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Cecilia said one day, “Can you keep a secret?”
“Anything.”
“I will see the world. Soon, I will sail abroad. I will meet famous people in important places.”
Percival dared not betray his ignorance by asking exactly where these places or whom these people were. He said, “Yes, you can go anywhere. Your family’s ships can take you.” One of their coal barges was cutting slowly across the bay beneath their feet.
“You are silly,” she said, but added kindly, “and sweet. My family’s ships only sail the South China Sea. I think I will sail on one of the Messageries Maritimes steamers—those are the most handsome. The suites have silk drapes.”
“Maybe I will—” he stopped to unstick the words from his throat, “go with you.”
Without a word, she took his hands in hers, as one might console a child. From then on, whenever they sat up high on the Peak, Cecilia told Percival of the places she would visit—Westminster Abbey, the Louvre, the Grand Canyon. Her family owned books, she said, with photographic plates of all these wonders. While she talked, with her eyes on the water, Kowloon beyond, she allowed him to touch her. He stroked her palms, kissed the backs of her hands, massaged her fingers. He explored her perfect forearms. Percival heard his own breath, heavy, as she asked him if he knew of this monument or that museum. In a damp sea wind, he brushed the goosebumps that rose on her skin. Cecilia allowed him to be as passionate as he liked, but stopped him at the elbow.
As a young man of half-decent though backwater origins, Percival was occasionally invited to the same banquets as Cecilia, mostly to occupy an odd single seat at one of the banquet tables. Cecilia never bothered about where she was supposed to be seated, and seemed to enjoy making a minor fuss disrupting the arrangements and sitting next to Percival instead. As pleased as he was by Cecilia’s attention, Percival could always feel the wave of Sai Tai’s anger pulsing at him from across the room. Cecilia’s satisfaction was just as palpable. It was disrespectful to snub an elder, but Percival’s wish to please Cecilia was stronger than his desire to uphold decorum, and besides, Percival told himself, it was Cecilia who was angering her mother. While the quiet of their time alone was what he longed for, Cecilia seemed to relish being in public, flaunting her unsuitable paramour, so much so that it seemed to Percival that she almost forgot him in her efforts to display him. She never introduced Percival to her mother.
In the autumn of 1941, a schoolmate of Percival’s asked him if the rumours were true. Cecilia, the friend said excitedly, had revealed in strictest confidence to a number of friends that she might marry the poor country boy Percival. It was the talk of the school. She and Percival had never discussed marriage. Percival assumed an offended air and told his chum that no gentleman would answer such an indiscreet question. He did not mention the rumour of their impending marriage to Cecilia. He was both afraid to open himself to her mockery, and worried that trying to clarify this rumour might cause its tantalizing possibility to vanish.
AS HE SIPPED HIS LEMONADE, PERCIVAL watched now as Cecilia served the ball to the American surgeon. A flick of her wrist, and the ball spun. Sure enough, her gangly opponent was caught off guard on the bounce. She called out, “Fifteen … love,” to the American, but as she turned she shot her triumphant glance at Percival. Of course, he realized with annoyance at himself, as usual he’d been unable to resist looking at her.
The Japanese invaded Hong Kong in December 1941, and by overrunning it in eighteen days demonstrated that it was not the impregnable fortress that the British had promised. Some La Salle students volunteered as orderlies at St. Stephen’s Hospital, and only one returned. He told Percival that the Japanese had shot the doctors, tortured the patients, violated the nurses, and burned the hospital down. The school Christmas dance was cancelled, and the British surrendered on Christmas Day. Though some of Percival’s friends asked him to join them when they stole into the hills to fight with the Gangjiu resistance, Percival stayed in his room, grateful that his landlady had such heavy furniture with which to barricade the door. All the tenants were hungry and sleepless, for around the clock the shots of executions punctuated the wailing of the girls and women being raped.
