A Chinese Affair Read online




  A Chinese Affair

  A Chinese Affair

  ISABELLE LI

  To Michael

  First published in Australia by

  Margaret River Press in 2016

  PO Box 47

  Witchcliffe WA 6286

  www.margaretriverpress.com

  email: [email protected]

  Copyright © Isabelle Li 2016

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry data is available from the National Library of Australia

  ISBN 978-0-9943167-6-9

  Cover and text design by Anne-Marie Reeves

  Edited by Amanda Curtin

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Published by Margaret River Press

  The paper in this book is FSC certified. FSC promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.

  CONTENTS

  1 A FISHBONE IN THE THROAT

  A Chinese Affair

  Mooncake and Crab

  Shower of Gold

  A Fishbone in the Throat

  2 AS GREEN AS BLUE

  As Green as Blue

  Fountain of Gratitude

  Blue Lotus

  The Floating Fragrance

  3 PEBBLES AND FLOWERS

  Pebbles and Flowers

  By the Riverbank

  Amnesia

  Further South

  4 TWO TONGUES

  Lyrebird

  Narrative of Grief

  Go Troppo

  Two Tongues

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  1

  A Fishbone in the Throat

  A Chinese Affair

  I dream of my mother again. She is sitting in front of the sewing machine, crying.

  I press on the wooden door and it opens quietly. My father tells me to come in. He is lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, where cobwebs dangle at the corners. He murmurs, but his voice is loud, echoed by the whitewashed walls. It is a winter morning before dawn. The fluorescent light tube, blackened at both ends, casts white light on his dark skin.

  My mother wears a thick cotton vest. She hunches over, a piece of cloth in one hand, rolling the sewing wheel with the other. Tears are trickling down her plump face, her nose red. She grimaces in silence. I cross the room and open my arms to hold her.

  I am woken by a stabbing pain in my heart, hands clutching my chest, sweating.

  My husband is in his third stage of snoring. The first stage is when he has just fallen asleep. He snores suddenly, waking himself up. He then turns on his side, starting the second stage, soft and varied. In this third stage, when he is deeply asleep, the sounds are loud but even.

  I get up and steady myself, feeling the soft hair of the carpet between my toes. I have become used to this—waking in the middle of the night, as sleepy and as alert as a snoozing owl.

  The hall is lit by the moonlight through the ceiling window. What is the temperature of moonlight? I tighten my dressing-gown.

  On one side of the living area are the Mongolian chest in dark green and the two Ming dynasty chairs in burgundy. Above the artificial white roses and between the two cast-iron candelabras, my husband’s deceased wife is smiling at me. She is surrounded by other family photos, her eyes following my movements. I sit down on one of the antique chairs, feeling dizzy.

  I told my mother I live in a house next to the beach.

  On sunny days I open the windows and the white curtains blow in and out, depending on the direction of the wind. I sometimes put on a straw hat and a pair of sunglasses to take a walk among the beachgoers. I wear various shades of grey and blend into the surroundings, become two-dimensional, a moving shadow, walking under the sun like a grey cat crawling under the moon. On rainy days, I close all the windows and peep up at the yellowish-grey sky and over to the greenish-grey ocean. Raindrops tap urgently on the roof like visitors keen to come in. I told my mother I live in a large house in an affluent area.

  I told her I am an interpreter. When I was young, she hoped I would one day live overseas and work for the United Nations. I told her that, as an interpreter, I attend international meetings, where people from different countries negotiate important matters. My clients are businesses, educational institutions and government agencies. I learn the jargon for macroeconomics, banking, insurance, fashion, medicine and its various specialities like cochlear implants and IVF. I make up Chinese names for expatriates going to China, and their wives and children, using beautiful Chinese characters, and explain the meanings to them, quoting Chinese poetry.

  At night, I may be called upon to interpret for counselling hotlines, when young mothers speak about losing their children to illnesses, middle-aged wives speak about losing their husbands to younger women in China, and older women speak about their loneliness from having no-one. The counsellors sound as tired as I am, but they diligently ask the Chinese-speaking callers open-ended questions, reflect back the situations by paraphrasing, and name the callers’ feelings. I hear ‘What should I do? I cannot see a solution,’ and I say ‘What should I do? I cannot see a solution.’ I hear ‘Are you feeling trapped?’, and I say ‘Are you feeling trapped?’ I speak for both parties as if I am having an internal dialogue to console myself, being simultaneously the suffering child and the hand that’s combing through her hair.

  I told my mother I was the interpreter at an international conference on synaesthesia, a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled. So I was not playing games when I read out the colours of people’s surnames. I met a Chinese artist there who painted lotus flowers in crystal blue. In another painting, he painted raindrops in yellow and titled it Shower of Gold. He painted me, too.

  I met my husband when I was interpreting at a writers’ festival for a Chinese poet in exile. The poet’s speech was disjointed, but I tried my best to make sense of it. At the request of an earnest audience, he read a poem from his latest volume. People applauded, not so much for his poetry, because he read it in Chinese, but for his long hair and his animated voice. My husband came to talk to me afterwards.

