up on the far side of the pool, we quickly rewrap our burritos and lower our bodies back into the deep end, gliding away.

  19, Thorndon, Wellington

  After my last exam I catch the bus down the hill. Thorndon pool glistens enticingly in the sunshine, the chemical colour of a blue popsicle. With my purple swimming cap and pink goggles on, I swim slow laps in the afternoon sun for thirty-five minutes. Getting dressed, my long hair feels coarse and a little bleached from the chlorine. It falls in waves around my sunburnt shoulders. My mum tells me to cut it but I won’t. I sit on the concrete steps above the pool to eat my bagel, in the exact same spot where I once stood huddled with a group of other twelve-year-old girls, shivering in the wind, trying in vain to cover up our exposed bodies which felt so awkward and new.

  22, Karori, Wellington

  Inside the aquatic centre it’s warm, humid, windowless. I pull on the swimsuit Mum bought me from a department store sale on our last family trip to Malaysia. It’s black with a sporty pattern of lilac stripes down the sides. I stuff my thick hair up into my purple swimming cap, sling my goggles around my neck and tiptoe across the yellow changing room floor. I’m terrible at exercising but I’ve started swimming regularly again in various public pools around the city: Thorndon summer pool, the site of many school swimming sports days of my childhood; Freyberg pool, perched on the edge of the sea; and here at Karori pool, all the way up in the bush-covered hills. When I lift my head above water I can hear the muffled sound of the wind beating against the roof.

  I grew up with access to swimming lessons and public swimming pools – privileges that are easy to take for granted when you’re a child. The public pool is governed by rigid structures of gender, class, whiteness, the various shapes of our bodies. As Ellena Savage writes, ‘In the history of pool rules, there have been, and remain, rules of non-admission, rules of active discrimination. Not to let Aboriginal people in. Not to let female people in. Not to let trans people in. Not to let people in who can’t afford to pay.’ Inside the doors of the aquatic centre, with its rigid rules that so closely resemble the anxiety-inducing rules of high school PE class, I feel the urge to cover myself up under the gaze of the tall, athletic swimmers with special racing swim caps. Yet I blend in here in this overwhelmingly white space, with my light skin, my brown hair and my ability to pay the entry fee. I breaststroke too steadily for the slow lane, but too slowly for the medium lane. Away from the changing rooms, in the pool itself – a public body of water – I am a stronger version of myself. Sunlight pours through the glass walls around the pool and reflects brightly off my chlorinated skin.

  25, Peak District, Derbyshire

  A forest pool surrounded by soft ferns and foxgloves bent over by the wind. A blue reservoir glistens through the pine trees on either side of the little pool. The water is cool, soft, the colour of jasmine tea, submerging my skin in flickering red and orange light. This magic place is called Slippery Stones, and it’s true, the rocks are slick with dark moss. My boyfriend and I are some of the oldest people here – groups of teenagers smoke and listen to Frank Ocean in the grassy meadow, wearily watching all newcomers who lay their towels down, like languid guardians of the pool. I wince as the teenagers cannonball one by one into the dark water, aiming for the middle of the pool, the deepest part where you can’t touch the bottom. None of them miss. This place feels both wild and safely enclosed, with slow waterfalls at opposite sides of the pool where the amber-coloured water flows out to a steady stream, which in turn becomes the River Derwent.

  26, Lucca, Italy

  There are wasps in the grass around the path leading up to the pool. A garden pond is covered with netting to stop small children falling in. Pond lilies are beginning to bloom on the surface, blush pink against so much green. I’ve got my yellow bikini on under my cotton dress, a gingham pattern on seersucker fabric. There are two ripe peaches in my tote bag. I had one for breakfast, too, along with a boiled egg and toast. In August the peaches here are the sweetest, with marigold flesh, tinged red at the core of the fruit. The juice drips down as I eat one after my swim, drying sticky on my thigh.

  Unpeel

  peeling fruit for someone is a sign of tenderness, love.

  Jane Wong, Offerings

  I CAN PICTURE my mum’s hands most clearly when they are curled around a piece of fruit. Usually a mandarin, the thick-skinned variety, with ribbons of orange peel twirled around her fingers. Sometimes a lychee. She uses her teeth to crack open the shells. Other times it’s a bite-sized ladyfinger banana, the sort that carries with it a heavy, honeyed scent. In a single movement she unpeels the banana and pops it in her mouth whole. I follow her lead.

