The Ghost Bride (5 page)

“The world is almost mapped,” he said. “There are a
few places still unknown: the depths of the African continent, the poles. But
the vast landmasses are charted now.”

“You sound more like an explorer than a
doctor.”

He laughed. “Did Yan Hong tell you that? I’m afraid
that I never finished my medical degree, although her husband did. My uncle
called me back before I was done. But it’s true I would have preferred to be an
explorer.”

“That’s not a very Chinese sentiment.”

China had eschewed sea voyages in the past,
disdaining contact with barbarian peoples and only interested in her own
affairs. China was the center of the universe, as even we overseas Chinese were
taught. The British were amazed at the speed at which news of China’s affairs
reached us in this far-off colony. The clan associations had couriers on fast
junks, and they regularly exchanged information before the British, with their
spies and settlements in Canton and Peking, could do so.

“Maybe I’m not filial enough,” he said with a
smile. “People have often complained about that.”

“Complained about what?” Yan Hong reappeared with a
cup of water for me.

“About my disobedience,” he said.

She knit her brows in mock annoyance. “You’ve been
talking to Miss Pan for far too long. The performance is beginning and Father is
looking for you. Hurry up or he’ll never be able to arrange the seating
properly.”

I
wish
I could remember more of the operatic performance. I’m told it was quite good. A
well-known troupe was in town and had been hired to give a private performance.
They did a few scenes from the opera about the Cowherd and the Weaving Maid, but
I hardly paid attention. From where I sat among the women, I tried
surreptitiously to catch a glimpse of Tian Bai. I could see his uncle, Lim Teck
Kiong, seated in front with a number of important-looking gentlemen, but he
wasn’t with them. Finally I caught sight of him in the back, arranging
additional seating for some late guests. No wonder he was considered useful in
the household. Had his life changed since Lim Tian Ching, the son of the house,
had died the past year?

Thinking about the dead man gave me an oppressive
feeling, as though the air had curdled in my lungs. My father was very
dismissive about things like ghosts and dreams. He would often quote Confucius,
who had said it was better not to know about ghosts and gods, but rather to
focus on the world we lived in. Still, thoughts of Lim Tian Ching cast a pall
over the proceedings. I hardly saw the actors as they leapt and postured before
me, faces elaborately painted and embroidered costumes quivering with feathers.
When I raised my head again, I caught Tian Bai’s eye from across the courtyard.
He gave me an unreadable look.

The dinner that followed the performance was of the
first quality. Even the rice was this year’s new crop, the grains chewy and
tender. At home we bought only old rice because it was drier and you could get
more rice per
kati
. I would have been content eating
only the white rice, but there were many other delicacies to sample. Steamed
pomfret, the silvery sides of the fish veiled in soy sauce and shallot oil.
Fried pigeons. Tender strips of jellyfish quivered under a sprinkling of sesame
seeds; and I was delighted to see my favorite
kerabu
, a dish of fiddlehead ferns dressed with shallots, chilies, and
tiny dried shrimp in coconut milk.

After dinner, there were games for the young ladies
in the courtyard. The daughters of the house, together with their innumerable
cousins, displayed their needlework, which was exquisite, and were complimented
on their fair complexions. I stood shyly on the side. No one had told me about
this so I had brought nothing to show. In any case, my own sewing was very poor
and mostly restricted to mending things nowadays. There were so many people that
I was sure that no one would care if I did not participate, but soon I heard Yan
Hong calling.

“Li Lan, come! Join the needle-threading
competition!”

The lamps were blown out and the silvery radiance
of the moon permeated the courtyard, bathing everyone in its pale glow. A table
was set up with several stations of needles and thread. The unmarried girls
would compete to see who could thread all their needles the fastest. As I took
my place, I was jostled by my neighbor, a large-boned girl with horsey good
looks. She gave me a cold glance, her eyes sliding over me dismissively.

“Ready?” cried Yan Hong. “Ladies, start!”

