404
PARTISAN REVIEW
would glow red at noon she had seen pigeons roosting. "Make haste,
girl," said her mother, standing under the globe of light. "Come,
jump," said her father, holding out his arms. Walking up the stairs
between her parents she had kept turning her face right and left to
watch the seashells marching up in twos . . . It was a courteous
cordial house-an old, old house even then, and this last war had
finally destroyed it, along with all the dear labyrinth of Binondo.
She said: "It's not there any more-your father's house ..."
He nodded: they had heard it was gone. And because he had
begun to like her: "It was waiting for us to come home," he added,
and felt his father's bony fingers on his hair; saw his father on the
beach, seated on the sand, and booming:
«The house of our fathers
is waiting for us to come home!"
When his mother was still alive and they lived out Stanley way,
they went swimming during the summers, the four of them that were
all
the family, to Deep Water Bay. He and his younger brother
Tony wore trunks but their father wore an old pair of trousers and
his pajama jacket while their mother wore a straw hat and sat on
the sand and knitted. She did not at all care for salt water but was
the most eager for these afternoons at the beach because the water
always started his father talking about 'home' and talking about
home always relaxed his father who tended to brood. There was al–
ways a fleet of junks along the shore and the bathers were mostly
dowdy family groups like their own: English, Chinese, Portuguese–
Deep Water, in spite of its elegant white sand, is not fashionable;
its currents and changing levels are too dangerous-but he and Tony
and their father could race each other all the way to an island across
the bay that was an hour's fast swim going and coming back, al–
though coming back they would feel so exhausted they could only
crawl up the warm white sand to where his mother sat knitting be–
side the lunch basket and a rubber tire she always took along just
in case she felt like a dip. While she handed the sandwiches around
his father would tell them about the waters back home he had swum
in when a boy. But what he most loved to talk about was the river
that ran right behind their house in Binondo.
He would describe how their house in Binondo had a large stone
azotea behind, with steps going right down to the water, and how
