From the Kenyon Review, New Series, Autumn 1992, Vol. XIV, No. 4
There are some who will tell you dragons guard the moon. If
you have any doubt, go to Malaysia on the night of any full moon and
watch lizards try to resume their ancient positions of importance.
Under the lip of rooftops, where cool air circulates between rafters
and walls, lizards wait for the moon. When the moonlight falls,
tangerine bright, into this space between house and roof, lizards sing
their moonsongs in tweets and riffles.
There are those who doubt this tale. They say that in the
tropics, walls crackle with the trails of lizards and beetles. spiders
and worker ants. Sounds separate, disappear, and return. The
doubters say that when the heat of the day evaporates in the air space
under the roof, lizards come to eat the mites and nightcrawlers
passing by, and that is why you hear them clacking, triumphantly
smacking down their latest meal. I only know that sometimes, wide
eyed in my bed, I could hear the music of their laughter
after the moon reached its peak.
“It is good luck to have lizards take up residence on your
walls,” Bee Bee told me. But I only thought to enjoy the luxury
of time suspended and imagined them as dragons come to save the
moon for me. And it must have been true because the moon seemed
to wink its approval.
In Malaysia, the moon seems closer because you are so near
the equator, but even without this sense of the moon,
my introduction to Malaysia would have been special. Bee Bee
had been after me for years to pay her a visit, and for years,
I had hesitated. Now the country seemed more than ready
to help me shed my reluctance.
It was all that Bee Bee had promised—and more.
It was a country of beautiful extremes, an array of people
of color, a profusion of flowers, birds, butterflies, and
traditions as varied as the climate that ranged from mountains
to seashore. A land as glorious in its delicacy as it was
in the clutter and filth of its urban back alleys. Even as my flight
circled in a landing approach into Penang, I glimpsed from my window
the beginning of some of the contradictions that awaited me. The
resort island of Langkawi rested at the tip of the mainland like a
lush green pomelo in a backwater pool of silvery blue ocean that was
unfit for swimming. And to the south, verdant mountains rose above a
thin layer of gray smog.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
my seat partner said. I answered yes, but why not?
We were the Ferenghi, the foreigners come to taste
for a moment a bit of this country. I would not see him again
for several weeks, the next time by chance
in the airport lounge at Kuala Lumpur. And by then,
he would not recognize me. By then, I would be
only one more brown face lost in a range of skin colors
from ebon Tamils to ivory complexioned Chinese. And I would stare
at him for a full five minutes, thinking him just
another Ferenghi, another blond American sampling the world between college
and the promised career. In the larger towns, outside
of the posh hotels and resort enclaves, I saw
them everywhere—English, Swede, Australian, American,
more native than natives below their streaked hair.
We began the conversation with his surprise that I had seen a side
of the country not opened to him. “These are beautiful people,”
he said. “Exotic. Different.
But I feel like such a foreigner here.
Nothing like it at home.”
What could I tell him?
How an East Indian cleaning woman in the train station
had passed me three times before she sat down and spoke?
She called me “Sister” and seeing my books,
asked where I had learned the “trade of reading.”
I showed her the photo of the author, Gloria Naylor,
an African-American. Our skin tones were the same
—hers, mine, the author’s—
and though she was younger, her dark skin was mottled, drawn
around the corners of her mouth in the same attitude
I’d seen on the faces of my grandmother’s friends in the States
who’d worked as day help in the white suburbs. The woman
told me she had seven children, three grandchildren,
and another on the way. She wanted to know how long
I’d been away from home.
“More than a month,” I told her. She smiled
and leaned heavily on her broom. “Here,” she said,
“I have the day to myself and my children only at night.”
When my train left, she waved good-bye
the way an old friend would.
The woman in the Central Market at Kuala Lumpur
was convinced I should buy something of Nonja silver.
“They were women of letters.
Like you,” she said. “They made their own way.” She was part Malay,
part East Indian. Because I am black, she asked me
about America and what to expect if she would move there.
I told her how color was still a simpleminded distraction in the States,
and how far we have yet to go. She pulled out a canvas bag
of silver belts, told me the history of each, reducing them
below the market price for every story.
Her daughter, she said, had moved to Singapore
where dark skin was not always a commodity.
“Because there are too many Ferenghi,” she said. “She needs to
come home where she is wanted.”
