The China Coin Read online

  Grandfather shrugged. ‘When the hunger came birds were shot. The eggs were taken. Perhaps they will come back.’

  Leah looked at Joan but Joan’s face was blank.

  They walked up the hill in silence, above the bamboo and the sprawl of the village. The old brown houses shouldered each other between dusty lanes and the new stucco houses were now a wall, a castle, guardians of the winding track south. The pig sties were stone trains running from the houses to the reservoir. Only a few people were moving about the village and they were moving very slowly, like ants in treacle.

  ‘It is not old, this village,’ said Grandfather to Joan. ‘My father – your grandfather – started this village only eighty years ago. He came from the west and built his house where nothing could obstruct the flow of good fortune to his family. I think he chose wisely. You are here.’

  Suddenly Swallow laughed. ‘Li, Li!’ She ran up to Leah, blew out her cheeks arid jumped into a heavy squat, like fruit falling.

  ‘Swallow, that’s rude,’ said Grandfather. But he was smiling.

  ‘What is?’ Leah shuffled toward the little girl.

  ‘Swallow has just worked out what your name means in Chinese.’

  ‘Leah? But Leah is an Australian name.’

  Grandfather shrugged. ‘In Australia you are Australian, but in China you are Chinese. In Chinese, you are a Pear.’

  Joan opened her hands to deny responsibility.

  ‘Oh.’ Just so Rose never hears of it. Leah tried to walk like a pear, a bloated overripe pear that had just rolled from the fruit bowl.

  Swallow squealed in delight.

  Grandfather stopped before several formations of low curved walls of earth and stacked rocks. Giants embracing the wind-blown grass. Swallow ran freely through the formations as if greeting old friends.

  ‘This is the village cemetery,’ said Grandfather to Joan. ‘The parents of your father are here, before you.’

  Two stacks of rocks and an almost complete circle of earth. No flowers, just dry grass.

  Joan squatted between the curved arms and patted the hard earth. ‘No writing …’ she said softly.

  ‘Not needed. We know where the family rests. Your father should be here.’

  Joan nodded. ‘He wanted to come back.’

  ‘Perhaps it is possible.’

  Joan looked at him thoughtfully and stood. They walked slowly toward the crest of the hill, talking as they moved.

  Leah trailed before the quiet grave on the hill and remembered the cemetery of two years ago. The formal lawn with the little chapel, waiting for the new arrival. Pain, some crying – she never cried – and it was all over. The cold lawn and the chapel were left waiting for the next arrival, and the next and the next. But this was different. It was as much a part of the Ji family as the kittens in the box. People had died but there was no pain here, not any more, as if those curved earth arms were reaching out to her, welcoming her into the family.

  For the first time Leah was thinking of Joan’s family as her family. Joan’s grandfather was her great grandfather, Joan’s father was her grandfather and Swallow’s Grandfather was her great uncle – if she wanted it that way.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Grandfather called back.

  ‘No, it’s all right.’ Leah followed Grandfather to the shoulder of the hill.

  The cemetery gave way to a slope of young trees – eucalypts. Leah sniffed and she could almost see her favourite national park, Ku-ring-gai. Dad had led her through thick bush, alive with bird cries, to a secret cove of dreaming water.

  ‘You like the trees?’

  ‘They are my trees. Stringy bark, iron bark! What are they doing here?’

  ‘This is waste land. The government gives land like this to anyone who can grow things on it. A man in the village took some seeds from an official and planted them here. So the hill is his and in a few years a forest will be his. Dragon should have thought of it.’

  ‘All the way from Australia …’

  Grandfather picked up a stick and bent it in his hands. ‘Your father, Joan, he never reached Australia?’

  ‘No. Only got as far as Singapore.’

  ‘Ah, but that is almost as good. He was rich?’

  Joan hesitated. ‘No, not really. Perhaps he would have been if he had stayed in Penang. He had a good business, repairing and selling machinery. But …’ her lips tightened. ‘There were the anti-Chinese riots, and he took us to Singapore for safety. He had to start again.’

