Authors: Stephen Chan
Then he thought about the death of his older brother. The Russians could make artificial diamonds. They would compress carbon at very high temperatures for five years. His brother had been compressed to death in the warlord years. Bright Star Brigade of General Wang’s Second Army had kidnapped him. Brother had fought like a truly desperate man with his twin whirlwind blades. The Bright Star Brigade crushed first his sword arm then, one by one, the other bones of his body. He was unconscious long before he was dead, he was dead long before they finished. Then they crammed him, misshapen and jellied, into a large earthen jar, his head on top like a stopper. Then they sent the spectacle to his mother. The woman warrior of the sky-flung sword never forgave him for becoming the oldest son by this brutal default. For decades, the Dragon Lady grudged him every meal. To the survivor of China’s internecine wars, there were only the reminders of death’s cruel hand. He grew very thin and very hard; his muscles were like lines of steel; his strength was legendary; but all of life seemed a fruitless quest to fill his stomach, and to lose the sight in his mind’s eye of the Bright Star Brigade falling about with laughter as they rode into the blue horizon.
He remembered he had eaten well before then. The bondswomen and slaves of the household had brought him food whenever he wished. After, his mother had reduced his portions and their frequency. Alongside in his stomach there was an emptiness and a knot whenever he thought of death and gradually, even in a new country, the knot assumed the shape and colour of a blackened hand.
What he always considered odd, even untenable, was a certain epistemology used by the Bright Star Brigade. The General was not called ‘Just Wang’ but ‘Justified Wang’. No doubt the recomposition of people as jelly and their storage in jars was a process the academicians could say was, if not ‘right’, then conditionally right. He had questioned son about this, and all he had got was a treatise on St Augustine and how a certain Latin phrase was probably better translated as ‘justified war’, rather than the ‘just war’ of the theologians and the generals. Wang, said son, was at least more honest than the translators of Augustine and the beneficiaries of his list of what was allowable in war. What was Augustine to him? he thought. Some black bishop on the North African fringes of the dying Roman empire. What about Wang, Bright Star, the resultant decade of half meals, bombardment, the uselessness of swords, the screaming stumbling flight for life, and the scurrying poverty of refugee existence in a strange, half-formed land? He would like to wipe out this past, but he couldn’t, and so he reconstructed in bright hard jewels the locations of his misery and turned their facets to the light.
Wife and daughter were in China. Perhaps they would risk a visit to White Stone. He would not dare go to Unused Sky. But, in Hong Kong once, he had made himself wander to the rundown suburb where his family had briefly sheltered, waiting for the New Zealand boat that finally came. The brown tenement was still there. A sparrow sang on the half-balcony of the third floor where, once, his dragon mother had left a vase of flowers. The Japanese were getting closer. Who knew if they or the New Zealand boat would be first? The sudden flowers, so out of his mother’s character, so absurd in the race of war, were like the blues and reds of a flag. He felt his slum of a halfway house had been transformed into the embassy of hope. As he stood there, groomed and prosperous, the sparrow’s song became the lullaby of time. For a very slow second, a full instant, he heard his mother sing old opera, he saw the case of spring onions Mr Lee had bought at market, and felt the unaged sun of more than fifty years ago.
Then he turned on his heel and left. He had dressed casually so as not to be noticed, but had been unable to remove his great diamond
cluster ring. It was welded to his finger with the torchfire of exception. He wasn’t the poor wretch of a refugee boy now. He was a king of prosperity. He took his hand out of his pocket and marched past his startled audience of children. The red-shirted ghost in their courtyard, they said, suddenly disappeared.
To be a ghost, he thought, would be to wander the world without a black hand in the stomach. After the hand had jellied you, it left. The true heaven was a community of hands. They were reincarnated into stomachs. People just became the ghostly residue of life that could not bear to leave the earth and its unused sky. To live without the hand in his stomach – he wondered what that must be like. But, like the diamond cluster ring, a signature his psychology had welded to his finger, the hand was, while nurtured as his eventual killer, housed like the full meal of his life.
