The light in our bathroom was the most lurid pink. Every once in a while, I would climb the stairs from the kitchen and flick on that prurient glow, expecting silence but hearing instead the uncanny murmuring of water. Inside the half-filled bathtub, slender black shadows dodged and weaved, marvelous in their ability to glide past each other and never touch.
The first time this happened, I could hardly move, transfixed as I was by the unaccounted for arrival of these gavotting creatures. Where did they come from? Had they slithered up through the drain pipes or had they been invited in?
The next morning they were gone. And so I sat and peed alone to the sound of nothing, staring down at my pink legs, pink feet scarcely grazing the tiles.
My grandfather was a master fisherman. I never got to see him in action, but I knew it to be true whenever I opened the bathroom dior and heard the murmuring of water. What he liked to catch most was eels from the Songhua River because they were a favourite of my grandmother’s. Without fail, distant relatives from disparate parts of town would crowd around our tiny kitchen table to clink glass and trade gossip every time eels appeared in the bath.
Over time, eels became my favourite too, not so much for the way they tasted, but for the way they moved; sinuous, almost faineant, as though they were teaching water itself how to flow.
The Asian swamp eel, or monopterus albus, is not a “true” eel. Unlike the moray or the conger, which belong to the order Anguilliformes, Asian swamp eels are classed under Synbranchiformes. These untrue eels begin their life as eggs cast into the water by a female, then gathered by a male into a foam nest he builds by blowing bubbles and secreting an adhesive mucus. When the eggs hatch inside the nest, the male carries the larvae in his mouth until they are ready to breathe on their own. Some would say this is a truer act than any committed by the fathers they have known.
Once, while massaging a headless eel in her palms with salt, my grandmother told me about her father and his abiding love for the Songhua. It was he who had shown her how to clean and gut her favourite fish, taking care to explain why it must be rinsed three times.
I imagine my great-grandfather scooping my grandmother out of the nest and carrying her in his mouth until she is ready to gut fish on her own.
When I plead for us to visit him, she finally relents, admitting that he lives now by the river. Where? I ask. Can you take me there?
Unit 731 was formally inaugurated in 1936, five years after the Imperial Japanese Army invaded and occupied Manchuria. Headquartered in Pingfan on the outskirts of Harbin, not far from where I was born, 731 was one in a vast coordinated network of units devised by the Japanese Empire to innovate weapons of mass destruction. This unit in particular focused on the development of biological, and to a lesser extent, chemical warfare.
The headquarters themselves were sprawling, encompassing some 3,000 staff spread across one hundred and fifty buildings as well as an elaborate underground tunnel network that allowed prisoners to be smuggled in out of sight. After all, the sanctioned line of the administration represented the 731 compound as a lumber mill. Prisoners were often transported in freight trucks, where they were made to lie beneath lumber logs. This slotted in neatly with the use of the codeword “maruta,” or “log” in Japanese, to refer to the people imprisoned there. Official Japanese documentation of the operations undertaken by Unit 731 make numerous mentions of yet “another log falling.”
Arguably, the two most important buildings were Buildings 7 and 8, which housed the headquarters’ crown jewels: its prisoners. Because what set this weapons research facility apart was its execution of experiments on living, breathing human beings.
Men, women and children – the majority of whom were locals living in Harbin and the surrounding area, although several were also communists, spies and prisoners of war from afar – were subjected to all manner of lethal agents. They included but were not limited to:
Anthrax.
Botulism.
Cholera.
Diphtheria.
Exposure to extreme temperatures.
Fleas, disease-infested.
Grenades.
Heroin.
Intense dehydration and starvation.
Korean bindweed.
Lewisite.
Mortar bombs.
Nuclear radiation.
Organophosphates.
Plague, bubonic.
Q fever.
Rape.
Syphilis.
Tuberculosis.
Undulant fever.
Vivisection.
Whooping cough.
X-rays.
Yperite.
Zoonotic diseases.
Those who survived their initial experiment were spared only momentarily. They were doomed to endure further testing until they, too, perished.
Pingfan was a place of no return.
The dead were transferred to the onsite crematorium for “processing”, whereupon their ashes were either buried in the nearby cattleyard or dumped into the Songhua.
Last year, I went to visit my grandmother at her new home.
The light in her bathroom is no longer pink. But her love for eels remains. She sits me down at the kitchen table of my childhood and teaches me how to clean, gut and cook eel, just as her father had done. Before we place them in the shaguo, we take care to rinse their bodies three times.
