by Tash Aw
But it wasn’t supposed to be this way. When this neighbourhood was first built, I remember looking at the tiled roofs and thinking, Whoa, they look so solid. In some estates the houses have blue roofs, while others have green. My mother cut out an advertisement from the Sin Chew Jit Poh with a drawing of a house just like this one. Far from the sea, where we wouldn’t have to smell the salty stinky mud when the tide went out, full of rotting fish that had slipped from the nets of the fishing boats. A house far inland, that couldn’t be swept away by freak tides or floods or storms. A place close to the city – so near that you could feel part of it, be absorbed and protected by it. She pinned the piece of newspaper to the wall in the bedroom – a patch of colour against the bare board. These places, they felt so new. It’s hard to imagine that now. You drive around this kind of estate and the streets look identical, house after house after house – they’re all the same, it crushes you. I know that’s what people from KL think. You come from the big city and you think, These places destroy your soul. Even I feel like that sometimes, and I’ve lived here for nearly ten years. I don’t know how things could have changed so much in thirty years. The houses we dreamed of then are exactly the ones we live in today, but they belong to a different world.
I used to wonder how my parents felt about each other during that long period of separation – those long years of hope. Sometimes we used to watch Shanghai Tang on TV, that Hong Kong series that had just come out then, which everyone was watching. We loved the costumes, the glamour – and that song! It made my mother cry every time. Once she dabbed her eyes and said, ‘It must be beautiful to experience such things. To be in love like that.’ And then, as if she heard the question that was forming in my head, she said, ‘It’s different for people like us. Your father and me, we don’t have time for all that.’
I didn’t think about it when she said it, but now I do. Didn’t have time for love. Is that what she meant? They were apart from each other, romance was impossible, I understand that. But love – that’s something else, isn’t it? My father was in another country earning a living far from his family, but that was another form of love. Distance is love. Separation is love. Loneliness is love.
One day – I can’t remember when, but a few years after my father left for Singapore – we received a letter from him. My mother read out a couple of sentences as soon as she opened the envelope. I have been going to church for the past few months. The pastor says that my life will improve because Jesus loves me. She stood reading for a minute or so, then took the letter into the bedroom and shut the door. I can’t remember exactly how the rest of the information filtered through to me in the weeks that followed – my mother never said anything as clear as
Your father is not coming back.
He is living with someone else.
He has another family over there.
It was simply something I came to understand, in the way children do – that things were no longer the same. One phase of your life is over, and suddenly you’re a different person, even though you don’t want to be, and hadn’t been planning to change. The world rearranges itself around you, and all at once you too are no longer the same. For a few bucks, my mother sold the baby clothes she’d been storing in a small box in the bedroom. She took the necklace my father had given her on their wedding day to the pawnbroker in town. She didn’t take her wedding ring – that would follow a few months later. You might say, So what? We needed money, we had to sell stuff – what was new? Still, it was different. There was a finality to those small acts that maybe the logic of adults – of clever, reasoned people like you – will interpret differently, will twist and reshape to form a kinder explanation. But a child always knows the truth, and in the end I was right. He never came back.
[Pauses. Sips tea. Rubs belly.]
Sorry. I have to stand up and take a quick walk now. Like I said, it’s those three years of bland prison food that are to blame for my stomach problem.
Bang bang bang. Bang bang bang. Someone is hitting the metal grille on the front door, and I know it’s her.
My body aches so badly I don’t think I can make it out of bed. Every time I move there’s a pain in my lower back – always in the same place, ever since prison. Like a knife deep in my flesh, twisting. I try to prop myself up, but the effort makes me cry out in pain. It’s as if my body is attacking itself.
Hey, are you there? You OK? Open up. Her voice is strong but calm.
Give me a few minutes.
What did you say?
I said give me a few minutes. I realise my voice is barely more than a whisper, and I’m breathing heavily.
After a while the pain finally subsides enough for me to get to the door. I let her in, and slump into a chair. You can’t read your emails or what? I say. I told you I was ill. I cancelled the session.
That was last week’s session. You said you had ’flu. You haven’t answered any of your emails or texts the last few days. I even called round a couple of times.
You called round? I didn’t hear.
You look terrible. You’ve lost a lot of weight.
I shrug. I don’t want to tell her that I haven’t been out of the house for over ten days. I’ve barely got out of bed during that time.
Just sit down and wait, I have something for you. She lifts up what looks like a large plastic container, and disappears into the kitchen. She comes back carrying a big bowl filled almost to the brim with soup. When she sets it down some of it spills over onto the table.
Ei, sorry. I’m so clumsy.
That’s when I realise how hungry I am. But it’s been days since I had anything to eat apart from some dry biscuits and an orange, and I don’t know if I can eat so much food. Part of me feels like devouring it all in one gulp, another part of me feels like throwing up.
Come, eat. She pushes the bowl gently towards me. It’s my mother’s special double-boiled six-flavour chicken soup. I told her to add some extra ginseng. When you have ’flu you have to eat well, otherwise your body won’t be able to fight the infection. Come on, just try a bit. It’s very nourishing. It’ll be good for you.
