As the Earth Turns Silver (2 page)

Sometimes under the weight, the shape, of his brother's expectation, Yung felt death-weary.

He stood before the washtubs out the back of the shop and gazed at his red-stained hands. He pulled the last beetroot from the water, brought down the blade quickly, once, twice, watched the leaves with their fine red stalks, the long end of the root, thin as a wet rat's tail, fall into the wooden box. Then he tossed the trimmed beetroot onto the others, carried the enamel basin to the wash-house and tipped them onto the purple-red mass in the copper. It would take half an hour for the water to come to the boil and then another hour, bleached worms, beetles, spiders slowly boiling on the surface of the red dirt water.

He went back and cleaned the tubs, tipped in half a sack of carrots, covered them with water, then took the broom and pushed it under then up through the vegetables, sweeping, tumbling them clean in the ever murkier liquid. He could feel a layer of sweat forming on his brow, the dampness of his white singlet, his shirt, under his arms. He loosened his grip, relaxed his arms for a moment, then pushed down again. Once he'd had tender hands, hands that knew only the calligrapher's brush, the grinding of ink stick with water. They were still soft, pale, not cracked and brown like his elder brother's, but now calluses had formed on his palms, on the fleshy pads below his fingers. He remembered the first time he'd done this, the rhythmic push and pull of wood and bristle, the sting of his skin rubbing, folding in on itself.

He pulled the plugs, watched the rushing, sucking waters, stepped back as the pipes drained onto the concrete pad. He picked out the cleaned carrots, dropped them into a bamboo basket, tipped the rest of the sack into the tubs and filled them again with water. How many years had he been here boiling beetroot, washing carrots, and trimming cabbages and cauliflowers? Eight? Nine? Almost ten years.

Standing on the deck of the
Wakatipu
as it heaved into port, he had been astonished by the landscape. Dusty clay and rock where men had hacked a footing. Where they had tried to anchor themselves, their wooden shacks and macadam roads from Antarctic southerlies. Hills thick with bush and curling foliage falling to the bays. Ships loaded with coal or logs from the West Coast or human cargo from Sydney. Wellington: a town built of wood and dust and wind.

Shun Goh told him
gweilo
gave this land a strange, mystical name. The name of the dark-skinned people, the people of the land. He said Maoris were dying. In fifty years they would be wiped out, the way a white handkerchief wipes sweat from the face. They would become a story passed from mother to son, like the giant birds they'd heard of. Fierce birds that could not fly.
Moa
, the people said, like a lament . . .
Maori . . .
their absence a desolation.

In those early days Yung thought he saw a Maori, but the man selling rabbits door to door turned out to be Assyrian. And the man selling vegetables was Hindoo. This is what all the dark-skinned people were – Assyrian or Hindoo – the ones who lived in Haining Street.

Over months, years, he did see Maoris, their status and appearance as varied as
gweilo
. When the
gweilo
Duke and Duchess visited,
Tongyan
adorned a huge arch with flags outside Chow Fong's shop in Manners Street.
Chinese Citizens Welcome
, it said. Everyone lined up along the route:
gweilo
,
Tongyan
, Maoris.

‘Who these Maolis?' Yung asked Mrs Paterson from the bakery next door, referring to the proud people in their finest
gweilo
top hats, pressed black suits and gold watch chains he saw welcome
gweilo
royalty, the groups of them he sometimes saw near Parliament.

‘They're from up north,' Mrs Paterson said. ‘They come to petition the government.'

‘What is
petition
?' Yung asked.

‘They want their land back,' she said, and then asked about the price of potatoes.

Sometimes Yung saw Maori fishermen or hawkers of sweet potato and watercress. They dressed in old ghost clothes and heavy boots, or wrapped an army blanket fastened with rope or a belt around the waist, sometimes even a blanket around their shoulders. But whatever their standing they never called out names or pulled his braid. They smiled, cigarette in hand, as if to a brother.

The first time Yung saw them he turned to Shun, looking for a sign. But his brother did not smile back. ‘Be careful,' he said.
Have a small heart
. Yung looked at the tobacco-stained teeth, the blue-green markings etched all over the dark faces. One of the men was young, perhaps his own age, and he had a straggly beard that partially obscured his tattoos. Yung looked him in the eye and smiled, just the corners of his mouth, then followed his brother, unsure of what he should do.

Yung pushed the broom down into brown water. Almost a decade, and he'd barely spoken to a Maori. Proudly tipped his hat to an old woman perhaps – the way he'd seen ghost-men meet, greet and pass their women – or to Maori men he'd smiled a hello. Only once one had come into the shop.

The man's face was fully tattooed and he'd held himself so very erect and with such dignity in his top hat and pressed black suit, a white handkerchief neatly folded in his jacket pocket, that Yung had been at a loss for words. Yung could imagine him waving from a shiny black motorcar as crowds lined the parade.

The man had nodded his head slightly. ‘Good afternoon,' he said. ‘Good afternoon, sir.'