There were five needles in front of me in varying
thicknesses from large to very fine. I quickly threaded the first three but the
last two were more difficult. Girls sighed and complained coquettishly. In the
wavering moonlight, the harder I squinted, the less I could see; so I used the
tips of my fingers to feel for the holes, just as I had traced the pathways of
insects and bookworms in my father’s manuscripts. The thread slipped through and
I waved my hand in excitement. “I’m done!”

There were congratulations from the other girls. My
horse-faced neighbor sighed and shrugged. I wondered what I had done to offend
her, but soon forgot in the excitement. There were other games as well, lantern
decorating and singing, and by the end of the evening I could not remember when
I had enjoyed myself so thoroughly in recent times. As we were leaving the Lim
mansion, my father glanced at my bright face.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” he said.

“Yes, Father. Indeed, I did.”

He smiled sadly. “I forgot how quickly you’ve grown
up. In my mind you’re still a little girl. I should have arranged for you to mix
more after your cousins left for Penang.”

I did not like to see the shadow pass over his face
again. Tonight he had seemed quite cheerful and appeared to have enjoyed the
performance. I once overheard Amah telling the cook that when my mother died,
part of my father died too. She had spoken, no doubt, in a slightly theatrical
manner, but when I was younger I took her words literally. No wonder he
sometimes drifted, as though the thin line that anchored him to the present was
fraying away. When I was younger I often felt guilty when he seemed troubled. Of
course, sons were better. Everyone said so. But I suspected that even if I had
been a boy, I would not have been enough to console him for the loss of my
mother.

Chapter
5

T
houghts of
my parents put me in a melancholy mood before I went to bed. Amah always said
too much thinking made me pale and peaky. Of course, she was perfectly capable
in the next breath of scolding me for going into the sun and ruining my
complexion. She never seemed bothered by her ability to embrace two opposing
things at once. I sometimes wished that I had that blithe assurance. My father
made the dry observation that Amah had no difficulty reconciling her viewpoints
because she had learned everything as custom dictated, and that was both her
bondage and her solace. I felt this was a little harsh. Amah did think about
things—just not the same sorts that Father did. Her mind ricocheted between
practicality and superstition. Somehow, I had managed to exist between both
Amah’s world and Father’s, but what did I really think? These thoughts drifted
through my mind until I fell into an uneasy slumber.

I
was
in an orchard of peach trees. The leaves were dazzlingly green and the fruit
that hung from the branches was pink and white, gleaming like alabaster. The
trees themselves were monotonously similar, as though they had been copied from
a painting. This was unsurprising as there were no peach trees in Malaya, though
I had seen them depicted in scrolls from China. With a mounting feeling of
dread, I saw how they stretched ahead in all directions, each broad vista
looking exactly the same. From behind the trees came the wavering sound of an
opera aria, the same that had been sung that evening by the actors in the Lim
mansion. The sound was muted and scratchy, as though heard from a great
distance. There was no depth or liveliness to it. As the music announced his
presence, Lim Tian Ching emerged from between the trees, a spray of peach
blossoms in his hand.

“Li Lan, my dear!” he said. “May I present you with
this floral token?”

He held the branch out to me but I was suddenly
stricken with suffocation, as though the air had curdled.

“What? No word to greet me?” he asked. “You don’t
know how impatiently I’ve been waiting to see you again. After all, the Double
Seventh Festival is for lovers.”

Unwillingly, I found myself walking with him
beneath the trees. He floated beside me with a curiously inhuman gait, and it
was only by a great effort of will that I managed to halt.

“How do you even know me?” I asked.

“I saw you last year at the Dragon Boat Festival.
You were down on the quay throwing rice dumplings into the water. How elegant,
how graceful you were!”

Taken aback, I recalled that I had, indeed, gone
with my father to celebrate that festival, which commemorated the suicide of a
poet. In their grief, the common people threw dumplings into the water to
persuade the fish not to eat his body.

Lim Tian Ching continued, “Oh, my dear, don’t frown
so. It spoils your features. Really, I was very impressed by you. Of course, I’d
seen my share of pretty girls,” he tittered, “but there was something about you
that was different. So refined. That must come from your father. I heard he was
a good-looking man before the smallpox.”

