I begin to have recurring dreams of a garden that partly resembles this one, but contains plants from various other landscapes I’ve known before: a giant yùlán magnolia with creamy basketball-sized flowers, a fig tree, pink peonies. In the dream I’m standing in the doorway of a high-ceilinged house looking up at the terraced garden, where a tall rosemary bush with bright purple flowers grows in the middle. There are furred peaches hanging from low trees, giant orange-and-black butterflies hovering above hydrangeas, some with parts of their wings missing. There is a kōwhai, a lemon tree and a red aloe.
Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet of Ngāti Ranginui, Chinese and Pākehā ancestry. Her poem ‘Day by Day’ tracks a series of solitary moments spent in the kitchen and in the garden:
(iii)
At home, in the garden.
My fingers cup the dirt,
pull up weeds, weigh
and scour. It is mid-afternoon.
Early evening reading
manuscripts. I reach
through the pages,
pluck out a koru fern.
It needs water, it needs
nurturing. That’s why
I am here.
To garden is to care for, to feed, to tend: to offer up your own tenderness to the earth. Some days, in this other island country, which is the furthest point from the island where I was born, I think this is why I am here.
20/5/18
In my head I’m planning and planting an imaginary garden, one made up of all the gardens I’ve ever known.
Fifth Lunar Month
a small fullness ~ season of birds flying homewards
To find a new poetic lineage I must draw a line diagonally across the Pacific Ocean. I begin with a slim book I checked out from the library, Women of the Red Plain: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Women Poets translated by Julia C. Lin. I flick through the poems, searching for traces of the familiar. Mei Shaojiang, a poet of Shaanxi Province, measures time in things cultivated from the earth:
Days are garlic and wild scallions, still
sprinkling loose dirt,
Days are newly rolled up hemp ropes, still
damp with water.
In the days after the incident in the lamplit living room, I became increasingly attentive to the needs and rhythms of my balcony garden. I set seedlings on one of Po Po’s floral-patterned plastic trays on the windowsill and watched them obsessively. I measured time according to each centimetre of growth. I watched the petals of daffodils turn to papery husks. I let them wilt and soften in their damp beds.
I decided to attempt my own translation of part of a poem in the book, one by Bing Xin titled ‘Paper Boats’ Bing Xin was born in 1900 in Fujian Province, one of several regions from which Hakka people originally come. I created this translation in order to bring myself closer to Bing Xin and her distant dreamscape of mountains and sea. I longed to get closer to the language, one I’ve always carried with me but lost pieces of over the years.
mother, if you see a little white boat
in your dream
don’t be startled
it is full of your daughter’s tears
it travels across ten thousand waves
to carry her heart
home to you
I slowly, carefully unfold Bing Xin’s paper boat, add my own translation to the many already in existence, then refold it and release it into the body of water that is closest to me now.
Ache
A Swimming Diary
Hampstead Heath
1 October
Water temperature: sixteen degrees, according to the chalkboard. A lifeguard watches from one end; a blue heron watches from the other. The heron presides over the pond from her perch just beyond the boundary line at the far end. All the women climbing into the water look as if they are swimming towards her, and in a way we are.
Without realising it, I’ve become stronger. After a summer’s worth of swimming I can swim the pond’s full length now without pausing to catch my breath. A woman with a long-legged bird (a heron?) tattooed on her left ankle rises from the ladder after me and smiles, shivering. She knows what I know: that the cold pond gives us an invisible superpower that we carry inside us for the rest of the day. Clouds pass across the sun; the wind picks up.
4 October
I undress fast enough so that I can still feel damp sweat on my back from the walk uphill. I lower my body into the water quickly, not thinking too much. I have recently discovered that I’m often capable of doing things that scare me if I don’t think too much. As my feet touch the pond I feel the sharp pain of the two-degree drop since my last swim. Pushing out, the ache in my fingers and toes is almost unbearable – and then suddenly it isn’t anymore. I have broken through it, out the other side, where there’s no more pain.
Afterwards, a woman sits on the bench opposite me eating a pear and wearing only her bra, knickers, socks and a woolly hat. I sit eating my apple and sipping hot water from my yellow thermos, having just pulled on my comfiest jeans, boots, two Uniqlo Heat-Tech thermal tops and my quilted cotton jacket.
7 October
Thirteen degrees means numbness at first. The pain takes a little while to take hold. I’m ten strokes out before I feel it in my fingers, mostly between the first and second knuckle. If the pain had a colour it would be a hot violet ache, purple with hard edges. On her break, one of the lifeguards cuts a gliding backstroke down the centre of the pond and for a moment we’re the only human creatures in the water. It begins to rain soft droplets on my neck and shoulders. I wonder what the difference is between the temperature of pond water and the temperature of a raindrop. I wonder how long it takes for a raindrop to warm up once it hits my skin.
Walking home in the wet floating mist, I hear the sound of a clarinet coming from inside the church on my street. The clarinet player is practising their scales; the bright notes chime through the rain like bells. A small girl and her mum take cover under the eaves. ‘Rain, rain, go away,’ she sings.
