January 04, 2009

Reviewed By Noor Jehan Mecklai
 

Within these pages, Li engagingly captures the life of women and girls of the marginalised Chinese community in the squalid slums of Calcutta in the 1950s and ’60s, shedding light upon the complex history of diaspora, on the outcast status and oppression imposed upon minorities, and the challenges of multiculturalism.

One is forced to ask what it is that somehow compels governments and society to ostracise these outsiders. Is it something connected with our strong sense of territory, a sense that we share with the animal world in general? Is it also the instinctive animal fear of the different species, let alone genus, plus the need to work hard for survival that robs these ethnic or foreign minorities of the chance to make friendly overtures to those who got there first?

In the case of the Chinese in Calcutta, what else was it that caused them to be marginalised? Naturally, the war between India and China in the 1960s didn’t help their case. But the Chinese, says the author, ‘went into businesses which the Hindus found polluting: Leather-tanning, shoe-making, hairdressing, carpentry and restaurant keeping’. And as far as leather tanning and other trades connected with animals are concerned, it is not only the Hindu caste system which abhors such livelihoods.

Even in modern day, egalitarian Japan there is an outcast class called Buraku whose members have traditionally followed livelihoods such as tanning and butchery. And regardless of how highly educated or wealthy they may become, it is very difficult for them to be accepted outside of their community.

Many of Li’s stories deal with arranged marriages and education. And in the very first story, The Palm Leaf Fan, we learn that even from the very tender age of six, for example, a bride-to-be in the Hakka Chinese system would live with the family of her affianced husband, a remarkably effective way of producing an ideal daughter-in-law for the day when the couple is old enough to be wed.

Sometime Life Makes You Cry reads another title. Mei Ling, despite her scholastic excellence and her plans for a university career, is reduced by an early and unsuitable marriage to ‘a woman in a shapeless and faded dress and a pair of flip-flops two sizes too large, her lank hair tied back with an elastic band, her face red and puffy from the fumes of… tanning fluids’.

Of her three children, sired by a none-too-bright husband, one is hair-lipped, while the last one’s mental age never passes that of a seven-year-old. The author presents these last details without comment, a typical ending to her stories as if to say, ‘You be the judge’.

Now, before her own marriage in Canada, Li spent some years at Sacred Heart School. But where is the compassionate heart of Jesus in Miss David’s setup? In the story called ‘Her Sinful Breasts’, Miss David evidently fears what lurks not too far beyond the surface of her own mind, and canes the girls at Sacred Heart for everything and for nothing, as well as caning the tables. However, Li’s mother, while continuously chanting ‘Hail to Amitabha Buddha,’ informs her that she has to go to that school for the sake of her future. So ‘in spite of Miss David’ her English improves, and she comes to enjoy ‘reading the Old Testament with its murders, rapes, incests, political and family intrigues, wars and blood sacrifices’.

 

Li engagingly captures the life of women and girls of the marginalised Chinese community in the squalid slums of Calcutta in the 1950s and ’60s, shedding light upon the complex history of diaspora, on the outcast status and oppression imposed upon minorities, and the challenges of multiculturalism. One is forced to ask what it is that somehow compels governments and society to ostracise these outsiders.

 

Since the slums of Calcutta are so vividly portrayed, one may forget that this is actually a beautiful city, founded by the British and possessing many impressive Anglo-Gothic and Anglo-Saracen style buildings. The author suggests that its name could be derived from the goddess Kali, whose large temple originally sat in the nearby village of Kalighat.

Most Chinese immigrants were Buddhists, however, and in The Buddha is All-Seeing, Li presents the contrast between monks and nuns who live fairly comfortably and pronounce the Buddha’s wisdom enthroned on velvet sofas in Aunty Liang’s temple, and the revered Old Master with his genuine piety, ‘his stooped, thin figure in a faded and patched saffron robe’. (In fact, Buddhist monks are ideally supposed to stitch their own robes from old scraps of cloth so that they actually feel aversion to them, rather than attachment).

The telling detail which ends this story is that despite running a temple, Aunty Liang leaves at her death a hairdressing salon and a tannery over which her children conduct a years-long lawsuit.

There is humour in Li’s compendium, too, and for a mixture of laughs and horror, read The Fish Pond, describing a monsoon flood in Tangra, ‘dotted with ponds, fish farms and garbage dumps, and running everywhere with open sewers’.

And seeing a silvery shape darting towards a mouse through the floodwaters in their house, two children give chase, diving into the filthy water, catching the fish, then sitting up and wiping the slime from their faces. ‘We smelled of rotting vegetables… (but) the carp was a foot long, an escapee from a fish farm.’ In contrast to this frenetic chase, their mother calmly prepared the carp in soy sauce and ginger, and the family devoured it.

Is there escape from the slums for these people? Jade becomes engaged to Ken-Yee, who lives in Canada, whose salary is declared to be $15,000, and who has $70,000 in his bank account. But she finds that though her husband is good to her, he and his joint family live in very cramped quarters and he pays rent to his parents to help pay their mortgage.

There is no car, she has to go out to work, and the $70,000 in the bank was a mirage, borrowed from here and there to buy his permission to import a wife. Yes, escape from the slums comes at a price.

 

The Palm Leaf Fan and other stories
By Kwai-Yun Li
Tsar Publications, Canada
ISBN 1-894770-1-5
108pp. $18.95