  ‘But he must have done well, to give you a Chinese name and an English one.’

  Joan laughed lightly. ‘It was not his doing, no, no. He just sent me to a convent school so I could speak English and the nuns couldn’t handle Chinese names so they named me Joan after Saint Joan of Arc. I think they were thinking how sweet it would be to barbecue the pesky girl.’

  Leah smiled. She was becoming interested in this hidden side to her mother.

  But Grandfather went on talking to Joan without a flicker of humour. ‘My father, he took your father and me up this hill when we heard of Japanese troops invading China, invading Manchuria. Long, long ago. I think 1931. He told us to go, find a safe place, because there was going to be a war. So Connected to Wealth reached Singapore. I went to Vietnam and we never found each other again …’

  Leah nodded gravely. It was a good story, good enough for Dad, maybe. ‘But no coin,’ she said sadly.

  Grandfather ignored her. ‘But why?’ He turned to Joan with sudden anger in his voice.

  Joan stepped back, uncertain.

  ‘The Japanese came here, built their fort just over there, some were killed and they killed some, but the village was still here at the end. Father was here, and mother, and I came back from Vietnam to help the village, to help the family. But where was my brother? Through the communes, the famines, through the Decade of Chaos, Connected to Wealth gave nothing!’

  Joan’s face darkened. ‘That is unfair. He wrote –’

  ‘Once. Oh, he may have written many times and the letters never arrived, but he never came back. I tell my father that he is staying away to become rich, that he will come back one day and help us all …’ Grandfather watched Joan’s face.

  Joan whirled on the old man. ‘He had to make a life for his family out there! You don’t know what it was like … He watched a mob burn his shop … He wanted to come back, but when he was ready it was too late.’

  Grandfather put on a smile and patted Joan. ‘Sorry, sorry. I did not mean to upset you. I only wish I had seen my brother just once more.’

  Joan let herself relax. ‘It’s past, isn’t it? My taxi-truck is coming.’

  Grandfather led the way down the hill. On the way to the taxi-truck he showed them a mandarin orchard, greeted the old man who owned the village buffalo, and stepped aside for the woman with the liquid manure from the village toilet. He stopped at the ‘corner shop’, a small hut at the edge of the paddies, and bought Leah a bottle of warm soft drink. He seemed to be making some sort of point, but Leah could not work out what it was.

  Joan left the village on the taxi-truck, leaving Leah with Grandfather, who was immediately more at ease with her than with her mother.

  ‘You like the village?’ Grandfather said, pointing a disapproving finger at Swallow, who was peeling a stolen mandarin.

  ‘Oh yes, especially Swallow.’

  Swallow gave her a piece of mandarin to spread the guilt.

  ‘It is a good place to live in now. Since the commune is over and we can use our land the way we want. A family buys a neighbour’s paddy and turns it into a mandarin orchard. The neighbour uses the money to buy a buffalo which he rents around the village. He does not do much work these days. The buffalo works for him. One family builds our village toilet to collect manure for his fields, or to sell. Families that are smart do well, but families who send sons to other countries do better. Most times …’

  Leah said nothing.

  Grandfather sighed. ‘Chained Dragon is
not smart. I do my best for him. You understand?’

  Leah did not, but she nodded politely.

  Grandfather walked through a grove of trees and chuckled by a fragile platform. ‘Of course some people are too smart for their own good. One man planted these lychee trees at the edge of his paddy. Good idea? But when the lychees are about to ripen their owner must go to bed with them every night to stop people from eating them.’

  Swallow looked remarkably innocent.

  They picked their way across canals, trenches, narrow bridges, to reach a lush shoulder-high jungle of vegetables. Jade was shopping with a basket and a sickle. Beans for tonight? A flick and the basket sagged a little. Cabbage? Tomato, pumpkin, sage, peas? Anything you want, and everything as fresh as a new-laid egg.

  Jade waved at them and threw an ear of corn to Swallow. ‘Tonight will be a little banquet.’

  Tonight was a big banquet. Joan came from Xinhua loaded with her bags, Leah’s bag, a pickled goose, smoked duck, salt pork, two enormous ocean fish, rice wine and a pressure lamp – ‘For when the electricity goes.’

