Garden of Evening Mists

  “Why haven’t you gone home? Even for a visit?”

  “Not while it was occupied by the Americans. I cannot bear the idea of it, all those foreign soldiers in our cities.”

  “It wasn’t too unbearable for you living here when Malaya was occupied by foreign soldiers!”

  “Go back to your old life in Kuala Lumpur,” he snapped. “You will never become a well-regarded gardener if you carry such anger with you.”

  For a while we said nothing to each other. “You were friends with Tominaga, weren’t you?” I asked. “What happened between the two of you?”

  “There is a temple up in the mountains. I want to ask the nuns to say prayers for Tominaga. Will you come with me? Tell the workers they can have the day off tomorrow.”

  Thunder grumbled in the clouds. My thoughts kept circling around the conversation with the Japanese visitors. There was another reason for their presence in Malaya, I thought, something of which I suspected Aritomo was aware, but would not reveal to me.

  Drawing back his right sleeve with his left hand, Aritomo picked up the teapot and filled his cup almost to the brim. He put the teapot down in the exact spot from where he had lifted it and pivoted on his knees to face the mountains in the east. He remained in that position for what seemed like a long time. Then, like a flower drooping to touch the earth, he brought his head low to the floor. Straightening his body a moment later, he held the cup in his hands and touched it to his forehead.

  I left him there, giving one last farewell to the man he had once known, a man who had already traveled past the mountains and journeyed beyond the mists and the clouds.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The road going higher into the mountains was muffled in a thick mist. It was cold inside Aritomo’s Land Rover, our breaths coating the windscreen in a milky cataract. Now and then he would wipe it clean to see ahead. In the terraced fields of the vegetable smallholdings, roosters bugled for the sun. Just before reaching the village of Brinchang, Aritomo swung into a narrow dirt road, following it uphill until it ended in a small clearing. We parked and got out of the car.

  “There are two trails to the top,” Aritomo said, hitching a rucksack onto his back. “We’ll take this one here, the more difficult one.”

  He forced his way into the ant ferns and lallang grass. I kept close to him. A narrow track lay behind the foliage. I walked carefully, trying not to slip on the patches of moss. To my right, the ground sheared away into a river about twenty feet below, the water shredded white by half-submerged boulders. The jungle was a monochromatic wash. The vague shapes of trees solidified when we passed them, only to disappear behind us. Birds called out, impossible to spot in the dense foliage. Thick, half-exposed tree roots terraced the path into loamy steps that sank beneath my weight. At an escarpment we stopped to watch the sun come up. Aritomo pointed to a scattering of low buildings on the far end of the valley as a rip opened in the mist cover. “Majuba.” It was the only word he had uttered since we entered the jungle. I recalled the previous occasion when we had hiked to the swiftlets’ cave, how talkative he had been, revealing the secrets of plants and trees to me.

  “There’s the house,” I said, catching a glimpse of the flickering flame of the Transvaal flag. Remembering Templer’s displeasure when he had seen it, I told Aritomo about it. I had hoped to make him laugh; instead a thoughtful look descended over his face.

  “Do you remember me telling you of my walk across Honshu, when I was eighteen?” he said. “I spent a night in a temple. It was falling to pieces, and there was only a solitary monk still living there. He was old, very old. And he was blind. The next morning, before I left, I chopped some firewood for him. As I was leaving he stood in the center of the courtyard and pointed above us. On the edge of the roof a faded and tattered prayer flag was flapping away. ‘Young man,’ the old monk said, ‘tell me: is it the wind that is in motion, or is it only the flag that is moving?’”

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I said, ‘Both are moving, holy one.’

  “The monk shook his head, clearly disappointed by my ignorance. ‘One day you will realize that there is no wind, and the flag does not move,’ he said. ‘It is only the hearts and minds of men that are restless.’”

  For a while we did not speak, but stood there, looking into the valleys. “Come on,” he said eventually. “There is still a long way to go.”

