The White Door

Praise

“Stephen Chan’s novel is a magical masterpiece that fascinates and moves the reader in equal measure. Drawing on his own cosmopolitan, hybrid and intriguing background, he manages to fuse fantasy with fact, resulting in a realist fictional memoir that speaks eloquently to the reader and grapples with multi-culturalism, estrangement and identity in today’s globalised world.”

— Zeinab Badawi

“Set against a backdrop of war, exclusion, refugee life and the protests of the 60s. Stephen Chan’s luminous novel is an invitation to explore the loving and lovely irrationalities of survival and dreams.”

— Helena Kennedy

“Images from Hollywood comic books to Dante’s Hell take us across a political landscape that embraces the ancient civilization of China and New Zealand. This book will help us navigate the tribulations of our generation.”

— Tim Shadbolt

If not invisibility, for people still stared at her, then safety. No one could take her for anything other than a rich Hong Kong tourist or businesswoman – maybe from Singapore, some other overseas, Chinese inconsequential, dozens came through every week, the people of White Stone were used to them, the baggage that came from being glumped into Guangdung’s urban sprawl. Better when it was still a well separated village, they thought.

That’s what she thought, too, as the sun began its rose-red descent. Then it would turn pink. Like a clock, she whispered, each downward lurch from colour to colour could be timed precisely. She liked the light at pink. Faded pink people scurrying homewards. Like a Disney movie. Pink Stone. And it would set off her red jacket. Oh, she looked like an overseas Chinese alright, different from, above all
unknown
to the locals. Someone’s gotten rich, the people might be saying, if they said anything at all. She’d scheduled just an hour to look at White Stone. This, too, was safety – better not to push too far, even if this would be the only visit for all the memories to come. Time to walk down the main street and back to her waiting taxi. Timed, this excursion of hers was timed. When the pink turned brownish, it would be time to turn.

Alternately dogging her steps or at her side walked her well-grown
daughter, looking even more overseas Chinese. Safety in numbers? Camouflaged by daughter. Who, here, wore black and gold and thought it could be an everyday outfit for rambling on the distant edges of the metropolis? Thin, unfattened like a Western model, slightly stooped at the shoulder, as if her head was too heavy, she made her mother seem taller than she was. Another part of the disguise… Ah, but who here would know how tall she was meant to be?

They turned at the brown light. The exit (or maybe escape) from White Stone was going to plan. By grey, they should have reached their taxi and then it would be a blur of ebbing light, darkness and the abrupt neon that announced the satisfactory transition from suburbia. Daughter was walking beside her, almost trotting. Couldn’t run in those shoes, even if it seemed the last hundred yards were meant to be run. She sucked in her breath as if she intended also to trot. Someone touched her shoulder from behind.

‘Aren’t you Kwok Meil Wah, who left here as a child some fifty years ago when the Japanese came?’ She turned, thoughts of impossibility in her mind. I was a child. Surely the weathering years should have prevented this? ‘I am Kwok Meil Wah,’ she said, and her mouth stayed open, and the sun, as if a camera, panned backwards to catch a wide meaning, bloomed forth in the gasp of her memory before nestling under the long horizon.

Meanwhile, the war of his parents forgiven, he was flying a Japan Airlines one-way ticket to New Zealand. The camera in the nosecone swept the Pacific onto his economy screen. He called for more sushi and saké, immediately regretted it as he withdrew his arm and nursed the thunderous bruises on his right ribcage. In Japan, the girls in the street had giggled at him; he looked like an escapee from a late-night samurai series – sword, scorcery and scowling. In fact, he looked more Japanese than Chinese, a distinction that acted against him in Japan. Out of my way, mumbling, illiterate, long-haired dog of a TV actor. The scowl came naturally then, though he admitted to himself that one badly-learned language tape for tourists did poor service
when he looked the part but could only burble like a prime idiot. On the JAL screen, the sun burst off the Pacific and the sudden cut to a location map showed they were near the equator. Flight data swept up – speed, height, times, distance to go – but it was in Japanese and he had closed his eyes before the English version replaced it. Your sushi and saké, sir? He heard the smile whispering in his ear. She placed the plastic containers on his tray and he felt the smile giggling off down the economy aisle. He thought of visiting this particular, rather pretty, stewardess at the South Pacific Hotel in Auckland, where all JAL crews stayed. Come with me. I’ll show you a good time in Auckland. Only he hadn’t been there for ten years himself, and the only good time he could remember of the South Pacific was, one night after a political party conference, the journalist Ian Fraser had eaten a carnation at his table out of sheer politicised frustration. Ian had become a local star since then, but he had not stayed in touch. As far as ten years could make it, this was all virgin territory. He instantly regretted the metaphor. His decade of escapee life had extracted every marital and extra-marital bruise from what had seemed innocent fields around him, and drawn them to his love-softened heart. He was meant to return on a white horse. Now, here he was, drunk on the enemy’s plane, unshaven, penniless, wifeless, jobless, accomplishmentless, heading to a species of location called home, and the sun in its relayed video glory shone like a ball of unredeeming flame.

