On the day of the change, we find Ah Tin in Trafalgar Square, waiting under Nelson. He is turning the Sinatra hat this way and that. With no mirror to hand, he has to guess how he looks. Like Frank himself? Like one of his old hep cat buddies? A sojourner? A good Hakka son? Or just an immigrant kitchen help on his day off? No, no, he doesn’t want to look like that. Hep cat? Hep cat, it is.
He cranes his skinny neck, but no sight of Cousin Ah Wing. As he waits, he tries to piece together a tune. And your heart goes, Ring-a-ding ding, ring-a-ding ding, ring-a-ding ding. Before he can stop himself, he’s taken the hat off again and pulled the scrap of paper from under the brim. He holds it next to the inscription at the base of the column. N-e-l-s-o-n. Nelson. Reassured, he slips the piece of paper back under the hat.
He waits.
Since Ah Tin’s arrival, his cousin has assumed the role of sometime guardian and frequent promiser of ‘ho yeh’— good stuff. This manifests itself in the form of hot racing tips (ignoring the fact that Ah Tin doesn’t care for gambling), the odd pack of Marlboro Red (Ah Tin has never gotten used to the taste), or even, in propitious times, a note out of a recent win (this is fine).
Ah Tin squints through the sun at the weekend crowd, a delirious landscape of sweaty pink bodies and regal, sprawling stonework. Small children, ignoring their mothers’ pleas, dangle off stone lions and kick their way through fountain spray. Families pull their fists out of paper bags and hurl showers of crumbs at pigeons; the very pigeons, Ah Tin puzzles, that leave droppings all over their important monuments. Ice-creams drip onto watches. White skins turning red.
Ah Tin doesn’t turn red, but he slides a finger under his shirt collar and feels a disagreeable moistness on his skin. And his head, throbbing, feels somewhat bigger than usual. He turns the hat this way and that. He decides it probably doesn’t belong up there. It’s far too hot and thick to wear on a day like this. Turning the thing round in his hands, he wishes he’d simply left it hanging on the back of his bedsit door. But hadn’t he waited long enough to show it off? Hadn’t he cradled it through that treacherous fortnight of anxiety, tedium and projectile vomiting as the ship steered its choppy course towards England?
Back in Hong Kong, his mother assumed that he’d thrown it out as instructed. She considered it bad luck, an unnecessary reminder of his Good For Nothing Uncle, a handsome, charismatic fellow of dubious means. He returned to the village once or twice a year, often unannounced, usually in time for dinner. Ah Tin’s mother, without so much as a glance in the direction of her prodigal brother-in-law, would prompt the children to greet him in their wearily dutiful chorus—“Uncle”—and order Ah Mui, the youngest of her seven daughters, to fetch another bowl and pair of chopsticks for the table. Ah Tin’s sisters, mindful of their mother’s tight, disapproving frown, obediently kept their eyes low while plowing food into their mouths. Ah Tin, though, would forget about the bowl of rice growing ever colder in front of him as he listened, mesmerised, to his uncle’s fantastic tales of places with names he’d never heard before, of mansions filled with gold and diamonds, of fighting with mountain bandits and dancing with aristocratic ladies.
After dinner Ah Tin and his sisters would press their ears against the kitchen door and strain to make out the muffled voices on the other side, one pleading, one angry. Good For Nothing Uncle would eventually emerge, already wearing his hat and coat, and bid a hurried, cheerful goodbye to his nephew and seven nieces before disappearing once more into the night. Then Ah Tin’s mother would say her piece.
“I’ve been wrong about your Good For Nothing Uncle. He’s good for one thing. Spinning a good yarn, that’s what. The stories you heard tonight? Put them out of your heads. They’re nothing more than fairytales for little children who don’t know any better and for fools who ought to know better. Fairytales—remember that.” She’d cast a stern eye over her seven daughters, all nodding gravely; and at her only son, stealing a longing glance toward the door.
“Especially you, Ah Tin.”
Good For Nothing Uncle’s last visit happened to coincide with Ah Tin’s fourteenth birthday.
“Fourteen, eh?! Well, I’ll be damned!!”
His uncle slapped him on the back, declared him a man and wished him great fortune and success. There followed an awkward pause, during which his uncle appeared to be troubled by some distant thought. Suddenly he whipped off the smoke-grey trilby that he’d been sporting at a rakish angle and planted it on his nephew’s head.
“Look at you! The girls will be falling at your feet!”
Ah Tin pushed the brim of the hat above his eyes. “Is this really for me?”
His uncle nodded. “A gift from me to you. Happy birthday, nephew.”
Ah Tin never saw him again. From the village grapevine he heard reports that he’d gone to try his luck in Shanghai, then Guangzhou. Later on there were rumours that he’d given up on China altogether and had moved to Indonesia. Whenever Ah Tin asked his mother about him, she would smack the back of his head with her ring hand, leaving a tender bump that stayed with him for days afterwards.
