Garden of Evening Mists

by Tan Twan Eng

  My father was confident that the British soldiers would stop them. But three weeks later the Japanese reached Penang. The British evacuated their own people to Singapore, leaving us natives to face the Japanese. The Europeans who had been coming to our parties for years—the Faradays, the Browns, the Scott brothers, all of whom my parents considered their friends—left on the ships, disappearing without a word to us. But there were also many who refused to run away, who refused to abandon their friends and their servants to the Japanese—the Hutton family, the Codringtons, the Wrights.

  Kian Hock, my brother, was in the police force. He had been sent to Ceylon for training two months before the Japanese came. My father ordered him to remain there. Old Mr. Ong asked us to go with his family to his durian orchard in Balik Pulau, on the western side of Penang. “We’ll be safe from the Jipunakui there,” he told us.

  We left home on the morning the Japanese planes started bombing Georgetown: Old Mr. Ong and his two wives and their sons and families packed into three cars; my parents, Yun Hong, and I in my father’s Chevrolet. The roads leading out of Georgetown were crowded; hundreds of people were fleeing to the hills of Ayer Itam. All of us had heard what the Japanese troops did to the locals in every town they swept through.

  The road became deserted as we neared Balik Pulau. We had passed only the odd Malay kampong. I had never been to this part of the island before. Old Mr. Ong’s durian orchard was on a high, steep slope. As we drove in, Yun Hong pointed through the gaps in the trees to the sea below. “I should have brought my paints and brushes,” she said.

  From the front seat my mother said, without turning around, “We won’t be here long enough for you to paint anything, darling.”

  The orchard’s overseer was Old Mr. Ong’s cousin, and he greeted us with all the ceremony due Old Mr. Ong’s wealth and status. The overseer moved his own wife and daughters out of their home to accommodate the old man and his family. My mother looked as if she were about to cry when we saw the dilapidated one-story wooden shack that was to be our new home; she was even more horrified when she discovered that we had to use an outhouse. She wanted to go back to our home on Northam Road immediately, but my father stood firm.

  Yun Hong and I soon got used to living in the shack. We spent our days exploring the orchard. The durian season had just started and the air was heavy with the smell of the spiky, ripening King of Fruits. Ah Poon, the overseer, warned us to be careful. “Can kill you-lah, if fall on your head.” Nets were stretched out between the trees to catch the durian. Walking beneath them, I felt I was inside a circus tent, gazing up at the acrobats’ safety net. Every time we heard the fruit dropping through the branches, we’d look up quickly, just to be on the safe side. Yun Hong could not tolerate the fruit, but I loved its pungent, creamy flesh. “Your breath stinks,” she would complain after I had eaten my fill. “No man’s going to want to kiss you.”

  We often went down to the beach, thrilled to have it all to ourselves. It was one of the few times in my life I could go swimming without having to worry about people staring at me and laughing and making snide remarks. This part of Penang looked out to the Andaman Sea, and once I even saw a pod of whales, their breaths erupting out of the water. They swam so close to shore that I could count the barnacles on their skin and hear their breathing, moist and hollow as though they were grunting through a rubber hose. The sound was familiar, yet also otherworldly. I would climb out onto the rocks and sit there for hours, watching them until evening fell and their presence was detectable only by their vaporous sighs. The whales stayed in the bay for a week and then one morning they were gone.

  It was easy to forget that we were in the middle of a war, but once a week, Ah Poon, returning with supplies from a village a few miles away, would give us the news. KL had fallen, and then Singapore. Thousands of ang-moh had been sent to internment camps. The Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was now in place—with Japan enjoying the lion’s share of the prosperity.

  Then the Kempeitai began sweeping through Penang, rounding up people and taking them away in lorries. Old Mr. Ong warned Ah Poon to stay away from the village for a while. One afternoon my father made us go to Ah Poon’s house. All the women, including Old Mr. Ong’s wives, were queuing up to have their hair cut by Ah Poon’s wife. They had decided it was prudent to make us look as unappealing as possible. That was the first moment I felt real fear.