8 October
My fingers sift through red and gold leaves under the surface. A leaf brushes my foot as I kick out and, as usual, I push away the thought that it might be something other than a sturdy leaf. There are ducks and moorhens and two women swimming in their woolly hats. I swim my usual small star-shaped lap around half of the pond, my boundaries marked by the life rings. I remember the first time I saw a moorhen here, and how I stopped in my tracks; how they look so like the pūkeko of Aotearoa, with their royal blue breast feathers and red beaks.
Over my post-swim cup of ginger tea, I scroll through the news on my phone and read a headline: ‘Humpback whale spotted swimming in River Thames’. Flashes of my dream last night suddenly come back to me. An enclosed body of water, a storm, a wooden boat, a grey whale breaching between slow waves.
10 October
The blue heron and black cormorant stand opposite each other on the life rings. I swim out between them and we all make eye contact, then look away. The cormorant shakes its leathery wings and holds them outstretched, facing me. Just like the shags perched along Wellington’s south coast, with their wings held up to the wind as if they were imagining how to fly.
A heron in flight is a small winged dinosaur, all elbows and spiked wings. It unfolds its body and swings up and out of the reeds, unbalanced like a marionette.
Someone said that the whale in the river was a wondrous thing, a sign we hadn’t ruined everything yet. I knew that wasn’t true. By the afternoon it had died. At first I couldn’t look at the photograph above the article head-lined ‘Humpback whale found dead in Thames hit by ship’. Later, I couldn’t stop looking at it: a body the size of a truck, bent backwards, being lifted out of the river and into the sky. The air where it should not be. All its dark blueness exposed, still wet.
15 October
My first sunlit swim since September. The water is the clearest I’ve ever seen. My arms and hands stretch out in front of me, pale gold, inked with the shadows of lea
ves.
Occasionally, I’m not the only Asian woman at the pond. And I’m not the first Asian woman to write about this place; Ava Wong Davies and Jessica J. Lee are two writers whose descriptions of the Ladies’ Pond I read long before I first swam here. In Turning, Lee writes: ‘I began to swim there alone, surrounded by women who seemed stronger than me. I wanted to be like them: sturdy, no-nonsense, unsentimental.’
In the shower, leaves and silt slide off my skin onto the blue tiled floor.
17 October
Today, a whale fall was discovered more than 10,000 feet deep off the coast of California. The whale fall’s discovery was live-streamed by the Deep Sea Cam on board the Nautilus, a boat operated by the Ocean Exploration Trust. A whale fall is created when a whale’s carcass floats down to the abyssal zone and lays to rest on the seafloor. As the whale decomposes it transforms into a feeding ground for an ecosystem of deepwater organisms, some of which are bioluminescent.
What does the bottom of the pond look like? The cormorants know. They slip under and leave circles of stillness on the surface that slowly disappear, erasing any trace of the point where their bodies entered the water. As I swim, my eyes are level with diving cormorants and with raindrops hitting the surface, exploding like stars.
21 October
It’s the first day of my period and the first day the water temperature dips below twelve. The boundary line has been pulled in, making the swimming area half its usual length. Now there are few who linger after their swim, setting off instead down the wooded track wrapped in scarves and beanies.
Cyclamens are popping up in the undergrowth, though it feels far too early for them. Cyclamens range from frost-tender to frost-hardy; from cream to dark pink. They were the first flower I saw in London after a winter of hardly any colour at all. They spring up from their nests of leaves and unfold their petals from a tight chrysalis, like pink moths. Raindrops cling to the undersides of their wings.
I think of this time of year as deep autumn – shēnqiū – and I’m now beginning to think of myself as an autumn swimmer. Cyclamen hederifolium are autumn-blooming. I was born during the southern hemisphere autumn. But these days, where does autumn begin and end? I catch myself clinging to these old markers of seasonal change while trying to track the shifting pattern of new extremes. April heatwaves, October frosts. I submerge myself in cold water and my body comes up burning.
22 October
A temperature of ten degrees in the water means the lifeguards stand on the deck asking swimmers whether they’ve swum recently, encouraging them to go slow. The surface glistens. The water is dark and silken, yet somehow also made of a thousand tiny shards of glass that squeeze and cut against my arms and hands. I measure my breathing. The pain gives way faster than expected, transforming into something smooth, shining, weightless. I almost turn back but swim out for one more length instead, just to stay in this velvety in-between state a moment longer, before the cold starts to bite into the centre of my chest, which is when I’ll start shaking from the inside out.
Chatting to the lifeguard, I tell her I’m not sure I’m tough enough to keep going into winter. She rolls her eyes at me. ‘Look, if you can do twenty degrees, you can do one degree. Just come. Just keep coming,’ she says. I want to have as much faith in my body as she does.
She pauses. ‘Listen. The kingfisher.’ I listen. I’ve never seen a kingfisher before, but I can hear it: a single high-pitched note, like a bell. She points to a gap between two silver birches where the kingfishers nest. I stare into the trees, hoping to see a flash of turquoise, but between the leaves everything is still.
Another woman, half undressed, listens in. ‘How do you know when to get out?’
She sighs. ‘When you start to feel wonderful, get out. Everyone’s body is different. Here, you’ll learn the limits of your own body. But euphoria is hypothermia.’
