by Inez Tan
Upon arriving in Singapore, they had to wait at the docks for his father, who was off borrowing money so he could redeem their passage.
By then, my grandfather was so hungry that he was crying.
A man who was passing by took pity on him and bought him a bowl of noodles from a roadside cart.
Sitting by the side of the road, eating that bowl of noodles, my grandfather felt, for the first time, like he could make it in this new country.
Years later, he went back to look for the noodles stall, but it was gone.
He said that was the best bowl of noodles he’d eaten in his whole life.
This is the most Singaporean story I know—the immigration, the poverty, the hunger, the great food that seems even better afterwards, soaked in the afterglow of nostalgia.
The disappearance of the world you knew as yours just as you discovered it was there.
We have all gained a great deal, but what each of us has lost makes us—dare I say it—unique.
Single
I DON'T KNOW if you’ve been asking about me. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I boarded a bus. For miles there was nothing but the flat white sky. I had a window seat on the left, four or five rows from the front. The bus smelled like the people on board, right down to the gum they were chewing, so that after ten minutes I knew who to ask for cinnamon, and who for spearmint later. First I waited a few hours. You could say I’ve tried to need as little as I could bear.
But I’m foolish. I was down to a single battery bar of music and I just kept running it down faster by starting one song over and over as soon as it got to the end. Right as the silence after the last beat fell, I’d reach into my pocket and thumb the track back. My player was a square Creative with a tiny joystick. It was that old. I’d bought it when I was 12, having just discovered that song—
And how am I without you,
Am I more myself or less myself?
The singer was Tracey Thorn, the band was Everything but the Girl. You’ve never heard of them. I used to spend hours thinking about that name, wondering what it meant. That’s how that started, a rare and new feeling, four words that had the saddest kind of everything. I got hung up on how a singer can be your own private someone. Tracey Thorn was brunette and lean, pale and not pretty, as though to say, no one needs to be pretty. In every song, in possession of as much confidence as reserve, she was a woman who could hold her own against men. That was why men loved her, and she could love them back.
Then there was the alternative—to cope with being vulnerable by making others vulnerable too. For me, this has always been closer to home.
But what do I know about calling a place home? I’m restless in an adolescent way. As a teenager I was still living in Singapore, but spending all my time on an online forum for fans of The Matrix. That kind of contact doesn’t exist anymore. People whose real names I never learnt sent me music that became my music, like I was of their generation, like I knew what they knew. We became close. The threads, the handles we went by, the hundred by hundred pixel avatars that were all of Carrie-Anne Moss: all that disappeared when things on the Internet could still disappear, but I’ve kept the songs with me. “Single”, in particular. I found out later that Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, the only other member of the band, were a couple, and she wrote that song when they had temporarily split. I called you from the hotel phone/I haven’t dialled this code before/I’m sleeping later, waking later/I’m eating less and thinking more. Her voice was blood-warm melancholy, yearning perfected. Reading reviews of their albums, I stumbled across the word ambivalence and thought it meant confusion. I knew that song was addressed to a lover, but I didn’t understand how that was possible. How could a lover make you feel so estranged?
I know I never answered you before, but I couldn’t— couldn’t tell you the difference between where I was going and where I was not. I’ve tried putting down non-refundable deposits. I’ve tried accumulating furniture. That double bed, even—only once, and with you. Please believe that.
I’ve tried, I’ve tried, I’ve tried.
But do you know what it feels like to be a fruit that anyone could pluck? Or to know what it feels like to rot each passing day on the branch? And to choose that instead?
No, now you know what it’s like to go hungry, and I’m sorry for that.
I’m sorry I never answered you before.
That’s why I boarded that bus. Would you accept this— the whole time, I wished you were with me? There was one thing I wanted you to see, by the last whiteness of that sky, hearing do you like being single, do you want me back, do you want me back? In all that emptiness a dark tree appeared, stripped of leaves, a swaying skeleton. Hundreds of black birds were flying towards it. The flock expanded and contracted as it moved, as if in response to surpassing design. As the bus rushed past, the birds closed their ranks and descended, each to its place without interference from the others. Each bird acted like a tiny point along an animated frame, a representation of something far larger being manipulated. And right then, I could see what you see: the two of us staying together, somehow. But you can always see something when you look for it, whether it’s there or not.
Talking to Strangers
HOW IS IT that we can feel distant from friends and close to strangers? Nate met Christina at a college debate competition. It was lunchtime, and they were sitting together at a table with other students from Boston-area colleges discussing international politics.
“Politics in Singapore are so screwed up,” said a boy wearing thick glasses.
“Have you ever been to Singapore?” asked a sallowfaced girl.
The boy admitted that he hadn’t.
“Then you shouldn’t judge what you don’t know,” the pale girl said.
Christina set her fork down loudly. She said, “We always have to judge what we don’t fully know.”
Her words were still ringing in Nate’s ears five hours later as he stepped onto the stage amidst the applause for winning the singles division. It gave him the courage to ask Christina for her phone number.
