Japs

Andrew Robinson

Illustrated by Carolyn Gowdy

Ellen is intrigued by the Star of David tattooed on my right shoulder. She doesn’t care for the symbolism, but it’s in her nature to be attracted to incongruity. As a ‘third-generation Holocaust survivor’ — a term she uses with vitriolic irony — she has a cultivated resentment towards Jewish-American mall culture. I have a romanticised image of the Jews, though Ellen forgives me this — she forgives me everything — saying simply that if I’d been sent to fricking Hebrew school, I’d understand. When she turned 13, she refused her Bat Mitzvah — quite a big deal, she tells me and her relationship with her parents has never quite recovered. She is a fugitive from the New Jersey future mapped out by her Slovak mother: marriage to a doctor or a lawyer and a life in the suburbs. All four of Ellen’s grandparents survived the Holocaust; one of them survived Auschwitz.

Why would I have a Star of David tattooed on my shoulder? I grew up in the north of England, with no Jewish ancestry. My mother is a Hong Kong Chinese: my father British, Anglo-Saxon. But riding the rumbling subway, in Manhattan, say, I hold my breath in claustrophobic panic, bodies pressed against me. Catatonic with gas chamber memories, I shudder as elevator doors close in on me.

The Shiva Naipaul memorial prize is awarded annually to the contestant best able, like the late Shiva Naipaul, to describe a visit to a foreign place or people. It is not for travel writing in the conventional sense, but for the most acute and profound observation of a culture evidently alien to the writer. This year the prize is worth £3,000.

The judges were Hilary Mantel, the writer and winner, in 1987, of the first Shiva Naipaul memorial prize, the writer Patrick French, Mark Amory (literary editor of The Spectator), Boris Johnson (editor of The Spectator), and Mary Wakefield (assistant editor of The Spectator).

Seven entries were shortlisted out of a total of 178 — three times as many as last year. It was a close-run thing. Ravinder Chahal’s exposé of the PR industry attracted strong support as did Barnabas Campbell on Christmas in Calcutta. Aidan Hawkes, Christopher Wraight, Adi Bloom and Emelia Jones made up the short list of seven. The runners-up can be read online at www.spectator.co.uk.

From where do I hawk up the smell of deathcamp furnaces; from past lives, or from TV documentaries? There was no room for reincarnation in my Protestant upbringing, nor is there in Judaism itself. These are all false memories.

Here, under the tropical Singaporean sun, I crumple my torn sachets of sugar and my sweaty receipts, wincing in the heat. The Starbucks bin — an open hole — evokes the rows and rows of wooden latrines at Birkenau. I mention this to Ellen, who just laughs, not knowing if I’m serious. At this point we’ve known each other two weeks, and she still doesn’t know what to make of me. She likes me, though; life can be lonely for a Westerner in Asia, especially a woman. Expats know more than most that life is transient, connections with kindred spirits rare.

‘I have this concept I can’t really explain,’ Ellen tells me when we visit Bratislava, ‘that all real cities should smell of urine. I think that’s why I’ve never settled in Singapore.’ In this regard, Bratislava does not disappoint. It’s late on Sunday evening, and from a roadside vendor we buy two greasy kebabs that smell of Leeds. Two teenage girls look at us, laughing. Ellen knows enough Slovak to understand that they are making fun of us, but she doesn’t tell me why.

I am amazed by how long it takes Ellen to complete a transaction using foreign currency. She seems almost to hope that by fumbling with her change long enough, the Slovaks will forget how much she owes them. ‘You really are a Christ-killing, tightassed old Shylock, aren’t you, Rodan?’ I observe. Ellen continues to fumble with her purse, not looking up at me. She says, ‘You’re a sly, slittyeyed Fu Manchu, Robinson. Don’t think I haven’t got my eyes on you, you slippery Chink.’ ‘Yid and Yang,’ I smile, pulling her towards me and kissing the crown of her head. It’s our private joke. The roadside vendor is visibly irritated.

