Asia Literary Review No. 16, Summer 2010

SUMMER 2010

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW SUMMER 2010 No. 16

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW SUMMER 2010 No. 16 Publisher Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Deputy Editor Poetry Editor Consulting Editors Contributing Editors

Production Designer Sales and Marketing Director Advertising Sales Cover Image

Back Cover Image

Ilyas Khan Stephen McCarty Duncan Jepson Charmaine Chan Martin Alexander Ian Jack, Peter Koenig, Chris Wood Karl Taro Greenfeld, Justin Hill, Andrew Lam, Nam Le, Nguyen Qui Duc, Palani Mohan, John Batten Sandra Kong, Alan Sargent Steffan Leyshon-Jones Anil Kumar Margarette Lung Gary Jones Flip-flops designed to insult Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and his government on sale in the Red Shirts’ fortified camp, Bangkok Palani Mohan

Asia Literary Review is published by Print Work Limited 2401, Winsome House, 73 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong www.asialiteraryreview.com To subscribe email subs@asialiteraryreview.com Editorial: 852.2167.8947 Email: stephen.mccarty@asialiteraryreview.com Advertising: 852.2167.8910 / 8980 Email: anil.kumar@asialiteraryreview.com Email: margarette.lung@asialiteraryreview.com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Printed in China by C&C Offset Printing Co. Ltd. ISBN: 978-988-18747-2-6 ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual stories © 2010 the authors This compilation © 2010 Print Work Limited

Contents

Contents

Stephen McCarty

From the Editor

7

Gary Jones

Reportage Weapons of Mass Disinformation

11

Jaina Sanga

Fiction The Maharaja and the Accountant

29

Poetry Old Poet There is no Routine to Poetry

55 56

Essay Looking for Laos

57

Poetry The Photo Ars Poetica

63 64

D. Rege

Tippaphon Keopaseut

Ocean Vuong

Banana Yoshimoto

Fiction A Little Darkness Translated by Michael Emmerich

67

Anis Shivani

Interview Chang-Rae Lee

77

Kate Rogers

Poetry A Paper House

91

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Palani Mohan

Photographic Essay Crop Stars

92

Memoir Grandma’s Casket

105

Fiction Grasshoppers

133

Min K. Kang

Poetry Korean Hillside History of Korea through Language

143 144

Sandip Roy

Reportage No Country for Old Women Photographs by Bishan Samaddar

Wen Huang

O Thiam Chin

Thomas R. Moore

Justin Hill

Steven Hirst

Kristine Ong Muslim

145

Poetry Bosphorus Kadiköy Ferry

165 166

Fiction Forward

169

Fiction It’s all in the Silhouette

183

Poetry Not Sleeping

203

Contributors

205

4

Asia House

Festival of Asian Literature May 2011

The only Festival in the UK dedicated to writing about Asia, The Asia House Festival of Asian Literature celebrates the newest and best writing across a broad spectrum of Asian countries in a series of talks, debates and discussions.

For more information www.festivalofasianliterature r .com Asia House 63 New Cavendish Stre r et London W1G 7LP www.asiahouse.org

HEAT Literary Journal. The Persistent Rabbit.

Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, Argentinian novelist César Aira, Barry Hill on Ezra Pound and the Orient, John Bryson in Panama, Priya Basil in Berlin. Two Mapuche poets from Chile. Brendan Ryan on the Ash Wednesday bushfires. Fiction by Mireille Juchau, Michelle Moo, Barbara Brooks.

Poems by ~ I I.O., Middleton, Leach, White, Gibian, Licari. Guan Wei’s Longevity for Beginners.

HEAT is Australia’s only international literary journal, received enthusiastically by readers, and applauded in the press for the quality of its writing and its outstanding design. As both a magazine and a book, HEAT is designed to travel, across academic boundaries, across literary categories, across languages and cultures. It offers variety in a single volume, poetry and fiction, essays and reviews, art and photography. HEAT is published three times a year. Subscriptions and contributor information are available at www.giramondopublishing.com/heat

Giramondo Publishing www.giramondopublishing.com heat@giramondopublishing.com

Editor’s Notes

From the Editor

‘N

othing is permanent but change,’ said Heraclitus.

Whether the celebrated Greek philosopher had the Asia Literary Review in mind when he fashioned those words of wisdom is debatable; nevertheless we have lived up to them.

This issue of the ALR is brought to you by a new editorial team. The previous incumbents did an excellent job of establishing the magazine at a level at which it enjoys a certain prestige. One of our aims now, with the assistance of the irresistible currents of history, is to spread the ALR gospel farther.

The twenty-first, so the commentators say, will be the “Asian century”: more words of wisdom, perhaps. Political, financial and even military ascendancy are always reflected in the literature produced in a certain place at a certain time: literature holds a mirror to the human experience. Today, Asian literature, in all its definitions, is capable of anything and everything, so powerful is the engine driving Asian ambition.

The ALR is uniquely positioned, as the leading literary magazine of its kind on the continent, to fly the flag for outstanding writing of all genres.

While marquee bylines on the cover are admittedly good for business (and the soul), the ALR remains committed to giving a voice to outstanding Asian authors, and authors writing about Asia, who otherwise might never be discovered or published.

Our mission is also to take risks and challenge accepted form, so please expect to see themed issues, regular columns, readers’ letters, graphics and other initiatives. To that end, we invite readers to contact us with their opinions on the content and direction of the ALR, with a view to publication.

Our email addresses can be found on page 2.

Vibrant and assertive Asian writing is emerging from Bangalore to Singapore, Harbin to Hanoi, yet much of it remains undiscovered by readers of English. This is the work we aim to bring to your attention.

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To restate our goals: exercising at all times level-headed literary judgment, we are determined to make the ALR the outstanding international literary magazine and to publish the finest literature possible, in translation or native English. Exceptional writers are out there and we are bent on finding them, for and with you. Difficult? Quite possibly. But don’t forget: even Salman Rushdie was unheard of once.

Finally, we offer a few thoughts on the health of the printed word.

Much has been made in recent months of the march towards presumed dominance of the same by Apple’s iPad and dedicated e-readers, such as the Kindle. The ALR is working with content providers to ensure our articles can be downloaded to all species of electronic media; our website will be the repository of not only the content available in the physical magazine, but of interviews, podcasts and more. Submissions that do not find a home in the ALR sold in bookshops may well find a niche in the ALR online.

However, our primary product remains the ALR you hold in your hands.

No matter what content – thanks to the magic of new technology – we can provide for you in audible words and moving pictures, the ALR will always be a literary magazine, devoted to the best of the written word. Print is not dead; it is merely sloughing off decades of calcification to emerge slimmed down and fighting fit into a world in which its younger brother is demanding to be heard and seen. We hear and see him too.

‘Nothing is permanent but change,’ said Heraclitus. That may be so. But in insisting on original writing of the finest quality, the ALR’s standards, we trust, remain the same.

Stephen McCarty

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The Caravan

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Weapons of Mass Disinformation Report and Photographs by Gary Jones

Dateline: Bangkok May 18. Thailand, having experienced fifteen coups since the Siamese Revolution of 1932, which transformed the kingdom from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy, is no stranger to political unrest. But recent events in the capital Bangkok have threatened to condemn the nation to full-scale civil war.

While hundreds of journalists from across the world have converged on the city to report on every nuance in the class-fuelled conflict, they have been joined by many more ‘citizen journalists’ using ‘social media’ to tweet, text and blog every development and their own opinions. But how accurate are such reports and should we trust this new species of reportage?

Gary Jones ventures onto Bangkok’s potential battlefields in an attempt to disentangle the truths, half truths, lies, assertions and slogans shrouding Thailand’s torment.

T

he early evening of Thursday, April 22 and Silom Road in the steamy Thai capital, Bangkok, appeared relatively untroubled for a major downtown shopping area in a city under siege. Thai office workers were stepping into the street to bypass razor wire that the army had stretched in rolls across pavements. But they were stopping off, as usual, at the end of another working day, for papaya salad and fish-ball noodle soup from busy roadside vendors before taking the Skytrain home.

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Rebel Reds taunt the police and army from behind a razor wire and bamboo barricade.

Grinning tourists in garish shorts and singlets posed for photographs with heavily armed Thai soldiers, sweating profusely but seemingly relaxed under head-to-toe riot gear. With flak jackets hanging loose and protective mattblack helmets buckled to their belts, war correspondents, perhaps weaned on the hardships of Baghdad or Helmand Province, strolled by, ice-creams in hand, in the last of the day’s sunshine. Some kicked back on the patio of O’Reilly’s Irish pub with a pint and a cigarette.

From the eastern end of Silom Road, however, at Sala Daeng intersection, fiery speeches could be heard emanating from loudspeakers at the corner of Lumpini Park. The junction was the southern-most and most determinedly defended limit of the Red Shirt encampment that, occupied by 10,000 to 20,000 anti-government protesters, had paralysed more than a square mile of central Bangkok’s prime commercial district for weeks.

In the days before April 22 the Reds – largely working-class supporters of Thailand’s ousted leader Thaksin Shinawatra, the billionaire former telecom magnate who, they say, gave the poor a voice, and who insist current Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s government took power illegitimately, backed by the army and the judiciary – had fortified their side of the junction with 12

Weapons of Mass Disinformation

A defaced poster of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva plastered to the side of a mobile toilet in the Reds’ encampment.

banks of old tyres, thousands of sharpened bamboo staves, petrol canisters, protective netting and piles of smashed paving stones to be used as missiles.

The government, the Reds claim, represents an élite unsympathetic to their problems. Journalists, along with the simply curious, were allowed access to the camp. Inside, women napped under the shade of Lumpini’s trees as heavily tattooed youths produced homemade rockets nearby. Small children played; Buddhist monks in saffron robes carried spears.

By the end of the day the scene had turned ugly. Although the Reds appeared not to have broken their lines in an attempt to storm Silom as threatened, a rival demonstration of 1,000 No Colours, demanding their city be returned to normality, had begun nearby.

The No Colours waved posters of the country’s revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej and insisted the Reds, many of whom had travelled to the capital from the country’s impoverished and rural northeast to make their voices heard, ‘Go home! Go home! Go home!’

Four – or was it five? – explosions rang out that evening, and blood pooled at the entrance to a branch of the Bank of Ayudhya, exactly where the No Colours had staged their noisy opposition to the Reds. The bank’s 13

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A monk passes through the crowds as Reds shelter in the shade of the Skytrain at Ratchaprasong, the busy focal point of their protest camp.

Young Thai soldiers commandeer a small car park to relax during a break in their duties guarding the entrance to Silom Road.

plate-glass window had been shattered and, next to the coagulating puddle, a small national flag had been crossed over neatly with the yellow flag of the king to suggest cooperation.

With young Thai soldiers, many visibly shaking behind riot shields, standing shoulder to shoulder at intervals along a darkened and now empty Silom Road, foreign correspondents, photographers and cameramen milled and chatted outside McDonald’s, but all was now quiet. In the previous hours my mobile phone had regularly beeped with incoming SMS messages from friends in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Shanghai. three dead – grenades, read one text. Another: shootings on silom. Another: You okay? Two foreigners killed in Bangkok. * * * 14

Weapons of Mass Disinformation

The following day the Bangkok Post newspaper led with the headline Bomb Terror Grips Silom. The story stated, ‘Silom was turned into a war zone Thursday night after four grenades were fired into the area where anti-Red Shirt protesters had converged, killing three people and injuring 75.’ This information, the Post reported, had come before midnight on the 22nd, directly from Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban.

Like the text messages I had received, the Post’s initial report proved inaccurate: only one person, a twenty-six-year-old Thai woman, had been killed on that evening and the newspaper revised its death toll with an online posting at 11:08am the next day.

Channel NewsAsia, The Sydney Morning Herald, Al Jazeera, Voice of America and many other news outlets had also reported Suthep’s claim that three had been killed, as well as his statement that an M79 grenade launcher had been used in the attacks. ‘It was clear that it was shot from behind the King Rama VI Monument [at the southwestern entrance to Lumpini] where the Red Shirts are rallying,’ he had told reporters.

What turned out to be inaccurate information had come from a senior Thai government official, thereby highlighting the difficulties journalists, and their readers, have had in wading through and making sense of what British author and journalist Andrew Marshall, a frequent contributor to Time magazine and a Bangkok resident of fifteen years, has called ‘the tsunami of bullshit and obfuscation from all sides’. * * * Half truths, unsubstantiated rumour and blatant bias have accompanied the gathering of the fluid and fast-moving news in Bangkok, centre of the worst political violence in the Land of Smiles’ modern history. April 22 was not the first, or bloodiest, clash since the National United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD), the political pressure group supported by the Red Shirt protesters, marched on the capital in mid-March. Nor did it result in the most blatant case of distortion, deliberate or not, landing in the hands of the press.

On April 10, government troops tried without success to take back control of a UDD protest site at Phan Fah Bridge, near Khao San Road, a popular hangout for international backpackers passing through Bangkok.

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A Red sports a T-shirt featuring an image of Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s former prime minister, ousted in 2006.

A soldier in riot gear stands guard outside a fashion boutique on Silom Road, a prime shopping and nightlife zone in the Thai capital.

Twenty-five people perished in clashes, including Hiro Muramoto, a fortythree-year-old Japanese cameraman for Reuters, who died from a gunshot wound to the chest.

‘There were no live bullets fired at protesters,’ government spokesman Panitan Wattanayagorn promptly announced on Thai television, insisting that only tear gas and rubber bullets had been used by the army. French television news channel France 24, however, quickly released footage showing soldiers firing live rounds and the government backtracked, Abhisit admitting in a televised statement that such ammunition had been employed by soldiers, but only in ‘self defence’.

Reuters continues to press for the results of an inquiry into Muramoto’s killing, believing the government has information that could provide answers for his grieving family. ‘The use of “self defence” is vague and arguably misleading,’ says Jason Szep, Bureau Chief, Thailand and Indochina, for Reuters News and TV. ‘Video footage showed troops firing live rounds 16

Weapons of Mass Disinformation

The No Colours wave Thai flags and make their anti-stand-off voices heard on the evening of April 22.

straight ahead, though the footage itself did not show the rounds going into the crowd. But it’s clear bullets shot at high velocity killed many. Many believe protesters were killed by soldiers.’

Marshall is less diplomatic, and is pessimistic regarding the search for truth in the matter. ‘The government’s delay in admitting that soldiers had killed civilians was stupid and self-defeating,’ he says. ‘The Reds constantly predicted crackdowns, which never happened but perhaps that was more an indication of their (justifiable) paranoia than any deliberate attempt to deceive. The truth of such events as April 10 will probably never be known.’ * * * Since April 22 and the explosions on Silom Road, the Red encampment’s barricades have grown higher and thicker to resemble medieval fortifications.

The Reds have procured kilometres of razor wire and the bamboo is festooned with rags to be soaked in petrol and lit should the military mount what is widely considered the inevitable attack on the camp. Every day the crisis has deepened.

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Top: Sharpened bamboo staves, walls of old tyres, razor wire and makeshift weapons, including improvised rockets and slingshots, have rendered the Reds a deadly force.

Above: Defiant Reds man the barricades at Sala Daeng. Many have insisted they would rather die than give up their opposition to the current administration.

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Top: Young Red supporters regroup behind their barricade while keeping a nervous watch on the police and army.

Above: Misplaced bet? In the Reds’ camp, a protester carrying a makeshift shield nails his colours to the mast and tries to buttress renegades’ spirits.

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On April 23, a UDD proposal to hold elections in three months was rejected by Abhisit. On April 28, security forces and Reds clashed on the outskirts of Bangkok and a soldier was killed. On April 30, more than 200 Reds forced their way into Chulalongkorn Hospital, near the Sala Daeng intersection. They were searching for army snipers and soldiers, but found none and hospital staff promptly moved about 600 patients to other buildings and hospitals. On May 3, Abhisit presented a reconciliatory roadmap that included elections for November 14. Although tentatively accepted by the protesters, Abhisit dropped the offer after the Reds made more demands, most notably for those responsible for recent Reds’ deaths to be brought to justice. In their accounts of these developments and others, both sides have frequently employed spin and bias.

On May 6, the government-run National News Bureau Public Relations Department released an article under the headline  patients died from chulalongkorn hospital evacuation. Deep into the text, however, the story mentioned that Public Health Minister Jurin Laksanavisit ‘reported that three transferred patients had died from cancer and another died from obesity, heart disease and renal failure’, prompting blogger Bangkok Pundit to ask, ‘So the Reds gave them cancer?’

While anti-Thaksin, pro-establishment Yellow Shirt protesters – a loose grouping of royalists, the urban élite and professional middle classes – have been noticeable by their absence in recent months, the appearance of the No Colours (Reds suspect they are mostly Yellow) has been only the start of additional confusion as the crisis has divided society and caused rifts in the armed forces. A ‘watermelon soldier’, for instance, wears green on the outside but is red inside. A ‘pineapple soldier’ is yellow at heart.

‘Tomato’ has been used to describe the police, many of whom hail from rural areas and are assumed to be red to the core. Rumours circulate of a disbanded group of specialist military rangers operating in the shadows. The Reds’ frontline security forces usually wear black and were said to be operating under the leadership of Major General Khattiya Sawasdipol, a rogue army officer more commonly known as Seh Daeng, or the Red Commander. Seh Daeng was shot in the head, apparently by a sniper, at Sala Daeng on May 13, as he was being interviewed by a New York Times reporter. An early CNN report noted that he had been shot in the chest; another that he was not in critical condition. He died from kidney failure on May 17.

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Soldiers peer through coils of razor wire, their first line of defence should the Reds decide to extend the limits of their makeshift ‘city within a city’.

A frontline Red security specialist stands defiant on fortifications at Sala Daeng, hours before the chaos of April 22.

And while their detractors assert the Reds are pawns of Thaksin, and that many are simply thugs being paid 500 baht a day to protest, many ask whether the movement has outgrown its mentor in exile. ‘The government wants Thaksin to be the chief funder and inspiration for the Reds so that it can claim these are paid hoodlums fighting one man’s battle,’ says Marshall.

‘But many Reds have real grievances. The government, and the Yellows, need to pay more than just lip service to this.’

Szep of Reuters is more circumspect in his appraisal. ‘It’s a very disparate movement,’ he says. ‘On some level it certainly has moved beyond Thaksin.

And they are very deliberately trying to play down their Thaksin links. But in the northern provinces he remains a powerful symbol for the Red Shirts and that doesn’t seem to be changing.’

One foreign correspondent for a western news agency, a Southeast Asia resident of almost a decade who wishes to remain anonymous, goes further: ‘Definitely, their movement has awakened a sense of political entitlement among the rural and urban poor, and that will not go away. And they seem to be forging an identity quite separate to Thaksin, who has taken a back seat in recent weeks.

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‘Also, the Reds have gone some way to boosting their credibility among the media, both Thai and foreign, despite initial scepticism that they are the paid foot soldiers of Thaksin and his allies. Their strong communications have helped – they are easily contactable by phone or in person at the camp and they continue to stream their regular press conferences over the internet, despite constant efforts to block the hosting sites.’ * * * Nobody covering the Bangkok stand-off claims the Reds are whiter than white. ‘One big lie is the Reds’ insistence they are a non-violent movement,’ says Marshall. ‘I don’t think they really understand the concept. The nonviolence of [Martin Luther] King and Gandhi wasn’t, “I’m peaceful, until you hurt me, and then I’m allowed to hurt you back.” It was non-violence, period.’

A stroll around the red camp proves the journalist’s point. Centred on Ratchaprasong intersection, home to luxurious hotels and luxury-brand shopping malls and a retail playground for the city’s affluent, the area was deliberately chosen for the UDD’s city within a city to inflict most disruption on the capital: the crisis has devastated tourism and slowed investment and growth in Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy.

At Ratchaprasong, protesters gather in numbers every evening to listen to speeches made by UDD leaders from a stage dominated by banners reading ‘Welcome to Thailand – We Just Want Democracy’ and ‘Peaceful Protestors Not Terrorists’. Under huge, and now incongruous, mall advertisements for the like of Loewe, Gucci and Celine, protesters wave placards reading ‘NonViolence’ and ‘Peace in Thailand’, as well as noisy foot-shaped clappers.

Heading down Ratchadamri Road and towards Sala Daeng, the sheer size of the camp can be appreciated, and how it has come to cater to its roughingit inhabitants’ diverse needs. Stalls sell everything from Red T-shirts (50–100 baht) to red curries and rice (30 baht). There are mobile phone charging stations, makeshift canteens and children’s book stalls. A VCD titled Who Is The Real Killer? with English subtitles, which analyses the events of April 10 from a Red perspective, is handed out free. Popular and practical souvenirs of the troubles include flip-flops featuring Abhisit’s face (50 baht); Buddhist Thais consider the soles of the feet the lowest and filthiest part of the body, 22

Weapons of Mass Disinformation

which is why, unsurprisingly, A4 posters of the prime minister have also been pasted onto pavements where crowds are thickest.

On three occasions I am approached while in the camp, in each case

by Thai women claiming to be Bangkok residents. Seeing my camera, they enquire whether I am a reporter and ask that I ‘tell the truth’ about them in any report. ‘Please tell the world we are not violent,’ they say. ‘We are peaceful people.’ A few metres away, stalls openly sell hastily machined wooden catapults for 30 baht and bags of marbles or metal nuts (ten for 10 baht) to fire from those catapults. More professional-looking slingshots, with greater power and accuracy, can be picked up for 100–200 baht.

Following the clashes of April 10, the army claimed to have lost nine M16 rifles, twenty-five Tavor rifles, six anti-aircraft guns, 116 shields, 105 batons and eighty body-armour suits. Ammunition supposedly missing includes 580 rubber-bullet rounds, 600 anti-aircraft rounds and 8,182 M16 rifle rounds. Many have been recovered, others have not.

The Reds have not been averse to attempting to hoodwink the media. ‘In this dispute, where many aspects of life have become politicised, we have to work on staying neutral,’ says BBC correspondent Vaudine England. ‘Some foreign journalists initially wore press scarves from the Red Shirts, unaware that some of the Thai words on them were Red Shirt political slogans, destroying the journalists’ neutrality in other Thais’ eyes.’

The news-agency correspondent confirms: ‘We were told we had to go to the Reds’ camp to be issued with new media armbands. We got the impression we wouldn’t be allowed in if we only had the existing band issued by the Thai Journalists Association. So someone went to the camp, brought back a stack of these new green plastic bands and asked one of our Thai staff the meaning of the wording on them. It turned out to be, “Dissolve parliament”. They were quite surprised when we called and said we had no intention of wearing their propaganda.’ * * * While traditional media have generally coped admirably, swiftly and accurately in the face of so much information and disinformation (Reuters, for instance, invested in a team of 40 editorial staff in Thailand), new media like Twitter have come into their own during recent events in Bangkok.

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Top: Despite claims that their movement is peaceful, the Reds are equipped with a variety of weapons, from assault rifles to catapults capable of firing marbles and metal nuts.

Bottom: Red Shirts express their hatred of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva by treading on images of his face pasted to pavements around their camp.

One keen follower was Australian Jason Gagliardi, creative director at a Bangkok advertising agency and a former journalist whose work has featured in Time, The Sunday Telegraph and the South China Morning Post.

‘I do think Twitter has become a game-changer in how people follow the news,’ Gagliardi says. ‘You have to filter out the wheat from the chaff, but if you follow enough of the right people you can build up a very good picture of how events are unfolding.

‘I found some of The Nation [newspaper] and Bangkok Post journalists to be good sources: @tulsathit and @Veen_NT at The Nation and @Terryfrd from the Post, with lots of real-time translations of red speeches and posturing.

I follow Andrew Marshall (@journotopia) and he was posting great stuff on the April 10 debacle. An Aussie guy, John le Fevre (@Photo_Journ), has been on the ground tweeting non-stop since the start of the thing. And I also follow some very pro-Yellow Bangkok rich kids who tweet vociferously for a crackdown. There are many others.

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Nervous soldiers lock down Silom Road after the explosions of April 22.

‘The beauty of Twitter, and also perhaps its real danger, is that you only build up the picture of what’s going on from whom you choose to follow.

So if you only follow people who support your bias or causes, you will get a very one-sided picture. But if you follow all sorts of people, especially some reliable journalists, it’s an excellent real-time source. I have been glued to it, the updates, the debate … By the time you go online to read a newspaper it often feels like old news.’

Marshall, it transpires, was not tweeting professionally. ‘I didn’t report for Time on the Red Shirts. I tweeted it, really as an experiment, and was surprised at how my follower count jumped from 150 to over 1,000,’ he says, adding that he only trusted what he actually saw, and has found it hard to believe any ‘facts’ coming from Reds, Yellows, government, politicians, police or military. ‘There was a great hunger for instant updates on the situation, especially with so many tourists coming to Thailand and with the violence occurring so close to tourist areas such as Khao San … It turns out there are some very reliable citizen reporters out there.’

Those working in more traditional media, however, maintain their distance from the phenomenon. ‘The Thai crisis is a good example of a story where Twitter, SMS alerts from local newspapers and so on are great tools for 25

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journalists, but have to be treated extremely cautiously,’ says the news agency correspondent. ‘Thai politics is very grey; there are so many false alarms, misinterpretations and inaccuracies, as well as much gossip swirling around.

Most reputable news organisations only report a fraction of what they hear.

The main task is sifting.

‘For example, there are several layers of Red leadership. When one leader makes a strong statement, how much weight should you give it? Is it likely to be moderated or contradicted by a more senior leader later that day? Is it really the position of the movement as a whole or is it a throwaway comment?’

Szep largely agrees, though has reservations about the accuracy of texts from local reporters. ‘I recall one week when, nearly every morning, local media were sending out SMS messages saying a crackdown was imminent and soldiers were about to advance on the protesters in the main shopping district at such-and-such a time,’ Szep says. ‘It never happened. There are loads of rumours flying around all the time.’

Australian freelance photographer Jack Picone is more damning. Having worked in numerous war zones delivering images for the likes of Newsweek, Stern and The Independent, Picone argues that citizen journalism, in addition to being frequently inaccurate, could also prove dangerous in conflicts for those on the ground.

‘Often in war zones there is sound intelligence [with which] to make informed decisions about what your next move will be, but in situations like April 10, chaos and confusion add another layer of danger,’ says Picone.

‘Further confusion was added via citizen journalism, with the public filing via social media like Twitter hopelessly inaccurate accounts of what was happening – and in several cases things that did not happen at all. As much as citizen journalism is now sexy and in vogue, it is quite disturbing how definitively wrong the untrained public can be in these situations.’ * * * No journalist approached for this article could predict with any confidence what lay ahead for the Reds, the government or for Thailand.

By the time you read these words Bangkok may be in flames and the country facing civil war; the army may have attacked the camp, with heavy losses on both sides; or the Reds may have dispersed.

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By the end of May 14, Khattiya’s shooting, coupled with a more aggressive approach to Red protesters from the army, had resulted in an escalation of violence. May 15 to 18 saw clashes breaking out at locations across the Thai capital. With the death toll rising by the hour, The Times of London stated on May 15, ‘Bangkokians got on with what Bangkokians do best: spreading rumours. The mobile-phone operators had a field day as misinformation, make-belief and wishful thinking were furiously texted as facts.’

By midnight on May 17, Thai government figures – clearly not always the most accurate – estimated the total number of deaths since the stand-off began in March at sixty-five, with more than 1,700 wounded. The recent injured include a photographer for the Nation, and freelance Canadian journalist Nelson Rand, thirty-four, who took three bullets while, coincidentally, on assignment for the France 24 television channel. Rand is out of danger.

It is frequently said that ‘the first casualty of war is the truth’, and that has proved correct in this confrontation. Ironically, as new media have become more prevalent, transforming themselves into a source of information for journalists and the public, and forcing traditional news gatherers to react at increasing speed, the state of affairs, rather than becoming clearer, has on countless occasions turned murkier.

Postscript May 20. The Guardian newspaper reports that after a bloody ‘final crackdown’ the Red Shirts’ camp has been obliterated and the Reds’ leaders arrested. The violence has left at least 83 people dead and 1,800 injured, mostly civilians.

On May 19 troops marched into Lumpini Park and armoured personnel carriers advanced through streets. Some protesters, in a last-ditch show of rage, turned their anger on the media. ‘Shops were looted, buildings set [ablaze] and journalists attacked, the Guardian reports. ‘The Channel 3 news station was set on fire and staff on the city’s English-language papers, The Nation and the Bangkok Post, were evacuated after threats.’ Italian freelance photographer Fabio Polenghi, 48, was shot dead by troops as the protest camp was overrun.

The Vietnam War is often referred to as the first ‘television war’. The Bangkok conflict may come to be considered the first ‘Twitter war’. But after months of mixed messages, propaganda, hearsay, misinformation and disinformation the outcome is incontrovertible.

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Letter Writer, 1953 by Michael Rogge. Digital print on archival paper, 35cm x 35cm, limited edition, printed in 2010. Courtesy of TĂ o Gallery, Hong Kong.

The Maharaja and the Accountant Jaina Sanga

E

very morning at the Baroda Palace, a turbaned guard dressed in a white uniform, a sword strapped to his waist, trudged up thirty steps to a turret, blew a few notes into a battered bugle and hoisted a flag of the British Empire. The flag was red and blue with a gold star of India in the centre.

Every evening, the guard sounded the bugle again and lowered the flag. After ironing and folding it into a precise square, he carried it on his outstretched arms into the maharaja’s library.

It was a wood-panelled room, lined with books on one wall and large portraits of the maharaja’s forefathers on another. A chandelier hung in the centre, just above the maharaja’s semi-circular desk and a glass case stood on the back wall below a bank of windows.

The maharaja rose from his chair and watched the guard as he entered.

For the past hour he had been eyeing the clock. He studied the flag for a moment, then reached into a drawer of his desk and took out a key for the glass case.

The guard, his bare feet noiseless on the marble floor, followed the maharaja to the case. His bad knee creaked as he bent down and he lowered his eyes in embarrassment as he held up the flag to the maharaja.

The maharaja laid the flag in the case, shifting it a little until he thought it was exactly in the centre. After turning the key he dismissed the guard with a slight wave of his fingers. When the maharaja returned to the files 29

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and papers spread out on his desk he could hardly concentrate; every now and then he wandered to the back wall and, with one hand at his hip, the other coiling the edges of his dark moustache, he stared absently at the resting flag. * * * The maharaja’s palace stood off the dusty road that led from the city to the aerodrome. A high compound wall and thick foliage hid the palace from the road. Just before the palace gates, a pile of broken bricks and a dilapidated shed marked the place where passers-by knew to turn their heads to catch a glimpse inside. The grounds were strewn with old fruit trees, mosaic fountains and bushes sculpted into shapes of birds. A gravel driveway went up to the portico in a long sweeping semi-circle.

The palace, built of red sandstone, was a sprawling structure with dozens of bedrooms, great halls and courtyards. The maharaja and the maharani lived there. Five ayahs and valets looked after their personal needs, twentysix servants tended to the palace and the grounds and an office staff of forty helped the maharaja manage state affairs.

The maharaja’s full name was Maharaja Sir Balram Sayaji Gaekwar Sena Kas Khel Shamsher Bahadur of Baroda, more simply Maharaja Balram, or Maharaja of Baroda. Or just, maharaja.

He was middle aged and there was an air of strength to his movements, in the way he strode through the palace grounds each morning with his back straight, and the way he sometimes sprinted up and down the cricket pitch, imagining himself a batsman in the Indian team, a childhood fantasy that had never left him. On Sunday evenings when he played polo on the palace field he could hoist himself, despite his thickening waist, into the saddle of a white mare in one easy swoop. He could ride with intrepid speed and, with his white silk shirt filling with the arid Baroda wind he could swing his polo club firmly and gracefully.

His maharani had never understood the rules of polo but she watched with interest from her upstairs sitting room. As soon as the umpire blew the final whistle and she saw her husband throw his mallet in triumph, she would step back from the gossamer curtains, clap her hands and twirl in glee.

Perhaps that evening the maharaja would be in a happy mood and come to 30

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her. She would rush to her dressing table to touch up the kajol under her eyes or weave more flowers into her plaited hair.

But the maharaja hardly ever went up to the maharani’s wing. On those rare occasions when he did visit her he sent a small gift beforehand – a leather pencil case, a box of handkerchiefs, some article of jewellery – telling her to expect his arrival. As far as romance went, that gesture was all he was capable of. When he lay in bed with her it was only for an hour or two. Once, on a chilly night, he asked if she was cold and went to fetch a quilt for her.

The maharaja worried about the flag that fluttered atop the palace at daybreak and came to rest at sundown in the sanctity of the glass case in his library.

The flag reminded him of his station in life. Fifty years ago, when he was barely six, his father, Maharaja Surendra Kumar, told him: ‘We are the sovereigns of this land, we have been entrusted a duty by God.’ The old maharaja had died soon after. The young prince’s main memory of him was as a weathered, sick man, sleeping most of the day, tottering into the library every evening to gaze solemnly at the flag. He remembered being taken to sit by his bedside every now and then, and the warring smells of alcohol, bedclothes and eau de toilette that lived around his father.

The prince was raised by his mother and two aunts. His mother was a graceful woman, her neck and hands always adorned with jewels. His aunts, both older sisters of his mother, had lived at the palace as long as he could remember. He spent much of his boyhood being tutored by experts who came in from Baroda and Ahmedabad. His playmates were the sons and nephews of the tutors. When he was fourteen, his mother and aunts took the brave step of sending him to school in Switzerland. ‘The boy must experience the world, he must learn to be independent,’ his mother said to his aunts. Yet, during the six years he was abroad, his mother bought a small castle on the lake near his school in Montreux and she and the aunts took turns living there.

After Switzerland he returned to the palace in Baroda and, without any formal announcement, assumed the title of maharaja. For a few years he did nothing. Then one day his mother and aunts decided it was time for him to marry. He protested vehemently. His mother wondered whether her son was like his father: did he have that fondness for men, too? She called him into the rose garden and as they sat on the bench she took his hand in hers. ‘It is 31

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a matter of formality,’ she said, ‘you can do what you want afterwards.’ The maharaja stared at his mother, ‘What are you saying?’ She looked away and said quietly, ‘I’m unable to say everything I’d like to.’

After marriage he suddenly started taking an interest in state affairs.

Either he was trying to forget about his new maharani or he had made a decision to live up to his princely status. The older aunt died; the younger aunt and his mother moved to Mount Abu; the climate was better there, they said. The palace seemed emptier than ever. His days, except for playing polo on Sundays and taking his vigorous walk through the palace grounds some mornings, were mired in work.

There had been no precedent set for the Maharaja of Baroda’s duties or for the cases that should be sent before him, so he ordered his officials to present every issue for his sanction: new doorknobs and doormats for a school, more weighty matters such as tax revenues, repairs to a temple, building new roads.

He approached each decision with equal authority, thinking he was making up for the diligence and energy his father had lacked. The British officers in the state of Gujarat sat up straighter: although this foreign-educated maharaja seemed harmless, they would keep an eye on him.

The maharaja followed the speeches of Gandhi and Nehru and Jinnah.

He was well aware that the flag hoisted each morning at his palace symbolised British sovereignty. But he was comfortable enough, what did he care about foreigners in his country? Besides, only last month the British officer of his district had expanded the maharaja’s dominion to a small village near the Narmada River. The British could go or stay; it made no difference to him. * * * The palace’s junior accountant was a man named Bhanjee. Bhanjee lived with his uncle in a two-room flat on the other side of Baroda, in Makarpura, near the government dairy. ‘Be thankful for your good fortune,’ his uncle said, ‘there are dozens of young men who want to work at the palace.’ When Bhanjee didn’t speak, his uncle said, ‘What would you prefer? Working as palace accountant or milking the government cows next door?’

Bhanjee was handsome: large forehead, intelligent eyes, a well-defined jaw and straight teeth. The girls at his college used to call him Charminar, 32

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because he looked like the man in the Charminar advertisement, the one with a debonair chap standing near a waterfall with a cigarette at his lips. A few times when his uncle wasn’t home Bhanjee posed in front of the mirror, an imaginary cigarette between two fingers and, turning this way and that, noted the many obvious similarities between his own face and the Charminar model’s.

Bhanjee showed up at the palace each day dressed in white cotton pants and a white bush shirt. His uncle sometimes gave him a handkerchief sprinkled with sandalwood water to carry in his shirt pocket.

Bhanjee’s office was small: his desk faced the door and on the wall next to the door hung an old framed verse of sculpture, the words in faded red ink.

Every day Bhanjee sat with the ledgers, adding and subtracting, doing the numbers in his head, nodding and clucking in astonishment at how much it cost to run the palace each month. He discovered that funds for the palace’s upkeep came not only from the maharaja’s private account but also from the state treasury.

Within a few weeks he grew bored with the ledgers. He strolled down the hall and around the kitchen and the dining room, going as far as the ballroom. It was indeed a grand palace, but it was terribly dull. Where were the musicians and the nautch girls? Where were the jugglers and acrobats?

The eloquent soothsayers? Where were the hookahs and festive banquets?

Bhanjee complained to his uncle that he was tired of his palace job. Could he go to England to study and become a barrister? ‘England! Are you mad?’ his uncle said, ‘Who has the money? Be grateful for what you have, show some gratitude to God.’ On many evenings after work, to show his gratitude to God, Bhanjee stopped at the Ganesh temple, rummaged in his pants pocket for some scrap of paper – a sweet wrapper, an old chit, a used bus ticket – and slid it into the donation box. * * * One day the maharaja wandered into the office of the junior accountant.

