As the Earth Turns Silver (10 page)

Oi Harn Goong, the founding ancestor of the Wong clan in Melon Ridge, named the village ‘hoping his new home would endow him with prolific offspring like proverbial melons on the vines'.

Edmon Wong,
Zengcheng New Zealanders

Ridge
: (agriculture) one of a set of raised strips separated by furrows; (gardening) raised hotbed for melons, etc.

The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary
, Second Edition

Chung-yung's Wife

My father was a shipbuilder, and his father before him. They built the large riverboats that plied the Pearl River with their cargoes of salt, and the seafaring junks that sailed from Canton to Amoy and Formosa. Father had three hundred men who worked in his yards, and we lived in a red-columned mansion in the eastern hills of Canton.

Father was an enlightened man. Although I was only a daughter, he made sure I was educated, almost like a son. We had a private tutor who taught us calligraphy, painting and poetry. I read the
Five Classics
, the
Four Books
, the
Book of Filial Piety
. And I dreamed of Mu-lan, the daughter who dressed as a man and saved her father from battle.

But I never wore the clothes of a man. I could not go out like my brothers to watch the street theatre, or sit in tea-houses with pearl-faced women – the red dust of their cheeks, their lips painted rosebud vermilion. Sometimes I'd go out in a sedan chair and watch the world from behind its curtains, but mostly I stayed at home, reading
The Dream of the Red Chamber
,
Journey to the West
, or doing needlework.

I was a good girl, respectable. Until I was fifteen, no one outside of the family knew of my existence. Then Father's elder sister arranged my marriage. She inquired after all the good families with eligible sons. There was the eldest son of Magistrate Chew, but although his father was known as a fair man, the son was renowned for his foul temper and lack of respect for the ancestors. There was the second son of the Lees, the wealthiest family in Canton – ah, but he was a spendthrift and a gambler. There was the third son of the Kwoks, who had a thriving silk business, but he was born with not enough breath – they say he had beautiful blue-white skin, a gentle man waiting to expire.

It was then that my aunt heard of my husband. A man from the neighbouring village of my father. A man whose older brother lived in the New Gold Mountain and had made enough money to send for him. His name was Wong Chung-yung. He was eighteen, and being a Gold Mountain man he had prospects. I did not know whether he was tall or handsome or kind, or whether he could quote from the classics or write a good couplet, but there did not seem to be any history of madness or of leprosy or tuberculosis – or of excessive opium or gambling. And our horoscopes were favourable: there would be plenty of sons and a life of good fortune.

Mother was First Wife. She gave birth to two sons and me, the only daughter. No one spoke of these things, but I know Mother did not want Father – it was she who found Second Wife for him. Over the years there followed a third wife, and then the fourth. Fourth Wife was barely older than I was, uneducated but wily. She had large phoenix eyes and fine white skin, paled with the application of crushed pearl cream. She was, after all, educated in pleasing men.

Mother could order Second, Third or Fourth Wife to do her bidding, and I had precedence over all their daughters. This is the way things are: the first has power; the last has none – unless by stealth and deception. Fourth Wife fed Second Wife opium-laced dumplings, and she died – though nothing, of course, was proven.

Now I would become a wife also. Unlike Mother, I hoped there would be no others.

*

On the day selected according to the almanac, Father and Eldest Brother carried me to the sedan chair. As we came outside, a chaperone hired from my father's village opened an umbrella; another threw a handful of rice to feed and distract the spirits. Everything was red – red silk, red satin and brocade – red as happiness and the mark on a bed sheet. They took me to my husband's house to the pounding of gongs, hoping not to meet any pregnant cats or dogs, or indeed any four-legged things. I heard my husband outside the sedan chair – he kicked in the door and carried me inside.

This was the place Father-in-law had rented: two rooms on the south side of a courtyard that was shared with three other families. Still in the eastern suburbs, where the Gold Mountain men buy when they come home with their riches.

There I learned to steam rice covered with half a finger of water. I learned how to hold a live chicken and a cleaver – how to pull the skin tight and pluck out the feathers of the throat. Bare pocked skin stretching over the windpipe, the way the eyes close in like a blade. I could pour the blood into a rice bowl, plunge the body into scalding water and strip off the feathers. One cut to pull down the warm entrails.

