He went over one more time what he had composed inside his head when he was tossing in the middle of the South China Sea, in the tongkang, the barge which had brought him to this part of the world.
When I was thirteen years of age, my father, Wong Tin Keng, the village physician, was imprisoned and tortured upon the orders of a corrupt magistrate. This vile slave of the Manchu devils accused my father of being a member of the Heaven and Earth League, a noble society founded by the loyal sons of the Chinese earth to overthrow the Qing dynasty and restore the glory of the Ming throne. Because my father was a loyal son of the Chinese earth, he was tortured to death. Soldiers torched our family home. I was the only one who escaped death.
Then he shut his weary eyes against the splinters of sunlight bouncing off the waters of the Bandong River. Once again he heard his mother yelling, “Run! Tuck Heng, run!” She pushed him out the door. “Aiyee!” A fiery beam crashed down upon her. Instantly she was engulfed in flames.
Screams and the odour of burning flesh had pursued him for the next two years, turning his sleep into nightmares. Manchu devils had hounded him by day, and Memory Ghosts had devoured him by night. He had to watch his mother, brothers and sisters burn to death, night after night. Rough hands had stifled the screams that rose from his throat—hands of his parents’ friends and relatives. If they had been caught shielding him, these brave souls and their entire families would have been killed. “Pull out the weeds, destroy their roots!” That was the edict issued by the Qing emperor for those who dared to oppose the Son of Heaven. To avoid the destruction of their families, many Chinese scholars had had to serve the Manchu invaders, his father had told him. “But not your great-greatgrandfather. He left the capital and returned to our village, and we, his descendants, became doctors instead of scholars.” This knowledge had lodged like a gold nugget in his heart ever since. Even as he had scuttled like a gutter rat, hiding in dark dank holes while making his way to the coast. After the fire, his sole duty to his parents was to stay alive, and this had sustained him and given him the tenacity to endure squalor, hunger and danger.
His dark eyes searched the Bandong River now for the silent lords—the harbingers of death. A large black log was floating perilously close to their sampan. Chan Ah Fook had warned him to look out for those evil beady eyes.
“It’s the eyes; they’re the only signs which give them away,” he had whispered. “If not for their eyes, ah, you won’t know they’re crocodiles! And only a Malay boatman can bring us up the river safely. They’ve got special prayers and charms. But remember, once we’re on the river, don’t ever say the word ‘crocodile’. You’ll offend the beast. This land is full of jinns and spirits. Hill, rock, valley and river—all have guardian spirits. Newcomers have to be careful not to offend them. Understand or not?”
And he had nodded as he listened to the old coolie in silence.
Their lone sampan inched its way up the river, pushing against the current. The boatman’s oar sliced through the muddy waters in stroke after stroke, his eyes on the riverbank, ever watchful for the slightest movement in the thick foliage which fringed the river. The jungle guarded the water’s edge. For miles there was nothing but an impenetrable wall of green, broken occasionally by a few brown huts built on stilts. Tuck Heng wiped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his coolie tunic. The heat was oppressive. The silence on the river was beginning to weigh heavily upon him. River, sky and jungle for mile after mile. River, sky and jungle. He had come to the land of foreign devils.
White-skinned and brown-skinned devils had crowded the pier where Chan Ah Fook had met him. What a babble of tongues and noise then! And now this unbearable silence, as though they were in a cavern never before traversed by man. He muttered a prayer. Hidden eyes were watching them as he untied his queue, mopped his brow and rewound the length of hair round his head. Clutching his cloth bundle, he pressed it hard against his chest. His thin hard face looked older than his fifteen years. His brows were creased in a dark frown against the shafts of light bouncing off the river. The afternoon sun hung in the sky. Implacable like a god.
He fixed his eyes on the back of the Malay boatman. By the power of my ancestors, Malay devil, row faster, faster, he kept thinking and wished that the acute pain in his chest would stop. Let him live through whatever ordeal Fate had in store for him in this land of the brown-skinned devils. He pressed his cloth bundle against his chest. Harder, harder. He would cut off an arm or a leg if that could ease his pain. Curse this oppressive silence! Curse the Manchu dogs! The bastards! May they die without a place to lay their bones! Without descendants to mourn them!
“Psst!” Chan Ah Fook’s weather-beaten face came up close to his ear, his square jaw jutting out as he strained to keep his voice low.
