by Ho Sok Fong
“If they won’t behave, then teach them a lesson,” said her father, solemnly imparting his wisdom. “Make an example of someone. Don’t be soft. Don’t let them think you’re a pushover.”
At the dinner table, they talked about family. About her cousins, who were around her age. Which ones were doing well, which ones were wasting their lives, which ones were beyond all hope.
“She won’t even see her siblings,” said her mother. “Before, it was bad, but this is a whole new level. Always fighting with her bosses, can’t hold down a job.”
“People like that never get far,” said her father. “They specialize in biting the hand that feeds them.”
She hadn’t seen these relatives for a very long time. When they were mentioned, she had only the faintest impression of who they were, like fragments from an old dream. Her parents acted as if surprised by her forgetfulness, mystified that she couldn’t recall her childhood playmates, but she had left her Chinese primary school early; her parents had been posted somewhere else and she’d had to transfer. Then they’d sent her to an all-girls’ convent for secondary school, and the three of them drifted apart from the rest of the family. She and her cousins had grown up to be very different people. Still, she struggled to imagine them as either these smug success stories or abject failures.
“How do you know all this?” she asked. “Who told you?”
“People talk.”
She thought of one summer holiday when she was a child. At her grandmother’s house, gathered on the shore with some of the cousins, watching her uncle plunge into the water. Into that big, deep lake. People were casting fishing nets off floating platforms, marking them out with rows of tightly bound bamboo, dividing the surface of the lake into little kingdoms. Her younger cousins said her uncle could dive and fix the nets underwater. He tied a thick rope around his waist and jumped. She went to the adults standing guard, and asked when he would come back up. They said she had to wait and see.
She crouched at the edge of the water, and a head suddenly broke the surface. Ripples erupted from the center of the lake, radiating in large, widening circles that sank into the wet mud of the shoreline. She wasn’t sure which she’d seen first: the ripples or the person.
“Your uncle has incredible stamina,” the adults said, using the English word. “Fixing the nets is no easy feat; he has to hold his breath, keep his eyes open to find the holes, and then stitch them back up. He has to make sure he has enough air for all that time.”
The sun was so bright that afternoon it made her dizzy. She lost count of how many times her uncle came up for air. Each time he surfaced, he opened his mouth wide to the sky, as if trying to inhale the clouds.
She asked why they didn’t just pull the nets in, and an older cousin told her it was too difficult, because they were big and heavy, with ropes and nails fixing them in place. Dragging them in would only tear more holes.
Talking too much was risky, and so she talked very little. She limited herself to explanations; the necessary clarifications. The seminar room, with her elk, was the only place where she felt calmer. She liked their energy and intelligence. Their naïveté. She liked how respectful they were. Liked that they asked questions and paid attention to her answers. They were very similar to her, she discovered: fond of leisure, averse to pressure. She felt less conflicted when she was around them.
If you asked them who they admired, they’d say Maugham, Carver, Tolkien, Harry Potter. No one mentioned Thomas Mann, Hemingway, Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf. If you asked why, they’d make faces.
“Hemingway’s dialogue is all over the place and I don’t understand it,” they said.
“Too many new words, too many characters. The relationships are so confusing.”
If she discounted the silent ones and painted each of those ringing questions, hypotheses, conclusions, and retorts a different color, the seminar room became a vivid tapestry. She was not displeased by the scene she had woven. Who knew whether she would have had the opportunity anywhere else. Sometimes she imagined they were animals calling to one another in a forest, each voice coming from its own shadowy location in the trees. She tried to coax the shyer ones. First, of course, they had to be allowed to listen quietly. But they couldn’t be beautiful, if they let themselves merge into the same color as the leaves.
Sometimes the debates were so engrossing that she forgot to be cautious. Forgot how she liked to think of herself as the wind, working invisibly in the background, conducting other people’s performances. The students had a variety of accents when they spoke English. Indian and Chinese were the most common, Malay the least. There were only four Malays in the group, and three of them stayed as quiet as shadows. The only one who didn’t was an animated boy, slight but always stylishly dressed. On hot days, he turned up in tight-fitting shirts and Capri pants, wearing shoes with pointed toes. He gesticulated exuberantly when he spoke, making the silver bell on his charm bracelet tinkle.
He was from the Drama department.
“If this novel’s adapted for the stage, I was born to play the part of the beautiful young Venetian.”
Whistles, cheers, boos.
He fluffed his curls. “No one could be better suited.”
“You’ve got black hair!” There was a flurry of laughter. “And you’re already too old!”
She let him carry on. She doted on—was delighted to indulge—the students with obvious literary talent. She had the group read aloud from e. e. cummings’s “Spring is like a perhaps hand.”
and / without breaking anything.
