by Jeremy Tiang
He hands her a framed photo he found on top of a bookcase: Janet smiling, him nervous, and Stella trying to look rebellious, all black clothes and cropped hair. “Thought you’d like this.”
“This was just before you left for London, wasn’t it?”
“Must have been.” He wonders if she’d already guessed, back then, that he had no intention of returning. “So, you’re okay?” He has asked this before, several times, but he doesn’t know what else to say.
“All right. I mean, not really, but also yes. Everything’s fine.”
“How’s your step-mother?”
“Vanda? She remarried, a while ago. Stockbroker. Always lands on her feet, that one.”
“I’m glad you have these people to hang out with.”
“I’m not really one of them—I came much later, and to be honest I’m probably not ideologically pure enough. But it’s always nice to see them. People seem to have forgotten what happened back then, and I need to be with people who still remember. We don’t even have to talk about it. They all know. The others I was in detention with, my batch, many of them are still fighting. Writing books and standing for Parliament. I—” She spreads her hands helplessly.
“I survive.”
“That’s already something,” says Maryam, who has appeared from round the corner, taking her arm. “You’re doing very well.”
“Come visit London,” says Henry, not knowing what else to offer.
She grimaces. “Not likely, that last trip ended pretty badly.”
“That wasn’t London’s fault,” protests Henry, but she is shaking her head and he doesn’t want to press too hard. If only we could have been closer, he thinks with some sadness. But there was all that distance, both geographical and the other sort, harder to define, that grew between them.
Revathi rejoins them, glowing. “What fascinating people! Thank you for inviting us.”
Stella smiles, they all hug again, and she leaves, walking slowly, holding herself very straight, Maryam a step ahead of her. “It’s good that—” says Revathi, but leaves the thought unfinished.
•
It’s in the mornings that he’s most aware Singapore is a tropical island. Before the blunt force of noonday heat, when the just-risen sun feels clean and strong, and the streets look burnished. As Henry strolls through Tiong Bahru, everything from the pink roadside bougainvillea to the small clumps of palm trees sparkle as if fresh-minted. They’ll be wilted and dusty by mid-afternoon, but for now are refreshed by the cool of night.
The woman at the bakery recognises him. “Your dad showed me your book,” she explains. “I remember your picture on the back.” She’s sad to hear that Jason has died—he was a regular customer. On an impulse he can’t explain, Henry asks what his father would usually get, and picks up a loaf of the same sort of bread.
Back in the flat, he takes a closer look at the shelves, and sure enough his authored books are all there. Not exactly prominent, but less dusty than the ones around them. Did Jason read them, or just show them off around the neighbourhood? Either way.
After breakfast, he and Revathi get back to clearing. Janet has begged off, claiming first work commitments and then dust allergies. Fair enough that she simply doesn’t want to be here, thinks Henry, he can hardly complain after all his years away. She offers to send her maid over to help, but he says that won’t be necessary.
They get into a rhythm of shovelling things into plastic bags—armloads of yellowing paper, milk turned lumpily solid in its carton, appliances grown rusty and unusable. These get hoisted out the back door, down the spiral staircase to the bins in the alleyway. The clothes that look like they might be salvageable go into cardboard boxes for the Salvation Army to pick up.
Everything in the flat teems with angry life. A jar left out overnight smells odd by morning, and has a film of blue mould over its surface within a couple of days. Getting rid of the rotting food is a low point, but having invested in rubber gloves and a box of disposable masks, Henry manages. Did Janet simply give up on their father? He was in the hospital for weeks, but some of this stuff has clearly been around much longer.
By afternoon, the outlines of the home he remembers show themselves, like an excavation carving out a ruin. Once they’ve got rid of the more recent makeshift furniture, the durable stuff from his childhood is visible again. They can see the floor too, scuffed terrazzo. There are plastic boxes everywhere, filled with what turn out to be newspaper clippings.
“I had no idea he was still doing this,” says Henry. “He’d read the papers, then cut out anything that might be of interest and file it away. If you visited and mentioned, say, yoga, he’d disappear for ten minutes and come back with a lifestyle piece about yoga from six years ago.”
“But it’s all on the Internet now,” says Revathi. “Newspapers don’t even have morgues any more.”
“We tried to explain that, but—” He gestures around, letting the lack of a computer speak for itself.
With its cupboards emptied, the kitchen looks piebald. There are ingrained dirt and food stains to be scrubbed away, and the pots on the draining board host their own ecosystem. The walls are moderately dirty up to just above head height, after which they are filthy. Jason must have made some attempt to clean the place, but only as far as he could reach without standing on anything.
“If your sister can be bothered to renovate, she could rent this out for a fortune,” says Revathi, looking out the window at the weekend brunch crowds, who are queuing patiently outside the trendiest joints downstairs.
“She’ll probably do that, she’s not sentimental.”
“And you?”
Henry runs his fingers over the counter, the texture calling back something like memory. “I won’t be here. Don’t know if I’ll ever come back again. Silly for me to want this to stay the same. A museum to what?”
“You grew up here.”
