Authors: Stephen Chan
Ah, father, he wears no armour. Just a white Chinese robe, edged on the shoulders with black fur. His hair is tied in a high ponytail, and it is black like midnight. The warrior is crippled, and can swing his sword only in an arc below his shoulders. He cannot raise it above his shoulders. So he reaps with his sword as if it were a scythe. When he rides forth, cancer dies at his feet, is trodden under the hooves of the horse. Your soldiers follow behind and the white warrior drives cancer back to its encampments.
Amid the tumult, for this is bloody business now, you will hear the doctor sigh. You must not ask him about the white warrior. The warrior is his son whom he has not seen for years, and there is great
sadness between them.
Father, the battleground will be a bloodied mess. Each struggle reduces your liver. But each struggle also drives back one more time the forces of cancer. When you are in pain, and your forces cannot hold, call out for the warrior. The warrior will always come. The army of cancer cannot touch him, for he comes from outside. Only when your last own soldier is killed, and the warrior stands alone, will he have to leave you, for then the time has come, and the good fight fought as well as humans can fight it. Until then, he will come across the bridge of the world. He is the best I can send – no helmet, no shield, no armour. This is love that fights for you, as naked as when I was born.
My Dear Son,
Even before your letter, I knew of the white warrior. One morning, after several mornings of not being able to enter, after several nights when I thought I would die from the pain, I finally managed to enter. I talked to my general, Cornelius, and he had been badly wounded. Almost all the officers of the high command had been wounded, and there were dead soldiers all around. But Cornelius said they had, at the most critical moment, received help. No one knew where he had come from, or how anyone could fight as well as the stranger.
I stood on the clifftop with the doctor, I had to look hard to see. My son, the white warrior looks just like you. But so very pale. Son, we have not the training, but we know what this is. Your mother wants to know that you are not crippling your soul in sending the white warrior.
Years ago, the spirit of Empress Wu rode back to Guangdung with Kwok Meil Wah. Faded now by centuries in which only historians
remembered her, she had revived spectacularly but briefly with the Shaw Brothers’ filmed epic of her life – a Hong Kong attempt to produce an equivalent to Cleopatra, with the beauteous Lin Dai as Elizabeth Taylor. But that was two decades ago and her star had waned until Meil Wah had called on it during that tear-soaked ride from White Stone. Calling out for thunderbolts, Meil Wah exhumed from heaven the single queen who had ruined the Tang. Even in the twentieth century, Chinese called themselves Tang People – not just iron statues of galloping horses, but a dynasty of such verve-ridden accomplishment that it could only end, in the politically-incorrect Chinese mind, with the extravagant pogroms of history’s most beautiful woman. The Shaw Brothers had ensured, on the widest possible screen, that all could appreciate the burning of the stage sets stretched across three sound lots. The end of the Tang was as spectacular as any array of iron horse artefacts galloping across the dividing fires of time.
Meil Wah imagined the snarl of breath and steam from the white horses, saw briefly the empress in her gold chariot, then saw her materialise in the hotel suite, in the shape of Teresa but ordering cocktails to reduce the pain of her next oblivion. ‘If we play thunder bolts against the sky,’ said Meil Wah. ‘If we laser the night, then we could make destruction rain upon White Stone,’ replied the Empress Wu. All night, the two planned the light shows of erasure, the rubbing out of memory, the deletion of tape, and the high cocktails invented a life in which all could be shot anew, recorded over, and a walk through a village, the maintenance of an empire, could be edited and refined, taken by angles, and never present the inconvenience of discovery and destruction.
In the morning, Teresa entered her mother’s suite. Curtains had not closed all night and sun streamed through the wide sky-framing windows. Two cocktail glasses and many miniature paper umbrellas littered the marble veneer table. Stretched across the couch was her mother with a grin of such satisfaction that it was ridiculous to
suppose she was asleep – but she was far away, playing in the high morning, racing the chariots, commandeering the lychee orchards of heaven, seducing under the branches of red fruit some boy who would become mayor of an unimportant village, while she would become the Empress of the World. Ah, the heaven-play of those who are
cloud-born
and lychee-fed, of those who can command the thunderbolts and have access to the moon’s herd of white horses, can call each of them by name, and ride them like something earned, like something deserved, ride them across untouched acres of sky like compensation.
