Extravagant Strangers, page 28
The Chen family in Mo’s extraordinary novel Sour Sweet live in London, but do so without any sense of expectation or any real desire to ‘negotiate’ with England. In the following extract from the novel, the family have to move out from behind the façade of their home and attempt to interact with English society. They do so while forcefully maintaining their view of the English as ‘the other’, which provides us with a unique perspective on English life.
From Sour Sweet
Before they knew what was happening, Mui had copies of the evening newspapers covering the floor. Random triangles of purple and orange carpet showed through gaps in the pages.
Such and such a place looked promising, Mui would announce from her knees. Then Chen or Lily would do their best to find disadvantages: this place was too far out or the rent of that place was too high. This other place was a district of Indians who wouldn’t eat their food (Chen knew quite well they would).
Finally, though, they had to do something. Chen arranged to see premises in south London, currently being converted to commercial use, which he had not been able to discredit from information in the newspaper.
They travelled in a family group, Man Kee in a cloth sling on his aunt’s back. It was the first time Chen had been on public transport with Lily in over two years and the first time ever with his son. He had, of course, brought Mui from the airport to the flat. Remembering Mui’s first difficulties in adjusting to her new life, he wondered whether the initial shock of descending into an Underground station and boarding one of the thundering, segmented, silver and red serpents might have been responsible for the dazed state of her first months. ‘Perhaps I was miserly not to take a taxi?’
Looking at Mui now as she confidently pulled the bell cord of the 113 over her head and as she insouciantly (rather saucily, Chen thought) stared back at the burly West Indian bus conductor (it was a mandatory stop and fare stage, not a request, a distinction Mui had yet to learn and one unexplicated by the TV serial), Chen was unable to connect this young woman with the shrinking creature who had sat next to him all those months ago. As they congregated on the open platform of the bus, Mui pressed the red button causing the bell to ting again, more faintly. Just to make sure, she gave it three more rings. The conductor at the other end of the bus leant over a seat to shake a finger at them. Chen could see his black face contorting in the frame formed by the window. Getting in on the act, not to be outdone, Lily rang once as well, then lifted Man Kee in his sling on Mui’s back and, holding his dimpled fist, helped him to ring lightly, four times in rapid succession. Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping! Chen shook his head vigorously at his wife.
The bus jerked to a halt, though fortunately Lily, who had an excellent sense of balance anyway, had been sensibly holding with her free hand the white pole bisecting the entrance to the bus. Chen bundled the women off into the empty road.
‘Husband, the stop is a hundred yards away!’
‘Do what I tell you!’
But he was not quick enough to be out of earshot of the conductor. As the vehicle moved off again the conductor was still on the platform looking back at them, no longer hurling abuse now he knew who the culprits were but shaking his capped head at the antics of the lunatic Chinese who smiled serenely, bafflingly, maddeningly at him as they disappeared into the specks far down the road.
And indeed there was an impression of invincible eccentricity about the little group now re-forming on the pavement for the next stage of its journey. Chen appeared unremarkable enough in his black trousers and brown padded jacket; although his trilby hat was a bit odd as accessory to these. The girls, however, having no uniform to provide them with an approximate sartorial guideline, nor a job to get them out of the house, had become rather disorganized about their clothing. One relaxation of convention had led to another. Both were wearing thin tunic suits in a tiny floral pattern (unfortunately no longer interchangeable as Mui was getting quite comfortable in her figure). Over these summery suits each was wearing a baggy cardigan of Chen’s. Lily’s was grey with walnut leather buttons, Mui’s olive-green in a chunky knit with transparent plastic toggles. Mui almost filled her woollen but, having shorter arms than her brother-in-law, had been forced to roll the sleeves back several times. Lily, on the other hand, found Chen’s sleeves too short, uncomfortably so, even with the cuffs rolled down, so that the top part of the garment acted as a strait-jacket, riding up under the armpits and exposing her wrists and a substantial length of her shapely forearm, while around her slender waist the cardigan’s elasticated bottom had concertinaed in a thick roll rather like the domed edge of a toadstool. Lily’s flat shoes – the ones she wore to the shops – were being repaired, which had left her with the choice of house-slippers or a pair of slightly longer than ankle-length Wellington boots (in the vernacular ‘larbah boot’), relic of typhoon seasons on the flooded barrack roof in Hong Kong, into which she had finally thrust her narrow, sockless feet. Mui had commandeered a pair of Chen’s size 7 shoes, laceless unhappily, in which her own size 3 feet floundered like landed fish. She proceeded with a circular, scuffling motion, reminding Lily of the way Father had advanced on his opponents in order simultaneously to hook their leading leg and protect his own groin from counter flick-kicks. Despite the three pairs of her sister’s socks she was wearing (which was why Lily’s bare feet were now rapidly blistering) every now and then a shoe would detach itself from Mui’s foot and Lily would fear for Man Kee in his sling on his aunt’s back – though Lily had no doubts Mui would fall heroically forward on her face if the need arose.
