The Water Beetles Read online

  Next to the machine, sitting on a porcelain stool with his legs crossed, our father inclined his head to scan the emerging paper. A tray with his evening meal, untouched, stood on a folding table beside him. It always took me a moment to see him. The glass and metal of the ticker seemed to soak up and throw back most of the scant evening light, while our father, in the black padded jacket he always wore in the evenings, his face turned down towards the paper, was a mere shadow beside it.

  Five nights a week our father would stay up to scrutinize the ticker’s messages, and those nights he slept very little. Even when his cough was bad, he sat up drinking tea and sometimes dabbing his lips with a white handkerchief, which he then examined for blood. One night a few weeks earlier, I had watched him there through the keyhole. He was sitting cross-legged on the porcelain stool, hunched by the machine and coughing. He held a handkerchief dotted with little blood rubies between two fingers in his left hand, as though he were holding a cigarette, while with his right he nursed the paper that shuddered from the machine. He stared at each new scribble as it crossed his open hand. And then the paper strip, having lived a life measured by the width of his palm, fell to the floor like a dead snake. In the morning, the servants threw it into the fire.

  Chow was responsible for the machine and for replacing the paper every second day, making sure it was ready by the time of the evening when the New York exchange opened. Once each roll was down to a quarter or less, he replaced it and gave us the remnants. Leuk and I loved to run around the rooftop garden, unravelling them and trying to crack them like whips.

  Leuk wanted to see through the keyhole, but I told him I wasn’t done yet. My father looked as though he had been posed on his stool by an artist, and there was something eerie about even the smallest movement of his head or limbs. Leuk insisted and reached up to push my head away from the keyhole. I whispered at him to stop and pushed his hand away, and then he grabbed my collar and pulled me down onto the floor with a thump.

  Our mother also knew the importance of this hour. It was this kind of remote silence in my father that had made us rich. She heard us from the third floor, and in a second she was rushing down the stairs, one hand holding up her dress to keep it from swishing. Leuk and I scrambled to our feet. Our mother rushed over with a belt rolled up in her other hand, speaking in that angry whisper that frightened me.

  “What are you doing here?” She grabbed us both by the collars and pulled us away from the door. I felt the belt against my neck and the pin from the buckle scratched me just below the ear. She hurried us down the stairs, and when we were far enough from the study, she warned us never to disturb our father at this hour again and threatened to hit us with the belt.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have introduced my mother that way. I know I must have tried her patience, and she had a lot to deal with for many years. Later I came to realize that she must have often been lonely, even with Ah-Ming and Ah-Tseng to keep her company. Children may offer love, but they rarely offer companionship, especially boys. So I don’t mention the business with the belt because I resent it, it’s just one of those little things that I remember, a part of that world that has mostly vanished. She lived a life of great luxury back then, but she was still at heart a village girl with no education. Despite everything she had, she saw her main job as keeping our family in order and together. Years later, I think she was troubled by the belief that she had failed at this.

  Leuk and I retreated to the library, my mother’s warning ringing in my ears. We looked at the books I had kicked across the floor earlier and started cleaning them up out of boredom. I stacked a few of them into a squat tower and cast him a look, thinking he might resume his game of knocking it down. Instead, he stood at the window at the library’s far end, craning his neck to get a particular view. The library jutted out a little from the back of the house, so that if you looked through the window, you looked onto an enclosure at the back, bordered by Ventris Road. This was a small yard used mostly for rubbish, just off the kitchen door. The window my brother was staring through had a small ledge outside where we used to conceal toys.

  I squeezed my face next to Leuk’s. From this angle it seemed the back of the house was a separate building. Above the rubbish yard, through a window on the fourth floor, we could see my mother talking to Sheung. It wasn’t his current room, but part of a suite that formed an apartment set aside for him when he married, with the other half of the floor for Tang. The fifth floor, which was mostly empty, had been similarly marked out for Leuk and me.

  When I think of our old house, I recall a photo of our family taken in front of it when I was still a baby. I lost my only copy of the photo sometime in my thirties, and time has retouched the memory accordingly. I see my mother sitting in the centre, with me on her lap and all the other children behind her, and my father standing at the faded edge. Of course, we would never have been posed that way in the original. My father must have been seated in the centre, flanked by my mother and the oldest sons, with the younger boys seated at the front. When I left for university, I had the photo stored in a frame that I bought from a shop near our house, and while the frame survived the long journey overseas and was otherwise never moved much, it must have been a flimsy piece of work. It came apart one day when I picked it up while cleaning, and the photograph of my family, which landed in a bucket of soapy water, was ruined.

  In August, a month after my sixth birthday, I got out of bed early in the morning to go pee. As I walked down the hallway to the bathroom, I heard a commotion on the main floor, so I continued towards the staircase. I listened for a moment and started back towards the bathroom, and then I heard someone crying. I ran back to the top of the stairs and listened. I held my legs together and grasped myself with my left hand through the long cotton nightshirt I wore to bed.

  I went down one flight to the landing and crouched behind the railing. In the front hall five adult figures clustered near the door, each moving awkwardly as though uncertain whether to leave or stay. To the left of the door stood my father’s doctor and a British officer, in black and khaki respectively, each toying thoughtfully with the hat or cap he had removed. They stared at the floor while Chow, beside them, translated for my mother and Ah-Ming, who stood to the right. My mother shook and cupped a hand across her mouth, containing her sobs so masterfully that they were almost inaudible against the steady rhythm of Chow’s voice. I had never seen or heard an adult weep, and it was nothing like the full-cry wailing of a child. She choked back every sob, all her effort focused on the pressure of her hand. It was all binding and discretion, containment, the labour of self-consciousness. As Chow finished speaking, he gently touched my mother’s arm.