• •
Some mornings, Bee Bee and I would visit one of the temples
in the heart of town, where the Buddhists were on one side
of the street, the Moslems on the other, and in front of each door,
flower vendors sold offerings of joss sticks, incense, and blossoms
to the passing crowds. The heavy smells of sandalwood and spice
drifted into the street. Holding offerings of jasmine and frangipani
and wearing wreaths of flowers in our hair, we joined
the lines of people going in. In the darkness of the temple,
with my bare feet on the cool stones, I remembered temples on the island
of Hawaii, and my friend, Makaleia,
who had been dead for twelve years when I went to Malaysia.
My memories of Hawaii are full of the heady smells
of plumeria and maile leaves, and watching Maka, a master teacher,
lead students in her hui in the graceful
movements of the hula. She and I had walked
under palms as heavy as the casurinas lining beaches in Penang,
and we had watched lizards, long sticks of curious eyes, follow us.
Makaleia, like Bee Bee, so full of laughter. The flowers I
threaded through my hair when Bee Bee and I joined the morning
procession into the temples were for her.
“I want to be a writer,” a young Tamil student said to me. “But
when I read about women writers, they do not have such happy lives.
What is a woman of color like me to do? I want to have a happy life,
but I want to be a writer. I don’t want to be lonely and alone.”
“We are never alone,” I told her. “We nag each other. We cry
together. We keep in touch.”
Bee Bee, at the other end of the table, laughed happily.
During those first days of my visit to Malaysia, everything
seemed to be in motion: the crowds, the smells, even the melody of
languages-a dozen it seemed, syllables playing against each other
in a canopy of sounds. And the sounds themselves played and replayed.
Early in the morning, the ping-ping of bicycle bells began the day’s
deliveries of laundry, fresh produce, newspapers, and mail. Diesel
fueled buses fumed toward the center of town, and trishaw drivers
took up their posts along the main roads. Some trishaws carried
their morning pickup of uniformed school children, some so small
they occupied only the middle section of the narrow trishaw seat.
Other trishaws ferried office workers or simply circled the block,
pedaling slowly in front of buses and cars
as they cruised for passengers.
By midmorning, downtown streets were clotted with food vendors’
stalls, their woks heated and ready, the chop-chop and swish of knives
and chopsticks mixed with the scent of rice, pork, noodles, cuttlefish,
bok choy, and peppers. Knowing my penchant for hot peppers, Bee Bee
would select a portion of the spiciest food which we’d eat
at one of the metal tables cluttering the edges of the sidewalks.
In the heat of the afternoon, we’d cool our thirsts with shaved ice
or melons. But mornings were the time for sweet rolls and coffee
made thick, Turkish style. Mornings held the last cool air
of the day trapped in the shadows of trees, dark corners of temples
and antique shops. That was the time when thousands of birds
sang their praises of heat: calling and cawing, whistling and squawking,
tweeting, chirping, trilling, and caterwauling-creating
their own songs and imitating a dozen others. Even in front
of the arcade mall, a bird seller’s shop echoed with songs
of caged parakeets, yellow-headed cockatiels, and brightly crested
mynahs. The noise followed us into the hubbub of the modern shopping
center where the old world slammed into the rudely efficient new world,
and the sounds of birds and trishaws were replaced by blaring
loudspeakers and pilfered hits from the latest American pop music
charts, along with a cache of designer jeans
and some version of Kentucky Fried McDonald’s.
On the street of tailors where Chinese shops advertised
their skills in ideographs, a single piece of English graffiti
declared: BEWARE OF GOD!
Nearby was a Sanskrit equivalent, a filagree of warning
scrawled like dragon’s fire.
Quiet is not a word I readily associate with Malaysian cities.
Each street held the sounds of half a dozen languages.
From dawn until well past midnight, people gathered to noisily
eat, work, drink, flirt, dance, and gossip. Malaysians eat five
times a day, maybe more: a quick bowl of noodles, sweet melon, or rice
cakes, an order of satay, Indian bread, or curry. Or a late night snack
along promenades like Gurney Drive, where moving past kiosks
of pirated audio tapes was like being trapped inside a radio
that never held to one station for the length of any song. The voices
of other strollers became the static in between, and the sea,
an arm’s length away, amplified everything. I had no choice
but to flow into the mood of the day, whether I was on Gurney
or at the Thieves Market, where you could find anything,
from ornate Chinese pipes and ladies’ leather
gloves to boxes of dolls’ heads, no bodies,
crates of uniform trousers, penny nails, or hand-held eggbeaters.
Lines of people squirmed around stalls like conga dancers,
the whole line stopping if someone caught sight of an item they
just had to have. Anyone need three hundred rubber bathtub stoppers?
And at the end of the market, the usual array of cubbyhole eateries
with a few tables set at curb’s end.