Now they set off to the Underground station from which they would take a train to the railway station from which they would take a final bus to their destination. Man Kee dozed placidly in Mui’s back, waking briefly as the train clattered through an eerie, spark-lit crossroad of tunnels and regarding his father with a large, incurious and unblinking eye before falling asleep again. Chen was grateful for this. The boy seemed quieter these days, or was it just that he was seeing him in the day?
On the BR train, where they had an entire compartment to themselves, Chen positioned himself near the window, ready to spring tiger-like on Mui should she succumb to temptation in the shape of the alarm cord. Irresponsible of the English authorities to put it so conveniently at hand; it was far too easy to pull. Also, it bore great resemblance to the bus cord which one might legitimately, under certain circumstances, pull. The red handle on the Underground was far less ambiguous, especially as this train kept stopping and starting at a variety of small stations in response to a pinging clearly audible in the compartment. But Mui, hunched forwards with Man Kee on her back, chin cupped in hands, was looking eagerly out of the streaky window. Chen began to relax. The girls woke him at the station. He pretended he had just closed his eyes.
The premises, directly opposite the bus stop, were being gutted. Shattered glass lay perilously on the pavement. Two windows had been knocked into one. The new front had been daubed with smears of white paint to prevent people accidentally sticking their arms through it. Through a clear square of glass they could see snakes of bunched electrical coils dropping from the ceiling.
Workmen came out, scraping their heavy boots on the plank floor. Chen was wary of this class of Englishman, crossing to the other side of the road on his way home from work as they spilled out of the pubs long after their statutory closing time, he used to think with fear and resentment. Mui and Lily stared at them with a blatant curiosity which, Chen knew, could offend. The English were peppery, often manufacturing pretexts for anger where none reasonably existed: a stare held too long, failure to meet their round eye at all. The girls’ exposure to this kind of thing had not been as thoroughgoing as his, he thought protectively. He waved them away. ‘Let’s go.’ The workmen seemed, fortunately, to be ignoring them so far. Mui had poked her head through the door and was inspecting the interior. Curls of wood-shavings covered the wood floor. There was a smell of fresh putty.
‘Brother-in-law, this is too big for us. We are small people only.’
Chen, too, had been taken aback by the properness of the place, the presence of the workmen and the wholesale repairs they were making. This was not what he had been looking for. He wanted a more cautious, less obtrusive start. A place like this could be unlucky; it was arrogant, defying fate. This could be a large restaurant. Mui, although over-awed, was still curious. Chen took her by the arm and drew her outside. The workmen were brewing tea over a primus, stirring gobs of condensed milk into the pan which contained the boiling tea. When the Chens were twenty yards down the street the workmen began to whoop and stamp. Chen hurried his women on.
‘What do the gwai lo sing, Brother-in-law?’
‘They are singing songs, Mui.’
‘What songs, Brother-in-law?’
‘Their own songs, Mui.’
‘Ah.’
‘Don’t look back, Lily.’
