THREE

 

September 1941

 

I was now twelve and about to start my sixth year at Diocesan. My first months there in 1936 were marked by the pain of separation from my mother. I had no idea then that my misery was shared by the other first-year students. The intense routine at the school, and its many rituals of belonging, compelled us to talk and think about things other than our sadness. So I adapted as I had to. I learned that fear is made worse by thinking, and that survival often requires no thought at all.

We were one month into the 1941 school year. Each fall, after the holidays, the return to routine was like the snapping of a flag, sharper and sharper each September, so that it took ever fewer days for us to regain the persona of the student boarder who sang the school’s official songs and rose in unison for its teachers. This time the transition was almost instantaneous, as though my summer break had been only a performance of some loud-mouthed youth who also carried my name and image. I was ready for the year.

Three large buildings made up most of the school: the dormitory, where three hundred boys ate and slept, the huge central building with the classrooms and theatres, and the residence at the far end where the headmaster and some of the teachers lived and where parents were sometimes received. These were surrounded by lawns, gardens, and an athletic track.

Sometimes, after class or in the evenings, Leuk and I met by a huge, ancient banyan tree at the edge of the property. We would sit or stand beneath the curtains of hanging roots, talking, speculating, testing each other with questions that neither of us could have answered. We talked about movies we would see or about snacks in the market and what food we missed most from Ah-Ming’s kitchen. We talked about all the things we missed from home, but not about the centre of that world, our mother, whom we missed most of all.

Early in October, Mr. Lo called us into his office to tell us that our mother was coming to visit us in a couple of weeks. I was thrilled to hear it, though disappointed that it wouldn’t be a weekend home. I met Leuk out at the banyan tree and we talked about her visit. We were almost desperate to impress her with things we had each made but were mindful of not doing anything too similar. Finally we agreed that Leuk would finish a painting he was working on, and I would show her my best effort in calligraphy.

One evening that week, I went to the teachers’ library. The housekeeper said none of the teachers was using the library at the moment, and I could go in if I was quick. I found the volume on calligraphy that I needed and put it in my bag.

Outside the library, I heard agitated voices. I looked down the long hallway to the teachers’ parlour, and in the yellow light I saw several of the teachers gathering close around the radio. Some looked right at it while others sat with their heads bowed in concentration. An older teacher, Mr. Yuen, held a book between the palms of both hands, worrying the page corners with his thumb. I couldn’t make out much of what the radio announcer was saying, something about Japan and its emperor, Hirohito, and about the Nationalist government in China. At the mention of the Nationalists, Mr. Yuen looked up and smoothed his white hair back nervously, and then he leaned over and whispered to the teacher next to him. I heard war mentioned several times. Then the announcer mentioned Singapore.

“How can they abandon Singapore?” a teacher shouted, and the others hushed him angrily while Mr. Yuen reached over and turned the volume up. The previous week, two boys in my school had left suddenly for Singapore with their families.

Afraid of being caught, I returned to the dormitory.

We had all been hearing fragmentary talk of war by then, but until that night it had sounded only at the peri­phery of our days, like a far-off noise or an argument overheard through an open window. War appeared on the screens at movie theatres, during the newsreels about Europe, when we were busy talking and throwing peanut shells at each other. War was a word, another subject, tossed out by the same adult sphere that assigned homework, wrote Sunday sermons, and gossiped in the market.

In the past two weeks, though, something had begun to shift. Five boys’ parents had come for unexpected visits, and within a day or two the parents had taken their sons from the school with all their belongings. Mr. Lo had been present at each departure, seeing the boy off with a lingering handshake, and at times I had seen him later in the halls on such days, wandering pensively or looking out over the grounds. I asked Leuk what he knew about these boys leaving, but he had no idea.

 

It was Sunday, October 19, the day my mother came to visit. I still recall the calendar posted at the far end of the dormitory over the sink, with all the Sundays in bright red. Every time I went to wash my hands or face, I looked at it and counted the days to her visit. On Wednesday evenings after supper, every boy in the school had to write his mother a letter in the dining hall, and these were delivered the following day. My letter the Wednesday before her visit had been a little longer than usual, and I had asked, with the mixture of formality and yearning that this ritual inspired, for a few extra items.

“Mother, could you please bring with you some sweets, but not too many as the headmaster doesn’t allow them to be hoarded, but I need a few extra to give to my prefect. I also need socks and if Leuk hasn’t asked you he needs some too. I greatly look forward to your visit. Can you also bring something to read because I’m bored? Your son.”