I jolt awake sweating in the air-conditioned night, the click of a Luger at the back of my head, palpitating with ghetto-panic. Down in the humid dark, crickets and frogs echo by the swimming pool. None of these memories is real. Ellen, sleeping face down beside me, doesn’t wake. I watch her breathing softly, arm coiled around my pillow. Her knee lies against the silk bedsheet, exposed, and I pull the duvet gently over her; she is 24 years old.

Our first night in Bratislava, and on a cocktail of jetlag and gin, we debate whose upbringing was the most absurd. She puts forward the case for Hebrew school and New Jersey, but I counter with my English public school, my Protestantism. It’s a toughly contested battle. In the end the debate devolves into who can remember the most ridiculous hymn. We laugh ourselves off tangent. She tells me the story of Haman, the wicked, wicked man; I explain to her that Aids is in fact God’s avenging hand on homosexuals, the same way it was told to me at Sunday school.

Ellen’s mother opposed her moving to Singapore, citing the justification that her daughter would be a target in a ‘Muslim’ country. This puzzled me; why would a woman who emigrated from Slovakia in her early twenties be closed-minded to her daughter’s desire to travel? ‘It’s not like what you think,’ Ellen tells me. ‘I know you have an image of this free-spirited émigré, but you’re way off. She was like born in a Jersey mall, shopping for discount Prada and DKNY. She hates Slovakia and everything about it. She even hates that I’m here right now.’ I’ve not met Ellen’s mother, but apparently she is cautiously optimistic about me. Before me, Ellen dated an Indian Singaporean for a while, so English and half-Caucasian is a vague step in the right direction. And then there is the tattoo, which to my surprise meets with approval. Perhaps she thinks I can help Ellen come to terms with her ethnicity. Ellen thinks otherwise — insisting, in fact, that being Jewish is a matter of religious choice, not an ethnicity — but appreciates me for my novelty value nevertheless. ‘You’re like that pig, from that movie,’ she says, both arms around my waist, ‘that thinks it’s a sheepdog. Hugh Granty half-Chinese, half-white English poshie who thinks he’s a Jew,’ she squeezes my waist affectionately. ‘You’re hysterical.’ She means it in a good way. An American way.

Sometimes I call Ellen ‘Anne Frank’ to wind her up. Her mother always said that there was a resemblance, and this has become an in-couple joke. Ellen dislikes being reminded that she looks or acts Jewish in any way. We drunkenly discuss Anne Frank and the possibility of her work having been forged. Ellen has heard somewhere that hard evidence has apparently proven otherwise, though I offer that a true revisionist would presumably challenge all evidence presented to them. At some point the debate evolves into a Monty Pythonesque song, ‘You’d never be happy if you were a Holocaust Revisionist.’ We generate a set of lyrics and a surprisingly catchy melody to go along with them. She makes me laugh so hard I need to cover her mouth to stop her; her muffled sniggers warm against my palm. I’ve never seen Ellen so happy as in Slovakia, and in a drunken epiphany I resolve to move here with her one day. By the morning, neither of us can remember how the song went.

The next morning, we take the train to Kosice, Ellen’s family home. A young couple go out of their way to help us, or so it seems to me. Ellen thinks she detects a grudging resentment in their tone. It’s an odd twist of roles, me arguing in favour of the goodness of the human soul. I don’t recognise you in Slovakia, she cautions, only half joking. I need to take you to some Singapore churches, rekindle some of that English bitterness.

Ellen’s Aunt Sylvie drives us to the Catholic/Jewish cemetery in Kosice. The Catholic section of the cemetery is immaculate. The Jewish section — maintained by the same council — is locked to the public, and Ellen and I clamber over a rusted metal fence to gain access. It is dense and overgrown; we heed Sylvie’s advice to watch out for discarded syringes. Here, by the Holocaust memorial, is the Rodan family grave. The last time Ellen visited Slovakia, her grandmother was alive. Now she is here, last of the Survivors. Ellen is quiet for a long time. I put my hand against the back of her neck and think about the Star of David on my shoulder, wondering if I am a part of this.

