The Black Isle (5 page)

“Sister Yeung,” I said quietly. “I know you. I want to help you.”

Again, Sister Yeung reached with both hands for my feet, her movement and expression an exact facsimile of the night before. When she squeezed my toes, I again felt nothing. But this time, I paid closer attention. Her fingertips were shriveled and as tiny as a child’s, smaller even than mine. I had heard about poor children hired by silk factories to fish out silkworm cocoons from boiling tubs with their bare hands—the job left them with stunted fingers. Sister Yeung had those fingers. Looking at her face creased with time’s unstoppable passing, I had a flash of recognition: She would never be young again. I began to weep.

“Sister Yeung, can you hear me?”

“One day…,” she started to say. “One day…”

Her body seemed to melt away, and once again, I was alone in the dark.

The next day, in the rickshaw to school, I refused to let Sister Kwan touch me. Her thumb was wrapped in a much bigger bandage than needed, exaggerating the injury sustained at the chopping board. Each time she tried to grab my hand, I let out a piercing scream. Finally, the rickshaw man told her to leave me be because I was attracting too many stares. He didn’t want the police or, worse, the Republican Army after us.

“Did you keep the amulet I gave you?” Sister Kwan tried to make conversation, casting herself again as the concerned guardian.

I ignored her.

“It was blessed at my temple by a very powerful priest. He has ended droughts.”

I stared out at the row of street carts next to the crowded tram stop, all of them hawking breakfast crullers and hot soybean milk to commuters in a hurry. The grease smelled delicious. I wished we could stop.

“She always liked you, you know. Sister Yeung. You were her favorite. That’s why we were all so shocked about what she tried to do to you.”

Lies. All lies.

“I suppose she was afraid to go alone,” she continued. “She was probably lonely.”

“Everybody’s lonely,” I snapped back.

That night I was ready with a new note for Sister Yeung.

Even if she couldn’t hear me, she still might be able to see the note.

Hoping for a new outcome this time, I threw myself onto the floor as soon as I felt the onset of the cold, leaving the note where my feet would have been. I wanted to see if Sister Yeung would behave any differently.

She came, moving forward exactly as she’d done before. When she stretched out her silkworm-factory fingers, I thought she would pick up the note; instead her hands passed right through the paper, as if it were liquid. She squeezed the spot where my toes would have been and didn’t seem to register the note. She appeared to be operating in a completely different plane, not seeing things that were there and seeing things that were not. It felt as if I were watching a film loop—her actions were completely identical to the previous nights. I had to break her routine.

“Sister Yeung!” I whispered. She didn’t turn but instead continued to gaze at the dent on the bed where I would have lain. “I’m here, Sister Yeung. Over here!”

As if in response to my words, she started to speak, without turning her face:

“One day…one day these little feet will grow big…” Her voice quickly began to wither into echoes, as if coming from deep down a well. “And they will carry you far, far away from all of us.”

“Sister Yeung!” I tried again from the floor. No reaction. “Please!”

The moment she vanished, I was flushed with grief and shame. How did she know? How could she have known?

Sister Yeung had unmasked me, voiced my most personal, most private secret—a fantasy I’d never shared with anyone. Yes, I had thought frequently of escape. Yes, I had dreamt about fleeing my family.
I wanted my hands to be free
.

I wept quietly at the foot of the bed for a while before crawling back in. Li stirred but miraculously did not wake. The butterscotch medallion sat in his palm like some magical tram fare. When dawn broke, my pillow was soaked with tears. Sister Yeung never returned. She must have found what she had come for.

Soon I, too, got what I was longing for.

That Mother and Father were moody was nothing new. Had we been any richer, or any poorer, they might have given in to the silken promises of the opium den; that they did not, I remain eternally grateful. But where once the two of them sank into what the amahs termed the Sulks, each moping around in a private gloom of their own, they now openly banged heads—an unthinkable move for Father, who had spent his entire life dodging conflict.

“Things will work themselves out. You’ll see!” Father would say.

“That’s all you ever do. Defer, delay, deny!” This was Mother’s usual retort.

Whenever these clashes grew too intense, a quaint old propriety kicked in; they clamped down and reconvened in their bedroom with boiling tumblers of tea. There, with the door closed, they lobbed accusations at each other until the acrimony wore them both down and a blackened silence took over.