“Throw this red packet into the water. Sweeten the guardians’ mouths with sugar. Pay your respects and tell them you’re new.”
Tuck Heng flung the red packet into the river and watched it sink into the murky depths. A sudden rustle of leaves. He started, his eyes searched the shadows. A monkey screeched. Then a flock of birds rose from the trees. The air was cool at this stretch of the river which was shaded by the jungle trees. The sun had dipped behind the dense wall of green by now. An uneasy silence settled upon the river with the onset of the tropical twilight.
“Watch out!” Ah Fook hissed. “Hakka dogs might set a trap for us here!”
His shoulders stiffened at this hint of danger. His nose sniffed the air like a dog on the alert. When a bright blue kingfisher dived into the water, his hand reached for the knife in his belt. But he relaxed when he saw that it was only a bird.
“Quick, quick!” Ah Fook hissed at the boatman in a tongue which sounded like gibberish.
But the boatman understood Ah Fook’s heavily accented Malay, and the sampan moved faster upriver.
“Nearly there. Keep your eyes on the riverbank.” Ah Fook switched to the familiar Cantonese dialect of their native Sum Hor and then, back to Malay, “Stop here!”
“You speak very well, Uncle.”
“In these parts you must speak the Malay tongue. Don’t fear shame. Open your mouth more. Soon you’ll be speaking like me.”
Their sampan slid to a halt.
Night had fallen by this time, and the riverbank was a mass of shadows. Tuck Heng thanked his gods and ancestors for his safe arrival. Clutching his cloth bundle, he stood up eagerly and jumped off the sampan. Down he sank, knee-deep into the soft mud. Fool! He cursed his own stupidity. He clambered up the riverbank. Slipped. And climbed again.
“Shit up to your knees. Shit and mud. Symbols of wealth.”
“Shut your mouth!”
“Curb your tongue! Wait for Uncle here. I will lead the way. Show you where the dungholes are.”
The boatman’s laugh and Ah Fook’s words stung him. He loathed mistakes. They were signs of weakness. How could he have been such a fool as to mess up his first step on the new land! And he had fallen upon it. Bowed before it. A good omen?
“Humbled by the guardian spirit of this place, that’s what! Be patient, young dog. Those who are too hasty, like your father, get killed. Follow me. I know this place like the back of my hand.”
Chastened, he followed Ah Fook down the path to the settlement. The moon had risen, and he could make out the dark shapes of the huts and the patches of yellow light beyond the bushes. There were many questions inside his head as they plunged into the wilderness. Before he could ask them, the night was shattered.
“You’re in luck, young dog! They’re going to drown the bitch tonight! Come!”
Chan Ah Fook raced ahead. The gongs grew louder. When they reached the village square, it was swarming with hundreds of miners and a sprinkling of women. Everyone had gathered in front of a temple, and the air was thick with Cantonese curses and obscenities.
“Drown the bitch!”
“Let the whore die!”
The men were pushing and jostling to get to the centre of the square. A miner swung his lantern above the heads of the crowd. “Throw her into the river!” he yelled.
“Not so fast!”
“The bitch must die a slow and painful death!” the men on the other side of the square roared.
“Whip her! Whip her!” the crowd chanted.
He shoved and elbowed his way to the front. Kneeling before the temple, hands tied behind her, the object of the crowd’s wrath was splattered with mud and dung, and bleeding from several lacerations on her face and arms. She had been whipped, and the lashes had cut deep into her flesh. A purple gash on her temple had left a trail of blood on one side of her face. Miners, bare to the waist and sweating like workhorses, were pelting her with lumps of dung.
“Slut! Whore!”
But the woman showed no sign that she had heard. Her eyes were glazed and fixed on a point above the heads of the mob. Her impassive face was oblivious of her tormentors. A miner went forward and gave her a violent kick. She fell onto her side. No sound escaped her lips. She lay where she had fallen, an inert figure that drove the men and the few women in the crowd into a frenzy. More lumps of pig’s dung flew through the air. One of them hit her in the eye.
“Ancestors, open your eyes! See the shame she has brought upon our village! We women of Sum Hor have a good name! But this she-fox has soiled it! Let me dig out her eyes! Her heart!”
A big-boned woman rushed forward and seized the bound victim by the throat. If the men had not pulled her away, she would have strangled her.
“Good, Ah Lai’s mother! Kill her with your own hands! Your no-good daughter-in-law!”