“Everything I grew up with is gone. I went looking for the National Library, and there was just a tunnel in the side of a hill. Might as well lose this too.”
He upends another drawer, spilling wooden implements he can only guess the use of. He holds one up for Revathi to inspect, a toothed semi-circle.
“That’s a curry puff mould. Did your dad make curry puffs?”
“Not that I know of. Must have been left over from…”
He trails off. There is something stuffed into a napkin-holder, carefully folded papers, some still in envelopes. He opens them and sees letters, age-spotted paper covered in spidery Chinese writing, and rough-edged photographs in faded sepia. He holds them up to the light. Pictures of his mother, he’s sure of it. It’s the schoolgirl from the one photograph he has of her, here all grown up, dressed in khaki fatigues, holding a rifle casually by her side, as if she’s forgotten it’s there. He flicks through the others, and there she is, pointing at the sky, looking at the camera with determination. They are all heroically posed.
He turns the last one over, and scribbled on the back in rough Chinese characters is her name, Siew Li. It’s her.
Revathi is silent for a while when he shows her. “You knew she’d gone inside, didn’t you.”
“We suspected. My dad just said she ran away, didn’t want to talk about where.”
The pictures are faded, easily half a century old. “I’ve seen ones like these before,” says Revathi. “I don’t know why they keep mementoes like this, but I suppose they wanted a record, just like everyone else.”
“Why didn’t he show them to us?”
“Maybe he thought that wouldn’t have done any good.”
“That wasn’t his choice.” Henry feels a stab of anger, then lets it dissipate. What’s the point now? He carefully unfolds the letters. There’s a small stack of them, the paper spotted brown with age. He brings the first one close to his eyes and reads, piecing together the Chinese writing with difficulty: I hope you are healthy, I hope you are safe, I hope you have not been taught to hate me.
&nbs
p; •
When he tries to remember the next few hours afterwards, they become a blur. The world is suddenly askew, and he can only keep moving, hoping to find his balance again. His plan has practical difficulties to be sorted, which mercifully keeps his mind busy.
“What do you mean you never learnt?” demands Revathi. “I didn’t think it was possible to live in the twenty-first century and not know how to drive.”
Henry shrugs. “Never needed to. I’ve only ever lived here and in London.”
“Is there a train or something?”
“There’s a bus as far as Ipoh, and I guess I can get a taxi from there.”
Revathi looks at the map. “There’s more than fifty miles.”
“I don’t see what else I can do. I called Janet, she doesn’t want anything to do with them. Leave the past buried, she said. I’m on my own here.”
“It’ll cost a fortune.”
“You have any better ideas?”
“Rent a car. I’ll drive.”
“Really?”
“Why not?”
“It’s a long way to go. Are you sure?”
“It’s an adventure, isn’t it? I’m not getting any younger.”
And just like that, they are speeding down the North-South Highway. He’s never gone on a trip without planning ahead, but he’d quickly combed the letters for clues—the postmarks, the topography—and after some quick Googling, despite his mother’s subterfuge, was able to roughly guess where she must have been. Revathi got on the phone to the car hire place while he tossed some clothes in a bag, and thirty minutes later they were passing through Malaysian customs, handing their passports over to a bored counter clerk who barely glanced at them. There was a bit of traffic over the Causeway, and they got momentarily lost in Johor Bahru’s warren of narrow streets trying to find a money changer. Now they have ringgit in their pockets and the expressway before them—plain sailing. The speed limit is 110kph, but he’s pretty sure everyone around them is going faster.
Henry continues reading the letters as Revathi zooms along, yelling at anyone cutting into her lane, which happens frequently. “There isn’t a lot of information. She keeps saying she can’t tell us where she is—she’s not allowed to, but also she doesn’t really know, it’s just somewhere in the jungle.”
“Are you sure we’re even going to the right place?”
“I hope so. By the seventies the Communists weren’t controlling many areas, so this is one of the few locations she could have ended up in.”
“How was she even getting these letters out to you?”
“They had people on the outside who brought them supplies, medicine and things like that. She got one of them to post these for her.”
“Wasn’t that dangerous?”
“Probably.”
“Are you going to show Janet?”
“I photographed them on my iPad and e-mailed her the copies. Technology!”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t have a data plan, so who knows.”
“There’s a KFC up ahead. Maybe they’ll have Wi-Fi.”
“We’ve only been on the road a couple of hours.”
“So? It’s lunchtime.”
At the rest stop, Revathi eats fried chicken as Henry checks his messages. Janet’s response is surprisingly mellow. She has already gone through all the letters, having forced Kevin with his A1 in Higher Chinese to translate. No new information, she says, but it’s nice to know Ma was thinking of us. She doesn’t know what Henry thinks he’s going to gain from this trip, but she wishes him the best of luck.
“You sure you don’t want any of this?” says Revathi. “Hot and crispy. If they had this in London, I’d be the size of a house. A chilli sauce dispenser at the table? People keep telling me KFC is better in Asia than elsewhere, but I never believed them till now.”
“I’m not hungry,” says Henry.
“Are you nervous?”