I stare at the bowl. Little swirls of oil make funny shapes on the surface of the soup. I take the bowl in my hands and lift it to my mouth. After one long gulp I set it back down on the table, and suddenly I find that I’m crying.
Later, when I’m back in bed, I drift in and out of sleep. Sometimes I can hear her typing on her laptop. When I open my eyes it’s dark, and she’s standing in the doorway to the bedroom. I’m going to go now, she whispers. I can’t be sure what else she says, or what time it is. The following day she arrives with more soup, some rice and some medicine. She comes for the next three days, until I’m healthy again.
November 5th & 6th
When my mother announced our move, she buried it in a jumble of other information in the hope that I wouldn’t worry about it until much later, when, like all children, I’d have silently processed the changes in store for us and appreciated how they would affect our lives, without her having to explain it all to me. You’re growing up fast, we’ll have to buy you a new school uniform. Next year you must study harder at school. History is a useful subject, but you should concentrate on maths. It’ll be easier for you at Uncle Kiat’s house. He has electricity from the mains. It’s quieter there. He might even give you your own room. There was a silence at the heart of all she told me, a missing piece of the jigsaw that was both essential and superfluous – her omission made the picture baffling, but it also explained everything. What she left out was, ‘We’re moving out of our house, because it’s falling apart. Because we can’t afford to live even in a shack on the verge of collapse. Because it’s killing me to raise a child and work at the same time.’
I remember standing in the kitchen as she packed our possessions into raffia bags, waiting for her to elaborate on what she was saying – to give me an explanation, and maybe a hug, too, which might comfort me and give me the reassurance I needed to
face this sudden shift in our circumstances. But she merely continued to talk about things that seemed unconnected to that moment – the price of fish going down that season because of an oversupply, the washing she’d have to do when she got back from work that evening, the list of chores she’d left me to do. Collect more water from the well, ask Auntie Lian for some charcoal, make sure all your clothes are folded and ready to be packed in a bag. I waited for reasons as to how and why the decision had been reached to move out of our home and into the house of a man we barely knew, but there were none. She talked, but the awful gaping silence remained amid her chatter. Nowadays when I remember that moment, I think: that is what shame sounds like.
I had known that our lives would be changing some months before, when my mother revealed that she had divorced my father. We’d got used to him being away, and I knew, with all the certainty that only a child can have, that he was never coming back. I no longer dreamed of his return, no longer imagined lying in bed one morning and being roused from sleep by the sound of a man’s voice in the kitchen and knowing that it belonged to my father, even though I’d forgotten what he sounded like, or even how he looked. That he actually lived in another country just a few hundred miles away made his absence real. He wasn’t living in some Greenland, or New Zealand or Somalia, or any other fairytale land that was so distant and magical to me that it kept alive the possibility of a miraculous return. For a few months, when I was smaller, I’d imagined my father living in an igloo. What exactly he was doing in the igloo I wasn’t sure, but it was connected to making sure my mother and I were all right. It had been such a difficult journey to get there that he was still trudging through thousands of miles of snow to get home. The idea of distance made him seem close to me. But by the time I was ten or eleven, I knew that there were no igloos in Singapore, and that my father lived in a place that we could get to by sitting in a bus for half a day. He wasn’t coming back because he didn’t want to. His proximity solidified the gulf between us.
Still, when my mother sat me down and explained what a divorce meant – it means Papa and I are still your parents but we are no longer husband and wife, do you understand? – I knew that it signalled a shift. I just didn’t know how that shift would play out. My mother could have disguised the divorce as something gentler, or hidden it in other half-truths or incomplete stories, as she had done before and would do many times later on; but for a reason I couldn’t determine, she wanted to emphasise the split with my father after all those years of waiting. ‘Mama is still your Mama, but she is her own woman now,’ she’d said. ‘She is free.’ She referred to herself as if she was talking about someone else – as if she hadn’t yet got used to the idea of being the woman she described.
For a few months after the divorce announcement our lives continued without fuss or noticeable change. School for me, the fish-processing factory for my mother. After school, the dead hours at home, playing in the yard on my own, or roaming the country lanes that I’d already come to know so well. Waiting for my mother to come home. I noticed she was staying out for longer than usual, and at first I thought nothing of this development. It had always happened from time to time, when she had to do longer shifts at work, often at short notice, and as dusk fell I’d know to make myself dinner from the leftovers in the refrigerator, and not to wait for her to come home before I went to bed. But in those months her absences felt more deliberate and consistent, and sometimes, half-roused from sleep by her late return, I’d notice that the noises she made as she moved around the house were somehow different – more purposeful, even energetic, unlike the slow, heavy sounds of a normal evening when she’d worked overtime and would barely have the strength to fix herself dinner before falling into the raffia armchair and turning on the TV.
