TWO

 

July 1936

 

Despite some of the stories Leuk told me about the Diocesan Boys’ School, I thought of going there only as being sent away from home, and I was terrified. My older brothers’ total lack of interest in saying anything at all confirmed my belief that my mother’s decision was one of deliberate cruelty. The only time I heard anything close to consolation was when Sheung looked up casually at me from a newspaper and said, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll survive.”

His bluntness only cemented my impression, and my fear, that the school was some kind of machine that blunted human feeling. I had seen a movie in which a man was lost in an immense, swirling crowd, and as he spun around, struggling to find his way, he was met only with the indifference of everyone around him, people drowning in their own chaos and fear. That was what I started to expect school would be like. Maybe nothing could have reassured me. And maybe, had I known what would come later, during the war, I would have understood that there were far worse things. But I was only seven.

For the moment, on this summer afternoon in 1936, I consoled myself by staring steadily at a photograph of my father. I was perched on a stool, trying to ignore the old tailor who was finishing my school uniform.

My mother had draped the framed picture in black crepe ribbon, as she had done in every room in the house. It had been, I learned later, a year of tumult and worry with the family firm. With the business held in trust and my older brothers still two years away from taking it on, it was as though my mother had riddled the house with images of my father to warn the world that his legacy could not be toppled. She didn’t understand the legal complexities of the business and how it would pass to her sons — she was never consulted in such things anyway — and in the strain of losing my father and the void it created, she began to feel a formless dread for the integrity of her family. Twice she made my older brothers swear they would develop the upper-floor apartments for themselves upon marrying, rather than moving out, and reminded Leuk and me that we were expected to do the same.

The tailor fussed over a few final details. Then he nodded to Ah-Tseng, who left and brought my mother in. She looked me over and her eyes misted as she touched my cheek. I hated the uniform and it probably showed. I doubt she took much notice of the tailoring itself. Then she cleared her throat self-consciously, whispered something to Ah-Tseng, and left quickly. The tailor, a red-faced man with short white hair like a boot brush, bowed ostentatiously to her back.

Ah-Tseng handed the tailor an envelope of money as I fought my way out of the stiff woollen outfit. The tailor’s apprentice, a boy of no more than twelve, helped me. During the fittings his main job had been simply to hold up a large portable mirror that he carried in on his back. I noticed each time how his hands were covered in cuts and bruises.

After folding up my uniform, the apprentice began to put away the tailor’s kit and the tall mirror in its bamboo frame. He held the mirror with one hand while he fished a long leather strap out of his pocket, which I assumed was used for carrying it.

“Don’t do that inside!” the tailor snapped, and he struck the apprentice on the side of his head. The tailor nodded at me and they left. I followed and watched them go down the front steps of the house to Wong Nai Chung Road. Once there, the apprentice took the strap and rigged the mirror onto his back with the reflective side facing outward. Then they hurried down the street, the tailor carrying in his hand his bag of tools and the apprentice on his back the reflection of clouds and airplanes.

 

Our father rarely involved himself in our lives, with the exception of getting us admitted to school. Leuk was the last son whose admission he’d overseen, and in my case the task fell to my mother. Over the past year I had caught glimpses of her struggling to master the forms. Of course, it was a given that I would be let in, but she was unable to handle the details of paperwork without help. The headmaster sent his wife to our house to assist her, and I sat beside my mother while she asked Mrs. Lo questions about the school, something she knew little about despite having three sons living there. She grew especially unsure of herself at all the talk of uniforms and rituals, of cricket, of the mysteries of boiled puddings for dessert. In later years I understood that it was my father alone who straddled the two worlds of the British and the Chinese. Without him, and with his business held in trust and her older sons away at school, my mother felt herself little more than a village girl thrust out among strangers, and the strain of maintaining face in this unbuffered world was slowly wearing away her confidence.

I left for school on a Monday morning in late August. Leuk had left a day earlier, while I got to have an extra day at home with my mother and Wei-Ming. At the front doors, my mother wept openly as I put my jacket on and Chow loaded my bags. Now I was in the car, wearing my uniform and holding a bag of plums Ah-Ming had given me. Chow’s neat black driver’s cap floated over the headrest. I alternated between looking out the window and watching my feet dangle over the seat.

I asked Chow if the school was far from our house. He said that no, it wasn’t that far, but since I was going to board there, it didn’t matter. He said all I needed to do was pay attention to the teachers and respect them, and to behave well. It was a very hot day and the windows were rolled down, and as the car sped along, I smelled flowers, rotting garbage, and now and then the scent of the harbour. We climbed a hill up Stubbs Road. We moved out of a neighbourhood of apartments and houses and onto a road bordered by high walls hung with vegetation. There were few pedestrians, and the thick, soft walls of vines and trees around us seemed to dampen the engine’s sound.

The world seemed very bright and close. Ah-Ming had ironed a sharp crease into my shorts and I was wearing new shoes. The jacket didn’t feel too hot. My mother had told me I must wear it so that I would step out of the car properly dressed, but I had other worries.

