Predicting the Weather

Old Charlie Tam could tell, just by looking at the western sky at dusk, what the weather was going to be like the next day. A clear pink wash on tufts of feathered cloud meant a fine day tomorrow with mild temperature, but gray tinged with yellow, the color of jaundice, meant bad weather coming. You could equate the hue of the western sky with the color of char sui pork belly, roasted, left to cool then sliced thinly. The fresh inside cut would be a delicate shade of glistening pink, the color the sunset should be for be favorable weather. But as the slices sit, congeal and curl, they go gray and streaky, the color and texture of rain. When the pork is going off and the fat is starting to turn sickly yellow, that is very bad – not just for the weather but also for the stomach. There was no real mystery to predicting weather. If you watched the sky. If you knew your pork.

Then Charlie bought a black and white television set (for color had not yet come to New Zealand) and watched the weather after the news bulletin; not that he could keep up with the spoken English very well, but because he could watch the pictures and they told him more than he wanted to know. He liked the sound of the words and watching the mouths enunciate the crisp consonants and well-rounded vowels.

But there was a price to pay for improving English speaking. Overnight, Charlie’s weather-forecasting ability was shot to pieces. He couldn’t reconcile troughs and ridges and highs and lows and isobars (he had to have that one explained to him – only understanding by analogy with yet he), and how it all related to fine and settled or scattered showers or heavy rain warning or gusts up to and a temperature high of, with what he saw in the sunset as he sat on his verandah and gazed into the gloaming. When he started watching the TV weather, he became resentful and moody at dusk, since he knew in his head that pork colors could not compete with western science for predicting the weather.

His children growing up with English education had to tell him about the science and, although he did actually understand the principle of convection rain (as demonstrated by the condensation under the lid of the boiling soup pot) and how it affected them in Otaki, a fertile plain in the rain shadow of the Rimutaka mountain range, he pretended not to, just so that he could go on staring into the sunset and know what tomorrow’s sky would bring. It was his little joke on them as they were growing up. They thought him to be a simple old peasant – and he played that role when it suited him – but over the years, the peasant gardener had been very savvy, coming from having nothing to owning a modest, but productive garden.

The early days had been very long and hard. Back-breaking work that turned just enough money to buy rice. Eating yellow, rotting and blemished vegetables, not fit for market but enough to sustain them. Fresh meat a once-a-week luxury. Eggs from chooks that Pei-Pei raised and fish traded with the local Maori. Nowadays, he could afford to hire a little help and give himself time to rest at dusk, instead of working through it.

Watching the evening fall was a simple pleasure he did not want to give up. As a young man, he had composed poetry to the sun’s rising and setting, reflecting on its relentless marking of time, measuring the shortness of human existence. That was in the Old Country. But here in the New Gold Mountain, he was a humble gardener, no longer a poet. He never told his children about his appreciation of the beauty of the sun setting, and especially not the Colors of Pork. He would not open himself to their scorn.

“Stop-a watch that stupid TV. Ni hou fey, aahh!!” his ever-practical wife would scold as she pushed him out the fly screen door to the back verandah.

Charlie had taken to leaving the TV after the news to sit on his old bentwood rocker on the back verandah, knocking the ash out of his briar pipe, scooping a bowlful of Park Drive and tamping it down while he waited for the sky to change color. The aromas of dark and bright tobacco mingling with Pei-pei’s char sui tantalized Charlie’s nostrils as he pinched his eyes and dared the sky to take the TV’s side against his.

On that particular mid-summer’s evening, Charlie rocked gently, enjoying his pipe, surveying the straight military rows of drumhead cabbages in the field. He felt like a general taking the salute from marching infantry in dark green uniforms, the small young heads turning to him vowing loyalty and strength as they marched past. They were hearting nicely. Charlie waved his pipe at them, conducting his battalions of brassicae while whistling the Bridge Over The River Kwai march through the small gap in his front teeth.

Long ago, when he used to take his first crops of cabbages to market, he remembered the rhyme that the barbarian children had used to taunt him and the other Chinese:

“Ching Chong Chinaman velly velly sad

Pissed on the cabbages and made them go bad.”

Nowadays, they had long ceased to use the rhyme because Charlie’s cabbages were the biggest, juiciest, crispest and sweetest grown in the region and he always got a very good price for them – a yield and return that made him prosperous. He laughed to himself as he conducted his young cabbages. What was his secret, the townies wanted to know, and he would just smile and nod. No speakee Englishee. Only a few of the other Chinese guessed that a little slurry made of night soil (when they had an outside long drop) and sheep poo (when they put in the septic tank) put in the hole of each seedling got them away to a roaring start. And they weren’t about to tell. In fact, you could assess from the quality of the cabbages who among the growers was following suit. He mused that the rhyme should be

“Ching Chong Chinaman velly velly glad

Put shit in the cabbages, best you ever had.”

Yes, Charlie was a very content old man in his later days. He was very careful with his money. He trusted neither banks nor paper money and insisted on getting paid for his produce in coin, which he stored in a large biscuit tin buried in amongst the Chinese groceries in the pantry. When he accumulated enough, he went to Rubenstein’s jewelry and converted the cash to a diamond or some gold. At first, he had wanted jade and silver, these being highly valued by Chinese, but Sol Rubenstein convinced him that diamonds and gold had greater investment value in the white man’s world and would be worth more than jade. Charlie, betting a penny both ways, bought diamonds from him and jade from Chinese dealers in Auckland or Wellington, whenever he went to the city. He kept his treasure in a small fireproof strongbox under the floorboard under the leg of his heavy wooden and iron framed bed. He was determined not suffer the fate of old Lum Tong, who had kept his coin in biscuit tins under his house. When Lum Tong’s house burned down, the coins and tin had melted into a mass of metal worth a fraction of its minted value. Charlie was a much better steward than that.

He also figured if he was ever robbed and the thieves found the cash tin amongst the dried cuttlefish in the kitchen pantry, they would miss the strongbox under the bed.

But there were no bandits in the New Gold Mountain, at least, none that he had seen. Not like his old village in China when, from age twelve, he had to take his turn patrolling the perimeter at night, armed with one bullet in the ancient family rifle and awash with fear in the pit of his bladder of night time marauders. His only problem with thieves in New Zealand was the occasional rabbit or hare after his crops, but they soon wound up in the hot pot. No, there were no regrets coming here at all.

Charlie returned to contemplating the sunset. But funny how, tonight, the sun was sinking but getting brighter and brighter. The radiance, instead of diffusing and ebbing into blushing cerise and magenta and lavender, was hardening and bleaching white. In fact, the point of light before his eyes was beginning to blind him, like the reflection of the noonday sun off a mirror. He put his hand up to shield his eyes and the pipe fell from his lips as he realized the bright light was inside his eyes and he was flying headlong into it.