At her words, I realise I’ve come to know my limits. I know the amount of time it will take for pain to bloom into pleasure. I’ve come to expect the voice that says: just a little longer. But a little longer is what it could take for shock to kick in. Once a swimmer’s misjudged their limit and stayed in too long, they can’t lift themselves up the ladder. ‘We try not to let you reach that point. Once you do, we just shout at you until you get yourself up and out.’
Wellington Harbour
31 October
Getting off the plane at Wellington Airport, everything is too bright. Hot blue sky, platinum sun, glowing hills covered in tree ferns. My eyes aren’t used to this pure, undiluted sunlight. The surface of the sea gleams and I can’t look directly at it.
My current visa’s expiry date looms. In order to live any longer in England, the only option for me was to fly home and apply from here. While I wait for the outcome, each morning I visit Toby, who’s been living with another family in our old house since my parents moved overseas. We go down to the beach and he happily trots into the sea, dunking his nose in the waves. When he’s looking tired, we wander back and sunbathe on the grass. I pick lemons off the tree while tūī swoop noisily overhead.
Before leaving London it helped me to think of this trip as a brief in-between period of my life. As if by naming my reality I might feel less adrift. Once the visa appointment was over, all I had to do was wait – it could take anywhere from two weeks to three months, they said. But now that my parents have left, without a physical home to return to, I feel like I’m floating and empty. I fight to keep my anxiety from bubbling over into raw panic. I try to focus on the things I know are real: the garden, a little wild now, is still a place I know by heart. The beach across the walkway is just the same, and so is Toby, apart from speckles of grey fur around his brown eyes.
Two twelve-hour flights mark the shift from the deepening cold of autumn to the slow warmth of spring. My body quickly adjusts, leaning into the hard northerly wind as soon as I get to the coast. I focus on swimming: I replace my routine of swimming in the pond with swimming in the harbour, which feels much more natural to me, to be in constant motion in the tide’s swells. I tell myself I’ll keep moving. I’ll keep swimming, I’ll keep writing.
There are two things that make up a Wellington spring: cold wind and hard sun. I feel them both as I undress behind the bus shelter at Lowry Bay. A man walking a cocker spaniel stares at me like I’m insane. The tide is so low I have to wade far out, my body exposed to the wind, waves sucking at my ankles. When I’m waist-deep I dive under. It’s cold but an unexpectedly soft kind of cold, gently prickling my skin. I swim parallel to the shore’s perfect curve. I am the only creature in the bay.
3 November
When picking Tip Top ice cream flavours, I alternate between three: cookies and cream, chocolate, and boysenberry ripple. Today is a boysenberry ripple kind of day, sharp on the tongue. My cheeks are sore from walking into the wind. Oriental Bay is packed with sunbathers, though only a handful brave the rough water. The sand, imported from Golden Bay, is grainy between my toes. My friend Ella and I smear sunscreen on our shoulders and then she runs ahead of me towards the jade-coloured sea. I skip towards her and we dive into green waves, three to four feet high above our heads, rocking our bodies. London and Wellington are in opposite seasons but somehow the temperatures of the pond and the sea feel almost the same. There’s no need to swim; the waves pull me up and down between their crests, flying and falling. ‘This is one of the best things about being alive,’ Ella yells above the noise.
means deep, as in the depth of a colour or the depth of the sea. The water is indigo in parts, pea green in others. Ella tells me to look down: layers of sand are rippling and shimmering beneath the surface, moving with the waves and the light. deep autumn; deep spring.
5 November
This beach, where Toby and I have been swimming since we were both small, has always felt like its own ecosystem. It’s different from the rest of the coastline, the quiet bays sloping away from the wind. The stretch of shingle between the sea wall and the tide i
s vast, at least two hundred metres wide. The beach drops down a few steps from the water, a bank of driftwood and rocks to be clambered over.
After rain, when the stormwater ponds fill up, ducks take up residency here, joining the oystercatchers, gulls, shags, sparrows and banded dotterels. There are signs warning dog walkers that this is a nesting ground for kororā, little blue penguins, the smallest penguin in the world. This beach is full of life: native flax, purple daisies, hardy succulents, spiky shrubs with yellow flowers, bees, cabbage butterflies.
It’s blowing a northerly gale and Toby insists on taking me to the beach. I throw driftwood for him as we tumble across the rocks, mussel and pāua shells crackling underfoot. Toby runs head first into the waves, ears flapping.
I strip down to my togs and follow him in. An adolescent gull with grey spotted cheeks hovers nearby, eyeing us from up high. I call out to Toby, who’s snuffling a clump of kelp, and we make our way back up the beach, stumbling in the pebble drifts as if wading through snow.
6 November
In the bay at high tide, I can hop down straight into the water from the bench behind the bus stop. I didn’t think I was brave enough to swim today, but then the sun slipped out from behind a green ridge. Efforts to keep my belongings dry are useless; waves wash over my tattered canvas sneakers. Next to the bench, someone has left a large crumbling rock with semi-calcified mussel shells dangling from it.
Small Bodies of Water Page 10