When the noise of violence had exhausted itself after a few days, Percival ventured out to try to find some food. White, yellow, and brown soldiers of the British Army swung from the lampposts, their bodies already swollen, discoloured. Those who still lived were being marched away barefoot by the Japanese, many of whom now wore good English boots. For the first time ever, Percival knocked on the door of Sai Tai’s grand garden house on Des Voeux Road. He didn’t know what he would say, but he wanted to see Cecilia, to know that she was safe. In reply to his knock, there was only terrible silence. Finally, a neighbour appeared, implored him to stop banging lest it attract the attention of the Japanese, and informed him that Madame Sai and her daughter had gone. They had abandoned their house for a rented apartment on the sixth floor of a plain building. Sai Tai, the neighbour said, hoped that after climbing so many stairs, a Japanese soldier would not have the energy to violate her daughter. The neighbour did not know the address of the apartment where they had fled.
La Salle and St. Paul were both commandeered by the Japanese, so there were no more classes to attend. The Kempeitai, military police, arrested and punished suspected members of the Gangjiu with great efficiency, the flash of a sword by the side of the street. Bystanders were commanded to watch. The head was speared on a fencepost, if convenient. Hunger, both of people and beasts, made the days long. One day, as he searched for a shop that had food to sell, Percival saw a pack of dogs ripping with mad pleasure a hunk of meat, perhaps a piece of dead horse or donkey? Normally, he would not think of eating such meat. Now, he wondered how he could distract the dogs or scare them off long enough to grab it. Then he saw the man’s body several feet away, clothes ripped open, the stump of neck. The head was nowhere in sight, other dogs must have carried it off already. Sai Tai’s handsome garden house was soon taken over by General Takashi, so it was best that it was empty when he came to seize it.
Percival was lucky that he still had a few of the silver coins his father had provided, and with these he barely managed to feed himself. In late spring, as deaths from starvation became common, the Japanese declared that those with foreign papers could apply for exit permits. Percival had the French laissez-passer he’d used to enter Hong Kong. He learned that the freighter Asama Maru would sail for Saigon in two weeks, and some said that things were better in Indochina. Percival used the last of the Qing coins to pay the bribe for an exit permit, and to purchase a ticket on the boat. All he had left was the family charm, the reassuring lump around his neck, which he was careful to keep out of sight lest he be killed for it by a Kempeitai. Down by the docks, Percival recognized a number of Cecilia’s family’s ships, which had been seized by the Imperial Navy. They were being repainted in military grey and branded with the Rising Sun insignia. Percival had not seen Cecilia since the invasion. He thought about her often, but Sai Tai was keeping her well hidden.
A week before Percival’s ship was due to sail, a woman in peasant dress approached Percival on the street. Sai Tai had sent her maid to summon him. The next day Percival found the apartment building, climbed the stairs, and at the precise time he had been commanded to appear knocked on a green wooden door. The door swung open. Percival was startled to see Cecilia’s mother rather than her servant standing before him. She wore a formal silk robe that was incongruous with the modest apartment.
“You are …?” she asked, as if she did not know. As if she had not summoned him. The matriarch fixed him with her narrow eyes, dared him to speak. He was frozen, as terrified as if she were a Japanese officer.
“Is something wrong with your legs?” she said. “Come in. Close the door.”
Percival did as instructed.
Sai Tai glided across the room, her feet hidden by generous silk folds. She came to a rosewood chair, its wood so dark that the chair emerged from shadow only when she lowered herself regally into its arms. Percival followed meekly, unsure how close to approach, erring on the side of being a little far away.
“Are you a mute?” she said. “Introduce yourself.”
“I am called Chen Pie Sou,” said Percival, guessing that she cared more about his Chinese name. “It is a great honour to meet you, madam.” He stepped forward and bowed his head.
“I wish I could say the same.” She sat intensely straight, as if sitting in such company required immense effort. “Understand that I wanted my daughter to marry someone suitable to her family’s stature.”
“Naturally, madam.”
“My maid tells me your family is in the rice trade.”
“Yes, madam.”
“However, I have never done business with them. They must not be very important.” As she leaned forward, her jade bracelets clicked against the arms of the chair.
“I’m sure you are correct, madam,” said Percival.
“But people always need rice. At least you are not completely worthless.”
“We have a house in Indochina, which my father built. It is—”
“Your family has a house?” she barked. “You think this is worth mentioning? Then you are very nearly worthless.”