The maharaja slumped into the guest chair at Bhanjee’s desk, put his head in his hands and said, ‘What is the point of all this?’ The maharaja’s voice was slow and deep, his accent more British than Indian.

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Bhanjee had never spoken to the maharaja before, never even been in his presence, only seen him from a distance and now he could reach out a hand and touch his shoulder. He saw heavy pouches under the maharaja’s eyes and a thick moustache almost covering his mouth.

‘Don’t just stare,’ the maharaja said, sitting up, ‘Say something.’

‘Yes,’ Bhanjee managed, then looked away. Should he stand, should he sit, should he bow, he had no idea what to do.

‘Go on,’ the maharaja said, ‘have you nothing to say?’

Bhanjee’s eyes fixed on the verse hanging on the wall behind the maharaja.

He had never paid much attention to it before. He saw the words now, the red swirling calligraphy. He began reciting the lines, his voice shaking a little: ‘Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice. Better than knowledge is meditation. But better still is surrender of attachment to results, because there follows immediate peace.’ His diction was nothing like the maharaja’s, his was plain and flat and completely Indian.

The maharaja blinked. ‘Repeat that,’ he commanded and Bhanjee, poor fellow, didn’t know whether the maharaja was mocking him or being serious. He had no choice but to repeat the lines, so he said the words more flippantly, as though disowning them, yet wondering all the while whether he was reading the words correctly.

‘Who wrote that?’ the maharaja said.

Bhanjee felt an unusual dryness in his throat. He tried to gesture with one hand at the wall. He could see the dash in the corner of the frame and knew the author’s name was after it, but the maharaja’s head was in the way.

The maharaja said, ‘It’s from the Bhagavad Gita?’

Bhanjee nodded. He had no idea whether the words were from the Gita or the Bible or the Koran.

‘You know any other verses from the Gita?’ the maharaja asked.

‘Yes,’ Bhanjee lied. ‘Many,’ he added. He lowered his eyes and stared at a piece of pink blotting paper on his desk. He vowed to buy the book and memorise every page.

‘What’s missing?’ the maharaja said.

‘The Gita? Your Highness ...’ Bhanjee’s gaze bounced between the maharaja and the frame behind him.

‘What’s missing in this palace?’ the maharaja said, a sad exasperation in his voice, a distracted expression on his face. ‘What’s missing in my life?’

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‘Excitement,’ Bhanjee blurted. ‘This place is uninspiring, it’s boring, you should have friends and parties, musicians and mimes, you should enjoy your money, your position, you should –’ He stopped, his eyes found the blotting paper again. This was no way to speak to the maharaja. He didn’t even speak to his uncle like this. He would be dismissed for sure.

‘Ah!’ the maharaja said and Bhanjee thought he smiled. ‘What’s your name?’

When Bhanjee mumbled his name and looked up, the maharaja was gone. Bhanjee stared at the frame on the wall.

At home during dinner his uncle asked why he wasn’t eating. Did he have a fever? That night Bhanjee lay in bed thinking of his encounter with the maharaja. He regretted his ineptitude and even more, his forwardness. At 4am he heard the milk lorries pulling out of the government dairy.

The following day the maharaja appeared at Bhanjee’s office in a beige British-style suit, hair oiled and combed. Bhanjee stood up and started smiling and bowing. He had rehearsed an apology for his rudeness. But he had imagined some other palace official coming to dismiss him, not the maharaja himself.

‘Come, join me for breakfast,’ the maharaja said.

‘Breakfast?’ Bhanjee’s eyes widened in alarm.

The maharaja stood in the doorway, waiting.

With his heart skipping rapidly Bhanjee followed the maharaja to the terrace overlooking the rose garden.

Bhanjee drew his breath when he saw the spread on the table. At home, for breakfast, he ate a banana and drank a glass of milky tea prepared by his uncle. Here, there were bowls and platters of food, more than they could possibly eat; he didn’t even know what most of it was. A servant appeared with a silver teapot; behind him, another servant carried something else.

Bhanjee sat in the wicker chair across from the maharaja. His hand trembled as he raised the teacup to his lips. He didn’t dare reach for the sugar. The more he tried to control his movements the more he felt himself fumbling.

The maharaja told him about the new dam on the Mahi River, about ten miles from Baroda. Construction was to begin soon. It was a large, costly project for the district, but once complete it would provide irrigation for 2,000 square miles of land, most of which was in drought-prone areas.

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‘Agriculture, you see, is the backbone of our economy,’ the maharaja said and Bhanjee, struck with deferential awe, nodded in agreement. The maharaja narrowed his eyes in concentration. ‘Of course, we can’t just rely on farming.

We have to build big – big industries and factories, oil refineries ...’ Again, Bhanjee nodded.

Breakfast with the maharaja became the new routine. Bhanjee was always astounded at the variety of food laid out on the table and the procession of servants who emerged from the kitchen bearing silver trays. Sometimes the maharaja ate heartily; sometimes he took a few bites and pushed his plate away. Bhanjee pulled his chair closer to the table, his knees disappearing under the starched white tablecloth. He learned to take toast with jam, porridge and cream, eggs and baked beans. And he heaped three teaspoonsful of sugar in his tea. Bhanjee was at least twenty years younger than the maharaja, but looking at them at the table they could have been the same age the way they joked and laughed and told stories. * * * Within a few months Bhanjee was promoted: Chief Aide to the Maharaja of Baroda.

He went to the tailor in the bazaar and ordered new shirts of good cloth.

He began combing his hair differently and sported a moustache. A slight swagger graded his walk. The other palace staff looked sceptically at him; some whispered obscenities behind his back.

Bhanjee breathed life into the palace. No longer was it the sleepy, subdued structure hemmed in by the outskirts of Baroda. He convinced the maharaja to host a grand party for the Europeans. The ballroom was refurnished, the silver service was polished and the entire palace was festooned with lights. ‘We need good motorcars to fetch our guests,’ Bhanjee said. When the maharaja nodded, Bhanjee placed a trunk call to Imperial Motors in Bombay. A few days later a fleet of Rolls-Royces swept onto the palace’s gravel driveway.

On the day of the party, pale-skinned women in sleeveless evening dresses, their husbands in white suits, gathered in the ballroom, where they sipped champagne and admired the gilded furnishings while they waited for their host. ‘You must make a grand entrance,’ Bhanjee had coached the maharaja.

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Bhanjee entertained the guests by going around the room reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita, expounding the meanings and gesturing with his hands. ‘Is he the jester?’ one of the husbands asked his wife with a chuckle.

‘Not at all,’ she replied, severely, ‘he’s the court poet!’

Two liveried servants opened the doors at the far side of the ballroom.

The maharaja cut a magnificent figure in a brocade jacket, a shell-shaped diamond-encrusted brooch on his lapel, his moustache twirled regally upwards and his abundant black hair falling around his neck in curls. ‘Are you sure about the brooch?’ the maharaja had asked Bhanjee that morning, ‘It’s so big, I’ve never worn it before.’

Bhanjee coaxed, ‘What’s the point of keeping it locked up in the safe?

You must look like the Maharaja of Baroda, no?’

In the ballroom the maharaja circulated among his guests, speaking in fine English, using words Bhanjee had found in the dictionary and written down that day: ‘caliginous’, ‘adumbrate’, ‘pelagic’, ‘puissant’, ‘chiaroscuro’.

Every once in a while he glanced at his chief aide to see whether his performance was satisfactory and Bhanjee beamed his approval. The maharaja spoke about the arts, about Italian opera and Dutch paintings, about the price of an antique Egyptian vase, all the while smiling and leaning attentively towards his guests, just as Bhanjee had shown him.

Whether his guests were impressed by his knowledge or impressed by the brooch it was difficult to tell. The white gentlemen nodded and tried to say a few words. The white ladies, too stunned to speak, bowed and breathed, ‘Oh, your Highness!’

Just before dinner, Bhanjee went up beside the maharaja and whispered discreetly in his ear, ‘Madam Patricia, the one in the too-tight pink gown.’

After dinner, as the band began warming up, the maharaja ambled over to the ladies. A collective tremor made all their dresses rustle and quiet sighs escaped many hopeful lips. His eyes hesitated for a moment, then fell on Madam Patricia’s sequined pink bodice. Madam Patricia, trying to appear nonchalant, stepped forward and offered a pale trembling hand to the maharaja. As the band began playing he led her to the floor, where, oblivious to her husband’s anxiety, she danced in the maharaja’s arms, lost for those too-brief moments in the rapturous spell of his royal eyes. * * * 37

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And where was the maharaja’s wife, the maharani?

Anusha-devi had not been invited to the party. She was seldom seen anywhere in public at all. Many in Baroda didn’t even know she existed.

Bhanjee met her for the first time a week after the party when the maharaja sent him to deliver a packet.

Bhanjee found her in her suite at one end of the palace, amid velvet cushions on a carved wooden swing on her veranda. She was reclining, one leg tucked underneath her, the other hanging down, a small dainty foot visible below the pleats of her sari. An old ayah was pushing the swing slowly with one hand. Bhanjee, coming up the stairs, held his breath at this sight.

He coughed discreetly. When the maharani turned, Bhanjee saw she was quite youthful. He clutched the packet tightly in both hands.

‘You must be Bhanjee,’ she said, her voice thin and delicate. ‘Come, please come up.’ Bhanjee removed his shoes and stepped onto the veranda.

As he held up the packet, she smiled and said, ‘You’ve brought me a present?

Is it from him?’

She gestured for the ayah to stop the swing. The old woman extended her arm to help the maharani step down. Bhanjee shuddered slightly as he imagined the maharani’s soft henna-painted palm resting in the ayah’s coarse hand. A slight wave of her fingers sent the ayah away. Bhanjee was alone with the maharani. After adjusting her sari ghunghat over her head, she walked to the veranda railing.

Bhanjee had no choice but to follow. He bowed, gave her the packet and bowed again. He should have left but he felt compelled to stay; perhaps she had some message for him to deliver.

Standing beside her at the railing he didn’t dare look at her directly. She untied the string, peeked inside the small flat box and sighed.

He gazed down at the view. Beyond the stables and servants’ quarters and over the thicket of acacia he could see Baroda Zoo. He could make out the clusters of cages, the pond of green water and the path that led to the aviaries. He’d forgotten that the back of the palace bordered the zoo. He remembered riding the little train at the zoo when he was a young boy; his uncle told him it had delighted him more than the animals. He wondered if he could spot the little train from the veranda.

She seemed to read his mind. ‘You can’t see the train from here. But if the wind is blowing from the east you can hear the train’s whistle and the shrieks of school children.’ She laughed lightly. ‘At night I sometimes hear 38

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the tigers growling. And, if the wind is blowing from the east, I can even smell them.’ She laughed again, tipping her head back, the sari ghunghat slipping a little.

Bhanjee tried to imagine the acrid smell of tigers, of their skin and excrement. What came to him instead was the scent of the jasmine flowers pinned in the maharani’s long plaited hair.

‘You look like someone I’ve seen before,’ she said, suddenly.

He felt the blood in his face. How he wished he was the real Charminar man! He kept his eyes trained on the vast view.

‘You’re a master of the Bhagavad Gita, aren’t you? I’d like to hear some verses,’ she said.

From the corner of his eye he saw her raise her hand and he thought she might rest it on his arm. Oh, if that happened, he would most surely melt.

He thought he heard the sound of wind chimes coming from somewhere.

He stepped back, bowed hurriedly, scurried toward the stairs, shuffled into his shoes and dashed away.

For days afterwards he regretted his behaviour. He imagined her telling the maharaja, ‘What an idiotic chief aide you’ve hired. He can’t even speak.’

Bhanjee thought about the maharani on the swing, her sari swaying with the breeze. He thought about her standing on the veranda, a small lonely figure amid the grandeur of the palace, gazing at the expanse of the zoo, straining to hear the little train’s whistle. * * * The maharaja sat at his desk poring over the Baroda Daily. His photograph appeared on the front page as the guest of honour at a ceremony for the Mahi River Dam. In the picture he was resting his right hand on a huge block of cement, bestowing his blessings on the start of the project. The other photograph on the front page, above his, showed Gandhi marching with several supporters. The maharaja glanced at the caption: Gandhi protests against British-imposed salt tax.

In the library, Bhanjee sat across from the maharaja in an armchair with his legs stretched out, one arm thrown over a mirror-work cushion. He took riding lessons now and played polo with the maharaja every Sunday.

Yesterday, during the third chukka, he was in the line of the ball, about to be ridden off when he swung his mallet anyway. Thwack! The ball bulleted 39

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through the goal. He smiled and rubbed his moustache as he recalled how the maharaja had cheered. His gaze wandered to the windows. A gentle breeze filled the curtains. In the courtyard outside, water bubbled in a fountain, birds twittered in the trees.

Bhanjee had forgotten his dreams of going to England to study. It was cold and drizzly there. And why go abroad when there were so many opportunities at home? He told his uncle he was going to devote his life to serving the maharaja. His uncle smiled brightly. He imagined his nephew talking everyday with the maharaja, advising him on important matters, tending to stately business. Indeed, his nephew was meant for palaces.

Besides, Bhanjee was a man with foresight. As India lugged its way towards independence, the state’s royalty would be forced to cede authority to a national government and the maharaja’s private purse would gradually disappear. He thought vaguely about encouraging the maharaja to join the fight for freedom, but squelched the idea almost immediately. The work of dislodging the British was best left to those who preached non-violence and launched hunger strikes from their prison cells.

The maharaja’s style and status had to be maintained. By extension Bhanjee’s position would be secured. He drafted an agreement protecting the maharaja’s interests: ‘The Maharaja shall with effect be entitled to receive from revenues of the State quarterly the sum of rupees nineteen lakh and sixty thousand, free of taxes. This amount is intended to cover all Palace expenses including personal staff, and said amount will not be decreased for any reason whatsoever. The said sum will be drawn by the Maharaja at the beginning of each quarter from the State Treasury.’ When the district office complied with Bhanjee’s demands he began thinking of other agreements and stratagems to shore up the maharaja’s position.

Now in the library, he heard the maharaja sigh heavily. ‘Are you happy with the paper?’ Bhanjee asked eagerly.

‘Yes,’ the maharaja replied, smoothing his hair with both hands. It was a good picture and he liked the way the reporter had described him: ‘An enlightened Indian monarch who should be commended for exemplary governance.’ Money for the dam project came from the state treasury. He was glad to be spending the money wisely.

His eyes drifted to the article on Gandhi. He skimmed a few paragraphs: Gandhi and seventy-eight followers had set out on foot from an ashram 40

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near Ahmedabad. Their destination was Dandi, a hamlet on the seashore about 250 miles away. The journey would take twenty-three days. At Dandi, Gandhi would defy British law and boil seawater to make salt.

The maharaja folded the newspaper, set it aside, then stood and paced the library. Outside, on that high turret above the palace, the guard blew the bugle. The maharaja stopped pacing, closed his eyes and listened. ‘Good,’ he said, turning to Bhanjee, ‘the flag will be here soon.’ * * * One morning, after breakfast with the maharaja, Bhanjee took the path that led towards the rose garden. He knew that beyond the trellised archway, and beyond the mosaic fountain, there was a path that went round the side of the palace and ended up near the maharani’s quarters.

As he strolled under the trellis he plucked a red rosebud from a bush. He examined the stem, made sure it was free of thorns, then pinched off a few leaves from the end. He was surprised at how composed he felt.

When the maharani’s veranda came into view he half expected to see her waiting for him. Perhaps she would wave. He slowed his steps, his heart thudding in his chest now. What if one of the gardeners or one of the stable boys should see him? He kept walking, his head bent, the rose stem imprinting the skin of his fingers. He heard her voice before he saw her. She was singing. He angled himself within the trees, out of her line of vision and feasted his eyes on her face.

He recalled what the maharaja had said. ‘She’s quite ordinary, not very beautiful. I was forced to marry her. Rich family from Gwalior, understand?’

Bhanjee understood perfectly. ‘She has crazy hobbies,’ the maharaja said, ‘She doesn’t want children, or can’t have them, who knows. But she raises baby plants. Bonsai, they’re called.’ Bhanjee had heard about the greenhouse on the maharani’s terrace. ‘And now she wants to start a crazier hobby,’ the maharaja said. ‘She wants to raise baby crocodiles. Imagine that!’ The maharaja laughed and for a moment Bhanjee thought he heard an undertow of sympathy in the laugh.

The maharani finished her song and left the veranda. Bhanjee stood in the trees for a long time. He felt perspiration under his arms and on his forehead. He looked at the veranda once more before walking back. On the way he tossed the rose into an overgrown vine. He returned to his office and 41

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as he leafed through some files on the Mahi Dam project he kept thinking about crocodiles. * * * The maharaja opened the letter from Sir Arthur Remington and read it with a mixture of interest and trepidation. It was an invitation to go tiger hunting in the Ranthambore Forest. The maharaja had been on several hunts before, but never with an Englishman.

Sir Arthur, an antiques connoisseur, lived in Udaipur, a town in Rajasthan about 350 miles north of Baroda. It was known all over the British Empire that the maharajas in India owned the finest collections of jewels. Sir Arthur was interested in a big diamond brooch that was in the Maharaja of Baroda’s collection. The jewel had belonged to the first Mughal emperor, Babur Timurid, who invaded India in 1526. Shaped like a shell, the brooch was trimmed with jade, rubies and lapis lazuli, the body of it studded with large, brilliant, superior-quality white diamonds. How the brooch came into the Maharaja of Baroda’s family nobody knew for sure, but it was said that some ancestor had won it from the Mughal emperor in a game of shatranj, the older, more complex version of chess. Sir Arthur wanted to befriend the maharaja, talk about jewels in general and judge his attachment to this family heirloom.

‘Should we accept this invitation?’ the maharaja asked Bhanjee.

‘We?’ Bhanjee said, ‘The invitation reads ...’

They contemplated the letter for a few minutes. It would be rude to refuse. They decided that the maharaja should go on the hunt and Bhanjee would stay behind in Baroda to oversee the Mahi Dam construction, which was moving along smoothly, but still required close supervision to prevent glitches in case the rains came early.

One morning, Bhanjee stood in the portico and watched the Rolls-Royce with the maharaja seated in the back pull slowly out of the driveway. Two other vehicles with valets, servants and the maharaja’s luggage led the way. A plume of dust lifted behind the procession and hovered above the crunching gravel for a long time. * * * 42

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That afternoon, after the maharaja was safely on his way – he must be past Gandhinagar by now, Bhanjee calculated – and, after the palace had settled into a new, lazy rhythm, Bhanjee ventured out of his office. He checked his hair and moustache in the hall mirror, smoothed his shirt and loped towards the maharani’s wing.

His heart was beating fiercely as he climbed the steps to her veranda.

As he had expected, she was on the swing. No ayah in sight. The swing was stationary, she supine, draped in a white sari against cushions that were purple and orange and blue. Was she asleep?

He coughed lightly, then called, ‘Your Highness, your Excellency ...’

‘Yes,’ she said, without stirring. ‘What do you want?’

He cleared his throat. Her neutral tone disheartened him. Absently, he put a hand to his pounding heart. ‘It’s me, Bhanjee,’ he said from the top step, his feet already out of his shoes.

She lifted herself quickly and fumbled with her sari ghunghat to cover her head. As she trained her eyes on him her face broke into a smile.

He came closer, kept bowing, breathing heavily, not daring to look at her face, but noticing instead the toe rings on her bare feet. ‘Your Highness, I’ve come to ask if you would like to go to the zoo tomorrow,’ he said, ‘to see the crocodiles.’ When he looked up, he saw the precise centre parting of her hair, the clear, youthful hue of her face and her nose that sloped slowly towards her mouth.

She was silent for a long moment. Finally she said, ‘Come, see my plants.’

She led him up a few steps to a terrace. He followed her into the greenhouse and sighed in awe at the staggering array of miniature plants, all neatly arranged on shelves. Oranges, apples, lilacs, orchids – he had never seen such tiny fruits and flowers. She began pointing and reciting the names of the bonsai, touching some of them with her fingertips.

He noticed her shoulders, how they came up on slight points below her neck. How old was she? Just a few more years than him, he assumed. He tried to pay attention to the names of the plants. Her knowledge of botany was remarkable. He let his gaze drift carefully downwards and he noticed her supple back, her modest waist.

‘This one takes the most pruning, it has a mind of its own, the trunk just grows and grows,’ she said, lifting the tiny leaves so he could see underneath.

‘Do you like it?’

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‘Yes, Your Highness,’ he said. They are all as fragile and beautiful as you, he wanted to say.

‘He doesn’t think much of me,’ she said suddenly, turning to Bhanjee.

‘Has he told you terrible stories about me?’

Bhanjee couldn’t bear the sadness in her voice. ‘No. Oh, no, Your Highness,’ he said.

‘When we have a son he will send him to study in Switzerland,’ she said slowly, then looked at Bhanjee, right in the eyes for the first time. ‘Have you been to Switzerland?’ she asked.

‘No, Your Highness,’ Bhanjee said.

‘He studied there, you see,’ she said. Bhanjee’s heart sank a little at the whiff of admiration in her voice.

‘Yes, he mentioned that,’ Bhanjee said.

Her attention reverted to the plants and she continued telling him the names. As they approached the last few pots, she turned to him again.

‘What time should I come to the zoo tomorrow?’ she said, and as excitement leapt into Bhanjee’s face she added calmly, ‘I’ve never been to the zoo before.’ * * * In Ranthambore, crouched on a silk quilt spread over a mound of hay atop a large Banyan tree, the maharaja’s fingers were aching. The rifle in his hands was pointing downwards at the target, a medium-sized tiger. Lissome and alert, the beast paced near the tree with its head slung low, sniffing the earth, its paws and shoulders working gracefully, deliberately. The maharaja ventured a glance at the animal. He saw its elongated shape from above, abstract stripes of black and amber, the back muscles taut and sinewy.

Momentarily he was filled with a sense of awe and thrill. Such a magnificent jungle cat and he had the power to finish it. A tremor skimmed his spine. An insect hovered near his creased and sweaty brow, but with one hand cradling the gun barrel and two fingers of the other hand taut at the trigger, he had to ignore the insect.

He shifted his leg and felt the coarse, stringy hay give under the quilt. The goat tied to the tree trunk below was bleating and prancing. The maharaja clenched the rifle tighter and closed his eyes for an instant. A languid breeze 44

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sifted through the evening and brought with it the scent of khus grass that edged the small lakes in Ranthambore.

Hunched in the hay, next to the maharaja, Sir Arthur was watching the tiger intensely. He was a square-shouldered Englishman with an elegant, properly trimmed beard. Like the maharaja, he wore khaki shirt and jodhpurs and a matching pith helmet. One of the pockets at his chest bulged with a smoking pipe. Earlier that day he had taken the maharaja to tour the tenthcentury Ranthambore Fort. He had shown the maharaja the exact spot where the Rajput women had immolated themselves to avoid humiliation during the siege of Ala-ud-din Khilji.

The maharaja was amused by Sir Arthur’s knowledge of Indian history.

‘My friend, you even pronounce the words like a native,’ the maharaja said.

Sir Arthur bowed deeply. In a mock Indian accent he said, ‘I have been practising for you only, Your Highness.’

While they were strolling through the fort Sir Arthur discussed the maharaja’s diamond brooch. He explained that he wanted the jewel for Her Majesty the Queen’s collection. Would the maharaja consider selling it? ‘Of course,’ the maharaja said, laughing, ‘for the right price, everything’s for sale.

Except,’ he arched his eyebrows and waved an index finger in the air, ‘except the maharani. She’s not for sale.’ They laughed together and Sir Arthur squeezed the maharaja’s shoulders good-naturedly.

Now, around them the air throbbed with the sounds of the forest. The whooping cries of the langur monkeys, the wing beats of the kingfishers, the grumbling hiss of the marsh crocodiles. In the neighbouring trees the jeep driver, two shikaris and two assistants sat quietly, their eyes on the tiger. The beast was pacing, to the right, to the left, its head dropping lower and lower.

‘Easy now,’ Sir Arthur whispered to the maharaja. They were not even fifteen feet off the ground but he was peering through a pair of binoculars strapped around his neck, holding them to his face with both hands. ‘Easy, easy. Hold ... steady,’ he said.

The maharaja didn’t hear him. The veins of his knuckles turned blue as he gripped the gun barrel. How many animals had he shot and killed? Many.

He couldn’t remember exactly.

He focused through the gun sights. His proximity to the tiger amazed him. The insect that had buzzed at his brow landed on the tip of his nose. He wondered how many tigers Sir Arthur had killed. How many brooches had 45

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Sir Arthur bought? And then the thought struck him: India was a playground for the British. The realisation came to him in a heady wave: the white rulers had run his people into servitude and poverty.

Below him the goat was moaning, scampering, its spindly legs becoming more and more entwined in the rope, its pitiable cries goading the tiger.

The tiger stopped pacing.

‘Now,’ Sir Arthur said, his voice soft but urgent.

The maharaja’s fingers dithered on the trigger. He glanced at the sky and imagined black clouds making slow revolutions above him. The British were ruthless. They had oppressed his people for decades and he had done nothing. He led a pointless existence in his splendid palace.

On the ground, the tiger’s paw struck the goat’s belly and in one easy, effortless motion silenced the bleating.

‘Shoot,’ Sir Arthur said. ‘Come on, shoot. NOW! SHOOT!’ The maharaja turned to Sir Arthur, his gracious host, with reticent eyes.

He’d had enough of the British Empire’s bravado.

The tiger began rolling and tossing the goat in the dirt as though in play.

Within seconds the prey was a furry, messy heap of blood and flesh.

A commotion stirred the tree. Sir Arthur’s binoculars fell to his chest. He began cursing and waving his arms. The tiger stopped feasting and glared upwards; who dared disturb his tasty meal? With a rumbling growl it leaped into the tree, with a flash of stripes through the green foliage and the loud snapping of branches. Then, a deep grunt as the tiger missed a hold and fell back to the ground.

The forest held its breath for an instant. Sir Arthur was shaking with anger.

The maharaja’s mouth set in a defiant line. The tiger compressed its hind legs and leaped again, higher this time, exploding through the leaves. From the nearby trees the jeep driver, the shikaris and the assistants all screamed. Sir Arthur’s face gaped in terror. The maharaja’s hands slackened on the gun.

The tiger’s jaw, white and pink and thick with saliva, found the silken quilt.

With one tug those teeth might have up-ended this happy human sport. A gunshot sounded from the nearby tree, from the jeep driver’s rusty Enfield.

A bayonet missed the tiger’s neck but its zephyr distracted the beast. The teeth left the quilt and the raging animal tumbled to the ground. Sir Arthur grabbed the gun from the maharaja’s hands, aimed below the leaves and unleashed two frenzied shots.

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The tail thrashed madly, violently. Bullets pelted the dirt, one grazing a hind leg. The roar that came deep from the tiger’s belly echoed in the maharaja’s soul. He squinted down just in time to witness the noble creature bounding away into the thicket. The forest hung still for a moment, uncertain of this unexpected triumph. Then somewhere a krait slithered out of a hole, a pair of sloths grunted and snorted.

In the jeep, on the way back to the house, Sir Arthur said to his guest in a biting tone, ‘Your Highness, I reckon you owe me the brooch for this.’

Under his breath the Englishman added, ‘By God, you owe me the maharani as well.’

The maharaja turned his head to the window and stared at the night. * * * At the zoo Bhanjee suggested they go straight to the crocodiles.

The maharani nodded. She gestured to the old ayah who had accompanied her. The ayah hobbled away to wait at a bench.

The maharani wore a long blue ghagra. A thin shawl was draped around her shoulders against the early-morning dampness. Bhanjee saw she was wearing a necklace; earrings and bangles too. She had taken the trouble to adorn herself for him? He looked down at his own clothes – long pants and a new white bush shirt – and wondered whether she would notice the brown piping of his collar and pockets, which the tailor in the bazaar had told him was ‘the-first-class-new-fashion’.

They walked briskly down the stone path that cut through a grassy area where a peacock was standing on one foot. As they turned a corner the unchaperoned maharani took a step closer to Bhanjee. They were walking now as a couple that had come to the zoo together. The few other visitors paid no attention. Bhanjee wasn’t too well known and hardly anyone had seen the maharani before. But Bhanjee noticed she kept her eyes on the ground and turned her face whenever they passed someone.

They crossed the tracks of the train that took children around the zoo; the tracks were barely twelve inches wide.

‘My uncle used to bring me to ride the toy train when I was small,’ Bhanjee said. ‘I still remember the sound of its whistle,’ he added, recalling the long, high-pitched trill. She smiled without looking at him and he felt 47

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encouraged to keep talking. ‘We used to go to the Baroda museum too. Your Highness, do you know it’s designed like the Victoria and Albert Museum in London? They have original paintings by Turner. He’s a famous British painter. Do you want to go there tomorrow? To the museum?’

She didn’t reply. But he felt certain she would go to the museum with him. Past the gazelle fields, the bandstand, over the train tracks again and past the cages of sleeping lions, he kept talking. The path went slightly uphill before a small lake came into view.

‘Ah, here we are, your Highness. The crocodiles,’ he said with a flourish, as though they belonged to him.

They stood at the fence, he with his hands in his pants pockets, she gripping the railing, arching her neck and leaning forward. The raw smell of moss and mould filled his nostrils as he scanned the green water. Mixed within a tangle of weeds, pink and white lotus flowers grew near the edges.

Except for a few mosquitoes that hovered over the dark surface of the water, everything was still.

‘There,’ he whispered, pointing to a far bank across the moat where three or four crocodiles lay in the grass, a muddle of scales, snouts, limbs and tails.

‘Look there, Anusha-devi.’ He couldn’t believe he’d said her name; fuelled by his own boldness, he moved closer to her.

‘Why do you like crocodiles? Why not,’ he turned towards her, ‘peacocks, or swans, or parrots. Why not dogs? In foreign countries, in England and America, they train dogs to help blind people.’

‘I’m not blind,’ she said, laughing girlishly. ‘You are intelligent, he was right,’ she added, ‘he said you know about the world.’ Bhanjee’s heart fluttered at the compliment. ‘I don’t know why I like crocodiles,’ she said. ‘They are mythical creatures. Goddess Ganga rides a crocodile and Kamadeva, god of love, has a crocodile as his emblem.’

‘Oh.’ He looked away. ‘God of love’. How casually she said the words.

‘I’ve been reading about reptiles,’ he said, ‘I think crocodiles are ...’

‘Hey,’ a voice from somewhere behind them. ‘This part is closed. Go away. No one is allowed here.’ Bhanjee turned and saw a uniformed sentry walking towards them.

‘What?’ Bhanjee said, ‘Why is this closed?’

‘How should I know?’ the sentry said, stopping before them and wiping his brow with his hand. ‘Did you not see the barricade over there?’

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He gestured in the opposite direction from where they had come. ‘These muggars are dead,’ he pointed to the pile they had been staring at on the far bank. ‘They’re going to be hauled away tomorrow. Their skins are useful.

They fetch good money, I’ve heard –’ ‘But aren’t there more?’ Bhanjee scanned the water again. ‘There used to be more, I remember.’

The sentry shrugged. ‘One by one, they’ve been dying. Who knows why?

Maybe the water is bad.’

‘What’s in there?’ The maharani pointed to a place in the shade near the dead crocodiles where a dilapidated wheelbarrow held a wooden crate.

‘Who knows,’ the sentry said, shrugging again. ‘Look, now please leave before you get me into trouble.’

‘Okay, we’re going,’ Bhanjee said.

‘Go see the cheetahs, or the elephants,’ the sentry called behind them.

‘I’m sorry,’ Bhanjee said to the maharani, ‘I didn’t know ...’

She raised her hand in a slight gesture and dismissed his apology. ‘Was there any word from him last night?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Has he reached Ranthambore safely?’

‘Yes, Your Highness,’ Bhanjee replied. ‘There was a trunk call from Sir Arthur’s secretary. Do you wish to see the remainder of the zoo?’

‘No,’ she said, flatly. ‘And I don’t want to go to the museum tomorrow.’

She was looking straight ahead so she missed the deep disappointment on Bhanjee’s face. ‘But,’ she said, ‘perhaps there is one thing you can do for me.’ * * * The maharaja bristled in the back seat of his Rolls-Royce as he watched the Rajasthan desert falling past the window. Sir Arthur had gone too far. The brooch and the maharani, the audacity of the man! This was no way to treat the Maharaja of Baroda! He would lodge a complaint in the District Court of Udaipur. Also in the High Court. He would even send a letter to Her Majesty the Queen!

He had spent the night at Sir Arthur’s house and announced first thing in the morning that he was going home.

While the maharaja’s luggage was being loaded into the car the Englishman stood in the portico. ‘So what happened?’ he said to the maharaja, ‘Too 49

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scared to shoot the tiger? Not man enough? I hear you’ve hired a handsome chief aide to take care of your other manly business.’ He slapped a hand on his thigh and pivoted his hips.

The maharaja looked at him aghast. A dozen obscenities rose in his throat.

He spat on the ground and stormed toward his Rolls.

Sir Arthur laughed. ‘Do you know how much money your chief aide wanted for palace funds? For sure he’s siphoning some off for himself.’

‘Bhanjee?’ The maharaja turned around slowly. ‘He’s the most honest ...’

‘Honest?’ Sir Arthur scoffed, ‘Do you have any idea what he’s spending the money on?’

‘Parties,’ the maharaja blurted and Sir Arthur laughed loudly.

Now, in the purring safety of his costly car, the maharaja brooded. Bhanjee was his right-hand man. He had no reason to doubt the man’s integrity. But. How much money had Bhanjee withdrawn from the treasury? A nerve in the maharaja’s leg began to twitch. He slouched into the seat and sighed heavily. * * * Long after the zoo had closed and the whole city of Baroda was asleep, Bhanjee stood at the fence of the crocodile moat.

Why had he agreed to such an outrageous task? ‘I know there are eggs in that crate in the wheelbarrow,’ the maharani had said. ‘Could you get them for me?’

What was he supposed to say? How could he refuse? He had enquired about the crocodile eggs at the zoo office but no one had given him a straight answer. Even his offers of bribes had yielded no concrete response. So he had taken matters into his own hands. He had come to the zoo an hour before the gates closed and, after wandering around for a while, ducked under the gazebo near the bandstand. He had crouched under the wooden beams for almost three hours waiting for the zookeepers to leave.

Now standing at the fence, in the same white long pants and first-classnew-fashion bush shirt from the morning, Bhanjee wondered if a crocodile still lurked in the water. His eyes panned the surface, a vein thumped madly at his temples. There were heavy clouds that night and the spurious light of the half moon offered him no consolation. He recalled the earnest look on the maharani’s face, the certainty in her voice. After looking about to make 50

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sure no one was around, he heaved himself over the fence and stood on the narrow grassy bank of the moat, his hands refusing to let go of the fence behind him. He expected a muggar to charge out of the water. It would rip and crunch his limbs in its long protruding jaw. But the sentry had said all the crocodiles were dead. Yes, that was it. They’re all dead, he kept repeating to himself.

Slowly, he stepped out of his shoes. What if there were no eggs in the wooden crate? What if the maharani was wrong? With one hand he unbuttoned his shirt, then his pants and stood there with his zip open and his shirt unbuttoned for a few moments. He contemplated saying a prayer.

But God would never sanction this stupidity, so why ask for his blessings?

Yet now he wished he hadn’t put all those sweet wrappers and scraps of paper into the temple donation box. He took a deep breath, slipped out of his shirt and pants and hung the clothes over the fence. After tucking his undershirt more securely into his briefs he inched himself into the water. The algae slithered between his toes. As soon as he was waist deep in the green murk he began flapping his arms and legs. He had gone swimming a few times as a young boy with his uncle in the sea near Porbundar. His uncle would tie a big empty ghee tin to his back to stop him drowning. With the waves crashing around his head, the salt water seeping into his nostrils and the rope of the ghee tin cutting into his stomach, the whole experience of swimming had been entirely unpleasant. The water in the moat smelled sickeningly of fungus and decay. He pinched his nose with an index finger and thumb, opened his mouth and breathed with loud uneven gasps.

It was less than thirty metres to the opposite bank and the deepest part of the moat was not even to his neck, but by the time he emerged on the other side he was exhausted. Neither the air nor the water was cold, but he was shivering. He saw the outline of a small mound and instantly remembered the pile of dead muggars. His heart lurched and contorted and something in his stomach began churning and coming up into his throat. Four more steps and he would be out of the water and right in front of the heap. The stench – he held his nose tighter and opened his mouth only a sliver. He stumbled through the weeds and lotus plants, the stems and leaves slippery and slimy against his ankles. What if one of the crocodiles was alive?

He could see their shapes distinctly now, their scales jagged and rubbery.

He shuddered and took a step back into the water, although his eyes searched 51

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for the wheelbarrow on land. It was several feet away; farther than he had imagined. Somebody must have moved it. Please, Shiva, he glanced at the sky and whispered in prayer, please let there be eggs in the wooden crate.

He put both hands on the sides of the wheelbarrow and looked in the crate.

Straw. Hesitantly he put his hands inside and rummaged through the straw.

About fifteen eggs. He smiled to the darkness.

