by S. L. Lim
Jun comes by more regularly. Yannie’s mother appreciates this very much. ‘He’s a nice boy,’ she says. ‘He’s what they call “husband material”.’ Yannie’s mother generally prefers the male to the female. Jun brings gifts – a plate of fried rice, a piece of fruit – and helps clean up after meals, which Shan never does. Yannie sees her brother walking, talking, strolling arm in arm with this pleasant and personable young man, this jaunty yet respectful lad. It is hard to reconcile this with the brother she knows at home. The two of them don’t speak unless it’s for some logistical necessity. Relatives ask how her brother is, and she says, ‘Alive.’ For some reason they all find this very funny.
Every now and then, a group of her brother’s friends will come. These are noisy, spirited evenings, lots of laughing and backslapping, her mother running back and forth asking if anyone would like a soft drink or some noodles. She asks her mother if Shuying can come one day for a visit. ‘No, no,’ her mother says, ‘it’s too much trouble. Girls are too hard. They’re always judging other people, hiding their feelings, holding grudges. See, you’re like an elephant, Yannie – you never forget when you have an enemy. Besides, it wouldn’t be comfortable for your father, having a young girl around. Oh, look at your black face. Yannie, you are so silly, everything you say is so exaggerated.’ She and Yannie’s father smile at each other, not entirely unkindly, joined in their amusement at Yannie’s ongoing delusions.
*
Still, all things considered, amusement is one of Yannie’s mother’s better emotional responses. A brief history of a few of the others:
Once, their nine-year-old neighbour comes by to ask if anyone has seen his lost pet cat. ‘Oh, he wants to come inside our house, eh? What a nice excuse. Good chance for him to look at all our things. Putting on his innocent act – and cat shit everywhere, the smell! Next time I will poison the thing, I will put out cat poison. What else to do? That is the only way.’ Shakes her head in grim acceptance. The extremes which she, in her wounded virtue, has been driven to by this uncaring world.
She does not like the sun, fearing UV radiation, and so installs double curtains on all of the windows, which are kept perpetually closed. The house is shrouded in darkness every day until about six o’clock, at which point she deems the light has become sufficiently weak to be permitted a minor entrance. Prior to this point, she will react with outrage if you attempt to part said curtains, even fractionally – ‘So hot!’ she will cry out, in a tone of wounded shock, as if the sun has singled her out specifically for individual persecution. She looks at you with disgust, unwilling to believe that such a failure of judgement could coexist with reason.
‘Just a little bit – it’s not that hot,’ Yannie ventures once, and the look on her mother’s face would have knocked her sideways if she were not already wearily inured to her mother’s perpetual rage and disappointment, flaring and subsiding but never ceasing altogether, at the incomprehensible perfidiousness, ignorance, stupidity, cruelty and active malice of the world in general and her offspring in particular.
‘What? What? Did you hear that? Do you hear what she says? Yannie says it’s not that hot.’ Yannie’s mother swivels round, gesturing and projecting all at once to Yannie’s father, brother, ancestors, and an entire imagined chorus of spectators filling the amphitheatre. How has Yannie dared to trespass upon this area of parental – or, more specifically, maternal – magisterium? The condition of experiencing temperatures, of objectively evaluating the weather’s hotness or non-hotness, is expertise belonging specifically to Yannie’s mother and none else.
But she does like the people around her to be a mirror for her moods. When she is happy you are supposed to be happy as well, and if not there will be consequences. ‘Look at Yannie over there with her sour face, ha-ha-ha.’
But when the blackness comes on her you must go black as well, or else there must be something wrong with you, you are shallow and dumb and a useless mouth and sure to dump Yannie’s mother in a nursing home when she gets old. This period is always referred to as Next Time, an indeterminate yet inevitable future. Next Time is a lament, Next Time is a threat. Next Time conveys a curious moral ontology: Yannie’s mother is right, not necessarily due to the strict fairness or factual correctness of any of her claims, but because of her temporal proximity to the suffering of age, a proximity which renders questions of correctness or fairness not just marginal but actively offensive.
