The Burnished Sun by Mirandi Riwoe

Author:Mirandi Riwoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2022-02-17T03:56:13+00:00

She Is Ruby Wong

Ruby can hear the low murmur of the London crowd being ushered to their seats. She drops her cloche hat and cloak over an armchair and slips out of her dress. Holding it up, she admires the flower that adorns the low waist, the lustre of the blue silk. Later, she will go dancing with Bert; she wants to try that new quickstep he learned in America after the war.

She pencils a thick line of charcoal across her left eyelid, then pencils the other. Just as the Chinese women do in her grandfather’s photographs, Ruby pins a fragile cascade of silk flowers behind her ear, before sliding the tortoiseshell comb into her hair, the one with the silvery butterfly that dances with each nod of her head. Drawing three filigree bangles from a velvet pouch, she pushes them onto her left wrist where they jangle as she moves. Sitting back, she contemplates herself in the mirror, satisfied with the transformation. Glad she’d packed the props into her trunk at the last moment. Hopes Larry doesn’t miss them from the costume wardrobe at the Enmore.

Of course, her narrow, tapering eyes, and her olive skin, dark with both Chinese blood and the Australian sun, are of no artifice. What she had tried to disguise in the schoolyard of St Bernadette’s, Ruby now accentuates with paint and ornaments. What had once made a secret corner of her soul curl in on itself has been smothered beneath this brazen deceit. Although – her hand pauses as she daubs red on her lips – it is not entirely a deceit. With each day, she becomes less certain of where the line lies between what is embellished and what is real, or even whether a line actually exists.

A sharp rap on the door. ‘Miss Wong, the Circle is ready. Quite a crowd, as usual,’ says Hutchison, the stage manager. ‘What will you be talking of tonight?’

‘I am thinking of simply reading some poetry,’ she says, in her carefully cultivated voice. She’s almost completely lost the Cairns twang. She tries to modulate her speech somewhere between what she learned from her elocution teacher and what she knows of a Chinese accent. In particular, she thinks of her Great-Aunt Moy Wong’s speech pattern: the back-to-front sentences and how she dropped prepositions willy-nilly. ‘Perhaps Li Bai. Poet, very old.’

She waits for him to leave and stands from the dressing table. Allowing her petticoat to fall to the floor, she folds it over the back of the chair and steps into emerald-green trousers. Over her blouse, she slips on a black Chinese jacket, running her hand across the nap. Admires, yet again, the pale yellow dragons embroidered into the silk. She tugs the jacket straight and returns to the mirror. Content with the Chinese woman she sees reflected. Ruby may not be fair enough to play Juliet or Rosalind in the Shakespeare plays she adores so much, but this part she performs to perfection. London’s premier Chinese Reciter.

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