Spittoon Presents: Bone China by Ruru Hoong

Spittoon Presents: Mate, oolong, jasmine... in this personal tale of transnational existence, author Ruru Hoong discovers tea as a throughline across continents and generations, life and death. Following the story, Hoong herself shares her thoughts on bilingual writing. So put on your kettle, wherever you are, and enjoy.

Note: To stay true author's original intentions, we have left Chinese characters untranslated and untransliterated in this story.

一. Mate

“华侨在思想上是无家可归的，头脑简单的人活在一个并不简单的世界里，没有背景，没有传统，所以也没有跳舞。”《谈跳舞》， 张爱玲

I am not typically a superstitious person. But when the cebador pours boiling water into the cup of tea, scalding the ground leaves to a pungent, bitter hiss, I flinch, biting back a reproach. He does not notice my distress; instead, he takes a long swig through the bombilla before handing me the cup.

Gracias, I say, but I don’t mean it. The Spanish feels foreign and tart on my tongue. It is neither auspicious nor professional to oversteep the tea, but what gives me the right to be an arbiter of Argentinian tradition?

Reluctant but not wanting to cause a scene, I take a small sip of the mate for show, its acidic astringence shooting straight up my nose.

Het is goed? He winks at me and pats his hands dry on his pants, leaving dark, palm-shaped imprints. The wail of a bandoneon signals the start of the next tanda. The room is abuzz with tension, cabaceos being thrown across the room, eyebrows raised, looking to harpoon a partner; figures making their way clockwise around the wooden hall.

I arch my neck in his direction, willing him to respond with a nod of his head. He does not. Instead, he finds himself a partner across the room, and crosses it in great strides.

Great, I mutter to myself, the bitterness of the scalded tea still lingering on my tongue. Another tanda to be sat out.

I am so resigned to this fact that I do not see the middle-aged man sidling up to me.

“这么漂亮的女孩，怎么没伙伴儿?" His precise lilt, though accented and tainted by his rancid breath, impresses me. Then disgust fills me for being so easily won over.

“I don’t speak Chinese,” I say, even though I do.

“America?”

“Singapore.”

“Dance?”

There is no etiquette to this one-word exchange; it is a ping-pong match wrought on a dance floor. There is no way to decline a verbal ask, so I accept defeat and set down my long-forgone tea, offering him an extended hand.

I am furious with myself the whole time I am being lifted and manhandled across the floor. This is not dancing. But what can I expect from an inauspicious night, flagrant in its ignorance of etiquette and tradition? He whips my leg up into a boleo, almost hurling my heels into another couple, and I feel myself go rigid in response. He grips me tighter. As a deep-rooted uneasiness churns my stomach, I fight to keep its contents from spilling over his pudgy fingers.

I manage to keep it all in for the duration of the tanda, but it is not a good night. I am hollowed out, empty except for my twisting stomach.

So I am not altogether surprised when I emerge from the dance hall to four missed calls from my mother, and a foreboding message telling me to come home.

回家吧，

           公公去世了

二．乌龙 // Oolong

They say that Oolong tea can reduce the risk of heart disease, so the summer before I leave for college I endeavour to sit next to Gong-gong at every meal, refilling his cup far more often than necessary under the guise of filial piety.

But it is no use: with every pour of the steaming tea, he ladles himself another bowl of his favorite laksa. I can see the coconut milk coagulating into fat in those narrowed arteries, white viscous blobs clinging to their walls. No amount of hot tea can wash it down. He turns his shy, cataract-clouded eyes on me and wears a sheepish I’m ever so sorry but I can’t help it smile. All I can do is block his laksa-filled bowl from my parents’ vision before they can snatch it away.

I realize that makes me complicit in his slow march towards death, but all I want is for him to be able to enjoy his remaining days. With the greedy, sheepish delight of a small child, he serves me tea in return, his blue-veined hands trembling with the effort.

Dinners are taken in silence. Though Gong-gong and I have a common language, we have no common conversation. Tea is the only currency of our communication. I pour him another warm cup, watching as his fingers tap the stained tablecloth in thanks:

            我

                        爱

                                    你

The tea evaporates into the chilly air-conditioned air.

