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| ISBN-13: | 9781775588429 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 88 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
This Paper Boat
By Gregory Kan
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2016 Gregory KanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-845-9
CHAPTER 1
Outside the square of land you last appeared on
seventy-five years ago, I pretend to busy
my phone. I am
taking in the way Wellington had to force itself
upwards to meet you, who always seemed to be waiting
at the top of stairs. At the gate, I peer
into the front garden, my back to the bend of the road, a position
from which no passing car or pedestrian
can see me. You can be found.
I have to hear you to keep you
here, and I have to keep you
here to keep coming back.
It is sometimes the least
personal thing, to want to renew one's openness
to the outside.
The name of the house was a Samoan word, Laloma, meaning 'The Abode of Love'. Iris Wilkinson, the poet and scholar of the family, occupied the top room, which looked out on to hills kindled with gorse. I. remembered her mother below, at her old sewing machine, which broke the thread so often it taxed her patience. Her children's frocks were always the prettiest, though her sight had begun to blur behind her spectacles. Young seedlings grow up through the adult gorse, cutting out its light and eventually replacing it. Most methods of destroying adult gorse plants have been found to create the ideal conditions for gorse seeds to germinate.
At Island Bay, I look from tide pool to the moon and then back
to the tide pool. I realise
that you couldn't have been catching shrimp big enough
to eat
but small enough to contain, in large numbers, in old
marmalade jars. When prying driftwood from the sand, I smell
crushed lemon leaves. I don't know anything about
the past except
for what the past has left me.
The handle on the driver's door of my car is broken,
so I have to climb over
from the passenger seat.
Origin of garden: Middle English gardin, from Anglo-French gardin, jardin, of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German gart – an enclosure. The words yard, court and Latin hortus all refer to an enclosed space. Love has to be kept away from the world. After meeting him for the first time, I. watched Harry leave the garden through a hole in the back fence, under the ngaio tree. She stood crumpling the pale lemon leaves in her fingers, their scent creeping out into the skin of her palms. The stream came down in a waterfall, to a pool nearly six feet deep. There was a huge boulder in the middle of it, where she could sit.
Looking down at my boots I couldn't tell whether I was in Singapore, New Zealand, Thailand or Brunei. All dirt tracks look the same to me, at night. The gradual accumulation of sediment. Crouched beside the track, I ate biscuits to try to stay awake. When we began moving again I watched one of my platoon-mates stumble off the track, in sleep. The sediment is compacted as more and more material is deposited on top. Walking through Wilton's Bush a few days ago I was disoriented when I cut my hand on a thorny, overhanging branch. I realised I had no gloves. No camouflage paint on my face, no equipment vest, no rifle around my neck, no ammunition, no water, no signal set, no platoon, no rank. Eventually the underlying sediment becomes so dense it is essentially rock.
My parents always ask me when I'm coming back
with all that coming back
can presuppose.
On the plane to Auckland
I worry about what to ask them.
I ask these questions, not so that I can
write, but I write so that I can ask these questions. I worry
that my parents' answers are just another thing that I will be
taking from them.
The two men sitting next to me
discuss the construction and regulation
of fences.
At the dining table my mother speaks
readily but I wish she would trust
her recollections more.
As she talks, she looks off
to the right, where her Bible study notes have
amassed like leaves against the roots of a tree.
There are details I know she has hidden
from me. It is difficult to see my time
as removed or separate from that of my
parents'. I draw the boughs
downwards in the thickets
behind her eyes. A verbal tic, she cycles
through my siblings'
names – Joel, Sarah – before she gets to mine.
When my mother began attending school she didn't know her name. Her family used to call her Ah Nia or Nia Kia, which translate as 'small one' or 'small child'. Being small she was often seated at the front of the class. She tells me that she wasn't very clever, but that she was helpful and obedient and that teachers liked her.
Drainage is important in Singapore, and at the time no drains were covered. There was a drain that ran across her garden, emptying itself eventually into a large canal. She heard reports of children swept away in periods of heavy rainfall. She doesn't know where the canal led. Drifting trees and dead dogs when water levels were high. She remembers talking with her sisters for hours, with their feet pushed against one bank of the drain and their backs against the other. They sometimes crawled through drains to reach the other side of the road, below the increasingly heavy and unsteady traffic.
When my father was a child, he would fish in drains that cut across his village. Sometimes the rain fell heavily enough for eels to be found in the larger drains. Sitting where the drain disappeared into the ground, a hooked worm swinging from a strip of coconut leaf in his hands. The biggest eel he ever caught was one and a half feet long. He hunted eel and fish in drains until he was fourteen or fifteen years old.