  Jade seemed quietly embarrassed, but she laughed and joked as the meal was prepared. Swallow taught Leah the proper way to use chopsticks as they tackled the banquet.

  Dragon said he’d heard that the students in Beijing were holding a class strike. Nobody was going to lectures.

  ‘I think that’s a great idea!’ Leah said.

  ‘You would,’ said Joan. ‘Poor Deng.’

  ‘But he’s right!’ Grandfather laughed, sweeping his chopsticks over the laden table. ‘He says it is glorious to be rich!’

  6 The Secret

  For the next few days Leah and Joan settled into the village and the Ji house. Leah was astonished how well Joan became part of the scene, feeding the stove with straw while Jade cooked, going down to the fields with the sickle for the day’s vegetables, scrubbing clothes by the well as if it was fun. Leah actually worried that Joan might like the village so much she would want to stay, but Joan destroyed that shadow on the third day, when she started muttering about long hot showers and something fresh to read. Then Leah relaxed and began to enjoy the village.

  She had noticed that there was something going on around the house, some murmuring current, but she did not know what it was and ignored it. Far better to slow down and allow the slow rhythm of the village to ripple over her head. And it was very easy to tolerate the small problem of Little Swallow, who had adopted her for playmate and dumb sister and would never shut up.

  ‘Do you have ducks?’ Outside Tiny’s room, so early the sky was still purple.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Chickens?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Buffalo?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Goose?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re very poor, aren’t you?’

  ‘I used to have a cat.’

  Just before dawn a few schoolchildren and some parents trudged reluctantly to the village toilet. (She went later in the day and tried to hold her breath until she left.) A couple of roosters called to each other as the sky began to lighten and a hen shrieked in outrage as some woman reclaimed her kitchen. The cat kicked herself free of her kittens, stepped daintily out of the box and disappeared. The hens in the empty shed complained drowsily, occasionally flapping a wing, as if to bat the rim of the sun back below the horizon.

  Joan was still asleep. She was still a self-confessed ‘city slicker’ – but she had handled snakes as a girl of seven in the Snake Temple in Penang. That had come out last night.

  With the coming of the sun, Dragon charged over to the well, jerked up a bucket of icy water and splashed it over his body, shouting, almost in pain. Jade built a bright fire with straw under the stove and Swallow slowed it down with sawdust at the side. Leah was sent out to the shed to find some eggs to add to the short soup and Joan finally rolled out of bed to wipe and set the table. Grandfather came up from his house to join the family for breakfast, then Dragon wobbled his bicycle toward Xinhua. The tracks from the village filled with hurrying men, then schoolchildren wearing red scarves.

  Why didn’t Grandfather go to Xinhua with Dragon? Was he staying here because of Joan?

  ‘Do you go to school?’ asked Swallow.

  ‘Yes. A big brick building in a place called Chatswood.’

  ‘Why don’t you go to school here?’

  ‘I don’t think they would let me in.’

  ‘Because you’re not clever enough?’

  ‘Well, not really …’

  ‘You should go to school. You get the words all wrong.’

  The village quietened again. The tracks emptied but they were never quite deserted. A woman walked to the vegetable patch; a man rode into the centre of the village and offered to sell kitchen gadgets; a man with a bell flourished ice-creams on a stick.

  ‘Do you have an ice-cream man?’

  ‘Yes. He comes to the house in a van when it is hot.’

  ‘What’s your house like? Is it like mine?’

  ‘A little bit. We have carpets on the floor, and a gas stove, and a washing machine, and a TV …’

  ‘A colour TV?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your mother must know important people.’

  ‘Oh no, no. Almost everybody owns a colour TV.’

  ‘But you don’t have a duck.’

  Grandfather took Joan up to the roof of the house to show her the view. Something was in the air. Jade joined them, and she did not look happy.

  ‘We are going to have a bigger house,’ Swallow said from below.

  ‘Another house?’

  ‘Oh, no. This house will grow. When we can buy bricks.’