I learned to wash clothes, my hands stinging with the cold water of winter, callused from the smooth wooden stick, from beating a man's trousers on stone.

And I went shopping in the market – the first time I had walked the dusty streets, the first time I had been out alone. I did not know how to carry the bottles of pickles and fish, the vegetables and the flour. Many times I dropped them and had to go back to buy all that I had broken.

My husband stayed with me six months, enough time to fill me with a son. Then he sailed for the New Gold Mountain and I came to his village. To the house of his mother and father and his older brother's wife.

I wept for three days. Mother-in-law scolded, ‘Do you want your son to bear the mark of your tears?' And so I tried to forget my husband – a man who made me laugh and cry and consider wondrous possibilities. I washed my face and closed my heart. And when my time came, I gave birth to twin boys.

This was a comfort to me. My husband's older brother's wife had no children, only daughters. The first was saved, the second smothered by ashes when she turned her face to suckle, and only after much weeping the third was left by the roadside. No one knows whether she was taken as a slave girl or eaten by dogs.

But I gave birth to sons, the first who looked like my mother and the second who took after his father. This was a double happiness, a blessing of the goddess Kuan Yin.

It was Sister-in-law's envy that cursed us – that, and the ghosts of her daughters.

The day before their fifth birthday, my sons came down with fever. I boiled ten different herbs, fed my sons the bitter black tea; I took a coin and scraped their foreheads, the backs of their arms and along their spines; I went to the temple, lit incense and prayed to Buddha and Kuan Yin.

It was on the fourth day, the number of death, that the one like my mother died. Only the one like my husband survived.

Now I look at my son whom I love – I see the straightness of his nose, the fullness of his lips, a certain way of lifting his head when lost in contemplation – this is the shape, the space left behind by my husband.

Chung-yung's Wife

Every woman has two faces. One a fine white porcelain – a slipping smoothness, carefully shaped, dressed for the eye. The other big and raw and strong, ingrained with the hardness of life.

I do not speak these things; I cannot think in daylight. Only at night when all is quiet, when the only sounds are those of frogs calling and Father-in-law's sporadic snoring. When I lie awake in this room barely big enough for the beds and the wooden barrel toilet.

I listen to Mother-in-law swear and push Father-in-law onto his side, his snort and snuffle and ease into breathing. I hear Sister-in-law cry out in her sleep, and I hold and kiss my son; smell the small boy smell of him, the mud and grass and lychee trees and play by the river.

My sons. My memory of their births and the aftermath is fragmented. Here, and not here, like reading a book where one central chapter has been reworked at random – here a full paragraph, there a full whitespace, here the end of a sentence with no beginning, there a beginning with no end.

I remember my body, squeezed by the hand of God, my innards pressed together, so that all I could do was stop breathing. I heard deep groaning. Tearing pain. The sound of boiling water, and far away Mother-in-law crying out, ‘His backside, it's his backside.'

When I woke, Mother-in-law was screaming. I could not open my right eye. The pain in my head, in my body.

Then my left eye closed over.

The midwife called out, ‘It's a boy, it's a boy,' but I could not see. My face was thick with pain – my forehead, my eyes, my ear.

Mother-in-law screaming at Sister-in-law. The midwife quietly saying, ‘There's another.'

*

Later, Sister-in-law said she had done it to waken me. I had fainted with the pain of labour. So she had picked up the lid from the pot of boiling water and put it down on my forehead.

The heat of the metal burned into me, and when she pulled it away she took my skin also.

I could not open my eyes for nearly two days. Mother-in-law told me that my face swelled the way dried fish stomach puffs up when put into a slow fire. My right ear stuck out from my swollen head. My lips were fatter than Father-in-law's fingers. I remember throbbing, the wound oozing into my hair and down my face, lying in bed shivering with cold, my bedclothes soaked with sweat. And I remember my sons – their thin cries like the mewls of two kittens.

I did not go out of the house for six months, and even then Mother-in-law would not let me stay in the sun. I did not wash clothes or gather firewood or shop in the market while my face and my body healed.

I have no right eyebrow now, no hair where the pot lid touched my face – just a raised, widened forehead, a sweeping arc of skin like a gibbous moon, pale and puckered, knotty, as if afflicted by tiny, colourless varicose veins. My right eye is pulled upwards, the whole of my face drawn tight by the scar.

My husband does not know – I am the only one who knows how to write.