They were happy, and their enthusiasm made her feel young. The boy read with such rhythm, almost as though he were singing. “I like ‘i like my body,’” he said. There were still ten minutes left, so she let him read it. She didn’t think too much about it. The poem was beautiful, and she couldn’t resist beautiful things.
As he read the electrifying lines, she was struck by his beauty. His eyelashes were very long, and fluttered across the pages. If the poet were alive, she thought, he couldn’t fault him. Notes launched from the tip of his tongue and thrilled along her spine. In places, his voice went as taut as a violin string; in others, it spread wide as an opened letter. She didn’t notice that other students were leaving the room.
That was April, and April passed quickly. Wind stirred the dead leaves, making them march across the ground like an army. Every so often, she’d feel calm and steady, like a clump of firmly rooted plants, no longer needing to worry about falling over. She weeded the garden at home, and noticed soft, new shoots pushing through the earth. The cuttings she’d planted earlier in the year had quickly shriveled, but there had been a spell of rain and they were struggling back to life. Spiders spun webs between their stalks.
The school on the hill was closed for the holidays, and the bell echoed through the empty building. Mosquitoes and flies glided across the murky surface of the pond.
She went to supervise an exam and spent the time staring out at the neatly mowed lawn. A flock of birds swooped past, close to the ground. She didn’t hear a thing, but saw their black outlines slashing quick, jagged shapes through the sky, rising and falling, flapping on the wind, racing to catch insects before the rain. In the distance a row of manicured trees, and the sky like a low-hanging cloud. The light dimmed, blurring the view, streaking the lawn a dusky yellow. The windows were like paintings.
Before the students had arrived, she’d exchanged a few words with a Malay teacher. Purely out of habit, she’d found herself asking: “Where did you teach before coming here?”
The teacher had answered: “Malay College.”
She’d been silent for a while, mulling over each word, as if counting grains of rice. She’d stared into the exam room, at the tables with their place numbers and the rows of empty chairs, and then couldn’t help adding: “When you were there, did you teach any Chinese students?”
The Malay teacher had avoided her eyes. After careful consideration, she’d replied,
“No, the students were all Malay.”
She’d known perfectly well this would be the answer, and yet it shocked her. At the same time, she felt profoundly bored by this routine of asking things to which she knew the answers. Had the question bothered the woman? Perhaps she thought it was hostile, or deliberately provocative? It was impossible to tell; her reply had been perfectly measured. Her eyes gave nothing away. Tone appropriate, expression neutral. Calm as a millpond.
Then the Malay teacher had changed the subject, and started talking about the student who’d been caught cheating a few days before. He was going to be expelled, of course. There was a sad resignation to the woman’s tone. She had hummed and nodded in response, none of it meaning anything. She thought of this as she continued to stare out of the windows, watching as the rain beat down and the lawn turned hazy.
The air conditioning was very cold and she’d woken up too early. She yawned.
She’d always liked the Malay term air muka, used to mean “facial expression,” but literally meaning “surface of water.” The expression on your face, giving away the emotions beneath. Although in reality, perhaps a rippled surface said more about the wind outside.
Talking. There were appropriate topics, and others it was better not to mention. Some people never seemed to waver over which was which.
Things hidden underwater should not be exposed to air. People laughed, but the loudest never laughed with their eyes. Their eyes were as guarded as nutshells, and their expressions were like caves: you knew at a glance that nothing would slip past them. But knowing was one thing. Knowing could not protect against moments of weakness. For example, forgetting what was appropriate. Forgetting to be vigilant. Because once you forgot, once you’d crossed that line, no matter how you tried to fix things, you’d never make them right again. You’d become gradually more isolated. Until now, the line had always been very clear.
She started to feel bored with herself, and bored with drawing the line.
May came, and the wind turned with the season. She had to remind herself to close the windows before she left work. One day she forgot, and arrived to find a shallow puddle of water in one corner of her office. This was how she discovered that her floor wasn’t level.
Damp seeped into the plaster of the walls. The air conditioning was set too low for rainy days. She hunched her shoulders and walked into his office. He was reading a letter and looked up sternly from his desk as she entered, just as he usually did.
“Students tell me you’ve been promoting homosexuality in your seminars?” he said. “And that you made a Muslim student read a homosexual poem out loud?”
She would have defended herself, but then realized he must be referring to e. e. cummings, and even the thought of trying to explain made her feel so exhausted that in the end she said nothing at all.
“This is an extremely serious matter,” he continued. “I’ve received complaints. I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out for you, because you know what kind of place this is. There are people who prefer not to encounter these things. Naturally, you can teach whatever you like—and, well, I understand that literature shouldn’t be confused with politics…but now we have this problem, and it’s going to be tricky to explain to the higher-ups. To be frank, if it weren’t for the complaint, I’d be inclined to ignore it.”
