The Other (excerpt)

My memory of those years has lost a lot of crispness, but writing is a funny thing because it dredges up things buried in the deep. The good, the bad, and the terrifying, and whether you like it or not, once it’s out in the open, there’s no getting rid of it.

            A year after we started Methodist Youth Fellowship, our father agreed to let us go to church on Sundays. I was the one who suggested it. Belle didn’t mind tagging along if it meant getting out of the apartment for several hours. Mom would occasionally come with us if she didn’t have a morning shift but it was mostly me and Belle. “You really like it that much, huh?” our father said. There was a hint of disbelief in his voice, but much to our surprise (mostly my mother’s) he let us go without a qualm. I thought maybe it was because it meant getting the kids out of the apartment for several hours, or maybe it was all the leftover food we brought home throughout the week. But I knew what really sold him on the idea was Emma coming to visit. She even brought homemade turnip cakes. Mother’s turnip cakes were still better though, but Emma wasn’t too bad of a cook herself.

            I remember handing out pamphlets and spreading the good word with the Carpenters around our district. Perhaps feeling emboldened by the swelling numbers at the youth fellowship, Rev Carpenter decided to venture into Oi Wah estate on a recruiting mission. To say that people were less than receptive would have been an understatement. Nourishment for the soul didn’t seem very appetizing when people sorely lacked nourishment for the body. Old man Chow, a particularly cantankerous individual with a perpetually aching back, actually called George a White Devil. Rev Carpenter didn’t speak a lick of Cantonese but I think he understood by the look on Emma’s face.

            I remember the critters we kept at the Sunny Hill Methodist Centre. Rev Carpenter said that the Lord’s presence can be felt through all living things so what better way to learn than the act of caring for God’s creations. There were other religious points associated with this but I doubt any of us remembered. All children loved animals but Belle loved animals and there was a rabbit (who she had named Thumper because she had just watched Bambi on one of the local television stations) that she was really fond of. “I’ll love him forever!” she said. He was just a pretty little thing with brown fur and floppy ears that perked up every time someone picked him up to cuddle him. Sometimes, if you let Thumper out of his cage, he would follow you around while you tended to the garden.

            Father was fired from his construction job because he missed too many shifts on account of being drunk or hungover. On most days he spent his time studying horses and drinking beer. He even carved a shrine dedicated to the gods of fortune and placed it on the nightstand beside his bed. This was before the alcohol tremors had destroyed the last vestiges of artistic talent he had once possessed. For a time, it seemed like he had managed to court a bit of favor from the gods that he worshipped, until it didn’t.

            Mr. Wong came back after two years of radio silence. He still had the keys to the apartment. Things might have turned out very differently if Mrs. Wong had decided to change the locks. I was home when it happened and I remember how Yin and Ying screamed. Mr. Wong beat his (now ex) wife into a bloody pulp before my father was able to pull them apart. She managed three steps out into the hallway before fainting. On that day, blood peppered the hallway outside our units instead of marbles. Mrs. Wong spent two days in intensive care and then three months in a regular hospital room. 

            Some good, some bad, and some terrifying.

I’ve witnessed two miracles in my lifetime and one of them happened four days before Easter Sunday in 1986. That was during the three years between the day I first met Emma Carpenter when we shared a plate of my mother’s turnip cakes and the day she left Sunny Hill Methodist Center after The Very Bad Thing had happened. This was easy to remember because Emma left a month after Christmas day. George Carpenter was also gone by then, and that marked the end of our days in idyllic Sunny Hill.

The Rev had been preaching about Easter for several weeks. Rebirth, resurrection, eternal life. Death itself lain dead. It’s a lot to take in for a seven-year-old but it was also fascinating. Jesus came back from the dead. Death, the ultimate adversary, conquered and vanquished. I thought that if Jesus could do that then surely there would be hope for Dad, and Mom, and the rest of us. It was a nice thing to think about.

            The rest of the kids went home after Sunday service but I decided to swing by Sunny Hill for a little bit. I took the scenic route along the shoreline so by the time I arrived, Emma was already there. The weeks leading up to Easter Sunday were one of the busiest times of the year so Emma was hard at work. We exchanged hellos, said a few things and she sent me off to do my own thing. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon and there was no one else in the center besides me and Emma. I didn’t mind. Like I’ve said, being on your own can be nice sometimes. Thumper hadn’t been feeling well. Some kind of rabbit flu. Rev Carpenter had taken Thumper to the vet the other day and the vet said it was the Snuffles, which I thought was a silly name and really something you’d normally call a rabbit and not a bacterial infection.

            Thumper seemed to be doing better after a round of antibiotics. He was pawing at the side of his cage and looked at me the way Belle did when she wanted the last piece of chocolate, so I let him out for a bit of exercise while I worked on the garden. The cabbages and cauliflowers were almost ready and I wanted to make sure we’d get the most of our harvest. I liked gardening. It’s very Zen. Emma taught me that word and I remember thinking it was neat. We all deserve a bit of Zen in our lives. There were times when I thought it’d be nice to be a gardener when I grew up. Or maybe a cook like my mom. She could teach me how to make turnip cakes. I couldn’t imagine telling my father though. I’d rather not give him a heart attack. He had his fair share of health problems as is.

            I cleared out all the weeds and was about to step over the short fence circling the garden, but I tripped as I was crossing over and landed hard on my right foot.

            A yelp followed by a whimper.

            I was wearing my gym shoes that day. Some people called them sandshoes or pumps but in Hong Kong, we called them Bak Fan Yu because that’s more or less what they looked like. They were made of cloth, always came in white, had soft plastic bottoms and when you wore them it looked like you had two giant white fish on your feet. They were also dirt cheap and would mess up your feet if you wore them for too long. Sometimes, we wore them to funerals because in Chinese funerals, you had to wear all white and they were usually the only white shoes people had lying around. And when you wore these shoes, you could really feel the ground with your feet because the plastic bottoms were so thin. What I felt underneath my right foot that day was brittle, but also squishy, and slippery.

            I lifted my foot and saw Thumper lying underneath, spasming, with blood leaking out of his tiny mouth. The soles of my right shoe took on a pink hue. It could have been a minute. It could have been ten seconds. It might as well have been an hour because when I picked him up, Thumper had stopped moving. And he was so heavy. Dead things put on extra weight. I dropped Thumper and ran.