Our fate was sealed by two other events happening in quick succession. First, Father lost his job. His spineless principal, under pressure from a growing cadre of antibourgeois parents, decided that the teaching of poetry to twelve-year-olds was a waste of resources. Then the stock exchange crashed in New York, which meant that our stock exchange, too, was crushed in the ensuing depression.

Things had not worked out according to Father’s lazy faith in goodness happening to the good. By default, Mother, that well of negativity, won.

We were called in to a family caucus.

Father, decided our matriarch, was to redeem himself in the Nanyang—the South Seas—a band of tropical islands that were seemingly immune to the ups and downs on Wall Street because its assets were material. Real, as opposed to the intangible, theoretical realm of stocks and bonds. The world would never stop needing tin, rubber, palm oil, tobacco. Mother’s reasoning was that even if Father had to take on humiliating work in the plantations, at least we knew nobody there who could gossip.

He was to remit money home to us at the end of every month. And if the situation looked steady in the longer term, he could send for us, as many of our compatriots had done with their families. A few had even been known to thrive in the heat and dust.

Father mulled this over and emerged with a counterproposal: “I will take Li with me. No boy should be without his father.”

Rather than argue, Mother conceded instantly—here Li probably got his answer about whether Mother loved him—but under one condition: “Ling. Take Ling, too.”

“Twins should never be separated,” she said. “They’re two halves, yin and yang. They can never be a whole person unless they remain together.”

Imagine Mother, chief debunker of ghost stories and myths, coming up with a theory like that!

Inwardly I was scared but thrilled; outwardly I pulled long faces. Li, too, bemoaned his impending exile. But for the first time since our day in
Paradis
, I saw some of the old spring in his step. I caught him whispering to himself, half excited, half fearful: “I’m going to be an Overseas Chinese.”

Overseas Chinese. As in “Mr. So-and-So is an Overseas Chinese, which accounts for his poor taste in suits” or “Mrs. So-and-So is an Overseas Chinese, so you can’t expect her to know how to fry eels.” I’d been raised to think of the Overseas Chinese as a separate race, an underclass of lost souls deprived of basic things—sometimes an eye, sometimes an ear, but mostly proper manners and the ability to speak Mandarin like they meant it. They were the banished tribe, the wanderers, the deserters, the outcasts. Different, set apart, marked for life.

I had to put away my biases. For I, too, was about to become one of them.

The night before we set sail, there was a mournful air about the house, a feeling of missed opportunity too late to be salvaged. We played gramophone records by Shanghainese divas warbling about lost love in a minor key while the amahs stuffed clothes into two crowded trunks reeking of mothballs.

Mother sat on the couch with Li lying across her lap, both completely lax, almost comatose, both sets of hooded eyes staring into the distance while she massaged his little hands. Nobody spoke. The twins must have intuited our impending separation because they chased me around the downstairs, clinging to my sides like barnacles. Each time I pulled free, I got no more than three steps before having to surrender again. I lay flat on my back on the rug with both of them sinking their warm, heavy heads into my armpits, feigning sleep. I didn’t want to look at them. I couldn’t bear it. I let their heads fall to the floor and then crept away, only to have them catch me once more.

Through the door, I could see Father slumped at his desk, drunk on plum wine. The family photographs stared back at him. He picked up the frames in turn and whispered the name of each child as he encountered their image. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he’d mistaken Xiaowen for Bao-Bao. He didn’t touch the one of Mother seated alone; perhaps he had forgotten how much wheedling and how many vials of tranquilizers it had taken him to get her out of the house and into the studio. Or perhaps he did remember but was now suddenly sentimental about it. I wriggled out of the twins’ embrace and went to him.

“Why don’t we take these pictures with us?” I said.

“We can’t.” He rubbed his thumbs over the one group portrait, all of us standing, somewhat stunned, before a painted sunset. “These are the only pictures your mother has of us. It would be like robbing her of her memory.”

But by not taking them, I wanted to say, we would be robbed of ours.

Then I realized. Better to forget.

I
HEAR HER VOICE IN MY HEAD
as I make myself a pot of pu-erh tea. I hear
his
, too, of course—but his I’ve been hosting in my conscience for years, as constant as the beating of my own heart.

I want your story,
she said.
I need it.

The dense black leaves unfurl with the help of a spoon, but, like memories, they are old and stubborn. After a few quick stabs, they turn the water into ink. Medicinal ink that tastes of rot and regret.

