Street Trade // Minying Huang
Minying Huang looks at what was and what is in her contribution to our guest edited month exploring the theme of Urban Ephemera.
Turning onto Chesterton Hall Crescent, past the old Polonia Club (est. 1976) on the other side of the street, still hearty (like its fare), still going strong, still standing in that early twentieth-century red-brick house, and myrtle-green treetops over the tops of uneven, discoloured back-garden fences, down to the close with the low walls where we lived at number four (四). And, you know, there was a time when it felt like death had almost found us, was about to find us, had brushed up against the clouded glass of our door, the address or omen numbering our days. I want to run up to the familiar yellow-green hedges, still growing, still glowing, a would-be sight for sore eyes, outside a single-storey home no longer ours, rooted and tended by my māma and bàba with love for ten years and which have since passed into other hands: a spell of protection, maybe. This patch of land right here where the hedges grow is where I played catch in the communal parking spot and Knowledge Adventure games on Windows 98 in the living room, hula-hooped (poorly) in front of the TV, danced to countless songs by former Malaysian child star 王雪晶, and became obsessed with The Swan Princess (1994) and The Little Mermaid (1989) which (I’m told) I would watch and rewind on repeat. This is where I learnt to wash dishes and crack and chopstick-whisk eggs for the first time while stood on a well-stickered green plastic stool to make up for my lack of height; where I excitedly asked my māma to serve me and my friend 大白菜 or ‘Chinese leaf’ instead of Brit-friendly boiled peas and quickly, albeit briefly, lost the appetite for our 家常 taste (in future, we stuck to pizza on play dates); where I threw tantrums captured on home video, along with other antics, to come back and kick me in the teeth. I always feel that I should feel more when I find myself in this part of town, but the Crescent is—it sometimes feels like—just another street; and it’s this absence—the spectre of could-be emotion, which must have passed me by—that leaves me (somewhat) reeling on the edge of my (something like) detachment. And it’s not that there’s not a warmth here or that I don’t feel but sometimes it’s a little like waking up from anaesthesia and waiting for the body, confused, to catch up; and the moment for feeling dulls and slips, keeps passing you by, before you get the chance: an agitation of delayed reactions, never not trying to hurry their way back to something gone. And, if you have to try so hard, is it real? What feels real today is this forever tightness in your chest: the dull thrum of too much, too much, still not enough, ringing in your ears, listless on your skin, carried by your breath. Opposite SPAR where Costcutter used to be back when a Freddo from the corner shop would only put a kid—other kids—10p out of pocket, the Blockbuster-turned-World Foods store on Chesterton Road, which my bàba instead remembers as having been a motorbike shop, is now a specialty bakery and café I’ve yet to set foot in. Bàba insists that people once sold motorbikes in this place, and he could be right. But, for some reason, my memory can’t let go of (won’t shake) the image of that Blockbuster blue (nostalgic) or the idea of it and shelves and stacks full of VHS tapes and DVDs for customers, giddy with the thought of heading home with a takeaway dinner from Hing Hung (still open) or Hotpot (now closed) down the road and a new release, to peruse at their leisure. Also, I really kind of like to think that I would have remembered living minutes away from a motorbike shop; that I, 大伯’s rackety ramshackle motorbike kid, would have been enthralled by it.
***
瀛瀛 watches as her uncle draws shut the scraping metal folding door to his motorbike parking business and 小店铺 or convenience stall on the side with the street-market blue tarpaulin overhang, located on the ground floor of a greying four-storey apartment block (at that time populated by, and tightly packed with, three generations of 黄 family members). Stepping away from the door, he dusts off his hands before bending down to lift her up—‘大伯抱抱!’—and sit her up high on his shoulders. Feeling immensely tall and therefore pleased with herself, she is dazed and giddy with delight and the urge to stretch out her short legs. Unfazed and chatting away to the small, restless child on his back, her 大伯 keeps his hands on her skittish knees as they venture down the old-town alleyway, her bàba, māma, and gōng gong trailing behind them in their wake. From Cháozhōu’s winding old-town alleyways, where ancient, browning, beat-up courtyard houses rub up against 80s and 90s low-rise, working-class concrete flats at odd angles, seemingly worlds apart from the high-rise new builds, bright lights, neon colour, and glass upon glass upon concrete and polished stone of the gleaming new city district whose threshold touches theirs, they emerge out onto a gently curving stretch of road. Barefoot or feet clad in sandal slippers like how—though she doesn’t know it yet—her bàba used to walk and work these streets, hawkers sit on pavement edges selling vegetables out of buckets and large steel bowls laid out on the puddled ground, gutting 带鱼 and all kinds of other fish over beds of plastic bags and yesterday’s newspapers, and bagging rice cakes or 年糕 and golden-brown, lard-laden 老饼, each one finished with a red stamp, for doting grandparents to take home to their children’s children. Local butchers push and park their stall carts. The cuts of the day hang from hooks on a bar. Masters and apprentices sharpen cleavers on slabs of stone and slice meat on wooden chopping boards; practice their art, standing by the wayside. Up by West Lake, where non-old town folk come to take leisurely strolls and where the tourists congregate, vendors display t-shirts and jackets and gadgets and gizmos out on blankets in front of the stippled stone fences surrounding the lake and its park.
***
It is December, 2014. Or 2017. I am seated on the back of my older cousin’s motorbike, my arms around her waist, feet on the foot rests, just about, a bag of 加多宝 sandwiched between us, pressed against my stomach. We are zooming across a cable-stayed bridge above the River Hán, the low thrum of the seat dulled by the blare of the wind in our faces, the blur of the lights and steel ropes—the hazy reflections they cast on the water—as we whiz past. I think of how I used to love tagging along with 大伯 on grocery runs or trips to the garage. On trips to anywhere really: I was in it for the ride. She remembers too—my wide-eyed obsession with the thrill of the ride, the need to go places—and laughs, tells me stories about myself. I was a relentless kid. Her bàba still rides to get places sometimes. She rides faster (when her children aren’t around). She has children now: two of them, who call me yí yi, which is a funny thought. They’re in her husband’s car along with the rest of my family, or maybe beneath the bridge, at the restaurant already. Time is wild, and I can’t keep up with its blues and greys, its swings and shifts, myself, or these moments. I turn my head to look back at the water, remember how my bàba once told me that 大伯 used to swim here in his younger days of thick black hair. In the blink of an eye, the bluing then greying of towns and cities, loved ones, loved places; the clock-ice of emotion, littered with cracks and lines. I can’t wait to get to the restaurant with the unpainted walls, hand out cold cans of herbal tea, pull up a plastic stool, and hear the collective crack of the cans at the table, again.
Minying Huang is a UK-based poet and writer. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PANK, Electric Literature, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, the Shade Journal, and Augur Magazine, among others. She recently completed her MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.
