The jo shot out from his hand and I stepped neatly aside without thought. Putting an atemi punch into his ribs I got him tilted off his feet. Merging my subsequent movement into his tilt I threw him to the ground, disarming him of the staff. He landed gracefully and curled his body into an ukemi forward roll, to come up again on his feet. When he turned around I was pointing the tip of the jo at the softest part of his neck.
We stood there, facing each other, our breaths barely discernible. Only the whisper of gentle waves and the rustle of leaves could be heard.
From that moment on we went all out. He still held back, but not by much. As for me, I gave it my all, and in return I received punches, kicks, and bruises from him. I was thankful my family was not around to see me hobbling up from the beach, rubbing my body, putting camphor balm on my bruises. He had warned me that in all fights one had to expect to get hit. The point was to minimize such occurrences.
I trained on my own too, making the effort to get into the daily habit of waking up earlier than my usual time. Long before it was fashionable to go running purely for health reasons I was already doing it, running along the beach, sometimes ten miles a day. I lost whatever fat I had, replacing it with a strange combination of a runner’s body and the muscular frame of an aikijutsu-ka. I also worked on my swordsmanship, doing hundreds of cuts daily, increasing my speed until my sword came slashing down in a blur. All these activities made me eat voraciously and Ah Jin, our cook, started complaining that I was losing weight in spite of her good cooking.
These were the foundations of a regimen that would go on until I was old—the foundations that made me one of the most respected teachers in the world after the war. The only respite I had was when Endo-san had to attend to his own business. And what that was I never asked. It would not have been polite.
Chapter Five
The most rewarding way to see the place one lives in is to show it to a friend. I had taken the beauty of Penang Island for granted for a long while now and it was only through acting as Endo-san’s guide that I learned to love my home again with an intensity that surprised and pleased me.
After the experience with the fortune-teller in the snake temple I made an extra effort to ensure that we avoided the temples whenever we explored the streets of Georgetown. There was never a shortage of places to show him and, in order to impress him with anecdotes and little known facts, I learned more about my home by asking the servants at Istana and reading the books in my father’s library.
One evening we stopped outside St. George’s Church, drawn by the voices of the choir in practice. We stepped inside and sat at the last pew. When I was younger, I whispered to him, I used to sing with the choir.
He silenced me and closed his eyes as the voices surrounded us, and I sat and listened again to the traditional English hymns that had formed the music of my boyhood. I had given up singing when my voice changed, four years ago, but it comforted me that the tunes and the order of service remained the same.
Afterward, when we were walking within the church grounds, Endo-san said, “That was a very stirring selection.”
“Maybe now you can begin to understand why the English feel they have to colonize half the world.”
He saw I was only half serious. “What were those last few lines?” he asked. “I heard mention of a sword.”
I could still remember the verses I had sung so often: “I will not cease from mental fight; Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand ...”
He nodded and repeated those lines. “I cannot agree. The sword must always remain the last option.”
“It’s just a song,” I said.
“But a song, as you have noted, powerful enough to drive a nation.”
“We use swords in training,” I pointed out.
“What am I teaching you?”
“To fight,” I said.
“No. That is the last thing I am teaching you. What I wish to show you is how not to fight. You must never, ever use what has been taught to you, unless your life is in danger. And even then, if you can avoid it, so much the better.”
He made me promise him that I would always remember that.
It rained heavily for the next few days and I could not show him around the town. But when the skies cleared again I took him exploring through the quay and the godowns on the waterfront. We walked out to the end of the wooden jetty and stood looking out to the Malayan mainland.
“What is that place?” He pointed to a collection of buildings on the Butterworth shore where two ships were in drydock, lifted high out of the water, their rusted hulls looking as if they had been smeared with galangal powder.
“The second largest shipyard in the country after Singapore,” I said. “The navy uses it for their repairs as well.”
Endo-san studied the shipyard for a while. Then he turned back to look at the range of hills behind us. “I wanted to ask you what that hill is called, that one with the houses on it.”
I knew even without looking what he was referring to. “Penang Hill. The highest point on the island. Those houses you see are government houses and holiday homes. We have a house up there too.”
“Will you take me there?” he asked.
“I was planning to,” I replied.
We hiked up Penang Hill in the early dawn at the end of the week. His chauffeur dropped us at the foot of The Hill, two miles out of Georgetown, near the Botanical Gardens, and we walked for ten minutes into the forest. It had rained the night before and the path was slippery, the dead leaves turning to mulch beneath our boots. The branches soaked us as we pushed them away. “It’s here somewhere,” I said, using my walking stick to lever myself up a muddy slope.
“Well, I have never heard of it,” Endo-san replied.
“That’s because you’ve never traveled with the locals.” I slipped, and his hand held me firmly, pulling me to a standing position.
“Careful.”
“There it is,” I said. “Moon Gate.”
Once it must have been as bone-white as the full moon on a cloudless night. Now the wall with the empty circle in it was stained with moss and fungi. Bird droppings, smeared by the strokes of the rain and dried by the heat, streaked its sides. It stood alone at the edge of the jungle, just a square slab of plastered bricks painted white, three steps leading to the round gateway set in the center.