I began to expect the myriad of sounds, so much so
that on the day Bee Bee and I saw a boatload of Burmese monks,
I was stunned by the silence that swept the crowd. We were
at the ferry terminal purchasing tickets to leave Penang,
when the street, normally awash in a babel of noise, fell quiet.
Suddenly, I saw a surge of saffron robes
extending from a boat ramp onto the quay.
But the only sound I heard was the whisper of sandals.
Everyone moved to let them pass.
“No one touches a priest, especially women,” Bee Bee whispered.
I watched the monks glide by, the line punctuated, now and then,
by motorcycle policemen coasting beside their charges.
Within minutes, the group extended without pause
past three docks, nearly six city blocks.
We waited a full five minutes, maybe more, but I never saw its end.
Just a procession of men in saffron robes, faces clean-shaven,
boyish, almost expressionless but not submissive.
In that honored space accorded all holy men,
they simply moved through the crowd without the need to
acknowledge anyone else. When Bee Bee and I left, they were still
moving in a silent procession, in complete uniformity
as if they moved as one: one brown shoulder exposed,
one saffron robe fluttering in the humid air,
one head, shaved and slightly bowed.
It is hot in Malaysia, and between humidity and the noise,
there is no sense of quiet until you reach the mountains or the sea.
The quiet of the hidden valleys in the limestone mountains near Ipoh
demanded the same reverence those monks had held over the dockside
in Penang. The mountains were mysterious and restful, and offered me
my first glimpse of the real beauty of Malaysia. And it was there
I met Lau Soo Chye.
• •
The day after we reached Ipoh, Lau Soo Chye
had strolled into a teahouse where Bee Bee and I
were spending the better part of a sweet afternoon
with one of her students, a handsome master of the tea ceremony.
Lau arrived late, bringing with him bags of fruit, seeds,
and berries, which he immediately spread upon the table,
a bounty full of fresh odors and clean air.
Even before he told me his name, he had begun to peel
a lily pod, his fingernail quickly slicing the seed’s
green sleeve to expose the sweet white pulp nested
in the pockets of stems like marbles on a Chinese checkerboard.
The fruit, he said,
had been gathered on a trip he’d just made to help a friend harvest
melons. Within seconds, I was eating
the seeds of lily pods and slices of sweet mango,
knowing neither their names nor his.
And it was with that kind of trust that I went with Lau and Bee Bee
on an excursion into the mountains of Ipoh.
After the noise of Penang, even the smallest rustle of leaves or soft
thrumming of insects had seemed loud. At an orchid farm, I watched
lizards scoot through the sawdust around pots holding plants called
Queen’s Lip and Jane’s Story.
Row after row of delicate blossoms exuded scent. Lizards
held a pose that extended the stem of the plant
into its shadow and sometimes I made the wrong choice
the way I had in the Yucatan when I’d mistaken a giant lizard
for a fallen tree limb until my camera clicked
and it had scurried away, taking its smaller, more photogenic
kin with it, laughter trailing behind them.
In Ipoh, I had no better luck.
“Quickly, quickly,” Lau instructed
while I tried to capture the lizards mid-flight on my camera lens.
Everything seemed to move rapidly: the light
filtering through palms and vines, the scent
of blossoms, the swirl of insects.
At a stream, water rushed over rocks with such force,
I failed to hear the whine of mosquitoes
until after I was bitten.
Lau gathered sprigs of thick grass and rubbed
its juices across my skin.
In seconds, the stinging had vanished.
The mountains of Ipoh rise like the cliff dwellings of Taos,
except in Malaysia, mountains still hold their primordial state.
When I looked up at the shale cliffsides
of Ipoh, bats swirled from their caves into the first rays of dusk.
It was early evening, and the movement of their wings hummed
in the cavern openings. Then they took to the air, circled,
floated and in a single wave, returned to the silence of stone.
I counted at least six caves on one cliffside alone.
At the base of another mountain, Lau took us to a monk
who told fortunes, and another who offered sanctuary for those
in need of a time of peace. Their retreats were carved out of the
mountain itself. The walls of limewashed rock seemed safer
than any room I’d been in for months.
Outside, Lau showed me trees that rained winged seeds.
Its pods were gossamer and floated to the ground around my head
like butterflies or the shadows of stars.
“A gift,” Lau said,
and offered them to me the same way he’d offered
the sweet seeds of water lilies the day before. I think he said, “It
will cleanse you,”
but I can no longer remember if he meant the lily
pods or the winged seeds from the limestone caves of Ipoh.
