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Image: Toby Morris
Image: Toby Morris

EssayOctober 5, 2022

The big snow: Christchurch, 1992

Image: Toby Morris
Image: Toby Morris

For John Summers, snow in Christchurch brings back memories of himself as a nine-year-old boy who took up little space and did what he was told.

I saw a photo the other day of the snow that covered Christchurch in 1992. “The big snow”, it was called. Airplanes were grounded, the river would flood and, out in the fields around the city, lambs died by the thousand. The photo omits this chaos. It was of thick drifts on the streets of Beckenham, cars stranded. But there is something wrong with the picture: those cars look too old, the shop fronts are dated. I know this because I was there, and those cars and shops were only as they could have been to me – not old, not new, just the cars and shops I saw every day.

I was nine years old, and the snow was thrilling. The silence, waking to see our backyard entirely white, the soft crush of it underfoot and air that stayed cold even as it entered your lungs. Nothing like it had ever happened before. Even adults thought so, and the normal rules were forgotten. School was cancelled. My brother and I ran about outside, jumping and rolling in it until my shoes were soaked through and my hands ached with the cold. And when I came inside, it was on TV too. I sat on our couch and I watched what I had already seen.

But at some point during all of this, I felt my breathing thicken, that cold air having an effect, and by afternoon I was struggling, wheezing loudly. I began to breathe in gulps, pushing my head up into the air like someone sinking beneath the water. None of this helped. I could take only one breath for every two I needed, and then for every three, for every four. I was losing. I lay on the couch, mum holding my asthma inhaler to my mouth. I sucked on it desperately. I got better, although not better enough.

In Christchurch hospital I was given a bed and a thing called a nebulizer. It created a medicinal mist for me to breathe, and I sat in its fog, my mother in an armchair beside me. Gradually my asthma become little more than a rasp. Even so, we were told I would need to spend the night, and my mother stayed with me and slept in that arm chair beside the bed. A curtain was pulled around us and through it I heard a girl somewhere on that same floor who cried loudly and frequently. Sometimes I heard the nurses too, talking amongst themselves, not about me, but something important and serious, something grown up.

I heard that the girl had lead poisoning from old paint her parents had scrapped off their house. I don’t know if this is right, but it is my memory, and it fitted the way I understood things to be: paint flakes fluttering down to inflect your blood, the snow appearing overnight, the asthma, the doctors making their pronouncements. Once a fortnight my brother and I went to our gate to wait for our father to take us to his house for a weekend. Stuff just happened, it came to you. One morning I woke up in my bed and when I went to sleep that night it was in the hospital’s sheets.

This was not unique to me. It is surely the way of all children, the world continually throwing forward new things to respond and react to. But I do think that this feeling was stronger, more persuasive for those of my nature. I was a “good boy”, I tried to do what mum and teachers and others asked, never attempting to have a say, and so all the while waiting for what next, to be told. I remember a hot day spent at my father’s house and there I told my sister that it would be great to go for a swim.

“Do you want to go swimming?” she said.

“No,” I lied. “I was just thinking about how good it would be.”

“If you want to go just ask.”

Unable to ask, to say what I wanted I moped under a tree with a book.

This was the way you were expected to be, were praised for being. Putting your hand up to ask permission, hurrying to class when the bell rang, speaking only at what our teachers called “an acceptable volume”. And yet, faced with this, there was an unease among those same adults, as if discovering it wasn’t what they wanted after all. It was in my sister’s response, and the teacher’s indulgent smile at the hijinks of the class clown – I knew I could never earn one of those smiles. And there was their shock too at my marks. Being a good boy didn’t mean, as they assumed, that I was a good student. It was purely the condition of toeing the line. Admirable but unenviable. I wonder why I was this way.

One possibility is that it was a response. My parents had divorced. And so, having already encountered much strife and anguish, why add any more? But then that divorce occurred when I was small, younger than three. The earliest memories I have come later and are of the house mum rented in a suburb called Heihei, a brick house owned by a man named Cooney. Once I saw a coiled snake in one of the bedrooms. The girl next door had a playhouse that was three stories high. These memories are vivid but not accurate. It’s possible that there is an explanation in there but I cannot find it. What I can find instead, from this distance, is that desire to be small, to not make a fuss. In my first year at school, we painted pictures of ourselves, the others filling their sheets of paper, outstretched hands reaching each margin, wild hair bursting to the very top. I painted a tiny me in the bottom right-hand quarter. I left the rest of the sheet blank, as vast and white as the snowy streets of 1992.