We went through it, and started the climb up Penang Hill.
“How high is it?” Endo-san asked.
“A little over two thousand feet. It’ll take about three hours to reach the top. Nothing like the world’s highest mountain.”
We could have taken the funicular railway, which had been in operation since 1923, but Endo-san had refused. He wanted to feel the climb, he said. We would take the funicular on our way down.
Within an hour I was soaking wet. My bag felt heavy and despite my daily training my breathing became labored. “Come, keep moving,” Endo-san said, hitting my bare calves with his stick. He moved in front of me and set the pace. Rainwater streamed down the path to soak our boots. My hands were muddy from gripping wet branches and pushing myself up from the ground. Roots, many as thick as my wrists, reached out from the earth and made our progress difficult.
We stopped at a wooden tea shack at the halfway point, greeting the other early-morning hikers.
“Look at them,” Endo-san said. “They do not look as tired as you. And some of them are not young anymore.”
“These are people who climb The Hill every morning. I’m quite certain they’re already used to it,” I replied, a touch defensively.
Endo-san took out his camera and photographed me sitting on a wooden bench as I drank a steaming cup of tea. Around me birds in bamboo cages brought up by the hikers twittered and hopped on their perches, sensing the approach of dawn.
“Let us go on, you have rested enough,” Endo-san said.
We resumed our climb. The sun spread through the canopy of leaves and warmed the air. Tendrils of steam curled up from th
e ground, as though someone had lit joss sticks and stuck them into the watered earth. Monkeys whooped as they crossed from branch to branch, showering us with heavy droplets of water and damp twigs. Occasionally we caught sight of them, big brown furry creatures that disappeared quickly into the trees, leaving only the trembling leaves to betray their passage.
Just before noon we reached the summit, emerging from a lane behind the Bellevue Hotel. The air was cool at this height and the wind was blowing in banks of mist. We bought crushed sugarcane juice from a hawker and I drank it hurriedly, as though afraid it would disappear. We went past the hotel and went down a narrow road. There were no cars up here, just bicycles and a few army trucks.
“The Hill is always crowded with ang-mohs,” I said.
He looked puzzled.
“Red Hairs,” I explained. The phrase was used to describe the Europeans, many of whom were avoiding the worst of the hot season in Georgetown by coming up to The Hill. Endo-san laughed.
We turned left at a stone fountain set in a circle of flowering plants and entered the gates to Istana Kechil, the Small Palace. I took out the key and opened the front door. There was no one inside. My father came to shoot snipe, birds from Siberia which chose to winter here, and he never allowed anyone to use the house, even when we were not staying there. It had been a long time since we last visited.
The house was musty and cold with the silence of desertion. We opened the windows and doors and went out into the garden, where the bougainvillaea and hibiscus trees were in full bloom, moving in the wind.
Endo-san climbed onto the low wall of granite blocks that bounded our property to prevent people from falling into the ravine below. It was turning out to be a clear day and all of Georgetown lay spread out beneath us. We could even see across the channel to the mountains of Kedah. Turned into shades of blue by the distance, they lay beneath a layer of clouds. Surrounding the mountains were flatlands, cut up into quilted squares of rice fields. Narrow threads of white stitched the smooth surface of the sea: ferries carrying cargo to the mainland; steamships heading for Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, India, and the world beyond; navy boats patrolling for pirates from Sumatra and the Straits of Sunda.
He set up his tripod and began to take photographs: east, west, all directions, shifting his camera with precision, as though he had marked out a grid on the ground. The camera clicked and clicked, like a gecko in mating season.
I remembered the photographs in his house and wondered why he was never shown in them. Was it because he had always been traveling on his own? “Let me take some pictures for you, so you can be in them as well,” I offered.
He declined. “My face would only spoil the pictures.”
From experience, I knew the night would be cold on The Hill, so we had come prepared. We walked to the Bellevue Hotel for dinner in our black dinner jackets. The headwaiter seated us on the verandah, giving us a view of the lights of the town below, which flowed inland like a tide of white phosphorescence from the water’s edge at Weld Quay. The seas enclosing Penang were unseen in the darkness, and only granules of light indicated where the boats were.
Endo-san said with an appreciative tone, “Thank you, for bringing me up here. That sight is worth the climb, is it not?”
“Yes it is, Endo-san,” I said, knowing somehow that this would be a night I would always remember.
He narrowed his eyes when he studied the vines in the trellises above us. Something among them made a slight movement. “Are those snakes I see, curled around the vines?”
“Pit vipers,” I said. “One of the hotel’s claims to fame. There’s no need to worry—no one’s ever been bitten here. You can hardly see them, they’re so well camouflaged.”
“But you know they are lying in wait just above, ready to fall on you.”
“I ignore them, as does everyone eating here.”
“The great human capacity for choosing not to see,” he said.
“It makes life easier,” I said.
The waiter placed a stove and a pot on our table. On a large plate were some eggs, lettuces, chicken, fish balls, and noodles. As the pot boiled we started to throw everything on the plate into the pot.
