“ ‘This is no time to seek refuge in fairy stories. We must act now! Tonight!’
“ ‘I am so afraid. She will find us down wherever we hide.’ He laughed shortly. ‘She’ll even come after us when we are dead. We’d have to stay vigilant forever. Even after death.’
“When he turned his gaze away from the pin I saw his eyes were just as dark. They were filled with a terrible fear and, worse, something I could not identify.
“ ‘We’ll leave tonight,’ he said, after a long pause.
“I closed my eyes in relief. He had seen the sense of my arguments.
“I started to pack a small bundle of clothes in my room. At the Hour of the Rooster everything fell quiet. Suddenly even the moon seemed loud. I stopped moving and waited. A moment later I heard a small wail, keening, drifting over courtyard after courtyard, like a crow flying from tree to tree, sending out the awful news.
“The emperor was dead. I continued my packing and then panic jolted me. I snatched up my bundle and moved silently across the corridors, avoiding the spectral figures carrying lanterns. Everyone was moving, going somewhere. The wailing was unrelenting, as though it wanted to penetrate the very edges of the empire. I ran through the hallways until I saw the familiar lights in Wen Zu’s room. It was empty. I spun around, fear making me dizzy. I found his note on the table. I read it, folded it away and made my way to the Hall of Repentance where the massive silk fan hung.
“It was dark, but a small candle gave some light. I heard no sound except for the constant wailing, blowing like a desert wind. I entered the hall, crossing over the wooden threshold, the floorboards creaking. The silk fan lay half folded on the floor like a giant crane shot down from the sky by an archer, its spine cracked, its wings broken.
“Wen Zu sat on a wooden chair, his back to me, facing his handiwork. From the blood on the floor I knew he was dead. On the table his left arm stretched out, his hand holding a long narrow knife. I stepped around the spreading pool of blood—thinking how appalled he would be by the mess—and faced him.
“He had cut his own throat. His robes stuck to him in a bloody paste. And he had cut his eyelids off before he killed himself. His brows and cheeks were crusted with blood, and his eyes stared ahead, eternally aware, vigilant even beyond death against the woman he feared so much.
“I knelt before him, and bowed to him who was, for the briefest moment, between Kuang Hsu’s death and his own, the Emperor of China, the Son of Heaven.”
Here my grandfather stopped and I realized it had become painful for him to continue. I was torn between consoling him and urging him on. The house had become silent and the courtyard, lit by the moon, had the desolate air of an abandoned stage. He got up from his chair and stretched himself.
“Did the dowager empress order the death of the emperor?” I felt a heavy sadness for Wen Zu’s death and for my grandfather’s loss.
He shrugged. “No one would ever know, for she died the day after Kuang Hsu’s death. I knew that the factions which had wanted Wen Zu dead would also want to cut off all the loose ends. My life was still in danger. I ran.
“I became one of the hysterical figures that crowded the night in that palace. I sent a message to my family and my father made arrangements for my wife and daughters to join me. I invoked my mother’s name whenever possible and we were given safe passage to Hong Kong. As I hurried up to the boat, the driver of the cart that had carried us to the harbor said, ‘Don’t worry. Your parents will be moved to Hong Kong also. You’ll see them soon.’
“I waited for three years but they never came. Eventually we sailed to Malaya, hoping to evade whatever people they sent after us. In that time the three-year-old distant relation of the dowager empress was named emperor, and China collapsed. Do you know the phrase from the foreign devils’ God Book?—
’Woe to you, O Land, when your king is a child, and your princes feast in the morning!’
“The monarchy disappeared forever and Sun Yat Sen’s Republicans prayed before the tombs of the old Han Chinese emperors, informing them that, at long last, foreign invaders—white or yellow—no longer ruled China. It was only then that I finally felt safe. By that time Malaya had become my home—even your grandmother grew to love it here.
“Aunt Mei said she died not long after she came to Malaya,” I said.
“Giving birth to my third child, a boy,” my grandfather said. “He was too weak, and did not live long.”
He let out a heavy breath, and I knew we had come to the end. “All records and traces of Wen Zu disappeared. He never existed in history except to me and to those few who remembered him. Many of them will be gone now. Perhaps only I am now aware that once there was an emperor by that name and that once, strangely enough, I was his friend.” My grandfather stopped, his eyes looking far, far back in time. “I have never told anyone of him. Not even my wife or my children. But the lessons I learned in the palace have stayed with me.”
I sat as unmoving as the miniature tree in the courtyard. Somewhere in the house some jasmine incense had been lit and I breathed in its light, discreet scent.
The wily old man, I thought. I saw too late that he had used the magical jade pin to lead my mind, taking it to wherever he had wanted me to go. Despite Endo-san’s lessons, I had fallen into the trap my grandfather had laid for me. But I could not help liking him. I had come to Ipoh expecting accusations and acrimony to be thrown from both sides. I had planned never to see him again after this meeting but the afternoon by the fountain, and now this strange tale, had made him human, a man with a history, not the caricature of a controlling, narrow-minded man. I realized I could not be indifferent to him now, especially when he made it clear that I was the only one to whom he had ever divulged his past.
He would never come out and ask for forgiveness for casting my mother away, and to ask him to do so would be futile. The offering of this strange fragment of his past was a request for understanding and absolution.
He reached out and took my hand. “I have told you this long-winded, winding tale because I want you to know your history also. I want you to know that you have a long tradition behind you, so that you do not have to chase after a tradition that is not yours.”
He meant Endo-san, that was obvious. Once again I wondered who was reporting my activities to him. “But I want to,” I said, looking him firmly in the eye. Who was he to tell me what to do?