Wherever he was with his friends, they would look out for tembusu trees, and they would look out for the perfectly symmetrical fork of a branch. The slingshot he gave me when I was seven was smooth and varnished. The trunk of a tembusu tree is dark brown, with deeply fissured bark. The best ammunition is a glass marble, he tells me, because it is perfectly round, and this perfect roundness ensures the consistency of its flight.
There was a book of animal stories on my bedside table. He said: You can hold in such a way that the air is trapped between your hand and the water. My father stepped into a clearing with me on his shoulders. We were in an upward tug of forest. He said: By relieving the pressure exerted by your hand you can release the air at whatever rate you desire. We were moving at a distance from the water. Where we were it was green and tufted.
I spoke but I was not sure if my room-mate was awake. I was barely eighteen when I got there and I would be twenty by the time I left. Our room was furthest from the toilet and I tried to stay asleep even as I parted the hallway lights. After a few months I became too tired to have a temper. I dipped the rag in black shoe polish, and then in water. I had developed a different accent and a hunger for chimes in the darkness that only I could hear. My mother used to make up stories in the darkness that no one knew the endings to. It was a kind of permission to have imperfect and beautiful plans.
I went a few times with my mother
to visit her at the rest home.
As a child I knew her as my great-aunt.
She had lost most of her memory. Every visit she asked
my mother what her 'position' was, and every visit
my mother told her that she, my mother, was the seventh
of nine children. This was how my great-aunt recognised
my mother or my mother's siblings, who
were my great-aunt's only visitors.
She would ask my mother to walk her around the garden.
She woke often
in the middle of the night, screaming
for the staff to wash her. Before being admitted
to the rest home, my great-aunt stayed with my aunt Vivian, who
was the sixth of nine. Vivian found her, one night, washing
dishes in the toilet.
She fell twice in one night. Not knowing what else
to do, my aunt and uncle considered
tying her to the bed. She sometimes
repulsed me. I remember that when hugging her I wondered
what made her skin so
detached from her flesh.
She had kind,
sad eyes. Her funeral was simple. The pastor spoke in Teochew.
My mother tells me that my great-aunt was actually
my grandfather's first wife. He had moved
to Singapore for work, leaving her
in Guangzhou. He did not think
he would ever see her again.
My mother does not know how
my great-aunt made her way to Singapore. She arrived
to find my grandfather,
his new wife, and children. My grandfather and grandmother did not stay
at the house, but at the Chinese medicine shop
they operated.
My great-aunt lived with and took care of
my mother and her siblings for the rest
of her life.
She had no other friends or family in Singapore. She used to bathe
the children in rainwater
collected in a giant urn outside the house. The water was
always cold. Intensity
plays a fundamental role in the formation
of memory. Once she dug at my mother's boils
with her nails. I know nothing of death
except for what the dead
have left me.
Gui Po – A ghost in the form of a kindly old woman,
who returns to help
around the house, and who was sometimes too close
to covet.
Her mother had ten pregnancies altogether. One was a stillbirth. One mouth less to feed, my mother remembers her saying. Below the full moon of the eighth lunar month, an open-air altar is set up for the worship of Chang'e, the Moon Goddess of Immortality. We are so stupid to worship the moon, my grandmother said. The Americans who went up there found nothing.
Her father was a Chinese physician. In his shop, jars of preserved seahorses, snakes, cockroaches, centipedes, millipedes. Poison to get rid of poison, her father said. My mother was promised that a sweet, preserved plum would follow each black mouthful of medicine.
His father died when he was seven. His father loved to drink, and always came home late. One day he collapsed in the bathroom of a restaurant. My father doesn't remember much. He remembers enjoying soft drinks, peanuts and cookies at the funeral. It was well attended, and he was caught up in the festivities. In the coffin, his father's face was dark and purple. It was a very large funeral, my father says.
Beside a large river, I tore the head off a quail, as instructed. The liver was reddish-brown, with no white spots, which meant the quail should have been healthy enough to eat, but I threw it into the river as soon as the boats left. The smell on my hands ran on for days. The first sound of rain reaching the jungle canopy was always far away enough for me to hope it was the wind. I heard later that one of my platoon-mates lost his machete in the rising mud. In the jungle I came to know a darkness full of noise, none of which I could recognise.
I want very much to smoke but I know my mother
thinks I've given it up. I put the kettle on and I tell her I am going
downstairs. After filling it is necessary to either
expand or expel. Minutes later I return upstairs
to find she has made the cup of tea for me.
My parents are not used to seeing me for such long periods
in the house. My father comes into the living room
and turns on the television.