Teresa called up for coffee. It arrived in two vase-shaped pots. She poured it into Ming-play cups. A few dynasties after the Tang, she thought, disapproving of a China with its own absurd Chinoiserie. She balanced the hot, almost translucent cup on her mother’s forehead. The moxibustion of coffee, giggled Teresa, and waited for Meil Wah’s eyes to re-enter her only twentieth-century body. ‘Come in from way out there, mother,’ she sang, like a parent to her child, but the child was way out there and came in, not deeply, enough to flutter lashes, with the grumbly reluctance of a spoilt princess. ‘At least that’s wiped your hideous grin,’ said Teresa. ‘Now, take a gulp, deep gulp, swallow it down. Come on, two more gulps, three seconds between each gulp, and you’ll see the brave world has been cured.’
‘Don’t want this brave world,’ but drank the coffee anyway… held the telephone a long way from her mouth and ordered pineapple slices, a very English bacon and eggs for two, with cream cakes for breakfast dessert, and more coffee. ‘What was that poem? The one he wrote..?’ ‘Which poem?’ ‘No, no – it’s coming to me now.’
Arden, dressed in imperial
armour, snarling angry breath from iron
chariots. Arden choosing thrones on tours
of the empire. Dispensing damnations to
princes in black robes.
‘Ah, Teresa, for a while last night I toured the empire and put the world to rights. There was no more pain or suffering. Lions lay down
with lambs. Men beat their swords into plowshares. I conjured up a great abyss to swallow all the unrighteous, and I restored the family tree with fresh plaques of oak.’
‘And you sent shafts of light into the sky,’ said Teresa, ‘and light chimed in the hebrides of heaven.’
‘Just so, just so… Don’t mock… The day will come when we must find some space inside each of us for this cosmic clutter.’
‘Just dreams, mother, just dreams. You’ve just had a dream.’
‘Perhaps life is best lived, perhaps saved, as a dream. Don’t deny the perpetual dream manifesto which both liberates and trains the soul.’
At a time when his soul was still complete, the Patient Heart landed in New Zealand. Tired, slightly ill (his plane had been tossed through a remarkable storm which had lit the night sky), hungover, still unshaven, and cursing the grey of morning, he called up a taxi and deposited himself in the back seat like a heap of soiled baggage.
Drove off from the uncompleted terminal, through the half-used suburb of Mangere. Thought of the flight approaching New Zealand, when the stewardess re-emerged into his life by waking him – waking him by the unusual method of gently closing his snoring mouth with two incredibly white fingers – and pointing out to him the picture on the screen, a long white cloud lit from above by the newest risen sun of all time. Ah, New Zealand, he said. As they flew down the ridge of the land, cloud would break and there would be lit bays and green hills and the stolen lands that made up the young state shone like a reclaimed duvet of innocence. But when the plane came under the cloud, the grey engaged him like a furious reality and he would not eat his breakfast. Now he looked ahead through the video screen – land scooped into view – and now he looked out his window, and land passed him by, and the light outside was paler than the light within
the last jet of his ten-year exile.