“I don’t know what I am. Janet’s right, I don’t know what I think I’m going to find. But it seems important to go.”
“You want primary sources, that’s all.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t do this before, but I also don’t know why I’m doing it now.”
Revathi wipes off her fingers with a moist towelette and pats him briskly on the shoulder. “We’re excavating. Let’s get back on the road.”
The landscape is featureless, mountains in the distance, scrubby plains and run-down buildings along the road. The highway rips right through the country, a long thread up the spine of the peninsula. Palm tree plantations give way to paddy fields. When he sees grazing water buffalo, he knows he is a long way from home.
His father took them on a couple of holidays when they were children, only to Malaysia. Back then, it was all trunk roads, and they’d crawl for hours behind timber lorries while their car soaked up the sun like an oven. Janet was prone to carsickness and had to clutch a plastic bag the whole time, while Henry tried desperately to forget where he was by never looking up from his book. Jason would shout at them to navigate, but as he’d never taught either of them how to read a map, they weren’t able to do much more than stare helplessly at him. On their last, disastrous trip, they’d gotten a flat in the middle of a monsoon, and had to stand in pouring rain as Jason changed the tyre, swearing with such abandon that it was almost funny.
When he tells Revathi this memory she raises an eyebrow. “No wonder you’re so anti-holiday.” It’s true, he realises, he can’t remember the last time he went somewhere for pure pleasure—too easy to find some purpose for each trip, research or a conference. They reach Ipoh in the evening and decide not to go any further. Revathi is starting to look exhausted, and Henry feels pointlessly guilty about not being able to share the driving. He’s tired too, jetlag and his recent lack of sleep starting to hit him. Luckily, it’s out of tourist season, and easy enough to find a cheap hotel. The owner assumes they are a couple, and even when they ask for separate rooms, leers, “You had a fight, is it? I’ll give the madam a double bed, in case the sir changes his mind.” Revathi glares at him hard enough that he stutters into silence, and hands over their keys.
They’d passed by some hipsterish coffee places on their way in, but this hotel is in the old part of town, and starting to fall apart. A section of the lobby ceiling is actually crumbling, though instead of repairing it, they’ve chosen to fix a net beneath to catch the falling flakes of plaster. In his room, the high ceiling has damp stains across it, and the arrow pointing towards Mecca has peeled so it droops towards the ground. When he mentions this to the owner later, the man smiles, “It doesn’t matter, sir, nowadays people have an app to tell them where Mecca is.”
The air-conditioning gives him sinus trouble, so he turns it off and sleeps with the windows open, even though that lets insects into the room that hum and buzz around him. Finally, he fumbles through the drawers for repellent, and finds instead a single plastic-wrapped mosquito coil. Popping it on top of the little metal prong, he lights it and breathes in the chemical scent. When did he last smell this? Probably not since that last Malaysian vacation. A thin wisp of grey smoke rises and diffuses around him. When he turns the light off, he can still see the bright ember.
•
The next morning, Revathi knocks on his door and thrusts a brown paper packet at him. “Here, breakfast.”
They sit at his rickety table and eat their nasi lemak, which tastes slightly unfamiliar. More pandan? And chicken curry instead of fried chicken. Revathi rolls her eyes at these observations. “Please don’t become one of those people who list all the ways Malaysian hawker food isn’t as good. Those are the worst kinds of Singaporeans.”
He gets out the map and they trace the day’s route. A little farther along the expressway, then the road toward the Thai border, and onwards into the hills.
“If you change your mind, we can just go look at temples instead,” says Revathi.
“Why would I change my mind?”
>
“Finding out about the past doesn’t always work out the way you hope.”
“Thank you, professor.”
It’s only later, when they’ve wandered out in search of coffee, that he thinks to ask, “Have you ever wanted to find out about your own family?”
“There’s nothing to find out. We’re very boring.”
“Once you start looking, though—”
“It felt like a big enough deal, the first time I came back to Malaysia to see where my parents had come from. I didn’t think about looking further back. My grandfather was brought over by the British from Jaffna—they wanted him to run a general post office in Selangor. One colony to another, so the systems were the same. I’ve never even been to Sri Lanka.”
“It’s not too late.”
“Who knows what there is left to find? Anyway, I don’t have anyone to tell, and I’m not that curious myself, so what’s the point? Live in the present.”
“I wish I could.”
“I didn’t mean you. Do what you have to do.”
They start driving again, and despite the blazing sun, there is something sombre about the day. He is short of breath, and can’t get the temperature comfortable no matter how much he adjusts the car’s ventilation system. They leave the highway and continue along dusty roads. The sky seems bluer here, and he wonders if that’s his imagination or if there’s a scientific explanation, lack of pollution or something. Traffic is thinning out.
When they pass a small town that is little more than a row of shops by the side of the road, Revathi says she needs a break and pulls over. They walk to a tiny kopitiam—just a wooden shack with plastic chairs beneath a picnic umbrella outside—and get coffee, good and strong with a layer of condensed milk at the bottom. As children, Henry remembers, before he and Janet were allowed coffee themselves, they’d fight to be the one to swirl the white into their father’s drink.
