Slow Boat to China and Other Stories

Kim Chew Ng, Carlos Rojas

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231540995
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires asiatiques

"Dream and Swine and Aurora," "Deep in the Rubber Forest," "Fish Bones," "Allah's Will," "Monkey Butts, Fire, and Dangerous Things"—Ng Kim Chew's stories are raw, rural, and rich with the traditions of his native Malaysia. They are also full of humor and spirit, demonstrating a deep appreciation for human ingenuity in the face of poverty, oppression, and exile.

Ng creatively captures the riot of cultures that roughly coexist on the Malay Peninsula and its surrounding archipelago. Their interplay is heightened by the encroaching forces of globalization, which bring new opportunities for cultural experimentation, but also an added dimension of alienation. In prose that is intimate and atmospheric, these sensitively crafted, resonant stories depict the struggles of individuals torn between their ancestral and adoptive homes, communities pressured by violence, and minority Malaysian Chinese in dynamic tension with the Islamic Malay majority. Told through relatable characters, Ng's tales show why he has become a leading Malaysian writer of Chinese fiction, representing in mood, voice, and rhythm the dislocation of a people and a country in transition.

inscribed backs

Legend has it that once, after his prayers, Viye Tunra took a branch and whipped himself on the back three times, and said, “If you are more calm and peaceful, and stop struggling, I will help you find the way.”

GUAN LIYE, AL-RASHAH

1

INITIALLY, this had been merely an accidental discovery that Mr. Yur, a “coolie expert” in the history department of a local university, made in the course of his research. Mr. Yur had spent over three decades investigating early nineteenth-century patterns of Chinese transnational migration, and his research had already yielded rich results. His representative works include A Typology of Coolies (doctoral dissertation, London, 1969), Interactions Between Chinese Coolies: Struggle and Cooperation (Taiwan: Academia Sinica, 1975), and Coolies and Aborigines: 1900–1941 (University of Australia, 1978), all of which are regarded in the field as must-read classics. Once, he was on the riverside with a coolie with whom he had developed a close friendship after having interviewed him for a long time. They were singing (he still remembers it was a song called “Ah, South Seas,” from the War of Resistance), and the coolie was crooning sorrowfully out of key (because he couldn’t read or speak standard Chinese, and only knew a local dialect, he therefore had no choice but to memorize the lyrics): “Ah, South Seas, you are my beautiful homeland.” When the elderly coolie took a towel and started vigorously rubbing his back, Mr. Yur suddenly noticed several dark blue Chinese characters on his shoulder. Initially, Mr. Yur thought these marks were merely moles or scars, but when he looked more carefully (even as his curiosity aroused the coolie’s resistance), he saw that they were in fact a line of characters written so closely that they almost ran together. Each character, moreover, had a subtle mistake and was either missing a stroke or had an extra stroke. The text seemed to say, “Ah, South Seas, you are my mother’s homeland” (Mr. Yur remarked with a laugh that, to use a linguistic term, this was but a process of verifying a transcription). The character for land had too many strokes, to the point that it appeared to be merely a dark blue blob. Mr. Yur could tell that the characters had been inscribed with a needle, like a tattoo. Upon noticing that Mr. Yur was staring intently at his back, the old coolie became visibly distressed, as if someone were staring at his private parts. He quickly put on his shirt and refused to answer any questions (such as who did this, and why?). And while the coolie remained outwardly friendly, his manner grew noticeably colder. From the coolie’s reaction, Mr. Yur sensed that these tattooed characters must be subject to some sort of taboo, perhaps having to do with religious (or superstitious) belief, but more likely they had to do with some secret society. As everyone knows, in contemporary Chinese society tattoos had already become virtually an exclusive symbol of membership in a secret society. Those, however, are typically tattoos of tigers, dragons, flowers, the demon Zhong Kui, or of big-breasted women. These tattoos rarely include much writing, and instead typically feature the name of the man’s beloved. Mr. Yur joked that he remembered that the mother of the Southern Song general Yue Fei had tattooed the words Serve the Country with Utmost Loyalty on her son’s back, and in one of Jin Yong’s martial arts novels the disciple Chen Xuanfeng, who secretly learned the “Nine Yin White Bone Claw” technique, has the Nine Yin Sutra tattooed on his belly. Mr. Yur also recalled an old joke about how a male patient was visiting the doctor, and while the doctor looked down and saw a tattoo that said “a flow,” his pretty nurse looked down and saw instead the phrase “a spring river easterly flows.” Or how several years earlier there was a rumor that when communists caught men visiting prostitutes, they would tattoo the word whoremonger on the men’s cheeks.