The old Daimler gleamed as it pulled through the gates, up the gravel drive to the steps, where Leuk and I stood with Mr. Lo. He stepped forward first to greet our mother. Chow got out quickly to open the passenger door and our mother stepped out onto the gravel. I still remember the emerald green of her dress and her jacket of white silk running with embroidered willow branches. She beamed when she saw us. We ran past the headmaster to her, and as Leuk and I embraced her, I felt our arms cross over the ermine stole around her neck, her sole concession to Western fashion. The fur pressed into my cheek, and I smelled her perfume as she murmured words only my brother and I could hear. Chow ran around to the back of the car and lifted packages out of the boot.

Mr. Lo accompanied us into the parlour. It was an ornate and stuffy room, a mixture of European and Chinese furniture sinking into thick Persian rugs. A low coal fire burned in the brazier, and a photo of the missionary Robert Morrison hung on the wall, next to a much larger photo of King George. My mother settled herself into a sofa just beneath these images and passed each of us a small box wrapped in brown paper. Her eyes shone as we took them, and she pursed her lips.

We sat with the boxes on our laps, waiting to be told that we could open them. My mother looked at us for a moment with a smile, and yet I felt a slight disquiet, sensing that she was both happy and worried as she nodded at the boxes.

“Go ahead. After you open them, I only want to hear about school.”

After we opened our packages and thanked her for bringing what we’d requested, she asked us about our schooling. Leuk brought out his painting, of three carp swimming in a pond in which the branches of a willow were reflected. I brought out my scroll and handed it to her excitedly. She was delighted with our work and pored over each one.

She told us about our older brothers and how well they were doing with the firm and asked us more about school. She seemed happy, almost relieved, to talk about our education and the good grades we’d earned. She talked also about Yee-Lin, the young woman Sheung had married that summer, and how pleased she was with her. Wei-Ming, who was now seven, had just started at a school nearby.

Though I was glad to see her, throughout the visit a question gnawed at me. I thought of the boys who’d left abruptly in recent weeks and worried she had come to take us home, or might soon.

I remember being conscious of every moment of her visit, fearing it was a prelude to our leaving the school. I had no idea where those other boys had gone, or what had become of them. School was where we surely belonged, and to be apart from our parents for a time, even our entire families, was a necessity of life. There was a time to separate; somehow I knew this, from my arrival here five years earlier, from the way we were induced to bond like little tribes, or from our growing lack of interest in writing home to our mothers. There had been nights when I wondered if the true purpose of our school was to break us from our families, and I felt shame at my enjoyment of my life here, even though I missed my mother terribly at times. But who were they, these women who lived in service to their own inarticulate power of love, to take us back when we were not yet men? I thought of being taken away while the other boys went on learning and bonding, studying the secrets of manhood. And if I were suddenly taken home, I knew I’d be both happy to be with my mother yet dangerously incomplete.

I was sorry the whole visit was taking place in the parlour. Everything else in our lives at school was somewhere else — the classroom, the theatre, the field, the painting studio — but I hadn’t planned on showing our mother around. We ate lunch there and she talked a little more about Wei-Ming’s school. At the end of the visit we walked outside, where Chow was waiting with the passenger door already open.

On the gravel drive, she put her hand on Leuk’s shoulder and gave each of us a kiss. As she leaned over, I threw my arms around her and felt tears prick my eyes. When I did that, she moved her hand and brushed her fingers slowly over the clipped hairs on the back of my neck. My mother stood up again and I looked at her face.

“Over there!” I said. I pointed at the banyan tree in the far corner of the field. “Do you know what that is?” I asked.

“What is it?”

“It’s where Leuk and I go to talk almost every day. Almost no one goes there. That’s where Leuk told me you were coming to see us.”

She glanced briefly at the tree. “Then I’m glad I came.” She kissed me. “I’ll be back before Christmas.”

Mr. Lo was back and my mother returned his bow as he said goodbye. She stepped quickly into the car, and Chow got in and turned it around. I had been excited to tell my mother about the tree, to be outside in the sun again with her. It seemed she had just arrived. In the clear afternoon light, I imagined the parlour as a sombre box, a musty playhouse decorated by fussing old maids and colonial lawmakers, crammed with cold and over-polished wood. I thought that if I could only show her my scroll again, here in the sunlight, it would look better. But when the passenger door shut and I saw her face filtered through the greenish glass, tears welled up in my eyes, and I fisted my hands and held them tight against my sides. Leuk turned to look at me for a moment, as though he, being one year older, could surrender a few seconds of looking at our mother when I could not, and took my hand.

