The Garden of Evening Mists (36 page)

The noise of the river quietened. In the main prayer hall a nun in grey robes shuffled past us, the bouquet of joss-sticks in her hands fumigating the air. Huge coils of sandalwood incense hung from the rafters, turning in languid, infinite spirals. Gods stood on altars, fierce-eyed and scowling, some carrying tridents and broadswords pierced with metal rings, all covered in a sparse fur of dust and ash.

I recognised the red-faced figure of Kwan Kung, the god of war, from the few times my
amah
had taken me along to a temple in a Georgetown alley, when she would beg the gods for her weekly lottery numbers. She never once won any money but it never stopped her from going back, week after week. The God of War was clad in black armour, his yellowed beard gathered in one gloved hand. ‘He’s also the God of Commerce,’ I told Aritomo. ‘Business is war, I’ve heard it said.’

‘And war,’ Aritomo replied, ‘is a business.’ Kneeling on a padded wooden stool before another deity was a woman in her seventies, her hands shaking a wooden container filled with flat bamboo sticks. She rattled the container until a single shoot edged out and clattered onto the floor. She put down the container, bowed before the god and picked up the stick. She hobbled to the temple medium, a man with a tuft of beard on his chin. He turned to a chest of matchbox-sized drawers behind him and selected a piece of paper corresponding to the number on the woman’s bamboo stick. The old woman leaned closer to the medium to hear the answer from the god.

‘Do you want to try it?’ whispered Aritomo.

‘It can’t tell me what I want to know,’ I said.

A nun came up to us, her placid features and shaven head making it difficult to guess her age. Aritomo wrote down Tominaga’s name in Chinese characters and gave it to her. Then he took a bunch of joss-sticks from her and dipped them into the flame of an oil lamp. He went to stand before the statue of the Goddess of Mercy, in a square of sunlight falling in through a hole in the roof. He closed his eyes, opened them again and inserted the joss-sticks into a fat-bellied brass urn on the altar. White threads of smoke rose into the sunlight.

‘Once, when I was being disobedient, my mother told me a story about a murderer,’

Aritomo said, his voice dry as the scent of sandalwood perfuming the air. ‘He had been sent to Hell after he died. One day, as the Buddha was walking in a garden in Paradise, he happened to glance into a lotus pond. And deep in the pond he saw this murderer, suffering the agonies of Hell.

‘The Buddha was about to resume his walk when he saw a spider spinning its web, and he remembered how the murderer had once refrained from killing a spider crawling up his leg.

With the spider’s permission, the Buddha took a strand from the web and dangled it into the lotus pond.

‘Down in the depths of Hell, the murderer saw something gleaming in the blood-red sky, dropping closer and closer to him. When it was just above his head, he reached out and pulled it.

To his surprise, it bore his weight. He began to climb out of Hell, to climb up to Paradise. But the distance from Hell to Paradise is thousands and thousands of miles. The other sinners soon saw what he was doing, and they too began to climb up the web. He was higher now, almost out of Hell. Stopping for a rest, he looked down and saw the thousands of people, men and women, old and young, all trying to follow him, all clinging on to the thread. “Let it go! This thread is mine!” he screamed at them. “Let it go!”

‘But no one listened to him. He was terrified that the strand would break. A few of the others had almost caught up with him. He kicked at them, kicked them until they released their grip and dropped away. But his frantic movements broke the strand above him, and then he too plummeted back into Hell, screaming all the way.’

Swallows flew between the rafters, stirring the incense smoke in their wake.

‘I couldn’t sleep for weeks after hearing that tale,’ Aritomo said.

We left the prayer hall and went up another set of steps. Aritomo greeted some of the nuns we passed. At the top of the steps a path opened up into a small garden bordered by a low wall. In the Kinta Valley far below I could make out the town of Ipoh, the shophouses and tin-magnates’ mansions like grains of rice at the bottom of a bowl. Up in the mountains, above the treeline, the jungle thinned out, losing the strength to climb any higher

‘How would you improve this little garden?’ Aritomo asked, sitting down on a wobbly stone bench.

My mind was still on the murderer, given his chance to escape Hell only to lose it, and a few seconds passed before I replied. ‘I’d get rid of that hibiscus hedge – this space is too crowded for it. Then I’d fill in that half-hearted ornamental pond, and cut away most of that guava tree blocking the view,’ I said. ‘Simplify everything. Open up the garden to the sky.’

