After his departure, Ah Long calls Ren over to the formal dining room, the table’s polished surface marked by neat piles of unopened mail. They’re all addressed to William and will be forwarded to his family.
“What is it?” Ren asks.
Ah Long holds up a white envelope. For a dizzying second, Ren wonders whether his master has finally received an answer from that lady Iris, the one that he wrote letter after letter to. But no, this letter is for Ren. His name is written on it as a single Chinese character. That’s the part that Ah Long can, thankfully, read.
“For me?” Ren has never in his short life received anything like a letter, though he knows how to write one. Dr. MacFarlane taught him the format, when they were practicing dictation. Ren slits the envelope open carefully. Inside is a single piece of paper.
“Who’s it from?” asks Ah Long suspiciously.
But Ren is reading slowly. It’s short, no more than a few sentences, and when he’s read it through twice, he tucks it away.
“From that girl,” he says.
“The one with short hair, from the party?”
Ren nods, impressed by Ah Long’s memory.
“What did she say?”
Ren hesitates. How to explain it, this reluctance to share her words? Simple ones, but private. “She said she’d always remember me.” And Yi. “And that we’d meet again. There’s an address here if I want to write to her, care of Lee Shin at the medical college.”
Ah Long grunts. Somehow, he seems satisfied.
* * *
The next day, in the still, hot afternoon, an unexpected visitor appears. It’s Dr. Rawlings. Waving aside Ah Long’s attempts to serve him tea, he sits at the kitchen table and studies Ren’s forlorn little figure. “Do you have a place to go?” he asks.
A headshake. “I might go to Kuala Lumpur. To see Auntie Kwan—my old master’s housekeeper.” Ren still has her address tucked away in Dr. MacFarlane’s carpetbag. With a pang of doubt, he wonders if he’ll be a burden to her.
“Boy, stay with me,” says Ah Long, in his gruff broken English. “I find another job.”
Ren stares at him, astonished. Ah Long has never said anything to him about this, but there’s a warm feeling in his stomach. As though a cat is sitting on it, with its furry, comforting bulk.
Dr. Rawlings inclines his head thoughtfully. “I have a proposal for both of you. I’ve a job transfer coming up, and my current staff doesn’t want to relocate. I’ll need a cook and a houseboy. It will be much the same sort of bachelor duties, since my wife and family are in England.”
Ah Long glances at Ren and gives an almost imperceptible nod. “Thank you, Tuan. I think about it.”
Rawlings nods, too, a storklike jerk. He also looks at Ren. “I’m not a surgeon like Mr. Acton was. I’m a pathologist and a coroner, which is an interesting field of study, though I understand if you find that frightening, after all you’ve been through.”
Ren says seriously, “Will it be all right?”
“Yes. I promise that you’ll have time to go to school. I heard you said no to the lawyer, but I think in a little while, you’ll change your mind. Mr. Acton would have wanted it. He thought very highly of you.”
Ren’s face brightens. “Did he?”
“Indeed he did. He told me about your treating that girl Nandani’s leg, and said you were a natural physician. You ought not to waste such a gift—you may save many lives in future.”
Saving lives. Ren feels a bubble of hope. Yes, he would like that. “Where are you transferring to, Tuan?”
“Singapore,” says Rawlings. “The Singapore General Hospital. I think you’ll like it there.”
Notes
WERETIGERS
The tiger has traditionally been revered across Asia. Ancestor worship in the form of tigers—the belief that the soul of an ancestor could reincarnate as a tiger—was common in Java, Bali, Sumatra, and Malaya, and though the ancestor form was considered “friendly,” it was also feared as a disciplinarian.
Spirit tigers appear in many guises, including guardian spirits of shrines and holy places, corpses who transform, and entire villages of beast-men. Tigers, like humans, were thought to possess a soul, and were often addressed with honorary titles, such as “uncle” or “grandfather.” In many tales, the true nature of the weretiger is that of a beast who wears a human skin—the exact opposite of the European werewolf. There is probably some connection to Buddhist and Daoist beliefs that certain animals could, by practicing meditation and magic, attain human form. Yet no matter how powerful they become, they are never quite human.
Shape-shifters, in particular, embody the tension between man and his beast nature. In most tales, the tiger acts in ways that people normally do not, expressing hidden or forbidden desires: the most basic of which is to murder people in their own houses. The weretigers of Kerinci were said to covet gold and silver, while southern China has a number of stories of attractive women who are tigers in disguise, and are only revealed when they start digging up graves to devour corpses, much to the horror of their husbands. More amusingly, in Pu Songling’s story “Mr. Miao” (苗生), a stranger who joins a scholar as his drinking companion is so irritated by the poor quality of poetry recited at a gathering that he turns into a tiger and kills everyone (perhaps the ultimate literary criticism!).
MALAYA
Malaya is the historic name for present-day Malaysia. Colonized by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and finally the British before independence in 1957, Malaya was a highly profitable source of tin, coffee, rubber, and spices, as well as home to the important trading ports of Penang, Melaka, and Singapore.
PERAK (KINTA VALLEY)
This book takes place in the state of Perak, most notably the Kinta Valley towns of Batu Gajah and Ipoh. One of the world’s richest tin deposits, the Kinta Valley has been commercially mined since the 1880s. For more than a century, up till the 1980s, Malaysia continued to supply more than half the world’s tin ore.
Kinta has a long history, having been settled since Neolithic times. As far back as the 1500s, the Portuguese noted that Perak paid its annual tributes in tin. During the 1700s, it was famous for its wild elephants, which were trapped and sold for the elephant armies of the Moghul emperors. The landscape is dominated by beautiful limestone hills, many of which are riddled with natural caves and underground rivers.
Ipoh, the largest city in Perak, was once known as the cleanest, neatest town in Malaysia. The center of commerce and prosperity that resulted from the tin boom, it’s famous for good food and many historic buildings. As this book is set in a fictionalized Ipoh, I’ve taken liberties with certain landmarks, like the Celestial Hotel, whose construction began in 1931 but opened later. Likewise, although Ipoh had several dance halls, the May Flower is a figment of my imagination, inspired by Bruce Lockhart’s account of a Chinese dance hall in Singapore in his memoir.1
BATU GAJAH DISTRICT HOSPITAL
Founded in 1884 on fifty-five hectares of land, the hospital is built in colonial style and laid out in a low gardenlike setting. The buildings have modernized since then, but a few of the original structures can still be seen. I took liberties with the layout of the hospital to add steps down the hill, a pathology storeroom, a cafeteria, etc., as well as the entirely fictitious hospital staff, imagining what it might have been like in 1931 based on old photographs of similar colonial hospitals and wards.
CHINESE NUMBER SUPERSTITIONS
Chinese have a great love of puns and homonyms. This fondness for wordplay, coupled with feng shui, has led to many superstitions around lucky numbers, lucky directions, and the orientation of buildings. There is the sense that by naming something, you imbue it with both positive and negative powers, and this is particularly true of numbers.
During the Hungry Ghost Festival, you’ll see quantities of paper goods fashioned for the dead, which are meant to be burned as offerings. Every detail is considered in these replicas, including the appropriate license plates and house numbers. A model of a car, for example, made of paper stretched over bamboo or reeds and intended to be burned, will likely have a license plate with a lot of fours in it to signify that it’s for the dead.