Chow drove through the broad gates of the Diocesan Boys’ School. The car passed from the silent pavement to the soft crunch of fine gravel, up a drive that led to a large white building. I stepped out of the car and noticed a yellow-winged bird jumping around the base of a bush beside the front steps. There was a sign with the school’s name over the entrance in Chinese and English. As I was sounding it out, Chow put my bags down beside me, and I turned to look up into his face. My hand was in my pocket and I fidgeted, then pulled it out impulsively. As I did so, I realized I was about to offer it to him to hold, and stopped myself. I adjusted my clothes awkwardly, then put my hand back in my pocket. I realized I’d forgotten to ask my mother when her first visit would be.

I took my hand out again and held both arms stiffly at my sides and looked straight ahead at the school’s front doors. A minute passed in silence, during which neither Chow nor I spoke, and I felt heat climbing my scalp and neck in the late summer morning. The school entrance was flanked by ornamental bushes with an unfamiliar scent, mingling with the smell of dry gravel dust. I thought to steal another glance at Chow to see if he was watching me, if there was something I should do next, but then the doors opened. Mr. Lo, the headmaster, came down the front steps to greet me. He wore a suit the colour of wet limestone and his glasses caught the sun.

 

I moved into my current flat six years ago, in early 2009, just before my eightieth birthday. The evening I arrived in Malaysia from the United States, it was monsoon season in Kuala Lumpur, and as the plane landed, I looked out the window and saw the smeared image of a city drenched in weeks of heavy rain.

My daughter, Evelyn, picked this flat for me. It was sparely furnished, as I had requested, and I brought only a few things with me on the long flight over. Preparing for the move was more work than I’d first expected; the sorting of accumulations is a bit of a cliché for old people, but it’s true. In the end I don’t know what moved me to keep some things and discard others. Giving things away to friends and neighbours, in the belief they might be of interest, seemed more like an eccentric form of littering than preparation for a different life, and so the garbage bags filled quickly. When my daughter greeted me at the airport, I did indeed feel lighter, though that’s a sensation one shouldn’t overthink in old age.

It had been nine years since my wife Alice died, after her long illness, and though I’d adapted to living alone, I never quite overcame the feeling of living an uncentred life. For the first few years of her disease, when her hospital stays were mostly acute and she was able to travel and live her life in between, I approached her illness as a problem for us to overcome. But in the second stage it was less clear what was happening to her and why, and her illness exacted a more severe toll than we had expected. She changed. The disease merged with the woman who was my wife, altered her personality, and try as I might, I could see her only as a sick person. I felt pity, and resented feeling it. Leaving our old house, which felt changed, even invaded, was a relief after a decade of illness and another of solitude.

When Evelyn brought me up to the new flat, I looked around and appreciated its plainness and large windows, though the smells were what I noticed first. The building was then newly finished; all the way from the entrance the scents of paint and sawdust had trailed us in a growing eddy, and the chalky odour of cut stone and the last ghosts of wood polish and sealants followed me into the flat. My daughter had stopped by earlier to open a few windows, so that when we entered the flat I was struck by the rain-crisped atmosphere of all these fading residues. It must have been that scent, of freshness and the ancient sea-damp of my childhood, that impressed on me that this was the first place in my life where I would live alone.

A feeling of unease seized me at that moment, and to shake it off I walked over to the windows overlooking the park. The sky, bound in stony clouds across the landscape, surrendered endless rain onto the city, painting the roads and sidewalks in a dark gleam. I let the initial stab of loneliness pass and turned to help Evelyn direct the movers.

I had returned, if not to my old city, then at least to its corner of the world. To be close to Evelyn was good for both of us, though I knew we wouldn’t have agreed to this had it not been, like a pianist’s flourish, a gesture in service of the end. I didn’t want to see this reunion as a portent of decline, even though that was what it was. Looking at Evelyn as she fussed over my things, I knew I should feel joy. Over the years I’ve known events in my life that others would envy: travelling the world, getting into medical school, marriage, children, a rewarding if truncated career. But too often I found myself unable to feel true happiness, only a sense of troubled relief, as though I were continually avoiding disaster. Only once, a long time ago, did I really feel that deep illumination, a great burst of happiness when I found someone I’d yearned for.

For years I told myself I should sit down and write a memoir of my mother, and a couple of times I went as far as to type a title at the top of a page, which I underlined decisively. I felt a desire, sometimes even a compulsion, to release a portion of myself, to set it outside myself. I thought I had to do this in order to be legitimate to others, even to confirm to myself that I was real. But I made little progress with the memoir, and in the cleanup for the move from Chicago I finally put the idea aside for good. As time goes by, I feel this failure lighten, knowing how little we can truly transcribe of what resides inside us.

Evelyn stood next to me at the window. Despite the heavy rain, she pointed out the nearby gardens where I could walk, a mall with restaurants, an Anglican church. I watched her finger draw a circle over the glass, tracing and retracing as though to reassure me with the smallness of its scope.