Mangere, an airport set in rural land like Narita. Only there were no Japanese farmers to fight the slow reclamation of harbour mudflats, the nationalisation of surrounding pasture, and the flightpath was over the peripheries of poverty that marked Auckland, as an unknowing schizophrenic is marked by his own ignorance. That moment as you reel from one state to another, enter the state of comfort, and wonder what you had just left behind. Mangere could be passed through like that, and speedily forgotten. One day, coming to the planes again, it would grin at you like a true land recovered. Only the Patient Heart was not thinking of a return to the terminal depressions and outrage of his past, but of a step towards requiting them, and he asked the driver to not leap through Mangere but, in the shadow of the squat green Mangere Mountain, to stop at what was called a lawn cemetery. It was acres larger now, but he knew the spot from a map in his mind and, as the taxi waited, some part of him was there long before his body ambled over, and – he remembered afterwards – his body was wearing an olive trenchcoat and his arms were huddling the cold body and the wind blew his matted hair, and he was the criminal from the outer reaches come at last to visit the grave of his grandparents, of the Dragon Lady who had died largely unmourned in his absence, and her long-suffering husband who had taken his exit some years before. Together now, and the grave wore photographs of the two when they were young and almost settled refugees, confronting a future forever on a strange half-used periphery.
He bowed three times. He had refused to do this after his grandfather’s death. Some antique ceremony from the outlands his young, modernising mind sought to leave behind. Now he bowed, and it was a gesture, not a belief – he had gone beyond the refugee culture that claimed to know it was Chinese – but the words he heard himself speak were heart-true, though bleak as the sky.
Grandparents, thank you for inviting me to visit you despite all the years that have passed. And you, grandmother, thank you, for
I boycotted even the sight of you for years before my departure, anxious to live in the new world and repudiate those who drew me close to the old. Thank you, for I knew it was you both who mobilised ancestors to watch over me at every roadblock of every warlord rebel in every part of Africa. Ah, how I felt the charred descendant of that antique Chinese admiral who sailed to Africa and stayed, taking his Ming dinner set with him, and scattering the cups along the shores of Dar es Salaam as he watched his junks sail away forever. You drew me close, but not close enough. Couldn’t reach out at all in New Zealand and, from Africa, could reach only as far as Okinawa – part Japanese, part native, part Chinese. If we’re lucky we discover, do we not, half our past – and we need to reinvent the rest.
He bowed again, repeating the gesture like good manners. Went back along the boulevard of graves to his taxi, meter still running, and left to start to find one of his parents – that one not in China, constructing a cosmic endgame for history’s tricks of going walkabout with its wooden plaques; that one beginning the endgame to his life, unknowingly but somehow always deliberately setting out his array of light-meters, and framing the blue sky, untarnished in its intensity, for a perpetual sun-ridden matinée.
Many years in the future, when he was lamenting the loss of his eighth truly significant woman, he fell to writing again. Her name was Marja, Finnish Marja, pronounced Marr-ya, with a rolled second ‘r’ and an inflected ‘i’ before the ‘y’. No one could say it properly, so all his friends called her Maria, and she answered their insufficiency. Finnish Marja would smile as she was addressed as English Maria. The eighth woman. All his life there had been a girl of the moon, someone to cry over in the high night of her increasing absences; then there would be an elegant older woman, who would drive her own sports car and be good to him in bed, and who would want him totally; then there could be a wife of capacious gifts, an academic of great strength, who would eventually leave him. Then the cycle would be repeated – and he had gone through two complete cycles now, calling out the names of the moon girls in his married sleep, and with the advent of the third cycle there came certainly the sports car-driving woman, an aristocrat this time, and a moon girl of such astonishing beauty he prayed with all his heart that the cycles would stop and she, at last, would be the moon girl made wife, the eighth and last of the traumatic pageant of beauty. And anyway, for him, eight was a holy number, written without beginning or end as two seamless circles that fed each other. Feed me, Marja, he would whisper, pronunciation correct, under the
moons of a long and only briefly answered year.
When he was a child, just learning memory, the moon meant something entirely different. Instead of pretty pretty moon, the repetitive coo of New Zealand mothers, he got pretty light light, since he was, he remembered he was told, Chinese. And he was called Happy Occasion at a Grand Court. Since, later, he learned that his father’s name meant Red Emperor, he was happy enough to be an occasion of any sort in his palace of dreams. There was a palace of dreams in Parnell, Auckland, on a hill that overlooked the harbour cranes, and his combined first memory was of poverty. Then his father would carry him out of the poverty-ridden shop, into the life of the sky, and they would watch richer sunsets than he ever saw again, and the cranes would burn, and the moon like an impossible goddess would rise from her land of snow and seep into the heavens till it filled his sky. Poverty, sunset, sky: this was the Parnell of his soul.
