The Drowned Man

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I spent much of my time with my Chinese amah, who spoke rudimentary English, but who often said things to me in Mandarin. Because of this mélange of words, I had difficulty keeping the two languages I was hearing in separate categories. My speech was basically in English, sprinkled here and there with Chinese expressions.

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My father, with his musical ear, intensely absorbed by languages and fluent in Chinese and Japanese, encouraged me to speak Chinese. The little I knew as a six-year-old would be gone by the time I was twelve.

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I spent many afternoons with my amah walking to the beach near the house. I remember one of these walks, particularly, because a crowd had gathered along the water’s edge to look at something. I sensed that whatever they were looking at was something I didn’t want to see, and I resisted Amah when she tugged at me to get a closer look. She was stronger than I and soon we were jostling through the crowd to get to the center. There, splayed out on the sand, was the body of a Chinese man, grotesquely frozen into the contorted position of his last struggle with the ocean. He was a gray specter, almost like a piece of driftwood, dramatically inanimate in a way I have never forgotten.

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There was so much anxiety pushed under the rug in those years, so much hushed talk of atrocities committed by the Japanese or by the warlords. I only caught bits and pieces of these stories, but it was enough to give me a sense of dying and death that was out there somewhere beyond the safe enclave of our family. Now I had seen my first dead human and it brought into sharper focus the fuzzy dread of the stories overheard.