“What is this called?” he asked. “Looks like our shabu shabu.”
“Steam Boat. Perfect for a night like this.”
“When is your family returning from London?” he asked, as he placed a cooked egg on my dish.
“Near the end of the year.” I burned my tongue as I bit into the
egg.
“Tell me about them.”
I thought for a while. One takes one’s family so much for granted, I never really thought about describing mine to anyone. I took a sip of tea to cool my tongue and said, “My father’s forty-nine years old. He has gray—almost white—hair, but a lot of women think he’s very good-looking. He keeps fit by swimming and sailing. He works extremely hard. He used to spend more time with us, but after my mother died . . . That’s what Isabel tells me. I was too young then ...” I shrugged, unsure how to explain my father’s detachment from his children after my mother’s death.
“Yes, I met him, when I signed the lease for the island.”
“I have two brothers. Edward’s twenty-six and William is twenty-three. They’re very much like my father, I think. Edward read law—like my father, he’s a qualified barrister but he’s chosen to work in the family business. William left university last year and my father wants him to work for the family as well.”
“As all fathers do,” Endo-san said.
“Edward—well, I’m not close to Edward. He’s cold, and we seldom talk. Isabel is twenty-one, and I think she is stronger than my two brothers in many ways. At least she always gets her way. She wasn’t very pleased with me when I told her I would prefer to stay at home than go with them to London.”
“And you, where do you fit in?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “The half-Chinese, youngest child in an English family? I don’t think I fit in anywhere at all.”
Endo-san remained silent, and suddenly I found myself saying all the things I was never able to say to my father. “What makes it worse is that I go to the same school my brothers attended. Many of my teachers used to teach them and everyone knows who my brothers are. But instead of making me feel closer to them, it has only widened the differences between us.”
“You are not what everyone expected,” Endo-san said softly. “And young people are often oblivious to the hurt they can cause.”
“Yes,” I replied, feeling relieved that he had not belittled my circumstances, but had in fact understood them so thoroughly.
I wrapped my hands around a cup of tea to keep warm. There was only a small crowd tonight, mostly senior British Army officers in their uniforms and with their wives. I recognized some of them. Their voices were loud, happy, and carefree. I pointed them out to Endo-san, and he studied them, almost as if placing them in his mind. A six-piece band started to play and a few of the men led their women onto the dance floor.
“A popular place with the army,” he remarked.
“Oh yes. They maintain a small garrison here. Like a lookout point. It makes sense because from here they can see the whole island and the surrounding seas.”
“All the way to India,” he said.
“Yes, all the way there. Perhaps even all the way to Japan.”
He laughed. “Then I shall come up here more often.”
We woke up early and greeted the sun as it rose over the rim of the sea. We left the house and climbed down a track to the edge of the cliff, where we sat on a cold, narrow ledge, and began zazen. In the vegetable farms below us I heard the roosters crowing. Mongrel dogs barked and wooden gates slammed. Mist wreathed the valleys in thick patches, like frost on moss-covered boulders.
I gripped the edge and felt faint from fear. It was only six inches wide and there was a sixty-foot drop to the tops of the trees below. In my mind the drop lengthened to abysmal depths and I wanted to open my eye
s. I imagined the ledge giving way, heard it crumble as the stones broke beneath our weight. To the west, clouds sailed in with the rain and I thought the wind would blow us off. I held on harder and wished the exercise were over and complete. My eyes could not help but drop down to the pointed tops of the trees, spears waiting eagerly in a pit.
“Let go,” he said. “You will not fall.”
“What if I do?”
“I will catch you.”
I glanced up to find him looking at me, not a smile on his mouth, just a nod, and then he closed his eyes again. I thought about his words, words uttered softly, without any faltering, words that would mark a change in my life.
At that moment, I knew I would trust him completely, whatever the consequences to me. I closed my eyes and loosened my fingers and the euphoria of release rushed through me. The sun came out from the clouds and joined us like an old acquaintance. Soon my eyelids burned red beneath as the light filled the world. I no longer felt I was on the cold hard ledge but as if I were floating high above the land, close to the heat of the sun, whose light I could see inside my head, illuminating an expanse that seemed wider than the universe.
After a light breakfast, we went out onto the lawn. We bowed and he kicked me, aiming for my kidneys. I was not fast enough— I was staring at his eyes, at his hands, still thinking of the ledge and his words to me. The pain flared like red ink splashed on paper and I dropped to my knees. I saw his other leg start to move and knew it would go for my head. I rolled along my back and came up standing. The kick missed me and for that split-second he was mine. I lifted his leg, using its upward swing, and kicked the inside of his shin. He grunted and I pushed him off balance, onto the grass. He rolled up onto his feet and sent another kick to my side. I jammed it by moving into it, stopping it from extending fully, but I went right into his fist. It slammed into my cheek and I saw white. I fell backward, and blacked out for long seconds.
“You are improving. But you are still looking at my hands, my feet, and my eyes,” he said. He pulled me up and examined my eyes and my cheeks, his fingers stroking my face. “Nothing serious,” he said.