There was a Parnell of his heart, and this was green. Green, because behind the shop, beyond a crescent that sloped away, a great domain of trees had jumped to giant life – taller, grown faster than in England – and these acres were called, presciently, the Domain. In the middle of the Domain, on a hill he would clearly see, there was a huge white museum, and it was called – simply, rather than presciently this time, since it looked like a Roman temple, and later he imagined it was a Roman temple – the Museum; and his father said all the past is contained in the Museum, and that was why, he thought, birds sang in the green Domain, to honour the past in the white Museum.
But the green was in his heart because that was where his parents taught him love and laughter – even though they were poor and the world they had escaped grew older than belief. They taught him all the polite paths through the green – what they themselves were learning. Later, as a young man, he taught himself the hidden trails among the great trees, skipping over the heartfelt roots of heaven every night, as he cried tear-blind for the first moon girl of his canopy-obscuring life.
There was a Parnell of the body, and the body’s early mind, and this was brown; brown because of the two brown panels that faced his cardigan as he grew, and among the first things that he knew was how
much had been left behind, and how existence was a loss that could never be reclaimed. Living was to build a bridge over the chasm of perpetual loss, and the stronger you built the bridge, the deeper you dug the chasm.
Among the second things that he knew was that they were
better-off
than other people who were browner. Each bright morning a Maori boy would pass the shop and his father would sell him, discounted, bruised fruit. Down the road there was another shop, and it was smaller, dingier, somehow irremediably poorer, and the couple who eked out their precarious margins in that compressed space were Indians.
But what he loved as he learnt to know was the clatter of the passing trams, how trams had to stop if their magic masts disconnected from the wires overhead. There would be a blue flash sometimes as mast disconnected but then, in the laws of exact chances, laws that govern how you jump precisely, it would bounce back to its energy-feeding connection. The blue flash was the immutable law of life. Sometimes you had to, for no reason but having to, make a jump – and all freedom that the world allowed was contained in that blue flash, and then you were anchored again, and that was that, and being anchored was brown, but the blue was a momentary transfiguration of all the child’s prayers he said, from his shop front, to the universal non-refugee sky.
For what reasons are moon girls sent to the earth and cross that bridge of light? For years he has asked that question. They are sent to discipline the wants of youth, and the remembered wants of youth. They are sent to accept as gifts the completed hearts of chosen men – for these men cannot choose, and their bodies learn to live with space in place of heart, and the space is called want, and want pulses to the timetable of the moon, and the timetable is the strictest tempo in the world of months and tides and wolves and hearts. And because want cannot replace the heart’s own full beat, the body loves the moon girl as it slowly dies.
Ah, from time to time, the men rebel. Gilgamesh, the great Sumerian king, four thousand years ago, drunkenly refused his fate. One desperate night, at the full-moon feast, he tore a leg from
the sacrificial ox and tossed the charred and broken rump into the heavens with all the strength of sun-born kings. Ishtar, the goddess of the moon, thought it poor substitute for Gilgamesh’s heart, and took away the single chance the king might have for everlasting life. Atop his bold ziggurat, Gilgamesh accepted that his life was costed out, and hearts were the only fare for the beautiful carnivores of love.
His grandmother told him stories of ancient heroes. One, with full beard, almost like a barbarian’s, had also only one leg. He swung a fine sword meticulously balanced. But when he wanted to deliver a high side-kick, a supporting leg would instantly grow and anchor hero to the earth. A man entire only when he kicked, and only past a certain height. There was a moral somewhere in that, perhaps; but he hoarded the fairytales and learnt how, in sunset’s blaze, the
long-haired
sword-armed messengers of justice would sometimes translate themselves into the high birds of the sky. And stories were the only hoard of gold in the poverty in which he grew.
