Under the Dragon (20 page)

We left the temple and drifted back down into the town. I was at a loss whether to wander around the dusty market again, to book a seat on the next train or to return to the hotel for an evening of
thingyan
karaoke. Every option seemed pointless. Then, ahead of us in the crowd, we saw two elderly Chinese women walking in step, wearing identical apricot tunics, arguing. They were twin sisters and each carried a basket in her right hand. One was made of plastic and moulded into the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head. It declared ‘I love Disneyland.’ The other was a perfect, delicate bamboo shopper.

HER ROOM WAS BARE. Its bald white walls retained no history. It was a place without a past, where games began but life could not be contained. The windowless recess held only a stool and an atlas. In the dim evening light May sat on the stool. Kwan stood before her, the atlas held flat between her hands. ‘I hope that you enjoyed your luncheon, madam?’ she asked, anxious to please.

May mimicked the sipping of tea before setting her imaginary cup back on the atlas. The Tristar’s engines droned in her ears. ‘The duck was tender, stewardess, but it could have had more
hoi sin
.’

‘One hundred pardons,’ apologised Kwan, bowing as deeply as her rheumatism allowed. ‘I will advise the head chef in time for your return journey.’

May looked out of her daydream window and pictured the sunlight touching the clouds high over the Pacific. She imagined feeling its warmth on her face. The shimmering jetstream of another aircraft caught her eye. She inspected again her tattered boarding pass, turning it over and over in her hand. It must be pleasant to fly first class. Downstairs the tailor Ch’ien was drilling his nephew in his multiplication tables. On the dark street below a pack of dogs howled at the moon. ‘I do not think that I’ll be returning to Asia,’ she said, disturbed by the interruption.

‘But you always return, madam,’ Kwan replied, puzzled. ‘Every Sunday evening. It is our custom.’

‘My son may insist on me remaining in America. He has always wanted me to live with him there. He has a degree in mathematics from the University of California, you know.’ May’s empty smile quivered, then she lost hold of the sense of warmth on her face. She shivered as dusk’s mist rolled down from the hills. Lashio’s mountain damp had always irritated the sisters’ joints. She thought of the wide world that might have been hers, and for the first time in her long life felt old. ‘Stewardess, the cabin has turned chilly,’ she fussed, gathering up the strands of fancy. ‘Pass me my coat.’

Kwan lay the atlas down on the floor and reached up as if to an overhead locker. She unfolded a make-believe coat and lay it on her sister’s lap. The twins’ hands touched. Kwan’s fingers felt rough and callused, while May’s had retained the smooth, soft skin of a young girl.

‘You stink of cloves again,’ said May in irritation, jerking her hand away. ‘What is the in-flight movie today?’ she demanded.

‘
Dream of the Red Chamber
,’ said Kwan, while arranging a fanciful footrest for May.

‘I’d prefer to see a Hollywood film, like the ones shown at the video parlour.’

As neither sister had ever been on board an aircraft, their knowledge of air travel was at best uncertain. Their single visit to the Mansu video shop had done little to enhance the accuracy of their make-believe.

‘
Rambo
would suit me very well. Ch’ien’s nephew tells me that it is popular with young people. Please arrange it.’

‘Yes, madam,’ Kwan said, and tried to recall how to load a videocassette player.

‘I can’t see the screen, stewardess. Move aside. You are blocking my view.’

Kwan hesitated while miming the action of tuning a television. Her voice slipped out of character, becoming softer and doubtful. ‘You always go home, sister,’ she repeated. ‘You must come home. You live here.’

‘My parents and husband are dead. My son is in California. I have no family in China, and only a forgetful old sister in Burma.’

‘I am no older than you.’

‘But you do forget.’ May stood up, straining her back with the sudden movement, and cursed her age. The stool toppled over.

‘Be careful not to step on the luncheon tray,’ cautioned Kwan, pointing at the atlas.

‘I’m finished with this game,’ May complained, sweeping their play-acting away with a sharp gesture. Her room did not order the world within, rather it tried to exclude the chaotic disorder without. ‘It’s late and time for bed.’

