pinang
—which grew abundantly on it.
Realizing its strategic potential immediately, Captain Light obtained the island from the Sultan of Kedah in return for six thousand Spanish dollars and British protection against usurpers of his throne. The island was named Prince of Wales Island, but eventually came to be known as Penang.
The Malay Peninsula had been partially colonized since the sixteenth century, by first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and finally the British. The British made the most headway, spreading their influence into almost all the Malay States. The discovery of tin and the suitability of the soil and weather for the planting of rubber trees—both materials of vital importance due to the Industrial Revolution—saw them fomenting internecine wars in their bid to control the States. Sultans were deposed, outcast heirs were put on thrones, money was paid in return for concessions and, when even these failed, the British were not loath to back their preferred factions with arms and might.
Graham Hutton was there when Captain Light loaded his cannon with silver pieces and fired them into the forests: his way of spurring the coolies into clearing the land, my father had told us. The nature of man being such, the ploy had worked. The island grew into a vibrant port, located between the changing of the monsoon winds. It became a place for sailors and traders on the way to China to recuperate, to treasure a few balmy weeks while waiting for the winds to shift.
Graham Hutton prospered, and it was not long after that Hutton & Sons was founded. He was not married at the time, and his optimism in the naming of his company was much commented upon. However, he knew what he wished to accomplish and he let nothing impede him.
Through various underhanded dealings, and his eventual marriage to the daughter of another trading family, my greatgrandfather began his legend in the East. The company became known as one of the most profitable trading houses. But the roots of Graham Hutton’s dynastic impulses dug in harder; he wanted a symbol to represent his dreams, something to last beyond his own life.
The Hutton mansion was built to perch above a slight cliff and overlooked the meadows of the sea that merged into the plains of the Indian Ocean. Designed by the team of Starke and McNeil and inspired by the works of Andrea Palladio, like many of the houses built at that time, the white stone building was surrounded by a row of Doric columns and dominated by a large curving colonnade crowned with a pediment. Its doors and window frames were made from Burmese teak and my great-grandfather imported stonemasons from Kent, Glaswegian ironmongers, marble from Italy, and coolie labor from India for its construction. There were twenty-five rooms in the house and, true to his ambitions, my great-grandfather, who had made many visits to the courts of the Malay Sultans, named his home Istana, the Malay word for “palace.”
Surrounding the main building were expansive lawns; carefully planted trees and flowerbeds lined a straight drive of almost white gravel. The drive rose pleasingly toward the house and, if one stood at the entrance and looked up, the prominent pediment seemed to direct a traveler on a road to the sky. When my father, Noel Hutton, inherited the house, a swimming pool and two tennis courts were constructed. Adjacent to the main house and shielded by a head-high hedge were the garage and the servants’ living quarters, both converted from stables when Graham Hutton’s passion for racehorses waned. When we were children my brothers and sister and I often dug around the grounds looking for horseshoes, shouting with triumph whenever one of us found one, even though it was crumbling with rust and left that iron-blood smell on our hands which still lingered after persistent scrubbing.
In the normal course of events I would never have inherited all these things. My father had four children and I was the last. I never thought much about the question of Istana’s future ownership. But I did love the house. Its graceful lines and history touched me strongly and I loved exploring every part of it, sometimes even, despite my fear of heights, climbing up to the roof through a door in the attic. I would sit and look out over the landscape of the roof, like a tickbird on the back of a water buffalo, and feel the house beneath me. I often asked my father to tell me the stories behind the portraits that lined the walls, and the dusty trophies won by people related to me, the inscriptions on them linking me to these long-gone pieces of my flesh and bone.
Much as I loved the house, I had a greater love for the sea—for its ever-changing moods, for the way the sun glittered on its surface, and how it mirrored every temperament of the sky. Even when I was a child the sea whispered to me, whispered and spoke to me in a language I assumed only I understood. It embraced me in its warm currents; it dissolved my rage when I was angry at the world; it chased me as I ran along the shore, curled itself around my shins, tempting me to walk farther and farther out until I became a part of its unending vastness.
I want to remember it all,
I told Endo-san once.
I want to remember everything that I have touched and seen and felt, so that it will never be lost and brushed away.
He had laughed, but he had understood.
My mother, Khoo Yu Lian, was my father’s second wife. She was Chinese and her father had joined the mass exodus to Malaya from the Hokkien province in China in search of wealth and a chance to survive. Thousands of Chinese came to work in the tin mines, escaping famine, drought, and political upheaval. Her father had managed to become wealthy from his mines in Ipoh, a town two hundred miles away to the south. He had sent his youngest daughter to the Convent School in Light Street in Penang, far away from the coarse coolies he employed.
My father had been a widower when he met my mother. His wife Emma had died giving birth to Isabel, his third child, and I suppose he was also looking for a surrogate mother for his three young children. Yu Lian met my father at a party held by the son of the Chinese consul general, Cheong Fatt Tze, a Mandarin sent from Peking. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-two.
My father scandalized Penang society when he married my mother, but his wealth and influence partly eased the way. She died when I was seven and, except for a few photographs in the house, I have only faint memories of her. I have tried to hold on to those fading recollections, those softening voices and disappearing scents, augmenting them with what I heard from my two brothers and sister and the servants who had known her.
The four of us Hutton children grew up virtually as orphans: after my mother’s death my father retreated into his work. He went on frequent trips to the other states to visit his tin mines, his plantations, and his friends. He took the train down the coast to Kuala Lumpur regularly, spending days there while he oversaw the office just behind the court buildings. His only consolation in life, it seemed, was the company, but my brother Edward once told us that he kept a mistress there. At that young age I had no idea what he was talking about, though William and Isabel had giggled. For days afterward I pestered them about it and eventually our
amah
heard me mentioning the word, and warned me,
“Aiyah!