He placed the crate on his head and held it with one hand and, after a cursory nod at the heap of dead muggars, he was back in the water. Despite the load on his head he moved quickly and within minutes he had crossed to the other side. He set the crate down, brushed the water and muck off his skin and found his clothes. With his treasure in hand he crept towards the main gate. As he turned the corner after the aviary he saw the little train sitting silently on the tracks. It looked much smaller than he remembered.

The train cars, red and yellow and green, glistened under the light of a fluorescent lamp. He went closer. The cars were dented and scratched and here and there he could see the corroded dark metal under the paint. He wanted to climb aboard, turn on the engine and ride around the zoo.

Tightening his grip on the crate, he kept walking. At the main gate he manoeuvred the eggs one at a time through the iron bars onto the ground on the other side, then stepped a few feet away and flung the crate over the gate.

The crate clattered and cracked as it hit the pavement. He rushed behind a bush, thinking the sound might draw someone’s attention. But no sentries were around and the road outside was deserted. Somehow he managed to hoist himself up and over the gate. Hurriedly he gathered the straw that had scattered about, arranged the eggs in the cracked crate and ran.

When he took his booty to the maharani the next day she clapped. ‘I knew it, I knew the eggs were there and I knew you would bring them for me.’ She picked them up one at a time and began brushing off specks of dirt and straw with her fingers.

Bhanjee’s heart bubbled with pride.

‘How did you manage it?’ she said, gazing admiringly at the eggs, ‘I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.’

‘It was no trouble at all.’

‘What about ...’ her voice trailed off.

Bhanjee knew instantly she was thinking of the maharaja. No matter. He felt flooded by a simple, basic sense of well-being. He touched her lightly on 52

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the arm, ‘Please don’t worry about the eggs, Anusha-devi,’ he said, ‘I’ll make arrangements.’

Bhanjee sent word around the district that the palace needed a crocodile expert. The eggs might hatch any day. He ordered a crew of workers to dig a moat below the maharani’s veranda. * * * The maharaja returned from Ranthambore earlier than expected. If he was horrified to see the big moat being dug in the compound, he didn’t let on.

His mind was on Gandhi. More than 50,000 people had joined the march on the way to Dandi to protest against the salt tax. Salt. ‘Whatever you do will be insignificant,’ Gandhi said, ‘but it is very important that you do it.’

The boycott on salt had inspired mass civil disobedience in the country.

The maharaja went to his safe box and brought out the shell-shaped brooch. He wrapped it in a piece of blue velvet and fastened a small rubber band over the packet. Later that day he called Bhanjee into his library.

Bhanjee came in smiling. ‘Everything’s ready for our next party. The invitations go out tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Champagne, potato croquettes, trifle pudding, sherry after dinner. I’ve memorised new verses from the Gita. We’re having a full orchestra with a tenor and soprano ...’

‘I’ve decided to postpone the Mahi Dam project,’ the maharaja said with the authoritative coolness of an emperor addressing his subject.

‘Postpone?’ Bhanjee stared at the maharaja. He had never seen this meditative expression on his face before.

‘Your services are no longer needed. You are hereby relieved of your duties.’

‘What ...?’

‘You are no longer chief aide.’

‘Your Highness?’ Bhanjee took a step forward. He had long since given up the formal bow when addressing the maharaja, but now he said the words in a beseeching, reverential tone. The maharaja’s steely look brought Bhanjee down. He lowered his eyes. Had the maharaja guessed his sentiments for the maharani? Startled by his own culpability and even more, by his fragile position, he jerked his head from side to side. ‘The p-party?’ he stammered, ‘The Europeans?’

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‘Cancel the party. Cancel the Europeans. Cancel everything.’

‘But, what about ...’ Bhanjee’s mind whirled, ‘Your Highness ...’

‘I said, cancel,’ the maharaja said slowly.

‘My efforts? What about the maharani ...?’

‘Get out!’ the maharaja shouted. He saw Bhanjee’s face register disbelief, then shock. A streak of panic rushed through the maharaja. What would he do without Bhanjee? The man had been a devoted chief aide. But this was not the time to count his merits. Sir Arthur was probably right. Bhanjee was an embezzler. But, more than that, his fawning enthusiasm for the British and their affectations was intolerable. Trifle pudding and sherry after dinner!

A protracted silence filled the library. Bhanjee couldn’t look at the maharaja. He stood there, one hand limp at his side, the other fingering his shirt buttons.

Surprised at his own outburst, the maharaja sighed loudly and raised his hand in a vague signal of dismissal. ‘Go now,’ he said, a little less angrily. He reached into his jacket and brought out the blue velvet packet. ‘Here, take this.’

Bhanjee understood that it was a costly token from the maharaja for his exemplary service. He held the packet for a moment before slipping it into his pocket.

Without bowing, he turned and left the library. A slight smile crossed his face. He had taken the maharani to the zoo. He had brought her the crocodile eggs. Indeed, he was worthy of her. But the tiny smile vanished as a new realisation set in: he would never see her again.

On the way home he stopped at the temple. He reached in his pants pocket. A crumpled bus ticket, a sticky sweet wrapper, a blue velvet packet.

He shoved the ticket and the wrapper back in his pocket. After running his fingers over the rich blue fabric he slid the packet into the donation box.

Afternoon ceded to evening. At the palace, the turbaned guard climbed thirty steps to the turret and blew on the dented bugle. When he took the flag to the library the maharaja didn’t stand up. The guard approached the desk and waited, a confused expression on his face. Finally, the maharaja looked up from his work. After regarding the guard for a moment, he tossed him a key and gestured to the glass case with a slight lift of his chin.

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Liberation Road

Poetry D. Rege

Old Poet Old poet, you are a spent well, both in circumference and your cold damp base-stone – a centre of depth, in days you carried weight!

Look at your hollow lungs.

Your voice is a rattling bucket pulling out of your mouth, empty; you neither quench thirst nor raise the water table now.

Your value as a landmark is also fast depleting, for you are slowly crumbling in on the lonely toad of ego that still croaks somewhere within.

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There is no Routine to Poetry Every day I stand at the well and lower my rusted bucket.

On some days it goes deep into the hollow echoes and comes back empty to my smouldering palms.

On other days the water rises and rises till the bucket and the entire plain are drowned in a ood.

Today, it has returned with this one drop.

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Looking for Laos Tippaphon Keopaseut

D

uring my years studying literature I was told what makes a writer, although I can’t really see how the list of formative ingredients is any different to what makes any person who she or he is. A writer, I was told, is what she or he reads or believes in, the sum of his or her experiences, including those that happened before popping out of the gourd, learning to read and write, absorbing the cultural traditions of his or her country.

The last of those pieces in the jigsaw was the most problematic for me because, compared to the great nations of the world, Laos seems little more than an empty space. My own province, which had been a kingdom in its own right long before I was born, is not even mentioned as one of the first seven kingdoms in the origin myth of the Lao people. At first, I thought it a disadvantage not to have centuries of national and literary tradition to inspire me. Now I know it is an advantage: I can come from anywhere, go anywhere, be anyone and write anything. I am free … well, almost … and I can sum up my traditions, as lived and as remembered from my education, in a couple of pages. And here they are – in my words, not those of my teachers.

One day in 1890, France noticed an empty space between China and Siam and Vietnam and Burma. All the surrounding countries had picnicked in this space from time to time, but none found it healthy, or worthwhile, to hang around too long. ‘Alors,’ said the French, ‘Le Laos, c’est nous.’ It wasn’t so much wanting Laos, as they called it, as a possession; more a case of 57

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not wanting ‘les Anglais’ having their paws on a geographical construct they almost certainly would have called Laoland. And to be frank, nobody else much wanted the place, not least the Lao, because ten times more of them lived in Siam than in the empty space without a name. Why the French called the country ‘Laos’ is lost somewhere in the Quai d’Orsay; maybe they just couldn’t bring themselves to translate into the world’s diplomatic language of that time the old name for my country: Land of a Million Elephants and a White Parasol. The French kept the name Viang Chan, writing it ‘Vientiane’, which was said to be the capital of the empty space – although how you can have a capital without having a country I don’t know. Vientiane had just a few jungle-covered ruins to indicate a million elephants had ever been there. The French saw it as a nice, quiet place and when they needed a rest from frenetic Vietnam went lotus-eating in Laos and nobody came along to say, ‘Excuse me, but you’re sitting in my country.’

‘Credulous, mendicant and incapable of either initiative or hard work’ – that’s a direct quotation on the nature of the Lao from a report home by one of the first French colons, the same guys who invented diplomacy. Actually they wrote it in French. At the time the Lao didn’t understand French, or English, so they were not offended. In fact, some of us welcomed the French with open arms and other parts of the anatomy, causing them to write yet more accounts for a French public that was at the time into the ‘noble savage’ and still held to their hearts Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men and The Social Contract, describing us Lao women as ‘adorable, soft and playful’. That’s a little bit better than credulous and mendicant, but we can be almost as bitchy as our French sisters … when appropriate.

Lao life was not much affected by the French presence. We didn’t have to worry about ‘liberté, égalité and fraternité’; such notions did not extend to the Lao, to whom the honour of actually once having had a country was bestowed so it might be taken away from them. The French did not trouble us in 1907 when they signed a treaty with Siam giving Laos to France. We didn’t even know about it until ten years later, when some Thais, Chinese and Hmong in the north informed the French in no uncertain manner that they did not need civilising. And even then, us lowland Lao, it must be said, did not exactly jump up from our sleeping mats to kick out the invaders, particularly those of us in the south. We even thought we had our own little 58

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kingdom – Champassak – which had less to do with Luang Prabang or Vientiane and more to do with Siam. So if it didn’t bother Siam, what harm was there in having a few Frenchmen around? I suppose we were indeed rather credulous, and when the French told us they were here only to protect us we just shrugged and thought them a bit odd. There was plenty of land to go around, so live and let live and never mind; I imagine native Americans felt much the same way when they served turkey dinners to Puritan exiles from England.

Much has happened since then. Before I was born, Pierre Ngin wrote the first modern Lao novel in 1944 (Phra Phouthhahoup Saksit, or The Sacred Buddha Image). He wrote in Lao, when the French had their backs turned and Japan was preparing to lock them up, and when, anyway, Champassak was divided between Thai control of everything on the west bank of the Mekong River and French control of everything on the east, a situation that lasted until November 1946. That was more than a year after the Japanese had popped in to liberate us and popped out again. Then Champassak became a province of a larger kingdom and was ‘returned’ to France by Thailand.

‘Pierre Ngin’ doesn’t sound like a Lao name, but he has a road named after him in Vientiane, and Karl Marx does not; nor does Charles de Gaulle, for that matter. Then, in 1957, Maha Sila Viravong wrote History of Laos. Don’t bother looking for it in the shops – history is always changing in Laos, and even if you manage to pin it down between covers, characters, pages and even whole chapters can fall out or be rearranged. In the 1960s, while the rest of the world was into flower power and a cold war that grew pretty hot around here, Maha Sila went on to write The Lao Language Dictionary and The Rules of Lao Grammar. Although these opuses are still great hits at the Lao Language and Literature Department at the National University of Laos, where I studied for five years, neither is much read outside its walls. I have racked my brains, but I can’t explain why this should be so. After all, these seminal works are about our thirty-three written consonants and thirty-nine vowels, and the handful of vowels written nowhere but existing in the ‘inner’ minds of literate Lao. And like most, his books start at the beginning and go on to the end, then stop. Lao writers have been following that formula ever since: logical, informative, correctly spelled, straightforward and in the Lao language. What more can readers possibly want? Perhaps we Lao lack a good agent.

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Maha Sila’s daughter, Douangdeuane Viravong – Dok Ked to her friends – started DokKed Publishing, printed her own works and married the other writer of the day, Outhine Bounyavong. Language and literature follow the usual Lao way of getting things done and undone, and are very much a family business.

While I was busy with the grammar of Lao poetry in university, in Champassak my dear Dad and Mum, a couple not at all credulous, and certainly not mendicant, were hard at work in the rice fields and, thanks to Dad’s initiative, plucking profits from his coffee plantation up on the Bolaven Plateau. Dad didn’t steal the coffee plantation so much as just find it, much as the French had found Laos: overgrown, untended and deserted, and because nobody told him otherwise he presumed that if he cleaned it up it was his. Mum and Dad knew nothing of what I have said about literature; it is no disrespect to them to say that neither had ever read a book, and they didn’t realise that the Lao language, which they used every day, had a dictionary and a grammar to inform Lao how properly to use their language.

They were a bit surprised when I was accepted by the National University of Laos, and even more surprised when I decided to join the few who, with absolutely no coercion, elected to study in the Lao Language and Literature Department. It wasn’t easy explaining to Dad-Mum what Lao literature was, partly because Dad had been struck deaf the day I was born, though I am assured the two events were unconnected. It was fortunate for me that before leaving the village electricity arrived and, hot on its wires, maybe even as the posts and pylons were still going up, came an agent selling televisions on a pay-by-the-month basis. My going to university and the arrival of television were all part of the great mystery of development, and the Party said both were good and we all agreed. I think my Mum connected the two and expected to see me on TV. Before I left home we did the traditional ‘basi’, with the untraditional TV making a racket in the background, to put my thirty-two ‘khwan’ in order so they could function as one soul and protect me in my learning of Lao literature, a hazardous occupation if ever there was one.

I almost forgot: there was a long war in Laos that didn’t affect me much because I had the sense to be born well after it was over and the current regime is the only one I have ever known. Mum and Dad support it; so does everyone. You will not find a single house in our village that possesses three 60

Looking for Laos

elephants, the symbol of the old royalist regime. But everyone has a least a hammer or a sickle, sometimes both.

Such are the vagaries of history; it amuses me that, but for a twitch of a French cartographer’s pen nib, my village would have been in Cambodia – in which case I’d be writing more about ‘killing fields’ than tilling fields.

Even the super-literate French, when Laos was theirs, never wrote much about my country outside of the Paris journal Le Tour du monde, in which the locals were either ignoble savages attacking the brave explorers looking for Laos or noble savages being civilised by paternal colonists. Among the colonists there certainly were people who could read and no doubt some of them had good intentions. In the heyday of French Laos, before the Great Depression bit into budgets and stopped such frivolities, the French in Laos had even sent seven Lao to university in Hanoi. None of the magnificent seven studied literature, and they probably learned more about France and Vietnam than Laos. One can’t blame the French for that. They clearly wanted to show the Lao the example next door of what could be done with a little hard work. And the Lao did learn. Before you could say ‘sacré bleu’ the Indochinese Communist Party was born and the great seminar of Dien Bien Phu rather put a cap on French teaching. The French had never really found Laos. I’m not sure they truly looked that hard. Anyway, after they were gone it was the Lao’s turn to look for Laos.

One thing that seemed sure was that the Lao would not find Laos in its literature. Laos, let’s face it, is not internationally acclaimed for its literature.

And that is not because only Lao can read Lao, although I admit it is hard to like or dislike a book if you can’t read it. Like most countries, Laos, by which I mean the one with a million elephants and a white parasol, had its Golden Age. That was at least 450 years ago, when Lan Xang moved its capital from Luang Prabang to Vientiane to catch up with most of the other Lao, who lived across the Mekong in what has become Thailand. At that time it was allied closely with Lan Na (which means ‘Million Rice Fields’), Chiang Mai after the Thais renamed it. Cultural, religious and literary exchanges were so frequent that the two allies developed a special script, which they called ‘Tham’, although some linguists say that Tham is nothing more than the Yuan script used in old northern Thailand.

To bring us right up to date, by delving a little more into the past, an internationally funded project had, as of January 2010, made more than 61

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12,000 palm-leaf manuscripts available on the internet. These manuscripts took years to collect from all over Laos. Well, you can imagine my relief, and the relief of all students of Lao language and literature – 12,000 manuscripts to wade through would have certainly changed my five-year course at the National University of Laos into a post-graduate vocation. Imagine also my excitement. Laos has a written past. ‘Laos found!’ It would have been nice to end my journey there. But one little problem: it’s all in Tham script, I can’t read a word of it.

So, I continue looking for Laos. And if it doesn’t exist? I’ll just have to invent it. After all, isn’t that what writers do?

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Liberation Road

Poetry Ocean Vuong

The Photo After the infamous 1968 photograph of a Viet Cong officer executed by South Vietnam’s national police chief.

What hurts the most is not how death is made permanent by the camera’s flash the irony of sunlight on gunmetal but the hand gripping the pistol is a yellow hand, and the face squinting behind the barrel a yellow face.

Like all photographs this one fails to reveal the picture.

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Like where the bullet entered his skull the phantom of a rose leapt into light, or how after smoke cleared from behind the fool with blood on his cheek and the dead dog by his feet a white man was lighting a cigarette.

Ars Poetica When two ships emerge from a wall of fog their masts ablaze with flags of fire there will be a traveller on each deck with the same face watching flames reflect in the other’s eyes.

Because neither wants to see the other burn, they will have placed a wooden plank across the hulls a makeshift bridge.

Slowly, they will edge towards the centre their feet timid as a child’s first steps.

The ships will moan and creek beneath their fading weight.

Windows will burst into breaths of ember while two hands reach out the horizon shortening 64

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between their ďŹ ngers.

And if they should waver if they should fall before they touch may the sea receive them as it does two pearls of soft rain.

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Greedy (2010) by E.J. Cabangon. Oil over acrylic on canvas, 36in x 36in.

Courtesy of the artist and blanc art space, Manila, Philippines.

A Little Darkness Banana Yoshimoto Translated by Michael Emmerich

I

tagged along to Buenos Aires on a business trip with my dad, who runs an import company, only to find myself at a loss, overwhelmed by all I didn’t know. It felt strange to be in a city where everyone was white and the buildings looked utterly European, and yet everywhere I looked jacaranda trees stretched their branches into an unmistakably South American sky, clear and deep and almost achingly blue.

The young women I saw walking down the streets all looked curiously old, and though I was twenty-one I imagine I must have looked like a girl in junior high. No one tried to hit on me or rob me, even when I was alone. It may have helped that I was wearing an old pair of jeans faded enough to disturb the maître d’ at the hotel restaurant, and an even older Slam Dunk T-shirt that I had won years ago. With my jean jacket completing the ensemble, it must have been clear from a mile off that I was a low-budget tourist. My dad had said I couldn’t be too careful walking alone, so I wasn’t even carrying a bag.

My dad was off on his own that day, having gone to buy a guitar. He played classical guitar as a hobby, and was good enough to be a pro. He hadn’t come to this country to sightsee, or even, truth be told, on business; he was here to buy a guitar. He had finished his meetings the day before, so he had been in a tizzy all morning, unable even during breakfast to take his mind off the guitar shop. I went with him at first, entering the small shop and gazing at the truly beautiful guitars lined up inside. Musical instruments 67

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created by hand, lovingly assembled, carefully polished … eventually someone would come along who would play them, giving a new depth to their living, breathing shine. There was something practical in their beauty.

My dad’s eyes gleamed as he picked up one guitar after another, sighing at his indecision. They were all so splendid, he couldn’t choose. Realising he was going to be there all day, I said I’d meet him back at the hotel and left the shop. * * * I had watched that Madonna movie, Evita, in preparation for our trip, so I decided to pay a visit to Evita’s grave. I took one of the colectivo buses and headed for Recoleta, the neighbourhood of the city where the cemetery is.

There were so many trees in the graveyard it looked like a park. Crowds of people were wandering around outside with their dogs. One man was walking more than a dozen. That must be his job, I thought. There was a church with a tall steeple. I went into the cemetery.

With rows of imposing structures lining the paths it was completely different to the graveyard I had been imagining. Each grave was a building, rising high overhead. This cemetery almost seemed like a residential area. The pseudohouses stood on both sides of the broad paths, stretching into the distance.

The chambers inside were large enough to hold several people, not just one.

Houses for corpses. Then more houses … They were decorated with statues of angels, people, Christ or Mary. Some had their own small chapels, some even had automatic glass doors that led inside. Magnificent coffins could be seen in the chambers, arranged in layers. Some graves had stairs leading underground.

Evita’s was decked out with all sorts of lovely flowers – not a surprise, given the unending stream of visitors – but the grave itself wasn’t particularly impressive considering the museum-like splendour of the cemetery as a whole. So many silent houses for the dead standing in the quiet afternoon sun. I remembered going with my parents to see the ruins of Pompeii. The silence of that city, left precisely as it had been long ago. Streets of stone that hung heavy with an intimation of life, drifting through them like a scent. Silent buildings, eternally dead, set against the background of a blue sky.

Any one of the lavishly decorated edifices in these endless corridors of graves could have held about fifty of my mom’s gravestones. Her grave was 68

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so small; even among the more modest plots in that cemetery back in Japan, it was hard to find.

These are really cool, I thought. If I were rich, I would build her a grave like this. But almost instantly that feeling vanished.

Because it struck me that she would have hated these little houses.

It felt oddly natural to be remembering her here, where the dead outnumbered the living. No matter how many corners I turned, this town of graves just kept going: the same buildings, decorated with the same lovely carvings, the same flowers. The sun cast such deep shadows that I felt like I was walking in a dream. It struck me that if I kept walking around long enough, the border dividing this world from the land of the dead might disappear and then I could go there too. * * * My mom died of cancer three years ago. I’m an only child and I was closer to her than to my father, so I grieved for ages. I didn’t graduate that year and stayed in high school longer than usual. Members of the basketball team who had started out a year behind me were now in the same year, but they still talked as if I was a year ahead, calling me ‘the senior’. That became my nickname. It was great when I graduated, because everyone, even people in the same year, kept telling me, ‘Congratulations, Senior!’ By then, the faint, delicate aura that had lingered in the house after my mom’s death had entirely evaporated and my un-delicate dad and I had settled into our new, sloppy lifestyle. My mom had slipped quietly away from the world. She was gone.

She’d always had a vaguely fragile air about her; even when I was little I had the feeling she might not live very long. She never let her desires show, hardly ever laughed out loud; she looked, somehow, as if she had given up on something. I always assumed this was the influence of my father, who was subdued and tended not to be too excited about things, but when I met her old friends at the funeral they said she had always been like that. Never had much of a will to do anything, always kind of passive. That, they said, was the sort of person she was. * * * 69

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My mom’s mom, my grandmother, was the mistress of a famous painter who lived in Paris. So my mom was an illegitimate child. My grandfather spent three months out of every year in Japan, and basically my grandmother was his local wife. She and he were dead, and I had never met either of them, but I would always go to see my grandfather’s paintings when they were brought over for an exhibition, and I’d stand before them, musing. How strange to think I was related to the man who had painted them. I felt that every time I saw those canvases, with their liberal use of pale yellow. There was a portrait of my grandmother. I wanted to buy it because her eyes reminded me of my mom’s, but the price was ridiculous.

In his old age my grandfather had suddenly gone mad with love, abandoning his official wife and my grandmother to marry a girl in her twenties. I don’t know what happened to his wife, but my grandmother went crazy. She had lost all she’d ever had and I guess she just fell to pieces.

My mom became weirdly intense when she told that story. Those were the only times I ever saw her like that.

I always worried that she might suddenly vanish, because she seemed so fragile, but somehow whenever she recounted that story, she was strong. * * * I saw that it was almost three.

I wandered slowly among the graves, the sun beating down hard on everything. I passed by Evita’s grave again, looking at all the different dedications and at the sparkling flecks in the granite. Then I sat down to rest for a while on the root of an enormous tree. The faint breeze dried my sweat.

Why do graveyards always have trees like this, with branches that droop down low to the ground? Are they here to comfort the dead, or do they grow so large by sucking up their energy?

I wondered if my dad was still trying to choose his guitar.

My dad. A good guy who likes classical guitars more than anything.

My parents came here for their honeymoon. My dad bought a guitar then too. My mom stayed with him the whole time, he said, listening patiently as he played one guitar after another. And then she pointed to one and said, ‘This is your sound.’ That’s the guitar I have back at home.

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‘She had this mysterious side to her that let her do things like that, and that’s what I fell for,’ he said.

For the most part my mom got along very well with my dad, but he definitely had his oddities – even I could see that. I’m close to my paternal grandparents and as far as I can tell there’s nothing odd about them, so I figure my dad’s weirdness is completely his own. He’s been like that since I was little.

For instance, on my dad’s birthday, my mom always prepared his favourite food and would start cooking in the morning. My dad would promise to come home early, saying he would call if it looked like he might be late.

I would hurry back as soon as I was done with my after-school activities.

Eventually though, when I was slightly older, I learned what to expect. On those occasions my dad always came back late and he was always drunk. He never called. He didn’t do that on our birthdays, of course. He never missed our parties, even if he had to leave work early or call in sick. But when he was promoted, when he started his own company, even when we fixed a dinner to help him recover from the shock of a close friend’s death in a car accident, any time we were waiting to eat with him, for him, he would run away. It was even worse if we had invited relatives or guests. We would end up eating without him and only after everyone had left would he show up, brought back in a drunken stupor by friends or colleagues.

How many times did my mom and I get angry at him for that? How many times, from when I was a little girl to when my mom died?

‘I can’t help it,’ my dad muttered sadly. ‘When I think of you waiting for me, I get scared. I drag my feet, it gets late. And then it’s even harder for me to call. So I drink. The second I start thinking I might not be able to live up to your expectations, it’s over. I can’t help it.’

This was something he had inside him, we realised, and so eventually, little by little, we stopped holding open celebrations for him. Something about these events seemed to touch a wound somewhere deep inside him.

I couldn’t help marvelling that he had been able to start his own business when he had a problem like that, but I suppose the truth of it was that the harder he pushed himself outside, the more he unravelled inside.

Even so, my mom and I tried to come up with new ways to celebrate.

Once, the night before his birthday, we waited until he was sound asleep, then quietly prepared everything, setting out presents on the table and 71

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cooking without making a sound. Then, at two in the morning, we shook him awake and toasted his birthday in our pyjamas. I think our creative celebrations really helped him. Later he went off to work half asleep and that night he came back as always and had an ordinary dinner at home. It never occurred to us that if we had to go to so much trouble we might as well not celebrate. That was how we showed him our love; that was what human weakness looked like. * * * My mother only talked to me about it twice.

I was in elementary school the first time. In those days, my mom and I were still trying to correct that bad habit of my dad’s. I don’t remember what it was we were celebrating. Maybe it was the time he suggested we go on a trip abroad for summer vacation and my mom was so happy she decided to make something special.

She decided to make tempura, of all things. She had everything ready and we were sitting there waiting, just waiting. I knew my dad wasn’t going to be coming back, because he never did, so when I couldn’t wait any longer I fixed myself a cup of instant ramen. I offered my mom some.

She took a mouthful, then said, ‘Of course, it’d be a lot worse if he were seeing another woman or something, wouldn’t it?’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘His problem is he takes things too seriously. He just can’t deal with it when we try to do something special at home.’

‘To tell the truth though, when I’ve gotten all these things ready, put the oil in the pot, prepared all the ingredients I’m going to fry, and we’re sitting here waiting for a dinner we know we’re not going to have, I feel just like I’m in a box.’

‘In a box?’ I said. I didn’t see the connection.

‘You see, this feeling – I think it’s a lot like what you father feels out there, when he doesn’t come home. And when I think maybe that’s what attracted us to each other, I can’t stand it. Because I start thinking it’s the awful, painful feelings we carry inside us that resonate. All the bright, happy things we’ve built up, things in our lives that have their feet on the ground, it all starts to seem like an illusion and I feel like I’ve been shut up in a box the whole time. He shuts me up in a box because he loves me, because I’m 72

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important to him. Why is he so afraid of being a perfect husband? Or maybe … maybe we all have something like that. That’s what really scares me.’

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I’m here, aren’t I? Maybe you two are in a box, but I’m not. There’s no point waiting when we know he’s not going to come. Can you just fry my tempura for me? We could leave him a heap of cold tempura and go off to bed, just to get back at him. That’d be good. I bet he’d find it easier that way anyway.’

My mom smiled, then started frying my tempura.

After that night, my mom no longer insisted on waiting. Of course she did wait some, but she would start cooking things a little at a time and we would eat when they were ready. I pictured the two of them before I was born, trapped together. A man and a woman, suffering in the heat of their love.

I understood about the box the second time.

One day when my mom and I went shopping in Aoyama I suggested we stop by the Spiral Building to see an art show. It was an exhibition of miniature buildings by a foreign artist. Visitors could bend down and step inside and look out through their colourful windows.

‘Let’s go in,’ I said. But my mom said she would wait outside.

I kept pressing her to come, asking her why she didn’t want to, pointing out that the interiors were the best part, but she said she would wait. I thought it was odd. She had the same look in her eyes then that my dad had when he talked about why he couldn’t come home. It occurred to me that they actually were bound together, very deeply, by the wounds they carried inside.

I stepped into the little buildings, which were about the same size as the graves lined up in the cemetery where I was sitting now, and peered out of all the windows, looked at the little furnishings and the pictures on the walls, enjoying myself. And then I went back outside. My mother was waiting for me, a smile on her face, back to her usual self.

‘I’m beat,’ I said. Then, heading towards the expensive café on the ground floor of the Spiral Building, I said, ‘Let’s get something to drink.’

After finishing a cup off coffee – which she drank happily, as if it was something special, making it look like it was really good – she began to explain. That’s the sort of person she was. She didn’t like ambiguities. And she always looked thrilled by whatever food or drink she was putting in her 73

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mouth, as if it was the last thing she would ever eat or drink. It always hurt me to see her like that.

‘You thought I was acting weird before, didn’t you?’ my mom said.

‘Does it scare you to be in boxes like that?’ I asked. ‘Did you have some sort of bad experience once?’

‘I’ve never told you this before, but you know that your grandmother was sick and had to be hospitalised, right? Well, she committed suicide. It was a sanitarium, actually, not a regular hospital, so there were no knives around, but she extracted the blade from a pencil sharpener and slashed her wrist.

She was always very good with her hands.’

I’d had no idea. I knew she had been overwhelmed by grief, but no one in my family had ever told me the details.

‘How old were you then?’ I asked.

‘Eight,’ she said calmly. ‘When your grandmother went crazy, she and I were living alone, just the two of us. Your grandfather never came to the house anymore, and your grandmother was afraid even to let me go to school. One day, when I went home, she was waiting for me inside with a little house she had built out of cardboard – actually, it wasn’t that little. It was about as big as those buildings we were just looking at. She had cut out windows and put my toys and a table inside, and there was a candle burning on the table. She had even papered over the walls, so the inside was decorated with flowers she had painted. She had an artistic flair and it was a really adorable cardboard house. She told me she had built it for me and she asked me, crying, to live inside. So I decided that I would.’

‘You did!’

‘I lived in that house for two weeks. All day, all the time. I never so much as set foot outside. She brought in a potty and kept the place very clean, she took good care of me and never forgot to bring me my meals. When the sunlight shone into the room it shone into the windows of my little house.’

‘You sure could put up with a lot, huh?’

‘Because that was all I could do for her. She seemed so happy when she was taking care of me. She smiled. She had a sort of sacred air to her then.

She had been crying ever since your grandfather left and that was the only way I could cheer her up. And of course your grandfather only came to see us once in a while, so your grandmother was everything to me.’

‘Wow …’

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‘My teacher came to check on me when I didn’t show up at school and I was taken into care, and your grandmother was hospitalised. After that, as you know, I went to live with my aunt, and she raised me.’

‘It’s too much for words,’ I said.

My mom nodded.

‘Even now, I sometimes dream of waking up inside that house. Curled up, feeling the smooth cardboard against my skin, a thin line of sunlight streaming in through my little window, shining on the purple flowers your grandmother, my mother, had painted. I smell the paint, and miso soup.

And I hear the joyful, vibrant noises of your grandmother bustling around outside. It felt like before, waiting for your grandfather to visit. I couldn’t leave, even if I wanted to. Because I was so frightened of hearing your grandmother wail. I just stayed inside all day, not doing anything. Curled up, perfectly still …

‘I would wake up wondering if I’d be able to leave that day, but somewhere deep inside I knew that when I did finally leave, that would be when I had to leave my mother. So I felt like I had nowhere to go. I thought about sneaking out and calling my father in Paris, but I knew that would also mean saying goodbye to my mother. I made up my mind to stay with her until the end, even if it meant I was going to die.’

‘How awful …’

I understood the secret of my mom’s personality then. And I realised that part of her was probably still there in that house.

‘So when your father doesn’t come home, I sometimes find myself going back to that world. I feel as if that time, the waiting, will go on forever. I know I’m being shut up inside on purpose, because I’m loved, but it hurts too much.’

‘Have you told dad what happened?’ I asked.

‘No, I haven’t.’ My mom laughed. ‘I don’t want to.’

‘Why not?’

‘And let him know my weak spot!’ she cried. ‘Just kidding.’

My mom was the sort of person who held fast to her decisions. I realised she must have made up her mind to act as though none of it had happened.

She never did tell him about that house, right up until her death. * * * 75

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The whole time I was occupied with these memories the afternoon sun was slowly ripening into a golden dusk.

I sat frozen beneath the tree, gazing up at its big leaves. The sun filtering down through the branches played at my feet, forming a beautiful patchwork of light and shadow. Any number of couples passed by, walking arm in arm.

A few dogs came over to me, then wandered off.

It was a quiet time. So quiet I almost forgot I was in a foreign country.

The cross on the steeple gleamed in the sun.

In a little while, I’ll go back to the hotel and praise the guitar my father bought. I’ll ask him to play for me. And then …

Should I tell him mom’s story tonight, over dinner?

I thought about it.

No, I shouldn’t do it, I decided. It would only make him sad, make him feel bad. He would only look back in sorrow at how the little darkness he carries inside had called to the darkness in her, how they had suffered and loved together.

What darkness do I carry in me? I have no problem going home when I know people are expecting me and I’m not afraid of boxes. Eventually though, it will appear. That’s what growing is all about. How will I face it?

How will I learn to deal with it? I’m still young, fearless. I can even look forward to it. I want to see for myself what it’s like. From the outside, our family was ridiculously sweet, almost too peaceful, and yet we harboured a little, deep darkness with a secret history as pregnant as the silence of this graveyard. It wasn’t anything to be ashamed of.

I sat thinking for ages, protected by leaves alive with sunlight.

Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from New Penguin Parallel Texts: Short Stories in Japanese edited by Michael Emmerich. Copyright © 2010 by Michael Emmerich.

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Interview: Chang-Rae Lee

© Morad Bouchakour

Interview: Chang-Rae Lee

E

ach of Chang-Rae Lee’s four novels is a rewarding experiment in genre and voice. Lee (born 1965) recently published The Surrendered, arguably his most ambitious novel, tackling difficult subject matter. This protean, impossible-to-stereotype writer, who emigrated from South Korea to the United States at three, has so far defied any simplistic categorisation of himself as Korean-American.

His first book, Native Speaker (1995), winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, introduced us to Henry Park, a first-generation immigrant who ends up spying on and working for the aspiring mayor of New York, John Kwang.

Lee’s debut simultaneously confirmed and deconstructed the conventions of the immigrant novel.

A Gesture Life (1999) welcomed Doc Hata, an immigrant with a traumatic secret living in a New Jersey suburb: he played a passive role in the abuse of Korean ‘comfort women’ by Japanese soldiers during World War 77

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II. Although the novel provoked comparisons with Kazuo Ishiguro and his self-denying characters, the truth is that Lee offers a much more redemptive view of humanity than given in, say, The Remains of the Day. Lee’s third novel, Aloft (2004), instead of having Korean leading characters, put ItalianAmerican Jerry Battle and his family at the centre. Aloft is perhaps Lee’s most aesthetically polished novel, often questioning the conventions of the fiction of suburbia familiar from the works of John Cheever, John Updike, Richard Yates and Richard Ford.

Now comes The Surrendered, in which Lee confronts the Korean War for the first time, giving us three fascinating characters – June Han, Sylvie Tanner and Hector Brennan – whose lives intersect during and in the aftermath of the war and who ‘surrender’ to their fate with varying degrees of resilience.

The Surrendered is one of the most difficult war novels published recently in the sense that it completely deprives the reader of comforting toeholds and is relentless in its interrogation of war as the antithesis of humanity.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Lee’s writing is that he never ceases to experiment with language: Native Speaker is written in a highenergy voice that betrays the false confidence of the successful immigrant; A Gesture Life is narrated in a passive voice perfectly synchronised with the moral character of Doc Hata; Aloft is narrated in Jerry Battle’s sinuous, freeflowing, labyrinthine prose, in harmony with the deceit and hypocrisy of the major character; and The Surrendered, in keeping with its far-reaching theme, is Lee’s first novel related in the third-person objective voice, easily switching from character to character with the omniscience necessary for such a multi-spatial, disorientating narrative.

In person Lee is softly spoken, receptive to no-holds-barred intellectual conversation and has an appealing, wry sense of humour. I recently had the pleasure of meeting him during his visit to Houston’s Rice University for a reading and a discussion sponsored by the university in conjunction with the Asia Society of Houston. Later I had the opportunity to speak to him at length by telephone in his office at Princeton University, where he is a professor of creative writing.

Anis Shivani

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SHIVANI: I want to start with a question about your first novel, Native Speaker.

The voice immediately strikes someone reading that novel as borrowing something from, say, Maxine Hong Kingston, perhaps even the urban alienation novels of Don DeLillo and Philip K. Dick. Why is there an immensely energetic voice eager to push language to its limits? Why do you think that’s so characteristic of immigrant novels?

LEE: One of my desires for that book was to try to forge a different kind of language for this immigrant hero. Part of my frustration at the time as a reader of immigrant novels or ethnic American novels was that I felt so many of them were quietly domestic and familial in their themes and tenor.