  A shower had soaked the jungle, and we had to leap over puddles of water on the track. Aritomo pulled himself lightly over the roots, moving with a determined ease, responding to a call only he could hear. Branches, riven down by previous storms, obstructed the track, smearing our hands and thighs with lichen and shreds of sodden bark when we clambered over them.

  “How much further, this Temple of Clouds?” I asked after we had been climbing for an hour.

  “Three-quarters of the way up the mountain,” Aritomo replied over his shoulder. “Only the very devoted ever go there.”

  “I’m not surprised.” We had not met anyone else on the path. Gazing around us, I imagined that we had moved back millions of years to a time when the jungle was still young.

  “There it is.”

  The temple was a collection of low, drab buildings barnacled to the side of the mountain; I was disappointed, having expected more after the arduous climb. A stream ran past the temple, draining into a narrow gorge. In the sprays steaming over the drop, a small rainbow formed and wavered. Aritomo pointed to the rocks on the opposite bank. They seemed to be trembling. A second later I realized that they were covered with thousands of butterflies. I watched them for a moment but was impatient to move on.

  “Wait,” Aritomo said, glancing up to the sky.

  The sun hatched out from behind the clouds, transforming the surface of the rocks into a shimmer of turquoise and yellow and red and purple and green, as though the light had been passed through a prism. The wings of the butterflies twitched and then beat faster. In small clusters they lifted off from the rocks, hanging in the light for a few moments before dispersing into the jungle, like postage stamps scattered by the wind. A handful of the butterflies flew through the rainbow above the gorge, and it seemed to me that they came out looking more vibrant, their wings revived by the colors in that arc formed by light and water.

  We walked up to the temple’s entrance. A pair of cloth lanterns, once white, hung from the eaves, like cocoons discarded by silkworms. Blackened by decades of soot and incense smoke, the red calligraphy painted on them had ruptured and bled into the tattered cloth, words turned to wounds.

  No one was there to greet us when we entered and went up a flight of broken stone steps. The noise of the river quieted. In the main prayer hall a nun in gray robes shuffled past us, the bouquet of joss sticks in her hands fumigating the air. Huge coils of sandalwood incense hung from the rafters, turning in languid, infinite spirals. Gods stood on altars, fierce-eyed and scowling, some carrying tridents and broadswords pierced with metal rings, all covered in a sparse fur of dust and ash.

  I recognized the red-faced figure of Kwan Kung, the god of war, from the few times my amah had taken me along to a temple in a Georgetown alley, when she would beg the gods for her weekly lottery numbers. She never once won any money but it never stopped her from going back, week after week. The god of war was clad in black armor, his yellowed beard gathered in one gloved hand. “He’s also the god of commerce,” I told Aritomo. “Business is war, I’ve heard it said.”

  “And war,” Aritomo replied, “is a business.”

  Kneeling on a padded wooden stool before another deity was a woman in her seventies, her hands shaking a wooden container filled with flat bamboo sticks. She rattled the container until a single shoot edged out and clattered onto the floor. She put down the container, bowed before the god and picked up the stick. She hobbled to the temple medium, a man with a tuft of beard on his chin. He turned to a chest of matchbox-sized drawers behind him and selected a piece of paper corresponding t
o the number on the woman’s bamboo stick. The old woman leaned closer to the medium to hear the answer from the god.

  “Do you want to try it?” whispered Aritomo.

  “It can’t tell me what I want to know,” I said.

  A nun came up to us, her placid features and shaven head making it difficult to guess her age. Aritomo wrote down Tominaga’s name in Chinese characters and gave it to her. Then he took a bunch of joss sticks from her and dipped them into the flame of an oil lamp. He went to stand before the statue of the goddess of mercy, in a square of sunlight falling in through a hole in the roof. He closed his eyes, opened them again and inserted the joss sticks into a fat-bellied brass urn on the altar. White threads of smoke rose into the sunlight.

  “Once, when I was being disobedient, my mother told me a story about a murderer,” Aritomo said, his voice dry as the scent of sandalwood perfuming the air. “He had been sent to hell after he died. One day, as the Buddha was walking in a garden in paradise, he happened to glance into a lotus pond. And deep in the pond he saw this murderer, suffering the agonies of hell.

