A few days later, there was a commotion in the house. Noises floated up—people talking and doors banging in the courtyard below. I came out of my room and asked our maid, Ah Chun. Besides Amah, she and the cook, Old Wong, were the only servants in our large and empty house.
“Oh, miss!” she said. “Your father has a visitor.”
My father occasionally had visitors, but they were old friends; mild, retiring people like himself who came and went with little ceremony.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“It’s a handsome young man!”
This was clearly the most exciting event that had happened in a long time; and I could imagine that Ah Chun would be pressed against the courtyard wall gossiping with next door’s maid before nightfall. But my heart was pounding. The hope that rose in my throat almost choked me.
I made my way slowly down the stairs. The front stairs in our house were finely carved of chengal wood in my grandfather’s time. Visitors always exclaimed over the exquisite handiwork, but for some reason neither Amah nor Old Wong liked the staircase. They would never say why but preferred to come and go by the cramped back stairway. When I reached the bottom, Amah found me.
“What are you doing?” she cried, shaking her dust cloth at me. “Go back to your room at once!”
“Who is it, Amah?”
“I don’t know, but don’t stand here. You’ll catch a chill.”
Never mind that it was a warm afternoon. Amah was always darkly muttering about drafts and cooling elements. I started back up the stairs slowly when my father’s study door opened and Tian Bai came out. He stood in the courtyard taking leave of my father while I clung to the railing. I wished I didn’t look so disheveled, yet hoped desperately that he would see me. As I hesitated over the impropriety of calling his name, he exchanged a few more words with my father and took his leave.
When Amah had thought me safely upstairs, I made my way hastily to the front door. At the very least, I wanted to gaze upon his retreating back. There used to be a porter to man the great doors of our house and announce visitors, but now his post lay derelict. There was no one to see as I opened the heavy wooden door. To my surprise Tian Bai was still there, standing irresolutely under the eaves of the great gate. He started at the cracking sound of the hinges.
“Li Lan!” he said.
A wave of happiness washed over me. For a moment, I could not speak.
“I brought some medicine from Yan Hong. She heard you were ill.” The warmth of his gaze seemed to penetrate my skin.
“Thank you,” I said. The urge to touch him, to place my hands on his chest and lean against him was overwhelming, but that would never do.
After a pause, he said, “Did you get the watch I sent you?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose it wasn’t a very appropriate gift.”
“My amah disapproved. She said it was unlucky to give a clock.”
“You should tell her that I don’t believe in such traditions.” When he smiled, a dimple appeared briefly in his left cheek.
“Why not?”
“Didn’t Yan Hong tell you? I’m a Catholic.”
“I thought the English were Anglicans,” I said, thinking of his education in Hong Kong’s missionary medical college.
“They are. But as a boy I had a Portuguese priest as my tutor.”
There were a hundred things I wished to say, a hundred more to ask him. But time had already run out for us. Tian Bai raised a hand to my face. I dared not breathe as he ran a finger lightly down my cheek. The look in his eyes was serious, almost intense. My face burned. I was seized by an urge to press my lips against the back of his hand, to bite the tips of his fingers, but I could only drop my eyes in confusion.
Tian Bai smiled faintly. “This is probably not the best time to discuss religious convictions. I really came to send my apologies.”
“About what?”
He started to speak, but just then I heard voices from behind. “My amah is coming!” I said. I began to pull the door closed when a thought struck me. Swiftly, I wrenched an ornament from my hair. It was a plain oxhorn comb, but I thrust it into his hand. “Take this. Consider it payment for the watch.”
As soon as I could, I cornered my father to ask about Tian Bai’s visit. Since the day that he had dashed my marriage hopes, he seemed to have aged. Our financial woes and my illness had weighed him down so that fresh lines creased his face like new-turned furrows. Indeed, he seemed so guilty that I could hardly bear to reprove him.
“What was the visit for?” I asked.
“He brought some medicine for you from the Lim family.” My father was ill at ease, unsure whether or not to mention Tian Bai’s name.
“I know who he is, Father. I met him at the Lim mansion. Did he have a message for me?”
My father hung his head. “He told me that he had heard from his uncle that the arrangement between the two of you was dissolved. He said he was sorry, but it was possible that his uncle might still change his mind.”
“Oh.” My heart gave a lurch.
“Don’t get your hopes up, Li Lan. Tian Bai is not the one who will make these decisions. The family will have a great deal of say in it; and as far as I know from Lim Teck Kiong, he has made up his mind quite firmly.”
I nodded but hardly heard a word that he said. I could only recall the slight pressure of Tian Bai’s finger as it had traced the curve of my cheek.
Chapter 8
Since my illness, Amah had taken to sleeping in my room on a thin pallet on the floor. I protested at this, as she was old and the wooden planks were hard, but she insisted. In truth, it made me feel much better. Every night Amah securely fastened the wooden shutters, no matter how hot and still the air was.
“You mustn’t catch a chill,” she said. “That would set you back.”