She hits Yannie in the face. Not every day, but enough that it’s not a surprise when it does happen. A crack across the mouth when Yannie answers back. Or makes a ‘black face’ when asked to do a chore or some extra homework. Or just if the mood comes upon her. Humours. Miasmas. It seems the most scientific explanation.
But you cannot suggest to Yannie’s mother that the source of her distress might not be entirely external. Interior and exterior reality are utterly continuous and indivisible, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. How much does she know? Yannie will wonder on occasion. Does she realise on some level that she’s crazy? What other motivation for such rage, such panicked, vicious reactions? The self lashing out against incipient knowledge from the self.
One evening Yannie’s mother comes home in a state of high excitement. ‘Look at this! Look what I have found for you to wear. Such a good deal, a discount as well.’
Yannie looks. A bright pink short-sleeved top. You can’t say it’s not pretty. Good-quality, even. Form-fitting but not overly tight, the fabric nice as well.
‘I don’t like it,’ she says.
Her mother makes a hunh sound to brush aside such nonsense. ‘Don’t be silly! It makes you look so slim, so pretty. If I were your age, I would wear this!’
‘I really don’t want to,’ Yannie repeats. She can’t quite find the words. There is something fundamentally not right about it, offensive to her very self. To wear it – worse, to be seen wearing it – would feel like an unbearable misalignment of Yannie’s inner and outer worlds. An insult well out of proportion to what the top actually represents.
Her mother’s voice impatient. ‘I bought it for you, Yannie. I bought something nice for you, as a gift.’ An undertone of threat. ‘This did not come cheap, you know!’
‘I thought you said it was a discount.’
‘Oh, you think you are so clever. Bloody shit, what is wrong with you, Yannie? Why are you being so ungrateful?’
‘I’m not being ungrateful.’ Yannie hates how petulant she sounds. ‘I never asked for that top. I don’t have to wear it if I don’t want to. I —’
‘You bitch! You bloody, bloody bitch!’
‘Well, look who’s talking.’
The blows come hard and fast. Yannie feels her head reverberate: thwack, bang, bang, thwack. She stumbles backwards, puts out a hand to steady herself in a world now inverted and whirled. And then the collision – her bones vibrate with shock; it could be the tiles or the walls or the mirror, it could be something else. Staggers to her feet, finds her face in the glass. A bloody stranger, thick red ropes smearing down her nose.
She stares. Her mother stares too.
‘You’re bleeding,’ she says at last. ‘Clean yourself up.’ She gets a towel, presses it into Yannie’s face. Yannie lets her do it. She’s good at it, competent and gentle. No hands like a mother’s hands.
And then later: ‘You push people, Yannie. It’s because you were calling me filthy names. What do you expect? You push, and push, and push – you are too much. If those teachers at school knew what you are really like …’
This the mother who read The Twits to her when she was small. Puts plasters on her hands when she has scraped her knuckles. Fishes prawns out of the hotpot, drops them onto Yannie’s plate because she knows they are her favourite. Things don’t have sense when an object can change shape like that. A car turns into an elephant, an elephant turns into a car.
When you are eleven you accept what your parents tell you about the world. There is no alternative reality. It’s just what
you do.
Her father says, ‘You two just can’t get on.’ He says, ‘You complain your mother hurts you, but you also have power.’ He says, ‘Both of you have the power to hurt each other.’
Her father says, ‘Isn’t it better to have a mother who cares, than a mother who does not care at all?’
Her father says, ‘We need each other, Yannie. As a family we must stick together.’
This is one of his catchphrases: We need each other. Our Chinese traditions. Next time, you’ll be glad you have this family. It’s all we have.
In the meantime, it’s not easy to live in this place where cars can turn into elephants. Especially when there are steel bars on all the windows.
