The Black Isle (8 page)

I yearned to tell Sister Nesbit that her school was swarming with horrors. Yet how could I crush the nuns’ illusions with my righteous testimony? Ghosts would have proved false the efficacy of prayer, a practice they were working so hard to instill in their two hundred impressionable young wards; ghosts would have attacked the core of the missionaries’ idealism, that the dark Isle was worth illuminating. This was assuming, of course, that the sisters took my warnings seriously at all. Surely I could close my eyes and hold my tongue long enough to absorb a few years of verbs, adverbs, and long division, skills that would help me transcend the narrow rooms of Father’s world?

The alternative was clear: hard child labor, Bullock Cart Water forever. Damnation.

I don’t know what Li’s scholastic life was like in those days, but it couldn’t have been much grander. I watched him grow into a quiet boy plagued with bouts of exhaustion, chained to a thrice-weekly regimen of boiled pig’s blood to curb his anemia. On his good days, he played sports with his mates—soccer, rugby, rounders, badminton—and this meant that we grew into very different people. I devoured books, whereas he read nothing at all. We increasingly had nothing to talk about. We continued to sleep back to sticky back like a two-headed beast: he with the gold toffee disk tucked into his hand and me making tense, tight fists. I suppose we each, in our own way, were praying for a better future.

Everywhere in our neighborhood, however, steps were constantly being taken to protect the past, which, to most, meant the dead. The zealous staged street operas in Teochew and Cantonese to distract their ghost relatives from mischief, burned “hell money” to support their netherworldly spending, and placed six-inch blocks in entryways to prevent the unwelcome ones from supposedly gliding in—not that any of these measures made a bit of difference, as I often felt like telling them.

“Don’t you stare at me,” Father barked at me one afternoon when I returned to find him nailing a small, hexagonal mirror above our room door. “I bought this from the Taoist temple down the road. Better safe than sorry, don’t you think?”

To my dismay, our father had become superstitious. Once so modern, he now absorbed the old-fashioned panic around him. He grew gray and gaunt, losing most of his hair and a quarter of his body weight. To hide his sunken chest, he developed a pronounced hunch: A bone that looked like a baby’s elbow jutted out of his upper back, just below the neck. The old stork was turning into a camel. His fearfulness meant that I had to act bravely at home, as I did at school, to spare him additional worry. Naturally, I never mentioned the eyeless old man who had begun appearing every night at the foot of his bed.

Through the early 1930s, even during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the sneak attacks culminating in the occupation of Shanghai, Mother stayed in touch. At first I would rip open her letters the moment they arrived, savoring any news of the twins, but I soon found that to read Mother’s letters was to be driven mad with frustration. The little ones were very well, she always wrote without variation, and she was very well, too. No mention was ever made of the checkpoints that were reportedly making daily life so impossible or of the nighttime gun battles between the Republican army and the Japanese military that we heard so much about on the wireless. I learned more about occupied Shanghai from the mass boycott of Japanese brothels in Chinatown than from anything Mother cared to share.

She always signed off, “Yours sincerely, Mother.” No love, no kisses, just cordial sincerity, as if she’d been forced to pen these missives at gunpoint when what she really wanted to do was go out and dance on the beach. I had a theory that she was being held captive by the Japanese, but when I shared this with Father, he laughed so hard—and so acridly—that I thought the throbbing vein on his forehead would burst.

Not that Father, I suspect, ever painted her the full picture from our side. He wrote home every other month and sent along whatever money he could save, but steady work kept eluding him; not one of his clerking positions had lasted longer than two months. Most of the Chinese bosses were from Guangdong Province or Fujian, few of whom spoke English and none of whom had the patience to penetrate Father’s Shanghainese-fattened Mandarin. The lingua franca of the street was in fact Malay. Even the European
towkays
(bosses, in the Island vernacular) had to pick up a few words of it to make themselves understood to the help.

Father resisted learning. But it wasn’t all his fault; bad luck kept his spirits down. The Depression had left this part of the world tattered and raw. Walking to and from St. Anne’s, I saw rickshaw coolies squatting in the shade, some without fares for days. Beside them were construction workers (many of them Chinese women), wharf laborers, beggars, all stooping together in what at first appeared to be silent solidarity but, at a second glance, was clearly bewilderment so deep as to have rendered every single one of them speechless. Only their children had the enterprise to beg, filling the district with their ubiquitous cry: “No mother, no father, no supper, no soda!”