“How about an address?” she said. “You could write me a letter.”
He thought if there was anyone in this day and age to whom he would write an honest-to-God letter, it was this crazy girl, but he was also suspicious of smart girls and thought she might be trying to get rid of him. He gave her his address and said, “If you’re sincere, write to me.”
He checked his mailbox that day when he got home. He could almost believe that checking would make the waiting more tolerable. Would she write within the week? Would she even write at all? He didn’t know how he would know to stop expecting anything, but three days later, her letter came.
Dear Nate,
It was lovely meeting you in Boston. I hope you will believe me now when I say I am a serious correspondent. Yet, what is there to say to someone you don’t know at all? Nothing, or everything. Here are a few things I managed to think of today:
(1)
My college was designed by the same man who planned out Central Park. At night it’s shadowy and wicked, like a crime scene. It doesn’t feel like a safe environment for a young lady bicycling home from the library after dark, but maybe that’s what I like about it.
I steal things sometimes. Small things—not from stores, but from people. As a child, I took a tortoise-shell hairpin from my aunt. I left it out in my room, and was surprised when I got caught. I have never been caught since.
I would like to say I can’t help it, but I probably could. Most of the time I justify it to myself the way people do with social smoking—a little bit never hurt anybody. Do you smoke, Nate? Don’t feel judged. Unless you’re the kind who will anyway.
(2)
I have a terrible fear of open water. Last year, some other Wellesley women and I went to the beach. I stayed with the group that read New York Times bestsellers on the sand, but a few girls struck out for deeper water.
Suddenly one of them ran up to where
the rest of us were sitting. She said breathlessly, “Lydia’s lost her bracelet, the one Ethan gave her.”
Knowing what Ethan meant to Lydia, we couldn’t stand idly by. But of course, most of the girls—New Yorkers!— couldn’t actually swim. So I dove into the surf, ducking my head over and over again. Each time I came up, I was farther from shore. But to be completely honest, not by much.
We never found the bracelet. Lydia cried all the way back. I too shed tears, thinking all might have been well if only I’d done more. I made a show of going underwater, but I hadn’t been searching at all.
I’ve felt vaguely unworthy of Lydia ever since. She would try to talk me out of that feeling, I think, but I’m less inclined to tell her with each passing day of silence. And even if I were given another chance, would I really have done anything differently? Enough can be a lot to ask of yourself.
(3)
Avez-vous été à Paris? Have you been to Paris?
Qu’avez-vous fait là, mon ami? What did you do there, friend?
I cheated my way through high school French. I had a beautiful accent—sounding how others would like me to sound is a specialty of mine. But try as I might, I could never commit the grammar to memory. Verb conjugations leaked from my head like water through open palms.
There are lots of ways to cheat on tests, as a girl. You can write in pencil on your fingernails—girls look at their nails all the time, non?—and rub the marks off easily afterwards. You can write on the inside hem of your skirt, where no teacher could ever demand to inspect.
I usually went with the skirt trick. I never settled for less when I could get away with more.
(4)—a nice number, isn’t it? One last story, then.
When I was 14, my parents took me on a trip to England. We visited Cambridge, where a philosophy student named Andris punted us along the River Cam. He recited many facts about the university, some of which I pass on to you— that Darwin College was the first to admit both women and men, that the student with the lowest passing grade used to be awarded an enormous wooden spoon, that Sir Francis Bacon enrolled when he was just 12 years old.
My father was fascinated and asked more questions about tour guiding than about Cambridge. Andris told us that every year, aspiring tour guides had to take exams. “Theory and practical,” he said, meaning written questions and punting. We didn’t realise right away that he wasn’t joking about either one.
“How long do you have to spend studying for that?” my father wanted to know, meaning the written exam, because things that appealed to the intellect appealed to him.
Andris smiled sheepishly. “They’re not that strict. You only have to get seventy-five per cent of the questions right, because they only expect you to give tours that have seventy-five per cent of the facts straight.”
Schoolgirl that I was, I thought: three truths and a lie!
As you may have guessed by now, I still think that way.
I am curious to know which story you take to be false. I am interested to hear the ways you take me to be a better or worse person than I think I am. You, however, are not allowed to lie. That would spoil the fun.
Yours,
Christina
Nate pored over the letter. He wrote back, doing handwritten drafts. He guessed that she was somehow lying about the second story—about water, though not about fear. He wrote that he thought he understood. He never received an answer.
He agonised for a week. He didn’t sleep or eat well, and he didn’t spend time with anyone. Then something in him gave way and he threw himself back into school with renewed fervour. He added History and a concentration in French to his Political Science major. He campaigned and was elected as debate team captain. Phi Beta Kappa and two years later, he could call himself accomplished even when he didn’t feel like it.
He accepted the signing bonus of a prominent consulting firm and moved to San Francisco. On his first day of work, he and the other new staff were shown into a conference room whose glass walls afforded them a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge. They sat very straight in their new office clothes and stiff shoes. The men had on aftershave and the women wore new lines of perfume. There was a pretty brunette sitting at the end of the table. Nate thought she looked assured, as though she knew something that the others hadn’t figured out yet.