Taking my silence as assent, he continued with his
grotesque flirtation. “I asked everyone who you were. They said you were the
daughter of the Pan family. If circumstances hadn’t overtaken me”—and here he
looked suitably melancholy—“I would have wooed you a long time ago. But don’t
despair, now we have all the time in the world to make up for it.”

I shook my head.

“Li Lan, I’m a man of simple words,” he said.
“Won’t you be my bride?”

“No!” It took all my strength to form the word.

He looked hurt. “Now, now,” he said. “Don’t be so
hasty. I know that I should have approached you through your father. In fact, I
asked my mother to do so for me, and to get an article of your clothing so we
could meet like this.”

My thoughts flew to the ribbon that Madam Lim had
requested from me. I gagged, my throat as dry as if it had been filled with
kapok
, the silky fibrous seed coverings that
were used to stuff cushions and mattresses.

“I can’t marry you.”

He frowned. “I know, it is a little difficult with
my being . . .  ” He waved his hands as though he didn’t want to
say it, then continued, “but it’s not a problem. Many lovers have managed to
surmount this obstacle.”

“No!”

“What do you mean, no?” He sounded peevish. “We’ll
have a grand wedding. And afterward we’ll be together.” He stopped and smiled.
It was a terrible, fatuous smile. Air was being crushed out of my rib cage. The
peach trees swam together in a haze of green and pink. Dimly I heard Lim Tian
Ching shouting, but I forced myself awake with every ounce of willpower until I
sat up in bed, trembling and sweating.

I wanted to vomit, to spit up the bile of that
unwholesome encounter. I, who had been so carefully schooled by my father not to
believe in spirits, confessed to myself in the dead of night that Amah was
right. The ghost of Lim Tian Ching had passed through my dreams. His unwelcome
presence had violated the recesses of my soul. I was so terrified that I curled
up on my bed and wrapped the covers around myself, despite the sweltering heat,
until dawn came.

T
hat
morning, I lay abed for a long time, wondering if I was going mad. There was a
lunatic who sometimes wandered our street, his emaciated body barely clothed in
rags. He muttered to himself constantly; the pupils of his eyes constricted till
he resembled a crazed bird. I had given him a few coins before. Sometimes he
pocketed them, other times he licked them or cast them away. Amah said he
conversed with the dead. Was I destined to become like him? Yet I had never
heard of madness in our family, only whispers of the sad collapse of our house.
True, Amah and Old Wong, our cook, had odd dislikes, such as the main staircase
of our house. But I had grown up with their superstitions and was used to them.
I had never yet heard talk of madness. Yet I felt oppressed by shadows. It
seemed to me that the dead were all around us. Of course this was foolish. Life
was followed by death in the endless cycle of rebirth, if one believed the
Buddhists. We were all nominally Buddhist I supposed, although my father, as a
strict Confucianist, reserved a certain contempt toward them. I told myself that
it was a dream, nothing more.

Downstairs, Amah clucked over me but seemed to
think that my lassitude stemmed from too much excitement the night before. I
felt obliged to be cheerful as she quizzed me about the festivities. At length,
I asked her about Yan Hong.

“The daughter of the Second Wife?” said Amah.
“She’s the one whose marriage was a love match, though it was a big scandal. I
heard it from the servants. And luckily the young man came from a good family
although they had no money of course.”

“How did she manage to marry him?”

“Aiya!
The oldest way
of course. She got pregnant. How they managed it I don’t know, but they blamed
her mother for it. They said that was why Second Wife died.”

“I thought it was malaria.”

“Well, that was what they said. But if you ask me,
it sounds like she was so ashamed that she lost the will to live. And after she
died they felt guilty, so the marriage went ahead. The boy went to Hong Kong
after the marriage to study and she had the first child at home. When he
returned, she had the other two.”

So Yan Hong’s mother had bought her daughter’s
happiness with her life. It was a sad story but also explained the age gap
between her children. I thought back to last night. Yan Hong had seemed
cheerful, busy, and fulfilled. How I had envied her fortunate marriage. Nothing
was as it seemed, after all.