I was looking for a way to give a different voice to my hero. So I didn’t want the voice of this character to sound like anything one would expect from an immigrant hero.

Obviously the book is interested in immigration and the state of being a newcomer, of alienation, but I wanted to explore the subject and predicate it through a notion of language. And that’s what the book for me is really about. It’s about the centrality of language, its force and power – not just as an instrument, political or personal, but also as a way of describing and creating self.

So this is a character who is not just voicing his opinions and beliefs but calling himself forth. It’s a book in some ways about this kind of self-creation through language.

At the time I was reading a lot of DeLillo and connecting with what you speak about, the sense of alienation, of distance from the culture. DeLillo’s distance is quite differently cast to mine but I liked the language I was reading, particularly in books like Mao II. That language seemed to capture a certain moment of consciousness I was imagining.

SHIVANI: With that language, were you trying to deconstruct the notion of the model minority in Native Speaker? And when you say you were frustrated with a lot of immigrant novels, was it because the heroes were too tame or domesticated – which wasn’t what you wanted for Henry Park?

LEE: Yes, they were tame in the sense that the stories seemed to be so circumscribed by familial bond and legacy … which is fine, but I felt limited. I wanted my hero to act and speak on a larger stage and that’s why I cast the story as political intrigue also … to get this hero out into the world so he could conduct himself outside the private ethnic world.

SHIVANI: On the other hand, feelings of guilt and shame are typical of immigrant novels. You would have to say that Native Speaker is saturated 79

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with both guilt and shame, because of the immigrant’s sense of having betrayed his own culture. The shame comes from not having assimilated successfully enough, and the guilt from having assimilated too successfully.

In that sense it is like immigrant novels, isn’t it?

LEE: Oh, yes, absolutely. I’m not trying to suggest I wasn’t writing a novel that wanted to look at the immigrant condition and immigrant consciousness, but again, I wanted to do it in a different form and modality.

There’s plenty of family tension and drama in that book, and as you suggest it’s funnelled through the idea of what the costs of assimilation are. Of leaving behind the old world embodied in, say, Henry Park’s father and old ways of thinking and expression.

Many of the family tensions, say with his father, are predicated on differences in language. He talks about how his father uses language rather than its being only a generational conflict or a conflict of old world versus new.

SHIVANI: Did you work on the language for a long time, a number of years, or did you have the voice pretty early on?

LEE: I had the voice quite early on. I didn’t start thinking about this novel until, I would say, a few months before I started writing it, in the fall of 1991. You mentioned Philip K. Dick, but I was also thinking of noir novels, the noir voice. I was quite focused on the voice – in fact, that’s all I was focused on. And everything – characterisation, plot, structure – proceeded from that voice.

So in some ways it’s the most obsessive book I’ve ever written … obsessed with language, obsessed with its beauty, its glories, but also its brutalities.

SHIVANI: Native Speaker takes us back in time to the early 1990s, with the early national unease with multiculturalism …

LEE: Yes, there are a lot of references to the racial issue, between blacks and Koreans in particular. That period is so expressive of newcomers’ groups having difficulties with the native population.

SHIVANI: The Los Angeles riots occurred during the writing of the novel, now that you mention it. How did they affect the book?

LEE: There were some protests in New York, boycotts of Korean stores, greengrocers, so those were the kinds of things that more pointedly influenced what I was writing. The profound eruption of racial tension was definitely on my mind. And there was also a lot of stuff in terms 80

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of immigrants. There was the Golden Venture, where the Chinese were smuggled over on a big boat and washed ashore. Many of them died. So there was a lot of tumultuous activity.

SHIVANI: Do you now think of Native Speaker as a young man’s novel? Do you assess it differently, in ways you wouldn’t have when you wrote it?

LEE: I would. When I wrote it I was impassioned and probably semiconscious of all the things I was doing. But it certainly had a fury, a young man’s fury that I will probably never have again.

SHIVANI: The anger, the frustration, the hate Henry Park feels – it would be hard to create a character like that again.

LEE: Yes. SHIVANI: And you certainly haven’t in The Surrendered, with June Han. LEE: No, not at all.

Someone with that kind of rage, but also the exuberance and wonder at this thing called language. So yes, it is a young man’s book in that way.

I think that’s why it appeals to people still, it has a freshness, a sense of possibility and a youthful wonder.

SHIVANI: Yet the concern with language never leaves you in all four of your books.

LEE: No. SHIVANI: And that’s why you keep experimenting with different voices for your different novels. So in the second one, A Gesture Life, you have this emotional reticence, and then in Aloft, you have this exuberance of voice with Jerry Battle and I think you’re also parodying and playing with the suburban-novel genre.

LEE: Yes. SHIVANI: Then in the fourth, The Surrendered, your first third-person book, you are being very precise. But again, it’s a great experiment in language. So that concern has never left you?

LEE: No, absolutely not. The only way I can even begin to conceive of a novel is through its modality of language. All the other things are suggested by it and come after it, and I can’t really start it without understanding my relationship to the particular sense of that prose.

And in different ways the books are responses to each other; A Gesture Life was in some ways a response to Native Speaker for me.

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I was curious about a character at the end of life – who lives such a circumscribed, cloistered existence, at least in his mind. I was wondering how that would express itself. Of course it becomes its own motif – a motif of hiding, obfuscation, making things opaque.

SHIVANI: We talked about some literary models for Henry Park. What about Franklin Hata in A Gesture Life, did you have any literary models for his emotional reticence?

LEE: Not really. People have said that the book reminds them of The Remains of the Day, but to tell you the truth I hadn’t read it then. I only read it afterwards. I can see the similarities. One of the challenges of the book was to try to write from the point of view of someone who didn’t want to speak; Native Speaker was so much about this urge and instinct and passion to try to speak. A Gesture Life was to do the opposite, that’s what I started with.

SHIVANI: The idea of the Korean comfort women is a central part of A Gesture Life.

LEE: That was the germ of the original novel. Then I got on to the idea that I was going to write this book about the comfort women, but probably more discreetly. After about a year’s work I decided that I was interested in that approach and decided on following this character, Doc Hata, whose story uses the comfort-women episodes. They wholly determine who he is.

SHIVANI: The thing that really interests me about your books is the violence, the scale, the quantity of it. You see some of it in Native Speaker, but compared to what happens in subsequent books it seems relatively light.

A Gesture Life is where I think it really picks up, with accidents, trauma, injury, serious illness – I’m classifying all of these as violence because often illnesses and accidents happen abruptly.

LEE: That’s right.

SHIVANI: So what explains this change in your second novel and why does it remain a predominant preoccupation until today, with The Surrendered? Or perhaps it wasn’t with the second novel, perhaps it started from the first one but it’s been constantly escalating, if you would agree with that.

LEE: I would agree that all the books have a serious accident as a factor in the stories. Maybe what attracts me to it is that I lead a fairly quiet life and my characters for the most part lead quiet lives as well. I’m attracted to the idea that things and events and possibilities hang over them, that they’re constantly subject to the winds of fate. So I like the contrast of the placid 82

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life and this immediate, wrecking injury that can happen. It’s something I’ve always found dramatically compelling.

It provides me with infinite possibilities as to how characters are going to deal with this kind of injury. I’ve always enjoyed disruptive narratives, so on an undiscovered narrative level it’s pleasing to me. But most importantly it’s a way to open up character. I want moments of extreme discomfort.

In The Surrendered you could say I wanted moments where you would see the unseeable; in the other books maybe hear the unhearable.

SHIVANI: To go on to your third novel, in Aloft you have a narrator who can’t stop talking. He creates a breathless rhythm. This is the most noticeable thing to me about the book and the thing that I most like, with these long sentences, these endless sentences that seem to float above reality. This prose style was new for you, whereas in The Surrendered your prose is objective, detached, precise and even impersonal.

With the extreme length of sentences in Aloft, can you relate the prose style to its theme?

LEE: Absolutely. One of the themes of Aloft is this dream of infinite suspension. There’s a dream that Jerry Battle can float above the realities of his life and that’s one of the levels the book wants to work on. It wants to string you along in this endless language. That’s how he finds buoyancy. He enjoys it but ultimately finds it’s all a charade. And again, in those first three books I really wanted to marry the language to the characterisation and for me, Aloft is a coming-of-age story of a man who is sixty years old.

More broadly, it’s about a certain kind of American consciousness, a suburban consciousness. A dream of control and safety. A certain kind of master plan in which everything should go right. And the suburban master plan of course is safe homes, good schools, clean streets, clean air, no violence – and ultimately no heartache.

SHIVANI: No racial tension.

LEE: No nothing. When of course we know that’s absolutely the furthest thing from the truth. It is a suburban book, but I hope it works on that other level, the lingual level, the rhetorical level, rather than just unearthing the domestic difficulties and realities of these people.

SHIVANI: When you started that book were you a great fan of the suburban literature of Updike, Ford, Yates, etc.?

LEE: Oh yes, Cheever, Updike, Ford. I think what a lot of people missed about Jerry Battle is that I really wanted him to comment on that literature through the character of his language.

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SHIVANI: In A Gesture Life, whenever suburban life starts becoming too predictable or comfortable, you switch to scenes of World War II. You’re generally abrupt, so as soon as you start getting comfortable with Doc Hata and think that he’s going to be able to work things out, along comes some really horrible flashback from World War II. In Aloft you don’t have that contrast of physical locations, you’re not going from American suburbia to some other essentially violent location. Yet there is this tension, this rhythm up and down – but you do it with the voice alone.

LEE: Yes. And for me it’s the most literary novel I’ve ever written. It’s purely about the modality.

SHIVANI: Updike, Ford, all these suburban novelists, they’re incredibly precise and, I would say, even excessively or unnecessarily precise, in descriptions of suburban materiality.

LEE: Yes. SHIVANI: They take all the details of houses, gardens, streets, buildings, squares and churches very seriously. Were you parodying the Updike style, or at least rendering its artificiality? In Aloft, there are examples throughout the book where at some emotional peak you start talking about, for instance, ‘The truck was washed once a week on Saturday mornings for $22.94 …’ It’s as if you are disrupting the emotional peak and consciously commenting on the genre of the suburban novel, isn’t it?

LEE: Yes, I think so. Is it really important that we know the price of those special washes? It’s making fun of the people too, but one of the little fanciful notions I had was what would the suburban novel read like if Wordsworth were to write it? Slightly pretentious, over-romantic.

SHIVANI: So with the immigrant novel you were dissatisfied in certain ways.

With the suburban novel too, you had certain dissatisfactions?

LEE: If you think of A Gesture Life as the most insane kind of suburban novel, yes, absolutely. The book does spend a lot of time describing the beauty of Doc Hata’s house and the pool, and his neighbourhood and how manicured everything is. But of course it burns down and he loses it all.

SHIVANI: It’s a particularly American thing and yet there’s great pleasure to be derived from the well-done suburban novel, isn’t there?

LEE: Oh yes, because of that hyper-perceptivity. It’s such a rich and detailed picture of what life is like right now. I think we’ll look back on it and see these novels as very important to our sense of this time.

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SHIVANI: In Aloft Jerry marries an Asian woman, so he is at an angle to Asian culture just as I think you, the writer, seem to be at an angle to Asian culture in this novel. But only in this one, not in the other three, correct?

LEE: Yes. He has an angle on a different racial element and cultural element.

I could have made a lot more of the racial themes in the book but I didn’t, because I didn’t feel as if he was really capable of addressing certain issues.

He has this sense that race is more important than he thinks or knows, but he can’t appreciate that importance. In many ways it was just my realisation that that’s how most white people are: fairly well intentioned but in some ways completely lost.

SHIVANI: The emotional deadbeat who recurs in Native Speaker and A Gesture Life. In Aloft, you transpose this to an Italian-American to make it less of an Asian thing?

LEE: Yes, absolutely. Readers and critics were always saying, ‘Oh, look at these Korean characters who are just so deficient emotionally.’

SHIVANI: Unable to express themselves, to communicate.

LEE: Yes. SHIVANI: And that’s a big cultural stereotype, isn’t it?

LEE: Yes – and that’s not what I was looking to do.

SHIVANI: Let’s go to The Surrendered. One of the most interesting things about that book is your decision not to describe June’s intervening thirty years, between Korean refugee and successful New York antiques dealer.

Why did you do that?

LEE: I felt as if all that business would explain things that were not important to her character. It would explain certain questions about how she made herself fit into this world. And that was not important to the book.

It was more important to see the ramifications of her strong will to get by, her resilience. My original instinct was just to open up in the present and show that she had leaped all these years to a fairly successful and secure state of affairs. And I wanted to trace her efforts and her character in arriving at that place through the dissolution of her relationship with her son. So what I show about her background is really about her son and not about her. She is almost brutal in her composure and her self-possession.

SHIVANI: Is she capable of feeling emotion after her experiences in the Korean War? 85

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LEE: I’m not sure. I think she would like to, because you like to be a real person, but I’m not sure she can feel emotion in the same way. I think it’s too dangerous for her because emotion includes the possibility of loss and I’m not sure she’s willing to risk that anymore.

SHIVANI: When did you first know that you wanted to deal with the Korean War directly?

LEE: It had been a while, even before I finished A Gesture Life. But I was thinking of it vaguely, not in any specific way. The Korean War is important to my family and me. The fact that I’m here in America is some ways a consequence of the Korean War. SHIVANI: We were talking about violence and brutality earlier and I think they reach their highest pitch in The Surrendered, especially when you think of the Japanese atrocities in Manchuria, the torture and so on. As you were writing the book, were you concerned that violence and brutality can de-sensitise?

LEE: Yes, but I didn’t think that would happen because we’re de-sensitised already to violence – we see it on television, in the newspapers. But we don’t have a connection to these real-life people who have to endure these things. So I felt that if I did my job as a writer and created useful, full-blown characters you cared about and understood, or felt you understood, then the violence would only deepen your understanding and empathy.

One of the things I wanted to do with the violence was to write those scenes quite patiently and methodically. I didn’t want them to be rushed, or just explosive things that happened. All the scenes are entered quite quietly.

They’re engaged at a very different kind of pitch as we get into them. I wanted to invite the reader in to hope that nothing would happen. Those ‘scenes of violence’ are really scenes of life until certain moments, they’re scenes about human possibility until certain moments.

SHIVANI: The choice of missionaries is something that interests me in The Surrendered. You could say that missionaries are flawed, but at least they’re well-intentioned people. The novel would have been very different, of course, if you had featured, let’s say, capitalists, or spies, or generals, figures more associated with empire.

LEE: It had to be missionaries given the modern history of Korea.

Missionaries have been part of Korean life for a hundred years or more and were certainly instrumental in a lot of things that happened during the Korean War. So much of contemporary and religious Korean life is the direct result of missionary presence. So that was not really a choice; once I 86

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researched the orphanages in Korea after the war I found out that almost all were run by religious groups.

And that’s where the whole complicated notion of mercy comes up.

These people had the best intentions, but of course were as human and flawed as anyone else. So that was interesting to me.

SHIVANI: Were you really determined to expunge humour in The Surrendered from the beginning? This is another really distinctive element in the new book, this lack of humour.

LEE: I did attempt sometimes to write pieces that were more humorous, but the humour wasn’t the right tone. Obviously there aren’t many humorous war novels.

SHIVANI: Was it harder to write the book because you relied so much on humour in the other three?

LEE: I think it was more emotionally hard than anything else. I don’t think it was hard in terms of the writing or the process, but just to sit with this material, the kinds of things that happened and the anguish of the characters. Yes, it definitely took a toll on me. It wore me down.

SHIVANI: I’m sure you didn’t feel like an older man after finishing Native Speaker.

LEE: No, no. A Gesture Life was hard because in some ways Doc Hata is such a monstrous character. It was hard to sit with him.

SHIVANI: Was Aloft the most fun for you to write, would you say?

LEE: Yes, it was. I had a lot of fun with it. I really felt that I was playing, whereas I didn’t feel that at all with the other books.

SHIVANI: The scope of The Surrendered is very wide. Was it hard for you to keep the links loose enough and yet at the same tight enough? Did you struggle with that?

LEE: I was very conscious of the different scales of the book, that there would be sections that were very closely observed, even very internal, psychological.

But then I had to try to fit all that in with relevance and with the sweep of events. Yes, it took a lot to feel confident doing it.

SHIVANI: Duty versus love. This is, I think, a running theme in your novels.

It starts with Native Speaker, it’s very manifest in A Gesture Life. Henry Park has to kill symbolically the hyper-successful, big-shot immigrant John Kwang to free himself. Henry Park has to get rid of, in effect, all the father 87

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figures in his life. But could you say that this theme has retreated in your last two books?

LEE: So much of Henry Park is his struggle with the patriarch. A lot of the book is about that.

SHIVANI: You’ve killed off all your father figures now; there are none to worry about. I think you did that very well in the first book.

LEE: Yes, I don’t feel I need to do that anymore.

SHIVANI: How about the theme of unreality? John Kwang, for example, in Native Speaker, as a New York City councilman, memorises his whole list of contributors, which is an impossible feat. Your novels all seem to me a comment on the arbitrary confinements of realism. Would you say that that’s the aesthetic breakthrough you’ve been pursuing all along?

LEE: I mentioned before the notion of discomfort. When you read my books, at first blush they might seem to be traditionally realistic fictions, but I really don’t see them that way. I see them as maybe predominantly realistic, but very self-consciously they have significant alterations to all of them.

They actually defy the reader to question what he is doing here and what I’m doing here.

SHIVANI: Discomfort – the reader’s discomfort with notions of narrative realism or notions of what a story should be. What do you think critics have missed or are likely to miss about The Surrendered? How have they most misread it? What’s that element, do you think?

LEE: Sometimes I feel as if critics, if they’re deeply engaged with the book, they mistrust that engagement. And this book can be read by certain critics that way.

I wanted to write a book like some of the books I read when I was younger. You would read the book and you could not put it down. The kind of book, whether you loved it or despised it, you were not confused by your desire to want to read it. You may have been confused by things within it that you were not quite getting, but there was this passion inside the book that was very honest. And that’s the kind of book I wanted to write. I think that sometimes readers, critics, particularly sophisticated ones, they mistrust that feeling.

SHIVANI: The critic is more likely to mistrust.

LEE: Their job is to mistrust and to be sceptical and vigilant.

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SHIVANI: Can we talk about your four books as four varieties of immigrant ambition? It’s interesting that in the fourth one you don’t talk about it at all.

LEE: I would say the first three books are about immigrant ambition. The fourth isn’t.

SHIVANI: Do you think you have successfully avoided the label of ‘KoreanAmerican writer’ or some other such classification? Were you interested in avoiding such a designation from the beginning, and was that part of the motivation to write Aloft – as an experiment in testing your own boundaries?

LEE: In some ways with Aloft it wasn’t testing my boundaries, but it was testing the culture’s boundaries. Aloft is perhaps the easiest and most pleasurable thing I’ve ever written and in some ways the most autobiographical. But it tests the readership’s boundaries and I think it’s exposed them. I think some readers don’t read Aloft because they assume it’s not about the same concerns …

SHIVANI: They’ve taken it outside your other books and put it in a different place?

LEE: Yes. Whereas really, the book that is quite separate in terms of those kinds of things is The Surrendered.

SHIVANI: Why would Aloft be the most autobiographical of your books?

LEE: It’s the most squarely suburban and also it makes fun of this writer character, the great American writer character. It’s a landscape I know well.

SHIVANI: How about the label of the Korean-American writer, is that something that bothers you?

LEE: That’s not something that I wanted to avoid. It’s something that I sometimes find frustrating and irritating, but I think it’s just a function of the culture and a function of my career inside the culture. If my books are to continue to be taken seriously then at some point that label won’t be so useful. But it’ll always be there. And that’s probably what I hope for.

SHIVANI: I’m wondering about your relationship with modernism. Do you think writers today betray the legacy of modernism by speaking to broad audiences – writers who could enter into deeper levels of consciousness, the way modernism used to do? Do you think really good writers today ought to speak to narrower audiences again as opposed to broadening the audience?

LEE: I don’t think we have to do one or the other. I trust that even within a single writer’s work there will be books that have different scales of inquiry 89

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and exposure. I don’t write for other writers exclusively, but by the same token I don’t write for readers, I write for myself, the reader I am. Maybe that reader is not a pure modernist reader anymore and never could be.

SHIVANI: You published Native Speaker in 1995; there’s been a closing going on, slowly but steadily. As you wrote, a narrowing of who can rightfully live here [in the United States] and be counted. This seems to have come true very much in the last decade, but it began twenty years ago, which doesn’t seem coincidental to me because the early 1990s saw the onset of globalisation. The rhetoric of globalisation is openness and tolerance, yet there has been a domestic backlash as globalisation has picked up pace.

Did you really have this kind of intuition in the early 1990s that this might happen?

LEE: In Native Speaker there was a very faint sense of our American world being encroached on and changed forever by the larger forces of globalism.

There was a very small reference to China in that book. China: that’s going to be the place. But it’s not so much about China as the sense that this will be the last of American ascendancy and power.

For me, that has always been there and it’s part of the tension of being an immigrant in this land, when this land is not the land of the early twentieth-century immigrant. This is a land on the wane – and maybe I’m in the wrong place. The next book I’m writing is squarely about that, about a Chinese immigrant to America who has global ties and interests and businesses. So it’s an American immigrant story but it takes a different view of the centrality and power of this place.

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Liberation Road

Poetry Kate Rogers

A Paper House Copper penny scent of rain rising to the second deck of this rattle and shake on rails, the tram shudders past Fuk Tat T-shirt shop and the fortune teller on Sai Woo Lane splays his red doors open. Sea brine dampens my face by the open window.

At every stop more dried bones, shark fins translucent as finger nail parings, starfish, stiff and bristled. An old woman bent under an invisible weight, crosses against the light, angles through the turnstile at the back of the car. All bamboo scaffold, crumpled newsprint, she rustles and creaks up the stairs and into the seat beside me.

She is carrying a paper house to burn. Who will receive this gift from the smoke?

I wonder how I will mourn this city when I go.

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Jatiluwih’s name says it all. Meaning ‘truly marvellous’, the verdant area, nominated as a World Heritage Site, is renowned for picture-book rice terraces sculpted into hillsides under the shadow of Mount Batukaru in central Bali.

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Crop Stars Palani Mohan

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B

ali has been cultivating rice for more than a millennium, its fertile volcanic soil and plenteous water supply permitting two or three annual harvests.

Such has been its significance in Balinese life that rice has become the foundation of an elaborate cult and is revered in religious rites.

The gods are invoked to ensure healthy crops and abundant water; magic spells are cast to banish from the paddy fields thieves in the guise of mice or birds.

So adept at rice farming are the Balinese that every year, the gods willing, they produce more than enough for the island’s population of three million people, selling or giving away the surplus. Festivals celebrate the bringing home of the bounty.

Our photographic essay distils some of the enchantment of Bali’s not-altogether-earthbound rice rituals.

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North of Ubud a woman prays to the rice goddess, Dewi Sri, before the start of the harvest in April.

Shrines in her honour are erected in paddies throughout the island.

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Festivals take place throughout Bali before the harvest and at the end of the season, when the rice goddess is thanked for a bountiful year. Women are responsible for harvesting the crop and here, at a harvest festival north of Ubud, they are dressed in their ďŹ nest clothes for one of the island’s most important and joyous celebrations.

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Early in the morning in a small house near a paddy ďŹ eld, rice, a staple food in Bali, has been cooked for breakfast. Leftovers will be fed to chickens and pigs.

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All the images in this photo essay were produced using the iPhone application Hipstamatic, which gives photographs a wonderfully saturated ‘toy-camera’ look. I took more than 1,000 pictures in four days on my iPhone – a painfully slow and cumbersome process, especially when I was standing knee deep in water in a paddy field.

But the resultant images benefit from a dream-like unpredictability impossible to obtain using today’s standard digital cameras.

Palani Mohan

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Grandma’s Casket Wen Huang

W

hen I was nine, I slept next to a coffin. It was a heavy pinewood box covered in traditional Chinese carvings. It belonged to Grandma.

My father had it made for her seventy-third birthday and referred to it as ‘shou-mu’, which means something like ‘longevity’, but it was still the casket in which Grandma would be buried and I slept next to it every night. I could tell no one about it because there was superstition involved, and superstition was forbidden.

Grandma, who lived with my family in Xian, turned seventy-two in 1974 and became obsessed with a feeling of imminent death and was scared.

She knew all the old sayings and foremost in her mind was this one: ‘When a person reaches the ages of seventy-three or eighty-four, the King of Hell will make his call.’ She couldn’t tell us the science behind it, but it had been passed down from generation to generation so it must have been true. And she wanted to be ready. Soon after the New Year, she began nagging Father about her funeral arrangements. She wanted to be buried in the traditional manner and would not be denied her last request. Grandma often vexed Father with her adherence to the old ways, but on most things he could bring her around. On this, however, she was firm and resisted all attempts to dissuade her.

You see, the practice of burial was banned in China after the Communist Party took over in 1949. The Party’s mandates for cremation made practical 105

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sense: burial wasted land that might otherwise be used for agriculture or building; it imposed a heavy financial burden on the peasants; and, in urban areas, where the living were crammed into smaller and smaller dingy apartments, there was simply no room for the dead. There were also ideological reasons: many funeral and wedding rituals were rife with Buddhist and Taoist spiritualism, which runs contrary to Communism’s embrace of atheism.

Father, who had worked hard to become a model worker and Party member, faced a dilemma. He knew a traditional burial for Grandma would land him in political trouble, erasing the honours he had painstakingly accrued within the Party.

Chairman Mao’s campaign to eliminate old traditions and customs, dubbed the Cultural Revolution, though winding down had yet to run its course. I remember going with my school class to Father’s company for the public denunciation of a cadre who gave his son a traditional wedding ceremony at his home village outside Xian. A local had tipped off the authorities that the cadre had hired a red sedan chair to carry the bride, an ‘old’ and therefore banned. The cadre’s denunciation was severe. Walls were plastered with big white posters painted with black characters declaring: Break away from old traditions and crack down on feudalistic and superstitious practices. There was no escaping the message: a poster covered an outside wall of the communal lavatory in our residential complex.

My sister and I had no qualms – Grandma was ‘a feudalistic old lady’.

At school, I was a leader of a Communist youth group and at the annual singing contest performed a song called ‘Down with Confucius, Oppose Old Rituals’. I found the thought of participating in a traditional funeral abhorrent. I recall being at the burial of an old lady in a rural village, where enforcement of rules against old traditions was lax. Relatives wore white headbands, white linen shirts and shoes covered with white cloth. They cried and wailed. The old lady’s grandson walked at the front of the procession carrying a bamboo pole with a long strip of white paper tied to it. I didn’t understand what was written on the paper, but Father told me the characters were about hopes for a peaceful trip to the other world and a successful reincarnation. I cringed at the prospect of someday bearing that pole. My classmates would think I was a cheater, singing Communist songs at school but practising ugly old rituals at home. Worse, they would laugh at me if I had to wear a weird white outfit.

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At first, Father ignored Grandma’s pleas. He had always respected her wishes and never argued with her in front of us. But this was different. At dinner, he would sometimes tell Grandma about the famous Communist leaders who had embraced cremation, sometimes how people had been expelled from the Party for arranging traditional funerals and weddings, how their lives had been destroyed. After attending a co-worker’s funeral at Sanzhao Crematorium he told her, ‘It wasn’t bad.’

Sanzhao Crematorium is in the southern part of the city. Relatives, friends and co-workers gathered for a brief open-casket wake, but instead of the traditional sutra chanting and wailing, sad yet upbeat Communist-style mourning music was played over a loudspeaker. Government and company officials said a few words, family members stood up to thank the officials and talked briefly about the deceased, and the body slid into a gigantic furnace.

The ashes were collected in a cinerary urn and placed in a big hall like a library. Cremation applied to everyone, from senior leaders to street cleaners, the only real difference being that important leaders were accorded a bigger memorial service and relatives didn’t have to wait in line for the furnace.

During the festival of Qing Ming in April, which the Party had appropriated to remember all good Communists, relatives could retrieve the urn and do what they wanted with the ashes.

‘It wasn’t bad at all,’ Father said. ‘When we die, our mind is gone and we cease to exist. Why does it matter what happens to our bodies?’ Grandma shook her head; cremation horrified her. ‘I don’t want to be tortured in fire after I die,’ she said, grimacing at the word ‘tortured’. She had heard about how crematorium workers never completely emptied out the furnaces after each cremation. ‘When they scoop out handfuls of ash from inside the furnace, how will you know they are mine? You might be paying tribute to someone else’s mother at Qing Ming.’ She stood up and, to put an end to the conversation, began clearing the table.

Father, who wasn’t a particularly persuasive talker at the best of times, was lost for words. Mother was the straight talker in the house and she couldn’t bear to see her husband beaten so easily. ‘Where do you expect us to bury you?’ she said. ‘Have you seen any cemetery in the city?’

Grandma waved Mother off with annoyance. ‘Who said anything about being buried in Xian? I’m going back to the village in Henan,’ she said. ‘I want to be buried with my husband.’

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Our eyes were wide with disbelief. This was new.

Grandpa died of tuberculosis forty-three years earlier and, according to Grandma, he was buried at an auspicious spot next to the Yellow River.

She often bragged about how a well-known feng shui master helped choose the site, which he promised would bring prosperity to future generations.

Grandma believed that being reunited with Grandpa would complete a generation cycle and her descendants, meaning me and my sisters and little brother, would be showered with blessings. ‘You are not doing this for me,’ she said. ‘This is for the future of our family.’ * * * The future of the Huang family weighed heavily on Father’s mind. He was born into a well-known clan that had owned a large swathe of land near the Yellow River in Henan at the start of the last century. Grandma had told me hundreds of times about the ‘Huang Estate’. But bad luck destroyed the family fortune. Many of the men in our family, Grandpa and his brother and Father’s elder brother included, died of tuberculosis. Japanese troops destroyed the village. Floods swept away what was left.

Grandma and many of my relatives blamed the decline of the Huang family not on nature and the Japanese, but on the ghost of a villager who claimed Great-grandfather had short-changed him in a land deal. ‘After the villager died, he filed a suit against us in the world of the dead. His ghost came back to haunt us,’ Grandma would tell me matter-of-factly. Her hopes of a remedy depended on the good feng shui of Grandpa’s tomb.

Each time Grandma repeated that tale, Mother would interrupt: ‘The Huang family should be lucky that you lost all your fortune before the Communists came. Otherwise, you and your son could have been labelled landlords and executed.’ In a way, Mother was right. Without land, my family was proletarian and had the status of ‘poor revolutionary peasants’, which spared us all from the brutal persecution that befell many former landlords and capitalists and their children.

I could tell Father agreed with Mother’s assertions, but he said nothing. I think, deep down, he wanted to rejuvenate the Huang family. It didn’t have to mean owning land but he harboured hopes that my siblings and I could do better than him. If Grandma’s burial could help in some mysterious way, 108

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it might be worth the risk. I understood, even at that young age. Father taught us that filial duty was an important virtue – if we could not rely on our children, who else was there? – though the Party thought it feudal.

Father had no one on whom he could base his own sense of responsibility as a parent: he was only three months old when Grandpa died and Grandma raised him alone. She did not remarry, fearing a new husband might mistreat him. Instead, she left the village during the famine that followed the flood and went to the provincial capital. It must have been a slow and painful journey, hobbled as she was by her tiny bound feet. She found work as a maid for the owner of a large jewellery store in Xian. After my parents married and had me and my sisters, Grandma lived with us.

As Grandma became more vocal and persistent about her approaching death, Father became more withdrawn. He seldom talked at dinner.

Sometimes when I woke up in the night I could hear him murmuring to Mother about Grandma. Father told me years later that he was deeply torn between his loyalty to the Party and his obligation to Grandma.

Like many Chinese in those days, Father was a fervent supporter of the Party and I saw how confident he was at public meetings. At home he was different. One time, our teacher read us an article denouncing the Confucian idea of ‘filial piety’. ‘If your parents or relatives engage in any counterrevolutionary activities, you should not hesitate in reporting them,’ she said.

When I related my teacher’s remarks to Father, he dismissed them as propaganda. ‘That’s what people say in public,’ he said. ‘Only stupid people would betray the parents who raise and nurture them.’ All the same, he warned me not to talk to others about what I heard at home. ‘It is none of their business,’ he said.

With warmer weather came Father’s decision and one night after dinner he had us stay at the table. ‘Grandma has sacrificed much for our family,’ he said. ‘It is our turn to make some sacrifice for her. We are going to save money and make a plan so that she can have her wish when she dies. We need to be very careful, because not everyone will understand, so you must not talk to your classmates about what we are doing for her.’ And looking at each of us in turn, he said, ‘This must be our secret.’

As if to underscore the urgency of our undertaking, Grandma fell ill in the early summer. Her fever persisted despite the antibiotics Father obtained from the company clinic and so, on the recommendation of a co-worker, he rode 109

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his bicycle into the rural suburbs to see Dr Xu, who knew about traditional medicine. Dr Xu worked as a technician at a factory manufacturing socks, but in the evenings he practised herbal medicine to make some extra cash.

He had been caught several times and I had seen big character posters on the street near his factory denouncing him. Dr Xu now only tended to the needs of friends. Father, despite his belief in the modern, did not entirely trust western medicine. Dr Xu came to our house and took Grandma’s pulse, examined her tongue, looked at her eyes. He said Grandma was suffering from ‘shang huo’ – too much heat – and it was fuelling infections inside her body. He jotted down a list of herbs and handed it to Father, who squinted at the doctor’s scrawled characters. Because I didn’t have school the next morning, I took the prescription to a musky-smelling shop stocked with herbal medicines and watched as roots and grasses and things I couldn’t name were taken from glass jars lining the walls to be weighed and crushed and mixed into six small packets.

For six nights, Father emptied the contents of a packet into a small clay pot of water, which was left to bubble and brew for a couple of hours on a small coal stove. The resulting infusion was enough to fill a small bowl to the brim and Grandma would drink the dark juice, grimacing as she swallowed.

The illness drained Grandma’s strength, but not her determination. She needed the right set of clothing if she was to face death and told Mother to find a tailor to make her ‘shou-yi’. Father was instructed to have a casket made.

I sensed she was worried that, without a casket, Father would bow to Party pressure and dump her body into a furnace as soon as she dropped dead.

There was no hiding the pungent smell of the herbs and it wasn’t long before the querulous Mrs Zhang, whose voice in its strong Henan accent I had often heard documenting her litany of woes, stopped by for a visit. She was in her sixties and lived four doors down from our house. My parents tended to avoid her. Several times a day, we children were treated to her loud, crude swearing as she rebuked her morose husband for this or that transgression. I wasn’t prepared for the ‘sweet’ Mrs Zhang who bustled past me through the door and pulled my parents into her embrace, whispering softly with her gestures.

Mrs Zhang may well have been a mind reader because, uninvited, she began to explain that preparing a casket and a set of shou-yi was an 110

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auspicious thing to do and might even dispel the evil spirits that had attached themselves to Grandma’s body and made her ill. I was surprised that my parents paid her any heed, but on this they trusted her completely – Mrs Zhang was from the same region as Grandma and was familiar with the old traditions and customs. I heard her advice echoed by other elderly women in the neighbourhood. It occurred to me that our neighbourhood harboured many secrets – including where to find someone who made caskets for the living, even though the practice was outlawed and punishment could be severe, for the maker and the buyer. Father thought that if a casket might in some way help make Grandma well and offer her peace of mind, he was willing to take the risk.

For the next few days Father came home early only to go out again.

He spent several evenings with one particular friend, whom we respectfully addressed as ‘Uncle Li’, and together they explored the possible political ramifications of Grandma’s burial arrangements. Uncle Li, who had known Father since they were apprentices twenty years before, was head of the Municipal Light Industry Bureau, the agency that regulated Father’s company. He admired Father’s courage.

‘Your mother has gone through so much and this would be a nice way to pay her back,’ Uncle Li told Father. Uncle Li said he would try to cover for Father if anything went wrong, but if things were handled ‘quietly’ he doubted there would be any problems. ‘You come from a proletarian family and your mother was a poor, illiterate maid. They’ll probably let you get away with it,’ he said and suggested that if Grandma’s body was shipped to another province and buried in a rural area where the Party’s cremation policy was ignored, the company would not have jurisdiction, and even if things went terribly wrong and Father were to be caught, Uncle Li thought the ‘worst-case scenario’ would involve nothing more than a letter of selfcriticism. Father’s future in the Party would be erased, but he seemed to think that inconsequential.

I think Uncle Li rather liked the idea of having a casket made. Putting his hand to his mouth, he whispered conspiratorially, ‘Even if the Party finds out, you can always say the casket was ordered a long time ago and ask for an exception.’ * * * 111

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A stack of thick pinewood planks filled half our small courtyard when I came home from school. Father had recruited a temporary worker, who found the timber and even negotiated a substantial discount. Several curious neighbours nodded at Father’s explanation that he was making some furniture for the house. Everyone knew of Grandma’s illness, and that pinewood was the traditional wood for a casket, but no one so much as commented, except to say how fine the pine looked.

In those days, professional carpenters were impossible to find. The father of a classmate of mine, Feng, headed the carpentry team at Father’s company.

Once, Feng’s father took a few days off, saying he was sick, but secretly he had gone to Gansu to do a cash job. Someone reported him to the Party secretary and Feng’s father was brought back by two security officials and made to stand, head bowed, at a condemnation meeting attended by all the employees and their families. We all raised our fists and shouted: ‘Down with capitalist greed!’ For months we shunned Feng.