  I liked Chow. He came from a nearby fishing village and had been with us since he was fourteen. Between the fidgeting of the two men on his right and the sorrowing women on his left, he seemed to hold the unlikely gathering in balance, starkly ceremonial in his black jodhpurs and white shirt. I had caught the last few, strangely formal words in his translation. As he released my mother’s arm, the officer — who seemed relieved to be going — put the cap back on his head and gave a brisk nod to my mother and Dr. Carrick.

  Just as the officer turned, I stood up from my hiding place and snapped to attention, clapping my slippers loudly on the marble stairs, and shouted my best imitation of a sergeant-major’s bark. I thought it would be fun to surprise them. I threw my right hand up in salute, still clutching my penis with my left.

  My mother looked up first, and then everyone was staring at me. I think the officer smiled briefly, then turned and nodded quickly to Dr. Carrick before dashing out. Dr. Carrick picked up his bag. There was silence for a moment. Then Ah-Ming, her cheeks flushed with anger, flew up the stairs and seized me by the ear.

  “What are you doing? Don’t you know your father has just died?” She raised a hand to slap me, but my mother intervened.

  “Chung-Man, go back to bed!”

  I stared at her for a moment, and
then the meaning of Ah-Ming’s words became clear to me.

  I turned and ran up the stairs, the slap of my slippers’ leather soles echoing in the hall. When I got back to the third floor, I stopped and looked down at my clothes. I had peed myself like a baby. My white nightshirt was stained down the front, and the stairs, of greyish-white marble the colour of boiled bones, were splashed with a trickle of bright yellow piss.

  Of my father’s funeral I have patchy memories of black horses with ostrich plumes, of droning choirs and endless lines of visitors. My only vivid memory is of the Hong Kong Police brass band playing a march on the church grounds as we filed out in our dark clothes. I clapped my hands in time with them and sang as though it were a parade, before Ah-Ming told me to stop.

  Sheung and Tang were named as the inheritors of the business in my father’s will, though a board of governors, and not my mother, was to hold it in trust until they had both turned twenty. Starting in the fall, months after the funeral, Sheung and Tang spent more and more time with my father’s associates, learning the details of my father’s enterprises. Until late October they had most of their talks in a small pavilion on the grounds, because my mother declared my father’s study off limits to everyone but her. The garden by the pavilion was full of vines and trees that had a wild sheen when it rained and on sunny days hung like the damp and unkempt hair of ghosts, laying an unsettling shade over the rattan furniture.

  My father had been so little involved in our everyday life that his departure barely rippled in our routine. Leuk began boarding school in September, and our governess returned to instruct me in reading and writing while also watching Wei-Ming. I felt Leuk’s absence more than my father’s. Over the Christmas holidays my mother explained to me that I would be leaving for school next fall too.

  We were in the library the morning she told me. I was sitting by a window that looked onto the courtyard, playing with a globe that showed the British Empire coloured pink. I had a paper bag of roasted peanuts from the hawker down the street and was laying the empty shells in a circle around the globe’s base. My mother sat next to me and showed me the confirmation letter from the school. I recognized its red-and-gold emblem from a certificate that hung on Tang’s bedroom wall and asked her if the letter was about me.

  I was excited at first. I had always imagined the school as a single room identical to our library, full of uniformed boys reading our books and eating snacks prepared by Ah-Tseng. My mother explained to me that I would live there with three hundred other boys, that it was on the other side of the harbour, and that she would visit me only occasionally.

  I spent most of that day almost inconsolable, clinging to my mother and crying until she sent me to my room. Tang tried to distract me with my Christmas presents and stories about how fun the school was. All I could do was beg my mother not to send me. She dragged Leuk into my room, thinking he could set my mind at ease, but he had only just spent his first term there, and when he saw me sobbing and begging to stay home, he started crying too and said he hated being sent away to school.

  Finally, Tang and Sheung separated us and my exasperated mother gave us all money to go to the afternoon movies. Her only request was that Leuk and I shouldn’t sit together because she didn’t want us to cause a scene in public. My older brothers took the two of us out to the local theatre, and they each sat with one of us in separate rows. I sat beside Tang, noisily managing the three bags of candy he’d bought to keep me quiet.

  As Chow drove us home, Sheung pulled out a copy of the school magazine to show us that it could be a fun place. I flipped through the dense and unreadable English text in search of photos, which were few, until a drawing in an advertisement caught my eye. It turned out to be a regular notice in the magazine, and I would return to it again and again over the years as I worked on my English. Around the periphery of the image ran the words of the insecticide advertisement I eventually learned to read:

  Keep your books free from the ravages

  of Cockroaches and Silverfish

  with FLIT

  2 oz 4 oz

  50 cts 90 cts

  Obtainable at the Colonial Dispensary

  Pedder Street, Hong Kong

  At the centre of the notice marched an inexpressive tin soldier, his bayonet drawn and pointed at an immense cockroach. Unable to make out anything but the simplest words, I stared at the picture while we drove. When we got home, I ran in and showed the advertisement to my mother, thinking that the hunting of giant vermin was part of the school day. She waved it away in disgust and lectured Sheung for telling me stories. Worried that she would confiscate the magazine, I took it to the library and tried to conceal it on the ledge of the far window, but as I was trying to keep my balance, it slipped from my fingers and fell down into the rubbish yard below

  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.