  The ducks waddled from the village to the bamboo groves as the buffalo shambled to the grass under the lychee trees. The cat rolled in the dust and sprawled on a warm rock near the reservoir as the chickens spilled into Jade’s house. Joan and Jade walked away from the house, leaving the doors open, to sickle-shop. The ducks moved from the bamboo groves to the cropped grass the buffalo had left under the lychee trees and looked for tit-bits. The ducklings toppled from the rubble and swarmed into the reservoir.

  ‘Do you have friends, Li?’ Swallow was grooming a rag and peg doll.

  ‘Millions of them. All right, a few.’ Including Joan, once. Now Street Gangster Joan, Snake Woman Joan and more. Crazy woman. Is the split your fault …?

  ‘My ma says I am going to have a brother sometime.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘You don’t have a brother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even a father.’

  ‘Look at that buffalo! Laziest animal I ever saw.’

  ‘Fathers are fun. Most of the time.’

  ‘I think it’s sleeping on its feet.’

  ‘It’s all right. Now you got a sister.’

  ‘You? Yeah, thanks kid.’

  The buffalo moved slowly from the lychee trees as a wailing funeral walked past, dropping smouldering joss bundles. The cat came back into the house, swatted idly at a chicken and sprawled near the well. Joan came back to the house, alone, with her arms full. The buffalo sloshed into the reservoir, driving the ducklings back onto the rubble. The ducks, however, marched up the road and into the reservoir, completely ignoring the buffalo.

  ‘Do you fish, Li?’

  ‘Only once, Swallow.’ In that secret cove. With Dad. After he got the Cough.

  ‘Come on, I’ll show you how.’

  Swallow and Leah went into the flooded paddy with the fisherman, a silent man with a battery on his hip and two poles. He sent a minor electric charge into the water channel beside him and Swallow used the fisherman’s net to scoop up any small fish or crab stunned by the charge.

  Swallow ran far ahead of Leah on the way home, leaving Leah time to think about Dad and Mum and her. She had been angry with Joan ever since Dad’s death, and she had thought she was in the right. But from the moment they landed in China, Joan had been shimmering.
Now the driving woman she knew, now a glimpse of a street-smart little girl, now a polished, sophisticated woman, now blowing straw in the stove and loving it, now turning her back on Dad’s death, now putting her hand on her ancestors’ graves. Now gabbling happily away with Jade, but watching those students on TV with something like fear. Before China Leah knew Joan; now Leah knew nothing at all.

  She had stopped in the shadows of the bamboo and was no longer thinking about Joan when she heard Jade’s voice raised in anger on the other side of a clump. Jade was saying something about a ‘coin’.

  ‘Well, I wanted to keep them here,’ Grandfather said quietly. ‘They’re our family, aren’t they? You need the money.’

  ‘Not like that, we don’t.’

  ‘I don’t know where that stupid coin will lead them. Let them stay here a week and she’ll want to pay for the second storey.’

  ‘I don’t want a Hong Kong house! We want a house that we build with our own hands. We are not beggars. You tell them the truth about the coin …’

  Jade and Grandfather walked out of the bamboo.

  Leah watched them go and wondered if she should tell Joan what she had heard. This was her family, her village and she was happy with what they had found. Was it right to ruin it for her?

  She hesitated for five minutes, but the only thing she knew was that she knew nothing and was not capable of making a wise decision on this. So she told Joan.

  Joan looked at Leah gravely. ‘You sure you heard it right?’

  ‘Yes, something like that. What does it mean?’

  ‘It means that the other half of the coin is somewhere else, and Grandfather was keeping that from us.’ She hunched, as if she was carrying a sudden weight. ‘So he could persuade his “rich” relative to build the Ji family a mansion.’

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘I don’t want to move from here. Grandfather is still our close family. He’s my father’s brother. I like Jade, and Swallow likes you … But I guess we’ll have to work it out. Somehow.’

  It was quite easy.

  Joan sat next to Grandfather near the plum tree and pulled out the coin. She was thinking of some way to approach the old man when he sighed and plucked it from her hand.