Lily, however, was not to be so easily denied. She turned round and with an arm through Mui’s so she would not crash into a lamp post began to walk with short steps in the same direction as the others facing backwards (one of the exercises she had performed with Father in the courtyard).
‘Lily!’ Chen whirled round, scandalised. But now he was also able to see that the noise the workmen were making had nothing to do with them at all but involved one of their own number who had met with an accident (Chen thought it likely from his behaviour) involving the upsetting of hot liquid, in all likelihood tea, on to a sensitive part of his anatomy. Lily tittered. Chen found nothing amusing about the man’s mishap, faan gwai or not. In fact he felt distinct masculine solidarity with him. Did the girls realize how painful this could be? Perhaps they knew and didn’t care? Knew and gloated? Chen glanced at the nape of Lily’s graceful neck, one of the few parts of her body that had up till now always pleased him. He must spend more time with Man Kee, he decided, staring into that infant’s open, phlegmatic eye. He couldn’t approve of all this female influence.
They had reached the end of the road. Chen did not want to retrace their steps and took them down a smaller street on the right. From here they reached the main road again which, on a whim, Chen crossed. Loyally, the girls followed, though Lily’s feet were by now really quite painful in her Wellingtons and Mui’s back was aching from the weight of Man Kee’s sling.
It became apparent that the main road formed an unofficial kind of boundary. The side they were now on was older, more dilapidated than the north side, a change which took place with startling swiftness. They had been walking for three minutes and already the houses were visibly decayed. They passed a derelict terrace, the doors and windows covered with corrugated-tin sheets; through rusted holes in the crinkled metal they could see grass growing in the roofless rooms. There was still a sofa in one of the ruined houses and its springs had burst out of the rotten cloth like a robot’s innards. This was more like it, Chen thought with satisfaction; they would start here. It was ideal. Hardly anyone would come to the shop! Stray business, that was. Obviously one needed a modicum of local custom to survive. He had a little money left. Lily had also surprised him by revealing the existence of a fragrant hoard in the tea tin. At first pleased, he had later been unsettled by this evidence of his wife’s capacity to sacrifice immediate gratification and defer it for future providential uses, and even more upsetting, to carry it out secretly without his discovering. Not that there was anything sneaky or reprehensible about it. Nevertheless, he could hardly believe Lily had found a margin on the house-keeping. Whole new regions of the female psyche, not only unexplored but their existence hitherto unsuspected, opened before him. Chen did his best to put the whole thing out of his mind as quickly as possible. If there was more to Lily than he had ever imagined he did not, at this comparatively late stage of things, want to know. Could she, for instance, have manipulated him into directly raising the question of a move? When all along it had been she who wanted it? Had she known all the time and been laughing at him? Chen looked at her talking innocently with Mui (why were they both limping?) and frowned. What deceptions and secrets lay behind the childishly smooth skin of those faces? Chen decided to give Lily enough room to manoeuvre in future – for both their sakes.
They had now arrived at an open space, a demolition site, bounded by tall, braced buildings on two sides. In the middle there was an untended fire blazing. Chen led his party across the scattered bricks and tins. Lily deliberately walked through the large puddles, pleased with this chance to turn her boots to use. There had been, she now remembered, a small leak in the left boot at ankle height but time seemed to have plugged it. Fearing for Man Kee on such treacherous terrain, she took him from Mui and slung him on her own back. Mui, who was, indeed, experiencing some difficulties keeping her shoes on, fell behind the others. Lily and Chen approached the fire, which was much larger than appeared from a distance and was composed of rags, planks, straw packing, and half a car tyre which was giving off fumes and black smoke. There was no indication who had built it unless it was the English boys, throwing green bottles against the buttresses at the far end of the site. They had been hidden by smoke. But wouldn’t they have been poking the fire with sticks? Lily turned to Mui to share a Kwangsi memory but she had vanished. A moment later Mui materialized through a pall of smoke, coughing and red-eyed. The wind had changed! ‘It’s not good to rub your eyes, Mui. Let them water.’