I suspected that Amah kept the windows shut for other reasons. When I was a little girl, I had heard many tales of terror not only from Amah but also from her friends. Malaya was full of the ghosts and superstitions of the many races that people it. There were stories of spirits, such as the tiny leaf-sized pelesit that was kept by a sorcerer in a bottle and fed on blood through a hole in the foot. Or the pontianak, which were the ghosts of women who died in childbirth. These were particularly gruesome as they flew through the night, trailing placentas behind their disembodied heads. When my father discovered my childhood terrors, he forbade Amah to speak about spirits or the dead to me. Superstition was a sore subject for him, and Amah had grudgingly acquiesced. But now I thought I must try again.
“Amah, where do people go when they die?”
As expected, she clucked her tongue, grumbling that we shouldn’t talk about such things, then contradicting herself by saying, didn’t I know all about it anyway? But finally she relented. “When someone dies, the spirit leaves the body and after the hundred days of mourning are over, passes through the ten Courts of Hell. The First Court is the arrival gate. There the souls are sorted. The good ones go straight to rebirth, or if they are really saintly they escape the Wheel of Life and go to paradise.”
“What about the not-so-good ones?” I asked.
“Well, if you were moderately good, you might be able to skip some of the Courts of Hell by crossing the gold or silver bridges. But if you committed some sin, you have to pass through the courts. The Second Court has the judges where they read out your good and bad deeds. Depending on that, you might be sent on to different punishments.”
I had seen some of the painted hell scrolls that depicted the grues
ome fates awaiting sinners. There were people being boiled in oil or sawed in half by horse and ox-headed demons. Others were forced to climb mountains of knives or were pounded into powder by enormous mallets. Gossips had their tongues ripped out, hypocrites and tomb robbers were disemboweled. Unfilial children were frozen in ice. The worst was the lake of blood into which suicides and women who had died in childbirth or aborted their children were consigned.
“But what about ghosts?” I asked.
“Most are hungry ghosts. If they die without children, or their bones are scattered, they are unable to even journey to the First Court. That’s why we leave those offerings out at Qing Ming.”
But Lim Tian Ching was not a hungry ghost. At least, not as far as I could judge from the pile of funeral offerings his mother had burned for him. So why was he haunting me?
“Amah, I need to tell you something,” I said at last.
She turned. The expression on her face was strained, almost fearful. “Are you pregnant?”
“What?” The surprise on my face seemed to reassure her.
“You’ve been behaving so strangely!” she said. “I saw you at the gate with that young man the other day. He touched your face. And then I was sorry I told you that story about how Yan Hong managed to get married.”
“Oh, Amah!” I felt like laughing hysterically. “If only it were so straightforward. Then we’d be forced to get married.”
“Don’t count on that!” said Amah sharply. “Yan Hong was the daughter of a rich man. Her mother died to ensure her marriage. You have no such clout.”
“I thought you said her mother died of shame.”
“No, I didn’t tell you the real story.” She pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “Of course, they didn’t want anyone to know that such an unlucky thing happened. The servants told me that Yan Hong’s mother hanged herself, leaving a letter saying that if her daughter was not allowed to marry her lover, she would come back to haunt the family. That’s why the marriage happened. Otherwise Madam Lim might have turned the girl out or forced her to get rid of the baby.”
The more I heard about the Lims, the less surprised I was that the ghost of their son behaved the way he had. “Well, I’m not pregnant. But in some ways, it’s worse. Lim Tian Ching is haunting me.”
Amah was increasingly upset as I told her about my dreams, interrupting with cries of consternation. “This is bad, very bad!” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? I could have got an amulet for you; we could have had you blessed in the temple or brought an exorcist in.”
Although I quailed before the storm of her scolding, I felt an indefinable relief at sharing my burden. I wasn’t mad, just cursed. The distinction gave me little pleasure.
“But I don’t understand why he can haunt me. He said something about the border officials.”
“The border officials of hell? Dai gut lai see!” Amah crossed off bad luck.
“Do we need an exorcist?”
“If an exorcist comes to the house, people will suspect we have ghost trouble.” Amah frowned uneasily.
We already had ghost trouble, I thought, feeling a bubble of hysterical laughter rise in my throat. But if word got around that our family was ill fated, then I might as well forget about ever getting another marriage offer. Old Wong, our cook, was a taciturn fellow. Our maid, Ah Chun, on the other hand, was a different matter. She could scarcely hold her tongue about what we had for dinner.
“There is no help for it,” said Amah. “We must go and see a medium.”
There was a famous medium who lived next to the Sam Poh Kong temple at the foot of Bukit China. Bukit China meant China Hill in Malay, and in 1460 when Sultan Mansur Shah married the Chinese princess Hang Li Poh in order to cement trading ties with China, the hill was given to her as a residence. Because of the excellent feng shui, it later became the site of a huge graveyard. Some said it was the largest Chinese cemetery outside China itself. I didn’t know how many people had been buried on its slopes, now overgrown with lalang, the wild elephant grass, and twining creepers of morning glory, but rumor had it that there were almost twelve thousand graves there. It was a veritable city of the dead.