If this had been merely an isolated incident, he would not have felt that there was any value in pursuing an investigation. But over the following two decades, he indirectly obtained various pieces of corroborating evidence.

Of course, this was not yet another tall tale. He had a relative, a Dr. Tiao, who had spent a long term working as a doctor in the former Straits Settlements. Dr. Tiao was a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine who could treat virtually anything, and Mr. Yur mentioned this case to him. Dr. Tiao laughed and replied that in the several decades he had been practicing medicine, he had indeed encountered “quite a few” patients with tattoos, many of whom were coolies. Unfortunately, he couldn’t recall the content of any of the tattoos he had seen. “These are secrets that belong to the patients,” he declared solemnly. “And, furthermore, those sorts of patients are generally very uneasy, and are not willing to let a doctor examine their back.” Therefore, it had never occurred to him to look closely at the tattoos, to the point that he would deliberately avert his gaze when he happened to glimpse one. When asked to try to recall what they were, he pondered for a while but eventually shook his head. All he could remember was that one of the tattoos was quite large, covering the patient’s entire back like a swarm of ants. Maybe it was an essay or the sort of poem that in ancient times people would sometimes carve on the blades of their swords, but all of the characters looked like they were miswritten. He requested the patient’s information, but his request was denied on a technicality. Dr. Tiao, accordingly, did not create a file for the patient. Mr. Yur asked him whether he could recall any of his colleagues having mentioned similar cases, and Dr. Tiao pondered for a while but again shook his head and said that he couldn’t think of any. “We all have great respect for our patients’ privacy,” he emphasized. Dr. Tiao couldn’t understand, however, why those coolies had Chinese characters tattooed on their backs, given that virtually every single one of the coolies was illiterate. In fact, they couldn’t even write their own names, and when filling out any form of documentation (either official or private), they had no choice but to use a thumbprint in lieu of a signature. Why, then, would they be tattooed with text that they themselves had no ability to read? Who had done this? And why? What was the function and purpose of these tattoos? Were they a charm for avoiding evil spirits? I had never heard of such a thing. Dr. Tiao suggested that perhaps the tattoos were part of a classification system used by the company that had originally sold the coolies as children, the same way that it is still popular among Malaysian Chinese who raise pigs to brand their farm’s code on the pig’s back. Mr. Yur, who was an expert on coolies, weakly protested, “But, we have no proof …” But even Mr. Yur recognized that the questions Dr. Tiao had raised were precisely ones that he himself had long been pondering.

Mr. Yur asked Dr. Tiao to notify him if either he or any of his colleagues ran across any similar cases in the future, but for several years there had been no news of any new discoveries. At the time, Dr. Tiao had added an important caveat: “Even if that clan were to still exist, by now they would be so old that they wouldn’t need a doctor anymore, since they would already have almost all died out.”