‘Look, madam,’ said Kwan, resuming her role in the hope of pacifying her sister. ‘You can see the coast through your window now. We will soon be arriving in California. You will see your son. Would you please be so kind as to fasten your safety belt and extinguish all cigarettes?’

‘I cannot see my son,’ May bristled, displeased and impatient. ‘I cannot go there because I must care for you, in the memory of parents you don’t even remember.’

‘I wish that you would show me a little human-heartedness,’ sighed Kwan, her eyes downcast, her spirit subdued.

‘I am tired of you, old woman. I have had enough of this place.’

The twins were as old as the century, or at least that is what their parents had said of Kwan. May, they used to say, was as young as the century. The girls had been born in the year 1900, in the age before the aeroplane’s invention, while the dowager Empree Tz’u Hsi still occupied Beijing’s peacock throne and Mao Tse-tung wore a topknot. Their father had been a herbalist, a dispenser of cures and spices in Lashio’s clay-tiled Chinese quarter. In a paper-lined sleeping chamber his first daughter had emerged from the womb with reluctance, carrying with her the burden of past lives. Her eyes had been closed as if in reflection. It had taken two firm slaps to start her breathing. Her father had named her Kwan, which means ‘together’, because she had not entered the world alone.

The second twin, on the other hand, had begun her life as she would continue it, wailing and kicking. The child had fixed her eyes on the open window and uttered a deafening, demanding cry. ‘This one will travel far,’ the midwife had predicted. Her father had called her May, which translates as ‘beautiful’, not only because she was the prettier of the two. When spoken aloud the name also suggested ‘the very last one’, or ‘enough’: a suitable pun for the father of twins. Within the first hour of their birth May had pushed her elder sister away from the more generous nipple. For the rest of their lives she would claim the better part of all things from Kwan.

Their father and mother had been trying for over a decade to have children. He was a methodical man and had tended to their infertility with dandelion tonic and lenitives of eucalyptus. Litres of ginseng infusion had been supped in tender anticipation each evening, only to be thrown out in the morning with the night water. They had applied pepper balms and poultices of almond. In one spendthrift moment he had even prepared himself a draught of ground tiger whiskers. But the remedies, like the prayers to their ancestors, had seemed to be wasted. It was only when they had stopped worrying about conception that his wife found she was with child. He had wanted a single son, but did not admonish her for bearing him two daughters instead. In truth he suspected that his over-generous dose of gingko leaf had been to blame.

It was the necessity of the time to put children to work almost as soon as they could walk. In the storeroom there was cardamom to weigh and acacia leaves to package. Small hands were suited to removing the tiny stones from the big, aromatic sacks of cloves. Kwan enjoyed being beside her father, and began her work with him at the age of four. As they sized and sorted chillies, she listened to him tell how he had come to Lashio. She never tired of hearing the tale of his escape over the Nan Ling Mountains and across the Yunnan Plateau. He had wished to travel without baggage, but Kwan’s mother had insisted on bringing the family portraits. To him the old photographs were an unnecessary burden. He did not want his wife to strain herself and had advised leaving them behind. The young couple had argued for the first and only time, and it shamed him to admit that he had raised his voice at her. But in the end it had made no difference. She had refused to leave China without the portraits.

‘And now I’m glad of it, my daughter,’ he confessed to Kwan, pausing to look up at the four pictures, ‘because they have brought good fortune. Their presence gives me the strength to work harder, and has blessed me with you and May. It was wrong of me to want to abandon them.’

Kwan felt their forebears’ sepia gaze upon her back as she sorted and cleaned. She kept her young head bowed, only looking up from her labours when dusk had gathered around the storeroom’s front door.

For her part May managed to ensure that an unjust proportion of her work fell to her sister. She avoided preparing ginger remedies, because the syrup was bad for her skin, and never bundled
fu ling
mushrooms, as the spores always seemed to irritate her eyes. It wasn’t that May was lazy, but that she simply wished to be somewhere else. Every Friday morning she hurried ahead of her father down to the marketplace. While he met the herb traders from Hsipaw and Siakwan, she stared away beyond the lime groves, reaching out along the trade road towards another place. Her steps were always heavy on the return journey home. She had a restless spirit that would not be contained.

