As the Earth Turns Silver (23 page)

There are many ways to kill yourself. Some do it quickly, leaving their bodies as a farewell gift, or perhaps an act of revenge. Others, over a whole lifetime, die quietly.

Katherine did not understand what happened. First she heard his cry – low, deep, like that of an animal – then she felt the silver fork, the piece of pineapple fly from her hand, Robbie running, running from the room, arms flailing.

Afterwards he looked out at her with hollow eyes, arms loose by his side. Everything so loose, barely held together, almost as if his body had forgotten the meaning of muscle, ligament, bone.

She found him in the afternoon. One overhanging branch, the one he'd sat on as a boy. He was wearing his blue and white striped pyjamas – the pyjamas she'd proudly bought him, the very latest in men's nightwear – his bare feet a few inches from the ground.

There was nothing under the tree. Only grass, fallen twigs, dandelions that had yet to grow a heady stalk and burst into bloom. No overtoppled chair or box, nothing he could have stepped off into another world. And Katherine realised he had climbed the trunk, his fingers and toes wrapped over the wooden battens. That he'd sat on the branch as he tied the rope, first one end, then the other. How long had he sat there while she typed letters on monogrammed paper and filed newspaper reports into folders? What had he thought as he overlooked the garden: the honeysuckle he'd started to train up the white trellis, the roses whose young leaves were just beginning to sprout?

She did not want to look at his face, the length of his neck, the way his head hung to one side as if looking away, unable to meet her gaze. He used to poke out his tongue as a boy, when he was thinking deeply, when he was tying his shoelaces or even skimming a stone. She hoped he had flown, the way a cicada flies from its transparent skin, leaving a ghostly memory while its true self sits in summer trees, driving the world crazy with its singing.

He had been good at driving her crazy. Perhaps that was his role, the role of any child. To challenge his mother and father. And find them wanting . . .

*

Mrs Newman takes off her reading glasses. There is tenderness in her eyes – a soft, clouded sky – that Katherine has never noticed before. Her lip trembles. ‘It gets easier,' she says.

She gazes into her lenses, places them carefully back over her eyes, looks down at the newspaper.

*

Grief comes softly behind her. She does not know whose face he will wear. She might be typing a letter or washing a white bowl or looking out from the top of a double-decker tram. She might be at a show at His Majesty's, surrounded by laughter and gilt-edged conversation. And grief will come and touch her arm with his hand. She will turn and there he will be. He will wrap his arms round her neck. He will ask her to embrace him.

The major characters in this novel are fictional and their stories are works of the imagination; however, some of the minor characters are true historical figures. The most prominent of these is (Edward) Lionel Terry who murdered Joe Kum-yung in Haining Street, Wellington, on 24 September 1905. His interactions with the McKechnie family are fictional but his views, poetry, publications, trial and subsequent incarceration in mental institutions, as well as his popularity, are factual. During various periods at Seacliff Mental Hospital near Dunedin he enjoyed great personal freedom and during others he was subjected to solitary confinement because of his escapes and poor behaviour. He died still incarcerated at Seacliff on 20 August 1952, aged 80 years. Note: some of the ‘facts' about Terry as related in the novel, e.g. his education at Eton and Oxford, are not actually true but are what was believed and reported in newspapers of the time.

Dr Agnes Bennett was raised in Australia and England but first came to prominence in New Zealand where she was a popular and respected pioneer of women in medicine and a staunch supporter of female education and rights. Her life's philosophy was to give rather than receive and to ‘choose the leaden casket'. Drs Frederick Truby King and Ferdinand Batchelor were also major medical figures, Dr King being most famous in New Zealand not as lecturer of Mental Diseases at the Otago Medical School or Medical Superintendent of Seacliff but as founder of the Plunket Society supporting mothers and infants. (Elizabeth) Grace Neill was a leading nurse, public servant and social reformer, and Kate Sheppard and Lily Atkinson were at the forefront campaigning for women's suffrage in New Zealand.

Mary Anne (Annie) Wong came to Wellington from Melbourne to marry the Anglican Chinese Missioner, Daniel Wong. He died within a few years but she remained in Wellington working alongside subsequent Missioners before retiring to Hong Kong in the 1930s.