I am Kwok Meil Wah. ‘You are the one who – you must have been six like me – stole a horse and cart and drove it laughing and screaming until you lost control and it overturned in a grove of red lychee trees?’ Ah the red lychees, I had forgotten. How red they were. How sprawled I was, thrown from the cart, delirious with delight to land in a child’s heaven, all above me the laden branches of heaven’s dream. It was like a dream. Who is this man, this past dream in front of me now, retelling my dreams as if they were his own?

‘I am mayor of White Stone now. I remember what fun we had as children before the war came. May I officially welcome you home?
You know, the new laws allow you to repossess abandoned property. Your family had a big house. You know, I knew instantly when I saw you walk down the street. You haven’t changed at all.’

Not at all? So fifty years of absence make me still a child. Lines on face mean nothing? And all this westernisation, surely it should have sat on my skin like a thick layer of make-up, stage make-up. I cannot even act the Western stranger in a single straight-line walk? Did I even look from right to left, show homebound interest? I saw White Stone as two rows of peripheral vision. It was Teresa who actively looked, swinging her heavy head from side to side, and she is far too young, and this is twilight anyway, they weren’t meant to see, far too young to have come remembered from this tiny point of here. We should have passed, passed ourselves off, passed through. If we had hurried more for the taxi… What shall we tell the taxi?

‘This must be your daughter. You must have many children now. She is very beautiful.’

Yes, of course Teresa is beautiful. She looks like an intellectual taking time out to be a model. But who does he think he is? Some peasant consciousness that says I must have had many children. Why should I have? I have, but that was ignorance and what seemed natural at the time. Not because I was Chinese and Chinese have many children. And what would he think of my oldest child, a controversy in his small but far-flung international circles? Certainly not the traditional Number One Son. What if he had parachuted from the sky at the instant of sunset, a long-haired, almost lame agent of his self-conceived rebellion? Neither history nor ideology fly with him, wherever he’s flying, and I bet he’s flying… I wouldn’t wear a shred of traditional behaviour and expectation if he were here this moment in White Stone.

‘You must surely have dinner. We will feed the driver too. Auntie Wang, here is Kwok Meil Wah who sat on your knee and went on to steal lychees and she is a rich foreigner now come home to White Stone!’

The two women looked at each other. Something lit them for each other. Sometimes, the gods are only the second-unit directors of our
lives, only the cinematographers. They came close and each clasped the other’s elbows; and there should be the most amazing tears of recovery right now, thought Teresa, and she recalled much later, how the misty twilight scene dissolved and faded, having made its very cinematic impact.

Once there had been, he thought, a single story. As his mother told and retold it, there grew several variants. Forgetfulness, romanticisation, recreation. Maybe all three. Maybe it was merely a search for the best justification for being in New Zealand. She knew he had been restless since the labour-ridden day he was born. Even the story’s background shifted. It seems, from the latest accounts – and who knows how the story has changed in the last ten years? – they had a right, his mother and her mother, to board that last New Zealand troop ship evacuating itself and a few hundred Kiwi soldiers, and a few Chinese with rights to residence, before Hong Kong fell to the Japanese. Grandad had somehow secured rights on his worldwide rambles – or was it his great-grandad? One or the other had been an Indiana Jones figure, adventuring, gold-digging, gold-rushing, handy with a shovel, a pan and a gun. Never mind those early sepia tints of Chinese gold miners looking like muddied transplanted coolies. Ancestor was a two-fisted, high-kicking, narrow-eyed version of Clint Eastwood, Mario Van Peebles. The constructed image had him wearing a Stetson, Cuban heels, silver and leather that opened from throat to navel. Ever since images migrated from still sepia to frames that galloped through stories and lives, heroes and heroines had been appropriated by the enthralled masses. As a youngster, he had been Gordon Scott’s first colour film
Tarzan
; as a teenager, Yul Brynner’s black-clad leader of seven. He had spoken in clipped tones like Brynner ever since. And at 23, he became Bruce Lee, became at last Chinese in that projection of virtue and strength that had removed mud, dust, oppression, the mutilating selfishness he had always associated with his race, removed doubt. Ancestor came to mind without doubt and, doubtless, had somehow managed residency permits for self and family in – where?
God knows where, his mother as child must have thought – the
clear-watered
isles of New Zealand. Where? Why not America? Surely he had gold-rushed there. But no, New Zealand-bound it was. And the ship became the second-to-last to flee Hong Kong harbour before the city fell to the Japanese. One thing she knew was shellfire, as it had dogged her steps on the foot-numbing run and stagger from White Stone. Days, it had taken – the family’s hoard of gold sovereigns sewn, one per stitched square, into her mother’s quilted jacket. Come to a roadblock, extortioning soldiers (themselves fleeing the Japanese), armed bandits, she would tear out a sovereign as payment, bribe, safeguard, God’s provisioned relief. The fear came in that split moment between proffering of bribe and acceptance. Would they accept? White Stone to Hong Kong had been a chain of fear-prefixed acceptances. By the time of finding the troop ship, one sovereign left – a future bequest to a future first-born son, the sole heirloom of survival with almost no margin. The margin becomes an heirloom. The heirloom travels Africa as son out-Indiana Joneses his ancestor, the unarmed inter-governmental agent of the last wars of Africa, seeking non-existent shampoo and razor blades; finds the continent provisioned, no, festooned with Chinese toothpaste only. A smile to dazzle the bayonet-fringed roadblocks, the sovereign worked into a necklace carefully hidden, sweat-stained shirt buttoned resolutely up, a badge of immunities pinned to his cotton-covered, no flak-jacket chest.