But where is my inquisitor? I’m impatient. If I tell her my story, I will not have lived in vain, my deeds vanished without a trace.

There’s another reason I want her here—and quick. Unlike the fearless child I was, I am now afraid to be alone. I’m shaking. My remembering has forced open a whole city of graves. In speaking their names, I’ve surrounded myself with ghosts. Mother, Father, Li, Sister Kwan…I see them as clear as day. And this has only been the beginning, the innocent days of childhood.

Please let my savior arrive before I reach the darker depths.

These memories, once unleashed, can be held back no more. I gulp my tea.

Hurry, Professor!

THERE WERE AWKWARD GOOD-BYES
at the dock with Sister Kwan and our rickshaw man, the latter whose calloused hands I shook for the first and last time. They were standing in for Mother—the woman could not transcend her phobia, not even for our departure. Blotting out my sorrow at this maternal absence, I gawked at the leviathan that would soon remove me from the unhappy pit that was old China.

The boat was enormous. Li elbowed me for calling it a boat. “It’s a
ship
,” he barked. He’d even heard a smartly dressed gent refer to it as a floating island. I conceded the point—this was no mere boat. The vessel had a trio of towering smokestacks in brick red and black, each larger than our entire house. All three leaned back ever so gracefully like ladies having their hair done. There were seven stories of living space, under which were storage vaults and boiler rooms, deep in its bowels.

As passengers embarked, a group of painters with harnesses around their waists were being hoisted up along its side, having just stenciled on the ship’s new name, the SS
Prosperity
. Father explained that the vessel used to sail the transatlantic route exclusively, but the Depression had forced it to pick up business in the South China Sea. Its real name was being kept a secret. But what of names? Europe’s loss was our gain.

I shuddered with glee as we stepped aboard and saw the long, lifeboat-lined boulevards on either sides of the sun deck. I could already picture Li and myself racing up and down them. Sister Kwan wasn’t here to rein us in with her iron claws; Mother wasn’t here to mutter. And since Father never willingly touched us, our hands were now completely free! Just to find our living quarters, Father had to study the map and lead us through labyrinthine stairways, elevator lobbies, mahogany-paneled landings lined with chrome handrails, and, most strikingly, a high-ceilinged dining room with peacock wallpaper and crisp white linens. Floating island? This was a floating city!

Then I saw our room. The three of us entered a dark little vacuum not much larger than Father’s study. Eight feet by eight feet, if that. Against the near wall were two narrow bunk beds, the kind even coolies might complain about. Father said he’d take the lower one; Li and I were to share the one above. Seeing our dismay, he began to pace the room. The wallpaper was a sickly green, with an interlocking vine motif. Most depressing of all, there was only a single porthole that we were all to share—a miserable disk of sooty, unwashed glass through which we were to get our sightseeing done, presumably while seated at the one careworn chair perched in its shadow. Six days and six nights we had to spend in this cell. I tried not to think it was a portent of things to come, the plummeting tenor of our new life amidst the natives and grass huts of the Nanyang.

“Is there a mistake?” Li finally said.

Father shook his head. “This is what we paid for. Third class on this ship is equivalent to first class on the kind of ship people normally take on this voyage. So we should think of ourselves as being in first. We should feel fortunate.”

“What about first class on
this
ship?” Li grew impatient. “Can’t we go there?”

“Only third class is open. The rest of the ship is closed.”

“Mother wouldn’t approve.”

“Your mother isn’t here, is she?” Li kept quiet. Father continued, stating what I would come to think of as his life philosophy: “Boundaries are made for good reason. They set different people apart, and this is how we keep the peace.”

The horn sounded its low signal. As the SS
Prosperity
pulled out of the harbor, I thought about all the beauty spots of China I’d never get to see now that I was about to become an Overseas Chinese. The Ming emperor tombs outside Beijing. The poet Du Fu’s thatched cottage in Chengdu. The scholars’ rock gardens of Suzhou. These places would soon sound as foreign and fictional to me as the Jade Rabbit’s home on the moon.

Except for the panda-filled forests of Sichuan Province, I felt absolutely no connection with any of China’s supposed cultural treasures. Beyond family, my concept of “our people” didn’t stretch very far. I’d felt beggar children—brown, with beaky Uighur features—hurling rocks at my rickshaw. I’d experienced the rank betrayal of a Cantonese servant girl like Sister Kwan. These weren’t “my people.” In most cases, we didn’t even speak the same language. The all-purpose lumping together of everyone who happened to be born on the same enormous landmass was willful madness.