They had to go down the line and say their names. When they got to the woman at the end, she said, “Lydia.”
The two of them were assigned cubicles that faced each other. She smiled at him each morning when she came to the office and found him already at his desk. Coffee led to lunch, which led to dinner. It was on their first date that she told him that she had gone to Wellesley.
He was the first person she had spoken to in years about the painful event that had shattered the reverie of undergraduate life. One night, three women had been travelling back from Boston when they drove headlong into another car. No one knew how it had happened. Two of the women made it, Lydia said, but her friend Christina had died on the way to the hospital.
Nate was sure that it was the same Christina he had known, but it wasn’t the time or place to mention it. He and Lydia barely knew each other, and what was there to tell anyway? He reached out and took her hand. He found himself stammering, “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you.” It was the right thing to say, even if it felt wrong. And wasn’t that gratitude in her eyes?
He asked her out to dinner again the following night. Again he said nothing, and this time he found it easier. Before long, they were exploring the Bay Area after midnight and driving out farther on Sundays, to beaches, restaurants and galleries. That year, they worked Thanksgiving and Christmas, but the year after, they made arrangements to take a trip back East together. By then, they were very much in love. The plan was to fly to New York, stay two nights in his parents’ house in Westchester, and then drive to see her parents in Greenwich.
Things went wrong from the outset. An emergency came up at work. They barely had enough time to pack and rush to the airport. A freak snowstorm made traffic impossible, and Lydia became so carsick that she vomited in the taxi. The driver muttered filthily at them for the rest of the ride, even after Nate promised to add compensation to their fare. When they arrived at the terminal, they found out the promise of worse weather had grounded flights across the country. Rather than try to make it back home for a few hours, they decided to stay in the airport.
The shops were closed. Nate and Lydia were hungry and irritable. They sat against a wall and put their heads on each other’s shoulders.
“Are you mad at me?” Lydia asked suddenly, when Nate was almost asleep.
“No,” he said. “Why would I be?”
“You keep inching away,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said. She had thrown away her soiled clothes and changed into new ones, but he thought he could still detect a fetid odour. He squeezed her hand. “I love you,” he said, and she smiled and held him tightly.
Within minutes she had fallen asleep, while he was suddenly wide awake and restless. Any time he started worrying away at their relationship, he couldn’t help thinking about Christina. He still hadn’t told Lydia that he had known her, and he could never make up his mind as to its significance. And who was the Ethan Christina had mentioned; who was he to Lydia? She’d alluded to just one old boyfriend, a high school sweetheart, and they’d mutually broken things off a month into college. There were strangely few photos of them together online, which made him uncomfortably suspicious that there were many more, much more intimate ones, tucked away somewhere. Some days he felt certain that Christina had lied—that there had been no bracelet, no Ethan—but that scenario seemed too good to be true. He had gone through Lydia’s contacts in her phone and found nothing, but he knew that could mean anything.
They made it to New York, where Nate’s parents picked them up. They seemed happy to see Lydia at first, embracing her, insisting she call them Paul and Elaine. Yet
over the course of the drive home, they talked increasingly to Nate alone. Did he feel that he’d adjusted to living out on the West Coast? Was he working too hard, as always, was he getting enough sleep? Lydia put in the odd word and laughed along with his accounts, but she didn’t have much to contribute. Eventually she fell silent.
“Do you like it?” he asked her, as they entered the house.
“I do, I love it,” she said. She sneezed.
He turned to his parents. “Are the cats still here?” he asked.
He’d called them ahead of time to warn them about Lydia’s allergies. In fact, they had remembered, and had left the cats with a neighbour. His mother had cleaned the house from top to bottom, but apparently traces of dander remained.
Lydia sneezed again.
“You can bring her upstairs,” his mother said, sounding offended. “The cats didn’t go up there much.”
In the guest room, he saw that in his absence his parents had arranged a proud, shiny row of his debate trophies along the dresser. He set down Lydia’s suitcase and turned to look at her. Her eyes were teary, but whether it was from allergies or crying he couldn’t tell.
“I’m sorry to be so much trouble,” she said. “Your house is beautiful.”
“You’re beautiful,” he said. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
She smiled tremulously up at him, and then around at the room. “I didn’t know you did debate,” she said softly. “I had a lot of friends who did debate.”
“Skeleton in the closet,” Nate said. He felt as though he might choke.
“My friend Christina used to come back to campus every weekend with a different trophy,” Lydia continued, as if she hadn’t heard him. “She’d just leave them under the bed, or on the floor, like it was no big deal. When she died, I went to her house, because her family held the service there. And in her bedroom, trophies were on every shelf, every bookcase. She had prizes for chess, poetry, fencing, all kinds of things I never knew she did. I never knew that she’d had a different life, she’d had many different lives before I knew her. And then just like that, she vanished out of all of them.”