  Mum collects our peelings and tips them into the blue compost bin at the bottom of our seaside garden in Wellington. Throughout the year she spreads the rotted compost, mixed with soil, at the roots of plants and trees: beneath the lemon tree, the feijoa tree, and the wonky slow-climbing apple tree that produces three or four bulbous, sour fruits each autumn. I pick the apples once their cheeks begin to redden and wash them in the sink. Mum cores and peels them while I roll out the pastry. We toss the pale slices in cinnamon and dark brown sugar.

  My best friend at school hated the pithy strands that remained on her small segments of mandarin. Mid-winter mandarins are always the easiest to peel, the tender skin already loosened around the fruit. I became skilled at pulling away the white tendrils, delicately patterned like nerve endings, leaving a smooth unbroken surface. I’d pass the little bean-shaped pieces to her and we would each pop one in our mouths. We’d hold them on our tongues, enjoying the moment before the vesicles burst.

  In Shanghai, I used to watch the man at the fruit shop peel my giant honey pomelo. In the middle of the long summer break, when campus emptied out and I was almost entirely alone, I was prone to watching strangers’ hands. I hadn’t touched another human being in months.

  The honey pomelo, yòuzi, is widely cultivated in China. I’d never seen one before I moved to Shanghai. The character made up of tree and reason/origin carries the sensation of something round and heavy hanging from the branches of a tree. Unlike most mandarins and clementines the honey pomelo is not a hybrid, but an original root species of its own: a parent to many other citrus hybrids. (A grapefruit is a cross between an orange and a pomelo.) Citrus fruits, especially mandarins and pomelos, are often left as offerings at ancestors’ graves during Qīng Míng, Tomb-Sweeping Festival. People burn joss sticks and eat special candied snacks such as qīngtuán, green balls of glutinous rice flour filled with sweet bean paste. During the Lunar New Year, when they’re most abundant, mandarins are symbols of good fortune.

  The cutting of a honey pomelo is a violent, tender process. The man at the fruit shop uses both hands to firmly hold the fruit against the wooden board. He takes a long blade and sets it against the pomelo’s leathery yellow skin at a vertical angle. He pushes in and it gives way with a soft squ
eaking sound. The spongy pith is thicker than I realised – almost two centimetres. He pulls the knife downwards, making a long cut from the top of the globe to the base. The same again on the other side. He sets down the knife, grips the edges of the seam, and pulls. I hear that familiar sucking sound of the fruit’s skin ripping away from the membrane. The sound makes me thirsty.

  The pieces of shell fall away to the floor. My jewel-pink pomelo is bagged up and handed to me for six yuan. There are empty skins scattered all around the fruit shop’s tiled floor like offerings. I carry my naked pomelo home under my arm: my fragrant, sticky bundle. A sugar-sour scent follows me wherever I go. My Mandarin teacher tells me her mother uses the thick rinds for household cleaning. She puts them under the beds and leaves them there to absorb dust.

  My first summer as a student in Shanghai was a summer of unpeeling. Almost all others had left campus; I had two months to kill before my few friends would return. I was twenty-two. I had always wanted to return to Shanghai, a city so deeply embedded in my memory, a city I grew to love at a time when I was becoming myself. I’d always promised my mum (and myself) that I would at some point seriously dedicate myself to learning – or relearning – Mandarin. Eager to put off forging a career path with my new Masters in creative writing for as long as possible, I applied for a government scholarship to study Mandarin at a university in China – and got it.

  Waves of homesickness rolled over me throughout the summer. Going on dates with strangers made it worse. I had to come to terms with this new way of being, this new aloneness. Swimming, my usual way of reclaiming myself, wasn’t an option; the only pools around were inside expensive hotels, and the university pool had closed for the summer. The languid heat and high humidity made time slow down, made moving through the city feel like swimming. I set to work whittling down my daily life to the things I knew might keep me afloat in lieu of daily human contact: I bought a new prepaid Wi-Fi card, enrolled in an online poetry class, illegally downloaded all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls and cycled across campus every evening for a bowl of noodles or wontons, and fresh fruit. At the fruit shop that stayed open until late, the table out front was stacked with plastic boxes filled with candy-pink cubes. With a box of cut papaya and a pomelo tucked in the front basket, I cycled back through the violet dusk, warm smoggy wind in my hair.