Free The White Door by Stephen Chan Page A

why and how he longed whenever the moon was mirrored, and she thought at first marriage to someone so much older and who had become a stranger to his own land, his own people, must be punishment for sickliness, but his eyes were kind and she, impoverished at fourteen, had nowhere else to go, and when she fled to New Zealand years later to escape the arms of war, she brought up her three children in an iron-sheet shed, and then she died, and one of her daughters, the one who had stolen lychees and laughed in White Stone, was first taken as a ward and then sent in arranged marriage to an eighteen-year-old boy with long muscles and a single pin-striped suit with Oxford bags, a floral tie and long hair that was Brylcreem-shaped into that Clark Gable look that eluded all efforts by nature and, after they had a son, conceived in the brown room with no light, the family came to her grave, and the son danced on the marble slabs and placed flowers for the grandmother he had never known and, of whom, one photograph existed and she was seated and a sheet of painted books was stretched behind her.
     
    And, as the sun shone fitfully through Heaven’s Cloud, and the boydanced from grave to grave, singing some nonsense to himself, the others began the memorial picnic, offering first the roasted meats to his grandmother, and then looked around for the first-born son in his brown beret, and almost rushed to stop him, but withdrew to watch, as he had found a grave unloved by flowers, unvisited by picnicking loved-ones, and the son was walking a circumference he had plotted in that mind of children who know circles, and he was, like the socialist commissar of the graves, collecting a single flower from each grave and, a sufficient bouquet collected by circle’s end, brought them to the grave unloved and placed them in the headstone’s vase with such a studied tenderness that all the prophecies that had been intoned at his birth sprang to the parents’ minds, the child of flowers who would limp in a muddied world of black people and wave a centuries-old sword of fire beneath the moon and the black soil of heaven’s garden of stars.
    And had sought, before he was theirs, to wear sky in his hair, and had been returned, a refugee’s son, to relearn the limits of life and of grace, and to give up his heart to the creatures of heaven.
3: The shop at the end of the world
    Because he was proud and had grown weary of the slights of his parents, particularly his dragon mother and, anyway, the bands of stomach muscles could not constrict the black hand, and the timetable of the hand gave him ambition, because the timetable might be short and he had to hurry and he wanted to look back on this time of life with contempt, and because he had fallen in love with Meil Wah, he was indignant with himself that he could not prevent his wife from being subjected to the indignities, commands and deprivations his dragon mother had first dealt out to him.
    But there was nothing he could do. They were poor. They lived in the shop with his parents. His wife had come without dowry and she redeemed this lack by accepting the home and the hegemonyof the dragon. And if, in the stories, most dragons were the benign angels of God, messengers of glad tidings and playful in the heavens like dolphins, this mother-in-law she thought was the unlovely rogue of the skies who had been beached in the tree-fringed backwater of Parnell, and had the temper and scorn of an excluded creature, but her China of old, of warlords and slaves, was changing even then. The sickly mother of Meil Wah had died and her father with the heart of adventure before her and Meil Wah had accepted, because there was no choice, the marriage brokered around her, and the husband-to-be, she thought, could be loved, or something comfortable that usually grew in the wake of love might grow, even if love never did; but the in-laws were the hefty conditionals of the protocol she was imagining. That was in 1948,