The Queen of Patpong

Chapter 5

Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes

'Full fathom five thy father lies,' ' Miaow says. She's mumbling a little, embarrassed to speak the lines in this small apartment living room. In rehearsal at school, when she's on the big stage, she belts it to the back row.

'What's a fathom, Mia?' Mrs. Shin asks. As always, it takes Rafferty a beat to realize that 'Mia' is Miaow. His child has been reincarnated while he was busy elsewhere.

'About six feet,' Miaow says, with a sideways glance that stops just short of Rafferty, who had asked her what a fathom was in the taxi on the ride across town and then provided the answer. 'So he's thirty feet underwater. Pretty deep.'

'His bones are becoming what?' Mrs. Shin asks.

'Coral,' Miaow says immediately. The corners of her mouth lift as she gets to the line she likes best. 'And his eyes are pearls.' She waves the words away with her hands. 'I mean, 'And those are pearls that were his eyes.' '

'No 'and,' ' Rafferty says. Neither of them gives him a glance.

Mrs. Shin leans forward. 'Can you envision that, Mia?'

'Yes,' Miaow says, her own eyes drifting past Mrs. Shin. 'I see white sand with flickery ripple light on it, light coming through water, and the king lying there on his back all alone with a gold crown on and pearl eyes, and he's holding one of those sticks with a jewel on the top.'

'A scepter?' Rafferty guesses.

'One of those. And he's turning into something sort of fishy. Not fishy, oceany.'

'Exactly,' Mrs. Shin says. 'A 'sea-change.' It's a wonderful speech, isn't it? We're going to give you a special light when you say it.'

Miaow's eyes come back to the teacher's. 'Special like what?'

'You'll cross all the way downstage, to the edge of the orchestra pit, and you're going to look down as though you're seeing him through the water. We'll have a blue-green spotlight aimed up at you.'

'How will you make it watery?' Rafferty asks, interested in spite of his preoccupation with Rose and Horner.

'We'll shine it up through a big round glass baking dish, Pyrex because of the heat, with about three inches of water and food coloring in it, and the kid who's holding it will slosh it around a little.'

Miaow says, 'Cool,' which is one of the many words that's followed her home from school lately.

'I thought of it yesterday,' Mrs. Shin says. She picks up her teacup and glances down at it. 'A sea change.' To Rafferty, she says, 'Mia has some of the best lines in the play.'

'Yes, and I get to hear them over and over.'

'More tea?' Her cup is empty.

'No thanks. It's great, but I'm topped up.' Rafferty loathes tea but has forced down two cups to be polite. He has drunk more tea in the six weeks he's been condensing The Tempest with Mrs. Shin than in his entire life before they met.

'More Coke, Mia?'

'No.' Miaow feels the force of Rafferty's glance and corrects herself. 'No thanks.'

'It's a surprise to see Mia, but I'm glad you brought her,' Mrs. Shin says, standing and bending down to pick up her teacup. This is one of their regular Sunday rewrite meetings, where Rafferty proposes ways to condense and simplify and Mrs. Shin thinks of something better. His first inclination was to cancel today's session, but it gave him a chance to get out of the apartment. When he'd invited Miaow, hoping to help her shake her mood, she'd actually jumped into the air. He'd meant the invitation to demonstrate that life was going on in spite of everything, but to Miaow it was mainly about getting away from Rose for a while.

'She wouldn't let me come without her,' he says truthfully.

'Well, I'm happy she's here. She's a lucky girl, having a father who's a famous writer.'

'Huh,' Miaow says.

Rafferty says, 'Not so famous.'

As always, they're seated on the beige carpet in Mrs. Shin's living room, around a little black-lacquered table, inset with mother-of-pearl, that's about ten inches high and is almost the only piece of furniture in the room. Floor sitting is a trial for Rafferty, but Miaow can stay cross-legged forever, just one more benefit, he thinks, of being ten, or maybe eleven, years old.

Mrs. Shin goes to the counter that divides the kitchen from the living room and puts her cup in front of an electric hot-water pot. 'I don't know about you,' she says as hot water streams into the cup, 'but I feel as though I've been through a sort of sea change myself, little bits of me getting less Korean and more Thai every year.'

'How many years have you been here?'

'Twelve.' She picks up the cup and inhales the fragrance, a brisk, trim, short-haired woman in her late thirties or early forties, wearing a brightly striped blouse in hard-candy hues, tucked into fawn-colored slacks. 'And you?'

'Six,' he says. 'I'm becoming Thai by marriage.'

'That's a good way to do it,' Mrs. Shin says. 'Twenty-four-hour tutoring. And you're becoming Thai through fatherhood, too, of course.'

'That goes without saying,' Rafferty says.

Miaow says, 'Does not.'

'When I first got here,' Mrs. Shin says, 'I was only supposed to stay a year, and for the first three or four weeks I thought I wouldn't make it. I hated it. Everything was so different from Korea. Bangkok felt like a mess- more than a mess, it felt like complete chaos. The traffic, the heat, the noise, the dirt.' She shakes her head. 'And I was dripping sweat, waking up with a headache from the exhaust, and wondering why everybody smiled all the time. I was suspicious. What did they want from me? After eight or nine days, I noticed that the muscles in my cheeks ached a little because I was smiling back at everybody. So that was the beginning of my sea change-sore cheek muscles.'

'Mine was a keen awareness that my teeth weren't very good.'

'Your teeth are fine,' she says without a glance. It's a very Thai response. She sips her tea and looks down at Miaow. 'And the people, they… Well, from a Korean perspective the Thais are a little… haphazard.'

'We are?' Miaow says.

'From a Korean perspective.' Mrs. Shin emphasizes the words. 'Koreans tend to be highly organized. We're planners and list makers. Not particularly spontaneous, unless we've been drinking, and then we're too spontaneous. The Thais, on the other hand, sort of flow.' She sees the confusion in Miaow's face and laughs. 'Don't worry, I'm not saying anything bad about the Thais. It's actually about me, and it has to do with the play.' She crosses the small room again, barefoot, as are Rafferty and Miaow. One of the things Rafferty loves about Asia is how close everyone is to being barefoot all the time. When the two of them came into the apartment, they kicked off their shoes beside a plumb-straight line of Mrs. Shin's, just inside the door, and the backs of all the shoes were flattened, stepped on repeatedly to make them easier to slip on and off. After all his years in Asia, the sight still cheers him.

'As a Korean, I didn't think the Thais measured up to me,' she says, sitting down on her heels in a posture Rafferty has never been able to attain. 'And now here I am, twelve years later, slowly turning Thai and delighted about it. And it makes me think about Caliban.'

Rafferty says, 'Ah,' and Miaow says, 'Why?'

'We don't like Caliban. We're not supposed to. Shakespeare doesn't like him. Caliban is the only non-European on the island, except for Ariel, who's clearly an upper-class spirit, almost English. But Caliban… well, Caliban is definitely not English, and Prospero treats him like a dog.'

Miaow says, 'And he's…' She falters and puts both hands on the table.

'He's what?' Mrs. Shin asks.

Miaow shakes her head. 'I'm not smart like you.'

'You're one of the smartest children I've ever known,' Mrs. Shin says.

Miaow's mouth opens at the praise and stays open. She looks as if she's just been hit on the head.