Poverty was brown. The electric light that shone on it was brown. The room in which he slept with his parents had no windows and he never recalled the dust being swept nor sunlight’s shaft on dust dancing in the dawns.
His father sought to turn this lack into an advantage of sorts. For an hour each day, between work’s end and the child’s time for sleep, he laid out the trays and second-hand equipment of a photographic darkroom. This moonlighting he called Happy Snaps, but most of the happy snaps he took were of the growing, smiling child – a child with hair that sprouted thick and long, and over whom strangers would make prophecies – few commissions came the father’s way and the child reasoned early that the camera was not for business but his parent’s one escape. The child hoarded stories, the father images of his life – appropriated for a golden dust-free future, when the past was both a record and something he could richly mock. The aspiration was great: to have a light-meter you must first have light, and the room should not be coloured
like sleep before you even kissed the pillow and closed your eyes.
Closed your eyes, then made a moon in your mind to illuminate the brown, reciting to yourself a favourite child’s poem of the moon bright he had learnt from his mother. One day, when he learnt the rigours of speech, he thought, he would say this poem – not mother, nor father, but moon bright, after that the word for want.
From the grandparents’ room came each night a certain whine, a mechanically arbitrated whine that nevertheless suggested a higher, more courtly, more educated Cantonese than that with which he was addressed. Ah then, he thought, a hierarchy in language. It was a tape recorder, clumsily unwinding reel-to-reel a ritual opera with timed intonations, drum beats and cymbals clashing. In bed, the moon switched on, a brown music nevertheless intervened against that slippage to unconsciousness, and his dream of the moon and what was signalled by the acne on the moon’s full face.
The evening’s progression would be from dinner, all seated on wooden crates, Chinese newspapers spread as tablecloth, the table itself prefabricated from banana crates that were taller than the orange crates that served for chairs. A cat sat on one corner of the table, unable to eat except as a full person; chicken, blood pudding, fish would be served – particles of each to the cat as well. Afterwards, debris would be rolled up in the newspapers, and the apparatus of dining dismantled like magic. Magic is a rehearsed routine, he thought. Then bed, then moon, then the brown music.
And the music would always be of love, love lost or love divided, death or near death, reclamation of love on earth or in heaven. The division of love, more specifically of lovers, would be accomplished in a court populated by corrupt magistrates, inquisitorial lawyers, and parents anxious to divide the anguished pair. A last hopeless cling, and they would be ripped asunder, the girl to be imprisoned in her parents’ house, the boy to be sent off, a single cloth bag over his shoulder, to a distant university. Years later, for the most part, he would return – perhaps on a white horse
– to find her grave stone, marked by the incense of her broken heart.
What the child marvelled at was how love could be subjected to inquisition. Grown, bearded men in the hats, stiffened belts and regalia of judges and lawyers would denounce, in those days, something merely aspirational, virginal, and flowering for a first and only time.
Although all the operas had the same theme, he had a favourite – an aria in which the high notes were deliberately cracked, a duet between two men, the pale, love-lorn scholar praying for God’s miracle – ‘if the peach blossoms open’ – and his encouraging companion clasping his shoulders and singing sturdily, ‘of course God will let the preach blossoms open’, but it is the middle of winter, under a stark moon, and the merciless magistrates of love had smirkingly delivered a judgement that the pale scholar and his beautiful love could marry if only, and only on that winter’s night, peach blossoms would open. In his child’s dream, the sturdy friend would rush in at dawn, shake the hunched, slumbering shoulders of his friend, and point hard, like a communist poster, to a very great tree in ecstatic bloom. Only the child could see, flying up a sky-beam, the angel of God resheathing, as he grew smaller, the pure sword of winter flowers.