Stop saying that terrible word or I’ll beat your backside!”
Our father had instructed that we were to be addressed in the dialect of Hokkien by the Chinese servants, and Malay by the Malay gardener. Like many of the Europeans who considered Malaya their home, he had also insisted that all his children receive their education locally as much as possible. We grew up speaking the local languages, as he had himself. It would bind us to Penang forever.
* * *
I was not close to my siblings before I met Endo-san, being very much the solitary type. I was not interested in the things that fascinated my schoolmates: sports and spider hunting and fighting crickets for money. And because of my mixed parentage I was never completely accepted by either the Chinese or the English of Penang, each race believing itself to be superior. It had always been so. When I was younger I had tried to explain this to my father, when the boys at school had taunted me. But he had dismissed my words, and said I was being silly and too sensitive. I knew then that I had no choice but to harden myself against the insults and whispered comments, and to find my own place in the scheme of life.
After school I would throw my bag in my room and head for the beach below Istana, climbing down the wooden steps built into the cliff. I spent my afternoons swimming in the sea and reading under the shade of the bowed, rustling coconut trees. I read everything that my father had in his library, even when I did not understand it. When my attention left the pages I would put the book down and catch crabs and dig for clams and crayfish hidden in the sea. The water was warm and clear and the tidal pools were filled with fish and strange marine life. I had a little boat of my own and I was a good sailor.
My brothers and sister were so much older than I that I spent very little time with them. Isabel, who was five when I was born, was closest to me in age, while my brothers William and Edward were older than I by seven and ten years, respectively. William sometimes tried to include me in whatever he was doing but I always thought he did it as a polite afterthought and, as I grew older, I would make excuses not to join him.
Yet, despite my preference for being on my own, there were occasions when I enjoyed my siblings’ company. William, who was always trying to impress some girl or other, would organize tennis parties and weekend retreats up into the cooler climate of Penang Hill where, in the olden days before I was born, before the existence of the funicular tram, travelers were borne up in sedan chairs on the shoulders of sweating Chinese coolies. We had a house up on The Hill, which clung on the edge of a sharp drop. It was cold at night up there, a welcome change from the heat of the lowlands, and the lights of Georgetown lay spread out beneath, dimming the stars. Once, Isabel and I became lost in the jungle that covered The Hill after running off the track in search of orchids. She never cried at all and even gave me courage, though I knew she was just as scared as I was. We walked for hours in that green and lush world, until she got us back onto the track again. There were also rounds of parties at Istana where my father entertained, and we were often invited to other parties and receptions, dragon-boat races at the Esplanade, cricket matches, horse races, and any occasion that could justify, even slightly, a reason to dance and drink and laugh. Although I was by necessity included in these invitations, I often felt they were due to the influence my father held more than anything else.
There was a small island owned by my family about a mile out, thick with trees. It was accessible only from the beach that faced out to the open sea. I spent a lot of my afternoons there imagining I was a castaway, alone in the world. I even used to spend nights on it during those periods when my father was away in Kuala Lumpur.
Early in 1939, when I was sixteen, my father leased out the little island and warned us not to set foot on it as it was now occupied. It frustrated me that my personal retreat had been taken from me and for the next few weeks I spied out the activities that went on there. Judging from the supplies being ferried across by workmen in little boats, a small structure was being built. I contemplated sneaking onto the island but my father’s caution deterred me. So I gave up on it, and tried not to think anymore about it.
And halfway across the world, countries that seemed to have little to do with us were preparing to go to war.
* * *
“May I speak to the master of the house?”
I gave a small start. It was an early dusk in the second week of April and a slight rain was falling, soft as the seeds blown off wild grass by the wind, a deceptively gentle warning of the monsoon season soon to come. The lawns glistened and the casuarina’s scent added richness to the smell of the rain. I sat on the terrace beneath an umbrella where I had been reading and staring at the sky, lost in my dreams, looking at the heavy clouds resting on the unbendable horizon. The words, although spoken softly, had jolted me from my thoughts.
I turned and faced him. He was in his late forties, medium built and stocky. His hair was almost silver, cut very short and shining like the wet grass. The face was square and lined, his eyes round and glinting strangely in the twilight. His features were too sharp for a Chinese, and his accent was unknown to me.
“I’m the master’s son. What is it about?” I asked, suddenly aware that I was quite alone. The servants were in their quarters behind the house, preparing their evening meals. I made a note to speak to them about allowing a stranger to enter the house without any form of announcement.
“I would like to borrow a boat from you,” he answered.
“Who are you?” I asked. Being a Hutton, I often got away with rudeness.
“Hayato Endo. I live there.” He pointed to the island, my island.
So that was how he had managed to enter the house. He had come up from the beach.
“My father’s not here,” I said. The rest of the family was away in London, where they were to join my brother William, who had completed his university studies the year before but had decided to stay on in London with his friends instead of coming home to work. Every five years my father would reluctantly place his manager in charge of the firm and take his children to their homeland for a long visit, a practice many of the English in the colonies viewed as being almost as sacred as a religious pilgrimage. I had elected not to go this time. My father had been annoyed, for he had planned the journey to coincide with the start of my school holidays, and had in fact spoken to the headmaster of my school to allow me to miss the first month of the new term. But I suspected my siblings were relieved: I often felt that explaining a half-Chinese relation to their English friends and distant relations was not attractive to them at all.