It takes 28 hours for me to traverse a quarter the number of time zones, from Amsterdam to London to Singapore to Kuala Lumpur. By the time the wheels of the plane grate upon Malaysian tarmac, the atmospheric chill has settled in my bones, and the warmth has left my grandfather’s body.

三．茉莉香片 // Jasmine

At his funeral, the tea is cold. Sickly sweet. The cloying scent of jasmine makes me swimmy in the head, lightheaded with exhaustion. I feel the tiredness in my eyes, and know they must be red-rimmed. I want to cry, but tears do not come.

“Eat first,” my mum instructs, “Pay respects later.”

I pick up a greasy popiah with my chopsticks, its once-crispy exterior soaked through with oil, and bite down on it. The soggy radish, all at once savory and flowery-fragrant from the remnants of the tea, settles uncomfortably at the bottom of my stomach.

“Wah, the eldest grandchild is back from Europe!” I hear a booming voice from the back of the room. Is it my second auntie, or my third? I’m not sure. I sit down and take another bite of the popiah, willing it to stay down in my stomach.   

Gong-gong was the one who taught me how to hold my chopsticks properly.

He would sit me down at the table with a slender pair of metal chopsticks and hand me a bag of sunflower seeds, instructing me to pick each elusive kernel out and place it into the center of his palm. If any disobedient seed bounced its way to the floor, he bent down to pick it up without reproach or impatience. Cracking open each one on his blackened teeth, he would hand me a fully formed seed as reward.

He always gave me more than he gave himself.

Chopsticks are surprisingly versatile; they are still my cutlery of choice even after years abroad in countries that favour the sharp prongs of a fork and the rounded recesses of a spoon. They can kiap chunks of meat between its two appendages, guide noodles through thin slits, spear fishballs with ease.

But standing in front of the tray of his cindered remains I feel nervous. This is his 股骨, the young funeral director announces to the room. His femur. Not knowing the phrase for femur, I hear 骨骨 instead. Bone-bone.

No shit, I think to myself, he is all bones and no skin.

When it reaches my turn, I am handed the chopsticks and all at once the room feels quite swollen with expectation. You want this instead? The funeral director asks in English, misinterpreting my hesitation. He holds out a pair of tongs with a face full of cheery sympathy. Sorry, this one cannot use fork to pick up, ah!

He earns a few laughs at my expense.

I thought you weren’t supposed to laugh at funerals.

Blushing, I grip the chopsticks tighter, its metal edges leaving dark imprints in my skin. But how can I tell him that my teeth are clattering bone-on-bone, that my fingers are stiff not from lack of practice but from fear, fear that those sticks would cross the wrong way and disappoint Gong-gong, fear that my hands would falter and let his bones slide, let them smash into smithereens on the floor?

For his aged bones are not like the hardy youth of a sunflower seed.

And Gong-gong is no longer here to pick them up.

The humid air gags my throat as I pick up the largest bone from the mass of gritty pink residue. My chopsticks hover gingerly in the air, threatening, quivering.

I drop the bone into the urn without incident.

But something about the way it chips and disintegrates against the plastic walls makes the bile rise up from within me; I first feel a vague dampness in my oesophagus and tear away just when the walls of my stomach squelch and contract – I mutter my apologies as I make my bumpy escape to the bathroom:

I am delighted,

            delighted as I unload the contents of my stomach into the gilded sink,

                        delighted that I can feel again with such intensity,

                                   delighted by the relief that settles in the tips of my fingers. 

四．白牡丹 // White Peony

The heady incense emits a white smoke, but my head remains clear for the duration of the drive from the crematorium to the columbarium. My dad carries the burning joss sticks for the entire drive, releasing frightening, guttural cries out his open window:

            爸，跟着我们

                        爸，跟着我们！

I don’t believe in ancestral spirits, none of us do, but we follow the tradition anyways. In the clarity of my rejuvenated state of mind, I find it antiquated and awkward. But I mutter it a few times under my breath.

           公公，跟着我， please?