“Yes, madam.” Percival went down on one knee, his heart pounding, and imagined his head being lopped off.
“Get up!” He reminded himself that it was Japanese soldiers who decapitated their prisoners. Wealthy old women with jade-heavy arms were not known to do this. “Is my daughter running around with a totally spineless wretch?” Percival scrambled to his feet. “You are not bad-looking,” she said.
“Thank you, madam.”
“Good-looking men are indiscreet. They cannot be trusted.”
“Yes, madam.”
“So you agree. You are not trustworthy?”
“Not at all. I mean, no. I don’t agree. No, no, in fact, I am not very good-looking. That’s what I mean.”
Sai Tai sat back a little. “At least you make an effort to show some respect. Unlike my daughter. I am told that you have a French laissez-passer and an exit permit from Hong Kong. I’ve heard you have a cabin on the Asama Maru, and will soon be leaving for your home in Indochina?”
“Yes, madam.” He could barely utter these words, never mind being able to clarify matters. It made no difference, he thought, that he had never been to Indochina. His papers said that he was a resident of that country.
“I am told that the French and the Japanese have some kind of deal, that it dampens the bestial behaviour of the Japanese in Indochina. They say this year’s rice crop was good in Annam, and no one goes hungry, despite the Japanese occupation. Is this true?”
“I have heard the same,” he said.
“Your household must have stores of rice?” Only then, he noticed that her cheeks were less haughty than he had seen them before, perhaps a little hollow? Did even Sai Tai, he wondered, feel the hunger of the occupation? “You have the means to care for my daughter?”
Years before, along with peppercorns, cinnamon, nutmeg, and brandy, Chen Kai had brought with him on a visit to Shantou a photo of the house he had built in Cholon. It was six storefronts wide, and three floors high. Within, Chen Kai explained, were high-ceilinged warehouse rooms for fresh paddy and threshed rice. There was no building so spacious and grand in Shantou, he declared. Chen Pie Sou had resented his father’s taking of a second wife. Muy Fa had stared at the photo of Ba Hai in front of the house, and criticized the building’s extravagant size, saying nothing of her husband’s Annamese wife. Ba Hai was a small-boned, dark-skinned foreigner wearing Chinese clothes in the photo. As a boy, Chen Pie Sou swallowed his question; why, if his father had found enough gold to build a house like that and take a second wife, had he not returned to Shantou? But now, confronted by Sai Tai’s questions, Percival was glad to think that even Cecilia would admit that his family house was a decent size. “Yes,” he said, with a small burst of confidence. “My family has ample means to care for your daughter. Our house is large. Our warehouses are full of rice.” This last must be true, he reasoned, as his father was a rice trader.
“Then take my daughter with you to Indochina. Better that she escape with you, though almost worthless, than stay here and be devoured by Japanese dogs. Remember, I am choosing you as an option preferable to dogs. Come tomorrow at the same time for your wedding.” She waved him off, not moving from her carved chair.
Trembling, he backed away in stumbling bows, and fled down the stairs. That was how the couple became engaged. Cecilia’s mother did not offer her daughter’s hand. She commanded Percival to take it. As he left the apartment, Percival rejoiced at his good fortune—that the very rubble and stink that he was picking his way through had led to his engagement with the girl he longed for. The next day, they were married in the sixth-floor apartment by one of the La Salle priests who had somehow survived the Japanese invasion. Cecilia wore the cheongsam in which Sai Tai had once been married, and glared at her mother through the whole ceremony.
A few days later, standing on the deck of the Asama Maru in formal dress, the newlywed couple waved goodbye to Sai Tai, who sat in a canopied rickshaw on the dock. As Hong Kong retreated across the choppy water, Cecilia said, “I dreamt of Paris, or London, but I have married a country bumpkin who is dragging me into the Indochina mud.”
