Chapter 15 Fingers Made of Water
FINGERS MADE OF WATER
Fifty-two years ago …
It is time to introduce myself. This may be your story, but you are not telling it. You can’t, because you don’t remember it anymore.
I am Kwan Yam, the goddess of mercy and compassion. In my heart, I still recall all of your life, and your days—before you ever left Hong Kong, and arrived to Shek Kan Chau. It is the privilege of a goddess to know such things, to be in myriad places.
I know that you are beginning to wonder why I retell you these details, but I promise that it matters. The shape of your life has informed so many other lives that it bears looking at, albeit briefly.
I recall your birth, though you do not. I remember that humid, quiet evening in 1922, your Mami laboring in the privacy of her cramped Hong Kong harbor flat.
The bed was too hot, so she took to the floor, damp cloths easing her backache.
Soon after, infant-you had the shock of emerging to the world, and being lifted to her chest by hands that were warm and kind.
It was one of the few times that your mother was any sort of gentle.
If that sounds like a harsh indictment of her, it isn’t meant to be. Mami grew up with war and natural disaster, the way other children are raised with siblings. She has suffered much.
When you were born, she tried to put aside her disappointment, and never quite succeeded.
She had hoped for a studious boy, but got a careless girl; she hoped for more children, yet no others arrived.
All her expectations were therefore pinned on you, and no one child can live up to that. You fell very, very short.
As you grew, she raised you as she had been raised, with a sharp tongue and a heavy hand, her mind bent always toward worry. Your endless chatter aroused her ire, and her stern ways provoked your scorn.
Here is a short list of your “flaws,” as she saw them, which drove her to frustration.
You could not sleep well, especially as a youngster. That restless nature honed her tiredness to a teetering edge of exhaustion.
You could not stop climbing on chairs, tables, cabinets, like a monkey in search of the forest canopy.
Your fingers seemed to be made of water; everything slipped through them, or out of them. You caused so much breakage. Carrying dishes was a risk and washing them only slightly safer.
And you talked too much, as if your mouth were a teapot that continually poured out its brain to the world at large. Every day, you buzzed with too much energy, a thrumming lute string of a girl, jittering into trouble. This frustrated her more than anything else.
On the worst days, Mami would chase you out of the flat in seething exasperation and point at the unlit, echoing stairwell that ran like a spine up the center of the residential building.
“Go run,” she liked to say, often with an accompanying smack upside the head. “Put on your shoes and run from the bottom to the top, three times! And don’t knock the offering shrines!”
It’s hard to be sure whether she meant her task as punishment or some kind of bizarre therapy, but you actually enjoyed her strange command.
On your own, feet pounding concrete steps, there were no dishes to break and no one to disappoint.
The effort left you gasping and spent, briefly free of that frenetic energy which wore you ragged if you didn’t indulge it.
Sometimes you’d run an extra lap just to feel the calmness that movement brought, before breathlessly edging back into the flat.
And you were careful, didn’t knock the offering shrines that lined your door and your neighbors’ doors, each one displaying long joss sticks jammed into fruit. Even your clumsiness had limits. You didn’t want to offend the ghosts, after all.
Ghosts were a part of daily life, in Hong Kong and elsewhere. Less in the West, where they tended to be banished, but you’d never been to that part of the world.
For example. Your local food store was kept clean at night by the ghost of a man who’d once owned it. He was efficient and hardworking but prone to roaring at anyone who disturbed him when darkness fell. The current owners often left him offerings. He was friendly if they remembered to do that.
The temples were the busiest places: a steady traffic of the dead-but-not-gone.
Priests had an uncanny tendency to linger round their brethren, perhaps knew the offerings would always be good there.
The sad ones, to me, were those ghosts who came to the temple in search of family who never visited, never thought of them; beggar ghosts, hungry ghosts, forgotten ghosts.
The monks fed them and lit incense, but they still must have felt lonely.
Most of the ghosts in your particular building were hungry ones, with pinprick mouths and distended bellies.
A few were grandmother ghosts, a couple were waiting women.
Once, a fire-breather turned up, and the tenants all pooled their money to pay for an exorcist, but most were banal.