Father asked among his friends for an amateur carpenter, but drew a frustrating blank and was on the verge of despair when a labourer he had befriended came to the rescue. Having heard word of Grandma’s situation, he volunteered his carpentry skills and promised to bring two of his friends to work on the casket during the two-day International Labour Day holiday.

If Mother would serve them good liquor and food they would do the job free so no one could accuse them of moonlighting.

On May 1 my parents rose early to ready the yard for the carpenters. We lived in a residential complex of six tightly packed rows of drab tenements built with mud walls and red-brick edges. We had the end house on Row Five, which afforded a degree of privacy enhanced by Father’s planting of a small vegetable garden and two fruit trees at the front.

At eight o’clock, the carpenter and his two friends arrived. Mother pulled me and my sisters out of bed and sent us out to play with other children in the neighbourhood, instructing us, unnecessarily I thought, to shut our mouths.

When we came back at lunchtime the air smelled of pine and the yard was strewn with wood shavings and sawdust. Lunch was laid out on a small table in the living room. A bottle of Xifeng – a coveted local brand of rice liquor Father had bought on the black market – was placed next to a big bowl of steaming rice, around which was assembled a feast of four meat and vegetable dishes.

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Rice and pork were rationed: a pound of pork and a pound of rice per adult per month. Rice was a southern crop and had to be transported to the north. Mostly we ate noodles and cornbread. I was salivating at the sight and smell of so much food when Mother dragged me into the kitchen and gave me a piece of cornbread. She promised to let me have the leftovers if I behaved myself in front of guests. I understood; this was for Grandma, ‘the future of our family’. When someone mentions carpenters, the memory of Xifeng liquor and the pork and rice dishes floods back. Feeding the carpenters with such extravagance drained our ration and we did not eat meat again for a long time.

At the end of the second day, the wood shavings and sawdust cleared away, the courtyard held, perched on two wooden benches, a gigantic rectangular casket, more boat-like in shape than a hard-angled western coffin. I climbed onto a small stool and looked inside. It was big enough for two grandmas and I asked Father why there was so much space for such a little person.

‘Don’t forget that your Grandma will be wrapped in a quilt and layers of clothes.’ I nodded, and laughed when he added, ‘We don’t want to squish her in too tightly.’

After giving it a final wipe, the carpenters and Father lifted the casket and carried it inside. Our house was not large and I wondered where space had been found to store it away from prying eyes. Grandma’s bed occupied the only spare space in the living room and my sisters already overflowed their bedroom. That left only my parents’ room, which was shared with my little brother and me, but there was a space, next to the window, where I slept.

Mutely, I watched as my little plank bed was taken to pieces and replaced with the casket. There was a narrow gap between it and the wall, and there was where I would sleep.

‘Are you going to be scared at night?’ I remember the carpenter saying with a comradely tap of his finger to my nose. Father pulled me over, his hands fondling my hair. ‘It’s your Grandma’s future house. What’s to be afraid of?’

I nodded. Why would I be afraid of something belonging to Grandma?

At bedtime, in front of my siblings, I climbed on top of the casket and lay down on its lid, pretending to sleep and they applauded my bravery. When the lights were off and the night grew quiet, fear crept into my bed. * * * 113

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For the next sixteen months I was the coffin keeper, though I really only remember that first night, when the idea of Grandma’s death took on a physical shape in my imagination. I had seen a dead body before, a year earlier, when I was out one evening playing with friends and we heard loud gongs and horns a few blocks away. Our curiosity led us to a wake for an old woman. As her relatives wailed like we only heard in the movies, we sneaked into the room where the old woman lay in an open casket. With a shaking hand and urged on by my friends, I opened the veil and poked my finger gently into her pale, cold cheek. My friends jumped back, which startled me more than the strangely waxen feeling of her soft skin. She was dead. I had no nightmares about it, nor did I jump at shadows. But as I tried to sleep next to Grandma’s wooden box, I became scared. Soon enough, Grandma would lie in that box, as lifeless, pale and cold as the old woman. I was shivering, though the night was warm.

My mind was racing; try as I might to think of something else, my thoughts kept returning to Grandma – dead. What would happen to Grandma after she died? What happened to all of us when we died? It would only be much later that I heard about Christians and how they believed in ‘resurrection’ and how people who tried to do good went to heaven after they died. Muslims believed in heaven too, but not resurrection. Buddhists believed you came back again and again until you did it right and went to nirvana. Grandma used to tell me stories about how the spirit of a dead person would come back and begin life all over again, as a new person or, if they were lazy and didn’t help with house chores, as a pig. I didn’t want to be a pig. When I asked my teacher about reincarnation she shook her head and said it was pure superstition and good Party members did not believe such things. My teacher said that when a person died, that was it, nothing more, and their bodies would become like a cup of water poured onto parched ground, gone without a trace.

I tossed and turned in my little bed. Grandma would one day be gone and nobody would ever be able to see her again. She would simply disappear, as though she had never been here. I must have dozed a little because I was woken by Mother’s loud snoring and heard our neighbours, whose house shared a common wall with ours, come back in from their tiny courtyard, still bantering and laughing. I stared into the semi-darkness. The night was eerily quiet and a summer breeze stirred the thick leaves of the fig tree 114

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outside. I was wide awake. I remembered a story about a young woman who choked on a piece of food and her family buried her and everyone was very sad. Three days later, a grave robber dug up her casket in search of valuables, but when he lifted the lid and tossed the body aside, the food caught in her throat popped out and she gasped, opened her eyes and sat up. The thief screamed and ran away and swore he would only rob from the living. What if we buried Grandma and she came back to life? She would never be able to lift the heavy lid. How would she ever get out? I got up and went to the living room and snuggled next to Grandma in her bed. Sleep came easily. * * * Mother summoned an army of friends to help make Grandma’s shou-yi. In the 1970s men and women wore the same high-collared grey or navy blue uniform for everything. No one made traditional-style clothing for the dead, or for the living. Word-of-mouth led Mother to two elderly women, both of whom had seen or worn old-style dresses back in the 1930s and 1940s. On their recommendation Mother sought out ‘Aunt Deaf ’, who had recently moved from the countryside in Henan to join her husband, who worked as a rickshaw driver. She brought with her the knowledge of shou-yi and her husband let her do a little work because Mother promised she would be discreet and wouldn’t get his wife into trouble.

Aunt Deaf brought with her another elderly woman – ‘my assistant’ she shouted rather unnecessarily, but she was so deaf she could barely hear herself talk, let alone what others said to her. Mother prepared the women substantial lunches and for three days they worked behind the closed door of my parents’ bedroom. All I could hear was the clanking of the sewing machine and the snipping of scissors and Aunt Deaf’s shouted instructions.

When I peeked through the window I saw strips and pieces of blue, orange and yellow fabric strewn about the bed and one of the women wearing an arm or a leg of something as the other pinned and fussed.

On the third afternoon Grandma was presented with her shou-yi – a blue silk cheongsam-style dress trimmed with orange linen. Instead of embroidery, a yellow paper phoenix was glued on each side of the dress. Aunt Deaf held up a silk top and a cotton-padded winter coat of matching blues with paper 115

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birds on the front. A pair of tiny, handmade pointed shoes with similar paper decorations was submitted for Grandma’s scrutiny. She examined each item as it was presented, then went through them again, more slowly, with a sharp eye for detail. At the end, I saw Grandma had tears in her eyes and she grabbed Aunt Deaf’s hands and thanked her over and over, saying how lucky she was to be able to wear such beautiful clothes after her death. For as long as I could remember, Grandma had always worn the same baggy navy blue coat with buttons on the side and an ugly pair of pantaloons with white knee socks. She never cared about her appearance. It struck me as odd that within her was such vanity as to be fussy about her looks after death. Maybe it was because she wanted to impress her deceased husband. I did not tell her that I had seen traditional Chinese dresses in old movies, and compared to them Grandma’s shou-yi looked fake, exaggerated and spooky. * * * We lived as if under a state of siege, Father and Mother in constant fear that one of his co-workers in the residential complex would report us. ‘I felt like we were thieves and had done something terribly wrong,’ Father later told me during a visit to my college. ‘Each time I walked into a meeting I was convinced Party secretary Jiang Zefan knew – he looked at me strangely.’

I shared his fear. During the next two years, before I left for boarding school, I never dared invite friends home in case they found out that I, the good Communist, was a fraud.

Secretary Jiang never called Father to his office and my friends never found out. And if anyone knew, they didn’t seem to care. I’m sure a few company officials were aware of the casket; as one of the oldest people in the neighbourhood, Grandma was quite the venerable figure and a casket would only be her due. Because many officials had grown up in rural areas where tradition was in the blood, perhaps they didn’t want to provoke a fight with ‘longevity’ for fear of attracting bad luck.

Father said that although he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, he felt guilty about being at odds with the Party. I think he was sincere in this. I know many people who shouted slogans and pledged their loyalty to the Party at work, but at the end of the day, in the privacy of their thoughts, continued to believe and do what generations before had believed and done.

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Neither emperor nor Chairman Mao would ever be able to erase the past completely.

The casket seemed to work against the evil spirits, or maybe Dr Xu’s herbal medicines had something to do with it, and Grandma recovered. Our lives settled back into their routines. With the onset of autumn, Father decided it was cool enough to have the casket painted and I could smell the exotic reek of fresh paint from the street as I came home from school. It was still in my parents’ room, and after the paint dried the casket became a storage bin for the black-market bags of wheat and cornflower my parents bought as insurance against hunger. Layers of newspaper and two large pieces of tablecloth turned the casket into just another bulky piece of furniture and eventually we barely noticed it at all. I overcame my fear, little by little, and was soon sleeping soundly beside the casket. Grandma turned seventy-three and kept going to eighty, reminding us every now and then that she would ‘die soon’. We indulged her. * * * The casket and shou-yi were but the most public, and risky, part of Father’s preparations, and he managed those without detection. He was elected a model Communist Party member and was diligent with his duties to the Party. At night, under the bare twenty-watt light-bulb hanging over the dinner table, he and Mother pressed forward with their arrangements, working through various scenarios, each with a litany of problems and solutions. Father and I, as son and grandson, seemed to be the primary players in what I later liked to call ‘The Huang Family Underground Railway Project’.

If Grandma passed away in winter, early spring or late autumn, we would find someone who had access to a truck, the idea being to take Grandma’s body to her home village as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. It would be a twenty-six-hour drive on rutted, muddy roads. Father and I would accompany the body. We would hold a simple wake with any nearby surviving relatives and bury Grandma in the family plot.

However, if the company trucks were not readily available, there was a family friend who worked as a locomotive engineer and had connections at the railway station. We would wrap the casket and slip it onto a freight train.

If there was no freight train that day, we would ditch the casket, bundle 117

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up Grandma in a quilt and board the next passenger train for Henan with a lie that she was gravely ill. By stuffing the quilt with ice, we figured we could make the six-hour trip without arousing suspicion. There are strict rules against carrying corpses on passenger trains and we would need reliable train connections because, if discovered, Grandma’s body would be dumped at the next station for cremation and Father and I would be punished and publicly condemned.

If Grandma died in the summer, time became a critical factor. Should a truck not immediately be available to move her body, we would bury her in the nearby countryside and wait for the third anniversary mourning ceremony to dig her up and take her remains to the village. It was an expensive and complicated option, involving two moves and much vigilance, but it was realistic, and a grand aunt, Grandma’s cousin, said she would have no problems finding a spot in her village cemetery until we were ready to make the proper move.

There was no question that what we were doing was illegal and anyone helping us would be guilty of a crime, so my parents carefully sought out family members and trusted friends willing to take the risk. This, it turned out, was relatively easy. Soon there was a list of ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’ with all manner of connections, though I was fairly sure my grandfather’s cousin’s grandson didn’t really count as an uncle, nor the husband of Father’s second cousin, and two ‘uncles’ were close friends of Father from work, but I called them that anyway because I liked them. Father sorted through the list, cultivated connections and greased the wheels to ensure that when the time came it would be a seamless operation. * * * For many years, on the first day of the New Year, after our brunch of dumplings, Father would put me on the back of his bicycle and take me around the city with gifts for well-connected ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’. First, we stopped at Uncle Wu’s house, which was deep in a labyrinth of run-down huts and buildings in the eastern section of the city. Uncle Wu, a young single guy who shared a house with his mother, was introduced to Father through a relative. He was the locomotive engineer, the lynchpin of our back-up plan to move Grandma by train. After half an hour of chatting and updating him 118

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with news about Grandma, we would leave two boxes of festive cakes and head towards the apartment of the uncle whose mother was the cousin of Grandpa. He managed a group of drivers at the Provincial Transportation Company and would arrange the truck and driver. My nickname for him was ‘Uncle Blinky’ because he sweated a lot and blinked his eyes non-stop when he was nervous. Uncle Blinky came to our house every month or so and each time Mother would prepare food for him while Father poured him tea. He always received special treatment.

In my early teenage years I came to dread those New Year visits. I found the whole plan quixotic and said so. ‘Why go to all this trouble?’ I said in what I’m sure was that whiny know-all voice peculiar to teenaged boys.

‘When she’s dead, she won’t know what we do with her remains.’ And Father would frown and look disappointed. ‘You will understand when you grow up.’ I learned that if I refused to go, he would coax me with the promise of more pocket money. I called it my ‘New Year bonus’.

All families set financial goals for themselves, whether saving for a child’s wedding or just buying a new Phoenix bike or a colour television – major status symbols in the early 1980s – but in my family Father had only one goal, a proper burial for Grandma, and it became the focus in his life.

Father’s salary was small and he became obsessed with squeezing every penny. Mother, however, was more attuned to the shortages of the Maostyle marketplace: state-run stores never seemed to have anything, and were always running out of sugar or vegetable oil or cotton fabric, and she would line up with everyone else when word spread that supplies had arrived and buy as much as she could carry. Father deemed this wasteful: stockpiles of soap to last for years; a bolt of blue cloth bought in August to make school uniforms for the following year; enough tins of cooking oil to drown the whole family. On pay day he had Mother hand over her wages, which he put away with his own money in a locked drawer of a battered old desk from which he would control the household budget and, after interrogation about our spending habits, pay us children our allowances.

I begrudged being a victim of Father’s frugal ways. When I began taking violin lessons I yearned for a new violin of my own. I found one in the store for only about fifteen yuan and pestered him daily for several months. ‘This is for the future of our family,’ he would say. ‘We need to save money for Grandma’s funeral. I will buy you an expensive one when you become a 119

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famous violinist.’ He told me to borrow a violin from the school. Only later did I work out that fifteen yuan was a quarter of Father’s monthly salary.

We all suffered. While in high school, my elder sister was invited to a class outing. Father gave her only a tiny allowance, which she claimed was only half of what the other girls were given. ‘This is for the future of our family.

We need to save money for Grandma’s funeral,’ he said. My sister sobbed throughout dinner. She said, ‘If you buy Grandma a piece of candy when she is alive, at least she can taste the sweetness now, not imagine what it might be like when she is gone.’ We were shocked at her outspokenness. Father ignored her. Grandma intervened and Father grudgingly agreed to a small increase in my sister’s allowance.

Father’s tight-fisted ways became a frequent and growing source of tension.

In the winter following Grandma’s illness, Mother was offered a business trip to Shanghai, which I knew had many tall buildings and was where White Rabbit milk candies were made. Mother was excited; she hadn’t taken any out-of-town trips since we were born. She wanted money for a new winter coat but was met with the same response Father gave us all. That, as they say, was the last straw. She exploded. My parents argued sometimes, like all parents do, but we never saw them fight – until that night. My sisters and I retreated to a corner and watched as Mother stormed out of the house. Father sat down by the side of the stove, sulking and drinking his tea. Grandma sat by the edge of the bed, pursing her lips in displeasure. Pointing after Mother, she grunted through her teeth, ‘What a terrible woman.’ Father’s fury was rekindled and he turned on Grandma and, with raised voice, told her to stop such talk.

Mother and Father did not speak to each other for several days. Mother’s face was clouded with anger. The house was quiet and very cold. When on the night before her departure Mother came home with a new winter coat, all smiles and chatter, it was like a huge dark storm had passed and we children hugged each other. Father realised he had gone too far.

The top drawer of Father’s old desk intrigued me. Sometimes when I practised my sums I tried to figure out how much money he had saved and I tried numerous times to open the drawer. One day, I was stopped by several bullies on my way to school. They threatened to beat me up if I didn’t bring them two packets of cigarettes. No one smoked in our family so I couldn’t just pilfer some, and I didn’t have enough money to meet their demands. By pulling on the padlocked drawer I was able to make a small crack and, with 120

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a pair of tweezers, teased out a ten-yuan note. A week later, Father tricked me into the bedroom and shut the door on Grandma, who seemed to know something was about to happen. When he took out a thick leather strap, I knew, and he bent me over the desk and whipped me, hard. He accused me of being heartless for stealing from Grandma’s burial fund. * * * Everything in Father’s grand burial plan depended on finding the exact location of Grandpa’s grave. Grandma remembered it as being at the tip of a small bend in the Yellow River by the village. Given that there had been two major floods in the 1930s alone, and that the village had been rebuilt at least once and expanded through the decades, Father faced a challenge. In 1977 he took a week off work, loaded his bags with gifts and money and returned to the village where he was born.

Word spread fast and soon he was surrounded by a battalion of relatives – great uncles, aunties, cousins, cousins of cousins. His most important contacts were Grandpa’s two male cousins. The elder cousin, Yousheng Huang, whom Father called ‘uncle’, was the village chief. It took them a while – they were sure of the general area – until Yousheng identified amid knee-deep grass what appeared to be an unmarked grave and declared this to be Grandpa’s. He promised to have it tended and offered personally to oversee arrangements for Grandma’s burial. Father left the village with an empty bag but much relieved.

We were not so easily convinced: how could he be sure the unmarked grave was really Grandpa’s? If there had been any written records they had been lost to wars and floods. Who knew how much the river had changed since Grandpa’s time? Father grew impatient with our doubts and said, ‘Let’s have faith.’ I think, deep down, he was probably just as sceptical as we were, but chose instead to believe. Father, who thought my calligraphy superior to his own scrawl, dictated a letter of gratitude to Yousheng and wired him forty yuan, which was almost an entire month of Mother’s wages, to defray the cost of maintaining the grave.

Father was not at first aware of the obligation he had incurred by asking Yousheng to watch over his own cousin’s grave. A letter from Yousheng the following spring announced that his son-in-law had been offered a job in 121

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our city and that his daughter would soon join her husband there, but he was having some problems settling. Yousheng asked if Father could perhaps find his daughter a place to stay and a job to tide her over. I’m not sure how Father really felt about this request because before he could dictate a response the daughter was at our door. She was a peasant girl who giggled a lot and spoke with a heavy Henan accent, giving words the same twang as Grandma. My elder sister volunteered to make room for the new auntie by staying at the house of one of her friends and Father made frantic enquiries about jobs. Luckily, his company’s warehouse needed workers to load and unload cooking utensils. I feared our new auntie would outstay her welcome, but her husband found a dorm for both of them and she was gone in a week.

This auntie was just the first of so many aunties and uncles, and I wondered if other families could be as big as ours. Some came as tourists and used our house like a free hotel, some to request financial help, others looking for a job in the city. They thought Father was some big shot. He hadn’t realised that finding a job for the first auntie was the first crack in the dam. I and my siblings soon made no secret of our displeasure at the constant disruption to our lives. Each time we scowled through puckered lips, Father would scold us for being snobbish and ungrateful. ‘They have put in a lot of effort to help preserve Grandpa’s grave,’ he would lecture. * * * In the 1980s, China was slowly released from the grip of the austere ideological control of the Mao era and Father could breathe easier. The traditional funeral, once scorned as a wasteful relic of a misguided past, became commonplace and, for some, an outlet for new extravagance. It amused me to see one procession that involved a dozen or so cars and trucks loaded with hundreds of wreaths and paper offerings of perfectly scaled gold bars, TV sets, refrigerators and cars to be burned as ‘house-warming gifts’ so the deceased would not arrive in the other world empty-handed. As the procession passed through the streets, fake money was scattered in its path as a bribe to ghost-guards so they would allow the dead easy passage.

I hadn’t realised the other world was as corrupt as the one in which I lived.

In major cities burial was still banned, but enforcement was patchy and if 122

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one had the means to secure a piece of land, one had the means to bend the rules.

I left Xian in 1982 to attend university in Shanghai and late that year the company built a new red-brick, five-storey building. Father’s seniority allowed him a unit on the ground floor. The apartments had indoor plumbing and modern kitchens, but the rooms were much smaller and there was nowhere for Grandma’s casket. It ended up in a discreet corner of one of the big warehouses Father managed, behind some stacks of bricks. The real threat to Father’s meticulous plans lay in the countryside as Deng Xiaoping’s modernisation drive gained pace: the local government wanted to put a road through Grandpa’s cemetery and plant the area as an orchard to increase the income of the growing village. Families were told to relocate graves before the bulldozers moved in to level the whole area.

Father was against the relocation and said so in a strongly worded letter to Yousheng, who was still the village chief. Yousheng’s reply came with a visit from ‘giggling auntie’, the daughter we had helped years earlier. She said her father had fought local officials to preserve Grandpa’s gravesite and, she bragged, even lay down in front of the tractor sent to level the ground.

Yousheng saved Grandpa’s grave, but he had to bribe some local officials, she said. My siblings reported their ‘yeah, right’ scepticism to me, but it came as no surprise that Father appeared to be truly impressed and touched by Yousheng’s heroic act. Nor was I surprised that he wired more money to cover the alleged cost of the bribes.

When Yousheng suffered a heart attack in 1985 Father took the news badly. Yousheng was the keystone of his plan. He contacted Mingsheng, Grandpa’s other cousin, who assured Father he would carry on the task.

Minsheng had visited our family once and he struck me as honest; he was less glib than Yousheng. In return, Father brought Mingsheng’s seventeenyear-old son to the city to live with us and found him a job. Letters went back and forth and each time a relative visited Father would send back gifts for Mingsheng. In the end, even Grandpa’s grave was levelled, but Mingsheng said he had managed to place a marker at the gravesite, so all was not lost.

I graduated in 1986 and found a job closer to home as a teacher. Each pay day, I contributed part of my salary to Grandma’s burial fund, topping that up with a share of my earnings from moonlighting as an English teacher. I 123

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was much in demand from students wanting to study abroad and people trying to break into the lucrative tourism industry. Father was almost gleeful each time I handed him a wad of cash and he locked it up in the old desk drawer. ‘This is for the future of our family.’

A new player was written into the plan. Dr Yang, a friend of Mother for many years, was now head of the company clinic and he said that, with two ambulances now at his disposal, we could use one of them to transport Grandma’s body to Henan. If need be, he was willing to go along. He even suggested moving Grandma as she neared the end so she might die in her own village. He would hook her up to an IV so she didn’t die on the way, and the vastly improved road system meant the journey would not be a particularly long one.

My elder sister was also given a more prominent role, though I would not have considered that a likely outcome from the way it all started. She had been dating a college classmate for two years when he proposed marriage.

His parents came from a poor and backward rural village. Mother and Father wanted her to marry into a family with city roots. My sister threatened to elope and declared she would cut all ties with the Huang family if they did not accept her choice. My sister was always cunning, something I particularly liked about her because she was good at keeping us out of trouble when we were younger. She worked out a plan to win Father over and, with the help of her boyfriend’s family, presented him with a proposal he would find hard to resist: if she were allowed to marry her boyfriend, she could use her marital connections to gain access to the village cemetery, which meant that should there be any problems with the Henan plan, Father would have a permanent local fall-back position. Suffice to say the boyfriend is now my brother-in-law, a nice guy and the right choice for my sister. * * * I think it’s a common misapprehension among the young that old people seem to live forever. They are already old when we are young and seem to stay perpetually old as we mature and become adults and become ourselves old. Grandma approached her eighty-third birthday with the same dread of impending death as she had a decade earlier, but without the trepidation because she knew Father had everything in hand. I’m not sure if she was 124

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ever in better health as her eighty-third and eighty-fourth birthdays went by.

That’s not to say there weren’t any close calls. One night she woke everyone in the house and had us gather around her bed for her ‘last words’. The doctor was summoned. He gave her some tablets to reduce anxiety and she woke the next morning as if nothing had happened. Father, on the other hand, experienced a ‘cardiac episode’ when his heart went into palpitations.

‘I thought I’d be ready,’ he told his doctor. ‘I’m a wreck.’

As it was, we had plenty of warning that Grandma was approaching the end. In autumn 1986 she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The doctor said that, considering her advanced age, he didn’t think the tumour would grow particularly fast and surgery, followed by a strict routine of chemotherapy, would only make what extra years she might have extremely uncomfortable.

He recommended that we forgo treatment and let nature take its course.

Father informed all the players in his drama they would be called upon sooner rather than later and settled down to wait. Three months went by and nothing happened.

When Father first took on the responsibility of reuniting Grandma with Grandpa in death he was forty-three and I had just started my first year in elementary school. In 1988, Father turned fifty-seven and had a head of short grey hair, while I had become a teacher, my younger brother had graduated from a vocational school and my sisters were all married and pursuing jobs of their own. At times when we were all together we tried to persuade Father to relax and start doing things for himself, instead of always looking out for others. I took him on a trip to Shanghai and he told me that travelling was quite a hobby for him before he was married. I don’t recall him ever going anywhere. ‘I had to focus my financial resources on raising you children and preparing for your Grandma’s funeral,’ he said.

During a weekend visit I noticed that Father was coughing almost nonstop. He had always had lung problems, but said there was nothing to worry about. ‘Just a touch of bronchitis,’ he’d say, and shake a bottle of herbal syrup to indicate he had everything under control. But the coughing did not stop and we managed to persuade him to see a proper doctor. I switched my classes with another teacher and went with him to the hospital.

Pneumonia was the initial diagnosis and he was given a course of antibiotics. A week later, Mother called and said further tests had revealed small-cell cancer in his lungs. She didn’t want him to know, but he overheard 125

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Mother and the doctor talking and it was as if his whole world crumbled around him. Within weeks, his face had lost its lustre and he grew terribly thin from the chemo, which often made him sick.

It was during this time that China began the agonising economic transition away from central planning. Prices for some daily necessities soared five fold.

Overnight, savings became worthless. Father grew increasingly morose. At the end of one of my hospital visits he mumbled, ‘All the money we have saved over the past twenty years is probably not enough to buy a colour TV now,’ and let out a long sigh that is etched into my memory; it was the sound of futility and helplessness. He did not look at me.

In September I returned to Shanghai to begin my graduate studies. I thought I should stay because the doctors did not sound at all confident about Father’s prognosis, but he told me to go. ‘Your future is more important,’ he said. He sneaked home the night I left to see me off. That night he also gave Mother the key to the desk drawer and made her promise never to tell Grandma about the seriousness of his condition. * * * The telegram from Mother was brief: ‘Hurry home. Your father is dying.’ I took an overnight train and arrived in Xian late the next evening. A friend of Father’s met me at the station. We went straight to the hospital. Father was on oxygen and he was hooked up to numerous tubes. He seemed no worse than when I had left, but he said as I sat beside him, ‘The treatment doesn’t work.’ He lost consciousness three hours later.

The doctor explained there was nothing more that could be done for him.

He might struggle on for another day or two, but the chance of regaining consciousness was remote. I was asked whether I would consent to ending treatment rather than prolong his suffering. I agreed.

Minutes later, the full weight of my decision hit me and I rushed back into his room, pleading for the doctor to make one last try, but it was already too late. Father was dead. It was explained to me that Father’s body would now be taken to the hospital morgue and from there I could take it for cremation.

Grandma was sitting on the couch, waiting for me, when I arrived home.

She must have sensed something from my look. We had not told her how serious Father’s condition was because we were afraid the truth might kill 126

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her. Grandma peppered me with questions. I did not want to be the one to tell her.

A relative came by the next morning to collect Grandma so we could plan Father’s funeral. She moaned and struggled as we carried her out to a flatbed tricycle and peddled through the busy streets. At the relative’s house she grabbed at my hands like a fearful child and begged me not to leave her.

It was too much for me and I broke down, my tears a mixture of grief and anger. I pitied Grandma’s loss of her only son, because as the old saying goes, ‘It is tragic for the grey-haired to send off the dark-haired.’ But I resented her too, because of the way she had manipulated him into spending the better part of his life planning her funeral; the whole plan was a curse that had sucked him dry until there was nothing left but his own corpse.

I called a family meeting and, as if to punish Father for his obsession with tradition, proposed stripping his funeral of all ritual. ‘He lived like a model Communist Party member,’ I said, ‘and so, according to instructions from the Party, we should proceed to Sanzhao Crematorium and be done with it.’ I knew I was being unreasonable, but I was a hot-headed twenty-fiveyear-old who had just lost his father and I was angry. Mother ignored me and, over my querulous protests, she and our closest relatives decided on a traditional wake and a simple ceremony before the cremation.

The house was draped in black and wreaths of white paper flowers sent by friends surrounded the building. My siblings donned white linen clothes. I refused, but agreed to wear a white headband. On a table in the living room Mother placed Father’s picture, with incense and plates of fruit and other food in front of it. Friends and relatives kneeled or bowed before his picture and burned fake money.

I was supposed to carry his picture and lead my siblings around the neighbourhood, chanting and wailing to call his soul back for a final ‘reunion’ before being sent off to the netherworld. This I agreed to do, but under protest. At the main crossroads a relative chalked a circle on the footpath, inside which he placed stacks of fake money and set them alight and called Father’s name. ‘Come back, Zhiyou, your children are here to greet you.

We’ll send you off tomorrow morning. Have a peaceful trip. Don’t worry about your mother and your children. They will be well taken care of ...’

As the flames danced in the air and the autumn wind scattered the ashes, the relative turned to me and said, ‘Look at the flames. Your father is here 127

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to collect the gifts.’ The crowd started another round of wailing. I wanted to laugh at them, at all this absurd ritual. For Mother’s sake, I merely nodded.

Before leaving for the crematorium the next day, the same elderly relative handed me a pottery urn containing the ashes of fake money burned during the wake. I was supposed to smash the urn when the procession reached the crossroads. I was told the urn symbolised the body that had contained Father’s soul in this life; breaking it would liberate him so he could be reincarnated. I was tired and simply did as I was told. The urn broke into many small pieces.

At the crematorium loudspeakers blasted familiar mourning tunes.

Father’s body was placed in a glass case. We hadn’t hired a mortician to prepare the corpse, but his unshaven face looked peaceful. More than two hundred people had come, many of whom I had never met. The Party secretary called Father a remarkable Communist who had worked quietly for the good of the company. I was cynical. Was Father a good Communist?

What about his other life, the one he wasted in service to the very traditions the Party despised? One after another, friends and co-workers went up to the podium. None of them talked about political devotion. Instead, they spoke about how he had helped them at work or in their private lives, never asking for anything in return. Several people mentioned Grandma’s casket as an example of his love for his family.

It was my turn to speak, on behalf of the whole family. My mind went blank. I attended one of China’s most prestigious universities and I knew the crowd expected me to say something intelligent, something wise. But I couldn’t find the words. I was stunned by how heartfelt were the words of his friends and co-workers. I bowed to my dead father, then to the audience.

‘Thank you,’ I said. That was all. I could think of nothing else to say. I will regret that moment for the rest of my life.

Crematorium workers scooped up what was left of Father and placed the remains in a wooden cinerary urn, which we left in a temporary niche. * * * As I sorted through Father’s papers I made a pile of the considerable correspondence relating to Grandma’s situation. I was looking for a clue that might lead me to understand why he had become so obsessed about something she would never know. As a boy, I remembered him telling me 128

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about how a son cut a piece of flesh from his arm to cure his mother of an illness. Was it something like that? Or was it something more selfish, a way to beat a stifling system that cared little about the individual and demanded so much of them?

I asked Mother if Father had left any instructions about Grandma’s burial.

She shook her head. The topic never came up, but she recalled him saying in passing that his mother’s karma was too strong. When I asked what he meant by that, Mother said, ‘I guess your father felt much like you do; I think he resented the fact that, after everything he had done, she would outlive him.’

Grandma did not recognise me when I went to fetch her after the funeral.

She didn’t seem to recognise anyone, nor did she seem familiar with her surroundings. She looked and acted childlike. An elderly neighbour told me that Father must have taken her soul with him.

I went back to Shanghai and on visits during winter and summer holidays I slept next to Grandma and tended to her needs, feeding and bathing her, washing her clothes, cleaning up after her incontinence. Mother felt obliged to maintain the network Father had built over the years for Grandma’s burial.

One afternoon, in the fall of 1989, Mother noticed that Grandma didn’t respond to her feeding and her head drooped onto her shoulder. The doctor felt Grandma’s pulse and said it wasn’t good. Mother sent out word and, among family and friends, Grandma left this world, peacefully. She was ninety. * * * So meticulous was Father’s planning there was very little Mother had to do; every player knew his or her part. A tent went up outside our building. The casket was retrieved from the warehouse. Friends arrived to help Mother dress Grandma in the outfit made for her fifteen years earlier. A steady stream of people came to pay homage and some wrapped pieces of red string around her body before giving them to children, so that some of Grandma’s luck might rub off.

Mother did not tell me that Grandma had died until much later, so I did not attend the funeral. She said she did not want to interrupt my studies.

It was up to her to decide just how far Father’s plan would be allowed to proceed. As the crowd grew outside, Mother was in the house arguing with the team Father had put together. It would be too much, they said, for 129

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Mother to take Grandma all the way to her village with Father gone and me absent. My elder sister said the easiest thing would be for Grandma to be buried on the plot her husband had secured outside the city. Taking her all the way home could wait. It was agreed that this was the best plan. It was also decided the funeral should be kept small; one of Mother’s cousins was a traffic cop and he said the police were stopping large processions and forcing them to go straight to the crematorium.

At four o’clock in the morning three vans and a truck arrived. It was raining heavily. Grandma’s casket, covered with a waterproof canvas, was carried to the truck. Selected mourners forsook the traditional wailing and incense burning and quietly boarded the vans. The little convoy made good time on the empty streets and my policeman uncle asked the drivers to circle around the landmark Bell Tower at the centre of the city to give Grandma one last look at the city that had been her home for half a century.

The journey took less than two hours. The rain had stopped and Grandma was laid to rest in a small cemetery on a hill overlooking the southern part of the city. The urn containing Father’s ashes was buried separately near the bottom-left corner of Grandma’s coffin. His location, at the feet of his mother, meant the son would always be at his mother’s service.

‘Now that Grandma is close by, we can easily hop on a bus and pay tribute to her during holidays,’ Mother said when she told me some months later all that had happened. ‘I don’t think Grandma would mind being close to her grandchildren.’

Mother and my siblings carefully maintained the graves and paid tribute to Father and Grandma during Qing Ming and on Ghost Day in November, when the living send winter supplies to the dead by burning paper clothes and money. Mother was vigilant and in mid-2005 had my siblings refurbish the gravestones. She insisted it be done before the winter snows. They obliged.

Mother called me in Chicago, where I now live, to brag about her accomplishment. ‘I can now relax,’ she said. Two weeks later, I received a middle-of-the-night call from my younger sister. ‘Mother has had a stroke,’ she said. Mother never recovered. On the night of December 31, she died.

We buried her ashes on the hillside next to Father and Grandma and added another gravestone. * * * 130

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Father was about my age when he began his plan to bury Grandma. I find myself being hit by memories of my parents, sometimes with such intensity that I have to stop what I’m doing and let them play out in my mind. Once in a while, I will wake up from a vivid dream believing they were actually talking to me as if they were alive. On occasion, sadness envelops me and I wish time could reverse so I might visit them with the knowledge I have now.

Little by little, I find myself resorting to tradition and ritual for consolation.

At Qing Ming I set up a small altar in my Chicago home and put a couple of apples in front of pictures of Father, Mother and Grandma and light some incense sticks. I kneel before it and ask for their blessing. Sometimes I murmur to them news from my life, or even seek their advice on something that’s bothering me. Each time I visit China I set aside time to visit their graves. I take thick stacks of fake US dollars to burn and say, ‘Father, don’t be too frugal. Grandma is taken care of. Treat yourself to something nice.’

Father’s obsession with ‘the future of the family’ is starting to make sense.

Perhaps he was searching for comfort as I do now; a traditional burial for his mother was something tangible he could do to express his gratitude for Grandma having seen him through plague, flood and war. Perhaps Father felt acutely the limitations on his power to change anything, and his small effort to protect a shred of the past, even as the Party sought to erase all traces of it, was to be the mark he left behind.

My little brother has stayed close to home – he even works for the same company as Father – and he was only a little surprised when he received a phone call from Mingsheng, who was still head of Grandma’s home village.

He said a real estate company wanted to buy the land where Grandpa was buried. He had heard I lived in the United States and wanted to know if we were willing to outbid the realtor. ‘My brother is a writer,’ little brother told him. Mingsheng understood.

The past is tenacious. Unasked, my brother and I have inherited Father’s quest and, when the time comes, we will have to decide whether to take Grandpa to join Grandma on the Xian hillside. It is a lovely hillside. One could spend an afterlife there.

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Machinas II (2010) by Brendale Asinas Tadeo. Mixed media on canvas, 152.4cm x 121.9cm. Courtesy of Gallery NOVA, Manila, Philippines.