“But you spread the rumour that we wished to marry—”
“Were you stupid enough to believe that I would actually want to marry you?” She whirled away from him. “I fooled with you precisely because it was inconceivable that I could ever marry so beneath me. I did it to keep my mother’s suitors away. If it wasn’t for the war, she would have agreed by now to send me to England or America—in order to get me away from you!” She stalked towards the companionway, and shouted across the deck, “Now see what I’m stuck with!” She disappeared below. Percival looked around, saw the other passengers turn away.
As they reached open water, Percival clenched the rail at the edge of the deck, fighting down a sick feeling. The shallow-bottomed freighter began to roll. Had Sai Tai plotted a double victory, calling Cecilia’s bluff and forcing the marriage to show her control of her daughter as well as send her to safety? He stood, unbalanced by the sea, as flecks of black soot drifted from the smoky stack and ruined his one decent white suit.
When Percival made his way unsteadily down below deck, lurching against the growing motion of the boat, he did not know what he would say or do. He appeared in the doorway of their cabin. He spoke from instinct. “Cecilia, we’re married now.”
“Look at your suit. What a mess.”
“Isn’t there something special between us? What about when we were up at the Peak, holding hands and talking.”
“A worthless muddy peasant covered in soot.”
He closed the door, walked up to her, took her shoulders, and pressed his mouth to hers. In the Western films they had seen together, this was what the man did when the woman was upset, and then the beautiful starlet would melt into the man’s embrace. He wasn’t sure what to do with his lips or tongue, but he tried to scoop her towards him with his arms. Cecilia bit his lip, hard. When he pulled back she laughed, “You coward, can’t even stand up to your wife?” He touched his lip, tasted the salt, looked at his red fingertips. She said, “Is that what you call a kiss? It’s like kissing a block of wood.” Percival rushed upon Cecilia, they fell to the floor of the cabin with a lurch of the boat, and Percival forced his hands up her blouse. She struck him with her fists, landed punches on his sides. His lip bled freely, he kissed her through her angry insults, smeared her face red with his blood. Until his jacket was off, trousers, and then her blouse, and now they both struggled from their clothing until they began to move together rather than apart.
Afterwards, he rolled on his back, his sex a wet snail curled up on itself, sated and guilty. What should he say? He felt like crying, but a man must never cry. Had he hurt her? But a husband did not apologize to his wife. The ocean slapped the boat over and over. After a long time listening to the water meeting the hull, he said with regret, “Now that it’s done, it’s not what I thought.”
She turned on her side. Naked, she was more perfectly beautiful and terrifying than he had ever imagined—ivory skin and smooth curves. She said, “It’s not for thinking, then. And you’re not done.” She put her hand between his legs.
The second time, Cecilia straddled his hips and reached down to put him inside her, began to move. Once she was satisfied she draped herself over him like a sleepy cat. Percival was grateful for this quiet space which did not require words. Could this peace contain them, however they had arrived here? Tears welled, streamed down his face. He said, “I may not be what you wanted, but I love you.” The words were exposed, vulnerable on his lips.
Cecilia had an expression he had never seen before. For a moment she was unsure. Then, her face solidified. He couldn’t tell if she had taken a decision or simply defaulted to something in the face of confusion. “Well,” she said, “it seems even a peasant is good for the animal things,” and climbed off him, began to dress. A steaming, humiliated anger clouded Percival’s image of Cecilia. His wife stared at him, defiant, as if demanding that he strike the first blow if he wished to break her shell. He stood, put on his clothes, and went out into the salt spray of the evening.
Cecilia stayed in the cabin for most of the journey to Saigon. Percival spent the time pacing the deck. On occasion, Cecilia would appear there and summon him by saying, “There’s something I need from you.” Or she might say, “You’re still here? I thought you had fallen overboard.” He would take her wrist and pull her down to their cabin, the other passengers whispering after them.
Sometimes, he would go below deck telling himself that if only he persisted with tenderness, the peace that came after sex might last. On other occasions, at a snickering glance from a fellow passenger, he’d decide in frustration that he had marital privileges to exercise and storm downstairs. Sometimes, Cecilia led as she had on the dance floor, told him to move his hand or his tongue in a particular way, to go faster or slower. Other times, she alternated between beating him and caressing him. Whether she initiated it or he did, whether he went hoping for peace or to assert himself, their sex often opened a door to a truce, which Cecilia then closed with a torrent of insults.