  “The Buddha was about to resume his walk when he saw a spider spinning its web, and he remembered how the murderer had once refrained from killing a spider crawling up his leg. With the spider’s permission, the Buddha took a strand from the web and dangled it into the lotus pond.

  “Down in the depths of hell, the murderer saw something gleaming in the blood-red sky, dropping closer and closer to him. When it was just above his head, he reached out and pulled it. To his surprise, it bore his weight. He began to climb out of hell, to climb up to paradise. But the distance from hell to paradise is thousands and thousands of miles. The other sinners soon saw what he was doing, and they too began to climb up the web. He was higher now, almost out of hell. Stopping for a rest, he looked down and saw the thousands of people, men and women, old and young, all trying to follow him, all clinging on to the thread. ‘Let it go! This thread is mine!’ he screamed at them. ‘Let it go!’

  “But no one listened to him. He was terrified that the strand would break. A few of the others had almost caught up with him. He kicked at them, kicked them until they released their grip and dropped away. But his frantic movements broke the strand above him, and then he too plummeted back into hell, screaming all the way.”

  Swallows flew between the rafters, stirring the incense smoke in their wake.

  “I couldn’t sleep for weeks after hearing that tale,” Aritomo said.

  We left the prayer hall and went up another set of steps. Aritomo greeted some of the nuns we passed. At the top of the steps a path opened up into a small garden bordered by a low wall. In the Kinta Valley far below I could make out the town of Ipoh, the shophouses and tin magnates’ mansions like grains of rice at the bottom of a bowl. Up in the mountains, above the tree line, the jungle thinned out, losing the strength to climb any higher.

  “How would you improve this little garden?” Aritomo asked, sitting down on a wobbly stone bench.

  My mind was still on the murderer, given his chance to escape hell only to lose it, and a few seconds passed before I replied. “I’d get rid of that hibiscus hedge—this space is too crowded for it. Then I’d fill in that halfhearted ornamental pond, and cut away most of that guava tree blocking the view,” I said. “Simplify everything. Open up the garden to the sky.”

  He gave an approving nod. Unscrewing the cap of his thermos flask, he filled two cups of tea and handed one to me. From somewhere in the temple buildings below, the nuns had started their chanting, their voices rising to us.

  “The nuns seem to know you well,” I remarked.

  “There aren’t many of them left in this place; most of them are quite old,” he said. “Once the last one is gone, the temple will be abandoned, I fear. People will forget that it ever existed.”

  For a while we sat there, sipping our tea. “I want to know what happened to you, in the camp,” he said finally.

  The heat from the cup passed through my gloves and warmed my palm. “No one wants to hear about us prisoners, Aritomo. We’re a painful reminder of the Occupation.”

  He looked at me and then touched my brow, gently. I felt as though a bell deep inside me had been sounded.

  “I want to know,” he said again.

  The first stone in my life had been set down years ago, when I had heard of Aritomo’s garden. Everything that had happened since then had brought me to this place in the mountains, this moment in time. Instead of consoling me, this knowledge left me fearful of where my life would lead.

  I began to speak.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  For an anglophile like my father, Teoh Boon Hau, there was only one Chinese saying that he believed in: A family’s wealth will not last beyond three generations. Being the only child—and a son, no less—of a wealthy man, my father’s main purpose in life was cultivating and enlarging the fortune made and left to him by his own father, and ensuring that his three children would not grow up to fritter it away. I suppose he had good reason to be worried: Penang was full of tales of millionaires’ children who were addicted to opium and horse racing, or who had ended up as paupers, sweeping the narrow streets of Georgetown and begging for money at the morning market. He never failed to point them out to us.