Rodan is not a Jewish name, Ellen tells me for the first time on the flight over. Her paternal grandfather, fearful of a second Holocaust, neutralised the family surname when he emigrated to America. You would imagine a lot of American Jews would now be reverting to their traditional Jewish names, I say, asserting the Jewishness they were forced to hide. Ellen doesn’t understand what I mean. I explain at some length about Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, but she just squeezes my hand and says, ‘You watch too many movies, Robinson.’ In 1963, Aunt Sylvie — an undefeated Catholic, sturdy and blond married Ellen’s uncle, a Slovak Jew. She too will be buried here one day, among the condoms and the weeds, a pariah by marriage. Stiffening sharply, she fastens a protective hand on my Chinese shoulder. ‘Gypsy!’ Sylvie hisses, one of perhaps ten English words she knows. I look up; a clutch of ragged brown children eye us warily. ‘Gypsies, disgusting,’ Sylvie curses as she reverses the car out. I am impressed with her burgeoning vocabulary. There are more than half a million gypsies in Slovakia, and even though we have eight or nine encounters a day, the novelty never seems to wear off for Sylvie. ‘Ellen! Ellen boyfren’, careful,’ she says, a motherly arm encircling each of us. I feel strangely clean, strangely white as Sylvie shelters me from these feral children. Ellen tells me that if you go near the gypsies, they will kill you and eat your babies. We laugh, and Sylvie laughs along with us, not really understanding what was said.

The Chinese and the Jews have so much in common, Ellen observes over dinner one evening. Both equally miserable cultures, producing generation after generation of persecution-obsessed misers, incapable of enjoying themselves. She swigs hard, aggressively at her gin and tonic. She’d never drunk gin before she met me, but she’s taken to it. She scrutinises my face, challenging me. I’m alien to her and she likes this about me; not Jewish, not American, not Chinese. A race apart.

Perfunctorily, I indicate our near-empty glasses to the waiter. He nods hurriedly and disappears inside the restaurant. I look back at Ellen, the interaction having meant nothing to me.

‘I always thought the English and the Chinese had a lot in common in that regard,’ I tell her, and I mean it. I’d thought so ever since arriving in Singapore. Not the English working class, hard-drinking and hard-living, or the upper class, deranged on old money. The Chinese as a whole were like the English middle class: educated enough to despair of their future; far too sensible and uptight to enjoy themselves in the present. In that sense, it was hard to know from which side I’d inherited the negativity; both, probably.

Ellen is a veteran shoplifter, her skills honed in a hundred Kmarts. She walks effortlessly out of provision shops with bottles of $5 wine under her windbreaker. She is red-faced with frustration following a quick phone call to her mother, and we get drunk together to forget her anger. Have you noticed that once you start drinking you let slip with the meshuggenahs and drecks, I observe. She flashes me an exasperated look. Unusually, I find Ellen’s resentment towards her parents inappropriate. We are high up in the Tatras in Slovakia; tomorrow we move north, to Krakow and Auschwitz. I point this out to her and she snaps at me.

‘Don’t fucking play the Auschwitz card. Just don’t do the armchair victim I think I was Jewish in a past life thing. I’m not in the mood right now.’ ‘Right, and I don’t expect the inmates were in the mood, either. Couldn’t you just drop the whole I hate Judaism thing for a couple of days? It’s ... in bad taste.’ It’s the wrong thing to say, and I regret it. But I’ve not been able to stop thinking about her grandparents, tattoos branded on their inner forearms. Gestapo boots marching on the winter concrete.

She shakes her head. ‘You just don’t know what it was like for me growing up. Holocaust this and Holocaust fucking that. No one understands our suffering, so let’s make every ten-year-old who doesn’t dress in Prada a fucking social outcast. All this Jap shit.’ Jap?

‘Jewish American Princess.’ Ellen sits back with a sigh, frustrated at me for not keeping up.

Ah. So we were both Japs when we were young, though the word meant different things. On the streets of York, I was advised often to fuck off back to where I came from, and all racial slurs vaguely targeting the Far East retain a particular resonance. The first team didn’t discriminate between Chinks, Japs or Gooks in the post-rugby showers. But my head is fuzzy with Hungarian wine, and articulating this observation to Ellen would take too much effort.