More than once I thought of Maka and Hawaii, especially when
I went with Lau and Bee Bee into the caves. In Hawaii, I had
scrambled over stony cliffs, one handhold away from tumbling into the
sea, to take rubbings of petroglyphs that recalled the ancient gods
of the Islands. At Ipoh, my cave exploring was a bit more subdued
until I came upon a breathtaking valley on the hidden side of a grotto.
Caves have always been somewhat magical for me,
(especially after the caves of Majorca where Moors
and Nubians once took refuge and Jules Verne
was inspired to write Journey to the Center of the Earth)
so it was only fitting that when Lau pulled me, hand over hand,
to an outcropping where stalactite deposits had percolated into
wondrous forms, I felt myself pulled into the sudden unveiling
of something magical. The cave opening formed a picture window,
and in the overhang of stalactites, I immediately recognized
the curve and cup of dragons.
“It is from the rainbow,” Lau said, tracing the arch of the
stone. “All the patterns are ancient patterns of earth staring from
the heavens. Bending down.” I saw multicolored deposits layered
like rings of a tree. “The shape is the rainbow,” Lau continued. “In
my language, the rainbow is called: Dragon-coming-to-take-the-waters.”
When I touched the rock, my palm was filled with moisture.
Above us, a few white clouds scurried by.
Malaysia seemed at once distant and familiar. Everywhere
in the lattice of sounds, smells and colors seemed to
double and redouble. Night brought the scents of tropical
forests closer to cities. The air held the waning aroma of acacia
and cassurina, or foul odors of overripe breadfruit and prickly
durian, fruit bearing heavenly tastes cloaked in the smell of sewers.
“There are durian addicts who are outcasts,” Bee Bee said.
“There are laws against office workers eating the fruit at lunch.”
At night, half asleep, I could smell the raw earth
of backyard gardens, or pools of water turned mildew-green
with twigs and leaves. Under the locked awnings of shops,
there was the lingering scent of dye from silk factories, spongy
wood from the drying shed, rings of salt crusting
the edges of the tubs. In the temples, snakes
awoke from their drowsy daytime stupor to suck the eggs left
by worshippers. Behind the fresh air markets, ripe smells
of vegetation and fish blended with fine dust sifted through
bags of rice and sharp traces of sweat drying on the leather seats
of trishaws parked nearby. Sidewalk arcades along Gurney Drive
reeked of oil from roast duck, crispy fish, sauteed mushrooms
and broccoli. A sudden shift and the night air was bloated
with the dander of feathers from plucked birds
on their way to market, squids salted for the next day’s sales,
or the lingering smell of incense for kitchen gods
burnt low and fragrant as roasted cashews.
And always there was the smell of flowers: delicate
mimosa, the lacey scent of lilacs, a dazzle of orchids and wild
lilies. And caught in the current of rivers that untwisted from dense
trees somewhere in the heart of the country, flower petals
sometimes found their way past cities and into the sea.
• •
On the last day of 1990 in the last decade of the twentieth
century, I stood in front of the colonial railway station at Ipoh and
watched the moon rise just beyond the edge of rooftops. The night was
heavy with sounds, and the full moon hung low in a sky so balmy, birds
seemed unable to sleep and flowers barely closed their petals. The
moonlight fell across the flagstones of the promenade,
onto the shoulders and arms of lovers and onto families
sauntering in the heat of that Malaysian
night. I was strolling a few feet in front of Bee Bee, lost
in the laughter of everyone about to enter the new year,
when I came upon a couple of vendors advertising something
they called “elixir.” They were gypsies. Or at least, they said
they were. With the moon that low, it didn’t matter. Nor did it
matter if their elixir really was an aphrodisiac.
What could be more propitious than walking beneath a
full moon hanging low over a public square on a night so balmy?
“It will make your lover miss you even more,” the handsome
vendor assured me, his smile as inviting as gypsies’ I’d seen
in half a dozen other countries. How do they know that smile
and how its magic transcends all language?
I took the elixir
and dreamed of my lover.
“How could you drink
and not know what it was?” Bee Bee asked.
I smiled the gypsy’s smile.
“So . . . how did it taste?” she asked.
“Bittersweet,” I said. “Like a purge.”
A lizard darted from the base of a tree and crossed the brick
pathway in front of me. One more step, and I would have been directly
in its path. “That’s good luck,” Bee Bee said. The lizard peered up
at me, judged my size and its closing distance, then darted away.
“Every time I see a lizard, you say it’s good luck,”
I told Bee Bee. “There are lizards everywhere. How can they all
bring good luck?”
“Well, you’re here, aren’t you?”
I laughed at her logic, but still, there must have been some
truth in it. I was there. It was midnight New Year’s Eve, and the
moonlight was falling across the rooftops of Ipoh, Malaysia.