Grasshoppers O Thiam Chin

I

have always enjoyed being alone. Unlike boys my age who play football or fight video-game monsters, I prefer to do things by myself. One of my favourite pastimes is catching grasshoppers, which are quite easy to trap if you have the patience. I can spend hours searching for them in the large grassy field near the kopitiam, the coffee shop where my mother works. A food hawker, she has to be up by six o’clock every day to buy ingredients from the wet market.

I like to wake up at the same time she does and watch her prepare for the day.

She moves around the flat with light footsteps, hardly making any noise, and when she’s ready to leave she always reminds me to behave while she’s away.

As soon as the front door closes I jump up from the sofa, peep through the window facing the corridor and watch her limp towards the lift lobby.

When she returns from the wet market, she’ll call for me, telling me to come have breakfast before it’s cold. She always remembers to buy my favourite fishball mee-hoon, and it’ll still be piping hot when I dig in. My mother is a woman with quiet, simple ways. She grew up in a kampong and often tells me stories about her childhood. That was back in the early 70s, when there were still kampongs throughout Singapore – clusters of single-storey, zinc-roofed houses nestled closely together – where people tended small fruit-and-vegetable fields and reared chickens, ducks and pigs. One thing she never mentions in front of me is my father, and because I know it’s something that upsets her I never ask about him. He has become the invisible person who exists between us.

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We have lived in Ang Mo Kio, in the heart of Singapore, for as long as I can remember, though my mother tells me I was born in a kampong in Choa Chu Kang, in the north-western part of the island. She says I was in such a rush to enter the world that she didn’t make it to the hospital in time, and I was born in the very house where she started life thirty-five years earlier. She says I’m a kampong boy through and through, even though I now live on a housing estate among towering blocks of flats.

I’m only twelve but my mother tells me I behave like a person thrice my age. I don’t know what she means, though I can sense her pleasure in saying this so I just nod. Last year she declared I was old enough to take on adult responsibilities and gave me the keys to the flat.

Some days, when she’s at the wet market, I wander around our neighbourhood. I like the mornings, when the air is crisp and the estate is slowly rousing from sleep.

During my secret jaunts I often come across an old couple who like to stroll around a small hibiscus and bougainvillea garden near the estate. They move slowly, in step with each other, looking at the flowers, sometimes pausing to touch them. The old man holds onto the woman’s arm with a fierce grip, afraid of tumbling, but it takes only a glance at the woman’s face to know that she would never let him fall. When they bend their heads in unison, in close conversation, their white hair looks like a soufflé of clouds hovering above their faces. I often wonder what they are saying, what they have been saying all these years, and imagine what it’s like to be with someone for so long. Then they notice me and smile, and I walk away, embarrassed by my thoughts.

Occasionally I see the dirty man who sleeps on a wooden bench. I know he lives nearby, in a block where the old folk stay, and spends his days roaming the neighbourhood, cursing at nobody in particular, jabbing his fingers in the air. I have seen him before at the kopitiam, where my mother gives him food or a few dollars, out of pity. She told me his children abandoned him when they moved to a better housing estate. I look at his crusty heels, embedded with jagged lines of dirt, and think about the ground he has to cover each day to expend his anger.

I rarely stray from my world: a few blocks of flats, a garden, my school, the wet market and the kopitiam. My mother says there are dangers everywhere, even though we can’t see them, and we have to be alert at all times. I try to 134

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look out for these dangers, not knowing what they are and, so far, the only threatening thing I have encountered has been a mangy, agitated dog. When I have stayed out long enough, I head home, change into my sleep clothes and wait for my mother to return.

My mother refuses to tell me why she limps, saying only that she had an accident a long time ago. It was from not being aware of dangers, she once warned. I look at her uneven legs, the ungainly up-and-down movement of her body when she walks, and know there is more to her story than she is willing to reveal.

At the kopitiam my mother sells popiah, spring rolls, a trade she picked up from her father, my late grandfather, something she’s been doing since I can remember. I help at her stall after school and at weekends but when it’s quiet I like to play in the field, catching handfuls of grasshoppers with the transparent plastic bags my mother uses for takeaways. Their bulbous eyes, angular faces and compact, segmented bodies fascinate me. When I shake the bag they’re in and bring it to my ear I can feel the insistent thumping of the grasshoppers, like fast, tiny heartbeats.

Auntie Siew Bee works as a server at the drinks stall next to my mother’s and gives me canned drinks when her boss is not around. During the long lull between lunch and dinner, when there are few customers, she and my mother talk in the kopitiam while separating sticky popiah skins or plucking black seed coats from the heads of bean sprouts. They let me listen in on their conversations but if the topic becomes personal my mother will ask me to play in the field or run an errand.

Once, when my mother was busy at the stall, Auntie Siew Bee sat beside me and put her hand on my back, her eyes sad but knowing.

‘Your mother has had a hard life,’ she said. ‘It could have been better, if not for your scoundrel father.’ My ears latched on to her words, eager to hear what she had to tell me. She hesitated, but continued. ‘Your father treated her badly for many years, and your mother couldn’t do a thing because she had you to think about. He beat her up when he was angry or drunk, and one time he hurt her so badly she had to be hospitalised for a week. That’s why she limps.’ Auntie Siew Bee suddenly drew back, caught off-guard by her own words. ‘Maybe you were too young to remember.’ Then she rose to clear the empty plates and beer glasses from a nearby table, leaving me even more curious about my parents’ past.

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Sometimes, after spending an afternoon chasing and catching grasshoppers, I lie on my back in the grassy field and marvel at the changing moods above. I try to take in the whole sky, stretching my vision as wide as possible, aware that there are parts beyond my scope. The never-endingness of the world makes it impossible to take everything in or comprehend it all at once. I gaze at my grasshoppers and wonder what the world looks like through their eyes.

When I show my mother the grasshoppers I’ve caught she tells me to release them. She says insects are like humans, just smaller, and that they too have a life. When I open the bag and wait for the grasshoppers to jump out, the strongest, with thin, sharp-angled hind legs, leap out first, propelling themselves forward, landing on the flat blades of grass. It sometimes amazes me to see how high and far they can hop, given their tiny bodies. In school, during physical education tests, I often fail my standing broad jump by a few centimetres, no matter how hard I try.

To force the smaller grasshoppers to flee I give the bag a few rough shakes but there’s usually one left. I reach in and slowly bring it out, holding it gently in my fist and feeling it ticking with life. When I open my hand the grasshopper doesn’t move, then in the next beat springs away, disappearing into the dense grass. * * * The kopitiam has several stalls that sell other kinds of food, like duck rice, fish soup, rojak, fried carrot cake and zi-char. It draws its customers from the surrounding blocks of flats; people come for their daily meals, or a snack.

When my mother is too busy or tired to cook, I eat there, although my mother frowns at this and says the dishes are unhealthy, oily or lacking in proper nutrients. But when the stall owners give me meals free of charge my mother never tells me to say no, instead reminding me to thank them. When I’m at the kopitiam the stall owners talk to me, ruffle my hair and give me money for snacks.

Among the stall owners I especially like Uncle Ben, who sells duck rice and wears an apron stained with dark gravy. He owned a farm when he was much younger. Then the government came along and offered him a large sum of money to close his business and move onto a housing estate.

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He didn’t have a choice so he took the money, slaughtered the livestock and invited his kampong friends for a feast that lasted three long days. At the end, there was so much food left he had to ask his guests to take home doggie bags weighing more than five kilograms each. ‘Can you imagine how much food we had and how much was left?’ he said, stretching out his hefty arms in a proud gesture. ‘If you had been there, I’d have fed you ’til you were as plump as a piglet, not like now, so skinny.’ Then he tickled my sides with his greasy fingers until I broke out in giggles.

He once told me he knew my father way before I was born. In fact, he had hired him as an assistant cook and that was how my parents met. I must have looked surprised because the expression on his face shifted ever so slightly as he leaned in and told me this was our secret. From him, I found out how my father had a quick temper and drank beyond his limits.

‘I told him to stop but he refused to listen,’ Uncle Ben said. ‘Even when your mother was pregnant he drank like a fish, spending your mother’s money and his on alcohol. In the end I had to fire him.’

When I asked about my father’s whereabouts he said he could be dead for all he knew; that he had not seen him since he disappeared eight years ago, after the loan sharks started hounding him.

‘He really landed your mother in deep shit,’ Uncle Ben said. ‘I’m sorry to say it but your father was good for nothing. Bastard! Luckily I had some savings I could lend your mother. If not, I can’t imagine what would have happened to you or her.’ Sensing he might have crossed the line he softened his tone and changed the topic. After this I couldn’t picture my father without feeling shame and repulsion.

Sometimes, when he was in the mood to talk, Uncle Ben told me stories about his childhood. When he was my age he kept crickets in small glass bottles and trained them to fight. Tiger, his favourite, won against all its opponents and helped earn him extra pocket money. But one day he was playing with it and, when he wasn’t looking, a stray cat crept up and ate Tiger, leaving behind only a severed brown leg. Uncle Ben buried it under a rambutan tree beside his kampong house and gave up cricket fighting. * * *

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A few days before my mother’s birthday, her thirty-sixth, I planned a surprise. From my daily pocket money and the change the stall owners gave me I saved ten dollars, which I hoped was enough to buy a small cake and a gift. A few months earlier I had discovered her date of birth from her identification card, which she kept in a plastic case in her wardrobe. She looks very different in the photograph on the card, with long, dark hair tucked behind her ears and a bright, lively spark in her eyes. I stared at the picture, trying to find my mother behind the smiling young girl. My mother doesn’t like me going through her things so I had to take great care to put everything back in place. Once, she caught me rummaging through the drawer of her dresser, where she keeps jewellery, letters and wedding photographs, and caned me. She told me it was wrong to look through other people’s belongings and that she didn’t raise me to be a thief. When I asked her who the man in the photograph was, she brought the cane down on my thighs again, crying hard even as she left long streaks all over my legs.

On her birthday I headed to the neighbourhood bakery, where I realised I could afford only a slice and not a whole cake. I deliberated for some time before choosing her favourite flavour: pandan. I also bought a photo frame with a border of plastic flowers and inserted a photograph of us taken during my birthday trip to Sentosa Island the year before. In it, she had her arm across my tanned shoulders and was holding a hand above her eyes, shielding them from the sun. I put the cake in the fridge and hid the frame under her pillow.

Then I went to the kopitiam and waited for my mother to finish work.

It was dinner time and the place was packed with customers eating while watching the news on a TV set hanging from the wall. The sticky smell of deep frying and cigarette smoke suffused the kopitiam with an oppressive warmth. Drink orders flew through the air as servers moved from table to table, clearing cups and relaying requests. From a table of beer drinkers a man burst out laughing, inciting another with ‘Bottoms up!’ A short queue had formed in front of Uncle Ben’s stall, where he was busy chopping up glistening roasted ducks. My mother saw me and pushed out two orders of popiah, indicating with a nod where to take the plates. I served the food and dropped the payment into a large tin can in which my mother kept her money. There was a constant stream of customers and I had to double up, 138

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serving the popiah and washing plates and chopsticks. For the next hour or so I forgot why I was there in the first place.

When the dinner crowd started to dwindle and the ingredients ran out, my mother called it a day. I offered to help with the dishes but she shoved a two-dollar note in my hand and told me to buy what I wanted. I put the money in my pocket and walked to the edge of the dark field. The sky was the colour of a bruise and speckled with stars. I turned and looked back into the brightness of the kopitiam, at my mother busy behind her stall, cleaning and putting away the cooking utensils. I like to observe my mother when she’s unconscious of her movements, the rhythms of her body in motion.

When she looked around for me I could feel my body moving in response, taking a step forward, towards her. When she was finally done, and the lights above the stall were switched off, I returned to the kopitiam and we walked home together.

We sauntered through the neighbourhood in the cool breeze, cutting through the outdoor car park. A black cat lying on the hood of a Honda Civic stirred and jumped off as we approached. Near our block of flats the smelly man came up to us, barefoot and swearing under his breath.

He held out his dirt-streaked hand and stopped us in our tracks. He looked frightened, frightening. My mother dug around in her pocket and dropped a few coins into his hand. The man trundled on, his hand still extended and resumed his tirade. My mother stared at his retreating shape and sighed.

‘Do you know what today is?’ I asked, hoping to change the mood.

‘Today? It’s a Thursday, right?’ she said, turning to look at me. Then she continued walking, her limp more pronounced, heavier than usual.

‘Guess, guess. It’s a special day, don’t you remember?’

‘All I know is it’s been a long, tiring day and I can’t wait to have a shower and relax. Then we can have our dinner.’

When we arrived home I dragged her to the refrigerator. She found the cake and with a finger scraped the whipped cream off the top and tasted it.

‘It’s delicious,’ she remarked, holding her smile.

‘Now you can have the rest,’ she said, passing the slice to me.

Then I took her to her bedroom and told her to search for the second surprise. She laughed, lifted my head, kissed it and went to find her present.

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on her bedside table. Her features dissolved into a softness I hadn’t seen in a long time.

‘Happy birthday, mum,’ I said. She hugged me and announced that we were going out for a big dinner to celebrate.

Walking towards Ang Mo Kio Central, my mother held my hand. It was slightly past nine and the streetlights created overlapping ovals of deep yellow on the ground. Horns blasted while traffic streamed past us on the street. High above, among the dark branches of tall trees, flocks of birds cackled as they settled in for the night. Amid the cacophony, we could hear crickets chirping.

‘Do you know that it is only the male cricket that chirps? It makes the sound by rubbing its wings together,’ I said, having picked this up from a science book from the school library.

‘Really?’

‘Yup. And do you know that Uncle Ben used to keep crickets and put them in fights to earn extra pocket money?’

‘He told you that?’

‘Yes, but he gave it up when his favourite cricket was eaten by a cat.’ My mother nodded in amusement.

‘Now, my turn. Do you know the grasshopper only jumps forwards, never backwards?’ my mother said. I looked at her, astonished.

‘How did you know?’ I asked.

‘I used to catch grasshoppers too, when I was your age. With my bare hands, not with a plastic bag. Next time, before you catch them, try to observe how they move. You’ll see I’m right.’

‘I will,’ I said.

‘It’s important to be like the grasshopper,’ my mother added, ‘to keep moving forward, especially when times are bad.’ She stared straight ahead, keeping her stride and tightening her hold on me. It was hard to read the expression on her face, backlit by streetlights. Then she turned to me, smiled, and said: ‘Remember this, my son.’

As I walked beside her, I remembered the tiny grasshopper beating in my loose fist and the first leap it took as it jumped out of my hand into a different world, one far from where it came. I tried to imagine myself as the grasshopper – always leaping forward towards the unknown, never turning back – and wondered how it was possible to face the new without fear. At 140

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the back of my mind, I sensed something – knowledge budding, taking root, spreading. I’d soon have to leave behind my childhood, my entire history of twelve years. The thought scared me, like a freshly discovered fear, and filled me with anticipation.

As Ang Mo Kio Central loomed I set my sights on the bright dazzling lights, hoping that one day, like the grasshopper, I’d reach the place I was meant to be. I slipped my hand out of my mother’s and stretched my fingers.

‘We’re almost there,’ my mother said.

‘Yes, we are,’ I replied.

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27 Martyrs (2007) by Minam Apang. Ink, ballpoint pen on handmade paper, 21.5in x 29.75in. Courtesy of Chatterjee and Lal, Mumbai.

Liberation Road

Poetry Min K. Kang

Korean Hillside I’ve arrived at a westerly mountainside, and it’s lined with grassy mounds of dirt. At my garden, Grandparents lay vibrant plastic flowers on a mound. I sing to it child-flower songs and lie on my back. My feet face the mountaintop, and from that backward slope, I fall into the sky.

Grandmother’s cursing strikes me down to earth; she has thrown a shot of clear liquor onto her father’s grave, roaring, You have died too soon.

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History of Korea through Language My grandfather ticked his tongue at me, sounding the clicks that women make in markets when talking ill of some neighbour’s daughter, when he learned that I can’t read hanja.

(Once upon a time, there was a great Korean king who declared: Let’s stop using hanja; we need to match our blocklike tongue to a new alphabet.

No more Chinese.)

But even with the birth of the native phonetic script five centuries ago, I find myself struggling, deciphering pictographs that still exist in high newspapers and theses, so here’s a manual to help you get started.

We use the Chinese symbols of natural elements for the days of the week, like the “sun” for Sunday and the “moon” for Monday, but our coincidence with English ends there. Thursday’s for “wood”, not Thor, and Friday intrigues me more than the rest, for it has two different sounds, swapping sides within its contexts. It is always geum for “gold”, unless it is someone’s last name, like my mother’s, which is Kim, like short for “Kimberly”, but it’s actually Gim, which sounds just like the word for “seaweed”.

In English, you can call it just that, “seaweed”, or even “laver” like the Welsh, but please never call it nori like the Japanese, since you’ll need another manual that rewinds thirty-five imperious years of oppression behind my request.

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No Country for Old Women Sandip Roy Photographs by Bishan Samaddar

I

n her old age my mother has discovered television soap operas. Bengali television soaps all follow much the same script: sprawling, squabbling, extended middle-class families of feuding brothers, conniving wives and formidable mothers-in-law. My mother complains about how slowly the story always creaks along – by episode 983 every plot permutation has been exhausted – but at 7.30pm every day she sits down in front of the television set to watch the lives of other families unfold. As do her cousins, friends, neighbours – all people of her generation. Their own families are too busy, or live in another city, or another country on another continent. Television producers grow rich churning out these ‘surrogate’ families, as does dream factory Bollywood. In the five-handkerchief hit film Baghban, Amitabh Bachchan, once famous for rebellious ‘angry young man’ roles, and Hema Malini, once a celluloid ‘dream girl’, play an ageing couple shuttled back and forth between their busy children, unable to live together, stealing tender moments by telephone late at night. My mother loves it.

The breakdown of the extended family has become the arch villain in the story of growing old in a new India, where eighty-one million people are now older than sixty. As India greys, nostalgia for the extended family has become a national obsession of the middle class. In the second-century BCE Hindu epic the Ramayana there is the story of Shravana, the devoted son of blind old parents. In calendar art he is depicted as a young man carrying 145

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his parents in baskets suspended from a yoke across his shoulders, burden turned into filial duty. When I was growing up my great-grandmother ruled our household, putting jars of pickles out in the sun and soaking up the neighbourhood gossip. As her health failed, she sat on the veranda playing endless games of patience. She died in her nineties, surrounded by family.

My parents looked after her in the end days, just as they looked after my grandmother and my grandfather. Whether it was love or duty, I don’t know.

In India, it’s not always easy to tell the difference.

I met Gauri Nandy, an anxious-looking widow in her mid-seventies, who has left her family in her old age. She now lives at Naba Nir, a home for elderly women in a residential neighbourhood in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), where she moved after her sons and daughters-in-law assaulted her. She had refused to sign over to them the title of her house. ‘They pushed me down,’ she says softly. ‘I hurt my leg badly. I had to go to the hospital.

There was blood in my stool.’ Now she shares a blue dormitory room with a dozen other women. There’s a garlanded black-and-white photograph of her late husband on her nightstand, a picture of the monkey god Hanuman and a small potted plant.

‘I had a garden in my house,’ she says. ‘My husband gave me a little spade.

He would bring me plants. I remember my plants – red lotus, jasmine, bel.

Now I don’t know who looks after them. I miss them a lot.’

Nandy says she did her best raising her sons, making sure they were educated. One works for the local electricity board, the other at the tannery.

Their father helped secure their jobs. ‘If sons act like this, what can we do?

Every family has this problem now. The times are bad.’

It is a commonly heard refrain across India these days: ‘The times are bad.’

They’re not, not really. India has arguably never had it so good. In 2009, when most of the world was mired in recession, India’s gross domestic product expanded by six per cent. Prosperity is everywhere apparent in the emergent ‘New India’. Khan Market in New Delhi bustles even in the middle of a weekday afternoon with college students and young professionals crowding its crêperies and coffee bars. An autographed poster of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean is pasted inside the window of a beauty salon, which claims to have introduced him to the black eyeliner used to such striking effect in the film franchise. GQ, Marie Claire and People crowd the magazine racks of news kiosks – these are the Indian editions, with beautiful brown 146

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Gauri Nandy laments the breakdown of filial bonds in modern Indian families. She moved into Naba Nir, Kolkata, after her sons and daughters-in-law assaulted her.

faces on the covers. In the midst of all this is a Plexiglas donation box with the sign: Donate – Older Persons Need Your Help.

‘We have expressions in India, like, I was thinking about you, you are going to live a hundred years,’ says Himansu Rath, who runs the Agewell Foundation, which has put these donation boxes all over New Delhi. But such courtesy may now be seen as a curse. ‘Because of economic changes old people are being made to feel redundant.’

Rath blames ‘economic change’. My mother blames changing attitudes towards the elderly. ‘Younger people have no time for us,’ she says. ‘They are so busy. The computer and television is pulling them away.’ Sociologist Ashis Nandy says it is a little of both: ‘I think a framework of individualism has come to dominate the urban middle class. There is an element of distance, of the western kind, creeping into the relationship with their parents.’

Irudaya Rajan, a demographer at the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, Kerala, blames migration – internal and external. ‘I met a lady who ... told me she had three sons, two daughters. Now she is living with three dogs and two cats.’

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But eventually it all circles back to family. Prem Kumar Raja, the secretary of the Nightingales Medical Trust in Bangalore, claims that the breakdown in family support for the elderly is a relatively recent phenomenon. ‘Until even the 1990s ... elders were taken care of within the family. But with globalisation, the joint-family system is breaking down.’ * * * Sarah Lamb is a professor of anthropology at Brandeis University in Massachusetts in the United States. She has written extensively about ageing in India and says there was never really a golden age of the Indian family.

‘There were always old people being kicked out by their children,’ says Lamb.

‘It’s just that now you blame modernity and globalisation.’

Lamb says that despite the nationwide anxiety about the fate of the family, about eighty per cent of Indians still live in some kind of multigenerational household, although more of India’s elderly do live alone now than ever before. It might be that the plight of the elderly living alone has just been making the evening news these days. Debasish Roy, joint commissioner of police in Kolkata, cites the case of a senior citizen who died in his apartment. ‘After some time the smell came out and the neighbours called the police,’ says Roy. ‘This kind of thing didn’t happen in Bengal in the past.’

I blanch every time I hear these stories. My mother lives downstairs from my sister and her family. Yet for much of the day she is home alone.

I remember walking out of the gym in San Francisco one morning and receiving a text message from my sister: ‘Mom fractured pubic bone. Don’t worry.’ My mother was lucky. She fell in the morning before everyone left for work.

Roy says every police station in Kolkata now has a twenty-four-hour helpline and officers assigned to watch out for seniors. He is trying to persuade a local organisation to donate telephones with large number pads to the elderly who have trouble managing normal mobile phones.

As with many things in India, any action can seem Sisyphean: by 2020 there will be 140 million people older than sixty; by 2050 that group will represent one in four of a total population of 1.57 billion; and the fastestgrowing segment is those aged eighty or more, with United Nations statistics 148

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projecting forty-eight million Indians in that demographic bracket by 2050, more than the entire population of California today.

‘We are not keeping pace with anything,’ says A.B. Dey, the doctor in charge of geriatric services at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. ‘There are lots of promises regarding future growth and future programmes. But nothing much has happened.’

The well-being of the elderly is addressed in India’s constitution, which says in Article 41 that the state shall, within the limits of economic capacity, make effective provision for securing the right to public assistance in old age. A National Policy for Older Persons was put in place in 1999 to provide for the financial and health needs of the elderly and to set up geriatric care facilities and free hospices in every district. But a decade later, Mathew Cherian, who runs HelpAge India, says as little as ten per cent of the plan’s promised infrastructure is in place, which he blames on the inter-ministerial commission that oversees the plan’s implementation. ‘It has met only four times in the past ten years,’ says Cherian.

To be fair, if the government is having trouble putting its house in order, so is India’s populace. Rath, of the Agewell Foundation, says Indians are still coming to terms with the consequences of greater longevity: in 1960, they could expect to live an average of 42.3 years; in 2009, life expectancy was 69.9 years, according to the World Bank. People in their seventies and eighties have ‘absolutely no experience’ of what it means to live so long, says Rath. ‘This is really the first generation of old people,’ he says, and India is not ready. ‘There is no financial security and there is no health security.’

Pensions are for the privileged few – eighty-seven percent of India’s elderly do not have them – and that means most rely on their children to provide for them. Rath says elders are not used to demanding their rights and would rather go without. ‘You ask your father for 3,000 rupees to buy a pair of jeans and he will give you the money. You ask him to buy himself two undershirts.

And he will say no need. Old people are used to denying themselves.’

But that has landed many of them literally on the street. Cherian says he is seeing increasing cases where children dump their aged parents in some unfamiliar part of the city, figuring they will never be able to find their way home. HelpAge tries to reunite the families, which puzzles me: you cannot force children to love and respect their parents. Love, my mother always says, flows downwards. You can’t force it flow the other way if it does not want to.

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‘You forget this is India,’ says Cherian. Economic pressures might fracture families, but social guilt – as Cherian puts it, neighbours saying, ‘Oh, look at these children, they left their parents on the road’ – helps cobble them back together. That may work in cases of outright abandonment, but hidden from public scrutiny is the benign neglect that comes from confining the elderly to a single small room and feeding them one meal a day. Such neglect worries the government, so much so that children are now forced by law to care for their parents.

‘Elders are supposed to be respected,’ says Gauri Nandy at Naba Nir in Kolkata. ‘Do we now have to teach them that?’ * * * India is facing nowhere near the ‘grey crises’ of such countries as Italy and Japan, where declining birth rates and increasing life expectancy mean fewer younger workers to support growing numbers of seniors. India’s fertility rate is still fairly high and is not expected to drop to near-replacement until about 2050, so using robotics to assist in care for the elderly or opening the country to more immigration are not on any agendas. ‘Times are changing, but there is no shortage of family members to look after the elderly,’ says Lamb. Yet more and more Indians are ending up alone in their old age.

Lalita Rao lives in a pay-for-stay home in Bangalore, a city that in the last two decades has boomed as India’s hi-tech capital, a hot spot for the technorati. There is a Café Coffee Day serving caramel macchiatos on every block and the hottest civic argument seems to be about how late bars should stay open, although that’s not much of a topic in Rao’s quiet street of neat, modest middle-class houses. The television burbles in the front room, which is furnished with comfortable chairs and couches and shoes are left at the front door. Rao, once a table-tennis champion, now uses a walking frame.

‘No one could beat my backhand shot,’ she says. ‘Now I cannot walk much.

The doctor has said there’s a blood clot.’

Rao’s husband was a company director and their married life took them all over India. After he died she tried Singapore, where her son lives, but found it difficult. ‘They only have time on Sundays. Even then they are washing clothes and things. It’s difficult for them also. I don’t want to give trouble to anybody. That’s why I came here.’ Rao is seventy-six, a little hard 150

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Former table-tennis champion Lalita Rao lives in a pay-for-stay property in Bangalore. ‘No one could beat my backhand shot,’ she says. ‘Now I cannot walk much.’

of hearing, but cheerful and garrulous. ‘I like this place. It’s so calm,’ she says, and smiles, ‘No botheration.’

I tell her I live in California and Rao becomes excited. Her granddaughter lives on the other side of the country, in New Jersey, but her grandson is in California. ‘Do you want his address? I have it somewhere.’ And she pulls a plastic bag stuffed with papers from under her bed and starts rummaging, extracting a small tattered notebook containing her grandson’s address. Her grandson, it turns out, lives about half an hour from my place, but I don’t tell her that. I don’t want to visit him and be reminded of how far away my own mother is. I don’t want to remember that when my father died, by the time I changed planes twice and reached Kolkata, he had already been cremated.

He had become a garlanded photograph on a nightstand.

‘Facilities are very good here,’ says Rao. ‘I have no problem. I want no botheration.’ It’s her favourite phrase – ‘no botheration’ – and she repeats it like a mantra. * * * 151

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Above: A common sink at the end of the corridor at Gharaunda, an old-age home in New Delhi.

A portrait of John F. Kennedy presides over tea-time at Gharaunda.

Indira Jaiprakash, a gerontologist in Bangalore, says the provision of care facilities for the aged in India dates back to the 1720s and that what is on offer is much the same as anywhere else in the world: many are run by religious orders, some are funded through philanthropy and government facilities are often little more than ill-equipped and understaffed warehouses.

The privately funded Gharaunda home on the outskirts of New Delhi is built around a central covered courtyard, which has a large dining table running down the middle and for some odd reason a framed portrait of former US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy on the wall. On the terrace outside is a neatly trimmed garden, where one can hear the screech of peacocks and the lowing of water buffalo. Gharaunda is managed by G.S. Wadia, a retired businessman, who also lives there. He likes to recite Hindi couplets, most of which are in praise of Ritesh Jain, the industrialist who funds the home.

‘Everything is free here,’ says Wadia. Gharaunda has twenty-four residents, two to a room, he says. Meals are served three times a day, with milk at 152

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Raw deal? Seniors at Gharaunda play cards for several hours every day.

dinner. Medical services are free. I notice an elderly woman watching us as we drink cups of hot milky tea. Sandhya Mukherjee is Bengali, as am I, and she wants to tell me her story. Her husband is dead. Her parents are dead.

Her son died at twenty-four. She has a daughter, but her son-in-law does not want to keep her.

‘All day I get bored here,’ she says. ‘But what to do? We have to live.’

Then she leans forward to deliver the gossip about the residents fighting over food and clothes. ‘People fight about who is getting what. Maxis. Petticoats.

Shirts. Everything. People fight about who is eating too much. But at least the boss is good.’ Mukherjee would prefer to live with her daughter and grandsons and is uncomfortable being the recipient of charity, which is seen as a stigma.

‘In India, an old-age home is the last resort,’ says Jaiprakash.

Aloka Mitra, the secretary of the organisation that runs Naba Nir in Kolkata, tries to recreate a sense of family for women who have suddenly 153

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found themselves stripped of their own. Mitra calls the residents ‘mashi’, a polite term meaning ‘auntie’, though at sixty-nine she is older than many who live here. Mitra says she encourages the residents to participate in running the home, but while they can ‘poke their noses into the kitchen’ she asks them not to ‘shout at the cook’. The women seem genuinely fond of Mitra and they fuss over her, bringing cups of tea and snacks of puffed rice.

As we talk, an elderly woman with thick spectacles and pigtails looks into the room and says, ‘Hena Dutta died last night. Do you know? She was that tall lady. Always wore a nightie. She slipped and fell in the bathroom.’ Mitra commiserates. She says when she started Naba Nir she was thirty-seven. She was a new social worker with no experience and was terrified about how she would handle death.

‘Then Katyani Mukherjee died. She was this little old lady who would always hug me. She knew the sound of my car and would greet me at the door. She passed away from heart failure fifteen minutes after lunch. I was very scared because I thought the other ladies would be traumatised. I went and bought perfume, sandalwood paste, flowers and a new silk sari. We dressed her body in the sari and decorated her with flowers. We burned joss sticks. She looked so beautifully peaceful. She had no relatives except a grandson. Next day, the other old ladies came to me and said, “We are quite willing to die if you will give us that kind of a send off.”’

But within this apparent sisterhood of grey hair there is a core of pain, says Ruprekha Chowdhury, who is studying ageing in Bengal. This is a group of women who devoted their lives to providing for others, as daughters, wives, mothers and mothers-in-law. ‘They were the ones who fed everyone first and ate afterwards,’ she says. ‘It is painful to have to push each other to stand in line for food.’ Chowdhury says many women feel they have lost their sense of self; some cling to the stringent rules of food and dress in widowhood as a way of redefining themselves. When my father passed away my sister and I insisted that my mother not give up fish and meat. Those were the old ways, we said. My mother agreed. We thought we were being modern and progressive, but my mother said she just didn’t want to be a bother. ‘I didn’t want to have to have food cooked specially for me,’ she said.

For some women, old age can be liberating, says Lamb, who studied ageing in the villages of Bengal for her book White Saris and Sweet Mangoes.

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Esther, eighty-two, unmarried, was brought by her brother to the Sancta Maria Convent old-age home run by nuns in Kerala. A polio victim, with a seventh-grade education, Esther keeps a journal.

she says. ‘In the US that would be a negative thing but in the Indian village that was positive. They could go out freely in public.’ Lamb even met an old woman who walked around the village with her breasts bared.

Whether old age in India brings with it more or less freedom in the eyes of society at large, the overriding concern is financial. ‘They have no savings,’ says Chowdhury, which leaves many dependent on others for food, clothing and shelter.

Some depend on government, others on God. The Sancta Maria Convent old-age home run by nuns in Trivandrum, Kerala, hosts twenty-six women.

Esther, who says she is eighty-two, has been living there for sixteen years, almost as long as the home has been in operation. With her short cropped hair, hands twisted from polio, Esther breaks into Malayalam hymns with little persuasion. She writes in a journal every day.

Swarnamma, who is partially paralysed, says: ‘My health is bad. I can’t do much except help with vegetable cutting. I go to church and pray.’

Jesus is everywhere in the women’s rooms, on calendars and bedside tables, even presiding over the light switch. ‘I was a Hindu but now I pray to everyone,’ says Swarnamma.

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Above left: Swarnamma, a resident of Sancta Maria Convent, on her bed. Some of the residents say they are too ill to do much except go to church and pray.

Above right: A resident of Sancta Maria, which houses twenty-six women, many of them destitute.

Radhamani has been at Sancta Maria since her husband and son died. She shares a room with two other women.

She shares her room with two other women, each stashing their meagre possessions – dresses, perhaps a few ornaments, no photographs – in a locker.

Radhamani moved to Sancta Maria after her husband and son died about seven years ago. She had to sell their house to pay their medical bills.

Mariakutty never married and worked as a maid in private homes before age left her too weak. She has two sisters but has lost track of them.

‘We have feelings. We sometimes fight,’ says Radhamani. ‘But the sisters are nice.’

Aloka Mitra bullied and cajoled government bureaucrats into releasing funds at a time when the government was loath to admit that India could not take care of its ageing. She remembers a minister telling her, ‘You ladies have nothing better to do. So you are thinking up all these problems which don’t exist.’ Mitra’s persistence led to Naba Nir and another home for men and women.

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Mariakutty, eighty, has lived at Sancta Maria for twenty years. She is unmarried and has no real family.

Mitra’s son and daughter live in London. She says she wonders if in ten years she and her husband won’t need something as well. ‘There are a lot of people living alone in huge houses,’ she says. There is ‘enormous growing demand’ among her friends for care facilities aimed at the middle class that offer self-contained comfort with the reassurance that help is close at hand.

‘They say “Aloka, we will pay.”’ * * * Ankur Gupta is counting on that growing demand and his company, Ashiana, specialises in building retirement properties. ‘An old-age home is a negative product,’ he says, ‘if a person has no choice but to go.’ Gupta is selling an alternative to living with the children and speaks in PowerPointese: ‘We define independent living in two bases – one is needs based. One is enjoyment based. Needs based means security, police-verified maids, emergency response units, grab rails in the toilets. Enjoyment based means activities like a bonsai plantation, photography, ladies’ coffee break, badminton.’

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Ashiana has opened one complex in Bhiwadi, a couple of hours from New Delhi and prices start at 1.5 million rupees. Another complex is planned for Lavasa in western India. There, apartments range from 2.8 million to 7.5 million rupees. Gupta says, ‘The response is fantastic.’

Bhiwadi is what might be described as a “gated community”, solidly fenced and accessible through security checkpoints only. The billboard outside reads, ‘At Ashiana we nurture smiles.’ Ashiana Utsav is spread over twenty-seven acres and the cookie-cutter apartment buildings are laid out as in any other complex. The first thing I notice is how quiet it is. There is a hushed air about the place that doesn’t feel like India. The squash court is empty in the baking sun. It’s siesta time and the clubhouse is deserted. At the community centre I meet Major Saurabh Sharma, an ex-army officer who manages Ashiana’s senior residents.

‘The expectations are very high,’ he says. ‘I will be honest. There are a lot of people who are retired civil servants, army officers, corporates.’ He says his job is to strike a balance between the amenities they enjoyed previously and the security they want in retirement. A vegetable vendor comes every day with a cart and goes from building to building so residents can have their bazaar fix. Never mind that the vendor has been screened, can come during pre-approved hours only, must wear a security pass and, says Sharma, ‘You don’t get to bargain.’

Kailash Malhotra lives in the community. His children live in Florida, but he says, ‘At my age, without medical insurance, my children would go bankrupt.’ Ashiana is a good option for him. But it’s really a first step in moving into elder-care homes. It might have bonsai classes for seniors but there are no nursing facilities. That’s planned, says Gupta. * * * Sannyasa is the last of the four stages of life according to Hindu tradition, when one renounces family and moves to the forest to meditate and prepare for the next life. I cannot imagine my mother, who still micro-manages the dinner menu, bargains with the fishmonger and gossips with her cousins, just as she did a quarter of a century ago, renouncing anything. But the idea of renunciation remains powerful, an invisible current in Indian life. Dr A.B. Dey at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences says Hindus believe 158

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Kailash Malhotra leans on a walking stick as he leaves the dining hall of Ashiana Utsav, an upmarket retirement community a couple of hours from New Delhi.

in renunciation at the end of life and then rebirth. ‘So even if you offer the best-quality health care to a sick person, he might say we’ll see next time, why prolong this life?’ Dey illustrates his point with the Bhagavad Gita, which famously says the body is just a vessel and when it rots the soul needs a new home. ‘That is a devastating statement when it comes to geriatric care.’

