Rowena Fan
Breathing is, perhaps, both one of the hardest and one of the easiest things a living creature has to do. Take the three generations of Woo women. Soon-to-be-grandmother Shen Woo was secretly tired of breathing. Soon-to-be-mother Ling Woo was breathing short, sharp, malicious breaths in order to contain the hideous pain inflicted on her lower body. Ella Woo-Nolan was about to take her first independent breath, stuck somewhere between the perineum and the edge of the universe. The comfort of the womb was taken away from her as she tore her mother in three places and glided into existence.
Welcome, little one.
The time was 6.43 a.m. Ella wore a suit of scaly skin and congealed blood, with a thick tuft of straight, black, Asian hair. A week later, it would be shaved off to prevent it from falling out in clumps. An old Woo family myth.
The new grandmother inspected the baby’s genitals and sighed at the prospect of another female in the family. As a teenager she had been hit by a blind man’s stick, a symbol of bad luck, and now, two daughters later, this screaming hybrid Anglo-Chinese granddaughter confirmed the fate of the family.
A woman, of course, can attract prosperity. She could marry a doctor or an accountant, a businessman or a professor. That would give the family something to boast about! They would worship him like a god, feeding him the best food whenever he visited. They would be hoping that some of his status would dribble down the family line.
Outside, on that gloomy Friday morning, the rain poured down relentlessly on a quiet town somewhere in northern England. It was a difficult time to be born. Local people were afraid of the ‘others’: those who spoke in different tongues; those who ate oily food with heads still attached and scraped every crevice for edible flesh; those who lived to work and never had any concept of leisure time; those little people with unmistakable jet-black, glossy heads. It was the 1980s and things were supposed to be so much easier for the new generation. Those who were born on this soil were automatically given passports, but they weren’t really British.
Well, at least you will never know what it feels like to starve, little one.
At the family takeaway, the New Emperor, Man Woo, a roundish, bespectacled gentleman with smooth, dark skin, had been anticipating the phone call for hours. It arrived at 7.30 a.m. The terse voice of his wife confirmed that he had a granddaughter. He put down the phone and sighed at the prospect of another female, for women were the bane of his life.
Still, a life is a life. A life is a gift from Buddha. He plucked two incense sticks from a wooden vase and lit them on the steel hob. Standing squarely in front of his ancestors’ shrines, he allowed the pungent, sweet jasmine scent to fill the small, cold back room. In his mind, he thanked Buddha for the girl’s safe arrival. He would make congee, full of pork and thousand-year-old eggs, to help the little one grow big and strong. He would go to the chemist’s the next morning to buy cod liver oil and give her small quantities so she would avoid arthritis in her old age. Was she pretty? Would she grow up to have soft, pale skin, unlike her grandfather? Dark skin was a sign of the uneducated.
His younger daughter, Mei, had woken and was now stumbling down the stairs after sleeping off the graveyard shift. Unlike her tall, lanky sister, Mei was round and chubby-faced, with thick ankles and wiry but heavy black hair. Her nose was flat and full, her eyes small and beady. She stood respectfully, watching her father’s ritual and imagining the cramped living space being overrun by a child.
Mei was very similar to her father: calm and determined, simple and respectful of others. Her sister, Ling, was like her mother: hot-headed and passionate, stubborn and selfish. It was Mei who had insisted that the baby’s life should be spared, despite the stigma that would be attached to a young, unmarried Chinese mother. It was she who would take her father to the hospital every week to use the dialysis machine for his failing kidneys. It was she who began to notice how her mother had started to overlook the simplest things, frequently forgetting to lock the doors and shut the till. Her worrying was endless. Someone had to worry. Someone had to take on the responsibility.
Who would the new baby take after, her grandmother or her grandfather? Her mother or her aunt?
The incense wafted under Man Woo’s nose for a few moments, before they remembered the job at hand: they had huge sacks of potatoes to peel and cut into chips.
As time would have it, Ella grew quickly and steadily, with little margin for error. Fuelled by her grandfather’s pork congee, by the age of twenty-four she towered over most of her family. She had her grandfather’s sturdy stance and smooth, light-yellow skin. Everything else she took from her mother: she was lithe and had large, cartoonish light-brown eyes and permanently pursed, pink lips. Her long, dark hair was naturally straight with a slight kink towards the ends and a delicate sun-induced musky-brown highlight on her fringe.