She was silent.
“One of your students uploaded a video of himself online. There he is, on the internet, reading this poem of yours, making a speech about coming out of the closet. You should take a look, count up the death threats in the comments…
“Believe me, I wish they weren’t taking this so seriously. I don’t know what the committee will have to say about it. If they do decide to make a fuss—if they start picking through the egg yolk for bones, so to speak—they’re going to want an explanation. You’ll have to start thinking about what to say.”
Her preferred option was to say nothing and have the issue quietly fade away. There was a stack of documents on his desk, the top one branded with an intricate seal. The stamped red wax was like an omen, but one too mysterious for her to decipher.
Outside the office, it was so intensely quiet that she felt her eardrums might burst. She went to the cafeteria, where she met the Malay teacher from the day of the exam. They waved at one another, both smiling weakly. Did this woman know? And if she did, was she the kind of person who liked to make trouble and would go spreading it around?
She was distracted all afternoon, arriving ten minutes late to her seminar, teaching half-heartedly. Her brain was like a mis-wired electric circuit. She filled in paperwork incorrectly and had to start again, and then again.
At dinnertime, the house filled with the blare of the television. Soap opera, ads, news, another soap opera. Her parents looked listlessly at the screen, looked listlessly at her. Or perhaps they were perfectly content, or mostly content; she couldn’t tell. Then her father stopped watching television and insisted on talking, his eyes fixed on her, asserting his authority. She was his best audience. In these lonely, twilight years, she was the only remaining link between him and the outside world; between him and his fondly remembered days as a primary school headmaster. He didn’t approve of her mother’s approach to life. Her mother said people had to accept the hand they’d been dealt. That was just how things were. She’d been saying so for decades.
She helped her mother clear the plates, listening patiently to her as they washed up. Her mother’s solitary life: to her, life was always someone else’s story.
Everything about it: someone. else’s. story.
When she was finally alone, she just sat there, loathe to move. She couldn’t face getting into bed or brushing her teeth, just wanted to keep sitting. It occurred to her to look up that video online, and she started trying out keywords in her search bar. Eventually it appeared, but all she could see was the title, because the contents had been blocked.
That line: This video is a grave threat to the safety of others. It has been removed.
A shiver down her spine.
A week passed, then two. The shivers continued. She kept on going to and from her seminar room, still without any thought as to how she would explain herself to the committee. In any case, no one summoned her to a meeting. The matter was not mentioned. Had it passed? Been forgotten, just like that? Been hushed up? Or perhaps they’d reached their decision, and no explanations were necessary.
Then, at the end of the month, she heard the news: the committee had dropped her case. They had turned their focus on a younger, more troublesome teacher, who had given a lecture that touched on the restrictiveness of the Islamic dress code for women, reportedly claiming that it had become conflated with piety, but was actually rooted in ownership of a woman’s body. This had antagonized a few Muslim students, who went to discuss it with the teacher in her office and subsequently pronounced her attitude “disrespectful of the Quran.” They then wrote a letter of complaint to the head of the department, and the accusations snowballed from there. Coincidentally, the teacher’s contract was just about to expire, and the department decided not to renew it. It had been a busy day, and at the end of it she walked through the campus, following the slope, making her habitual detour via the Biology department’s fishpond. June, and the flame trees were ablaze. She hadn’t seen the Malay boy from the Drama department again.
Passing along a neon-lit corridor, she came to an open door and couldn’t help pausing to look inside. The young teacher was in the middle of packing, the floor strewn with boxes. At the sound of footsteps, she looked up. Waved, said, “Hey.”
And so she replied, still outside the door: “Hey.” A twinge of guilt, because while she’d been reveling in her escape, she hadn’t given much thought to the reason for it.
She hurried in, wanting to be friendly, eager to help, the packing tape pulling, ripping, sticking. The woman didn’t object. Papers, books in English, books in Malay. A good number of books in Chinese, a few characters on their covers tha
t she could still understand, although she stifled her curiosity. She packed the books into boxes. Then she came to the Quran with its foil-stamped cover, the eye of the storm, and froze. The woman took it from her and slid it nonchalantly into a box, continuing to stack reference books on top.
“Take whatever you like,” she said. “No one can see us. Even if they could, it would be fine. There’s no need to worry.”
The blinds were open and the lights were on. The woman took a pack of cigarettes from her handbag and offered her one, but she shook her head. Holding one in her mouth, the woman bent forward, her hair almost covering her face, and lit it. Tobacco smoke filled the room, irritating her nose and making her nauseous; she imagined her lungs filling with muck.
“I’m very sorry. I heard what happened.” Her words came out haltingly.
“What did you hear?”
“Well, I heard a bit,” she said. “It wasn’t very clear.”