One year while Mr. Yur was out doing some sightseeing after having come to Taiwan for a conference, he encountered a scene that left him completely stunned. Sitting in the shade under some trees by a temple, a group of slightly overweight and gray-haired old men were chatting and fanning themselves. Each of them had a tattoo clearly inscribed on his arm, which said things like, “Oppose Communism and Restore the Nation,” “Long Live the Three People’s Principles,” “Great Neutrality” [on the left arm] / “Perfect Uprightness” [on the right arm], “Accept Death” [on the left arm] / “Like Homecoming” [on the right arm], “Counter-attack” [on the left arm] … Each of these men seemed completely at ease, and they displayed their tattoos without the slightest concern that anyone might care what they said. Initially, Mr. Yur thought that this must be the meeting of some secret society, but when he asked his Taiwan companions he learned that this was actually a very common scene, and that the men were all former soldiers who had retreated to Taiwan from the mainland. During the Korean War, captured POWs were forcibly tattooed, and they later got corresponding tattoos in the same location to demonstrate their determination and loyalty. The result was indeed a label, but it simultaneously functioned as a political slogan. Mr. Yur’s friend, who was studying Taiwan history, asked, “Are you interested in them? This is a very simple phenomenon, and there is really nothing worth investigating there.”

Later, at a banquet with some fellow academics, a scholar specializing in Shang dynasty oracle bones heard about Mr. Yur’s fascination with these tattoos, and remarked with a mischievous smile, “This sounds like it is even harder to investigate than our oracle bone inscriptions. The texts we study are all engraved on shell and bone—although they were merely turtle shells or ox scapula, and not actual human bones—and therefore they can be preserved for quite a long time. Furthermore, after the oracle bones were buried, they were protected by the soil. But your object of study is inscribed on human skin, which is easily damaged. It’s not even possible to take a rubbing of it.” He laughed bitterly.

In the interim, Mr. Yur looked up virtually all of the relevant books and articles on the subject—including studies by Victor Parcell, who had done the most in-depth work on new Malaysian Chinese communities during the colonial period and on Chinese secret societies—but was unable to find any relevant records.

Sometimes he would think that somewhere there must be a lead of some sort. At the very least there must some clues regarding the men’s families? He repeatedly submitted oral history proposals to the National History Archives, but invariably received the same response: “This proposed project is completely unbelievable, and lacks any discernible research value.”

Many years later, when he was working on other “valuable” projects that he had no choice but to complete (because if he didn’t, they would impact his annual appraisal, and might even affect his chances of promotion), he had virtually forgotten all about that incident. Even his coolie friend, whose tattoos were the only ones he had been able to see with his own eyes, and Dr. Tiao, who was his sole witness, had both passed away without his knowledge.

This all changed following that unexpected incident. The incident in question occurred not long after he was reminded by his school that “he had reached the age of mandatory retirement.” Just when it seemed as though he had completely forgotten about those texts, they suddenly found him again.

Once when he was abroad, a car accident happened to send him to the hospital. He wasn’t sure how long he was unconscious, but was eventually woken by a bubbling sound, as if from an endless river. Before he was able to figure out where he was or what had happened to him, or even where he had been injured (he had a throbbing pain, but couldn’t determine its precise source), he turned his head and saw that in the bed next to his a withered body was lying motionless, like a bronze statue. The figure’s head appeared very small, like a desiccated fruit. The sunlight shining in through the leaves and the glass window was still burning hot. He noticed with a start that the skin containing those bones was covered with blue markings that appeared to undulate like ocean waves under the room’s intricate lighting. He fumbled around for his glasses and, after finding them on the bedside table, he put them on. Finding that the scene in front of him was blurry, he realized that his glasses were missing a lens. Yes, the markings were indeed Chinese characters. He wanted to immediately copy them down, but couldn’t find a pen and paper and therefore had no choice but to try as hard as he could to commit the text to memory. At the time it didn’t occur to him that he could have asked the nurse for a pen and paper. Eventually, perhaps because he was concentrating so hard, he passed out. After a while, he was violently shaken awake again, and an overweight Malay woman asked him coldly, “Do you remember your name? And your home phone number?” He sat up with a start, but noticed that the bed next to his was now empty. “Where did that old man go?” Mr. Yur asked in a soft voice. “First answer my questions.” The nurse refused to give ground. He therefore had no choice but to cooperate, and only then was he given the answer he wanted: “He was just taken away to be cremated. Like you, he was picked up from the street, but since he had no known relatives the government therefore had no choice but to cover his expenses.”