He gave an approving nod. Unscrewing the cap of his thermos flask, he filled two cups of tea and handed one to me. From somewhere in the temple buildings below, the nuns had started their chanting, their voices rising to us.

‘The nuns seem to know you well,’ I remarked.

‘There aren’t many of them left in this place; most of them are quite old,’ he said. ‘Once the last one is gone, the temple will be abandoned, I fear. People will forget that it ever existed.’

For a while we sat there, sipping our tea. ‘I want to know what happened to you, in the camp,’ he said finally.

The heat from the cup passed through my gloves and warmed my palm. ‘No one wants to hear about us prisoners, Aritomo. We’re a painful reminder of the Occupation.’

He looked at me and then touched my brow, gently. I felt as though a bell deep inside me had been sounded.

‘I want to know,’ he said again.

The first stone in my life had been set down years ago, when I had heard of Aritomo’s garden. Everything that had happened since then had brought me to this place in the mountains, this moment in time. Instead of consoling me, this knowledge left me fearful of where my life would lead.

I began to speak.

For an anglophile like my father, Teoh Boon Hau, there was only one Chinese saying that he believed in:
A family’s wealth will not last beyond three generations
. Being the only child – and a son, no less – of a wealthy man, my father’s main purpose in life was cultivating and enlarging the fortune made and left to him by his own father, and ensuring that his three children would not grow up to fritter it away. I suppose he had good reason to be worried: Penang was full of tales of millionaires’ children who were addicted to opium and horse-racing, or who had ended up as paupers, sweeping the narrow streets of Georgetown and begging for money at the morning market. He never failed to point them out to us.

We grew up in the house my grandfather had built on Northam Road: my brother Kian Hock, Yun Hong, and I. My brother was twelve years older than me. I was the youngest, but Yun Hong and I had always been close, even with the three years’ difference between us. She took after our mother and so was considered beautiful by many people, including our parents. Kian Hock and I had inherited our father’s plumpness, and my mother scolded me whenever I asked for seconds at mealtimes. ‘Don’t eat so much, Ling, no man wants a fat wife’ became a familiar refrain at the table, a refrain I always ignored, although it did not make it hurt less. Yun Hong always defended me.

We spoke English at home, garnished with Hokkien, the dialect of the Chinese in Penang.

My father had studied in an English missionary school when he was a boy and had not been taught to speak or read Mandarin, deficiencies he would pass on to his children: my brother went to St. Xavier’s, while Yun Hong and I studied at the Convent Girls’ School. The Chinese in Malaya who could not speak English looked down on us for not knowing our own ancestral tongue – ‘Eaters of the Europeans’ shit,’ they called us. In turn we Straits Chinese laughed at them for their uncouth ways and pitied them their inability to get good jobs in the civil service or to rise in our colonial society. There was no need for us to know any language other than English, my father had often told us when we were growing up, because the British would rule Malaya forever.

Our neighbour was Old Mr Ong, the former bicycle repairman. He had kept his ties to his motherland. When the Japanese invaded China, he started the Aid China Fund to collect money for the Nationalists. For his reward Old Mr Ong was made a colonel in the Kuomintang Army. It was just an honorary rank given to him by Chiang Kai-Shek, who in all probability scattered these around freely to the Overseas Chinese as rewards for their generous donations, but Old Mr Ong was very proud of it. He sent us a copy of the local Chinese newspaper with the photograph of him receiving the honour.

We had been neighbours with Old Mr Ong for twenty years, but my father only became friends with him after the Japanese massacred hundreds of thousands of Chinese in Nanking. We found it hard to accept the news when we heard it – the slaughter, the rape of old and young women, of children; the mind-numbing savagery of it all. What enraged my father more was the fact that the British had done nothing to stop it, nothing at all. For the first time in his life he questioned the high standing in which he had placed the British, the admiration he had always felt towards them. When he heard that Old Mr Ong had opened his home to the Kuomintang agents who were travelling the world to raise money and support, my father began attending the meetings. Together with Old Mr Ong and a group of well-known Chinese businessmen, he visited the towns and villages in Malaya and Singapore, making speeches and urging the people to contribute to the Aid China Fund. Kuomintang agents accompanied them to describe to the audiences how hard the KMT soldiers in China were fighting the Japanese. Sometimes I was allowed to attend these campaigns. ‘You can always tell which side a man supports, just by looking at whose photograph he puts up in his home,’ I remember my father saying to me once as we drove home after a rally. ‘It’s either a portrait of Sun Yat Sen, or that fellow Mao hanging next to the family altar.’ Our servants did the same thing in their quarters at the back of our house. A few days later my father ordered them to take down Mao’s portrait.