Lamb is more optimistic: some of the older people she has met call oldage homes ‘the modern forest’.

‘Thinking about it that way helps them cut the ties of maya, of illusion,’ she says. * * * ‘Once elders get into old-age homes we also become like any other country,’ says Raja of Nightingales Medical Trust. ‘Here family is still a strong institution. We can have family-based support. We still have time. But we don’t have much time.’

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Rita Sikand, eighty-nine, widow of a prominent Delhi industrialist, now lives in a pay-for-stay home with a collection of her soft toys.

What Raja thinks India really needs is family-based care and more daycare centres. Centres give the family a break and seniors something to do.

Nightingales has two centres, one for the affluent middle class and one for poorer seniors. A single facility proved unsuccessful because class and caste taboos proved too strong. ‘We can’t swim against the tide, there are certain realities,’ he says with a shrug.

Sociologist Ashis Nandy says seniors in India are beginning to realise they can make a formidable voting bloc. India’s prime minister might be almost eighty but the political rhetoric still woos the young. There are endless magazine surveys of Indian youth. The youth are hailed as the future of the country: 550 million Indians were younger than twenty-five in 2007, even though it also had the world’s second-largest population of seniors.

‘Don’t forget the elderly can also stick to their post much longer than before,’ says Nandy. ‘If you are heading an empire, your children can no longer hope to inherit it as easily as they used to. So it cuts both ways.’

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Bindu Ahlwadi, now used to meals for one at the Har-mit Trust pay-for-stay retirement home in New Delhi. Her husband is deceased and her daughter lives in Pittsburgh.

He sees India’s seniors slowly beginning to assert themselves. ‘I think you will see a greater degree of sops to the elderly now in terms of taxation and social benefits,’ he adds.

If that happens, M.V. Parasuram will be thrilled. The retired seventynine-year-old businessman runs the Forum of Senior Citizens of Karnataka from his home in Bangalore. He is a product of British rule and uses phrases like ‘yeomen service’. His hair is dyed black and he holds himself ramrod straight. He rises at four every morning. He plays tennis every day, goes for walks and arrives for work at his NGO at ten o’clock every morning in shirt and tie. He is in bed by ten at night.

‘Government doesn’t pay attention to us because we are not organised as a sector,’ he complains. ‘We have 4.8 million seniors in my state alone. We must collectively think alike. We must show how much of a vote we command.’ * * * 161

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The Garden of Remembrance at St Mary’s Church, Trivandrum, Kerala. Kerala has low mortality and high migration rates, meaning many seniors live alone.

My mother is intrigued by my meanderings in the twilight world of the aged, a land she occupies hesitantly. She questions me about the people I meet, some of whom are not so unlike her. I tell her about Romola Mitra, a woman I met at a pay-for-stay home that afternoon. She goes to the same social club as my mother. Her son lives in Britain now.

‘Imagine that,’ she says. ‘I would never have guessed people from my club lived in such homes.’

‘It’s not like it’s something scandalous,’ I say.

‘Of course not,’ my mother says hurriedly. She lets me sip at my tea for a few minutes, then asks, ‘What’s the food like?’

‘Why? Are you curious about the place?’

‘No, no,’ she says. ‘I’m not going to any old-age home. I don’t think I could adjust to that kind of fixed routine and fixed menus.’ But as I tell her more about where Mitra lives, and how they all go on excursions together, 162

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to see movies and plays, even taking trips to the beaches of Goa, she seems wistful. Though she lives with my sister and her family and adores having her grandchildren near her, it’s as if something is missing.

She talks about her own childhood. She grew up with thirty-odd cousins and she recalls how they would sit in rows and eat together and on summer afternoons would crowd onto their grandmother’s bed.

‘I don’t remember it being a particularly big bed, but, somehow, we all fit,’ she says.

My mother sits alone on her own bed now most afternoons. She reads a little, until her eyes tire, then naps until the children come home from school or the mall or take a break from their computers. Many of her cousins are dead and those left are scattered around the country. She knows some are bedridden by age and illness.

She brightens up a little. ‘The children, I hear, are all doing well.’ Then she says she does not need to go to a retirement home. ‘Look around you,’ she says. ‘The whole neighbourhood has become an old-age home.’

My mother doesn’t cry these days when it’s time for me to return to San Francisco. These rituals of taking leave have been going on for twenty years. She smiles goodbye and holds me just a little longer. I crane my neck in the taxi to look at her standing at the gate, her arm raised in farewell.

The old lady across the street who is recovering from knee-replacement surgery is standing on her balcony looking at us. A white-haired man on his morning walk has stopped in the middle of the street and is watching the taxi leave. The taxi turns the corner and the entire tableau disappears from my view.

Adapted from the New America Media report ‘No Country for Old Women’, broadcast on National Public Radio in December 2009, with additional reporting in February 2010. Sandip Roy thanks the South Asian Journalists’ Association for its assistance.

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Competition (2004) by Wang Qingsong. C-type print, 170cm x 300cm.

Courtesy of the artist, Beijing, China.

Liberation Road

Poetry Thomas R. Moore

Bosphorus a pungent bay bush in the April sun a yellow taxi on a cobbled lane a limping dog, a red clay court reflecting light, a dolmuş horn a ferry on the counter-current strait a pied caique, the Argo’s wake the stench of tunny from the Golden Horn a minaret, a cross, what we must do, what we have done bougainvillea on a poet’s grave a yogurt-seller’s lusty call a junkman’s raucous cart ripe figs that thumbs have split apart

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Kadiköy Ferry ‘I learn by going where I have to go.’

Roethke For months I’ve been trying to write a poem called ‘Kadiköy Ferry’ about how I am pulled back to Turkey because my children were born there.

I have some evocative lines in the poem like A gypsy girl sells flowers, her fingers curled around yellow calendulas and Dark-browed Anatolian faces fill the tea stalls, but the poem isn’t going anywhere – it’s dead in the water so to speak – even though there is a ferry ride in it from Kadiköy in Asia across the Bosphorus to the Golden Horn – and that is one fantastic trip. But I’m worried that the poem is maudlin, so I sigh, quit writing, and turn the page.

There’s a granite stone in line fourteen that is supposed to be a hint the children are dead, and I use fists of nails as a reference to the houses I built when I moved from place to place, feeling distraught with grief because my two children did die and they were born in Istanbul, where I’m drawn to, because of them. Then the poem ends in New England with falling maple leaves, an image of loss that’s a bit stale. But I do love that ferry ride and seeing the caiques in the Bosphorus and the Dolmabahçe Palace over on the European side.

To the south on a low hill you can see Aya Sophia where it’s been for fifteen centuries, and once, on the top deck 166

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of the ferry (as I said in the poem), I watched a Turkish guy with inward-peering eyes slowly picking a stringed instrument and looking as if he too had lost someone.

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Playing with 3 Numbers (2009) by MPP Yei Myint. Mixed media, 111cm x 165cm.

Courtesy of the artist, Mandalay, Myanmar and Osage Art Foundation, Osage Singapore.

Forward Justin Hill

‘A

nya, it is your father,’ he told her, as if she wouldn’t know it was him.

His voice came all the way from Shanghai, and it was fuzzy and grainy like their black and white television set when the wind howled around the mountain top. His hearing was not so good, so she tried to repeat it, but still he couldn’t hear so she ended up shouting single-fact sentences that sounded like slogans about her life.

‘I passed my exams!’ she shouted.

‘I’m studying hard!’

‘Life is good!’

‘We have plenty to eat!’

‘Don’t worry about us!’

‘Look after yourself!’

He always ended their brief conversations with the same question and she repeated the answer for emphasis. ‘Yes,’ she shouted. ‘I’m studying hard!’

‘Good,’ her father said, ‘good.’ It was all he wanted to hear. It was why he worked on the construction sites, he said. Why he never came home to their village; why she lived with her grandmother, Granny Zhou. It was also why Spring Festival meant so much to her – not because of the food, the clothes or the five-hour grainy TV gala, but because it was only at Spring Festival that her father caught the train home: a hunched and weary figure appearing in the lights of an early-morning train station, his life wrapped up in a plastic sack.

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‘You’re thin,’ Anya would say as he reached the spot where she and Granny Zhou stood waiting, and she would struggle to take his bag but he would never let her. Instead of saying kind things or hugging like characters in the Korean soaps, they ended up tussling over a dirty bag and he was stronger and more stubborn; Anya would follow him along the platform, with the dull sense of the debt she owed her parents growing bigger and bigger. No, not bigger, she thought one night when the weight of it pressed down on her: deeper, like a rut or a well, or a dark pit. * * * There was always a great press of people struggling out of the train station and they all had to show their tickets before the conductors would let them through the turnstiles. They spilled into the town square, which yawned wide and open, but Anya stopped abruptly because she never knew which way to go.

‘This way!’ Granny Zhou said and they followed her towards the far side of the square. Years ago they would have taken a rickshaw, but there were no rickshaws now and the cheapest option was a motorbike taxi.

‘How much?’ Granny Zhou said and started to walk, but Anya’s father called her back and all three wobbled on the motorbike as the driver negotiated the potholes. The suspension grated with each bump and the driver grumbled and complained, saying they should pay more for the damage. Anya hated to hear of money. Thought of it brought to mind all her obligation, and she had swayed back from the pothole edge.

They took a taxi to the bus station, a bus to their town, hitched a lift on the back of a truck or a tractor. Each step involved money and bargaining and that feeling of vertigo; when they arrived home Anya was exhausted.

Home! she thought. Safe. Together. Complete, like the cold full moon that painted the cherry branches and twigs across the concrete yard.

Home, like moonlight, cost nothing. * * * Anya cared for her father as she saw the other women care for their returning men. She made him tea, washed his hair, scrubbed his back when he sat 170

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in the blue plastic tub they used for a bath. His hands were calloused, his feet and shoulders, too, and even though the sun never touched his back to darken it, the skin on his back was dark, not from the sun but ground in dirt from his overalls. However many times she scrubbed and rinsed she could never really clean his fingertips: never scrub off the calloused skin, never have enough of her father.

The first days her father was bone tired and he would eat and sip a little rice wine then lie down and snore. He slept as deeply as a well and Anya sat and watched his face and although she had aged only a year, it always seemed that he came back three years older, as if he was living life quicker than they were. It was as if their home was the enchanted Peach Blossom Valley, where time moved slower, and mortals who left withered and died.

That thought made her feel safe, and even though her home was isolated and remote and the life was hard, it seemed that the mountains saved them from the world outside. Throughout the year Anya learned village songs and when her father came home she softly sang them, but her grandmother scolded her. ‘Don’t disturb Father Baba! Let him sleep. He’ll still be here in the morning.’

For the next ten or twelve mornings Anya’s father was there: grinning over his third bowl of seaweed congee – his face a little fuller than before, his tongue beginning to loosen with stories and jokes and wine.

These were precious days, too quickly devoured. When the time came she and Granny Zhou would fold all his clothes neatly and inside them she would hide the money she had not spent during the year. It was usually pitiable amounts, but they had struggled to save it, gone hungry, walked.

‘We can go without,’ Granny Zhou said and Anya didn’t know to argue. She helped pack all his possessions into the sack and the next morning he pulled it back onto his shoulders and they retraced their steps to the train station, where the crowd tried to pull them apart. It was all they could do to hold onto the back of each other’s padded jackets and push their way through towards the steel-cage waiting area, where she returned her father to the real world of smoke and factories and construction sites.

Then Anya went home with Granny Zhou. Another year to share the same cart, Granny Zhou liked to say, and share the same sorrows. * * * 171

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Granny Zhou was short and grey, wrinkled with the years. She had lost most of her teeth but not her tongue, and she lectured Anya at breakfast, lunch and dinner. When Anya came home from school she was still talking as Anya bent over her homework.

‘Yes, Granny Zhou,’ Anya said, but agree or disagree it didn’t matter, nothing would shut her up. As her grandmother talked Anya would sit by candlelight and practise her handwriting on paper so thin you could see the candle flame through it, clear and sharp and hot.

In the days after her father had returned to his work Anya’s memories were bright and clear and she took them out and thumbed through them, like a pack of photos. By the end of the year the memories were worn and dogeared and fell strangely together with moments or things he never said. The longer the year went, the more she colonised her memories with memories from other years, memories from other people, images from TV series and soft-focus photos she had seen of happy families and bygone times. * * * When Anya was eleven she was tall enough to reach the old boxes on top of the wardrobe. There was a blue cardboard suitcase with a broken hinge, a pile of yellow newspapers bound round with twine and an old shoe box covered with dust. She was careful not to dislodge the dust as she opened it; it was bursting with old papers and photos. There were old ration coupons and official letters; a wad of pictures of her mother bound with an elastic band that had snapped and been knotted. Anya’s fingers trembled as she pulled off the band and let the pictures fall out. One showed her mother as a girl with two pig-tails and a padded jacket standing before a statue of Mao, in front of a fake waterfall or under a magnolia tree, a single flower held to the side of her head. There were stiff and formal pictures of all the family, with her mother’s granny like a tiny shrunken prune, sitting in the middle of them, sucking her gums.

One of the pictures was of her father, and she almost didn’t recognise him in his thick-rimmed black glasses. One showed her parents standing behind a steel Flying Pigeon bicycle, like proud parents. Another was of their tatty old wooden house, which had been knocked down and rebuilt in concrete the year Anya had been born.

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Stuck in a torn envelope Anya found a black and white photo of her parents’ wedding day. It was small, curled and dog-eared and Anya lifted it out and cradled in her hand as if it was as fragile as a butterfly. The whole village seemed to have gathered for the wedding and long-dead men and women peered out at her as curiously as she looked at them. Their clothes and hairstyles were so old fashioned it seemed impossible that this had been only fifteen years earlier. Anya thought she looked like Mother. She had the same buck teeth and dimples and Anya wondered if she would have the same cheerful look on her wedding day, wondered how much of her mother’s good luck she had taken for her own. But then she saw that even though her parents stood straight in padded cotton clothes, each of their faces sought a different camera. Anya cried a little then, for she could see it was preordained that her parents’ fates should not run together.

‘What happened to Ma?’ she asked Granny Zhou that evening.

‘She died,’ Granny Zhou said.

It was what Granny Zhou always said.

‘Where did she die?’

‘Far away. Shenzhen.’

‘Is that why there is no grave?’

‘Eat your rice,’ Granny Zhou said. * * * Anya went to the local middle school, which was in the prefecture capital, Shaodong, forty kilometres away. Granny Zhou cried because she did not know how they could afford the fees – her father sent everything he had and Granny Zhou went around their relatives and borrowed money. Anya felt guilty for passing the entrance exams, but at the same time she was delighted because she felt the weight of all her family pushing behind her, like they pushed through the crowds at the train station.

It was an exciting year for many reasons, not least because she had never lived away from home before and her eyes were opened wide because her classmates came from a different world. They had mountain bikes and bedrooms, computers, mobile phones, parents who brought them to school on their luxury scooters. Anya felt alien. She sat and worked hard while her classmates played and slept and surfed the net. Sometimes Anya wondered 173

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what her old classmates in the village were doing: farming for the boys, she thought, and a factory in Dongguan for the girls. She was almost jealous, wishing she could earn money as well. Then she thought of her father and how hard he worked and bent back down towards her homework. * * * At night Anya slept on the classroom floor with the other country students; during the day she studied so hard her head hurt. One day her Chinese teacher took pity on her and told her to get more sleep, but her maths teacher was as hard and cruel as algebra and if she fell asleep in class he would make her stand and shout at her that he wasn’t going to have his pay cut because one stupid village girl couldn’t pass her exams. When she felt alone or sad, she would store up all her hopes for Spring Festival, when she went back to her enchanted village and her father came home and the full moon would shine. She would be so giddy in expectation of her father’s arrival that Granny Zhou would send her outside.

‘You’re making me feel tired,’ she’d say. ‘Go feed the pigs,’ she would say, or ‘Go scrub the steps,’ or – when nothing else worked – ‘Go climb the mountain!’ * * * Baba had been working in Shenzhen and you could tell from his voice on the phone that it was a bad year. The pay was low and two of his friends had been killed in an accident on the building site. He had broken his right arm and been on half pay for two months. Now he was home for Spring Festival.

‘I’m not going back to Shenzhen!’ he swore to himself as he poured another cup while Anya sat beside him. ‘Pay is higher in Shanghai!’

Her father drank all the way to the bottom of the bottle, but all he found was an empty bottle with a red and white label that said ‘Open-Your-MouthAnd-Smile-Wine’. He threw it into the bin and sat back down and had to use his left hand to fumble with his cigarettes.

The alcoholic redness showed dark beneath his tanned skin. It reached down his neck and gave him an unhealthy look, made his eyes seem very bright, 174

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made him seem strangely like one of the ghosts of Hong Kong cinema: not insubstantial or wraith-like, but human and demonic all at the same time.

‘Help me!’ he snapped, in a voice that made Anya jump, for he had never asked for help before, and she bit her lip to stop herself from crying, in case that made him more angry.

Anya fell to her knees and hung her head in shame. ‘I will leave school and go find a job so that you can rest.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ her father said. ‘Get up! You are so stupid you don’t know your luck. I never had the chance to study!’ * * * Anya didn’t know what she could do to make herself less sad, but the next morning she ran all the way down to the bottom of the village and spent the money she’d been given for Spring Festival on three jin of plums from Lady Li’s shop. They were fat and juicy and ripe to the touch. She carried them back up the hill, washed them and pulled out their stalks, and laid them out: sixteen blue plums piled on a white plate.

The sun came out that morning and pointed through the open doorway, lighting up those plums like they were peaches from Heaven. Her father and Granny Zhou slept late and Anya was as excited as a bride to see them wake and come out to see. Her father nodded and took a bite and said it was sweet, but Granny Zhou frowned.

‘How much did you pay?’

Anya knew that any number would be too much, so she divided it in two.

‘Six yuan,’ she lied.

Granny Zhou was still unhappy. ‘Too much!’ she frowned. ‘They cheated you. Next time you must bargain!’

That morning they sat and sucked plums, spat the stones, ate some more.

‘You’ll all have the shits!’ Granny Zhou said, and they laughed at her because they knew she was right, but Anya didn’t care if she had the shits or not: she was happy, her father was home.

That year her father caught the Shanghai train. Anya felt good about going back to school because she had seen pictures of Shanghai and imagined her father among the tall buildings, earning more money, living more comfortably, being happier. Granny Zhou always complained, and because 175

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Anya came home at weekends only it seemed Granny Zhou had to cram all her complaints into a shorter and shorter time. Blablabla, she went on and Anya didn’t listen because nothing ever stopped bad things happening. * * * Granny Zhou liked to nap every afternoon, and while she was snoring Anya remembered the box of old photos. She climbed up and brought them down and kept herself company by flicking through them. They were like her memories, confused, cluttered and in the wrong order, but pictures were all she had of her mother. She laid them out like a jigsaw and tried to piece together the mother who had died before she could remember. She was an unsmiling face in the pictures, but when Anya lay in bed at night and smelled Granny Zhou next to her, she imagined her mother as a pair of warm and gentle hands and a soft and loving voice.

‘That is because you were just a baby when she died,’ Granny Zhou said.

‘You could not see yet.’

But Granny Zhou was old and confused and a good half of what she said was nonsense. * * * Anya failed her maths exam that year and counted down the days to Spring Festival with dread. ‘Your father will scold you,’ Granny Zhou said, almost as if she was looking forward to it.

Anya said nothing.

‘You hear me?’

Anya sat down and refused to look up, but Granny Zhou kept digging.

‘He will scold you for being a lazy daughter! The money he has spent and borrowed and you cannot pass your exams!’

Well at least I can read, Anya thought and kept her arms folded. * * * Anya didn’t want to go to the station to meet her father, but Granny Zhou insisted and they went together to pick him up and pull him from the station 176

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crowds. Anya tried to act happy and excited but he beat her in the tussle for his bag again, and the taxi driver complained more than normal about the money, and the bus fare had gone up and all Granny Zhou did was make tutting noises with her tongue and complain, and Anya felt responsible for it all, felt responsible for all the family’s woes.

When they arrived home her words tumbled out, ‘I failed my maths exam!’

Anya didn’t know what to expect but her father’s face turned pale and he put his hand out to steady himself.

‘You failed maths?’ he said.

Anya nodded. She didn’t like maths, didn’t like the teacher, didn’t like the stupid numbers and equations and other children had parents to help them and all she had was a toothless old grandmother who talked nonsense all day. But she could see she was in trouble and knelt down and pressed her head against the floor and begged him to forgive her for being such a slow and blockheaded daughter.

Her father’s silence frightened her and Anya banged her head against the floor thinking he would stop her, but he did not. She butted her head so hard that she felt the skin break, saw the red smear on the white tiles, and kept banging. When she had been young her father had used his belt, but now it seemed a belt would not do. He fetched a piece of firewood and came back and beat her until she squealed and yelped like a thrashed dog.

‘I will work harder!’ she sobbed, and at last the blows stopped and she opened her eyes and he sat and glared at the corner of the room.

‘Do I work so that you can fail your exams?’ he demanded.

‘No,’ Anya said.

‘Do you want to be a blind fish?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Do you want your poor father to end up begging in the streets?’

‘No!’ ‘Who will care for me when I am old?’

‘Me!’ she shouted and he hit her one more time, then tossed the wood across the room, and Anya hurried into her room and put the pillow over her head so that he wouldn’t hear her sobs. * * * 177

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Granny Zhou made a great tray of dumplings that night and Anya’s father picked at the boiled peanuts as he served himself wine. One of Anya’s eyes was closed and she refused to eat so there was more for her father, but he drank a cup of wine with each dumpling, belched and spoke loudly – as drunken men speak – as if he was lecturing a great hall of students. Anya thought the other families in the village could all hear. They will be laughing at us, she thought. They will look down on us because my father is a labourer and because he cannot read a newspaper. Even though his words were aimed at Anya her father would not look directly at her, but he wagged his finger in her direction.

‘When I was ten I was a good student,’ he said. ‘I had the best handwriting in the class. But my father died and I had to work. My mother had many children to feed. I never got the chance to study.’

He let his mouth hang open and Anya could see the toothless gaps, the tobacco stains over the yellow of decay.

‘You must study!’ he told her and his eyes bulged out like in films just before men fell down dead. ‘Study hard! Understand me?’ his voice grew even louder so that he was roaring at her.

‘Yes, Father,’ she squeaked.

‘Promise me!’ he shouted.

‘Promise!’ Anya said, and her father relented and refilled his cup and drank it down, and winced at the heat of it in his throat. * * * Construction jobs paid well that year and her father said there was a deadline and he could not come home at Spring Festival, but would try to come for May Day. The wait seemed like an age to Anya, but when he did come home his pack was full of gifts and apples that he said they were ‘from the USA’.

Each was wrapped in a net of white foam. He had made good money and he talked about the way that Shanghai was changing, and change meant money, and his bosses had given him a bonus of two hundred yuan.

‘Now we have enough to pay Uncle Four back,’ he said, but Anya had bad news.

‘The school fees have gone up?’ he said.

She nodded.

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He let out a long breath. ‘Well, I will talk to Uncle Four.’

Anya tossed and turned that night, and she could hear Granny Zhou and her father in the main room, arguing.

‘If only your wife had given you a boy,’ she said at last.

Anya hated it when she said that because she hated to think of her poor mother’s ghost being insulted.

‘There’s no point educating a girl. You should have married again,’ Granny Zhou went on. And on, and Anya felt betrayed and confused and wished her mother was still alive. Her father didn’t speak much, and Anya wondered whether he was listening at all, but when he did speak his voice seemed sad.

It was too deep to carry through the wall, but whatever he said seemed to silence Granny Zhou.

That year Anya’s father gave Granny a crisp red one hundred yuan note and Anya and her grandmother took turns feeling it between their fingers, before Granny neatly folded it up and slipped it inside a knotted handkerchief she used as a purse.

Granny Zhou took Anya down to the market where they picked out the fattest and shiniest carp from the plastic tub of swimming fish, carrying it home with a string through its dorsal fin, the dying fish flapping dreamily, before they revived it in a bucket of cold water and left it in the bathroom until it was time for lunch. They ate and drank and laughed until their sides almost split, but father had a cough that would not go however many cigarettes he smoked.

‘It’s the concrete dust,’ he said and they all nodded. When he coughed up a hard lump he almost choked. They all looked at it, solid and immoveable, just like concrete. * * * There was too much work in Shanghai and her father announced he could stay only seven days, not the usual twelve. Anya might have failed maths, but she knew enough to know the difference between seven and twelve.

She watched the last of those days as carefully as if they were gold dust, but however closely she watched them she still she found herself standing at the platform watching the train pull away. Granny Zhou began to pull at her sleeve and Anya burst into tears.

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‘Don’t worry about me,’ her father had told her, ‘concentrate on your studies. When I was a child I could not go to school. Do not waste this opportunity!’

Anya felt she must have grown up for him to speak so openly to her and she wrote those words inside her school books and embroidered them onto her heart, her sleeve, her underwear: anywhere she might see and remember and work hard. Fear not the long road, she told herself, fear only short ambition. * * * In September, as the cicadas were dying, Anya took the bus home for the Mid-Autumn Festival. She ran in and put a letter down on the table. It was crumpled and worn and Granny Zhou looked at it with suspicion.

‘What’s that?’ she said.

‘I have won a place at Shaoyang Number One Middle School,’ Anya said.

Granny Zhou grunted. ‘Where?’

‘Shaoyang Number One Middle School. It is the best school in Shaoyang!’

‘Shaoyang!’ Granny Zhou said, as if it were far away, but when Anya read the letter out loud Granny Zhou choked on her tea. ‘How much?’

‘Four thousand yuan,’ Anya said.

Granny Zhou went quiet.

‘How can we afford a school like that? You must not tell your father. Hear me?’

Anya said nothing and Granny Zhou pinched her.

‘Do not tell your father! He cannot afford those fees!’

That evening at dinner neither spoke, then Granny Zhou put away the plates and they sat and watched Journey to the West on TV. But her face softened and she let out a long sigh. ‘Disaster comes in so many forms,’ she said and patted Anya’s hand. * * * Granny Zhou made fresh steamed bread and boiled eggs and spread five mooncakes on the table, but Anya could not bring herself to eat or speak.

‘Square objects do not roll,’ Granny Zhou said. ‘It is our fate to be poor.’

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Anya had hoped for something better, but she looked up at the wall where the photos of her ancestors – mother and grandfather and greatgrandparents – made a sad constellation. They were all poor and dead and stupid, Anya thought, but at least they did not have to put up with Granny Zhou.

There was nothing for a girl in the village, so Anya went back to her school books but when she tried to study the pages were as heavy as lead.

They ate their steamed buns, watched TV, did not talk about school.

When Granny Zhou was asleep, Anya got up and turned on the light, went into her father’s room and climbed on the bed, and took down the old shoe box. The photo of her parents’ wedding was curled and dog-eared and Anya lifted it out and cradled it gently.

Anya had changed and grown since she had last taken the picture down.

She had left her village and gone to the middle school, and as she looked at the photo of her parents she felt the gap of fourteen years between her and that day yawn open. She sat and stared at each of the faces – but she was no longer clear on the names of the dead people who had once sat her on their knee, or slipped her crab-apple candies – and even here on her parents’ bed, in the middle of her home, in the village where her family had always lived, Anya felt uprooted and unsteady.

The faces peered out from the black and white photos, into the future, but they did not look so curious any more; they seemed bewildered and amazed, like square objects that have been asked to roll down hill. Anya wished she could cross back and climb up on her mother’s knee. Her mother was sitting there in the picture. Even Granny Zhou was off to the side, frowning at the camera. Why had fate taken her mother and not Granny Zhou? Anya lay back and felt like crying.

The poor have their fortunes told, Granny Zhou often said, while the rich burn incense to the Buddha. Anya had burned incense and she had hoped, but the world was a heavy weight to bear.

That night gravity held her down on her parents’ bed and Granny Zhou’s words came into her head as if they were her own opinions: you have passed the exams but you are too timid. What is learning without ambition? You are a girl, your spirit is weak. How can a village girl succeed in the world?

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long road and all that she dragged behind her was like a dead weight. Light a fire against the wind, and you will be burned, her Granny liked to say. Anya lay that night and raised her finger – but try as she might she could not tell which way the wind was blowing. Forward, she thought, for no other reason than there was nowhere else for her to go.

182

It’s all in the Silhouette Steven Hirst

A

fter my oxygen-blast facial I’m standing in the shoe department at Harvey Nicks. I’ve got a pair of fabulous sky-high, pale blue Jimmy Choos that I saw in last month’s Hong Kong Tatler and an Anna Sui Dolly Girl gift set that I thought was just perfect for my Jenny’s coming home and there she is: Yolanda Li – kiss-kiss, darling-darling, blah-blah-blah. Oh. My. God. I know they were saggy before but it looks like she’s had them done in Shenzhen, not Seoul.

Josephine Wong! she says. How are you?

Cerise really is so draining on her. I’m never one to gossip, but I know for a fact she’s fifty-three. And a graphic-print Miu Miu micro-mini with Sergio Rossi sling backs? You gotta be kidding me.

Hello, Yolanda darling, I say, giving her a kiss on the cheek.

I love your new do, she says. Are you still going to Kim Robinson?

I am, I say.

Yes, she says. Kim’s always been wonderful with more mature hair.

Personally, I’m going to Ken Qi myself.

Well, we have a bit of a chit-chat about what she’s been up to. She’s still on the Ladies’ Committee of the Hong Kong Ballet, so she’s basically trying to get me to buy tickets to their next gala. Now I love culture as much as the next person, I used to take Jenny all the time – she adored the ballet – but Melvin’s never free these days and they always ask where he is and if he turns 183

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up he starts snoring during the pas de trois and, frankly, it’s not like you don’t know how The Nutcracker is going to end anyway, so I said I didn’t have my diary with me and could she possibly send me an invite?

My Jenny’s back next week, I say. I’m over the moon.

Charming, she says. Mango’s home next week too, she says. Jenny didn’t come back from London at Christmas, did she?

No, I say.

Easter? she says.

No. She had a very important dissertation to finish, I say. Is that a bespoke Hermès? I ask, looking at the little bag on her arm.

Yes, darling, she says, showing me the bag. Yolanda and I go way back when. It’s a Kelly, she says, a little too loudly. A waiting list of like forever.

I’m looking at the bag and thinking there’s something a bit funny about the buckle. Something-not-quite-right about it.

Mango popped over on the Eurostar for the weekend and put my name down, she says.

Oh really, I say.

Yes, Yolanda says, then adds, quite unnecessarily, All the way from rue du Faubourg, Saint-Honoré. Je t’adore Hermès.

Excuse me, says the woman behind us. I’ve been talking to my friend and I’m sure it’s you. Are you Josephine Wong?

Yes, I am, I say.

Oh, I knew it. Can I get an autograph please? she asks. What was the name of that song you sang?

‘Golden Moonlight, Silver Tears’, Yolanda says, smiling.

That’s the one, the woman says. My mother used to love it. She used to listen to it all the time. Totally deaf now, she says. Can’t hear a thing. Can you sign on the back of this?

Of course, I say, taking her Biro and signing my name on the back of her magazine.

Thank you, she says. My mother will be ever so pleased.

So, I’m standing at the counter with the Anna Sui Dolly Girl gift set and the Jimmy Choos – I’d managed to put back a pair of gorgeous chunky wooden Lanvin platforms so I was feeling pretty angelic – and Yolanda’s going on and on about how well Mango’s doing at the London College of Fashion.

How her second-year show was apparently a total success. How they might 184

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set her up with a boutique or even her own label when she graduates. And how Boris, the elder son, is doing terribly well at HKU studying medicine.

I’m inviting them all over to dinner with Jenny and Mango when the little Harvey Nicks assistant interrupts and quietly says, I’m deeply sorry, Mrs Wong, but, unfortunately, your account is temporarily blocked.

Yolanda shuts up and the woman behind us who I gave the autograph to turns right around to listen.

What? Can you try again?

Well … madam …

Is it your computer … again?

I do apologise, she says, looking like it’s the most fun she’s had since the property market crashed. I can hear the woman and her friend behind us tutting. Actually, we’ve tried three times already, the really rather dumpy assistant says.

So of course, as you can imagine, I’m absolutely mortified. I’m standing there in the shoe department of Harvey Nichols looking at the fat little assistant and Yolanda Li is standing next to me with her serious charity face on looking like Mother Teresa, if Mother Teresa ever had nails as long as Cruella de Vil’s, and those nasty cheap new tits of hers are pointing east and west and I’m thinking, God, is this not the worst Thursday afternoon in the world ever and at least Joyce Ma or one of the Harilelas or, God help me, Pansy Ho, hasn’t walked past, and just get me out of here and to my salsa class. I hand over a platinum card, sign the slip and off I go. Just let darling Paco put his strong hand on the small of my back on the parquet floor on the eighteenth floor in Causeway Bay and everything will be all right. * * * You’re such a tai-tai mummy, my Jenny said to me and then she laughed.

She must have been thirteen or fourteen then – a tiny little thing, so pretty, her fringe in her eyes. We were sitting having afternoon tea at the Mandarin Oriental, or maybe it was dim sum at the China Club, and I’d made some throwaway remark about someone’s new hairstyle or a pair of shoes that I thought weren’t quite appropriate for someone’s age or some such and Jennifer started laughing. You are such a tai-tai! she said.

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What is a tai-tai exactly anyway? I asked. I loved to tease her. Is it a good thing or a bad thing, darling?

One of our Chinese teachers taught us the other day, she said. I’m not sure you’ll like it. And she wouldn’t explain it to me. And then she was having a tutorial one evening at the dining table at home and she asked her teacher, a very charming young Englishman I remember, most elegant, to explain to me what it means.

Well, Mrs Wong, he said. It’s used in Hong Kong, Singapore …

Yes? I said.

The term used to imply respect, but now not always, he said. To qualify as a tai-tai, a lady must have lots of leisure time, lots of money and lots of gossip. I guess a tai-tai is a title of privilege, a middle-aged lady of means and social influence.

Well, I said, in that case, yes, thank you very much, I certainly am a tai-tai, but I’m not so sure about the middle-aged bit. And he blushed, which made Jenny laugh. We were like best friends really, Jenny and me. I used to love our little chats and shopping expeditions. As she grew older, she had all the exams and the extra classes and it wasn’t quite the same. And then when she went away to university I missed her terribly. I thought she’d gone forever.

So, Ah Kong is driving us to the airport in the Mercedes to pick her up.

The traffic is terrible and my nerves are in shreds, what with the weather and all. I’ve got the Dolly Girl gift set on my lap, wrapped up beautifully, and I’m wearing the new pale blue Jimmy Choos. Jacky is listening to rap or some such on those huge Bose headphones and reading a basketball magazine, wearing those jeans that look like they’re about to fall off – he’s always had such a cute little bottom since he was a baby – but apparently everybody’s wearing them at Chinese International. Gold chains. Baseball cap. All that bling-bling-bling.

Show a bit of interest, I say, tapping him on the shoulder. You haven’t seen your big sister for nearly a year.

Yeah, right, whatever, he says.

Melvin is on the other side of him, on his mobile. Where’s the Jaguar, darling? I ask.

He says there’s a problem with the suspension so it’s had to go into the garage. We can do fine with the Mercedes anyway, he says. He’s been having those chest pains again. Waking up two or three times in the middle of 186

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the night, when he’s not at the villa in Shenzhen. Of course, apart from Christmas, Valentine’s Day and the Mid-Autumn Festival we haven’t really shared a bed since Jacky was born, thank God, but I can hear him padding about in the early hours in the en suite, coughing and whatnot. I’ve told him again and again to make an appointment to see Dr Luk when he’s in town, but he won’t be told what to do. Says he’s far too busy. Some big deal going through. Another Mainland shopping mall in Wuhan or somewhere. He says the Harvey Nicks problem was simply a cash-flow issue and he’s already sorted it out.

I don’t want to know about it, I say, giving him a look.

Don’t worry, he says.

Don’t tell me, I always say. Just give me the papers and I’ll sign them.

What I don’t know can’t hurt me, I say.

Well, we’re standing there in the arrivals hall at Chek Lap Kok and who do you think turns up dressed like a dog’s dinner but Yolanda Li … again.

She really thinks I’ve forgiven and forgotten that night we were working in the Silver Dollar when Tony Leung came in and she ‘accidentally’ slammed my head in the kitchen door. Far-too-big-for-her-face-shape Gucci sunglasses, the same little Hermès Kelly in lime ostrich on her arm. There’s really something not quite right about that buckle.

What are you doing here, darling? Yolanda asks, tottering across the arrivals hall towards me, as if she doesn’t know.

We’re meeting Jenny, I say. She’s back today.

I’m breaking in that pair of Jimmy Choo four-inchers from Harvey Nicks so I’m in absolute agony – I mean, darling, torture – but if a woman has a great pair of shoes she’s won half the battle and they do so dramatically elongate the leg and I want to look my absolute best for Jenny after not seeing her for so long.

What a coincidence, Yolanda says. Cathay? Mango is on the same flight.

She leans in close to me. How’s Paco? Then, Donald can’t be here, she says to anyone who’ll listen. He has a meeting in Shanghai.

Oh, what a shame, I say. I do hope he’ll be able to come for dinner.