  I was in my Chinese costume, Prussian blue with gold and silver bamboo leaves. There seems to be some decorative value in a Chinese costume, which makes me feel like a porcelain vase, exquisite and brittle, to be treated with care, by others and by myself. So that day I walked with my chin high and my chest out.

  My husband used to be a carpenter, known for his impeccable craftsmanship. After his former wife passed away, he studied a real estate course and worked in the property industry. When he retired, he learned to paint and started going to art galleries and writers’ festivals.

  He has the look of a well-maintained and respectable gentleman. His jaw, once square, has lost its sharp edges. Like the furniture he made decades ago, he now looks subdued and reliable.

  His first wife died twenty years ago. She has large eyes, a prominent nose and a sensitive chin, and smiles contently in every photograph. Her last photo was taken on her forty-fifth birthday. She smiles from behind the elaborate square cake and the orange glow of the birthday candles, oblivious to the accident about to happen a few days later.

  My husband had been progressively reducing the number of her photographs in the house, until I noticed it and asked him not to. Instead I reframed some of them. My favourite is in an oval-shaped ivory frame displayed in a corner amid fine china. Sh
e wears a Chinese top and looks straight out of a 1920s movie. I also like a photo of her mother and her six aunts sitting on a fence at their family farm. Seven young women with frizzy hair, squinting under the sun, relaxed and cheerful, their floral skirts billowing in the wind. I spend a lot of time walking around the house, feeling accompanied and blessed by the dead, safely buried in someone else’s family history.

  My husband’s eldest son is a contractor for telecommunications projects. The second son is an accountant for a large chain of funeral companies. My husband’s daughter is a nurse in a mental health hospital. She is the only one younger than me.

  They are generally kind. Just like their father, they share a collective comical affection for me. My comments are exotic, amusing, controversial and not to be taken seriously. Once I told them an old neighbour of mine could read characters written inside folded paper. They all laughed. It has since become a standing joke.

  I can afford to be controversial. I can blink my almond-shaped eyes and make provocative statements to people’s faces. I once said over a family dinner, ‘The world is made of strings of energy. A brick and I are made of the same basic elements. The strings vibrate differently to form different particles.’ My husband looked at me, shook his head and sighed. He did not say anything for the rest of the evening, but he made me masala chai.

  The next day, after coming back from church, he said he was going to save a space for me in heaven. I looked up from my book. ‘How do you know we are not in heaven already? Every realm has the same problem of overpopulation.’ We were sitting in the garden under a weeping maple. Sunlight was filtering through the new leaves. My husband shuffled his newspaper but he did not turn the page for a long time.

  My husband likes to think of me as coming from the middle of nowhere. He often mixes up my hometown with Inner Mongolia, where he imagines I rode a camel to school.

  I go back to China less often now. After each trip, I would be depressed for several weeks. I would read Chinese books, browse Chinese websites, listen to Chinese rock music and talk to my friends in China on Skype. My husband once asked why I did not listen to the equivalent rock music in English. I said rock is about anger and there is nothing to be angry about in his society. When probed further, I said I could not explain because it is a Chinese affair. He was satisfied with my response; it confirmed me as his inscrutable oriental muse.

  Going out is not without challenges. We walk on the street, and people look at us, older men with envy, older women with contempt, Chinese women with curiosity, and Chinese men with disgust. Those who are English speakers talk to me in simple sentences, while the Chinese speakers pretend to whisper, knowing that I can hear and I understand. The strangest is when we see other mixed couples, mostly older white men with younger Chinese women, and we all regard each other critically as if we are looking at ourselves in the mirror.

  My husband took me on holiday once before we were married. When we came back to his house it had been repainted in crimson. A local landmark, it used to be called the White House. It is now called the Red House. I accepted his proposal for marriage and the fact that he had had the snip done years ago. I told my mother I am married to an older man, just like Jane Eyre to Rochester, and we do not plan to have children.

  I tell my mother many things, but I do not tell her everything. I do not tell her that I dream of her and that the dreams are my worst fears. I dream of her getting sick, being hurt, losing her way, or falling. Even her smiles make me worry.

  My mother is losing her memory. She hardly speaks, and when she does it will be questions about her children or remembrance of the distant past. She walks very slowly and has great difficulty climbing the stairs to their apartment. On winter afternoons she sits on a sofa in front of the television, looking like a chubby child wrapped up in too many layers of clothing. If asked, she says she is waiting for the weather forecast.

  I have not written to her lately. I have not told her that I am nearly three months pregnant.

  My mother once told me she was very hungry when she was pregnant with me. The only treat she had was three hard-boiled eggs a day. She could not endure the intervals between peeling and eating an egg, so she always peeled them first and then ate them all at once. She said she longed for fried rice during those days.

  I have been hungry too, sometimes feeling a surge of hunger in the middle of a meal, and I have to start afresh. I often feel like a wolf wandering in the winter forest, tormented and isolated by my hunger. I feel like smashing the table when food is late and kissing the waiter or waitress when my food is carried down the aisle. When other people’s food arrives ahead of mine, I regret not having ordered those dishes myself. During the day, I give up my usual Vietnamese roll or sushi and go straight to chicken kebab. At home, my husband is delighted to see his hearty stew suddenly in demand. I pity the North Koreans—no-one should suffer from hunger like that.