The first night on board the SS
Prosperity
, after a dinner of smoked ham sandwiches that Ah Ying had packed for us in waxed paper, Father sent us to bed. He said the waves were making him dizzy and he had no energy to watch us. We had no choice in the matter, as we all shared the same little cabin. Li took the side of the bunk nearest the wall while I got the outside, the result of much haggling—we were both afraid of falling off the edge—and as at home, we slept back-to-back. Li had his nose pressed against the wallpaper, so tight was our space.

My fortune was free, I consoled myself, my path uncluttered. The stars blinked their affirmation through the murky porthole, instigating the wild patter of my innocent heart. Before long, exhausted with anticipation and lulled by the waves, we all fell asleep.

To my surprise, Father had brought with him English language instruction books. The very next morning, he began giving Li lessons in the third-class cafeteria; I was not included—apparently I wasn’t important or clever enough. Father was no expert himself. Embarrassed to be seen struggling through the language alone, Li was clearly his alibi. Unsurprisingly, father and son became, through their shared new lingo, a colony of their own. Li gave me the cold shoulder, knowing that in the power dynamic of our new family unit, he’d better choose wisely.

“We have no choice,” I overheard Father say as they stumbled along, learning the alien alphabet. “Where we’re going, we’ll need to know English.”

“Where’s that?” Li asked.

“The Black Isle.”

The Black Isle! Until he uttered those words, I hadn’t even known where we were headed and somehow never found the inclination to ask. The Black Isle, where they spoke English! I pictured hairy Englishmen wearing sarongs and living in grass huts. Horrified, I covered my ears. I didn’t want to know any more.

I walked off my rage. But the farther I wandered from Li, Father, and the rest of the passengers, the more closed doors and deserted hallways I encountered. Unlit hallways in the windowless depths of an ocean liner are unfriendly indeed. Father had not exaggerated—most of the ship was empty. Paying customers were relegated to the drabbest portion of the ship while pretty stairways and exquisite promenades gathered oceanic dust. I ran down promising corridors lined with doors numbered in gold only to find each and every one of them locked. I kept expecting to run into someone who’d scold me for being where I shouldn’t be and spin me toward whence I came, but no such person ever materialized, not even a crew member on an unauthorized smoke break. All I heard was the low hum of the ship’s tireless engines chugging along and the wooden floorboards creaking beneath my feet. These sounds became my constant companions.

I hoped to find the peacock dining room Father had walked us through, but every door I tried refused to budge. Was that area now closed, too? Were all the nice parts of the ship locked away? The third-class cafeteria was a teeming lunchroom, the air dense with tobacco smoke and recycled grease, the windows frosted with the dew of communal sighing. Diners stood in line for food served in trays, just like at school, except most of the passengers were grownups, many with children in tow who were older than me. What a humiliating arrangement. What a far cry from the peacock room.

Finally, deep inside the belly of the ship, a couple of floors below the observation deck, a pair of heavy steel doors gave way. There were words in English above the door frame, in what I would come to know and love as Art Deco script. I couldn’t read them, but I detected a smell I recalled from a class excursion to a swimming club. Chlorine. A funny place for this smell. Curiosity got the better of me and I pushed through the steel double doors. Sure enough, a pool.

It was cold in the room, probably because every surface in it was tiled. The walls were ivory, pierced with horizontal striations of turquoise, and the pool itself was done in mosaics on the aquatic theme of blue. Ribbed chrome sconces flickered, and the stripes they cast on the water gave it an atmosphere of high drama, like a stage set anticipating the entrance of gloomy players. Lounge chairs lined the pool, all empty, their long, gray silhouettes peopling the room with silent spectators.

“Hello?” I called. My voice echoed loudly through the cavernous chamber. I heard water splashing. Someone was swimming laps, freestyle. A young girl in a red swimsuit with a matching red cap, about my age. Odd that I hadn’t noticed her first thing. She barely lifted her head. I had to think twice about disturbing her—she seemed so intense. I watched her swim a couple of more laps and when she didn’t pause to breathe, I called out again, louder. “Hello?”

