The White Door Read Online Free PDF

half-asleep, he knew, he was flying far from Chelsea. He was over seas not a single river. He was loving impossible women in his sleep, ignored by the stewardess. Not entirely. She brought him alternate sakés and coffees, touched his shoulder or stroked his wrist with a smile every time. It was she who now hunted, teased him. But he knew, beyond this pleasantry, she was withholding name, hotel number, access and possibility from his unshaven economy-class person. Not a true want of his would be addressed by her. He let the parade of his sleep-bound women sweep to his mother. Now she was, dressed in red, Empress of China, queen of the Tang, and she tossed thunderbolts with either wrist. A particular bolt carried off the stewardess. She rode it standing but was brought to him. A second bolt stripped her naked and he admired the vision. Now, if mothers could really do this… if they would really do this…
    Kwok Meil Wah was riding the taxi back to Guangdung. Ten million stars shone for her alone. She threw not a thunderbolt at the sky. But if I were Empress of China, she thought, the destruction of the past would be forbidden. But the past was problematic. There had been an Empress Wu, whose stormy reign had decayed the Tang. It never recovered its full glory. So, looking forward to the future, they had given son a name of complex half-syllables, a poem that shimmeredlike an abbreviated dance. Happy Occasion at a Grand Court, they had called him – in their refugee poverty still thinking of grand courts. Just plain ‘Happy’ if you make a brutally succinct translation. Son liked neither the pomposity of the first, nor the plebeian brevity of the second. He searched the jumbled assemblage of half-characters composed into his name and selected just one of them. Sometimes it meant ‘heart’, sometimes it meant ‘patience’, so he called himself ‘Patient Heart’ when he had to give a name to the Chinese society of New Zealand. Otherwise he was happy enough with his European name, which meant ‘prince’. His parents had made sure. Meil Wah chuckled beneath the Chinese stars.
    She remembered, however, the rough nature of Chinese society in New Zealand. Almost all refugee stock. Son could not abide them. Strange that he was now happiest amongst the warring tribesmen of the world. But he could escape them if need be – possessor of the eternal plane ticket, the patient heart could fly away, before they imploded beneath the weight of their parochialisms. When he was young, planes, like universities, seemed like the dreams of far horizons. Thus trapped, he grew a species of shy but surly good manners – always distant, almost always judgemental, pretending he could no longer speak Chinese, acculturating in New Zealand with zeal, until one day he had successfully lost all refugee language, began coming top of his class at school, and was henceforth coached by cherishing teachers, all women, towards the distant academy.
    One winter, the young Chinese pianist Fou Ts’ong toured New Zealand. The local Chinese community was awe-struck – a celebrity on the terms imposed not only by Europeans but the strange demands of European culture. The rough burghers of oriental Auckland sought a means of entertaining Fou during his sojourn from the artistic metropoles of the world. Finally, they packed him off to dinner with the younger brother of Meil Wah’s husband. He was an electric guitarist. It was the closest to Fou’s world they could find, but the young aspiring rock star knew nothing about Débussy, Chopin or Schubert, all the composers whose work Fou would interpret with such solemn tenderness. The dinner was unbearably stilted, and the patient heartwore a smirk that basically said, I told you so, and I’m getting out of this hole you call the life of the Chinese. Fou is Chinese, but the wide world is in his soul and plane tickets are in his hands. Fou had, however, thought Meil Wah, delivered her one extravagant courtesy