He was a sort of diplomat, she said, only representing a consortium of countries, and he worked in Africa. This last information drew gasps from her audience. The first-born son, they thought collectively, grew out of a fairytale of the most barbarous exotica. They’d seen a black man once, a tall American in blue suit and sunglasses, looking for a factory site. He’d seemed quite civilised, but in Africa surely they were still savages and, at best, untrustworthy. Meanwhile, Kwok Meil Wah continued the story they had requested, stories of sons being obviously a rite of passage, and this didn’t please Teresa at all, but
she was a little entranced by her mother’s transformation into native raconteur, stretching out the drama and exotica but, to her eternal credit, not catering at all for the village prejudices of White Stone.

Some sort of peacekeeper, but ununiformed. He’d never worn the blue beret. Just an armband and a plastic badge. Her audience envisaged the last Chinese sheriff of the high veld. But he wore, she continued, a canvas hunting jacket with the cartridge loops sewn inside. Whenever he encountered a roadblock of African soldiers, armed with Chinese rifles (she added for both the ironic and political emphasis), he would have ready, one for each of the cartridge loops, fifty Cuban cigars. Faced with guns, he would slowly lift open his jacket, slowly remove a cigar, slowly offer it to the officer commanding, slowly take out a lighter. The officer would shield the flame with both hands. Both hands off his Chinese rifle. Afterwards he would distribute cigars to all the soldiers, some boys who had never smoked. A waste of a good Cuban, he had always thought. And he would slide one for the road under the left epaulet of the commander, a slow gesture of incorporation and intimacy, and he would smile through his sparse but wire-like stubble as he did this, and all her audience thought, ah, Clint Eastwood, and pictured him riding his Land Cruiser into the sunset, leaving black Mexicans and Indians, converted by charisma to civilisation, waving like the chorus from what was already his forgotten past.

The thing about Land Cruisers, he thought, is that they’re Japanese – easy to armour, easy to adapt to desert warfare. Their balance, once adapted, so much better than any Landrover’s. His eyes were still shut. Oranges came to his mind. He would like a well-chilled orange. He would like to unwrap… ah, that stewardess’s orange-sashed kimono. Why not take a risk? he thought, invite her to dinner, assure her that, shaved and shampooed, bathed and reclothed, you are an object of adoration – or at least a credible dinner companion. But how to unwrap a kimono? He had learnt how to tie and untie a
hakama
, the split skirts of Japanese tradition. Took hours, subterranean
knots and crossovers that had to be bound and ribboned exactly. Would take half an hour to unwrap her, he thought. Time to cool any ardour. He giggled at his earlier image of oranges. Anyway, Japanese seemed to think he was, when unshaven and unshampooed, irredeemably subterranean himself. He was the troglodyte of the skies. And shampooed and besuited, well, the hair was still too long, something out of a bad manga comic; at best, an on-screen caricature, a momentary and unreal talento of the video pop charts. Better to be the surly, unwashed samurai of the late-night programmes after all the talk shows and competition shows had ended – the samurai of exile, to whom none spoke but who, it would be revealed at 2 a.m. precisely, could hurl thunderbolts with his right fist. He was still giggling when, unrequested, unseen, the mystic stewardess of his reveries refilled his saké with a lightness of touch undreamt in any movie. She would be, forever for him, a girl with no history and no name, ah, just the timely intervention of the Pacific skies.