‘It’s just my fucked-up childhood,’ Ellen says, softening, touching my wrist. ‘I’m sorry. You don’t know what it was like. Go to law school and marry a fricking surgeon. We are the suffering ones. Dress only in Gucci.’ I reach for her hand and stroke it, drawing her pain into me. ‘I didn’t mean to take it out on you,’ she says, resting her head on my chest, her hand on my right shoulder. ‘I never mean to take it out on you.’ She means it, too. I hold her like this for a long time; hoping that we’ll always be on the same side.

Outside the train station in Krakow, we see middle-aged homeless men tonguing each other; a retarded teenager leers at Ellen, touches his groin. I hold her close, navigating her through the spittle. Everywhere we turn, taxi-drivers hiss ‘concentration camp’ at us like Hong Kong hawkers. It seems as though the death-camp is the best thing that ever happened to the local tourism industry. We haggle prices for a while — Ellen is far better at this than I — and find a driver who will take us there and back for $40. On the way out of the city, he stops to pick up drinks and snacks. The car is filled with the smell of fermented milk and Polish sausage. I wind down the window ostentatiously, grimacing at Ellen.

In the little Mandarin she’s learned in Singapore, Ellen makes a few sharp comments about the driver, slowly and carefully composing each sentence. She doesn’t know the word for paedophile, but manages to say that he looks as though he enjoys having sex with kids. We look at each other and giggle like schoolchildren. Many of the barn doors we pass have Stars of David painted on them.

Auschwitz has a policy of not admitting children below 14 years old, but this is not enforced. Tourist children run around unsupervised, bored as they would be at any museum. When the camp opened to the public, there was talk of limiting access to Jews only. Though there are clear drawbacks in such a policy, my experience is certainly diluted by tourist overcrowding. In Slovakia and Poland, Ellen and I have been prevented from taking pictures of supermarkets, of stat ues, and of road signs. But no one objects to the groups of Japanese tourists smilingly posing in front of the gas chambers.

‘Fucking Japs,’ I say, to fill the silence. ‘The second most evil race on earth.’ ‘I thought you liked Japan,’ says Ellen absently, automatically correcting me.

‘Yeah,’ I concede. I do. I travel to Japan several times a year for work, and always hate returning to Singapore. After ten days in Tokyo, Singapore seems like a fishing village full of Asian hicks. After dumping my bags on the marble floor of our apartment, I need half an hour to vent to Ellen about the Singaporeans in customs and Duty Free. My heavily accented impression of a Singaporean speaking English always has her in hysterics.

Walking along the train line at Birkenau, I catch snippets of conversation from a group of English teenagers, here on an A-level field trip, I suspect. I learn that Sally got off with Kevin, that Rob chucked up all over his new trainers at the party last week. In Slovakia, we walked through a mediaeval torture chamber and it meant nothing to me. Ellen is 24 and remembers clearly all four of her grandparents, but it’s a matter of time before Auschwitz becomes ancient and intangible history.

We look inside an empty dormitory, see the wooden latrines at the back. This is what I meant in Starbucks that time, I tell her. I’ve always wanted to see this. To test this vague theory of reincarnation. To my disappointment, though, I feel nothing. I was wrong about everything; I’ve not been here before.

‘Why do you never hear about the ghosts of Auschwitz?’ I ask Ellen. ‘With all the millions who died here, you’d think there’d be some stories.’ She doesn’t reply immediately, seeming lost in thought. ‘Jews,’ she says simply. ‘Ghosts just aren’t a big part of the culture.’ I nod at the obvious logic of this. ‘If the Holocaust had happened to the Chinese, there’d have been a million stories,’ I observe. ‘In Singapore, there’d be a series of paperback bestsellers called Ghosts of the Holocaust. They’d be in every bookstore and they’d be up to volume 20 by now.’ I know that Ellen gets the joke, but she doesn’t laugh. Holding her hand tightly, I walk with her the length of the Birkenau train line. I think about her grandfather, arriving on a cattle train in 1944, and silently promise always to protect his granddaughter from pain. The sun rises bright above the watchtowers, and I squeeze Ellen’s hand to remind her that I am here.