He looked to his left to ensure the security grilles had not evaporated. He made a ruby fly like a plane again. He packed away the jewels. He created a hairspray mist around his head. Hair stiffened, he recreated the combination to the safe, then walked out of the shop. He had to seal the door in three different rituals before he reached his first steps in the night. A pair of lovers walked by, the girl with a magazine décolletage, and they stared into his grilled window. She said, ‘I’d like a sapphire ring’, and he was overcome with the temptation to present her with a tray. Like a ghost, he imagined himself gliding through the grille, the bulletproof glass, the alarm beam, and re-emerging with a sapphire ring for each of her fingers, walking off with girl and leaving lover flummoxed. It was a pure instant of gallantry and lust. He watched them walk away. But now I know how son does it, he thought. That combination could be radiated like a warming glow and fill each female gap like the food of love.
He watched a plane fly overhead. He waited for the cars at the intersection. He looked up at the art gallery clock. What time might it be, and what night winds did son ride if somewhere in the lost wide world son flew? He hummed a line from a Chinese opera. It was like
a prayer. When all the girls of all the world have come down all the steps of all the nights and all their fingers have worn all the rings of all the young men of the world, a phoenix with tail like jewels will fly, and all the fathers of all the men will die.
Years later, Teresa still thought of White Stone. Divorced, the workaholic proprietor of two shops selling leather clothes, she dreamt of looking out over Rangitoto, the volcanic cone in Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour. ‘Sparkling Waters’ was what Waitemata meant. She did not know what Rangitoto meant. She satisfied herself with the second most expensive option in Auckland and lived in Rangitoto Street – no view, but in the heart of padded respectability. She inhabited a vast house of shining wooden floors, and a great St Bernard dog commandeered the floor by set square metres as the sun moved across it every day.
After White Stone, she had taken to displaying portraits of her mother as a girl, her mother’s mother (whom Teresa had never known), her very much older husband (who had also died long ago), and the backdrops to the portraits were always book-lined studies, the only painted backdrop the studio had. The Kwoks, by contrast, lived in a series of sheds. No one in the family had ever acquired a book-lined study – except the oldest son, but he lived an impossible life. One of his succession of wives had sorted out and catalogued the entire history of family photos. There was only one of Teresa as a child. Father had sold his camera before she was born, as everything was mortgaged for capital as he slowly, stutteringly, began the construction of a minor business legend. Even then, the camera had been an only luxury in a desperately poor young manhood and when, from his arranged marriage to Kwok Meil Wah, a son promptly appeared, the camera recorded every smile and every walk by the white university tower. The motto was in Latin. For all her father knew, it read ‘impossible
to enter’. He had not been educated, wrote out contracts of sale with the most colourful grammar, but looked at the university as a great excluding fortress – the dividing line between refugee/migrant and blood of the country. One day, he would say as he wheeled young son past, taking photos of his first steps on the forecourt of the tower, you will enter these doors. The Chinese word for door looked just like the oaken porticoes of the colonial representation of gothic. One day you will enter here. He used to tell Teresa of the similarity in graduations. In European universities, the graduate would wear a special cap and gown. When you became greatly learned, a doctor, they gave you a scarlet gown. In China, he would say, ever since the time of Confucius, it was possible to change class by one route only. Otherwise, a peasant was always a peasant. China is full of legends where the boy child – sometimes the disguised girl child – of a poor family, always of a very poor family, sometimes of a piteously poor widow, would make the trip to the imperial capital and there, in a great tower, would attempt state exams. If he passed, and only a handful from all over China passed, he would be made a junior minister, married to a daughter from one of the emperor’s numerous concubines, and return (briefly) to his village, robed in red, a scholar’s cap with tassels on his head, mounted on a white horse, and extract family/widowed mother from poverty. Look at my son, the mother would say, he studied every night and worked to support me every day. Now this is the consummation promised for virtue. If the scholar came home only to a widowed mother, they would go and burn incense at the father’s grave and the red-cloaked scholar would weep tears of filial piety.