She was the perfect Anglo-Chinese hybrid. It was as if the harsh, jet-black features of the traditional Chinese person had been dipped into condensed milk, making her face creamy brownish yellow, with a sunny beam. People would stare at her, unsure what amalgam she was.
Since her Irish father had left before she was born, she grew up with all things Chinese. Boys would try to talk to her at secondary school, but her Oriental conscience would make her refrain from any type of shameful activity. She would run back to the takeaway, ignoring as many of her peers as possible (head down, large strides) and curl up to watch Neighbours with a bowl of chicken feet dipped in soy. She remembered, too, how her grandmother had insisted she learn to play the piano because the Wongs’ son had achieved his grade 8 certificate by the time he was fourteen. In return, she’d insisted on a new Sylvanian family toy every Saturday morning, so one of the adults would wake especially early and go with her to the largest toy store in Oldham to buy the figure of her choice. The other children were intensely jealous of her belongings. Her things always went missing at school. It was very true that she found it difficult to make friends.
In Ella’s year at high school there were three Chinese girls. They sat together on the third wooden bench down from the school gates at lunchtime, with their glassy eyes and empty icy stares. The three trolls. Two of them looked almost identical, with magnified, bespectacled eyes and stringy long black hair. The third girl was tall, at least five foot ten, with hairy, twig-like legs. She had tiny, cat-shaped eyes, with abnormally bad skin for a girl who had been fed good homemade soup by her parents. They were an insular club, doing everything together, refusing to participate in games or answer questions at school. Whenever Ella passed, they would lean closer and whisper offensively, pointing, rolling their eyes and giggling, giggling, with vicious pace and malice.
Ling noticed Ella’s lack of suitable friends. ‘I see Chinese girl at your school. Be friend! Be nice! You never schmile!’
Ella considered this. It’s not that she didn’t want to smile. Internally, she smiled fifteen to thirty times a day, at the little things other people didn’t notice. She smiled when an old lady managed to hold up the traffic, crossing the road with a devil-may-care swagger. She smiled when she saw happy couples who were unafraid of showing their affection, when being distant was an essential trait for an accomplished Chinese person. She enjoyed seeing people’s doodles, especially at school, when she had to sit next to the class bully. She would sneak glances to see what could be going on in that oversized, over-solid skull. Most people would draw squares, rectangles and cubes, or start hexagonal stars in an attempt to look skilled. The clever children, like herself, would cover the margins of their workbooks with circles, swirls and faces, and complex maps to buried treasure.
At the takeaway, where she spent every day of her life, she would sit on an uncomfortable woven chair in the corner as customers came in to be served. In her cheap reporter’s notebook, she would draw their faces (always a round circle for the face and a stick for the body), and then write a quick description of who they were, where they were going and finally what their big dark secret was. She could never bring herself to write down her own.
She smiles now at those type of memories. It was a time when she accepted her family’s values without question; when they were the core of everything; when relationships with the opposite sex were out of the question; when she could talk to white girls, but on no account act like any of them.
Her heart rate is beginning to climb. She is awaiting news. It’s a Tuesday morning and the family are out for lunch. She has feigned a stomach bug – each member of the household had offered to stay with her and force-feed her black tea, but she declined. It’s twelve now and realistically the postman should’ve come and gone – he probably has, but one can always hope. In a vain attempt to stop the butterflies in her stomach, she sits and counts the grains of leftover rice. One, two, three… it’s hard to count rice when it is stuck together in clumps. The sound of footsteps can be heard in the distance, then the soft thud of paper hitting a brown woven welcome mat. It’s here.
Ella walks as calmly as possible to her letter. She sits with it. She ponders all the possible outcomes. She doesn’t even care. She really doesn’t give a damn. She wants it to say yes. She wants it to say no. She doesn’t know what she wants. People here need her. She needs to leave. Putting aside her hesitation, she opens the letter in one firm rip. Her trained eyes scan the document for key words like yes, pleased, accept, confirm, congratulations.
They are there, embedded in the letter. An acceptance from one of the best news agencies in the world, located somewhere in Arab lands. She had applied for the post with no belief in her ability as a journalism graduate to land the role; she was far too shy and retiring. She had stared at her brown loafers during the interview, the ones her mother forced her to wear because they were close enough to black, and no, new shoes were not necessary. She had most definitely been the only Chinese girl waiting in the reception. And now this! The possibility of something new and the escape she had always dreamed of.