In 1938, when I turned fifteen, the Japanese government wanted to buy rubber from my father. He refused to entertain them, but later changed his mind and agreed to meet the trade officials in Tokyo. He took us all with him – it was on that trip that my sister fell in love with the gardens of Japan.

The negotiations with the Japanese failed. My father refused to sell any rubber to them.

The officials’ wives were chilly to us after that: no longer smiling, no longer keen to show us around. Later Yun Hong told me that the KMT had instructed my father to accept the Japanese government’s invitation and to report back on what he could discover. Unfortunately, the KMT failed to warn him of the long memories of the Japanese government.

Two years later, in the last weeks of 1941, Japanese troops landed on the north-east coast of Malaya, fifteen minutes after midnight and an hour before Pearl Harbour was attacked. People think that Japan entered the war through Pearl Harbour, but Malaya was the first door they smashed open. Japanese soldiers crawled up the beach at Pantai Chinta Berahi, taking the places of the leatherback turtles which emerged from the sea every year around that time to lay their smooth round eggs. From the Beach of Passionate Love, they cycled and fought their way down Malaya, riding their bicycles along the back roads past Malay kampongs and paddy fields and through jungles the authorities had assured us were impenetrable.

My father was confident that the British soldiers would stop them. But three weeks later the Japanese reached Penang. The British evacuated their own people to Singapore, leaving us natives to face the Japanese. The Europeans who had been coming to our parties for years – the Faradays, the Browns, the Scott brothers – all of whom my parents considered their friends – left on the ships, disappearing without a word to us. But there were also many who refused to run away, who refused to abandon their friends and their servants to the Japanese – the Hutton family, the Codringtons, the Wrights.

Kian Hock, my brother, was in the police force. He had been sent to Ceylon for training two months before the Japanese came. My father ordered him to remain there. Old Mr Ong asked us to go with his family to his durian orchard in Balik Pulau, on the western side of Penang.

‘We’ll be safe from the
Jipunakui
there,’ he assured us.

We left home on the morning the Japanese planes started bombing Georgetown: Old Mr Ong and his two wives and their sons and families packed into three cars; my parents, Yun Hong and I in my father’s Chevrolet. The roads leading out of Georgetown were crowded; hundreds of people were fleeing to the hills of Ayer Itam. All of us had heard what the Japanese troops did to the locals in every town they swept through.

The road became deserted as we neared Balik Pulau. We had passed only the odd Malay kampong. I had never been to this part of the island before. Old Mr Ong’s durian orchard was on a high, steep slope. As we drove in, Yun Hong pointed through the gaps in the trees to the sea below. ‘I should have brought my paints and brushes,’ she said.

From the front seat my mother said, without turning around, ‘We won’t be here long enough for you to paint anything, darling.’

The orchard’s overseer was Old Mr Ong’s cousin, and he greeted us with all the ceremony due Old Mr Ong’s wealth and status. The overseer moved his own wife and daughters out of their home to accommodate the old man and his family. My mother looked as if she was about to cry when we saw the dilapidated one-storey wooden shack that was to be our new home; she was even more horrified when she discovered we had to use an outhouse. She wanted to go back to our home on Northam Road immediately, but my father stood firm.

Yun Hong and I soon got used to living in the shack. We spent our days exploring the orchard. The durian season had just started and the air was heavy with the smell of the spiky, ripening King of Fruits. Ah Poon, the overseer, warned us to be careful. ‘Can kill you-
lah
, if fall on your head.’ Nets were stretched out between the trees to catch the durian. Walking beneath them, I felt I was inside a circus tent, gazing up at the acrobats’ safety net. Every time we heard the fruit dropping through the branches, we’d look up quickly, just to be on the safe side. Yun Hong could not tolerate the fruit, but I loved their pungent, creamy flesh. ‘Your breath stinks,’