After school, I often sat on a stone bench in the traffic island dividing Spring Street, the main artery of Chinatown. This island was tiny: just a small, raised slab with barely enough room for the bench, a hibiscus bush, and the pedestal where Mr. Singh, the Sikh policeman, stood directing traffic with oversized canvas sleeves fastened to his arms like wings. It was here, watching the throngs in cars, trams, buses, and on foot, that I received my practical education.

The Chinese, who made up a little more than half of the populace, came in a wide variety, from slave to millionaire. The ones known as Peranakans, whose families had been in the Nanyang for generations and proudly spoke no Chinese at all, fared the best. The rich ones swanned into Chinatown in big cars, trailed by uniformed servants, eager to distinguish themselves from the newcomers. The indigenous Malays mostly worked as drivers and laborers or led self-sustaining lives as fishermen; though most were poor, their lives were still in general not as dire as those of the South Indian Untouchables who took the worst jobs: hauling stone and removing night soil. The
karang guni
men were of this caste. Then there were Parsee, Arab, and Jewish shop merchants. These fluid types weathered the hard times better than most because they maintained family everywhere and did business with everyone. I found them admirable, if always a little sly.

Looking down on us all were the Europeans, who rarely stepped into Chinatown except on ghoulish excursions to see the death houses of Sago Lane, where old amahs rented bunks and waited to die. From the gin-soaked specimens I saw, I concluded that the Island’s Europeans were of a much coarser grade than those of Shanghai. Perhaps this was because they felt they owned the place rather than tenanted it, as in China.

But the heartening thing about the Black Isle was that, aside from the colonials, everybody mixed. Even in Chinatown, you would find a Taoist temple devoted to the goddess of mercy, a Hindu temple with stone buffalos stacked in a gaudy pyramid, an Anglican church with services in three languages,
and
a boxy run-of-the-mill mosque, all on the same street. Around the corner, there might be a synagogue, a
kramat
—the tomb of an Islamic holy man—and an Armenian church standing cheek by jowl.

I told myself that ghosts were just another facet of its lush, equatorial diversity—the dead walking among the living, everybody sharing the same air, the same soil. This die-and-let-live attitude was part of the Island’s social contract. As much as some of them frightened me, I had to learn to get used to them.

From my perch on the Spring Street traffic island, I witnessed the stirring of this cosmopolitan mélange. It was sitting here that I felt myself becoming an Islander and not just any old immigrant, any old Overseas Chinese who continued to dream of the Middle Kingdom. My day felt incomplete if I didn’t greet passersby in at least four languages—
vellikum
to the Tamil road sweeper,
cho sun
to the Cantonese butcher,
selamat
to the Malay watchman,
shalom
to the Jewish money changer. To the random lost soul, I trained myself to look away and solemnly nod, which was a language unto itself.

The ghosts of the aged
Samsui
women troubled me the most. Shipped away from their villages in Canton to haul stone on the Isle, these unmarried women, with their uniform of red head cloth and blue pajamas, seemed like nuns forever betrothed to the dust. I always felt butterflies in their presence even though, thank goodness, none of them addressed me. The sickly feeling would fade a few minutes after they did, and I would once again be reabsorbed into Spring Street’s bustling human swirl.

On my braver days, which typically meant after I’d been puffed up with praise or high marks from school, I would force myself to walk home via the dreaded death houses of Sago Lane, where the loneliest amahs and coolies went to die. On these confident afternoons, I felt the same nauseating emptiness I associated with Sister Yeung’s first visit, yet I saw no ghosts. Rather it was on my bluer days, when things had gone less well at school, that I would see them. The barred windows of the death houses would be crowded with the faces of the migrant dead, staring out like passengers on a motionless train. Was rubbish-strewn Sago Lane the view they’d chosen for all eternity or did they not have a choice? I had nobody to ask.