*
At school someone cracks a joke at Yannie’s expense. Technically it’s a very mild one, something about how her glasses are like Velma’s in Scooby Doo – all good fun, no malice at all. So Yannie hits her. Actually, she doesn’t hit the joke teller at all – instead, she slaps a different classmate caught totally unawares: a gentle, slow-eyed girl, someone who has only ever been kind to her, or anyone. Astonished, the victim stares at Yannie, eyes pooling with bewilderment.
‘Why did you do that?’ she asks. ‘What did I ever do to you?’
Yannie has no answer. But later, at home, after everyone else has gone to sleep, she chews on the end of her pen and writes:
There is a part of me
which you don’t see
and it’s like turning a stone on the ground
and finding crawling things underneath.
She still considers murdering her brother occasionally. He’s fussy with his body: spends too long in the shower, whines about it for days if he gets bitten by mosquitoes. But for all that, she knows that he does know his own strength. She does sit-ups and push-ups in the morning, push-ups on her outstretched palms, her fists. Imagines her small fist colliding with the soft flesh of his stomach. But compunction has already taken form: she knows there’ll never be an adequate excuse, an opportunity. And to be honest, she is relieved there won’t be one. It is always waiting, it will fall down at the last minute to thwart all her plans: this invisible screen between her dreams and her capacity to act on the external world.
Where does it come from, this bogus morality? Does it only apply to her brother, or to her family, or to all people in the world? Will it always stop her when she most needs freedom, sealing her eyes and locking her fists when she needs to act against the world?
*
Her brother finishes his A levels, with acceptable results. Everyone is asking the same question what to do about his future? The words go spinning round the house. Everywhere you look, someone is having a serious conversation, always the same one, in different iterations, interspersed with things like dinner, school, and going to the loo. Maybe, their father suggests, Yannie’s brother should take over the family shop, selling groceries and other conveniences. He has a mind for business; but surely there are better opportunities, their mother argues, for the beacon of the family, the eldest son. A family that starts off poor does not have to remain so. Her brother wants to go to university. Some of his high school friends, though duller, less gifted, are moving to the capital for further study; some, from wealthy families, will go even further. Australia, England, the United States. She and her brother exchange sidelong glances, a rare moment of solidarity – the first time in years. Such opportunities are out of their reach, they know: not for them, not this generation, not yet.
The conversation goes back and forth, up and down, spills out of the bounds of the house into the ears of their neighbours and relations. It comes no closer to a resolution. There is the prohibitive cost of fees, accommodation, transport. And on the other hand, her brother’s ambitions for something more. It is not unexpected for her to come home and hear her mother and father yelling at one another, her father in favour of her brother’s argument, her mother staunchly against. She will immerse herself in a book, only to emerge, hours later, and find them shouting at each other again, but with the positions reversed: now her mother is tearfully pleading the case, while her father is arguing against it. Her brother’s behaviour grows even more erratic. One moment he’s jolly: invasively, disconcertingly so, demanding you sit next to him, repeating a joke from the radio. Next minute you’re being yelled at, for laughing too loudly, breathing too much, taking up too much space. Why do you have to get on his nerves like that? Don’t you know whatever negative emotion he’s experiencing must be your fault?
‘Don’t bother him,’ her mother interrupts, when Yannie starts to answer back. ‘It’s a very stressful time for us all.’
At last, after agonies up and down and sideways, it is decreed that her brother will continue his studies: at a local institution, yes, but the best one. They’ll find some method to pay for it. Take out a loan and put the shop up as collateral. Before the decision is made, everyone is laden with doom and naysaying; once it is decided, her parents grow euphoric to an extent which is mildly alarming. The subject her brother will study is law. There is a sense of destiny, of inevitability to it, even though just a week ago they were arguing about whether he should go to university at all.
‘I never dreamed this day would come!’ her mother exclaims, using a cloth to remove imaginary stains from her brother’s face. Unable to stop touching him, like she’s putting the finishing touches on an almost perfect work of art. ‘This is a wonderful day for our family.’