Mum had driven me to the hospital, but I must have been distracted by my asthma because the drive is a memory I no longer have. I can imagine it now though, having since had the experience myself of driving in snow, knowing the way the car dances, sliding on just a little further when coming to a stop, the turns looser, the roads greasy with churned snow. I can picture the route we would have taken too, down Columbo Street, through Sydenham.

In my imagination we pass a house that is no longer there, but where I once saw a boy and his mother walking toward the door, both carrying groceries home. I had seen them before, and knew that, like us, the boy’s father didn’t live with them. You could see it in his following just behind, dragging the bag over his shoulder in a practised way. This was a mother and son used to always being a mother and son. We would have also passed the intersection where I’d spotted another boy my age. We had come to a stop there one night, outside a boxy, weatherboard house, a state house, and I looked up to see him at the second story window, combing his hair.

Both of these boys were like me I thought, even though on the surface they were very different. The mother of the boy on the corner was a punk, her hair a lavish mohawk. The boy at the window was Polynesian. In these and no doubt many other ways their lives were different, but there was something that I thought was the same. Each was also a “good boy”, I could see that in the carrying of the groceries, the combing the hair. These gestures spoke to a gentleness, a wish to please. It was heartening to know there were others like me out there, and I would always notice those two houses when we passed them, until eventually both disappeared. The house of the boy with the groceries was demolished and the spot became a grassy vacant lot. A block of flats would replace the home of the boy with the comb.

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I wondered and I worried about those two, my doppelgangers without resemblance, both somewhere else now in the city, thinking, feeling as me. Those brief glimpses had me convinced of this, when really there was only the one boy I knew anything about, and he lay in his hospital bed. The doctor came by and said he should be able to go home so he waited for his mother to gather to his things. He listened to the squeak of rubber wheels on linoleum and the rattle of cups as a woman came toward him with a trolley. “Do you want a Milo?? she said.

“No thank you,” he said.

She smiled, and he watched her walk on. The snow melted on the ground outside. He listened to the trolley rattle away. Maybe she would turn around and ask him again. Of course she wouldn’t. He knew that. He thought it anyway.

Keep going!
Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

SocietyJanuary 29, 2022

Fan tai sui: death and rebirth in the year of the tiger

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

On the cusp of the lunar new year – the year of the water tiger – Naomii Seah reflects on moving into a new phase of life, reconnecting with ancestral wisdom, and omens. 

In the new year, I woke up to a blackbird on my chest. She must have spent the night with me, tucked away in a corner of my room. Or maybe she had simply appeared in the night, morphing out of my dun-coloured furniture. 

My eyes fluttered open, blinking away the vestiges of night-time, and the first thing I saw was her beak, gleaming like a gold nugget in the dust. The blackbird was looking right at me, watching me from her perch between my breasts; her heart next to mine. 

There was a moment of stillness, of absolute silence in the grey-blue dawn. I broke the dream in my next breath. The blackbird fluttered; I sat up; it landed on the covers, and leapt for the windowsill. I cupped one hand around its beating wings, struggling to open my window with the other. In the next moment, it was gone. The sound of blackbirds singing drifted in the wind, and I put the back of my hand to my eyes and forehead. Was it a dream? A small patch of silver-white bird shit confirmed it wasn’t. I left it there, gleaming pearlescent on the dusty carpet. 

The lunar new year is here again. Pandemic years feel like highlight reels of half-snatched conversations, a few nights under the stars, flashing colours, half-memories of wine-drunk dancing with friends. But the lunar new year is here again, and the relentless march of time twirls back around, twisting in and around itself. 

Summer, spring, autumn, winter. History repeats itself. Time is linear and circular and angular. 

In the Chinese tradition, time is parsed into 12-year cycles. In turn, five 12-year cycles make up a larger cycle of 60 years. Five elements, 12 animals.  

For me, a new cycle is beginning. It’s my birth year, the year of the tiger. I’m turning 24. 

According to Chinese superstition, birth years or 本命年 (běn mìng nián) are a time when one 犯太歲 (fàn tài suì). It roughly translates to offending Tai Sui, the god who rules over the fortunes of a particular year in the 60-year zodiac cycle. 