And on my worst days, when I felt particularly put upon, there was even more. I could
hear
them—a soft, murmuring stew of regional dialects, like a sonic compass to rural China. I could never make out the individual voices, but the emotions transcended them all the same: desolation, nostalgia, regret. In a word, homesickness. Their pain was so powerful I tried to imagine my way into it.

Feel
, I told myself. Think of the twins growing bigger without me, think of all the smells that had made our old house home—orange peel, soy milk, jasmine water, mothballs. I slowed down my breathing, tried to parse the world from the exiles’ perspective. Yes, I was an Islander, but I understood their loss.

Gradually, my good days and my bad days made no difference. They were always there, and I always saw them.

Because this was the tropics, Spring Street had other exotic visitors as well. One day, as I was sitting on the island, the afternoon traffic inexplicably began dividing into two streams. From his already high vantage point, Mr. Singh the traffic controller stood on tiptoes and brought a sun-shielding hand to his brow. He widened his eyes and began waving his canvas wings, looking as if he were trying to fly away.

“Tiger!” he gasped. “Tiger!” But the more he flapped those wings, the more he attracted attention to himself.

Before we could even think of fleeing, a bushy-jowled beast materialized between the parted rows of cars and buses, his orange fur luminous against the blacks and grays.

“Stop waving your arms, Uncle!” I shouted at my frantic companion. “He’ll think you’re calling him!”

The tiger sauntered down the center of Spring Street, its eyes aimed at our island.

The bustling street went silent as the king of the jungle made his approach, the pads of his mighty paws sounding
thup…thup…thup
on the scorching concrete. Although I knew I should have been scared, there was something very soothing about his ease. I was riveted by his magnificent slouch, the black stripes on his face that looked at once lazy and so artfully inked, and the effortless intensity of his yellow-green eyes—eyes that locked onto me as if I were the only person who mattered in the world. I don’t remember what Mr. Singh was doing when I reached out, hoping to stroke the great cat’s whiskery cheeks, but I will never forget the luxuriant purr the creature gave me, nor the tilt of his snout as his pink tongue leapt out and snapped at the air.

As I took a step closer to him, the black hood of a Ford Model T rattled into view and slammed into my feline friend with a loud crack, sending him flopping to the ground ten feet away.

“Take that, you bugger!” came a cry from the driver’s seat.

I feared the beast had been killed, but he was back on his paws in seconds. Shaking his majestic head, almost sighing, he padded toward his aggressor, the car now backing away, and stared down the driver, a quivering Englishman. No roar, no claws, just a look of deep disapproval. Then my tiger turned, shot me a parting glance, and bounded in orange flight back to the forest.

Flush with adrenaline, I could feel my attachment to the old country evaporating. Even if I’d fought it—and I really didn’t—Shanghai never stood a chance.

During my fifth year at St. Anne’s, in 1934, I was made class prefect.

Sister Nesbit anointed me at assembly, while the hanging girl of Shaw Hall writhed and twitched just above our heads.

“For your leadership qualities and good marks.” Sister Nesbit smiled as she affixed the blue rectangular pin on my pinafore. “For being cheerful and brave.”

Cheerful and brave? It hadn’t occurred to me that this was how the world now saw me, so immaculate had my act become. Cheerful and brave—I liked that. Finally, somebody had grasped that I was special. For the privilege of junior sainthood, I was to continue what I did so well: exhibiting model conduct and being an exemplar of Positive Thinking. In other words, be a shining light in the dim, dark corridors of our frightening institution. I smiled until my cheeks ached.

Following my coronation, I became a heroine to the meek at the primary school. I showed them how to tie their shoelaces and how to protest when the drinks seller short-changed them. “Pharisees!” I taught them to shout.

My afternoons were spent proselytizing on behalf of the school library, for which I was paid with an extra borrower’s card. I was friendless anyhow and regarded the work as character-building time well spent. Not only did reading distract me from the school’s more disturbing ghosts, but also books were perfect shields against the condescension of the wealthy Peranakan girls, mercantile blood flowing thick in their boorish veins, who flocked together at recess and went out of their way to tell me, “You know, you speak quite good English for someone from Chinatown.” They never invited me to their parties, so I held my own with
Huckleberry Finn, Robinson Crusoe,
and
Little Women,
and in these fictional stars found true and fast friends.