This means he wants to listen to us, or at least
wants to be near us when we talk. Seeds
forgotten in
dew-soaked earth return as radiant things. I tell him
that his 'session' will take place
the next day because I don't want him
to feel neglected.
I. groped about in her father's pockets. There were two chocolate teddy bears, which she ate immediately. My sister and I would run to meet him on the patio at the front of the house, where he would be forced to reveal any gifts he had for us. Spilling his bags toward the living room. These gifts were simple, often chocolate or comic books, or – better – chewing gum and bubble gum, which were contraband items in Singapore. Good for once, I.'s father said to her. Good as good, she said in return. Years later, I realised that these gifts were gestures of affection, which he found otherwise difficult to express. Years later, I. had written a book, so he could give her a little place for pride.
After lunch my mother walks into the dining room
and my father and I both
blow our noses.
In the past when I thought about people my parents
were somehow
not among them. But some wound stayed
wide in all of us, and now I see in their faces
strange rivers and waterfalls, tilted over with broom.
You are watching the brown-paper covers of books grow
out around your father, as he dreams there
against the wall, thinking perhaps
how rocks are not quite lands.
My father works in a study at the front of the house, where he can see
only a portion of street, through the driveway's
mouth. I watch him dab his eye
with a tissue, the drooping eyelid no longer
able to adequately spread
and contain its fluid.
Last year, he fell against the stone
steps of his sister's house in Singapore, damaging the
nerves and muscles on one side
of his face. Some cultures consider crying to be
undignified. The Maori tangi involves the cultivation of intense
wetness around the eyes
and nose. In this expression of mourning, the wetness of living bodies
is invoked. Wet touch is closer and faster than dry touch. Sound travels
more quickly in water. So does electricity.
The air between me and my father is hung
with tiny water droplets.
I urge him through. I know that behind his answers
the memories trickle toward deep
cuts of anger.
Yuan Gui – a ghost who has died a wrongful death.
He roams the world of the living, waiting
for his grievances to be redressed. He hasn't left
anywhere he's been.
New Zealand Post rejected my father's application to be a mail sorter. He loves New Zealand, but says he finds it hard to elude the growing sense of his own uselessness. He is terrified of becoming a burden, unable to fuck, walk or even speak. At home in Auckland he is always at his computer. Every email he writes is copied to every friend he has. As a child he would climb the Flame of the Forest in his backyard. On the roof of the house, talking at strangers passing along the dirt road below, safe from dogs. I like to imagine him being mistaken for a chimney.
He wasn't as well-off as the other students, many of whom were from successful and prominent families. Some were accompanied by servants and bodyguards who waited for them during recess. He says the other students knew he wasn't worth knowing, but I know he wasn't poor. His family owned three hardware stores, and lived in the only brick-and-tile bungalow in the village. His grandmother owned a house near the city that was rented out to British soldiers. They had two housemaids. One eventually returned to her hometown in China. The other passed away in a rest home in Singapore.
They stung him with words, hit him from all sides at once, men who had worked with him for years. It didn't matter, didn't matter about Dad losing his promotion, I. told herself. The Singapore government had broken my father's rice bowl, giving his clients direct broking licences. There was no longer any need for him. His own investments, necessary to supplement his heavily reduced income, emptied themselves out underneath him. The starlings waited in the courtyard. When a sparrow hopped off with a large-sized crumb, they waylaid it, pecked it, grabbed its crumb and sent it off.
A large bag, to fit over his head and the gas heater. He woke the next morning, finding himself still alive. My father tells me he doesn't care much about having to leave, but I know he wishes he had a reason to stay. I have lived with reluctance sometimes, he says.
In his yelling I recall always hearing, 'what I've given', and 'respect'. He barely got out of bed, and if he did his head was fogged with anger and sadness. He hadn't noticed that years had leaked away between us. Coming back each night, late and drunk from entertaining clients. He had seemed more interested then in his dogs than his family. Because I wouldn't crawl to them, I. recalled her father saying. The stronger his desire to possess us, the further we withdrew from him.
I'm sorry I can't help you, I said, falling asleep against the deeply fissured wood in his eyes. I woke up in the middle of the night. He had fallen asleep gripping his shovel. By then all two or three hundred trenches held a candle at one end. We were all going to the same place.
My mother's voice is leaking
through the ceiling into
my room.
I know she's on Skype, because when she's on
Skype she speaks loudly.
My mother is speaking to Vivian, the sixth of nine.
Sitting next to Vivian is Bob, her husband. Karen, yes
you are my sister in New Zealand, Vivian says.
She giggles, and then is quiet.
My mother can see her already drifting out
under thick marsh.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from This Paper Boat by Gregory Kan. Copyright © 2016 Gregory Kan. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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