  We had been living in the durian orchard for nearly five months when the Kempeitai came for Old Mr. Ong. The secret police had been looking for him. They had also been looking for my father. Arriving in two lorries, they rounded us up in front of Ah Poon’s house. We knelt beneath the noon sun, our hands behind our heads. Some of the orchard hands managed to slip away into the jungle when they heard the Kempeitai coming, but there had not been the opportunity for us. And anyway, where could we have run to?

  The Kempeitai officers knew all our details. They compared our faces to the photographs in their dossiers. They ordered Old Mr. Ong and my father into Ah Poon’s house. We could hear everything from where we knelt outside: the shouting, the beatings, the cries of pain rising into inhuman screams. The younger of Old Mr. Ong’s wives fainted. I listened until I couldn’t recognize my father’s voice anymore. Then the house fell silent.

  The officers emerged without my father or Old Mr. Ong. They gave an order and their men moved among us, pulling one after the other to their feet and dragging them to one of the lorries: all of Old Mr. Ong’s sons and their wives, Ah Poon’s teenage daughters, the workers’ wives and children.

  And then Yun Hong and I were selected too.

  Weeping filled the air, our families begging the Japanese to let us go. My legs seemed boneless when I tried to stand up. I couldn’t breathe. The guards shoved us into the back of the lorry. My mother was screaming. I had never heard her sound like that. A soldier punched her and then, when she fell, kicked her, again and again. He kicked her face, her head, her stomach. I broke away from the other prisoners and ran toward her. A guard jabbed me in the stomach with his rifle butt. I doubled over and collapsed to my knees. I had never felt such pain before. I forced down the fetid vomit rising up my throat.

  “Get up, Ling!” Dimly I heard my sister shouting from behind. “Get up or he’ll kill you!”

  Swaying, I managed to get to my feet. I saw my mother lying on the ground. She was not moving. I could not even tell if she was still breathing. No one dared to tend to her. I looked back to the house where my father had been tortured. The guard shoved me and shouted. I limped back to the lorry. Yun Hong reached out and pulled me up.

  The Kempeitai stopped at three or four other villages to collect more prisoners, packing them into the back until there was no space left to even sit on the floor. The air inside the tarpaulin canopy baked in the heat. The seats by the open tailgate were taken by the two guards. Some of us suffered from carsickness, vomiting down the front of our clothes. The smell made me nauseous. I tried to hold down my gorge, but it was impossible. Yun Hong helped me clean myself, but there was not much she could do.

  The lorry stopped and we were ordered out to relieve ourselves. The women squatted on one side of the road while the men urinated against the trees on the other side. The guards smoked their cigarettes. Then we were on the move again. We crossed the channel to the mainland by ferry. At the Butterworth train station we were transferred to a goods train waiting by a siding. There were already prisoners packed into the cattle cars. I was thirsty—we had not had anything to eat or drink all day.

  “You think they’re taking us to Changi?” I asked Yun Hong, when the train began to move.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t know.”

  We traveled for hours. The guards gave us a bucket of water to be fought over between the fifty, sixty of us packed into the carriage. Someone said we were heading south. Yun Hong was hopeful that we were being transported to Singapore. “Father will find us there,” she said. “He’ll get us out of this.” She tri
ed to keep our spirits up. “If they wanted to kill us,” she whispered to me, “they wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.”

  The train stopped once. The doors opened and we climbed down stiffly. It was hot, the sun setting behind the mountains in the distance. We were relieving ourselves beside the tracks when I heard a train coming. Yun Hong pulled me to my feet and brushed down my skirt, doing the same for herself. Many of the other women were too exhausted to care.

  The sound of the train grew louder. It rounded a bend in the tracks and slowed to a stop next to ours. Japanese soldiers unlocked the doors to the cattle cars. Grimy, exhausted-looking British soldiers, some dressed in filthy uniforms, others in loincloths, stumbled onto the tracks.

  “They’re being taken to the railway in Burma,” a Eurasian woman next to me whispered. “Fucking Japs. Bastards.”