The man smiled, flashing a gold tooth. He looked at the strawberries and grapes.

He only wants the best fruit, Yung thought. The most expensive. ‘Stlawbelly go lotten. No good,' he said. ‘Glape best quality. Velly sweet.' He walked over, selected the best cluster – each grape plump, juicy, purple-black. ‘Please tly,' he said, offering it up.

The man took a grape and placed it delicately in his mouth. He smiled again. ‘Very good,' he said. ‘I'll take two bunches.' Then he looked around again. ‘How is the pineapple?'

Yung lifted a pineapple to his nose and sniffed. He tugged gently at one of the inner leaves, then put the pineapple back on the stack. He picked up another, smelled it and tugged at a leaf, which came away. ‘Good pineapple,' he said. ‘Lipe and sweet.'

As he handed over the packaged fruit, the man thanked him.

‘Good luck,' Yung said.

The man looked at him quizzically.

‘Your land,' Yung said.

‘Yes,' the man said.

They almost bowed to each other before the man walked out into the southerly.

What
gweilo
had ever treated him as respectfully? How many had even looked in his eyes?

Each day he worked in the shop. Each day but Sunday white ghosts came in and out. He handed them vegetables wrapped in newspaper or paper bags filled with fruit. They put money on the wooden counter and he counted out their change. Good day. Good day.

He wanted to talk. He wanted to understand. But how to say? His English was improving. But how many customers truly invited his stumbling conversation?

On Sundays and other afternoons or nights when his brother gave him time off, he would go to a clansman's – to another fruit and vegetable shop or laundry – or go down Haining Street, Taranaki, Frederick or Tory. They called the area
Tongyangai
– Chinese people's street, where people of the
Tong
dynasty lived. In shop or cook-house or gambling joint, or even outside on a warm summer evening, they'd gather together to gossip and drink tea. His best friend Ng Fong-man, Cousin Gok-nam, everyone would be there. Everyone but women. Chinese women, wives. Even as he visited greengrocery, laundry, market garden, as he drummed up support and donations for the Revolution, how many women did he see? Who could afford the poll tax or even the fare?

Yung shut his eyes. He tried to remember his wife's face, the way her brow furrowed in concentration when he wrote the first line of a couplet, when he challenged her to complete it. He tried to remember her voice, the sound of her laughter . . .

No,
everyone
would be there in Haining Street, and
gweilo
also, placing bets, or after work, crowded in with
Tongyan
, checking their
pakapoo
tickets.
Aaaaiyaa. Aaaaiyaa.
The thumping of tables. The smell of pork soup. The sizzle of garlic and ginger. White ghosts shoulder to shoulder, familiar faces without names. Their only intercourse green-inked characters marked on white tickets.

‘Beetroot cooked
la
! What are you doing? Why aren't the carrots out in the shop?'

Yung started. ‘All right
la
!' He dropped the last of the carrots into the basket. Watched the back of his brother's head as it disappeared inside again, his shiny shaven skin, the long oiled braid running down.

Shun Goh had given him the rest of the afternoon off – enough time to walk to Fong-man's, have a cup of tea, play a game of cards and maybe argue about politics. Yung was relieved to get away from his brother, and out of doors. Usually spring was windy, unpredictably wet, yet today he didn't have to hold his hat to stop it from flying away. He almost had to squint for the blue glare of sky.

He walked around the Basin Reserve where he'd seen men in funereal white play a strange game with a piece of wood and a ball. Once he'd seen the ball hit three sticks in the ground and all the men cry out and throw their hands in the air – everyone except the man holding the flat piece of wood. Today there were only children rolling down the grassy banks and a group of boys on the common with a stick. He continued up Webb Street, then turned right into Cuba, delighting in the warmth of the day, in the jostle of horse and cart and tram, in the noisy ducking and weaving of humanity.

He paused outside the fishmonger's with its window piled high with rabbits, the little curtain of them that hung across the top of the entrance. Rabbit tails would brush his face when he entered, the soft fur smelling of grass and gaminess against his skin. Rabbit stewed in an earthenware pot. One shilling each, or maybe only tenpence. He licked his lips and walked on, humming a song he couldn't quite remember the name of, a song that had lost its words but not its tune. He hummed as if he had all the time in the world – waving to Mr Paterson, breathing in the yeasty smell of hot bread as he drove past in his cart, only just becoming aware of children behind him.

He turned, saw the boys – half a dozen of them, maybe more, seven- to ten-year-olds, one fat, the rest skinny, each with a little tweed cap and dirty knees. The tallest was carrying a stick.

‘Ching Chong Chinaman,' they sang. ‘Born in a jar, christened in a teapot, ha, ha, ha.'

Yung kept walking. He felt his hat being knocked to the ground, his braid uncoiling, falling down his back, hands grabbing and yanking. Bursts of laughter and another yank.

He turned around and charged at them. ‘Pigs! Dog-shit!' he shouted in Chinese. ‘Drop dead in the street!'