They roamed the halls or begged in the stairwells, and during Ghost Month liked to hover above the food bowls, picking away at fruit and paper offerings.
Rarely were they dangerous, provided one treated them with respect.
That was easy enough to do. Put out food in shrines, offer polite greetings, and give them space.
The ghosts, for their part, almost never came indoors; everyone had wards, carefully placed, to dissuade them from entering private homes and causing distress.
You did not mind them at all, liked seeing them, would even try talking to them. The dead made better listeners than the living.
One of them in particular was your favorite. It was very old and almost faded away, all wispy outlines and hazy features. You could walk through it, as if it were a cloud; it wasn’t solid, like some of the others.
The neighbors called it a jian, meaning a ghost of a ghost; a creature that was barely sentient, more of an echo. It must have been a child when alive, because it loved to race you to the top of the building on ethereal feet, cackling and giggling.
Though you could never win, you did enjoy the challenge. Also, the ghost never minded your chattering, or your jitters, or your fidgets. In later years, you’d swear it listened, absorbing your words happily as it raced you to the roof.
When you think of it now, you remember the jian as a friend, and hope it rests in peace.
Perhaps fittingly, it was ghosts themselves that finally began to bridge the gap between you and Mami.
Once you turned six or seven, instead of having you buzzing and fluttering around the house, Mami could finally pack you off in a stiff uniform of plain brown clothing and let you fidget your way through school.
Under the tutelage of teachers, in the company of rambunctious students, you learned to read and write, along with the basics of numbers and some rudimentary history.
Instead of running up and down the stairwell with a jian, you could run outside at lunchtime with living peers.
And instead of hard smacks upside the head, teachers doled out palm-whacks with rulers. You liked the changes.
Mami, though glad you were no longer underfoot, was less than impressed with their teaching.
“Who is showing you how to write fu talismans and make wards?” she said one day, exasperated by your endless chatter about numbers and reading.
“No one, Mami.”
“No one?!”
“Teacher Ying says that spirit warding has no place in a modern, scientific education—”
“Aiyah! And what will Teacher Ying do the next time they are plagued by a bothersome ghost?” Mami exclaimed, squashing a stray mosquito between her palms. “You will need to know some wards before you are grown.”
She sat at the kitchen table and jabbed a finger; you sat, too, not daring to contradict.
“Pass me that piece of paper. Yes, that one. Sit here, quickly please.” Mami dug out a pot of ink from one of the cupboards and a small fine-tipped brush. You’d seen both of those objects many times before, but not been allowed near them.
“This is temple ink, made by monks,” Mami said, matter-of-factly. “It is perfectly balanced, with blood and ash and blessings mixed in.”
“Can I use regular ink for fu talismans?”
“Yes, but it will be unreliable. Maybe the glyph will work, maybe not. Temple ink will always give you a good result.”
“I thought we don’t go to temples,” you said, forehead creasing in puzzlement. Unusually, your parents did not observe religious festivals; they were the only people you knew, other than Westerners, who refrained from doing so.
“I don’t owe monks or gods anything, especially not my time or money,” Mami said, with a venomous acidity. “But their ink is still useful, so we buy that.” She drew an unfamiliar word with a steady hand and confident strokes. “Do you see this?”
It looked like a Chinese character, but none that you could quite recognize. From the corner of your eye, the lines seemed fluid and erratic, shining a faint glow. Like a match on the verge of snuffing out. But every time your gaze focused on them directly, it looked normal and static.
“This is a glyph,” Mami said, pointing to the ink-wet words.
“Put different glyphs together, and write them on paper or bottle gourds or metal with temple ink, and you have made a fu talisman.” She tucked loose hair behind her ear.
“Glyphs must be written very precisely. If you get them wrong, the fu talisman doesn’t work.
If you are trying to make a ward, for example, and your fu talisman is written wrong, then the ghosts will not be scared. ”
“How do you get them wrong? Or right?”
“When you write glyphs, you write the shape of a thought. Each word, each written character, tells a little story, but glyphs are more than words. They are the truth of a thing, the many layers of a thought.”
“Oh.” You poked one corner of one glyph; it left a dab of ink on the fingertip. “How many glyphs are there?”