“However, if you feel you have anything much to lose by not learning under Tanaka-san, I would be happy to let you go. You are aware that it has never been acceptable to have two
sensei
for the same thing?”
I flinched at his curt words; they were like chips of ricocheting granite piercing me. “No, no,
sensei.
I’m sorry I gave you the wrong impression. The thought of leaving your tutelage has never occurred to me.”
He softened his tone, and that was the closest to an apology I would get from him. “You found the boy Kon formidable, yes?”
I nodded.
“Yet you managed to control him. Why?”
I told him what I thought that night after I had met Kon, when I analyzed our encounter—that my mind was stronger and calmer than his. It was what Tanaka had told me as well.
Endo-san gave a rare, radiant smile. “I see I have not wasted my time with you. Yes, the mind. Once you control the mind, the body becomes helpless. At a higher level,
bujutsu
is fought by the mind. Remember that. Now you understand my insistence on you practicing meditation. Your mind will save you when your body cannot. I am pleased that you train so much on your own. I value the amount of hard work you have put into yourself. You have realized entirely on your own that if you yourself do not put in the work required—for any endeavor!—who else will do it for you?”
His words touched me. In all my years my father had never spoken to me this way; no one ever had. Sitting in the
seiza
position, I bowed deeply, my forehead touching the ground, the lowest anyone could reach, yet I never felt higher in all my life.
One question remained to me. “If a higher level of
bujutsu
involves fighting with the mind, what then is the very highest level?”
He closed his eyes for a while, seeing things he would never show me. “That,” he said, “would be never to fight at all.”
Chapter Thirteen
The situation in Europe was worsening. Hitler had launched his Panzer divisions into Poland, starting the tear that would soon rip the fabric of Europe into rags. I was on Endo-san’s island one evening when he called me into the house. He had tuned in to the BBC Overseas Service and I heard Neville Chamberlain’s voice, given a tone of hollowness by the distance and static, declare that Britain was now at war with Germany.
“Will your family be safe?” Endo-san asked.
Alfred Scott’s secretary had given me details of my family’s voyage home a few days after the party at Henry Cross’s house. “They left Southampton two weeks ago,” I answered.
“The sea lanes will be patrolled by German submarines,” he said.
I checked the date on his calendar. “They should be halfway home now, well away from Europe.” I tried not to show my concern, but the journey was so long, the distances over unprotected waters so vast. I felt guilty, for they should have been home two months ago, but because I had chosen not to go with them, my father had decided to extend their stay in London, since I would not be missing my new term at school. I reminded myself that I would call Scott to see if he had heard anything further from my father.
We continued to listen to the news. It was all so far away that I did not think it would affect our lives here at all. The news that came seemed like a serialized story, to be heard or read over breakfast and then forgotten until the next, more terrible, instalment arrived the following morning.
* * *
In spite of the resumption of the school term, Endo-san had intensified my training after he returned from his travels, almost as if he had to conform to some unwritten schedule. He agreed to conduct his lessons later in the evening to accommodate me, but then proceeded to push me to near fury, and there was no one I could talk to except Kon.
Once I became Kon’s friend I grew aware of the stories surrounding his father, Towkay Yeap. They had been floating in the air for a while, but I had never given much attention to them. Uncle Lim, especially, delighted in gossiping about the alleged leader of the Red Banner Society.
“You’re like one of the kitchen servants, going on and on like that,” I said to him one day, but still bursting with curiosity to discover more.
I learned that the Red Banner Society was a triad, a Chinese criminal gang, led by someone they called a Dragon Head. Many of the early migrants from China were members of these organizations, bringing with them the traditions and practices of their triads and, for a payment, helping subsequent fellow migrants stand on their own feet in a new country. The Perak Wars of Malaya of the 1880s had been backed by opposing triads, each out to carve a bigger territory for itself. They earned their revenue from protection fees paid by members, from prostitution and illegal gambling. Many ran their own opium dens and smuggled in the drug as well.
“Are you a member of any?” I asked Uncle Lim, and he glared at me, offended that I could ask so personal a question.
“Don’t make Towkay Yeap angry,” he warned me instead. “Some say his power is greater than that of the governor of Singapore.”
“Is my grandfather in these triads? He is, isn’t he? Is that why you are so loyal to him?”
But Uncle Lim said he had to search for some parts for the car, and refused to say anything more
* * *
In the little spaces of free time when Endo-san was busy, I became a regular visitor to Kon’s home. The house was in the wealthy Georgetown Chinese area that divided into Pitt Street, Light Street, and China Street. It was located two houses away from La Maison Bleu, the former home of Cheong Fatt Tze, who had been Chinese consul general to Singapore in the service of the Manchu government. His funeral, in 1916, my father once told me, was the largest Penang had seen; even the Dutch and the English governments had ordered flags to be flown at half-mast across their colonies. “That house is where I met your mother, in 1922,” he said to me. “Cheong Fatt Tze’s eldest son continued his father’s tradition of holding his famous parties. And there, one evening, I saw your mother dancing. I walked up to her and she smiled at me, and without a word she left her poor partner standing alone, and danced only with me for the rest of the evening.”
I watched him smile as he saw my mother again. “Do you know what she did when her heel broke?” he said. “She took off her shoes and threw them into a corner, which created a minor furor among the other women. And then she said, ‘Are you not going to act like a gentleman and take off your shoes as well?’“
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Took off my shoes and danced with her all night until it was time to go home,” he replied, his eyes bright with memory.