The kids laughed and ran off. He wanted to chase them, grab hold of them, push their faces in the dirt. The tall one, the one who'd pushed his hat off with the stick. The redhead or, even better, the fat one – he would have been easy to catch.

‘Ignore the barbarians,' his brother always said. ‘Never give them an excuse to retaliate.'

But he was sick of it. He was educated. He was respected. Back home he could have been an official. Even now people came to him to read and write their letters, their New Year couplets. He went to meet the newcomers off the ships, to help them with customs and immigration.

One night when his brother was down Haining Street a couple of young hooligans had come to the shop and started throwing cabbages around. Yung had been so incensed he'd tossed them out, both of them, into the street. He could still see the dust settle round them. They never came back.

Yung smiled. His brother never knew. He picked up his hat, recoiled his braid and covered it again, carried on.

He had walked this way so many times before – past the drapery, the pharmacy, over the tram tracks – yet only now did the saloon catch his attention. It was the veranda posts at first, the bright red, white and blue spiralling paint, and a similarly painted pole sticking out from above the doorway with the sign
S. Gibson
hanging from it. In the window there was a poster of a man in a suit and bun hat, pipe hanging from his mouth:
pipe tobacco in its most enjoyable form
.

Yung appreciated a well-laid out display, the aesthetics of colour and shape and categorisation. Arranged on shelves were blue tins of Capstan, Marcovitch Black and White, pale lemon State Express 555. There were matches in cardboard containers shaped like miniature hatboxes, as well as copper and tin versions, cylindrical and rectangular, wooden pipes and a brown ceramic tobacco jar inscribed with writing. Yung couldn't see all the words, and he didn't recognise them all either –
When all Things were made . . . better than Tobacco . . . a Bachelor's Friend
(what did Bachelor mean?) – but he did recognise the different tins and packets they sold in the greengrocery. He admired the china shaving mugs, each displayed with its own brush, the chrome hand clippers, Rolls Razors, cigar cutters, long leather razor strops, bottles of Scurf and Dandruff Lotion, and a Black Beauty Razor Hone with a long blue fish decorating the box.

A wooden partition separated the display from the interior. Even from the door onto the street he could only see another lead-light door with the words
Gents' Saloon
in the stained glass. He stepped back as the inner door opened, as a man emerged from the yellow-tinged, smoky light. As he walked past, Yung saw how neatly cut he was, how smoothly shaved. Yung smelled the tobacco and cinnamon. Another man entered the shop, and the smell of tobacco puffed out again before the door closed.

Yung could see his reflection in the window, his forehead shaved smooth, nothing of his tonsure or of the hair coiled under his hat. He'd had the braid for as long as he could remember. Some men cut theirs off. Some to stop the hair pulling, some for the Revolution. Even back home there were those who cut off their braids and then had to wear hats or wigs when they went out or chance execution.

Yung dreamed of the end of the dynasty. He dreamed of a new and powerful China, free of corruption, free from Manchu and foreign domination. He dreamed of Sun Yat-sen heading the new Republic, a man from Heung Shan who spoke English and not only the Peking dialect of the northerners, but also Yung's language, their language, Cantonese. Now he dreamed of a haircut like Sun Yat-sen's, like that of the man he'd seen walking out of the shop.

But
gweilo
saloons didn't cut Chinamen's hair, everyone knew that; and if, even if he had the courage, the foolhardiness, what would happen then? He would sit back in a chair, waiting for a barbarian to run a blade across his cheek, over his jaw, across his throat. The room would be wreathed with smoke. He would be surrounded by ocean ghosts, looking, watching, in an afternoon of no natural light, just the yellow glow of gas mantles. He thought of Fong-man, beaten in his shop in this very same street. He would sit back in the chair and feel the blade as it cut across his throat, and no one would notice if he didn't come out.

That night, Yung took the scissors from the drawer in the kitchen and cut off his braid. He heard the swish of the blades and the crunch as he cut through, his head strangely light, hair falling loosely at the back of his neck. He held the braid heavy in his hand, feeling terrifyingly liberated, and yet as if he had amputated a limb, as if already the sword had come down on his neck. He didn't know what to do. He looked in the mirror, the one he used every few days for plucking facial hair. He did not recognise himself. He felt as if he were growing paler or maybe pinker – because that was the true colour of barbarians, not white but pink, something like the colour of domesticated pigs. He looked at his face, at his hair. He felt as if even his name was translating. He put the braid at the bottom of a drawer and covered it with his most intimate apparel.

Why had he looked in the window of that saloon? Why had he not simply gone to Ah Fung's, the Haining Street barber, like everyone else? Why did he always want whatever he could not have?

He swallowed his shame. It would take time for the shaven parts of his head to grow, but tomorrow he would go. He would get Ah Fung to style his hair. He would buy bay rum. He would go out into the street, slick and sweet, smelling of bay oil and cinnamon.