Mr. Yur was extremely disappointed, and desperately searched his memory for that text, which seemed to have gotten shredded. In the end, he was only able to recall a single sentence:

On that long, hot September afternoon, that was oppressively sweltering. …

But he couldn’t be certain whether that even one sentence was correct. That was what he remembered hearing through his right ear, while in his left ear there echoed the sound of a different sentence:

“I, in exchange for my own, now appear on everyone’s back.”

Who would write such a hyperbolic phrase on someone’s back? It was almost like something he had recently read in a novel. He instinctively reached for his glasses, but discovered that now both of the lenses were missing.

That happened to be September, and it was still as sweltering as the weather described in that sentence tattooed on the man’s back. Perhaps for that reason, during the two months that Mr. Yur stayed at that courtyard, those two sentences continued to echo in his head. They quickly reverted back to pure speech, to the point that he lost all recollection of the original written characters. A low rumbling sound resonated between his ears like a curse, and for a long time he was unable to make out any other sound, and everyone around him complained that he always spoke in a cold and disinterested manner. Gradually, he also began to feel that the people around him were treating him coldly in response. It became virtually impossible for him to teach his regular seminars, because all he would do would be to lower his head and listen to the sound in his ears. Eventually he went to see an ENT doctor, who told him that his ears looked completely normal, adding, “You should be able to hear anything you want to.” After a while, he had no choice but to request early retirement, on the grounds that “he needed long-term recuperation in order to address the lapses in concentration he was experiencing as a result of PTSD following the car accident.”

The following year, during Taiwan’s Southern Expansion Policy, Southeast Asia became a hot new area of academic study, and given that Mr. Yur had been working in a related field, he was therefore invited by some academic institution to serve as an advisor and oversee some research projects. It was as a result of this that we had the opportunity to participate in this remarkable search.

Mr. Yur’s original plan was to find some sort of cover. For instance, he came up with a proposal to investigate “a life history of Chinese coolies in the nineteenth-century Straits Settlements: including their disease, medical treatment, and recovery.” This three-year project was designed to prevent him from encountering again that kind of “utterly absurd” criticism on the pretext that he was using a New Historicist approach. Embedded within his stated proposal was his original plan, but it wasn’t until the project had advanced to a certain point, and he and the other youthful participants had established a certain amount of familiarity with one another, that he finally began to relate the entire story to us in an emotional and nostalgic tone. He casually mentioned his “personal request,” and asked that we make every effort to keep it a secret from the funding agency. He hoped to use a large-scale fabricated background (what he calls a “maritime resource”) to investigate, to see whether or not it was possible to have the object of his search “float to the surface.”

“I think it might already be too late, and we may now be even less likely to encounter any survivors than if we were investigating a critically endangered species.” Mr. Yur sighed, adding, “This is how things always turn out. Twenty years ago this might still have been possible, but eventually you reach the point where history fades into legend.”

What followed was three years of formal investigation. After a meticulous division of labor and preparation, Mr. Yur was responsible for participating in the group discussions at each stage, and for adjusting the project’s ensuing implementation. The project proceeded like a well-oiled machine, and his plan was that during the latter stages the project committee would be granted a considerable amount of autonomy. Eventually, apart from participating in postmortem discussions and directing the writing of the final report, Mr. Yur was able to virtually disappear. The eighteen team members were divided into various groups, each of which was given a different set of responsibilities. They traveled to the former Straits Settlements of Singapore, Malacca, and Penang, where they conducted broad and meticulous field research. They visited old Chinese medical clinics, brothels, restaurants, coffin stores, barber shops, Chinese cemeteries, guildhalls for various different villages, towns, and cities, together with retirement communities, mental asylums, and so forth … visiting every location where, based on available records, they could determine there lived residents who were ninety years old or over. This historically un...