As the tugboat pulled the Asama Maru up the dull brown thread of the Saigon River, Percival and Cecilia stood on the deck of the freighter, watching the dense tropical foliage drift past, listening to the strange, raucous welcome of the jungle birds. He had been twelve years old when he had last seen his father, on Chen Kai’s visit to Shantou five years earlier. Now, he was married, and would meet his father again as a man. On that trip in 1937, Chen Kai had promised Muy Fa that the next time he returned to China it would be to stay. He had almost enough gold, he told her. Chen Kai did not say whether he would bring Ba Hai to China, and his son silently hoped that the Annamese woman would stay in the Gold Mountain country. Then, just months after Chen Kai had returned to Indochina, the Japanese had occupied Guangdong province. By 1939, they were in Indochina as well. The birds screeched around them, and Percival realized with surprise that there was no mountain here, golden or otherwise. Small local fishing boats with bright-painted eyes on their prows returned his suspicious gaze.
A bored moustached Frenchman glanced at their permits and Percival’s forged laissez-passer, and waved them down the gangplank. Saigon was an awkward jumble of European facades sprawled across a mud flat. Before they were off the gangplank a cyclo driver seized their luggage. He saw that Percival and Cecilia were Chinese and offered to take them to Cholon. Bumping along in the cyclo, which swerved erratically to avoid expansive mud puddles, they left Saigon on the road to Cholon.
Cecilia said, “A wretched hole.”
Percival replied, “There are fewer Japanese here.” Whether it was the collaboration of the French administration, or had something to do with the oppressive heat, the Japanese soldiers they saw seemed slower moving, more calm, than the ravenous troops in Hong Kong.
Upon arrival, despite having seen photos, Percival was surprised at the size of Chen Kai’s house looming over him. Was this it? The red-painted sign announced, “Chen Hap Sing,” the Chen Trade Company. Surely his father must have collected enough gold to return to China if he had built a house like this? Percival knocked on the door and told the servant who he was. The servant vanished inside. Shortly after, it was Ba Hai who appeared in the doorway. In person, she looked even smaller. After Percival introduced himself and Cecilia, Ba Hai stared at them through a long silence in which it was impossible to say whether she was more shocked or angry at their arrival.
She said to Percival, “You must call me ma and treat me with the same respect as you would your mother.” Ba Hai spoke the Teochow dialect, but in a way he had never heard, with the accent of her native Annamese tongue. She turned to Cecilia. “You may be young and beautiful, but if you forget that I am the first woman of this house, I will scratch out those pretty eyes of yours.” With that, she told a houseboy to take Percival to see his father, turned, and disappeared.
The houseboy led Percival up the stairs to the building’s family quarters. The servant opened a door, and Percival peered into the high-ceilinged room. It was well proportioned, the windows tall but shuttered against the daylight. There was a smoky, sweet-scented gloom. Percival recognized the source of the smoke. Some of the old men in his Hong Kong rooming house had been devotees. Why was the houseboy showing him this room? Where was Chen Kai? Then Percival saw that against the far wall, slumped on an ornate bed, was a skeletal figure who wore only a cloth around his middle and whose ribs heaved mightily as he sucked on a pipe of opium.
CHAPTER 4 (#u87f8b66d-f83e-5ed2-ae43-7721f87c789d)
THE SOUNDS OF TENNIS HAD STOPPED. Percival looked up from his lemonade to see Cecilia at his table, her opponent’s hairy arm around her waist.
“The Viet Cong are keeping your knives bloody, Doctor?” Percival could not recall the surgeon’s name. If he had remembered, he would have pretended not to.
“Nah. Disposable scalpels. Always clean—at the start of the case, anyhow. Pleiku is hot this week. Choppers bring them every morning. Kids, right? Fresh off the plane, all blown to bits, calling for momma.”
“Then you fix them?” said Percival.