Ah Tin grew smarter. He stopped asking about Good For Nothing Uncle. And the hat, well of course he couldn’t wear it out. But sometimes he hid himself away with it in the bathroom, the only room in the house with a lock, and caressed the dips and curves of its soft, felt peaks, which sometimes made him think of mountains. He’d try the hat on in front of the small, rust-spotted mirror, thinking he almost looked the part with his strong jaw and long, fleshy nose. But he didn’t like the way his doe eyes drooped at the sides; he thought this made him look girlish and sleepy. When he started to sprout some manly down on his face, he wore the hat while mastering the fine art of shaving, turning it this way and that and singing the only words he knew from the only English song he could remember: “And your heart goes / Ring-a-ding ding, ring-a-ding ding, ring-a-ding ding…” The rest, he would hum.
“You’re a good-hearted boy,” Ah Tin’s mother told her jobless son. “But tell me, what am I going to do with you? Oh, if only your worthless father had hung around long enough, but then…oh what’s the use? The men in this village, dreamers, all of them! They just run off when they feel like it! No good to anyone!”
Then she jumped up, reached behind the Goddess of Mercy and pulled out an old eggroll tin.
“Just look at your Cousin Ah Wing,” she said, fishing out a glossy black and white photograph from the pile of letters and snapshots.
Ah Tin held the corner of the picture between his thumb and forefinger and studied it closely. A row of men in black suits, the white Vs of their shirts split clean in half by thin, black ties. They stood under a large sign, which bore the Chinese characters for ‘Golden Dragon’. Ah Tin assumed that the much larger English letters above it held the same meaning. He spotted his Cousin Ah Wing in the middle of the row, and recognised some of the older boys from the village—his ‘brothers’. They sported near-identical hairstyles, shiny and slicked down. Thin white sticks dangled from the corners of their mouths. Some of them wore cocky grins, some of them sneered at the camera. They could have been a gang, a ridiculously well-groomed one. Or a backing band. Or a team of maverick secret agents, working for a covert government organisation. Whatever it was, it looked as if they belonged to something.
Ah Tin never found out whether his mother showed him the picture to inspire or deter him. If it was the latter, it was already too late; his mind was already set, seduced as it was by vague ambitions of Freedom! Adventure! Suits! And a chance, finally, to wear his hat.
*
Ah Tin squints at the sky. He can’t see Nelson’s head, but he imagines it to be there.
“Hey, Ah Tin!”
“Cousin Ah Wing!”
Ah Tin takes off the hat, less out of deference to his elder than a worry that he’s not wearing it at the right angle, or that he brought it out at all in this heat. Cousin Ah Wing is wearing a toothpick grin and a sharp new suit. It looks like the one he’s been talking about getting for weeks: charcoal-grey; extra-narrow lapels; expensive. Ah Tin admits he’s impressed, and curious to know how he can afford it on a waiter’s salary. But Cousin Ah Wing waves his hand in the air and grins,
“Oh, it wasn’t that much,” then “Right, let’s get away from all this pigeon shit.”
Ah Tin makes an effort to commit to memory street names and landmarks as his cousin negotiates their way out of the crowded square, across bustling streets and through the damp, funky maze of alleys and lanes leading to Chinatown.
The Happy Inn is small and bright, with a slow-trickling water fountain by the window, green leather booths, and mirrored tiles lining the walls. The waiters greet Cousin Ah Wing with noisy affection—“Ah Wing, you old bastard! What’ll it be today?”—while the waitresses affect weary, disapproving looks. Cousin Ah Wing expresses his desire to sit away from the fountain—“Makes me want to piss”—and after they have finally settled into a satisfactory spot, Ah Tin realises he is sipping hot Jasmine tea under a framed picture of Victoria Harbour at dusk, silhouettes of fan-shaped sails dotted against a crimson sky.
Cousin Ah Wing shakes a toothpick out of the plastic yellow holder and pops it into his mouth. Ah Tin puts the hat on the table and does the same. Cousin Ah Wing leans forward and taps his lighter on the table.
“Ah Tin,” he begins. He spits the toothpick out of his mouth and shoves a Marlboro Red in its place. “Let’s have your opinion.” He lights the cigarette and fixes him with a serious look. “What do you think of…Stanley?”
“Stan-ley? Do I know him?”
“Haha. You certainly do.”
It doesn’t take Ah Tin very long to run through the list of people he knows in England: the five brothers at the restaurant; Will the postman and Bob the milkman. He comes to the conclusion that Stan-ley isn’t one of them.
“I can’t say I do, Cousin. I don’t know this Stan-ley creature you’re talking about.”
“Stanley…Stanley…” muses Cousin Ah Wing, as if he too has begun to doubt his existence. “Yeah… Stanley Long.” Without warning, he thumps the table with his fist. “Right! That’s settled then!”
“Okay!” agrees Ah Tin, confused.
Cousin Ah Wing laughs, a big, hoarse laugh, and pulls a small, black notepad from his inside pocket. He starts thumbing through the pages, stops suddenly with a “Ha!” and slides it across the table. It’s a list, in English. Ah Tin narrows his eyes. He notices that all the first letters are in the uppercase. Names, perhaps? He concentrates on the strings of letters, waiting for their meaning to reveal itself. When it seems unlikely that this will happen and the letters start to morph into hazy blobs, Cousin Ah Wing laughs again and takes the notebook out of his hand. Holding it up, he points to each word like a teacher.
