I stood there, allowing the stillness to seep into me.’ She senses that this unusual arrangement may allow her to find the serenity she craves. Yun Ling accepts the proposal after visiting Aritomo’s garden: ‘The silence here had a different quality I felt I had been plumbed with weighted fishing line into a deeper, denser level of the ocean. Aritomo refuses to build her garden, but offers to take her on as an apprentice the offer – from a Japanese Imperial gardener to a Chinese woman – is unprecedented. Despite her hatred for the Japanese, she decides to approach Nakamura Aritomo, a former gardener to the Japanese emperor, known to her because his estate adjoins a tea plantation owned by a family friend.
Her sister, ironically, had dreamed of having a Japanese garden, and Yun Ling decides to create one in her memory. Even seeing war criminals sentenced to death and hanged did not relieve her torment. The tale begins when she is in her late twenties, after she has given up her job as a prosecutor, a role she performed for only a few years following the war. She narrates her own story when we meet her she is an elderly woman recording her memories for fear of losing them. At the war’s end Yun Ling, mysteriously, is the only survivor of her camp. The Teoh sisters were among thousands of civilians, many of them ethnic Chinese, rounded up on suspicion of resisting the Japanese occupation. Her maimed hand is a reminder of deeper scars. She is angry also with herself, for having survived when her sister did not. She harbours a deep anger towards the Japanese, who interned her for three years in a labour camp where she lost her youth, her innocence, her sister – and two fingers.
IN THE AFTERMATH of the Second World War and the end of Japan’s occupation of Malaysia, Teoh Yun Ling is desperately seeking her own peace.
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