The twins had been born, as the Confucians say, into interesting times. Their century had begun in an age of waning Chinese influence. The Middle Kingdom had yielded to foreign territorial demands and lost Ili to Russia, the Ryukyu Islands to Japan and control of Korea. France had made Annam its protectorate and the Manchu Dynasty was enfeebled by rebellion. For the ordinary Hunanese peasant, life was hard and cruel. Men toiled or starved, women were sold like slaves into wedlock. The twins’ father had brought his wife out of China to escape servitude and injustice. He had settled within Lashio’s city gate, willing to integrate himself into Burmese society. But the community had excluded him, though not to the extent of exempting him from the arbitrary tax imposed on immigrants by the Assistant Township Officer. If he failed to pay tribute in this way his trading licence and residence permit might be rescinded. It was bad luck to be both Chinese and poor. The young family was forced to live apart from their neighbours. They had nothing to do with the British colonists. Yet, in spite of having left their mother country, events over the border continued to shape their lives more than decisions made in Rangoon.

Before Kwan and May reached their twelfth year, China – and two thousand years of Ch’ing monarchy – were overthrown by Sun Yat-sen’s revolution. The turbulent decades that followed were marked by famine, invasion and war. Fear and uncertainty dominated people’s lives. The twins’ aunt in Anhwei province was killed in rioting. An uncle died when the Kuomintang seized Beijing. Survival came to depend to an even greater extent on self-reliance. Their father impressed upon Kwan that money alone ensured security. To earn it she devoted herself to helping him. The same events led May to realise that, with the advent of modern modes of transportation, people were more able to travel to places which offered greater opportunities for success.

In the year that Mao lead the disastrous ‘Autumn Harvest Uprising’ the twins’ mother passed away. She lay down one evening complaining of a headache. Their father lit a burner by her bedside and ministered a smudge of moxa leaves. The remedy induced a sleep from which she never awoke. As the Communists and the Nationalist Kuomintang swept in on each other in civil war, their father too turned in on himself. In all his life he had never missed a day of work. His regulated schedule had given him a sense of control. But with the death of his wife, he no longer reserved the week’s first day for the sorting of medicinal herbs, the second and third days for pounding cardamom and preparing volatile oils. His discipline faltered and the tight structure of his hours began to unravel. Age came on him as a deep tiredness, with a sudden confusion over dates. The absurdities of his failing memory both irritated and amused him.

‘Never in my life have I seen so much
ku sheng
,’ he raged, considering three costly packets of bitter root. ‘Who told you to buy it, first daughter?’ He himself was responsible, so he added in a softer tone, ‘Please take pity on your old father.’

He began to repeat himself, to mix poppy seeds with sweet
gan cao
liquorice, to prescribe hot chilli compresses instead of soothing camphor rubs to arthritic widows. He cursed his forgetfulness, growing fearful of his waning faculties. All day long he shuffled the order papers around and around his desk like
mah-jong
tiles or playing cards, lost in a losing game of Patience.

‘My daughter,’ he told Kwan during the sleepless nights, ‘you must remember to order the swallows under the eaves. Do not pay more than two rupees.’ Then he cried, ‘Are all the baskets becoming unwound?’

As his concentration deserted him, his conversation slipped into an irrational babble. At first Kwan assumed that he was talking sense – he had been lucid and informed before their mother’s death. She tried to make logical connections. But none existed outside his mind. ‘When did you come back?’ he would ask her, even though she had not been away. ‘I never asked for coriander.’

‘Please let him die so his pain may end,’ Kwan wished to herself.

‘Please let him die so my imprisonment can end,’ begged May aloud. The second daughter felt trapped by her father’s illness. She imagined the days of her youth slipping through her fingers like the bushels of sesame and soya, measured but unsavoured. His age seemed to deny her her youth.

Kwan held their father’s hand and felt it as cold as stone. Using his herbal textbook, she diagnosed a deficiency of
qi
and
blood. His movements became slow and he began to have difficulty with his speech. There was a puffiness under his eyes. Camomile infusions did not relieve his headaches. The neighbourhood doctor could not cure the scarlet rash which appeared on his neck and face. One week later he was dead.