Such a father’s dream, thought Teresa, only her brother had really done it, gone off and taken not one but two doctorates, then, after nearly crippling himself in a karate accident, disdained the academy for the life of an international official mediating in the world’s forgotten and usually useless conflicts. Teresa laughed. In the films, the scholar was usually thin and physically useless. The daughters of the concubines must have dreaded each year’s exams. Often, taking mother to her new home in the capital, they would be attacked by warlord brigands. Then it would be weedy scholar’s true love from
the village, the heartlost beauty of the paddyfields, following secretly behind, who would rescue them with heroic Kung Fu spinning kicks, take a fatal thrust, and die in her worthless scholar’s puny arms. Brother was always beset by the competing loves of women too. At least he was able to kick ass for himself – rather, he could do so with his good left leg. The right was a Byronic reassemblage of bones with pins and, on a good day, carried him convincingly in unknowing company.
Teresa moved. Dog wanted her piece of floor. She looked at the portraits and dreamed of a perfectly-shaped mountain of peace, the return of brother and the satisfaction of her restless parents. For something had changed after the journey to White Stone, as if mother now knew that half of adult life had ended and, as her children drifted variously into marriages and divorces, that such aspects of life, maybe most of life itself, was a series of charades that sought to re-enact or recapture some primal grasp of acceptance in the world on one’s own terms – even one’s compromised terms, but terms in which one had made a stand of sorts, over which one had had a say. Love me, leave me, accept me, go away, come back, come back more gently, why can’t the vision of you be as the vision of you before?
It could never be as before, thought Teresa. Otherwise the planes would fly faster, the horses gallop more rapidly, rejecting the true nagging knowledge that they were returning their wearied riders to only an impression of their origin. If I could see Rangitoto, she thought, I would know that any journey was symmetrical, a dance around a perfect cone; any stop was like the last departure; and it would all be washed by sparkling waters; and paradise would be the certain regularity of knowledge, a time that passed well anchored.
If brother were here, she thought, he would offer one of his alarmingly technical philosophical discourses, which simply said he did not know, but he would say so like a gentle cone, brother spinning words around himself like a smooth trouble-free volcano. He would grow green trees on lava slopes and all his jumbly conditionals would be said in a soft speech like the thigh of his latest lady in his latest dream. He, at least, went happily from vision to uxorious vision, but
Teresa had long vowed she would never even dream of marrying again. Dog followed a progression of assured, sunlight squares on the floor. One heart, one square, one life, thought Teresa, no great hairy dog she, but one firm arrow in the world, centred, fastened, targeted and certain till the end of time.
How high is the water. How high is the water. A description, not a question. Looking towards Chelsea as the train crossed the bridge, thinking of homes, seeking a houseboat, moored, a damp but
light-filled
destination. Instead of this dream, he thought, half-asleep, he knew, he was flying far from Chelsea. He was over seas not a single river. He was loving impossible women in his sleep, ignored by the stewardess. Not entirely. She brought him alternate sakés and coffees, touched his shoulder or stroked his wrist with a smile every time. It was she who now hunted, teased him. But he knew, beyond this pleasantry, she was withholding name, hotel number, access and possibility from his unshaven economy-class person. Not a true want of his would be addressed by her. He let the parade of his sleep-bound women sweep to his mother. Now she was, dressed in red, Empress of China, queen of the Tang, and she tossed thunderbolts with either wrist. A particular bolt carried off the stewardess. She rode it standing but was brought to him. A second bolt stripped her naked and he admired the vision. Now, if mothers could really do this… if they would really do this…
Kwok Meil Wah was riding the taxi back to Guangdung. Ten million stars shone for her alone. She threw not a thunderbolt at the sky. But if I were Empress of China, she thought, the destruction of the past would be forbidden. But the past was problematic. There had been an Empress Wu, whose stormy reign had decayed the Tang. It never recovered its full glory. So, looking forward to the future, they had given son a name of complex half-syllables, a poem that shimmered
like an abbreviated dance. Happy Occasion at a Grand Court, they had called him – in their refugee poverty still thinking of grand courts. Just plain ‘Happy’ if you make a brutally succinct translation. Son liked neither the pomposity of the first, nor the plebeian brevity of the second. He searched the jumbled assemblage of half-characters composed into his name and selected just one of them. Sometimes it meant ‘heart’, sometimes it meant ‘patience’, so he called himself ‘Patient Heart’ when he had to give a name to the Chinese society of New Zealand. Otherwise he was happy enough with his European name, which meant ‘prince’. His parents had made sure. Meil Wah chuckled beneath the Chinese stars.