“Rich-ard. Wi-lli-am. Ha-rold. These are names, Ah Tin.”
Cousin Ah Wing, it turns out, has been collecting them. Those of big-tipping customers, royalty, popular politicians and movie stars. All of them “Good names, Ah Tin. Go ahead, choose one”, he casually insists, as if he were offering him a cigar.
Ah Tin looks at the list. Finally, he asks,”You mean…change my name?”
“Relax, it’s not as drastic as that. Don’t think of it as ‘changing’ your name, so much as…‘getting another one.‘“
Ah Tin stiffens a little. “Who needs so many names? What’s wrong with ‘Long Tin’?”
“Nothing at all. Second Aunt chose a very good Chinese name for you. Very noble. But it doesn’t mean the same thing in English. In English it sounds like…like…a long tin. A long tin, understand? Haha! Like something Ah Mui keeps her knitting needles in. Hahaha!”
Just as Ah Tin begins to wonder where his cousin learned to laugh so much, he stops.
“Okay little cousin, tell me something. Are we in Hong Kong?”
“No.” Ah Tin, sensing that more is expected of him, adds, “We are…in England?”
“Exactly! So it makes sense, doesn’t it, to make a few alterations, fit in with the ‘gweilo’s”—Cousin Ah Wing nods at the English couple eating at the next table.
“Look at you now, big man in a suit. Who’d guess that in a past life you were just a scruffy little bumpkin from the village. Might as well finish the job, Ah Tin. Get yourself an English name. To go with the suit.”
Ah Tin nods, uncertain.
“Chinese names are too complicated,” he continues sagely. “Nobody remembers them. Why do you think we number the dishes? Who’s going to say ‘Yeung Chau Chow Fan’ if they can just say ‘Number 2’?”
Cousin Ah Wing, satisfied with his argument, crosses his arms and blows a smoke ring towards the ceiling. Ah Tin considers his cousin’s words. Finally, he offers,
“Stanley. I think Stanley is okay.”
“Uh-huh. Hhmm.” Cousin Ah Wing blows another smoke ring. “I think it’s more…my kind of name. Stanley Long. Remember?”
“Yes, yes, Stanley Long. But what if I were Stanley too? There’d be two of us! And, and, we could open a restaurant! Yes! We could call it…‘House of Two Stanleys’.” Ah Tin is startled by his own genius. “‘House of Two Stanleys’! That could be the gimmick! Who could forget a name like that!”
Cousin Ah Wing clears his throat loudly and stubs out his cigarette in the plastic ashtray. “I see where you’re coming from, little cousin...”
Ah Tin leans forward, encouraged.
“…but I don”t think it’s such a good idea.”
“Oh.” Ah Tin slumps back into his seat.
“See, people will get confused. They’ll think you’re me and I’m you, and…Hey! How about…” He scans his notebook. “Charles? Winston? Or James? James isn’t bad. Like that British spy…”
“James Bond. Yeah, I know.” Ah Tin pokes at the cigarette butt with his toothpick.
“Right! Or Jim, for short. Jim is more casual, James is more...”
“Double-0 seven.”
Cousin Ah Wing laughs again. “That’s right. Double-0 seven: Ladykiller! Hahaha!”
So it’s settled, then. Cousin Ah Wing becomes Stanley and Ah Tin, well…Ah Tin decides James Long is still under consideration. He thinks maybe it’s too ‘gwei’. So he listens to Cousin Ah Wing—Cousin Stanley—but only really half listens. Something about “short term pain and long term gains”, and Shortie Ah Ming’s dancing trophy and Smarty Ah Ho’s pretty sister just over from Hong Kong. Yes, he only half listens, because he gets distracted by the meat in his barbecued pork bun. It’s so tough that his gums are smarting. He glances at the other tables, but no-one else seems to be in pain. Maybe it’s just him. Maybe, he thinks, ‘gweilo’s are just tougher. Tougher gums, tougher teeth. They could probably chew their way through a pair of shoes, haha. He decides that The Happy Inn is making a nice little profit from charging these sorts of prices for cheap, low-grade meat. What works for The Happy Inn could work for The House of Two Stanleys, he reasons. And then he looks at his cousin, who is flirting with the waitress, and remembers that there is not and never will be a House of Two Stanleys, and that he hasn’t even made enough money yet to send to his mother.
He puts down the gum-destroying pork bun and decides to takes a chance on a sweet lotus paste bun from the steam basket. Better. Chewing thoughtfully, he turns his gaze from his cousin to Good For Nothing Uncle’s hat, sat on the table next to the toothpick holder.
Long. James Long. Ladykiller, haha. Ah Tin picks up the trilby and puts it on his head. Placing his fingers around the brim, he tilts the hat a fraction to the left, then to the right. Then he remembers the mirrored tiles lining the wall, but stops himself before he’s caught his reflection. It looks fine.
*
First published Dimsum Quarterly 1.2 © mimi lok
word
going native