Ling was a child of the 1970s. Arriving at the age of twelve and barely able to speak English, never mind having had the chance to dance to disco music, she found it difficult to blend into the background. People were fascinated by her. A group of girls would inspect her every now and then, looking at her dark irises and glossy black hair. They felt superior, as boys always preferred blondes, no matter how ugly their faces were.
She had friends, girls who would talk to her when they wanted some free food. Two in particular, Susan Sommers and Nicola Jones, would offer to walk home with her. They would ask her what she thought of their country; if she liked Coronation Street; if she really used to eat dogs and if she had to have an arranged marriage. When they reached the family takeaway, they would ask if they could come in and, sure enough, Shen would give them a portion of greasy chips, topped with mucus-thick gravy and enough salt to induce a heart attack. Ten minutes later, the girls had to be somewhere else, and would often leave without even a simple, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Ling would imagine she was still in Hong Kong, surrounded by her friends and her pet chickens, basking in better weather. Her mother had dragged the entire clan to England, supposedly for a better future. ‘We don’t have to like this country, or people. Just work hard!’ Shen would often declare. ‘Study! Work! Study!’
It was difficult when the English kids spoke so quickly, with these thick accents – they didn’t talk like how she had heard in black and white films. Those men wore long black coats with top hats and carried long canes. They were honourable and gentlemanly; they tipped their hats as they greeted people, always speaking perfectly: ‘Hello, sir’, ‘Good morning, madam.’ Women were ladies, with unimaginable grace and style. When Ling walked along the street, even though she took the same route to school every day, the same people still stared at her, as if she was suffering from bad karma. There were no charming men with top hats, calling her madam or opening doors. People scuffled a lot, and she was taught to keep important things out of her pockets in case they got stolen. She was spat at a few times, if that counted. People were peculiar in England.
She wondered if it was her lack of understanding of the language that was affecting her relationship with the natives, so she tried, tried, and struggled to master it. There was something embedded in her, though: she couldn’t pronounce her t’s properly or her r’s. People would always smile, and take great pleasure in correcting her pronunciation. It was strange to her; here were people who couldn’t speak a word of Chinese, not one bit, yet they were laughing at the fact that she could speak, but not quite pronounce, their language.
On Saturdays, when she helped all day at the takeaway, Mark Staley, a fat, hairy-bellied, balding taxi driver who lived two doors away, who never cooked for himself at the weekends, would take great pleasure in echoing Ling’s ‘plawn clackers’. He probably couldn’t read, since he always ordered the same thing and by number, then asking for clarification. How incredible, thought Ling, that this man felt superior because he could pronounce words from a language he had been learning since birth. Surely it was the same as feeling superior because one knows how to breathe or to walk.
Ling hated the food she served to her customers, too. She could never understand why the young boys would spend their pocket money on a cup of gravy to drink. She hated the way they would buy a portion of chips, then throw the food at each other and occasionally the shop window. She thought it was so wasteful; her mother complained because she hated cleaning up.
As Ling continued to settle into England, working in the takeaway became as normal as washing her face. She saw the same kinds of people; occasionally, an interesting person would visit. There was a fat man, with a heavy Irish accent, shiny new twenty-pound notes in hand. He stank of cigarettes and beer, and was often unshaven with a slight cock eye. He also had four sons; three of them resembled their father, but the last boy, the youngest, had escaped the inauspicious gene pool and looked something like an Irish Richard Gere. And every Saturday he would come, with two of his friends, to buy chips and curry. He would look at Ling with his eerily transparent blue eyes and push a smile through his lips. Occasionally, he would touch her hand as she handed him the chips. If her father was watching, he would immediately start yelling obscenities at her, and she would recoil immediately and disappear through the beaded curtain. One day, walking home from school, he cornered her. He romanced her, bought her some food; he flattered her and convinced her that it was love. They consummated their relationship once, just once, but it was enough. He left for Ireland with no forwarding address.
Often, her father would sit his two daughters down in the small back room and pace from side to side, menacingly holding a garden bamboo in his thick hand. Then the lecture would begin: ‘Engrand… not like Asia. We… no like Engrish. No Engrish boy! They no good!’
It was something Ling would spend many years reiterating to Ella. She had learned the hard way that falling in love and giving in to temptation were only for the weak. From the moment she had had her daughter, she knew Ella would be her only child and she would never fall in love again. There was no need. She had Ella and she would spend her life moulding her into the ideal daughter. In her old age she would always be looked after – that is the benefit of producing a daughter. She is always her mother’s possession.