  Sometimes I feel I am being eaten from the inside. Other times I feel like a ripe fruit, about to burst into something pulpy.

  My nose seems sharper than usual. I walk by men on the street, and I account in my mind: beer, cigarette, curry, onion, perspiration. Natural smells are still more tolerable than some deodorants that smell like blunt knives, and some perfumes that hit me like broken glass.

  I search the internet for articles and images. I know which day the egg was fertilised. It should have turned into a foetus this week, with its sex apparent. I try to imagine a world where sound is muted, where blood flow is a spring creek, heartbeat is distant thunder, a rub on the tummy autumn branches swaying in the wind.

  I find myself talking to her, apologising for any stress I have put on her. I have become careful. As the bearer of a secret, I avoid treading on manholes or walking under eaves, I wait patiently for the lights to turn green at pedestrian crossings, and I move away discreetly from people who sneeze or cough. At home I keep away from the microwave oven when heating up soy milk, and I wash my hands obsessively.

  I have put on weight, particularly around my midsection. I have outgrown my pants, and, since the weather is warm, I wear skirts and dresses. Loose long tops with ruffles in front are the most deceiving. My body temperature is high, my hands warm and my forehead feverish. I feel like a mini steamboat. My husband says the extra weight I have put on suits me.

  My husband is an experienced gardener, and the only task I can help with is weeding. He mows the lawn, trims the rosemary hedge, applies fertiliser to the gardenia and cuts back the roses, while I squat, picking weeds from the garden beds or between the pavers and the gravel.

  Every Saturday morning, when we are working in the garden, I wait to find the perfect moment. This is the time when I most want to tell, to confess, to unburden and expose. The calming new green, the fragrance of the spring flowers, and the primitive labour make me feel innocent. Sometimes I feel so much anticipation that I almost cannot breathe. I have prepared a whole speech, but still I wait behind the curtain for the lights to dim and the spotlight to turn on. The audience will stop their polite conversations and turn their heads to the stage. I will go up then, ready to be executed.

  I approached my husband once while he was thinning the citrus trees. He was in his shorts and T-shirt, his knees and elbows dry, and he was panting from manoeuvring the heavy-duty shears. I asked him to follow me and sit in front of the lattice screen with star jasmines. The flowers had not opened but the perfume was already leaking from the pink buds. I was in a green floral dress, a pair of sandals, my feet crossed at the ankles, my hands held together on my lap. I focused my eyes on the pavement, where a group of ants were carrying a dead bee. Just as I was about to start, he took my hand and held it between his palms. He said he had not been able to squat for a long time, and luckily I could, and it was very nice of me to do the weeding. Maybe we could use a gardener so we did not have to do everything ourselves. Then we would have more time to smell the roses.

  The night air is damp and heavy, the moon is hiding behi
nd a cloud. The wind chime makes a timid sound, as if it too is afraid of breaking the silence.

  I open the bedroom door as loudly as I can and switch on the light.

  My husband raises his upper body on one elbow and blinks in the sudden brightness. What is left of his hair is sticking up. His face is more wrinkled than usual, red from pressing on the pillow.

  ‘I have something to tell you.’

  ‘Come back to bed. You’ll catch a cold. And turn off that light.’

  I turn off the light and lie down. He reaches out his arm under my neck and holds me from behind.

  ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow,’ he says, his other hand on my belly.

  Mooncake and Crab

  The market is at its bustling peak on a spring day. Crystal and Hua plough through the crowd. They walk past a potato stall, where a big man with a square head is showing off his operatic voice: ‘Two dollars! Two dollars! Two dollars a bag …’ Then a fruit stall packed with radiant grapefruits and lemons in boxes. Then a vegetable stall with asparagus, beetroot, broccoli, leeks, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, mushrooms and spinach. Hua asks for the names of the fruits and vegetables in English and repeats after her. Her teaching is interspersed with commentary: ‘A grapefruit tastes like a bitter orange, and peels like a soft pomelo.’ ‘Yes, this is how small the Western zucchini is.’

  ‘How often do you come here?’ Hua asks.

  ‘Once every few months, maybe.’ Crystal is in her thirties, tall and slender, wearing a navy blue dress. Her long hair covers part of her pale face, dark circles under her studious eyes.

  ‘Everything is fresh here, and cheaper than the supermarket.’ Hua is in his seventies, stocky, energetic. His hairline has receded, leaving a broad forehead in full view, shining in the heat. His hair, which is kept at a considerable length, has turned completely silver.

  They stop at another vegetable stall. Hua rests the Woolworths shopping bag on the edge of the wooden tray. The bag already contains Chinese cabbages, shallots, dried chilli, coriander, bean curd, minced pork, and bottles of soy sauce, cooking wine and vinegar. He picks up a piece of ginger, smells it, checks all the tips, and hands it to the tiny Chinese woman behind the counter. His black nylon sweater is too thick for the season, with two wet patches forming at the armpits.