  The guards huddled together, smoking and chatting. One of the British POWs looked around. His eyes met mine just for a second. Then he sprinted across the tracks, heading for the trees. The guards shouted and fired at him. The man’s body jerked and he collapsed into the wild grass. He tried to get up but couldn’t. He started crawling toward the jungle. One of the guards strolled up to him and, pressing his boot on the man’s neck, shot him in the head.

  It was late in the evening when our train halted for the last time and the doors were pulled open. Thick jungle lay on both sides of the railway tracks. We were marched through the trees to a clearing where lorries were waiting. The drivers started up their engines and switched on their headlights. A guard threw blindfolds at our feet and gestured at us to put them on. Yun Hong gripped my hand. She was shaking. We had heard stories of how the Kempeitai would take their prisoners to a deserted spot in the jungle and shoot them.

  The journey was unending. We seemed to be going uphill all the time. The roads worsened. Finally the lorry stopped. No one dared to move. In the sudden silence I heard shouting in Japanese. Then someone ordered us to remove our blindfolds. I blinked, dizzy and disoriented. Climbing down unsteadily from the lorry, I looked around us, shielding my eyes against the spotlights. Night had fallen. Through the trees I glimpsed a section of a high metal fence topped with barbed wire. Beyond the fence was only darkness. From platforms in the trees, armed men watched the fence and watched us.

  I glanced at my sister. Our eyes met for a moment. We were worlds away from anything we had ever known.

  The guards separated the women prisoners from the men and marched us to one of the attap huts beneath the trees. Inside, twenty to thirty women were standing at attention, their faces sallow in the light of the paraffin lamps hanging from the low rafters. A thin, bald officer inspected the new arrivals. He stopped in front of me. I shivered when his eyes stared into mine. He moved on to Yun Hong. When he finished he spoke to a guard, who bowed and pulled out half a dozen of the women from the lineup. Yun Hong was one of the chosen. Two of the women started to weep. The guard slapped them. The six women, including Yun Hong, were led away.

  It was still dark when I left the hut with the other prisoners the next morning. I had not slept all night. My arms and face were swollen and itching from mosquito bites. We assembled on a parade ground. Yun Hong was standing on the far side with a group of young women. In the gray light I saw that her face was swollen and bruised.

  A small, thin man introduced himself as Captain Fumio. “I am in charge here,” he said through Father Jacobus Kampfer, the camp’s interpreter. “It is dawn in Tokyo. The emperor is about to have breakfast in his palace. You will show your respect to him.” He made us bow in the direction of Japan. We sang the “Kimi-gayo”—those of us newcomers who did not know the words had to move our lips, or risk being slapped. We were dismissed after the singing. I watched as Yun Hong and her group were taken away.

  “What are they doing to them?” I whispered to the Chinese woman ahead of me, but she did not answer or pretended not to have heard me.

  We queued for breakfast in an open-sided shelter that functioned as a kitchen and eating area. Each of us was given a bowl of thin soup and a small slice of coarse bread. We had ten minutes to gulp it down. Then the guards ordered us into single file and marched us through the jungle to a cave in a mountainside that formed the entrance to a mine. Supervised by Japanese engineers, the male prisoners tunneled deep into the mountain, shoring up the passageways with wooden beams and concrete pillars. The women carried away the broken stones in bamboo baskets, dumping the rubble into a ravine on the other side of the hill. Limping back to the cave after I had emptied my basket, I noticed a number of Japanese civilians walking about, consulting plans and plotting the angle of the sun.

  There were four levels in the mine, linked by a system of tunnels and airshafts. There must have been a river running close by, because a month into my internment, after it had been raining heavily for days, the walls in the lowest level collapsed. Water flooded the chamber, drowning the prisoners working down there. We had to go in and pump out the water. The chief engineer told us to leave the bodies there to be buried into the foundations.