‘Just living life and providing for my family was a good enough education for me!’ interjects Yannie’s father. He seems relieved when Yannie’s mother ignores him.
Books and clothes are purchased, arrangements are made, and soon they are gathering at the train station to say goodbye. Her mother smiles and waves, then goes home and lies facedown for several hours on her brother’s pillow, not speaking or crying. Yannie herself feels nothing, nothing at all. Maybe I can have a life as well, she thinks. She fingers the paper-cutting knife which for years she has carried in her pocket. She can’t quite bring herself to put it away.
Her brother might be gone, but once you get started on the conversation about careers and futures and whatnot, it’s difficult to stop. Yannie has three more years of high school. Her father drops casual remarks about the joys of being a nurse. ‘Really, they say that it’s very interesting work,’ he says jovially, apropos of nothing at all, as she emerges from the shower. ‘Quite fun, learning about different people’s bodies. The best part is, you’ll always have a job, because there always will be people who get sick!’
Yannie considers this option. Nursing. When her mother is busy, or out, she’s always been the go-to person for familial illnesses. Looking after her cousins, sick little kids running fevers, and all sorts of germs you pick up just by virtue of being small. Bodies she knows, but the thought of touching strangers fills her with an invincible repugnance. Blood, corpses, unfamiliar smells emanating from sad unfamiliar lives …
Tentatively she brings this up, but her mother says robustly: ‘Ha, you’ll get used to it. Like preparing a chicken before you start to cook. Anyway, when you have children of your own, you’ll have to learn how to cope with these things, so why not make money from it, ha-ha-ha.’
But Yannie can’t imagine herself as an adult. Her body, small as it is, seems to her perfectly formed for her daily routine: vaulting the fence as a shortcut when she’s late for school, squatting on the grass at the night markets so as to avoid staining her pants. Sometimes she looks at herself in the mirror, naked, marvelling at the suppleness of her young flesh. I could devour myself, she thinks. Drink my own blood and be forever young. Still, the future’s calling. What am I going to do? She can’t be like the women she knows, mothers and aunts – laundry and children, children and meals, hungry people who wolf down your work only to excrete it hours later. But then, she doesn’t see herself in her father either: perpetually anxious, stressing out over dented cans in the inventory and misplaced coins and loans and repayments o
f loans and cheap deals on milk powder and bulk buys of toilet paper.
Her brother comes home to visit during the university holidays. Time has not improved him. He was always pompous, aristocratic in his bearing, but now he’s become even more so. His preferences have changed: foods, clothes and books. He wrinkles his nose at their father’s paperback murder mysteries. He talks them through fine legal distinctions which, to Yannie’s uneducated ears, sound completely fucking stupid.
‘What does prima facie mean?’ their mother asks one morning.
‘Oh, I know,’ says Yannie. All those dips into the encyclopaedia for Shuying’s entertainment purposes weren’t for nothing after all. ‘It means “on the surface of things”.’
Her brother shoots a look that would wither glass. ‘Well, to the ignorant, that might be an acceptable definition,’ he says. Nose held aloft. ‘The true meaning is “on the face of things”.’
‘Isn’t that exactly the same thing, though?’ Yannie finds the temerity to ask.
Her brother’s mouth twists almost comically in his contempt. His fist thumps on the table. ‘To the stupid, they might appear similar. But only to fools with a very shallow understanding.’ He pronounces the word fools as if this, in and of itself, proves his own superior intelligence.
No matter how unbearably moronic her brother’s words, their mother responds in a tone of sort of hushed exclamation. It’s as if she’s unable to believe her own privilege at having birthed such a purveyor of genius. ‘Is it like that?’ Yannie notes her brother’s patronising smile: What a bumpkin, he is thinking. She shrinks with embarrassment on her mother’s behalf.
Her father is less cowed. While her mother simpers round, he sits there glowering. Then all of a sudden he blurts out: ‘Pompous ass!’