“Christmas,” he repeated. “And who knows, she may come back even sooner.”

When the car was out of sight, we headed back to the dormitory. I could smell autumn in the air again, blowing over and through us, washing out the scent of the parlour.

 

There was a reunion of my old class at Diocesan in August 1997. The joke among us was that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the year we ought to have graduated, not when we actually did. Of the original twenty-five graduates in our class, eighteen made it to the reunion, but the discussions about who was missing and why were strangely brief the first evening. Alice was doing better and could travel again, and I watched her mingle with the other wives. There was really only one she knew well, but she was at ease the whole evening. It was the first real break she’d had since her last stay at the hospital.

Of the seven former students who didn’t attend, two we knew to be dead, one sent his regrets, and four others never responded. As might be expected of a group of men approaching seventy, we had difficulty keeping track of who had died and who was merely absent. One of these was Wing Kwok, who had gone on to become a teacher at Diocesan. He had retired ten years earlier and no one had heard from him since. Two of the school’s current senior students joined us the first evening, but even they had only heard his name.

The two students and the current headmaster, Dr. Pak, gave us a tour of the school. Sometime after the war, new facilities had been put up and the old dormitory converted into classrooms. We walked through them, and I recognized the building from within only because of the entrance and the view from the windows. The entrance still had a distinct smell, not unpleasant, that I used to notice on my clothes when I went home on holidays, a mix of institutional laundry soap and resin, what I think of as the smell of echoing hallways. The grounds seemed much smaller than I had remembered them, and the old banyan tree was gone.

Vincent Lim, one of our group who helped organize the reunion, had surprised us all on the second day by giving us new blazers with the school crest on them. He and his wife handed them out and insisted we wear them. Alice gamely carried my jacket. I looked ridiculous in the blazer, as did most of my old friends. Stumbling into a lineup for a commemorative photograph, we looked like the inmates of some institution that used costumes as therapy, and I and a few others were quick to use the heat as an excuse to remove them by mid-morning.

Over lunch that day, in a Hunan-style restaurant at a shopping mall, the conversation turned back to Wing Kwok. Despite returning to the school a mere five years after graduation and having taught physics there for over three decades, he had kept a low profile among alumni. His retirement was known to only a few of us, thanks to a brief notice in the school bulletin. My memories of him were shadowy: a reserved, gangly youth, the son of a senior police officer who was shot in the early days of the occupation. It was said that the school waived his tuition after the war because of this, though he tried to conceal it. A few others recalled how he had excelled in science and won the physics and math prizes two or three times. Someone said we should go check the honour roll boards in the main hall, but no one could remember where they were or if they had been moved during the renovations.

Vincent Lim drank heavily during the lunch. He kept his school blazer on and sweated despite the blasting air conditioner. He became sentimental and talked about “the missing boys,” a phrase that seemed ever more grotesque as he flushed from the brandy and his lank grey hair stuck to his forehead. He ate rapidly and twice his wife discreetly touched his sleeve to get him to settle down.

Another classmate remembered an old rumour that Wing Kwok’s mother was half Japanese on her mother’s side and her father was a merchant who exported to Japan.

You know, said Vincent, I think I met her once when I went to the Kwoks’ home. She had a little of that rounded face that Japanese women have. She was very quiet.

Who knows, said David Chen. David was sitting next to Vincent. The owner of a large factory, he was a driven and pragmatic man with no interest in reminiscence. He reached over with his chopsticks and picked up a choice piece of goose from right in front of Vincent.

A petty argument erupted between them, with Vincent defending the importance of remembering the old boys and David replying that he was just here to enjoy himself with his friends. Our misery is behind us, he said bluntly.

Everyone else had grown quiet. The tables around us were noisy, but our utensils clinked awkwardly as we picked away at the last of the lunch. We settled the bill quickly and went back to the school. As soon as Alice and I walked back into the main hall, where a display had been put up for our reunion, I inhaled deeply and took in that familiar odour of polish and camphor.

Even now, eighteen years later, I sometimes notice one of those old school scents in something, like a storage trunk full of old clothing, and I can almost see the light slanting through the windows of the dormitory or the dining hall. In the last months of my life, the world outside seems to be nothing more than a jumble of clues, too many to make sense of — street food, garbage, gardens, exhaust, a kitchen, a forest, clothes dried after soaking in river water, and dried blood.