This image of the angel, hair flowing, tiny in the distance, tiny against the immensity of the sky, infiltrated his later dreams. But, before then, the angel would fade out and a close-up of a peach blossom fade in and, in dreams alone, the forces of evil would be defeated. In dreams, music was not brown.
He knew when moon girls came. Friends always said he was old enough to know better and, indeed, each time he was older and knew even better what was happening to him, and what was happening was that pure, aspirational flowering of the heart for an impossible,
peach-fed
love, as pure as the very first flowering of countless incarnations ago. One day, some life, he would marry all the moon girls but, by the time of Marja, he thought he had already once married her, then lost her tragically in the laws of the past, and this was the rediscovery, if never the reclamation, in the heaven of a millennium’s end and the
weariness-defeated start of all possibilities.
He never wavered. When a moon girl appeared he fell in love instantly.
His father was strong. Years later, when the doctors diagnosed terminal cancer, he remembered – and the memory was of sinuous elegance, like Roberto Baggio playing football in the World Cup of the sky. Feet placed astride litter, the father would lift, turn at the waist, and stack shoulder-height rows of fruit-filled crates. Particularly the long banana crates, he recalled. It was the way he turned the waist. Even when the father had grown prosperous and fat, the shoulders, forearms and calves – lift, grip, and propulsion – were still evident; but he remembered only the waist. He had never seen his father naked, but he must have had abdominal muscles like the ridged washboards his mother used.
When they afforded a second-hand washing machine, he would sit for hours, or what seemed hours, watching the clothes fed into the wringer and emerge in an endless variety of flatness – mother’s sleeves rolled up. Father’s sleeves rolled up as he stirred with a long stick carrots in a huge vat of water, to take enough dirt off them for sale. Father’s fingers as they peeled the outer layers of onions, mother’s tears, so that the onion displays would not be ruined by flaking skin, onions as smooth as apples. There would be a whole room full of the detritus of onions, lined along the wall, all the way up, with father’s stacked crates. He’d once run face-first into them in a childish panic, or enthusiasm. Learning to swerve would come later. Learning to turn the waist, adjust the feet, put out a palm to halt the forward rush. By the time he realised he would never have the chiselled features of the Roman epics, the Tarzan films, the Steve Reeves films, the Batman comics – that he was flatter than Hollywood allowed – he put it down to that childhood impact, face into father’s strong-built stacks.
When he was three, the story goes, when he was free, his memory of the story went, sixteen years before his hair grew over his shoulders and was bleached a rusted red by the sun, which nevertheless conspired to look a glossy black by night, almost blue-black in dreams, he was taken to a graveyard, a memorial visit to his mother’s mother, a sickly girl who, because sickly, could be married off only to the much older foreign-stained gold miner returned from a land that was called, by the savages who lived in it, Heaven’s Cloud, and his hair was already white and she barely fourteen but even with his shovel and
pistol-callused
hands, he was gentle and had fallen in love with her on sight and called her Mirrored Moon, as if he had stared at her in a still stream whenever Heaven’s Cloud had opened for his soft moment, rationed moment amidst savages and thugs. But the savages had been gentle to him, knowing from a distance why and how he longed whenever the moon was mirrored, and she thought at first marriage to someone so much older and who had become a stranger to his own land, his own people, must be punishment for sickliness, but his eyes were kind and she, impoverished at fourteen, had nowhere else to go, and when she fled to New Zealand years later to escape the arms of war, she brought up her three children in an iron-sheet shed, and then she died, and one of her daughters, the one who had stolen lychees and laughed in White Stone, was first taken as a ward and then sent in arranged marriage to an eighteen-year-old boy with long muscles and a single pin-striped suit with Oxford bags, a floral tie and long hair that was Brylcreem-shaped into that Clark Gable look that eluded all efforts by nature and, after they had a son, conceived in the brown room with no light, the family came to her grave, and the son danced on the marble slabs and placed flowers for the grandmother he had never known and, of whom, one photograph existed and she was seated and a sheet of painted books was stretched behind her.