The boy was sitting at the kitchen table, chewing a pencil, staring at a sheet of figures. Yung had come through to set the kettle on the stove. ‘Wai-wai,’ he said.
His brother’s son looked up at him longingly, dreaming of footballs and slingshots and climbing trees like gweilo children, not gluing paper bags or stacking fruit or sitting at the table doing homework.
Yung smiled. ‘Here, I’ll show you a trick.’ He flourished his hands in the way of travelling tumblers and magicians, in the way he remembered of singers and performers at a market.
‘Hold your hands like this.’ He held his hands out alongside his nephew’s, his long fingers extended.
‘One times nine,’ he said, bending the smallest finger of his left hand down. ‘You see, bend the first finger and the answer is the number of fingers to the right. How many? That’s nine fingers to the right, so one times nine is nine.
‘Now, two times nine. Bend the second finger from the left. You have one finger to the left; this is the number of tens. And you have eight fingers to the right; this is the number of ones. That’s eighteen. So, two times nine is eighteen.
‘Three times nine. Bend the third finger and what do you have? Two fingers to the left and seven to the right. Yes, that’s twenty-seven. So, three times nine is twenty-seven.
‘Let me see you do four times nine. Yes. Three tens and six ones. Thirty-six. Keep going. Do this right up to ten times nine.
‘No, you can’t do this with the three times table.’ He laughed. He looked at the boy’s homework and remembered how young he was. ‘You can’t do this with any of the other times tables. That would make it too easy, wouldn’t it? And, of course, you can only do it up to ten.’
The kettle whistled on the stove. Yung opened the padded wicker basket on the bench, took out the porcelain teapot and poured in boiling water. ‘Nine is an important number,’ he said. ‘It means eternity. Long life. Like the long noodles we eat at New Year.’
He poured five cups of tea, gave one to Wai-wai. ‘Drink tea,’ he said. ‘It will clear your mind. Help you think.’
The boy had his father’s strong, wide face but something of his mother’s intense, sad eyes. Yung patted him on the head. ‘As you grow up you will learn the nine considerations,’ he said. ‘How to be a good man. How to live a good, long life.’
He took a cup of tea to his brother, who was taking the trimmings out for the pig man from Lower Hutt. Shun Goh motioned to leave it inside.
He took a cup to Mei-lin, who was sewing a patch over the knee of Wai-wai’s trousers. He held the tea out to her with two hands.
She looked up at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said as she received the cup with both hands, and he saw the trace of a tear in her eyes.
He took his own cup into the shop, then a box of oranges. He pulled the fruit from their tissue, placing the soft paper into a bag to be used in the outhouse, then, two in each hand, he stacked the oranges row by glowing row on the wooden shelf. He could keep bringing in boxes, keep stacking them and stacking them till they spilled over and tumbled beyond the confines of wood and linoleum and glass – nine times ten, nine times twenty, nine times thirty – hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of glowing orbs burning in his liver . . . he could live and breathe and die forever beyond his ten fingers, beyond the colour of his skin, his small imagination . . .
He looked at the stack of oranges, their round dimpled skin, each so alike in their fieriness and yet, upon examination, so individual. He looked at the empty box and realised it was the simple things that counted – a single cup of tea held with both hands.
He tried to picture his own son, whom everyone said had grown in his image. What would he say to him? How would they speak?
He saw him pouring tea, praying before a shrine to his mother. He saw him kowtowing before her photograph, a bowl of oranges or mandarins, the white smoke of incense wrinkling the air.