Ling’s father had always told her, in the style of a true armchair expert, that people have three events that shape their lives. The first was being born. The second was death. The third was something random, a decision, an action that would turn a mundane life into one worth living. She asked her father what his life-changing choice was and he replied, ‘Winning the horse on Sunday. New Emperor! 33 to 1! Lotsa money!’ Her mother would frown and concede that the most important event of her life was coming to England, leaving behind her wooden shack and all the people of her village. Ling’s memory of her early life had grown sketchy, despite only spending four years in England, but she did remember her grandmother’s browning, wrinkled old body, lying constantly in their bedroom. She would sit with her occasionally, fanning her face and talking to her, telling her about how the world was changing. Before they left Hong Kong, she remembers taking her to an old persons’ home. It was long, airless, with three shadowy windows that illuminated the dust on the beds. Old people lay rigid on the grimy sheets, mouths gaping, drawing silent breaths and staring at the sky. People moments from death.
Ling’s grandmother wasn’t dead, even though she may have appeared so. Her granddaughter held her hand and wished people would listen to her opinion, but children have no rights. Her mother said, with steely eyes, that they could not take an old, useless woman with them to England. It would be a hard enough journey. She looked at her mother and, without bodily contact, left. There were random times that Ling would catch her mother shedding tears, always quietly and well concealed. She had failed in her duty as a daughter and the money she sent for her upkeep was compensation for the guilt. She hoped her daughter would not fail her. Ling would later realize having Ella was her life-changing moment. She would spend her life grooming her investment to be a good daughter, better than her mother was to her grandmother, and better than she had been. Disciplined. Faultless.
Ella knew this. She had known from a young age that she was allowed to achieve as long as she stayed within the clutches of her elders. She was an only daughter and her position in the family was always to protect those who had sacrificed for her. Her family had given so much to provide her with a hopeful future, so to leave them would only prove her selfishness, wouldn’t it? She had her decision to make.
It’s the most incredible type of loneliness that a child of two cultures feels. This person has been told from all sides to fit into the society they live in, like a dark inkblot trying to blend into cream vellum notepaper. It gets smudged, smothered, in order to lessen its impact. This lessening of their spirit, their soul, comes from the people they were born into and the people in the world around them. There are ones who tell them to be as true to their ancestry as possible, that there is a limit to how much they can integrate with the new world. Never forget who you are! Never forget to feed your family! Around you people are doing things your inbuilt guilt radar refuses to allow you to test. You are a self-restricting machine.
Two weeks before Grandad had died, he had bought a song thrush for Ella as a substitute for the dog she always wanted. It was matted brown, with cream patches. It had a long but sharp tail, and a proud, rounded breast that was covered in soft black freckles. Its new home was an iron cage, with chipped blue paint and rusty entrance, its floor covered with last month’s Sing Tao Daily. Ella fed it bits of potato, cabbage and random leftovers before realizing birds ate grains and nuts. Occasionally, when she left the bird on her windowsill, it would tweet a few lines, high-pitched and delicate, while jerking its head side to side. She didn’t know what the bird could see outside her small window, apart from a large oak tree and the grey muddy skies, and wished sometimes she could talk to the bird. It could never obey like a dog would; it was a thoughtless, thankless creature, leaving others guessing its pursuit of personal happiness. The bird stared into the darkening sky and wondered what it would be like to be free – it wasn’t much of a world out there. But it was what he had as an aspiration.
When Ella was twelve she grew tired of watching the bird’s restless demeanour. It had stopped singing so often. It would eat, flutter a little, sleep and do nothing else. Ella looked at the icy December cold outside, for it had begun to get frosty. She looked at her bird. She wanted to grant it freedom, for this must be the only thing that people want above love. But outside it was cold and the other birds had migrated south and nothing could possibly survive in that weather. The truth was, as much as she wanted it to be happy, she couldn’t let go of her only pet.
It turned to spring, and Ella was thirteen. It was a warm, delightful afternoon and people were happy. People were smiling and interacting with each other. Even her grandparents were laughing. She thought then, with the beautiful orange sky, that perhaps it was time to let her bird go.
In her tiny bedroom, in the corner, her only window was gaping. Her mother had already been in, leaving her clean socks and knickers on the bed. She moved towards the blue metal cage to look at her pet, but noticed it was empty. It had gone. Ling appeared in the doorway. ‘I let it go. Poor thing.’
It flew. It flew far and high, into corners that other birds of its kind had never seen before. And when it was ready, it would return to its nest, for it was never that far away from its consciousness.