We have tea, after, in the opulent lobby of the columbarium. I hold up the teacup, its bone china strangely cool against my lips. The tea is pure and light, a fine spring harvest from the mountains of Fujian. It is a homecoming for Gong-gong, for it is from Fujian that my great-grandfather began his journey to the Malaysian border, beginning our long collective sojourn across the globe, in search for a better life.

My flight back to London boards in the next hour, so I get up hurriedly to leave, bidding my rushed goodbyes and promises to return soon, which are made to be broken. I have gone as quickly as I have come. As my aspirations circle me further and further away from home, I am no longer sure what I am searching for, or what it is I am trying to prove.

My father has a theory for this: offering up a laugh aching of resignation, he tells me I am looking to emulate the nomadic nature of my Hakka ancestry.

It is in our blood, he says, in our bones. 在骨子底里。

I return to this moment every day as I steep my morning brew. I sit down, breathe in its light floral aroma. And offer my Gong-gong a cup of tea.

Discussion with the author

Deva Eveland
Can you talk about your decision to write in both English and Chinese?

Ruru Hoong
I’ve thought about this a lot, because translating it into one language would make it more accessible to wider audiences. But I think a lot of meaning is lost in translation, and my strong sense of attachment to the title of the piece – 骨瓷 gǔcí – was what made me keep parts of it in Chinese. Bone-china doesn’t sound particularly significant in English, but guci conjures up many more associations and vivid images for me, perhaps because of how Chinese in its written form is such a pictorial language: (i) firstly, gu means bone, and the imagery of bones is very central to this piece. What drove me to write this piece was the striking moment when I was expected to pick up my grandfather’s ashes and place them in an urn: that scene is still 刻骨铭心 kègǔmíngxīn (etched into my memory). Feeling the brittleness of my grandfather’s bones through my chopsticks was when his death really hit home for me. (ii) Guci is bone-china, a fine porcelain. Given the importance of tea – and tea as ritual – to this piece, it seemed apt to reference the vessel that holds the tea. But it also has meaning in another sense: (iii) Bone-china is called guci because it indeed contains exactly that – bone, which makes it one of the strongest types of porcelain there is, which allows thinner, finer cups to be produced. I recently picked up ceramics during lockdown and have been fascinated with porcelain as a material – it is so much more compact than other clays, and allows me to be so much more precise with what I want to make, so I very much liked the idea of titling the piece that: in some ways it is a reflection on how the heaviest of things can simultaneously be the lightest of things. (iv), I think there’s also something very poignant about the fact that you add animal bone – literally, the material of death – to strengthen the vessel in which you drink your daily nourishment out of. My grandfather has, in his small but meaningful ways, made me who I am today. His sacrifices enabled my father to thrive, and it still fills me with a sense of wonder that a young boy from a village in the middle of nowhere Malaysia could’ve made it to where he is today! And (v), lastly, not many people know this but bone-china is actually an English invention (despite the word China in its name… though unsurprisingly, China is now the world’s largest producer of bone-china!). The British empire had their hand in everything (including the ex-colonial outpost of Singapore…), so I found that appropriate and mildly ironic. Also, at the time of my grandfather’s death I was living in London, so the relevance of both UK and China to this material made it seem like a very apt title.

As for deciding what to translate, and what not to translate: I try to make the piece accessible even to the non-Chinese speaking reader without taking away the authenticity of the communication, if that makes sense. For example, I translate femur because it was a phrase I didn’t even know myself! I don’t translate others when the meaning is implicit through its context. I’m a strong believer in this: if we can leave French and Spanish phrases untranslated in mainstream English writing and leave it to readers to infer from context, we should be able to do so with Chinese!

Ruru Hoong was born in Singapore and has lived in Shanghai, Singapore, the Bay Area, and London. Her writing is very much influenced by the clashes and confluences of the cultures that she lives and has lived in. She is a 2020 graduate of Faber Academy in London and is currently editing her first novel.

For further interpretation on this story by Jack Calder, see the original at the Spittoon Collective website.

READ: Spittoon Presents: "Happy All the Time"

Image: Alice Pasqual (via UNSPLASH)