“You must wonder why I was so against your mother marrying your father. What a terrible, bigoted, and vindictive old man, you must have thought. And I did not even bother to attend her funeral.”
“It had crossed my mind,” I said.
“I went to her, in the temple. I saw your father in the crematorium, placing your mother’s bones and ashes in the urn. I asked her for forgiveness. But of course it was too late then.
“When she set her heart on marrying your father I tried my best to prevent it. I had been warned that she could not marry him.”
“Warned? By whom?”
“A fortune-teller at the snake temple in Penang.”
I held my breath and a feeling of unreality came over me as the memory of the day I had spent with Endo-san at the temple uncoiled itself inside me.
“Because of her warnings I tried to stop the marriage and, when I failed, I allowed my anger to dictate my words.”
“What was the warning?” I asked.
My grandfather lowered his eyes and placed his hands on his lap. “The fortune-teller said that both families would be brought to ruin through a child of Yu Lian—”
“That could mean anyone. If my mother had married someone else—”
“—through a child of mingled blood of Yu Lian, who would eventually betray them,” he went on.
“Betray them? To whom?”
“You know who. The Japanese. They are already making plans to invade Malaya. You are extremely close to one of their highest officials.”
“He is merely my teacher,” I protested. “The Japanese would be foolish to start a war with the British in Malaya. Endo-san’s a diplomatic official, not an army officer.”
“Next to a parent, a teacher is the most powerful person in one’s life.”
“Is this why, after all these years, you finally decided to speak to me: to warn me of some fortune-teller’s words—words which already caused my mother so much pain?”
He shook his head. “I am not asking you to do anything against your own wishes or reason. I have learned over the years that life has to take its own path. Look at Wen Zu and me. Even with all the warnings we had, still our lives followed the pathway that had been written down. Nothing could have changed it.” He sighed, and walked to the edge of the courtyard, raising his head to look at the sky, now covered with clouds.
He turned to me and said, “It’s late. Go to bed. I’ll show you my garden tomorrow. People in Ipoh say it is one of the worst in town, but I disagree!”
* * *
Aunt Mei was quivering with barely controlled curiosity the following morning, eager to discover what he had told me. “We talked about his family and my mother,” I said. “We’re getting along well.”
“I know you two are getting along well,” she replied, almost tartly. “He doesn’t usually spend so much time with anyone without getting irritable.”
I thought about her life. My father once told me her husband Henry had been killed in a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. Tensions between these two races erupted occasionally in violence and blood; Henry had been on his way to fetch her from the school where she taught when his Austin was surrounded by an angry mob. They turned it over and set it aflame. She had lived her life alone since then.
She led me to the Hall of Ancestors, where the tablets of the dead were placed, small wooden boards carved with the details of those gone by. They sat on a descending altar, shaped like the steps of an amphitheater, watching us play out our lives. The burned-out ends of joss sticks poked like twigs from a large brass urn on a low rosewood table. Three evenly spaced oil lamps shed their light on plates of offerings—mandarin oranges, apples, and buns.
“Why are these tablets here?” I asked. “They don’t contain the ashes of the dead, do they?”
She lit some joss sticks and gave three to me. “These are memorial tablets of the dead of our family. Here we keep their memory alive. We pray that they will watch over us, and keep us safe.” She pointed to a red tablet, carved with golden strokes. “That one there is your mother’s. And the one just above it is your Uncle Henry’s.”
“Thank you for arranging this meeting,” I said softly, speaking into the rising smoke. I meant the words for Aunt Mei and she smiled. But she said, “They can hear you, and I am sure they too accept your thanks.”
* * *
I ended up staying with my grandfather for a week and he took great delight in showing me around the town.
One evening we walked past an open-air stage that had been erected in the town square. Some sort of performance was about to commence and we joined the crowd in front of a row of the largest joss sticks I had ever seen—each one approximately seven feet high and with the thickness of a telephone pole—their tips glowing with the redness of fresh magma and giving off clouds of incense smoke. Although rows of seats were provided, the crowd seemed to prefer to stand, and not a single chair was used.
“What’s going on?” I asked my grandfather. “Are we not allowed to sit on these chairs?”
He shook his head, his eyebrows almost meeting in reproach at my ignorance. “The Festival of the Hungry Ghosts begins today. Once a year, for a month, the gates of the underworld are opened to allow the spirits to roam the earth. They are eager to revel in human pleasures again, even if vicariously. Most are benign, but some are angry and malevolent. We take special care not to offend these spirits, so we offer prayers and food, and traders and shopkeepers sponsor these public performances to appease them so that their business affairs are not disturbed.” He pointed to the rows of vacant chairs. “Those are for the unseen guests. No one is allowed to sit there.”
The curtain opened to the audience’s applause. It was a Chinese opera and the actors were heavily made-up, their faces painted white and then rouged artfully. Their costumes were flamboyant, in bright shades of red, their headgear heavy and elaborate. The music from the orchestra was raucous, and the actors enacted stylized fights through a variety of acrobatic movements. I tried to enjoy the elaborate backward somersaults and exaggerated sword-fighting but the idea of being surrounded by spirits, voracious for all the sensations of human experience that they could never tangibly savor again, filled me with unease. I studied the faces in the crowd, wondering who was revenant, and who was real.
* * *
The day before I was to return home, my grandfather dismissed his chauffeur and drove us out of town to the limestone hills. Close up, the hills did not seem as bare as I had thought. Shrubs and trees clung to them like mold and, in certain parts, the vegetation was thick and smooth as a bear’s pelt. Half an hour’s drive out of the town, the sky darkened as it prepared to rain.