本命年 is traditionally a year of laying low. No big career moves, no moving houses, no big events, no nothing. You’ll want to escape the notice of Tai Sui, lest he turns his evil eye on you. It’s an ominous warning, especially as I’ve just finished university, and I’m moving into my professional life. My lease is also ending, prompting entry into the stressful rat-race that is the Auckland housing hunt. As many of you will know, one’s early 20s are typically a turbulent time, even without the shadow of bad luck.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. 本命年 is also heralded as a time of immense change. It’s a time of transition, of transformation. It’s known as the threshold year. For me it’s the threshold of adulthood. There will be obstacles – hello omicron! – stress, and struggle. But it’s not a reach to imagine there will also be triumph, achievement, new opportunities, and new goals. A new beginning. 

There’s a myth that the human body regenerates every seven to 10 years. The reality is, our bodies are in flux all the time. Cells multiply, divide and die; some fast, some slow. Neurons are never replaced. But it’s true I’m a different person to when I last went through 本命年. 

A friend from intermediate recently reached out via messenger. I hadn’t heard from him since I was 12. I scrolled through our old conversation. 

By the way, your profile pic makes you look like a douche, I told him. CHANGE. IT. RIGHT. NOWn, I demanded. The next message was also from me: You there?

Maybe friendships also move in cycles. I went for a coffee with that friend from intermediate. I’m sorry I was so mean back then, I said. He laughed: don’t worry, it was a different time. 

We talked about our old friends. How back then the world seemed immense, vast beyond imagination. But it was small, too, contained in the basketball court we commandeered after school, whooping and running around; the smell of damp concrete in the air. 

This year, my world is also expanding: from university campuses, academia and study into the wide unknown of the working world. Yet it’s also shrunk immeasurably – only some months ago, the universe was contained in the four walls of my bedroom in Grey Lynn, and the blue glow of my laptop screen. I’m learning that everything is in flux: bodies, worlds, relationships. 

I drove that intermediate friend home from coffee, promising to catch up again soon. It seemed a fitting time to reconnect. 

My dad gave me a talisman in preparation for 本命年. It features a man dancing with a fan raised above his head, prayer beads clutched in the other arm. Floating Chinese characters surround him, and I can read none of them. There was a time when that didn’t bother me. The ages of five to 12 were spent diligently pretending I was a Pākehā kid in an olive wrapper. 

You might not believe in this stuff, my dad said, a defensive note in his voice. But we’re Chinese. I’ve always believed in it. I took the talisman quietly, tucking it into the back of my phone case. 

My dad is used to defending his superstitions to me; I’d always been dismissive of them. But I’ve actually become pretty superstitious recently. Part of it is an effort to reconnect with my parents and my ancestry. After all, where does superstition end, and tradition, religion and folk wisdom begin? 

Recently, I’ve been inundated with what some might call signs. More cynical people, and at times, myself, might dismiss them as basic cognitive pattern recognition. I still don’t know which one to believe. Maybe it’s both. 

For example, I woke up one morning last week with a bright red bite between my eyebrows. I’ve been receiving messages at 11:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44 and 5:55. And I’ve spent hours thinking about the blackbird. 

Google told me that the blackbird is an emissary of death. I scrolled through endless badly designed websites, pop-up ads for hot-Kiwi-mums-near-me blaring as I searched for something, anything at all to give the incident meaning. It probably just flew in to eat the bugs that accumulate around my lamp at night-time, I told myself. But there was an itch in the back of my mind. I couldn’t shake the way it had looked at me. How it had quietly settled on my chest. It felt like I’d been claimed. 

In the Chinese tradition death is a rebirth. When my dad told me about 本命年 the pieces clicked into place. I told him about the blackbird too. My dad said my grandfather had loved birds. He recounted catching songbirds with my grandfather in the thick Malaysian jungle as a boy. Your grandparents came to visit you, he told me. 

It’s the beginning of a new year. It’s a rebirth, a renewal, a precipice, a fall, a rise, a cycle. I’m an earth tiger; in 2022, it’s the year of the water tiger. According to the Chinese elemental system, earth absorbs water, and water nourishes the earth. Now I’m no oracle, and I still can’t read whatever signs I’m being sent, if any. But in this case the stars align. This year, I’ll absorb whatever challenges Tai Sui sends. I know they’ll help me grow. 

And in the background, time will continue its endless spin.

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