After several hours, I take the lid off the shaguo and greedily inhale. The fish that had once been cold and slick in my hands now felt warm, velvety on my tongue.
How heat and time t r a n s f o r m s things.
I think of my great-grandfather as I chew, holding him close in my mind as the soft, spicy eel flesh yields to my bite with grace. I imagine my great-grandfather’s ashes alighting on the surface of the Songhua,
drifting slowly down to the riverbed,
settling there until the next tide pulls him downstream.
Only on the fourth day did Jesus come to Bethany and raise Lazarus from the dead. Mary, Lazarus’ sister, had by then been made ruinous with despair, after sending for Jesus to save her brother from the leprosy that consumed him, and hearing nothing. She had watched Lazarus die, helpless, surely mortally wounded by her messiah’s dereliction.
Little did she know it was a test.
I wonder who my grandmother prayed to the night her father disappeared. Did she run through the streets with her sisters, calling his name? Did they walk along the banks of the Songhua, hoping against hope to find him there with his rod in hand, dozing?
In the story of Lazarus, Lazarus himself does not speak. Rather, the voices we hear belong to Jesus and Mary. It is an epistolary narrative concerning these two, wherein Mary’s faith wavers but is, in due course, restored through Jesus’ miraculous resurrection of her brother. Can one be condemned for neglecting a dying man if one also has the power to bring him back? The Bible pleads “not guilty.”
The story of Lazarus is a parable, a morality tale with a happy ending, a murder mystery where the bad guy was the good guy after all. Lazarus, meanwhile, is not the protagonist, but the dead girl that kicks the movie into gear, the mute body upon which the son deifies the father, and the ends justify the means.
Can the leper speak? No, not even in his own story.
Australia’s first multiracial lazaret opened in 1907 on Peel Island, known as Teerk Roo Ra – “the place of many shells” – to the Quandamooka People who are the island’s Traditional Owners. This unprecedented facility brought together he white leprosy patients detained on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) and the Aboriginal, South Sea Islander and Chinese patients detained on Gealug (Friday Island). Racial segregation continued on Teerk Roo Ra, however, with European patients living alone in wooden huts raised off the ground – some even with a verandah – while “coloured” patients lived two or three to a single corrugated iron hut that boiled in the heat and leaked with the slightest rain.
In “Black Woman-White Woman: A Story of Aboriginal Australia,” J. P. Graham learns that Frank, her Aboriginal grandfather, was detained on Teerk Roo Ra twice, eventually dying there in 1939 at age sixty-four, months before the cure for leprosy was discovered.
She searched for him in the archives, trawling state, library and online databases for any trace that might bring him closer to her. She spends hours every day staring at the only photograph she has of him, sometimes using a magnifying glass, “in the hope that something hitherto missed might reveal itself.” The black-and-white picture, so grainy that it appears sfumato, shows a man reclined on the ground with sleeves of his light-coloured shirt rolled up, his eyes meeting your gaze directly. At first glance, it betrays nothing; it is impossible to divine what Frank might be feeling or thinking at the moment the photo was taken. He is neither smiling nor scowling, his face almost entirely blank.
That is, until Graham draws our eye to the blade of grass dangling between his lips. She finds small comfort in the thought of her grandfather – a skilled fisherman and handyman – whiling away the years trapping fish and working on his wood hut, chewing blades of grass. Official records kept by the lazaret reveal that Frank was renowned on the island for his carpentry. He earned two pounds ten shillings a week to cut timber and dig graves.
When Graham showed this photo to her mother, she is rewarded with an unexpected story about the time her grandmother Dolly led the family on a clandestine trip to see Frank. They moored the boat offshore in the dead of night and swam to Teerk Roo Ra, where Frank waited for them on the beach. Together there, they had a picnic, the stars overhead, the shells beneath their feet.
The night I read this passage in Graham’s book, I had a dream. I’m back in Harbin again. I can tell it is late spring: the air is cool and dry, the berms dotted with amur adonis like a fleeing pirate’s trail of scattered gold rings.
In the dream, I’m following someone. I don’t know who the dark figure is, although they are always ten steps ahead. Somehow, this feels like the right distance. It’s not clear where they are leading me, but I follow nonetheless, carried by their certainty.
We walk for what feels like days, passing no one, until we emerge on the banks of the Songhua. It suddenly begins to rain.