“Hello,” a voice answered behind me. I jumped. It was a man in a Western-style suit. His face was in the shadows but his Shanghai accent was unmistakable. I wondered how long he’d been standing behind me.

“So this part of the boat is open?” In my nervousness, I’d slipped and called the ship a boat again. Thankfully, the man didn’t mock me.

He stepped into the light, revealing thick brows and dark European features. “It’s open,” he said in perfect Shanghainese. “To you and me, everything’s open.”

His words confused me, so I changed the subject. “Are you that girl’s father?”

He smiled. “Do I look that old to you? No, that’s Rachel,” he said, as if it explained everything. “Come, let’s not disturb her. She’s very…serious.”

He guided me to the other end of the hall, where there was another set of doors, identical to the ones I’d entered. I watched the swimming girl while we walked toward these doors, hoping she’d finally lift her head and let me see her face.

“Oh, don’t stare,” the man said in a friendly voice. “Rachel can be awfully shy.”

In his gentlemanly fashion, he allowed me to enter first, unlike Father, who always rudely pushed ahead. I found the smell of his cologne delightful. His hair was so long that its curly ends brushed his collar. Had Mother seen him, she’d have sent him straight to the barber. To me he was the very picture of masculine grace. Here was a complete stranger who was kind, gracious, well spoken, who took enough of an interest in me to show me around, while my own father cowered like a scared sheep in his third-class ghetto, incurious, unquestioning, passively believing the lie that the rest of the ship was closed. I decided then that I would never share my findings with Father or Li.

The doors led directly to the peacock salon. It was as if the man had read my mind.

I gasped and raced in, the flimsy soles of my shoes immediately buffered by luscious, endless carpeting. Nobody was here, not a soul. A hundred tables were set—starched white napkins atop expensive china, no fewer than three wineglasses per diner. Strains of watery music emerged from the next room. My flesh tingled. Somebody was practicing the harp. The gas-lit chandeliers flared on together at this moment—puff!—and the mahogany pillars glistened with fresh polish. A huge banquet was certainly in the cards for some lucky passengers tonight.

“How do you know where everything is?” I asked. “We’ve only been at sea one day.”

“I’ve made this passage many times and know how dull it is if you confine yourself to one area. My wife lives on the Black Isle.”

“And you live in Shanghai?”

“Mostly.”

“Don’t you miss your wife?”

He smiled ruefully. “I never stop missing her. Even when she’s standing right before me.” He walked to one of the large windows on the sides of the hall.

It was nearly evening. Stars were rehearsing their twinkles, and a blushing band of peach light lingered at the end of the horizon, fading slowly down the waterline.

“Look at the water,” said the man.

As the sky dimmed, the black ocean came alive. Fairy lights, maybe thousands of them, bobbed up and down with the waves, each flashing pink, blue, and silver at different intervals. They formed a dense garland around the ship, their colors unsynchronized, yet harmonious, even hypnotic—pink, blue, silver, blue, pink, pink—like a soft electric glove easing the ship through the dark water.

“Jellyfish. They light the paths of ships at night so the ships don’t collide with whales or the sunken galleons on the ocean floor. These jellyfish are the seeing-eye dogs of the marine world. They’re possibly the cleverest creatures on earth. People underestimate them because they don’t make any noise, but they have their own way of speaking. Whenever they flash like this, you know things are going to be all right. I wanted you to see them so you’d know that things are going to be all right.”

I nodded vaguely.

“It’s late now. You better run along back to your family.”

Needles of panic. “But I don’t know how to get back.”

The man pointed to an elegant mahogany door with an inlaid anchor done in red cherry. I ran to it and placed my hand on the brass handle; then I looked back, sorry to have to abandon my handsome newfound friend.

“See you tomorrow?” the man asked. My mood lifted. “Shall we meet again at the swimming pool?”

I beamed. “What time?”

“The same time, after lunch. I could give you English lessons.”

My heart leapt. “You know English?”

“And Hebrew and French and Russian. Not by choice. History forces some of us to learn a little of everything.” He waved good-bye. “
Au revoir, mademoiselle
. ’Til we meet again.” He turned back to view the water.

I bit my lip, then asked, “What’s your name?”

“Odell.” He smiled, charmed that I would ask.

“See you tomorrow, Mr. Odell.”

As I ran toward our inelegant cafeteria, guided by the cloying scent of pork trotters being drowned in fat, I thought it odd that the man never asked me my name.