What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

the Ba Chang was a sorceress and that she had bribed the authorities to harass him.

I went with Loc Tuc—that was the monk’s name—to the mainland as his convert to Hoa Hao. He might have lost everything, but he did not lose his gift with papers. So I was born again as Loc Cuoi. We ended up in Singapore, where Loc Tuc had contacts and where I myself became a monk.

Singapore is the best city in the world. That is where I discovered Loc Tuc’s real book. Sun Tzu. Though you would think with such a treasure he would have defeated the Ba Chang on Bidong. This book he hid from me. Loc Tuc was a cosmopolitan man. He made me wade through the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, though I admit I like poets; the Analects of Kung Fu Tzu, though I am a practical man myself. Not to mention the verses of the poet emperor Ts’ao Ts’ao. As a matter of fact, Loc Tuc traded in stolen bamboo slips from raided archaeological sites, the graves of the ancient Chinese noblemen, and these were a particular pleasure to me. Of course, what he coveted were the actual words of the Buddha, and he conspired at length trying to acquire the Kangyur in its earliest known form, even though that was not his kind of Buddhism. He said that there was a version written in the hand of the Buddha himself and that he hoped to have it before he died. The tortures he put me through memorizing and memorizing. I ask myself today, Why? What did he see in me? Because he was not a man to do anything for nothing. Of course, I was his lackey, his dog. He was teaching me to bite anyone he didn’t like. But what else? Because you don’t need to teach a dog good manners. But maybe I was his insurance. A dog will bite you too, and if you let go the chain, he will ravage you. So Loc Tuc chained me up with his books and paper. But I was still a dog. He knew. I knew.

You would say, then, that I was lucky to be taken in by this monk, Loc Tuc. You would say that he saved me from worse things that could have happened to me; that he calmed my life, took my tears away. So why complain about the way the darkness made us all hallucinate, made us all see the water ripple in a certain direction, made my sisters’ hearts quiver, my mother and father think they were each holding my hand? Why quibble about what made the boat lift and pull southeast or southwest, what made me fall asleep thinking of my father’s hand in his pocket or his hat waiting to be touched the next day? Who knows why we left on that particular evening? Perhaps this was my fate. Perhaps you’re right. I didn’t have a hard life. It was simply a life. A life like millions of lives.

We may pretend to have control of things, but we don’t. It’s up to the heavens, as laid out for us by destiny. Why question the stars? Wars are inevitable and we have to pay the price, human nature can’t be changed, the laws of nature prevail no matter how we fight against them, the strong survive, the weak perish. Blah blah blah blah! Crap, lo dit! Yes, I learned the strong survive, all right, the weak perish. But take it from me, the strong are just strong, not best. The most ruthless, the greediest, but not the best. I know what got killed in me. I know where he is, the weak little shit who kept waiting for goodness, the geum, who wanted to jump up and trust anybody; who was ready any time to forgive.

So luck had nothing to do with it. I chose the monk. He didn’t choose me. I saw him in his brown hassock with his frigging bells. I knew he wasn’t a good man. Who is? I knew all I had to do was flatter him. Not too big because he would see through that, but small, you know, a look of admiration here, a favour there, get him a little lump of opium. You know, quiet, quiet. He would scold me and tell me it was wrong, but he’d take it, and then I’d find him listless, his body slow as oil, in the prayer pagoda, his eyes filmed over and his fingers burned. I don’t believe in destiny. If you follow the Buddha, you know you have to make your own path. So I made my path by choosing the monk.

I remembered nothing of Saigon. The shanties of Pulau Bidong had been my city for seven years. By now I had almost forgotten my father and mother. My mother in her red dress, my father in his hat with his hand in his pocket. In the years that passed this is all that remained memorable—the red dress over a fading figure and the hat and the hand in a pocket. When I close my eyes at night, I see the glow of the red dress and this hand reaching into its pocket. And when I open my eyes in the morning at the end of my last dreams, there again is the afterimage of a red dress, a hat, a hand. No matter my dreams, that would be the beginning and end of them. Long after it matters I still see that image like the skin under my eyelids.

Singapore—when we came to Singapore I knew I would live there for the rest of my life. It was clean like a good glass of water. I had never seen anything like it before—the glass towers, the swept streets, the orderly manner of everything, the birds—I felt like a rough and dirty stone put down in the middle of it all. We left seven months later. Loc