We made our way there by rickshaw; and as I sat squeezed up against Amah, I shivered at the memory of Lim Tian Ching’s stables and the puppet-like rickshaw puller I had seen there.
“What is it?” Amah was fearful of a recurrence of fever, but I told her it was nothing.
“Tell me, have I been to this temple before?” I asked.
“A long time ago your mother and I took you on a feast day. You were just a little girl at the time, barely three years old.”
“Did Father come?”
“Him? You know your father! Anything that isn’t Confucian he’s bound to avoid.”
“Confucius venerated the ancestors. I don’t see that the Taoists would quibble with that.”
“Yes, but the Taoists also believe in tree spirits, mountain spirits, and ghosts. Aiya! Didn’t you study that, with all your father’s book learning?”
“He made me read the classics.”
I remembered copying a passage from Zhuang-Zi’s dream of a butterfly. Zhuang-Zi, a Taoist sage, woke up from sleep and said that he didn’t know whether he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who dreamed he was a man. Father had a rather lofty interpretation of Zhuang-Zi, preferring to concentrate on his philosophical ideas of man’s place in the universe rather than the literal Taoist beliefs in immortality, shape-changing, and magic potions. He complained that the common people had corrupted these existential musings into all sorts of folk religion and mumbo jumbo. As a result I had never paid too much attention to their beliefs. Perhaps I should have.
The Sam Poh Kong temple was famous in Malacca. Even though I couldn’t remember visiting it, I knew something of its history. The Sam Poh Kong temple was dedicated to the famous Ming admiral Zheng He. He was the one who, from 1405 to 1433, sailed from China around the Horn of Africa almost up to Spain. I had loved hearing about the exploits of Zheng He when I was a child, made all the more exciting since Malacca had been one of his ports of call. The accounts of his enormous treasure ships and the sheer numbers of war junks and seamen who accompanied him on his mission were amazing. In life, the admiral had been a eunuch who rose to his position by sheer ability. In death, he had become a god.
We climbed the temple steps and passed beneath the glazed roof tiles that had been brought from Chinese kilns. The deep eaves were hung with red silk lanterns and a red cloth was tied around the open door. Crowds of people moved through a haze of incense smoke from the hundreds of burning joss sticks. Amah bought a bundle and lit them at the main altar, mumbling prayers. I stood silently by while she bowed. Although I ought to do the same, I felt unable to. Years of my father’s resistance prevented me. Instead I stared blindly at the statues of gods and demons that were fearfully and intricately carved around the huge altar. The muttering of the devoted filled the air, broken occasionally by the sharp clatter of bamboo fortune sticks being shaken. This was the consultation of the oracle. A tube of sticks, each with a few cryptic words written on it, was shaken vigorously until one or two sticks fell out. For a fee, a meaning would be deduced by the priests.
I wondered whether Amah would have my fortune read in such a manner, but after she had completed her obeisance, she caught me by the sleeve and we went out of the temple into the dazzling sunlight again. Outside the gate containing Hang Li Po’s well, poisoned twice but said to never run dry, she turned left and followed the wall until we came upon a makeshift stall set up against it. It was nothing more than an attap leaf shelter against the sun and rain. There was a mat on the ground and an enormously fat middle-aged woman was seated upon it. She leaned against a wooden box with multiple small drawers, such as peddlers carry, and flicked a palm-leaf fan against the heat.
“Is t
his the medium?” I whispered.
Amah nodded. Somehow this wasn’t what I had expected. I thought that she might have a house near the temple or some other kind of more professional arrangement. This woman looked like a beggar. Amah had warned me earlier that the medium preferred payment not in the Straits dollars minted by the British but in the older tin currency of small ingots shaped fancifully like fish, crickets, or crocodiles. These were increasingly rare, and as we had none at such short notice, I could only hope that the copper half-cent coins in my purse would suffice.
There was a young man consulting her. He wore a broad-brimmed bamboo hat that completely concealed his face, though not his lean figure. The hem of his old-fashioned robe, though furred with dust from the road, was curiously embroidered with silver thread. Amah and I stood farther back, waiting our turn. She held an oiled-paper parasol to shield us from the merciless sun. Trickles of sweat crept down my collar, and the rice powder dusted over my face became damp and sticky. I stared at the man’s clothes, wondering what was taking him so long and why he bothered to hide his face when his dress was so distinctive. The embroidery was worked in a pattern of clouds and mist, and I thought if I should ever see it again, I would certainly remember it.
At last the man finished. I noted that he had given her a small tin ingot, charmingly shaped like a tortoise. Some said that the tin animal money was cast during religious ceremonies, that spells were said over it, and that the animal shapes were sacrificial proxies; but I saw only that it shone as though it had just been minted, despite the fact that most tin-animal money was at least a few centuries old.