The husband, very handsome when he was younger, is British – grew up here in Hong Kong. Their name’s Barker actually but I always call her Li out of habit. He’s terribly high up in waste management.

I’m sure he’ll be delighted, says Yolanda.

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Then, of course, out she comes, Mango, in pink low-slung Juicy Couture sweatpants, hair up, merest hint of lip gloss, thin as a rake. LV carry-on.

Pristine white Stella-McCartney-for-Adidas trainers. They were in the same year at Saint Paul’s, her and Jenny. Mango was Head Girl. She’s got that Eurasian look, Mango, that’s so very twenty-first century.

Mummy! she says, running up.

Mango! Darling! Yolanda cries.

Tears, hugs, the whole works.

Hello, Mango, says Jacky, blushing like a beetroot, I notice.

Hi, Jacky, says Mango. How did your exams go?

Not bad, Jacky says. He’s talking to Mango about drum and bass clubs in London and Yolanda is wittering on about their new lakeside villa in Hangzhou next to Carina Lau’s and yet another bloody AIDS ball she’s frantically organising with that bitch Loretta Lu when this creature appears.

Is that Jenny Wong? asks Mango.

Hey sis, says Jacky.

Hey bro, it mumbles.

Hello Jenny. Welcome home, my darling, I say, smiling.

Shaved head. Leather jacket. Not a trace of foundation. Black baggy sweatshirt with something about Burma written on it. Those big army boots.

Red laces. I give her the Anna Sui Dolly Girl gift set.

I hardly recognised you, says Mango.

No, says Yolanda.

Jenny’s wearing thick black leggings. I mean. And Chloe they are not.

She won’t let me kiss her. She’s pierced an eyebrow. She doesn’t unwrap my Anna Sui Dolly Girl gift set, just stuffs it in her backpack, without a word.

She’s got fat, Yolanda Li says to me.

For God’s sake, Jenny says, looking at my new Jimmy Choos. What on earth are you wearing?

What do you mean, darling? I ask.

Why don’t you just have them bound?

Un moment, s’il vous plaît, says Mango. I just need to powder my nose.

I’m staring at my feet when Melvin comes over, he’s been on the phone again.

Hello, my little mushroom, he says to Jenny. How was your flight?

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Hungry? He doesn’t seem to notice what she’s wearing.

Yolanda asks, Do you want to join us later for supper at the Marina Club?

But Jacky has a basketball game and Melvin has an early tee time at Mission Hills in the morning and Jenny will be jet-lagged, thank God, so we can’t possibly. Then Yolanda remembers my mentioning dinner sometime in the next couple of weeks and gets out her pink crocodile organiser to fix a date.

Her Mont Blanc is filled with green ink. Ah Kong carries Jenny’s bags to the car. She talks in Cantonese to Jacky, who is briefing her on the new slang so she doesn’t sound like a returnee and, well, there were more than a few new phrases you would never hear coming out of my mouth.

How long are you back for, darling? I ask.

Don’t know, she mutters. I’ve got a thesis to write. How is Maria?

She’s fine, I say. I thought you and I could check out that new boutique spa in Bangkok for a long weekend. Just us girls. It combines holistic medicine with nutritional counselling. Maybe do a spot of shopping. My treat, I say.

I’ll probably meet up with some friends and go to the mainland, she says.

Backpacking.

The mainland?

I need mountains, she says. I need sky.

She sits in the front and chats away with Ah Kong. Asks him about his kids. She turns and says a few words to Daddy. Doesn’t even look at me.

This city is ridiculous, she says. She stares out the window, fiddling with her iPhone.

You have put on weight, I tell her. Nothing. We paid your card bills.

Nothing. Granny can’t wait to see you. Silence. Did you get my emails?

Are you exfoliating? I try. London’s very dry you know.

When we get home she goes straight into the kitchen to talk to Maria and my mother, who’s postponed her mah-jong game especially to see her.

There’s a lot of laughter and Dong Dong and Bo Bo are going crazy, barking and jumping up and down.

You’ve got fat, I hear my mother say to her, laughing, as if she’s pleased about it. Maria’s asking her lots of strange questions about politics and her course.

They all go out for a walk with the dogs up The Peak. My feet are absolutely bloody killing me, so I stay home and just sit there in the living room and watch it go dark outside through the picture windows, flicking 189

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through a copy of the latest Hong Kong Tatler. Eleanor Kwok looking graceful in aquamarine. CC and Harriet Tung sharing the secrets of a happy marriage. Marie-Christine Louey throwing a costume party at the Grand Hyatt. And … oh God, there’s that socialite who has had more reclamation work done to her over the years than Victoria Harbour. I turn the page and there they are. A double-page spread. Proud Mum and style maven Yolanda Li and budding designer daughter Mango going shopping together in the rue du Faubourg. After I’ve thrown the magazine across the room, knocking a few pictures off the Steinway, I light a Jo Malone orange blossom candle and I put on ‘Golden Moonlight, Silver Tears’.

The sixth highest-selling record of the year, it was. I breathe deeply and I count slowly to twenty-five. I watch the tiny Star Ferry crawling far below between the skyscrapers. I try to clear my mind of all unnecessary things and ‘focus on the light’ as my Buddhist master tells me, but I just keep thinking about what Jenny said to me at the airport about the Jimmy Choos. I can still see my grandmother and her tiny little black cotton slippers tucked underneath her. Every bound foot conceals a jar of tears, they used to say. * * * Jenny’s very jet-lagged the first week she’s back so she’s asleep most of the time.

Then, when she’s feeling better, she’s off to Causeway Bay a lot. Meeting up with friends, she says. I don’t know where she knows them from. She’s now a vegan and eats only organic. Developed a wheat allergy somehow, so Maria’s constantly off to Pacific Place and IFC and Times Square stocking up on what she can and will eat. Which apparently includes chocolate. Lots of it. I didn’t even know they made vegan chocolate. It’s terribly expensive.

She spends an awfully long time in the bathroom. Not with a green tea revitalising mask on as I suggested, that’s for certain. She says a lot of unnecessarily nasty things about how shallow and materialistic Hong Kong culture is when she does deign to speak. Stays in her room when she’s in, with her guitar music playing. I notice in the hallway as she’s scuttling back into her den after using Daddy’s computer again that there are some very funny-looking marks on her arm. I read an interesting article recently in the Taiwan edition of Marie Claire about self-harming and I try to talk gently 190

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to her about it as the article advised, but she just ignores me. It’s almost like she’s not actually come back, my little Jenny.

So when she’s out in Causeway Bay I have a peek in her room. Maria has taken Dong Dong and Bo Bo for their walk. Jacky’s with his pals playing basketball and Melvin’s gone over the border – a minor problem with the new shopping mall and something about a golf tournament in Shenzhen.

The house seems very, very quiet. I push open the door of her room. A stale smell. I think she’s been smoking. Something. She’s taken down her old Darcey Bussell Swan Lake poster and put up a poster for some Japanese movie I’ve never heard of but looks quite frightening. The Anna Sui Dolly Girl gift set is sitting on her bedside table, still wrapped. The floor is a mess.

She won’t let Maria in to clean. Made her swear she wouldn’t. Says she’s perfectly capable of cleaning up after herself. Doesn’t need a slave. I open the window a little to let in some air.

There are books everywhere on her bed. I used to love sitting and doing her homework with her when Maria brought her back in the afternoon from Saint Paul’s. Then the homework became more difficult and I couldn’t quite keep up so much anymore. She had tutors of course. Always British.

Such nice manners, unlike the Americans, who can barely tell a knife from a fork. Or those Australians. Much too casual for my liking and, well – that accent.

There’s a very long essay on the bed, pages of it, with crossings out in pencil all over the place and notes scribbled in Jenny’s lovely handwriting in the corners. It’s called From Lily Feet to Platform Mules: The Fetishisation of the Feminine Foot in Contemporary Chinese Culture and goes on about ‘pre-revolutionary’ this, ‘pornographic’ that, something about ‘enforced infantilisation’ and ‘the ugly Chinaman’. I flick through a few of the books.

The Speculum of the Other Woman by some wrinkled old French matron who’s wearing a fabulous mink in the author photo. Something to do with the ‘archaic mother’ and ‘imaginary father’. For all their haute couture and pastries the French have some very strange ideas. Transgender Theory and the Politics of Diaspora. Written On the Body. Orientalism. I thought she was studying political science.

What the fuck are you doing? Jenny gives me a start.

I turn around. Jenny darling, I say. You were very quiet. I thought you were out. Were you in Daddy’s den again?

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So, you thought you’d come in here and snoop around?

I just thought I’d tidy up a bit, I say.

How dare you. Get out of my room, she says. How dare you.

Darling, I’m just worried about you, I say.

Worried about me? You only care about yourself, she says, pushing me out of the door. Just leave me alone. That’s what you always used to do.

That’s not true, I say. I wanted you to have all the things I never had, an education, choices, I say.

Yes, she says. Ballet or tap. Violin or piano. Swimming or tennis.

Exactly, darling, I say. I just wanted the best for you. I’m your mother, Jenny.

Maria was more of a mother to me than you ever were, she says.

She’s the goddamn maid, I say. I just want to talk to you. It’s important, darling.

I’m listening, she says.

Well, what are you going to wear for the dinner party on Thursday?

Oh for fuck’s sake, she says.

Sweetheart … I say.

Don’t you have nails to polish?

Then she slams the door in my face and won’t open it. Puts her music on very loud. I sit on the floor in the hallway with my back against the door and have a bit of a weep. She’s upset me.

What are you doing? my mother asks me in Shanghainese as she wanders out of the kitchen.

Nothing, I say. Have you taken your pills today?

I’m not a child, she says. What’s the matter? Why are you sitting on the floor? What’s all this shouting about? You woke me up, she says.

Don’t you have mah-jong with the Laus?

Don’t worry, she says. When are we going back to Shanghai?

Oh, please, not that again, I say, standing up.

I had fifteen servants when I was growing up.

Yes, until your father gambled it all away, I say, pushing her down the corridor.

You know, you were just the same yourself when you were little. Your own road.

What are you talking about? I certainly was not, I say.

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And those movies, she says with that roll of her eyes.

They put food on your table, I say.

Drink some soup, she says and she’s out the door.

I know for a fact that Kevin Chung’s mother cried for a week when he didn’t get into the London School of Economics. Jenny was upset too.

Thought he might kill himself. We never once put that kind of pressure on her. There’s always Manchester, darling, I said. And it can’t be that awful. They have Selfridges and Harvey Nicks now. But when she did get into the LSE, we were so proud. Kevin Chung’s mother was absolutely mortified when she wasn’t visiting him in the hospital. We had an absolutely unforgettable week in the Seychelles to celebrate, I seem to recall.

Such a pity one’s not really supposed to wear mink anymore. * * * Maria’s been with us years and years. She’s an absolute darling and a tiny little thing. She was ever so good with the kids when they were small. Ever so patient. And such an angel in the kitchen. We’ve both been slaving away for days on the dinner party and finally we’ve just about decided which table service to use. She’s right, of course. The Royal Doulton is so much more understated than the Wedgwood when dining with friends. And of course the Cristofle does go with everything. The caterers have delivered on time and we’ve got our lists ready of what needs to go in when. The flowers are all arranged, almost. My nails are done. And the Portuguese white that lovely darling Paco recommended is chilling. Check, check and check. The doorbell rings and Maria goes to buzz them all up.

Turn off that television, Jacky, I say. Go and get Jenny. Where is she? Is she still in the bathroom?

Jacky’s talked to her and he says she’s coming to the dinner, but I must admit I was a teeny bit … what’s the word? … apprehensive. That’s it. Thank God for Valium, or whatever it’s called these days … Diaza– something or other.

Good evening, Josephine, Donald says, kissing my hand.

Exquisite manners, always has had. He’s wearing a lovely cream linen suit and what look like handmade brogues. John Lobb, I shouldn’t doubt.

Melvin shakes his hand and takes an elbow.

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Donald, I need a spot of advice, he says and guides him to the bar and then the balcony for a drink and a chat.

Don’t smoke please, Melvin darling, I say to him.

They look terribly serious. Boris, the son, who is very tall and rather tanned these days, is in chinos and a beautifully starched white button-down Oxford. He’s decided not to specialise. Says he can do more good in general practice. And apparently the money is astounding if he can buy into the right location. Yolanda looks half-decent for once, showing off her new décolletage in a Diane von Furstenberg signature wrap. She’s got that lime green Hermès Kelly on her arm again. Bespoke, my foot. Mango is stunning as ever in ballet flats and a little sixties cocktail dress.

Real vintage, Mango says. From this wonderful little weekend flea market in the thirteenth arrondissement. It just spoke to me.

Sweet, says Jacky, fiddling with his hair, which he’s spent hours gelling into a mess.

Jacky chats with Mango and Boris, and Donald and Melvin look rather hunkered down on the balcony. I’m sure that’s a wisp of cigarette smoke.

Mother emerges at some point, having brushed her hair, changed into an old black and red floral dress, and put on some lipstick, a nice pair of heels and a simple string of pearls. Which leaves us waiting only for Jenny.

Jesus, says Jacky.

I drain my gin and tonic.

A glass of wine please, says Jenny. How do I look?

She’s wearing a black vinyl miniskirt and tottering on huge YSL platform heels. A tight pink diamante encrusted vest-top shows off those weird marks on her arms. No bra. She has put on a lot of weight. Bright crimson lipstick.

Pale blue eye shadow. Thick black mascara.

Where did you get that outfit, Jennifer? Yolanda asks a little too politely.

Do you like it, Mummy? Jenny asks in her little girl voice, giving me a kiss on the cheek and taking a glass of Portuguese white from Jacky. You should do. It’s all from your wardrobe.

So Melvin, says Donald, how long before the yuan overtakes our dear old Hong Kong dollar? Three years?

I think it will be even sooner than that, Donald, says Melvin, directing him to a chair at the dining table and we all sit and Maria goes around serving the homemade vegan mushroom soup heated as per the caterers’ instructions.

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So which part of our collective memory are you knocking down this week, Uncle Donald? Jenny asks.

You used to be such a thin little creature, says Yolanda.

I was anorexic, Jenny says.

You were not, darling, I say, taking a sip of gin. You were just very, very lucky.

Jacky and Mango seem to find this the funniest thing they have ever heard and cannot stop laughing.

Mother, Jenny says.

What darling? I reply.

You said you wanted to talk to me, she says.

This soup is absolutely delicious, Josephine darling, says Yolanda.

Well, Jenny says. I’m a Marxist.

It’s the white truffles that make it special, I say.

How marvellous, says Yolanda. She’s grinning from ear to ear. You’ve always been such a wonderful hostess.

It looks awfully like we shall have rain this evening, Donald says.

You’ve never fucking understood me, Jenny says.

I must get the recipe from you before we go, says Yolanda.

Jacky engages Mango. You out at the weekend? Great new night at Hei Hei on Sundays.

Didn’t you hear me, Mother, Jenny says. I’m a Marxist.

I hear the crowd’s moved on, says Mango. Too many Chiggers. Sugar has the buzz these days.

I thought for a minute she was going to say she was a lesbian, says Donald to Melvin, and they both chuckle.

I sometimes watch Ellen on the cable, says Yolanda.

Which is worse, says Melvin.

Exactly, I say to Yolanda.

Jenny is making loud growling noises when the doorbell starts ringing and ringing and I’m thanking God and thinking who the hell can that be, not the goddamn Mormons again. Who keeps letting them in? Jacky is laughing like a hyena. Yolanda and Mango are staring at the same spot on the ceiling. Boris, who does look handsome in that shirt, is carefully stirring his mushrooms and white truffles. Donald and Melvin are talking very loudly about property prices going up again and how marvellous it is.

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Sell now or wait? speculates Donald. That’s the dilemma.

Exactly, says Melvin.

Bourgeois scum, says Jenny.

Jenny darling, please, I say.

Property is theft, she says.

She’s high, Jacky says. She’s on something, man. Got to be.

That’s enough, thank you, Jacky, I say.

And then the dogs are barking like mad. Maria runs into the dining room shouting something over and over again and screaming about men with guns and because she’s from Manila no one laughs.

CIA! CIA! CIA! What are you talking about? I’m standing and have her by the shoulders.

What do you mean CIA? The apartment is filling with men and women in neatly tailored police uniforms and very plain clothes.

What’s this all about? I try to keep a level voice.

Oh my God, says Jenny.

Please stay calm, madam, says a rather plain plain-clothes man holding up a badge. Why can’t any of them ever look like Andy Lau? Are you Mrs Josephine Wong? We have search warrants.

Jacky has stopped laughing.

What the hell is going on? I ask, more than once, following them as they go round the flat and spread out in all the rooms. They’re going into my closets, searching the shoe drawers. My mother is muttering about the Communists and her jewellery, and I’m afraid she might become hysterical so I have to calm her down.

Please sit down, madam, an easy-on-the-eye gweilo policeman says to me in English, which has a soothing effect.

He’s slowly telling me that there has been a phone call about irregular land sales and kickbacks relating to a commercial development in Wuhan.

The call was to the Independent Commission Against Corruption. The ICAC ordered an investigation. Its officers are at this moment searching Melvin’s offices in Wan Chai. All the bank accounts in question are in the name of Josephine Wong.

That’s my name, I say. Why … ?

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an animal at those marks on her arms. Melvin, still sitting at the head of the table, is glaring at her, then he says, Don’t worry, mushroom.

Melvin, I say. Tell them to get out. Tell them this is a mistake. Tell them they’ve ruined my damn dinner party.

I think maybe the diazawhatsit is reacting rather badly with the Bombay Sapphire and I try to get a grip.

Shut up, woman, Melvin says. Will you please just bloody shut up?

How dare you talk to me like that, I say. How dare you. After all the shit I’ve put up with for thirty years.

Stop it! screams Jenny, now in tears and covering her ears. Just stop it!

Please try to calm down, Josephine darling, says Yolanda. It’s not nice.

Oh shut the fuck up, Suzie Wong, I say, deciding that moment is as good as any to simply lose it. Those new tits of yours are as cheap as that fake Hermès bag you keep dragging around. Did they throw that in as a free gift in Shenzhen?

In for a penny, as they say, and my almost full glass of gin, ice, lemon and all is tipped down her designer décolletage.

Boris chokes on a pitted imported olive.

My shit! Melvin shouts and bangs the table. If it wasn’t for me you’d still be selling fish balls with Yolanda Li in some hostess bar off Nathan Road.

Mango gasps. Donald coughs up a strangled I say. Yolanda is white as a sheet and plucks an ice cube from her expensive new cleavage.

Melvin is about to start again so I turn on him and say, Oh just go back to your little whore in Shenzhen, why don’t you? And stay there.

His face couldn’t get much redder and he’s banging his little fists on the table so the cutlery is rattling. Don’t you talk about her like that, don’t you ever dare talk about her like that, he says and he’s screaming, I mean, darling, literally screaming at me in Cantonese, and the kind of language you just don’t hear except in a Temple Street brothel or maybe among off-duty minibus drivers. Then he’s standing up and pulling at his birthday Dunhill tie and knocking over his chair and calling me all sorts of nasty, vile names and, I can’t remember, but I may have been responding in kind and Jenny’s crying and laughing and rocking, and Dong Dong and Bo Bo have got out of the scullery and are running around and around the table legs, barking and nipping at Yolanda’s ankles as Jacky and Mango are staring at each other shaking their heads, and I can see there’s a policewoman in my dressing 197

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room going through my La Perla. And then Melvin’s gasping and wheezing and grabbing at the edge of the imported Scandinavian rosewood and he snags on the Ovo raffia runner and I’m standing there staring at all that fine bone china and lovely French fluted crystal sliding ever so slowly away from me towards the other side.

Melvin, my sweet darling, I say.

Ah Ba, Jacky shouts.

Wong Gor, says Donald.

Sir, Maria calls, and bounds towards him.

Daddy, Jenny calls out in a voice I haven’t heard for years, I’m so, so sorry.

Her eye shadow and mascara are running down her face, but I’m watching tiny Maria as she flips Melvin onto his back and climbs right on top of him.

After a quick feel of his neck, she begins to pound his chest, pinch his nose and starts blowing and blowing for all she’s worth into his mouth.

By the time we exit our apartment building there’s a bit of a crowd and it’s raining cats and dogs. The police have Melvin’s computer and for good measure the kids’ laptops and piles and piles of papers. God knows how they knew so quickly but photographers are snapping away and I give them a few moments of Gong Li dignified suffering while staring daggers at our neighbours braving the weather to watch our departure. Yolanda is standing at the back with Donald and Mango and Boris. I smile at them and wave.

Yolanda is crying as she looks at the Tuscan marble floor of the foyer.

We have to go now madam, a policewoman says.

I give Jenny a hankie and tell her, don’t worry, darling, blow your nose, it will all be okay, and she lets me hold her hand. My mother takes the other.

I’m so sorry, Jenny whispers. I’m so sorry.

As we walk out to the road I think of what Paco always says in salsa class about keeping your chin up, back straight and eyes wide open. I didn’t properly have time to change, only to grab a silver Chloe clutch and touch up with a little Crème de la Mer so I’m wearing a cinched-waist Emporio Armani cream jacket, boot-cut Miss Sixty jeans and the new Jimmy Choos when we watch them load Melvin into the ambulance. Tai-tai with an edge, that’s how I’ve always liked to describe my personal style. * * * 198

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I never saw my mother much when I was little. Once she’d sold all the Shanghai jewellery she had to work like a slave, night and day. We shared a kitchen and a bathroom with three other families. No air-conditioning. The only lullaby I got was the planes taking off and landing at the old airport in the middle of the harbour. I used to lie awake in the heat listening to the neighbours arguing with pots and pans, waiting for mummy to come home and wondering where they were going, all those planes.

Of course there was no money for going to school after father died. I started doing shifts at a factory in Kwun Tong near the harbour, sewing blonde hair on these funny little dolls. Hong Kong was all factories in those days, and no shortage of workers from all those horrible squatter camps.

Plastic flowers. Fairy lights. Party Susans. Factory after factory. That was where I met Yolanda Li. Not that she called herself that back then. She was sticking the eyes into the holes in the dolls’ faces. Big bright blue eyes.

Thousands of them. Then one day we were having noodles for lunch and she said did I want to go and meet a cousin of hers who needed staff for a new club he was opening in TST. Easy money, she says.

What kind of club is it? I say.

Don’t pull that face, she says. It’s not like that. The Silver Dollar. Very high-end. Japanese guests. Lovely décor.

I didn’t tell my mother about it for a while and when I did, by then, I was able to give her so much from tips on a Saturday night she couldn’t really say anything. And then one night the resident singer rang up to say she couldn’t come in. The boss had heard me singing in the kitchen and sent me up on stage. There was an agent in that night looking for a new girl singer in the style of Connie Francis and the rest, as they say, is Canto-pop history.

We have a lovely saying in Chinese: one generation plants the trees, the next gets the shade. When I became a mother myself, it was terribly important to me to be around and see Jennifer grow up. Take her to the ballet classes. I did the PTA social committee. Jenny did piano lessons. All of it. I wanted most for us to be friends. You know? Chums. I particularly remember the third time she was in the Jean M. Wong School Stars of Tomorrow show at the Cultural Centre. It’s my most treasured memory.

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busy. Melvin was building up the business then and he needed me at his side at all those endless banquets and functions and whatnot. Of course he expected me to give up the singing. No question about that. I had my family.

I didn’t mind. Not at all. I opened lots of doors for him. The dinner dances where they would ask me to sing. Nights at the races in Happy Valley in the right boxes. I knew how to get a party going all right. He didn’t know a fork from a spoon when I first met him, let alone which to use with what. And then of course Yolanda Li had to go one better and get herself a gweilo.

You know, in a way, I think Jenny did us all a favour when she made that call to the corruption people. It was time for us to downsize. Reconsider our priorities. Everybody’s doing it. Look at Trudie Styler. Madonna’s gone organic. I’m ready to hold my chin up and face the future. I’ve already got my court outfit planned. Very sleek. Very simple. Beyond fashion. Beyond style. What’s the secret? It’s all in the silhouette, darling. Jacky won’t come.

Says he doesn’t want to be on the cover of Eastweek. Faded star in corruption scandal, they said last week.

Jenny looks so much better already without that eyebrow stud and the hair will grow back soon enough. We’ve an appointment this afternoon with her psychotherapist, Dr Caleb Mortimer, in the Prince’s Building, and after a mother-and-daughter yoga class we’re going up to see Daddy at the Matilda.

Dr Mortimer says we can both learn from each other, Jenny and I. It’s a mutual process. A two-way street. Sometimes we seem to talk more about me actually, almost like it’s me who’s got the issues.

Last time Caleb asked me, What do you think about this Josephine? And he slid several newspapers towards me across his lovely burnished walnut desk.

I don’t read that rubbish, I say. But then, isn’t all publicity good publicity, Caleb?

He picks up one newspaper. Faded singer turned sleaze queen in Mainland graft probe, he reads. Former model and actress Josephine Wong, best known for roles in low-budget seventies sexploitation pics such as Kung-Fu Angels … blah, blah, blah. Wong, aged – That’s a damn lie, I say. They’re years out.

Caleb seems fascinated by my mother. And he goes on and on about my shoes. Obsessed. Can’t stop talking about them.

What exactly do shoes mean to you, Josephine?

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You’d think I was Imelda Bloody Marcos. I’ve tried explaining to him but, darling, as if a straight man could ever understand. Life just always looks better from the top of a fantastic, sky-high pair of high heels. You should have seen the outfit my mother wore to escape the Communists, I said to him.

Is it important to you how other people see you?

How long exactly have you been in Hong Kong? I said. I mean, what sort of question is that? * * * So I’m sitting in the Fourth Floor Restaurant at Harvey Nicks, next to the window, nursing a Cosmo and watching the cars go by on Queen’s Road Central. Ah Kong is dropping Jennie off soon. I don’t know what on earth we’ll do when we have to let him go: the last time I took public transport Elton John was married to a woman.

Hello, darling, says a voice from behind me. Can I join you?

I turn around and it’s Yolanda Li. Yolanda, I say. Thank you for the flowers.

She smiles and sits down. She’s wearing a very simple grey cashmere top and a pair of black pants and she looks almost quite classy. Patent flats. She’s still got that Kelly clutch with her. She puts it next to her on the booth. Sees me looking at it.

I hear TVB are doing an interview, says Yolanda.

News travels fast, I say. Yes. ‘Weathering the storm’ … ‘The true Hong Kong spirit’ … Something brave like that.

You were right, she says. Another Cosmo?

About what? I say. Oh, why not?

She waves over a waiter and orders two more Cosmos. When they arrive she takes a long gulp and looks me in the eye.

The bag. It’s fake. Mango spent the money I sent her for it on coke.

Cocaine? I say.

Yes, darling, she says. She hasn’t paid her tuition this year and she’s three months behind with the rent. In fact, the London College of Fashion didn’t even seem to know who she was.

Oh Yolanda, I say. We both take long gulps of Cosmo.

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Jenny’s not going back to college in September, I say. We’ll see how things go. The medication is making a massive difference already but she needs her mother most at a time like this.

Oh, of course, says Yolanda nodding.

When her friends call from London I tell them she’s resting. She’s still having the occasional outburst. Got very overwrought in Casa Armani yesterday and started scratching a velvet sofa and wailing, so we had to leave and go somewhere quiet for an ice tea.

Yolanda stares out the window. Where did we go wrong? When’s the court case?

Not certain yet. Melvin’s people have the best legal team in place. One of them was on the winning side of the Nina Wang case but they don’t seem very confident for all we must be paying them. They’ve mentioned prison a few times. Never a good sign. It turns out all the property is in my name. So there is a God after all. I had the locks changed on the Shenzhen villa and all her things thrown out, the little bitch included. She can go back to her farm or her paddy field or wherever it was she came from. And she can take the bloody child with her. Melvin’s in no condition to undergo a DNA test.

How is Melvin?

He might be off the ventilator next week, I say. Turns out Maria saved him when she gave him the kiss of life. Funny, I never knew she was a qualified nurse.

I’m hungry, says Yolanda. She flicks through the menu and sighs. What do you say we go and get a bowl of noodles?

I nod, get the bill and we’re going down the escalator looking at all the bags and shoes and mannequins and scarves and necklaces and things all piled up, but I just want to get outside and then we’re running across Queen’s Road Central, dodging cars and laughing at the thrill.

Beef brisket? I say. She nods. Come on then, I say, and off we go.

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Liberation Road

Poetry Kristine Ong Muslim

Not Sleeping Cinder girl does her household chores and keeps her mouth shut. Her sisters have gone to the church where all the angels are made of stone. The gods of yellow have long ago receded to blackness. She can only conjure them from memory, can only wipe the glass windows clean with a rag that gets dirtier with every swipe. She sweeps away hands and ears on the oor.

Doll parts, she convinces herself.

And what little love she has will teach us a lot about hate.

The magic mirrors begin to sprout inside the rooms in a house where there are no keys.

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Contributors

Contributors

O THIAM CHIN’s short stories have appeared in Asia Literary Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Kyoto Journal, The Jakarta Post, Cha, Karavan and Qarrtsiluni. He is the author of two story collections, Free-Falling Man and Never Been Better (nominated for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award 2010). His new fiction collection, Under The Sun, will be published this year.

JUSTIN HILL has been likened to George Orwell, a boxer and Tolstoy. His acclaimed first novel, The Drink and Dream Teahouse, won the 2003 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a 2002 Betty Trask Award and was banned by the Chinese government. His second novel, Passing Under Heaven, won the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award.

The first of his Conquest Trilogy, chronicling the momentous events surrounding the Battle of Hastings, will be published in May 2011.

STEVEN HIRST was born in Yorkshire, England, and has worked in Chengdu, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, where he is based. After reading English at Oxford University he worked as assistant director to Alan Ayckbourn at the Old Vic in London and the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. He studied creative writing at Hong Kong University and has been a language tutor to several renowned Chinese actors.

GARY JONES is a British journalist based in Shanghai. Focusing on human-interest and behind-the-news features, he has contributed words and pictures to numerous publications worldwide, including Time magazine, The Times and The Sunday Times of London, The Sunday Telegraph, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, British GQ and the South China Morning Post.

MIN K. KANG was born in Busan, South Korea. She has lived in the United States since 1996 and now resides in San Francisco. She is a graduate of Texas A&M University, College Station and is pursuing a master’s degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University.

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(VVHQWLDO UHDGLQJ IRU WKH WKLQNLQJ SHUVRQ Griffith REVIEW presents the best Australian and international writers who tease out the complexity of current events through essays, memoir and fiction.

You don’t have to be incredibly smart and worldly to enjoy Griffith REVIEW, but you probably are! Invest in Australia’s best literary quarterly. Subscribe online with the promo code ALR2010 for special savings. Act now so you won’t miss November’s second annual fiction edition, Writing from the Rim.

‘Of all the small magazines in this country, Griffith REVIEW is the one that’s essential reading.’

– The Australian

Edition 28: Still the Lucky Country? A timely reflection of Australia’s sources of power, influence and fragility on the cusp of the Asian century.

Edition 29: Populate and Perish Explores the balance between immigration and sustainability in an era of climate change.

www.griffithreview.com

Contributors TIPPAPHON KEOPASEUT is the owner of the Book-Café Vientiane bookshop, Laos, and joint owner of Lao Insight Books, an English/French publishing house that publishes books exclusively about Laos. Political affiliation: never mind the principles, stick to the Party. Literate, likes pho noodles and shoes.

PALANI MOHAN was born in Chennai, India, moved to Australia as a child and lives in Malaysia. His photography has featured in many of the world’s leading magazines and newspapers. He has published three books, the latest being Vanishing Giants: Elephants of Asia and has won a number of international awards.

THOMAS R. MOORE’s poems have appeared in The Worcester Review, College English, Wolf Moon Journal, The Café Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Flint Hills Review, Naugatuck River Review, Off the Coast and Words and Images. His poem ‘Calving in Te Awamutu’ received First Prize in the 2009 Naugatuck River Review narrative poetry contest. He has taught in Iran and Istanbul. He lives in Maine, United States.

KRISTINE ONG MUSLIM’s work has appeared in more than 400 publications worldwide, most recently in Boston Review, Coe Review, Cold-Drill, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Southword and Strong Verse.

She has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and four times for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award.

D. REGE is an Indian author and poet. She lives in Mumbai, where she also teaches creative writing at St Xavier’s College. Her work has appeared in publications including the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The North, DesiLit and Muse India. She is working on a collection of short stories and a book of poetry.

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Contributors KATE ROGERS’ poetry has been published in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada, the US and Britain, in Many Mountains Moving, Dimsum, Pressed, The New Quarterly, Contemporary Verse II, Canadian Woman Studies, The Mad Woman in the Academy and Orbis International. She is co-editor of the international women’s poetry anthology Not A Muse and has published a collection, Painting the Borrowed House.

SANDIP ROY is a journalist and radio-show host based in San Francisco. He is a New America Media editor and a commentator on National Public Radio. An immigrant from India, he writes regularly for ethnic and mainstream media in the US and India and blogs for The Huffington Post. His work has been included in anthologies such as Contours of the Heart, Story-Wallah, The Phobic and the Erotic, Desilicious and Mobile Cultures.

BISHAN SAMADDA’s photographs have appeared in newspapers and periodicals around the world, including Outlook, The Telegraph, India Currents, Tehelka and The San Francisco Chronicle. He lives and works in Calcutta, India.

JAINA SANGA grew up in Mumbai and moved to the US as a student. After receiving a PhD in English she taught English and Cultural Studies for several years. She is the author of a book of criticism of Salman Rushdie’s fiction and the editor of two volumes on south Asian literature. Her fiction has appeared in the Asia Literary Review, Epiphany and Carpe Articulum. She lives in Dallas and travels to India frequently.

ANIS SHIVANI is a fiction writer, poet and critic. He is the author of Anatolia and Other Stories and is working on a novel, The Slums of Karachi, and a book of criticism. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Georgia Review, Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, Agni, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Stand and Meanjin. He lives in Houston, Texas.

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Contributors OCEAN VUONG was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and lives in New York, where he is an undergraduate English student. He has received an Academy of American Poets award and two Pushcart Prize nominations. His poems can be found in Word Riot, the Kartika Review, Cha, Softblow, Lantern Review and Asian American Poetry. He practises Zen meditation and is an animal-rights activist.

WEN HUANG is a writer and freelance journalist whose articles and translations have appeared in The Wall Street Journal Asia, the Chicago Tribune, the South China Morning Post, The Christian Science Monitor and The Paris Review. Translated works include The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu and Woman from Shanghai by Yang Xianhui.

BANANA YOSHIMOTO, novelist and essayist, hails from Tokyo.

She won the Kaien Newcomer Writers’ Prize in 1987 and the Izumi Kyoka Prize in 1988 for her first novel, Kitchen. She has also been the recipient of numerous other Japanese and international literary prizes, notably Italy’s Maschera d’Argento. Her work has been widely translated and is published in more than thirty countries.

Art and the Artists MINAM APANG’s recent ‘War with the Stars’ paintings draw from ‘one specific story: a myth (re-told by Verrier Elwin in Myths from the North East Frontier of India) that weaves a tale of betrayal and revenge …’

E.J. CABANGON lives in Manila, Philippines and has held regular exhibitions since 2003.

WANG QINGSONG is known for his large-format tableau photographs. His work is currently on exhibition at the 17th Biennale of Sydney.

MICHAEL ROGGE, film-maker and photographer, lives in Holland. He was based in Hong Kong and Japan during the 1950s.

BRENDALE ASINAS TADEO is the inaugural scholar with Art on the Verge, a programme offered by Rogue magazine and Art Cabinet Philippines to encourage emerging visual artists.

MPP YEI MYINT was born in Burma in 1953. His works feature in the collections of the Singapore Art Museum, National Art Gallery of Malaysia and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan.

211

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͛͜͝Ǧ͕͜͝Ǧ͖͛͘͝Ǧ͔͘Ǧ͜ ͖͂͝Ǥ͔͝Ȁ ͖͂͘Ǥ͔͝

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͛͜͝Ǧ͕͜͝Ǧ͖͛͘͝Ǧ͙͔Ǧ͙ ͙͂͘Ǥ͔​͔Ȁ ͙͂͗Ǥ͔​͔ ͛͜͝Ǧ͕͜͝Ǧ͖͛͘͝Ǧ͙͕Ǧ͖ ͙͂​͙Ǥ͔​͔Ȁ ͙͂͘Ǥ͔​͔

20% discount off ͘ Ǥ

͔͗ ǡ ǡ ͕​͕͚͕͘͝ ǣ ȋ͚͙Ȍ ͚͔͖͛͘͜​͛͘ ǣ ȋ͚͙Ȍ ͚͛​͙͚͖͙͛͝ Ǧ ǣ ̷ Ǥ Ǥ ǣȀȀ Ǥ Ǥ Ǥ

New fiction | reportage | non-fiction | photography | memoir

PALANI MOHAN the mystic Bali rice harvest: a photographic essay BANANA YOSHIMOTO the darkness within CHANG-RAE LEE the American immigrant novel SANDIP ROY India going grey

Also in this issue: FICTION BY Justin Hill | Jaina Sanga | Steven Hirst | O Thiam Chin POETRY BY Thomas R. Moore | Kristine Ong Muslim | Min K. Kang | Kate Rogers | Ocean Vuong

Hong Kong: HK$99 China: RMB99 Singapore: S$25 Malaysia: RM35 Thailand: Bt395

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