*

There is an old saying: Never marry a woman from Tile Kiln. We live in a small village and theirs is large. When the sweet potato harvest is good, they come in the night, and by morning nothing remains. Never pick a fight with a man or woman from Tile Kiln, they say. Their brothers and uncles and cousins are too numerous.

Chung-shun's Wife

The earth's full of the dead. They hold up the land and wander the streets. Come to the door, pretend they are beggars.

Alone. I hear knock-knocking, strange voices.

I am very still. Silent.

The New Gold Mountain is full of devils. They have red hair and big noses. They all look alike.

Husband went to the New Gold Mountain twenty-two years ago. Devils made him pay to get off the ship. He paid for the ship and then he still had to pay. All the money. Because we are
Tongyan
, he said. White devils don't have to pay and black devils don't have to pay, only people from the Middle Kingdom. This is the poll tax, he said, this is why I could not go with him.

I waited twenty-one years and he came back. Bought concubine. Bitch concubine that men go
nerve-sick
over. Her father gambled
fantan
and
pakapoo
and smoked up the money. Ha! Then he sold her to buy opium.

Husband took her to Canton. Paid for her to learn to read devil language so she could pass the devil test. He took her with him.
Fuck her grandmother.
She was first woman to see the New Gold Mountain. Husband is Number One Son, I am Wife. Every day I get up first. Use rice stalks to light the stove, boil the water, steep tea. Feed the fire with sticks from lychee orchard. Feed Mother- and Father-in-law.

Every day I get water from the river. Carry two big pails, swing my hips, swing the pails on the shoulder pole. Every day do what Mother-in-law says.

*

Husband has brother: Number Two Son. He left wife here too; went to be with Husband in the New Gold Mountain. Sister-in-law has small feet like rich man's wife, so does not work in the field.

She writes the red scrolls, so we do not pay a scroll-writer. Around the door she writes,
In and out of the house, walk in peace.
She writes above the fireplace to protect us while cooking. On both sides of window, she writes. She writes the red paper scrolls with long curling black ink, so devils and ghosts do not come.

She writes the letters to my husband. I say, Tell him I am good wife – do everything Mother-in-law says. Tell him, Send plenty of money. Tell him, Come back. She tells him I am useless, no-good wife – I know. She tells him, Get concubine. Don't come back. She reads Husband's letters. Says concubine has a son.

Ghosts everywhere. On graves: dirt-hills with turf for head. There are no names. Where are the ancestors? Who can remember? The dead get dug up, their bones put in urns. Lychee orchard is full of urns. No lids, so dead can get out.

I do not go to lychee orchard. I tell Sister-in-law, Go get sticks for fire.

River is full, too. Full of drowned ghosts. Girl babies and bad women and boy babies who got sick and died. I tell Sister-in-law, Go wash the clothes in river, but she has small feet – I still have to bring back the water.

Long time ago Husband looks at me and says, ‘Stupid woman, scared of ghosts. That's no ghost, just dirty beggar.' He drinks wine, tells me ghost story . . .
Night-time, raining hard. He walking home on built-up earth of rice paddy. Drunk and cannot walk straight. Terrible ghost comes, coming to him. He's running; ghost coming. He runs faster, faster, ghost light still coming, tumbling over rice paddy. He falls in rice paddy; ghost still coming, big shiny ball, rolling, tumbling to him. Cannot get up, ghost coming.

‘What happens, what happens?' I hide my head in my hands.

Husband laughs. ‘Ghost afraid, just like stupid woman,' he says. ‘Ghost come closer, closer, then gone. Just rain on rice paddy.'

Night-time. Raining. I cannot sleep. Ghosts come. They stand over my bed. I see heads but no body. They all have girl faces.

Husband says the New Gold Mountain is full of white devils. They smell like sheep-meat and butter; they don't like
Tongyan
. But not many ghosts in the New Gold Mountain. Not so many kill themselves or get killed. Husband says you hear someone outside door in the New Gold Mountain, this is not ghost, this is
Tongyan
or
gweilo
. No ghosts on raining night. He says, in the New Gold Mountain all ghosts are ghosts, you know.

I say, ‘Know, don't know, don't like ghosts.'

When I die, Mother- and Father-in-law dead, Husband in New Gold Mountain. Who burns paper money and incense and puts out food? Who looks after me?