The man says, “Take care of yourself.”
Bracing himself, Ren makes a mad dash up the driveway into shelter. The pelting rain soaks him, and he hesitates at the door, worried about the water pooling on the wide teak planks. In the front room of the house, an Englishman is writing a letter. He’s seated at a table, but when Ren is shown in, he rises with an enquiring look. He’s thinner and younger than Dr. MacFarlane. It’s hard to gauge his expression behind the twin reflections of his glasses.
Ren sets the battered carpetbag down and reaches into it for the letter, presenting it politely with two hands. The new doctor slits the envelope precisely open with a silver letter opener. Dr. MacFarlane used to open letters with his stubby finger and thumb. Ren drops his eyes. It isn’t good to compare them.
Now that he has delivered the letter, Ren feels a great weariness in his legs. The instructions that he memorized seem hazy; the room tilts around him.
* * *
William Acton examines the piece of paper he’s been handed. It comes from Kamunting, that little village next to Taiping. The handwriting is spiky and tremulous, the hand of a sick man.
Dear Acton,
I write with little ceremony, I’m afraid. I’ve left it too long and can barely hold a pen. With no relatives worth recommending, I’m sending a bequest: one of my most interesting finds, to whom I hope you’ll give a good home. I sincerely recommend my Chinese houseboy, Ren. Though young, he is trained and trustworthy. It is only for a few years until he gains his majority. I think you will find yourselves well suited.
Yours, etc. etc.
John MacFarlane, M.D.
William reads the letter twice and looks up. The boy stands in front of him, water trickling through his cropped hair and down his thin neck.
“Is your name Ren?”
The boy nods.
“You used to work for Dr. MacFarlane?”
Again, the silent nod.
William considers him. “Well, now you work for me.”
As he examines the boy’s anxious young face, he wonders whether it is rain or tears running down his cheeks.
4
Ipoh
Friday, June 5th
Since I’d picked up that horrible souvenir from the salesman’s pocket, I was unable to think of much else. The shriveled finger haunted my thoughts, even though I hid it in a cardboard box in the dance-hall dressing room. I didn’t want to have it anywhere near me, let alone take it back to the dressmaker’s shop where I boarded.
Mrs. Tham, the tiny, beaky-faced dressmaker to whom I was apprenticed, was a friend of a friend of my mother’s, a tenuous connection that I was grateful for. Without it, my stepfather would never have allowed me to move out of the house. However, Mrs. Tham came with an unspoken condition: that she should have free access to my private possessions at any time. It was an annoying but small price to pay for freedom. So I said nothing, even when the little traps I set—thread caught in a drawer, a book open at a certain page—were invariably disturbed. She’d given me a room key, but since she obviously had her own, it was quite useless. Leaving a mummified finger in that room would be like throwing a lizard to a crow.
So it stayed in the dressing room of the May Flower, and I lived in constant fear that one of the cleaners would find it. I considered turning it in to the office, pretending that I’d discovered it on the floor. Several times I actually picked up the horrid thing and started down the corridor, yet somehow I always turned back. The longer I hesitated, the more suspicious the whole affair seemed. I remembered the Mama’s disapproving glance when we were dancing; she might think I was a pickpocket who’d had second thoughts. Or perhaps the finger itself held a dark magic that made it difficult to get rid of. A watery blue shadow, that made the glass vial colder than it should be.
I’d told Hui of course. Her plump, pretty face creased. “Ugh! How can you bear to touch it?”
Technically, I was only touching the glass bottle, but she was right—it was unsettling. The skin had blackened and shriveled so that the finger resembled a withered twig. Only the telltale crooked joint and yellowed fingernail prompted a lurch of recognition. There was a sticker on the metal lid with a number: 168, a lucky combination that sounded, in Cantonese, like “fortune all the way.”
Hui said, “Are you going to throw it out?”
“I don’t know. He might come looking for it.”
So far there’d been no sign of the salesman, but he knew my real name.
“Ji Lin” was the Cantonese way of pronouncing it; in Mandarin, it would be “Zhi Lian.” The Ji in my name wasn’t commonly used for girls. It was the character for zhi, or knowledge, one of the five Confucian Virtues. The others were benevolence, righteousness, order, and integrity. Chinese are particularly fond of matched sets and the Five Virtues were the sum of qualities that made up a perfect man. So it was a bit odd that a girl like me should be named for knowledge. If I’d been named something feminine and delicate like “Precious Jade” or “Fragrant Lily,” things might have turned out differently.
* * *
“Such a peculiar name for a girl.”
I was ten years old, a skinny child with large eyes. The local matchmaker, an old lady, had come to call on my widowed mother.
“Her father named her.” My mother gave a nervous smile.
“I suppose you were expecting a son,” said the matchmaker. “Well, I’ve good news for you. You might get one.”
It had been three years since my father had died of pneumonia. Three years of missing his quiet presence, and three years of difficult widowhood for my mother. Her frail figure was more suited to reclining on a chaise than doing other people’s sewing and washing. The skin peeled off her pretty hands, now rough and red. Previously, my mother had put off all talk of matchmaking, but today she seemed especially dispirited. It was very hot and still. The purple bougainvillea outside trembled in the heat.
“He’s a tin-ore dealer from Falim,” said the matchmaker. “A widower with one son. He’s no spring chicken, but neither are you.”
My mother plucked at an invisible thread, then gave a slight nod. The matchmaker looked pleased.
The Kinta Valley in which we lived held the richest tin deposits in the world, and there were dozens of mines, both large and small, nearby. Tin-ore dealers made a good living, and he could have sent to China for a wife, but he’d heard my mother was beautiful. There were other candidates, of course. Better ones. Women who’d never been married. But it was worth a try. Crouching closer to eavesdrop, I hoped desperately that this man would choose one of them instead, but I had an unlucky feeling about it.
* * *
Shin and I, future step-siblings-to-be, met when his father came to call on my mother. It was a very straightforward meeting. No one bothered to pretend that there was some romantic pretext. They brought Chinese sponge cakes wrapped in paper from a local bakery. For years afterwards, I was unable to swallow those soft steamed cakes without choking.
Shin’s father was a stern-looking man, but his expression softened when he saw my mother. It was rumored that his late wife had also been a beauty. He had an eye for attractive women, though, of course, he didn’t visit prostitutes, the matchmaker had assured my mother. He was very serious, financially stable, and neither gambled nor drank. Studying his face surreptitiously, I thought he looked hard and humorless.
“And this is Ji Lin,” my mother said, propelling me forward. Wearing my best dress, outgrown so that my knobby knees stuck out, I dropped my head shyly.
“My son’s name is Shin,” he said. “Written with the character xin. The two of them are already like brother and sister.”
The matchmaker looked pleased. “What a coincidence! That makes two of the five Confucian Virtues. You’d better have three more children so you can complete the set.”
Everyone laughed, even my mother, smiling nervously and showing her pretty teeth. I didn’t. It was true though. With the zhi in my name for wisdom, and xin in Shin’s for integrity, we made up part of a matched set, though the fact that it was incomplete was a bit jarring.
I glanced at Shin to see if he found any of this amusing. He had sharp, bright eyes under thick brows, and when he saw me looking at him, he scowled.