La Maison Bleu, the Manchu’s house, got its name because its walls had been dyed with indigo obtained from India, and that made it easy for me to find Kon’s home just down the road.
I knocked on the wide wooden doors. A whitewashed wall ran around the property so that I could not see inside. A moment later an old man pushed the doors open with difficulty and I stepped over the low threshold. The doors closed behind me and the sounds of the streets were immediately silenced.
The house was built in the Chinese style, the edges of the roof pinched upwards. The terra-cotta tiles on the roof were thick with aged mold, the pigeons picking their way jauntily over them. I saw Kon come out on to the balcony on the second floor. I waved to him and he disappeared back inside.
He met me at the front entrance and led me into the main hall. A large wooden screen, carved with a thousand detailed figures and leafed in gold, barred all outsiders from the house within. Red lanterns hung from the crossbeams of the ceiling and square wooden pedestals inlaid with mother-of-pearl supported vases and jade figurines. The clay tiles felt cold under my bare feet when I removed my shoes. I began to cool down from the heat outside.
Towkay Yeap, Kon’s father, came out from behind the screen and shook my hand. With his thin, bony face and dark, intelligent eyes, he had the appearance of a scholar from Confucian times. I had heard rumors that, like many of the wealthy older Chinese, he was a habitual frequenter of the opium dens in town. Indulgence in the drug often caused the flesh to melt away from the face and stretch the skin tight, and looking at his face now I could almost believe the stories.
He inquired after my father, and said they had some dealings together. “One of the rare few English
Tuan Besars
who would openly do business with us,” he said, honoring him with the title of “Big Boss,” the term given by the Malays to great men. “I was at your parents’ wedding.”
He seemed genial enough, and I wondered if he would be capable of ordering the deaths of his enemies. I shivered when I felt he knew what I was thinking. To unsettle me further he said, “Please convey my regards to your grandfather in Ipoh.”
I was discovering how small my world was as Towkay Yeap gave me a fathomless smile before he turned away into his study.
“This is a lovely house,” I said to Kon as we went up a wrought-iron spiral staircase in the cobbled courtyard. I heard the female voices of his household, the
amahs
chattering in the kitchen, the sound of a steel cleaver on a wooden chopping block as lunch was prepared, and I caught the smell of glutinous rice steaming when a soft wind blew through the house. A dog barked at my presence and a male voice scolded it.
“Diamlah!”
“My father bought this place from Cheong Fatt Tze, who had it built for one of his lesser wives. It’s very much smaller than La Maison Bleu.”
“How many wives did he have?”
“Eight official ones.”
“Lucky number,” I said.
“For us Chinese, yes. This house has only ten rooms, but Cheong’s had thirty-eight. Apart from that the features and decorations are almost identical. Built by the same team of craftsmen.”
I had thought my room was bad enough, but there were even more books in Kon’s. Unlike mine, his books, in addition to those written in English, included volumes in Chinese.
“Sorry about the mess. I have a large collection of books on Chinese history and art,” he said. “Since I began my studies with Tanaka-san I have also begun collecting books on Japanese culture.” Kon moved a pile of books from a chair and asked me to sit. Large windows and a door opened to the balcony let in the light. I heard the cries of a hawker and the
tok tok
sound as he knocked on his wooden clappers while pedaling his pushcart past the house, selling wonton noodles.
“How did you meet Tanaka-san?”
“At the Flame-Watching Ceremony at the Ocean Pearl Temple near his house.” Kon saw my blank expression and explained, “On the fourteenth night of the Chinese New Year, my father, as one of the trustees of the temple, performs a ceremony. Some embers of holy paper are placed in an urn and fanned until they catch fire. The temple monks then read the flames and predict the New Year’s fortune. People often wait outside the temple to hear the monks’ proclamation. I was there that night when a fight broke out. I saw Tanaka-san quell it, and I made my way to him, and asked him to teach me.”
“So you began learning under him after that night?”
Kon shook his head. “He refused me at first. But I found out where he lived and waited outside his home every day after school until dark. This went on for a few weeks until he relented. And you?”
“I had it easier than you. Endo-san came to my house to borrow a boat and after that offered to teach me.”
“He must have seen something in you,” Kon said, “some quality you have.”
I felt uncomfortable with the subject. I had often wondered why Endo-san had decided to make me his pupil. Had it all been merely an accident that he leased our island and then made himself such a large part of my life?
“Do you think my meeting him, and our meeting—all of it—was by chance?” I asked.
Kon touched one of his books. “It depends on who you ask. Some people would view it as a consequence of choices made in our previous lives.”
“Endo-san once talked about the Buddha’s Wheel of Life. I don’t believe it. Surely we are not fated to continually pay for the same mistakes?”
And then Kon said something to me that made me wonder if each life that began was as pure as some would wish to believe.
“The problem is,” he said, “some mistakes can be so great, so grievous, that we end up paying for them again and again, until eventually all our lives forget why we began paying in the first place. If you’re able to remember, then you must make the greatest effort to put things right, now, before you forget again.”
He stood up and said, “Enough talking. Let’s go and practice. I’d like you to show me some of the things you’ve learned.”
We left his room of the many books and unsettling words and went downstairs to his training room. But I never forgot those words he said and they would return to me again, through Endo-san’s voice.
* * *
“You must pay attention. Everything we do here is life and death,” Endo-san said, his exasperation making him brusque.