“She’s no daughter-in-law of mine! I curse the day she crossed my threshold!”
“Didn’t you buy her for your idiot boy? Didn’t you?”
“I was blind at the time! By the gods, I swear I was blind!” the big-boned woman shrieked, her eyes blazing with rage.
Throughout this exchange, the victim maintained a stoic expression. Is it strength or indifference? he wondered. He had never witnessed the punishment of an adulteress before, although he had heard stories of how such women were drowned in rivers and lakes back home in Sum Hor. He peered at the woman as he would a trapped rat. Even a rat would shriek when tortured, but she neither cringed nor whimpered. Her silence incensed the mob.
“Whip the bitch! Whip the lust out of her!”
The women started to flail her with bamboo poles. The louder their men urged, the harder the women hit. It was as if they had to prove their own fidelity to moral law.
“Kill her!” the men ordered.
“Stop! By our ancestral laws, she must die by drowning!”
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“Tai-kor Wong Fatt Choy, Lodge Master of the White Cranes in Bandong. The man you must obey.” Chan Ah Fook had emerged suddenly at his elbow. “I will bring you to him when this trouble is over.”
Tuck Heng studied the broad unsmiling face of the thick stocky man. Big Brother Wong had a high forehead. His queue hung down his back like an emblem of his authority, unlike the coolies who had wound theirs round their heads.
“Brothers! We, the White Cranes of Bandong, are faithful to the laws of our clan and village—laws laid down by our forefathers in Sum Hor, laws obeyed by hundreds of generations. An adulteress shall die by drowning in a pig basket!”
His foghorn Cantonese voice rose above the cacophony, the voice of ancestral authority and continuity in the new land. The miners, uprooted from home and hearth, clung to that voice and obeyed it.
“Drown her in a pig basket!”
“Let me scratch out her eyes first!” Ah Lai’s mother lunged forward.
But the men yanked her away. One of them brought out a large cylindrical rattan basket used for ferrying pigs. Two miners held the basket firmly, while two others thrust the bound woman into it. The mob jeered and pelted her with stones. The pig basket offered her scant protection since there were large gaps through which the men could see her.
“Big Dog! Big Tree! Take her down to the river!” Tai-kor Wong ordered.
Two burly miners, heavier and taller than most of the men, stepped forward. Using thick twine, they secured the pig basket to a bamboo pole and hoisted the pole onto their broad shoulders, the basket swinging between them.
“To the river!” Tai-kor Wong barked.
“Drown her! Drown her!” the mob started to chant.
There was a carnival air about the procession. Some men carried paper lanterns, some were beating gongs and tin pans, and the rest were cursing and swearing at the top of their voices.
“The sow slept with a Hakka dog!”
“Throw her into the river! No burial for her! Let her be a nameless ghost!”
No fate is worse than this, he thought. Dead and clanless. What could be worse?
Several miners poked and jabbed the woman in the basket with the sharp ends of their bamboo poles, hooting with wicked glee as she writhed in pain. The basket swung wildly between the carriers.
“Take this! Stick it into her!” A miner handed him a bamboo stick.
“Do it, young dog!”
“Give her a hard one!” Ah Fook’s voice ripped the air, yelling with the rest of them. A devilish fever had swept through him.
The woman in the basket let out a piercing squeal like a pig being slaughtered.
“Good, good!”
They whooped and hooted like fiends from hell. A grizzled old miner thrust his hand into the basket and ripped off a piece of the woman’s clothing. He flung it into the air, and his mates roared and guffawed. They surged towards the pig basket. Eager calloused hands, starved for the touch of a woman’s breast, thrust through the gaps in the rattan. They squeezed and pinched and groped. The basket swung wildly. Shrieks pierced the night’s foul air. They’d broken her silence! The mob hit their gongs and tin pans in reckless glee, mad malice glittering in their eyes.
The men plunged into the river with their victim. More men waded in. They beat the water with bamboo poles to keep the crocodiles at bay. Those on shore kept banging on their gongs and tin pans, calling on their ancestral gods and spirits to witness their righteous punishment of the adulteress.
As the pig basket was dropped into the river, a wild cheer rose from those on the riverbank. The gongs clamoured and clanged. Above the din, he heard a thin shrill cry. It sliced through his heart like a blade, and bleeding, he staggered back to shore, pushing his way through the mob.