This piece of well-meant advice did not seem to be at all appreciated.
Mui scuffed resentfully after Chen, ploughing straight through a pile of beer tins and sending them clattering against fallen masonry and into puddles, just like a gwai lo hooligan. By the time she had rejoined Chen on the road her shoes were white with the ash from previous fires which lay thickly on this side of the site. As they turned the corner Lily took a last look at the fire, still burning in isolation, with nobody so much as throwing one extra plank on it or even enjoying its heat. How strange the English were, how indifferent, how careless of the consequences of their own deeds! And as for their attitude to their old people it was nothing less than shameful neglect, a national disgrace. With the image of the fire and the plight of the English aged now inextricably merged in her mind – both to do somehow with loneliness and a shirking of responsibilities as well as inevitable physical extinction – Lily wandered abstractedly down the road, barely listening to Chen. (Perhaps the fumes of the fire had poisoned her without her being aware of it.)
Each of the party was now locked into his or her own thoughts, no longer functioning as a single unit with a common purpose, the girls’ sense of their own individuality reinforced by nagging little corporal pains: Lily vicariously indignant on behalf of others less fortunate than herself, dimly conscious of pinched, raw toes; Mui regretting having ever implanted the idea of a move into her sister’s and brother-in-law’s heads, sidling along like a crippled land-crab and wishing she was in front of her television. Only Chen was happy, walking on a cushion of air in this suburban wilderness where one street led into its twin, the whole area having the effect of a maze through its uniformity. Chen chattered excitedly to Lily. Here was where they should settle; this was perfect. Lily wasn’t altogether happy but she didn’t want to curb Husband’s enthusiasm at this stage. ‘You know best, Husband,’ and she left the decision in his hands.
When they got home Lily levered her Wellingtons off with difficulty and – a stroke of inspiration – soaked her sore feet in what was left of the mixture she had bottled for Husband’s flu. So eager to dose others, it was the first time she had tried her own medicine. Of course, it was the least objectionable way of taking it. As it turned out, the mixture, at first astringently refreshing on hot blistered skin, then warming and soothing, proved a panacea. Or (Lily pondered later) had her memory failed her? Had she been, in fact, administering to Husband not Father’s patented internal draught but the liniment he had used to toughen the calluses on his already formidably armoured knuckles? At any rate her feet gave her no trouble the next day, while Mui was still limping. Rather ostentatiously, Lily thought.
Two days later Chen went to reconnoitre the area again. He insisted on going solo and was surprised at the lack of resistance from the girls, contradictory creatures that they were. The workmen were having another tea-break when he passed them. What incorrigible idlers! Crossing the main road into the ruined district but going in another direction this time, he found what he wanted. Within the week he was able to present the girls with the accomplished fact: premises vacant and ready for occupation in two weeks.
William Boyd
[1952-]
William Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana. The son of a physician and a schoolteacher, he spent his early years in Ghana and Nigeria before leaving, in 1961, for a boarding school in Scotland. Boyd later attended the University of Nice and the University of Glasgow. In 1975 he married Susan Wilson, a publishing company publicity director, and in that same year he began a postgraduate programme at Jesus College in Oxford. In 1981 Boyd became a television critic for the New Statesman. He also worked as a fiction reviewer for the London Sunday Times and as a lecturer in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, before turning to writing full-time.
Boyd’s first novel was the widely praised A Good Man in Africa (1981), a comic romp that depicts the sex and alcohol-soaked mishaps of British diplomat Morgan Leafy. The novel earned Boyd comparisons with Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, and received the Whitbread Literary Award for best first novel and the 1982 Somerset Maugham Award. In 1981 Boyd also published a collection of stories called On the Yankee Station. In the following year his second novel, An Ice-Cream War, won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. The novel is set in East Africa during the First World War and uses interweaving narratives to expose the senselessness of combat. 1984 saw the publication of Stars and Bars, a novel which follows the misadventures of a displaced Englishman as he bumbles through New York City and America’s Deep South.