  Three hundred prisoners lived in the camp. There were seventy or eighty Europeans: civilians and captured Allied soldiers. The rest were Chinese and a handful of Eurasians. The British men kept to their own, as did the Australians and the Dutch. But there were no such divisions among us women. All forty-four of us slept in one hot, crowded hut: Europeans and Chinese and Eurasians. The huts were constructed from bamboo and thatched with attap and all were sited under the trees.

  None of the other prisoners knew where our camp was located; they too had been blindfolded when they were transported here. From my conversations with the Chinese women prisoners, I discovered we shared a common background: we all had fathers or relatives who had been active in stirring up anti-Japanese sentiments.

  I asked about Yun Hong around the camp, but no one had seen her. Finally Geok Yin, one of the older female prisoners, said, “There’s a hut behind the officers’ kitchen. That’s where they’re keeping them. That’s where they’ve taken your sister. If she’s lucky she might only have to serve the officers.”

  For a few seconds I could not speak or move. Then I turned away from her. She was only telling me what I had known but refused to accept from the moment Yun Hong had been taken away from me.

  I asked Father Kampfer to teach me Japanese. The Dutch missionary was in his sixties, and he had previously lived in Yokohama. Once they realized I could speak simple Nihon-go, the guards started treating me better than the other prisoners. I asked them to help me improve my Japanese, and occasionally they would even slip me extra rations or cigarettes. I used the latter to barter for food—there was never enough to eat, and I was always starving. Food was the one thing that obsessed all of us. I convinced the camp administrator to assign me to work in the officers’ mess, preparing meals. I had never had to cook a meal in my life, but working in the kitchen would give me the best chance for survival, and I learned quickly. From the kitchen window I could look out to the hut where Yun Hong was held. Five times a day a line of Japanese men could be seen outside, waiting their turn.

  One afternoon when I was working in the kitchen, a mine shaft collapsed. The officers rushed off from their half-eaten meals to assess the damage. Making sure that no one was watching, I slipped out of the kitchen and walked casually to the hut. The door was padlocked. I went around to the back and peered into a barred window. Through the dimness I could make out beds, partitioned by flimsy bamboo screens. A few girls were sitting on their beds chatting, some of whom I guessed were only fourteen or fifteen years old. I called out Yun Hong’s name. The girls whispered among themselves before passing on my message. Yun Hong appeared at the window a moment later, her face covered with fading bruises. From the shock in her eyes I knew I too had changed.

  “You’re so thin,” she said. “Think how pleased Mother would be, if she could see you now.” Tears slid down her cheeks and over her lips. I reached between the metal bars and gripped her hand
s. I would have done everything I could to trade places with her. And I should have.

  Each day was unchanging, differentiated only from the one before by who had been injured, who had fallen ill, who had died. At night we slept on wooden pallets, driven mad by fleas and mosquitoes, counting the calls of the tok-tok birds. We worked eighteen hours a day in the mine, surviving on a daily diet of a piece of bread and soup with bits of rotting vegetables floating in it. All of us suffered from a variety of illnesses: dysentery, beriberi, malaria, pellagra; very often a combination of them. I was fortunate to work in the kitchen, but I suffered my share of disease and beatings too. The lack of food and medicine, the heavy labor and the punishments slowly culled our numbers. We gave the worst of the guards nicknames: Mad Dog, Butcher, Pus-Face, Shit-Brains, the Black Death. It made us feel, if only for the briefest instant, that we had some control over our lives.

  On two or three occasions I caught glimpses of lithe, brown figures beyond the fence, sliding soundlessly between the trees. “Orang Asli,” a prisoner told me. “The Japs leave them alone. Some Jap was killed by their poisoned darts.”

  Every three weeks lorries with Red Cross markings would arrive at the camp, unloading steel boxes and barrels that the prisoners had to carry into the mine. Thinking that none of the guards was paying attention to him, an Australian private peeked inside one of the boxes. Fumio had him tied to a bamboo frame on the parade ground and whipped. He was then locked inside a low, tin-roofed cage for two days, where he was unable to sit or stand upright. He went insane, and in the end they had to shoot him.