The noise of the siren came to her then, a sound enveloping her like heat. The medics, a blur of white, surged forward. She saw them remove the boy’s hand from hers, and then someone placed their hands on her shoulders, pulling her gradually away.
When the ambulance had disappeared, she found herself alone, the bystanders gaping at the pool of blood, her stained clothes. She saw her father, the panicked expression on his face, as he made his way to where she stood. She began to walk in the direction that the ambulance had gone, but her father reached out, caught her hand, held her still.
Two nights later, he sat with her in a corner of the restaurant. He told her that the boy, in the presence of his parents and his sister, had died a few hours ago.
She nodded but said nothing.
“What are you thinking, Ching Yun?”
Around them, chairs scraped, voices rose and fell. “We all stood and watched it happen,” she said, at last. “If I had thought to call out to him, I could have stopped it. If I had only tried to reach him.”
He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. Then he said that what she believed was false. The boy had been too far up, he had been lost in a world of his own.
She shook her head and pushed her chair back, standing up. Her father let her go. She went outside into the cool evening air. On the sidewalk, she smelled tobacco smoke and looked up to see the mechanics next door sitting on crates, cigarettes pinched between their lips. Fluorescent signs arced over the street, glowing bridges of colour. From the dwellings above, raucous laughter tumbled down. She heard the clatter of mahjong tiles, a chorus of radios.
She kept walking, across the street, up the stairs of the apartment building, until, finally, she reached the rooftop. This morning, she had learned from the boy’s sister that this had been his favourite place. He always wanted to be alone, his sister said, flying his kites, and when he was older, he wanted to find work on the merchant ships, to travel from port to port, seeing the world.
Below, the ground was neon, an electric river. In the distance, Kowloon Harbour was a series of tiny lights surrounded by a flood of dark, a breath away from Hong Kong Island. In her mind, she could fill in the emptiness, temples clouded by the smoke of burning joss sticks, streets reaching up like ladders, composed entirely of stone steps. At the summit, she imagined children setting their kites aloft.
Farther away were countries she had never set foot in, but which filtered through her imagination. Britain and China, India and America. For the first time in her life, she wanted to be anywhere but where she stood. She wanted to come to all things with the clarity in which she had seen the boy, and in which she had been seen by him.
When Clara was nineteen years old, her father took her aside to that same table. He set an envelope in front of her, the letter that she had been waiting for, an answer from the University of Melbourne. Her hands shook as she read the lines, then handed the sheet of paper back to him. Her father leapt to his feet, shouting the news to everyone in the restaurant. The cooks came out from behind the glass, her mother and sisters rushed to embrace her.
On that day, she gave herself an English name, as many young women were choosing to do, on their departure from Hong Kong. Leung Ching Yun, Clearest Spring, the name of her childhood slipped away from her, into the past. She wrote her new name out in the letter she sent to the University of Melbourne. Clara Leung.
As a young woman, when describing Matthew to friends, she would often speak of fate, of how she and Matthew had crossed paths on the narrow, snow-covered walkways of the university, of their chance meetings as they hurried from one class to another. They had the same group of friends, expatriate Asians in Melbourne, from as far away as Malaya, North Borneo, Thailand and Hong Kong.
She and Matthew had stood out from the group – the men mostly enrolled in science programs, the women taking classes at the secretarial college. She studied literature, hoping one day to be a schoolteacher. Matthew had started a degree in civil engineering, but a year shy of completion, he had given in to his longing and transferred to the history department.
She can still see him as he was then, a young man of twenty-three, his hair carefully combed, his expression serious. The first time Matthew came to the boarding house where she lived, he carried a bouquet of flowers in each hand. I couldn’t decide, he had told her, his eyes pensive. I couldn’t choose. He was wearing his usual clothes, slacks, a white shirt and a sports jacket. They spent the day in the kitchen, trying to recreate the dishes of their childhoods: laksas, dumplings, fragrant breads. Eleanor Henley, Clara’s landlady, was in charge of the turntable. She played Elvis and Slim Dusty, “A Pub with No Beer.” Eleanor watching Clara and Matthew with a knowing, motherly smile.
Standing over the stove, he asked about her family, about Kowloon. Clara described the restaurant, the crowded rooms where she and her sisters had amused themselves, dressing up in their parents’ finery. Each week, her mother would light sticks of incense and pour wine into tiny porcelain cups. She held whispered conversations with the ancestors, urging them to drink freely, to live well.
From the time of her adolescence, she told Matthew, she had known she would leave Hong Kong, she would go into the world beyond. Too many books, her mother had said, chiding her, too many idle dreams. And yet her parents had not tried to dissuade her.
At one point, when Eleanor turned her back, he whispered in her ear. Would she follow him anywhere, to Malaya, to Britain, to Canada? He looked at her as if afraid she might vanish from the room, vanish into thin air.
“Just ask,” she said, teasing. “Ask and you’ll know.”
The night she saw her first snowfall, they were sitting together in a restaurant, winter coats buttoned up against the chill. She and Matthew watched the twirl of snowflakes through the plate glass windows, sparks of white carried sideways by the wind. He began to tell Clara about his father. During the war, he said, his father had worked for the Japanese occupation forces, and in September of 1945 he had been murdered by the men he worked with. Hidden in the trees, he had seen his father’s death, watched as the body was thrown inside a truck, and the truck driven away. He spoke quickly, as if fearing the words themselves could cut him, as if he were hurrying along a narrow ledge.
The blurred lights of the passing cars slipped across their table. “And afterwards,” she said, softly. “How did you go on?”
“We left Sandakan, my mother and I. We took the steamer to Tawau, in the south. It was sudden. There was no time even to find his body, to bury it properly. Later on, in Tawau, my mother remarried. Her new husband had children of his own. She went on.” There was fatigue in his voice, but no anger.
“Sandakan was all that I had known. Everything I loved was there. The year I turned eighteen, I went back by myself. But people remembered my father. They knew what he had done during the war. They remembered things I hadn’t known at the time. I came to see that there was no place for me there, that what I wanted had disappeared long ago.”
His words trailed off, and he looked up at her, his eyes blank, as if he had lost his place. There was a cup of coffee on the table in front of him and he reached for it, holding it in his hands.
“So you left Sandakan,” she said, wanting to help him, to prod him forward. “And you came here.”
In his eyes, she saw uncertainty, and then a decision slowly taking shape. She waited, saying nothing.
“There was someone I had known there from that earlier time. A girl, Ani. Her parents had died during the war, but she still lived there, in Sandakan. We saw each other again.”