  We grew up in the house my grandfather had built on Northam Road: my brother, Kian Hock; Yun Hong; and I. My brother was twelve years older than I. I was the youngest, but Yun Hong and I had always been close, even with the three years’ difference between us. She took after our mother and so was considered beautiful by many people, including our parents. Kian Hock and I had inherited our father’s plumpness, and my mother scolded me whenever I asked for seconds at mealtimes. “Don’t eat so much, Ling, no man wants a fat wife” became a familiar refrain at the table, a refrain I always ignored, although it did not make it hurt less. Yun Hong always defended me.

  We spoke English at home, garnished with Hokkien, the dialect of the Chinese in Penang. My father had studied in an English missionary school when he was a boy and had not been taught to speak or read Mandarin, deficiencies he would pass on to his children: my brother went to St. Xavier’s, while Yun Hong and I studied at the Convent Girls’ School. The Chinese in Malaya who could not speak English looked down on us for not knowing our own ancestral tongue—“Eaters of the Europeans’ shit,” they called us. In turn we Straits Chinese laughed at them for their uncouth ways and pitied them their inability to get good jobs in the civil service or to rise in our colonial society. There was no need for us to know any language other than English, my father had often told us when we were growing up, because the British would rule Malaya forever.

  Our neighbor was Old Mr. Ong, the former bicycle repairman. He had kept his ties to his motherland. When the Japanese invaded China, he started the Aid China Fund to collect money for the Nationalists. For his reward Old Mr. Ong was made a colonel in the Kuomintang Army. It was just an honorary rank given to him by Chiang Kai-Shek, who in all probability scattered these around freely to the overseas Chinese as rewards for their generous donations, but Old Mr. Ong was very proud of it. He sent us a copy of the local Chinese newspaper with the photograph of him receiving the honor.

  We had been neighbors with Old Mr. Ong for twenty years, but my father only became friends with him after the Japanese massacred hundreds of thousands of Chinese in Nanking. We found it hard to accept the news when we heard it—the slaughter, the rape of old and young women, of children; the mind-numbing savagery of it all. What enraged my father more was the fact that the British had done nothing to stop it, nothing at all. For the first time in his life he questioned the high standing in which he had placed the British, the admiration he had always felt toward them. When he heard that Old Mr. Ong had opened his home to the Kuomintang agents who were traveling the world to raise money and support, my father began attending the meetings. Together with Old Mr. Ong and a group of well-known Chinese businessmen, he visited the towns and villages in Ma
laya and Singapore, making speeches and urging the people to contribute to the Aid China Fund. Kuomintang agents accompanied them to describe to the audiences how hard the KMT soldiers in China were fighting the Japanese. Sometimes I was allowed to attend these campaigns. “You can always tell which side a man supports, just by looking at whose photograph he puts up in his home,” I remember my father saying to me once as we drove home after a rally. “It’s either a portrait of Sun Yat Sen, or that fellow Mao hanging next to the family altar.” Our servants did the same thing in their quarters at the back of our house. A few days later my father ordered them to take down Mao’s portrait.

  In 1938, when I turned fifteen, the Japanese government wanted to buy rubber from my father. He refused to entertain them, but later changed his mind and agreed to meet the trade officials in Tokyo. He took us all with him—it was on that trip that my sister fell in love with the gardens of Japan.

  The negotiations with the Japanese failed. My father refused to sell any rubber to them. The officials’ wives were chilly to us after that: no longer smiling, no longer keen to show us around. Later Yun Hong told me that the KMT had instructed my father to accept the Japanese government’s invitation and to report back on what he could discover. Unfortunately, the KMT failed to warn him of the long memories of the Japanese government.

  Two years later, in the last weeks of 1941, Japanese troops landed on the northeast coast of Malaya, fifteen minutes after midnight and an hour before Pearl Harbor was attacked. People think that Japan entered the war through Pearl Harbor, but Malaya was the first door they smashed open. Japanese soldiers crawled up the beach at Pantai Chinta Berahi, taking the places of the leatherback turtles that emerged from the sea every year around that time to lay their smooth round eggs. From the Beach of Passionate Love, they cycled and fought their way down Malaya, riding their bicycles along the back roads past Malay kampongs and paddy fields and through jungles the authorities had assured us were impenetrable.