I
spent
the afternoon lying on a rattan daybed downstairs. The tiled floor in the study
remained cool even during the burning heat of the day. I could not imagine how
the coolies managed to work the tin mines. The mortality rate was very high but
still they came by the boatload from China, along with Indians who disembarked
from Madras and Chennai to work the rubber and coffee plantations. I had often
wondered what it would be like to set sail from here to other lands. Tian Bai
had done so, and I would have liked to go east to see the Moluccas, and then
onward to Hong Kong and even Japan. But such voyages were not for me.

I was ruminating over this when a parcel arrived
from the Lim household. “What is it?” I asked when Amah brought it in. It was
wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. I picked it up with both hands and
frowned. After my frightening dream the night before, I felt suspicious of
anything that came from that family. But it turned out to be a length of batik,
beautifully printed with floral motifs of indigo and pale pink. There was a note
enclosed from Yan Hong.

You forgot to collect
your prize for winning the needle-threading competition. I hope to see you
again. Best wishes, etc., etc.

“Very nice,” said Amah approvingly.

For her, the best part of the evening had been the
fact that I had won the competition. I had been forced to tell it several times
for her benefit and had even overheard her boasting about it to our cook, Old
Wong. I had never done well in the feminine arts and I suspected that Amah felt
bad about it. “Reading, reading!” she would grunt, and snatch away whatever book
I had. “Spoil your eyes, you will!” I once pointed out to her that needlework
would have done the same thing, but she never listened to me. This piece of
cloth was the best thing I could have brought home, short of a marriage
proposal.

Although I didn’t want to admit it, I was pleased
too. I shook out the cloth and something shiny fell out of the folds.

“What’s that?” asked Amah. Her sharp eyes never
missed anything.

“It’s a pocket watch.”

“Was it part of your prize?” It was a brass men’s
watch with a round face and delicate hands. “That’s very strange. It doesn’t
even look new. And why would Yan Hong give you a watch? It’s so unlucky.”

She looked fretful. We Chinese did not like to give
or receive certain gifts for superstitious reasons: knives, because they could
sever a relationship; handkerchiefs, for they portended weeping; and clocks, as
they were thought to measure out the days of your life. If any of these were
presented, the recipient usually paid a token amount to symbolize that it was a
purchase and not a gift. My heart was beating so loudly, however, that I was
afraid that Amah would hear it. I was almost certain that I had seen this watch
before.

“It could have slipped in by accident,” I said.

“Careless!” she said. “If it isn’t your property
you shouldn’t keep it.”

“I’ll ask Yan Hong if I see her again.”

I left Amah shaking her head and escaped to my
room, where I examined my find. Amah was right; it was not a new watch. There
were scratches on the brass case and the chain was missing. The more I looked at
it, however, the more certain I was that it was the same watch that Tian Bai had
been repairing the first time we met.

In the novels that I read, the heroines were
continually exclaiming over some love token they exchanged, whether it was a
hairpin, inkstone, or more daringly, a tiny shoe from a bound-foot girl. I had
always discounted them as ridiculous. But now, as I cupped the watch in my
hands, the soft ticking was like the heartbeat of a small bird. I slipped it
into the pocket of my dress. This unexpected gift filled me with secret delight
for the rest of the day, and my spirits only began to sink as dusk fell and I
remembered my dreams. After dinner, I lingered so late in the kitchen that Old
Wong shooed me out with his dustpan.

I was on the point of going to Amah’s room for
comfort and gossip when I remembered that this was her evening off. Once in a
while she would go out to visit her friends and play mahjong. When I was very
small, I sometimes tagged along to this fascinating parallel world of amahs,
where much gossip and information exchanged hands. We slipped in through back
doors to the servants’ quarters and listened until, lulled by the conversation,
I fell asleep and Amah carried me home on her back. I’m sure my father never
knew about these excursions. Now as I climbed the stairs, I wished that I could
sleep like a child again, safe in a warm circle of friends. As it was, I opened
the windows. The night was cooling and the air smelled like rain. Somberly I
climbed into bed. I was afraid.