Yue Jackson (surname Yue), son of a Chinese father and Scottish mother, lived in New Zealand and China. For many years he was the English Secretary at the Chinese Consulate in Wellington. Consul Kwei Chih and the incident recounted in ‘If the Time Has Not Come', as well as Kwei Chih's son's reaction, did happen, though all other local names are fictionalised.

All political figures, whether New Zealand or Chinese, are real. The only exception is Alexander Newman, husband of the fictional Margaret Newman.

Sir Robert Stout did preside, as Chief Justice, over Lionel Terry's trial. He was a member of the Anti-Chinese League and was, like many leading figures of the day, anti-Chinese. Interestingly, his wife Anna Paterson Stout, a prominent woman of her day, was sympathetic to the Chinese.

Although Chinese New Zealanders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did have friends and supporters, the anti-Chinese legislation outlined in this novel is historically accurate, as is the general climate of racism and sometime violence. The shooting in Naseby and the murder of Ham Sing-tong in Tapanui are true examples. My paternal great-grandfather, Wong Wei-jung (Wong Way Ching) was brutally murdered in Wellington in 1914. The case was never solved.

Romanisation of the Chinese in this novel was problematic as, although my characters are Cantonese and only spoke Cantonese, many famous Chinese names, places and terms are only recognised by the general reader in Mandarin, either in the
pinyin
system used in modern China or the older Wade-Giles system. There are many different, often non-standard methods for romanising Cantonese and the common spellings in New Zealand are very different from those used elsewhere.

Because
pinyin
did not exist at the time of the novel, I have generally used the familiar Wade-Giles Mandarin romanisation for famous historical figures and places or whichever form they were most famously known by, but generally used Cantonese for everyone else. Sun Yat-sen was Cantonese and therefore recognised by the Cantonese romanisation of his name, and the province is most readily recognised as Kwangtung.

According to Chinese custom, surnames are listed first, though when Chinese entered western countries like New Zealand, government officials often mistook parts of given names as surnames and what with varied methods of romanisation, many Chinese ended up with erroneously recorded surnames which survive to this day.

I have hyphenated the two given names to make it clearer which are surnames and which are the given names. However, people were often called by one of their given names, eg, Wong Chung-yung was referred to as Yung by his elder brother. As the position in the family is so important, Yung referred to his brother as Shun Goh, Goh being the term for elder brother. Cantonese also often refer to people by Ah plus either their surname or a given name.

I have used the standard spelling used by New Zealand newspapers for Consul Kwei Chih. The Chinese ‘violin',
erh-hu
; the Goddess of Mercy, Kuan Yin; and the woman warrior, Mu-lan, are all romanised in Mandarin, but most other Chinese words, including units of measure and money, are romanised in Cantonese. I am indebted to Janet Chan of Picador Asia for her help with Cantonese romanisation.

Most of the early Chinese in New Zealand came from three main counties in Kwangtung (Guangdong) in southern China:
Tseng Sing (known as Jungseng in New Zealand, Zengcheng in
pinyin
or Tseng-ch'eng in Wade-Giles);
Pun Yu (Poonyu, Pan Yu or P'anyü); and
Sei Yap (Seyip, Siyi or Ssu-i).

By the turn of the twentieth century, Wellington had arguably become the major centre for Chinese in New Zealand. Media and popular portrayals of the Chinese at the time generally focussed on Haining Street and were usually sensationalist, negative and highly inaccurate. The Chinese community was centred on Haining Street and neighbouring Taranaki, Tory and Frederick Streets though many Chinese also lived above their businesses scattered throughout the city.

Note: the spelling of the Wellington suburb Kelburne did not change to its present day Kelburn until 1917.

This novel is not my family's story nor that of any particular Chinese New Zealand family, though my family did come from Melon Ridge (
Gwa Liang or Gwa Ling, Gualing or Kua-ling) and Tile Kiln (
Nga Yiel or Nga Yiu, Yayao or Ya-yao) villages in Tseng Sing county, and some of the incidents in the novel were inspired or informed by true experiences. This includes the sizeable amount of money raised by patriotic Chinese New Zealanders to support Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution, and my maternal great-grandfather's (Wong Kwok-min, Huang Guomin or Hung Kuo-min, also known as Wong Hum) involvement.

Although I have endeavoured to be historically and culturally accurate, there are many different and even conflicting views. There were also instances where I was unable to find out the ‘truth'. At the end of the day this is a work of fiction, not of history.