“Humpty dumpty,” the doctor snorted. “The Cong bury these little jumpers. Charge pops up so high and blows the kid’s balls off. Cuts off his legs, too. See, I figure they intended it to rip out a soldier’s chest, but the yellow soldier is so much shorter, they calibrated it wrong.” He laughed and looked to Cecilia, who smiled obligingly. How did she put up with the smell of white men’s sweat, Percival wondered. It stank like river oxen.
Cecilia noticed the two glasses. She caught the eye of the waiter, gestured to bring another.
“Don’t worry about me, honey. You’ve got a business deal to discuss, right? I’ve got to go.” He bent for a peck on the cheek from Cecilia, but she found his lips with hers, made a show of the kiss. Percival drank his lemonade.
“Wow,” the surgeon winked at Percival, “a country worth fighting for.”
“Bye, love,” she called sweetly as he left. Cecilia sat and drank a whole glass of lemonade. Her chest still heaved from the effort of the game.
“A new business partner?” Percival asked in Cantonese. “Or a friend?”
“Everything is business,” she said.
“It’s like that with you, isn’t it?”
She leaned forward. “Dai Jai must leave Vietnam immediately. The mood in Saigon is sour. I heard of one officer in the Rangers who turned in his brother to the quiet police.”
“A suspected communist?”
“Supposedly. Or a family feud. But there’s no time to waste, Dai Jai is in danger.”
“How did you hear of his problem so quickly?”
“His problem? Your problem. I’m sure this is your fault, always blabbering on about China. For all the times you talked about returning there, if only once you had actually gone!”
“I tell Dai Jai to marry Chinese, but I should remember to advise him that his wife must also be Chinese inside, unlike his mother.”
She laughed. “Is that supposed to be some kind of insult? Pathetic.”
“It is from his mother,” said Percival evenly, “that Dai Jai learned to speak before thinking.”
“His mother thinks about surviving and advancing in this world. As for defying some trivial new rule from Saigon, from whom else but you could Dai Jai get such a nonsensical idea?” She signalled for another lemonade. “Anyhow, when you already teach Chinese students English, why should you oppose teaching them Vietnamese?”
“It’s different. English is profitable,” said Percival. “We may not have to teach Vietnamese anyway. As you know better than anyone, the right contacts can change any Saigon policy. Mak is making inquiries.”
“Mak, always Mak. It’s good Mak has replaced your brain, as your own was always so lacking.” She switched to English. “Listen to me. I don’t give a shit about your school. Think about your son.” Then back to Cantonese. “We must send Dai Jai to Europe or America, before he is taken from us. I will arrange it.” She drained her glass. Percival watched the beautiful line of her throat undulating as she swallowed. He had loved kissing her there.
“Did you rehearse that vulgar English expression just for me? You would send him to a place full of foreigners?” he said.
“You would say he is a foreigner here.”
“Of course he is. But why should he leave, when I am well connected in Vietnam? I’ll protect him. Anyhow, if he goes anywhere, it should be to China.”
Cecilia laughed. “You are so predictable, both in what you say and what you fail to do. If you really wanted to go home to China, you would have gone by now.”
“I stayed for you.”
In 1945, after the Japanese surrender, people were moving in every direction. Cecilia had challenged Percival to do what he said he wanted, to return to China. She would not go. He was still in love with her then, hopeful that things would work out between them. He stayed. When he was eager to return in 1949, to cheer Mao’s unification of the country, Cecilia became pregnant with Dai Jai and there was no question of travel. They had waited a long time for a child, had thought themselves barren. Then came the school, and with it the money and its enjoyable uses. By the time of their divorce in 1958, Percival, like many other Cholon businessmen, was regularly sending money home to help the Great Leap Forward but knew that to enjoy his own profits he must remain outside of China. Already, by then, it was important to keep such remittances secret, for China had made its full transition from being an ally in the defeat of Japan and fascism, to being a communist threat to America and the free world.
“Bullshit,” she replied. “Tell you what—you keep the Saigon dogs from getting near our son. I will speak to my friends about sending him abroad. These days, there are ways to send people to America—for studies, for technical exchanges.”
“I will make this little issue vanish. My contacts can easily do it.”
“Don’t be so sure. Besides, you mean Mak’s contacts, your money.”