The new night-time noises confused me. The quick padding of her footsteps, criss-crossing the little house as she darted from kitchen to sitting room, back and forth. Sometimes she’d come into the bedroom, pausing to make sure she hadn’t woken me before taking something from the chest of drawers. I’d pretend to be sleeping, but in fact I was kept awake by the strange energy that filled the house – an energy that should have enthused me, but that filled me with a dull dread. A fear of something that remained hazy and unnamed.
It was soon after that I learned of our move to Uncle Kiat’s house on the other side of the village, and as the move drew closer I began to understand that my mother’s new optimism was linked to the end of everything I found reassuring in my life. Our little house. Our evenings and Sundays together, occasionally riding on the scooter into Kuala Selangor to buy candy from the store. The feeling that we didn’t need anyone else in the world to survive. My mother sighing as she dozed off in the afternoons, saying, ‘I could sleep until the end of our days.’ The comfort in knowing that I could sit on the bed next to her for all that time, and that when she woke up our world would still be the same. The beautiful boredom of it all, when we were together.
‘You’ll see, Uncle Kiat’s place will be much more comfortable for us,’ she said as she packed the last of our things into the raffia bags. ‘He’s being so generous in taking us in.’
I didn’t figure out until later that Uncle Kiat was a distant cousin of my father’s, who’d grown up with him until the age of twenty or so, when he’d left to work in Penang for a couple of years before returning home. I didn’t remember him from earlier in my childhood, and his sudden entry into our lives was baffling to me – not because he was new, but because my mother talked to and about him as if he’d always been with us. ‘Go fetch Uncle Kiat some tea,’ she would say when he came through the door. ‘You know he likes to drink tea. Hot weather, hot tea – only Uncle Kiat does that!’ At first I thought I might be going mad, and that I’d forgotten the presence of this man throughout my growing-up years. I became anxious, worried that the problem was mine – why couldn’t I remember him at all? But then I realised it wasn’t me. The familiarity my mother showed was real – she knew this man well. Had done for a long time. She’d just never shared that familiarity with me, until now.
The journey wouldn’t have taken more than twenty or thirty minutes by foot, and we didn’t have many possessions to transport – three large raffia bags that between us would have been unwieldy but manageable – but Uncle Kiat came to pick us up in his green Datsun. The back doors were stuck and couldn’t open, so I had to climb in over the front seat. The upholstery was torn and stuck together with black tape that chafed against the backs of my thighs as we made the short drive. My mother had been chatty all morning, but in the car she fell silent, and I wondered if she thought she’d made a mistake and was now regretting her decision. I knew, though, that she wouldn’t be changing her mind – she had no choice but to follow through.
Uncle Kiat was silent in the car, and even that first day, without knowing the man at all, I sensed that he was by nature uncommunicative and slightly withdrawn. I wished that I didn’t compare him to my father – or the version of my father who lived on in my imagination – but I couldn’t help it. My cheeky, silly father, who rarely stopped talking. I closed my eyes and tried to scrub out those images. In order to survive and be happy, I had to forget that I’d ever had a father. I didn’t know why that thought came to me just then, sitting in that hot, airless Datsun, but it did.
‘Uncle Kiat likes you so much, he just doesn’t know how to express it.’ My mother spoke softly as we unpacked our things. The sentence had the neatness and tenderness of something that had been planned in advance. ‘Did you hear me?’
I sat on the bed and looked around. ‘Yes,’ I said. The room was small but bright, and recently painted white. The floor and walls were constructed from brick and concrete and felt solid, unlike the timber boards of our old home. The mattress on the bed was soft, and I suddenly felt sleepy, even though it was only midway through the afternoon, or maybe towards the end of the day – I can’t remember exactly. It was still light, in any case. I lay my head on the pillow and fell
asleep at once – the deepest sleep I’d had in a long while. I heard my mother talking to me as I drifted off, but couldn’t make out the words. I felt her hand sweep the hair off my forehead, the smooth warmth of her palm on my skin. Later, I heard her and Uncle Kiat talking in the next room, their voices muffled by the thick walls, reduced to low murmuring that at first surprised me – what was that sound? In our old house, noise passed through the wooden partitions as if they didn’t exist – but then lulled me back to sleep. I opened my eyes briefly and blinked at the clean bare walls, but when I shut them I saw my old bedroom and believed that I was in it once again.
I felt as though I was slipping into another world, where everyone looked different, wore odd clothes and spoke in a foreign accent that I found difficult to understand at first, but soon made sense of. I recognised some of them – my mother, Uncle Kiat, the people of the village – but they too were wearing strange outfits and speaking in that alien manner, in voices that were dull and mumbling. My father was there too. I didn’t recognise him, but he was familiar. I knew he was my dad. All this was taking place in a city made of stone and steel, indestructible, immune to floods and winds and mudslides. The rules in this new world were altered. I slept in the day, went to school at night. Sometimes I didn’t go to school at all. As I roamed through the streets of this new city I had the ability to become invisible to its citizens. Others had this gift too, but not everyone. My mother drove a car, she didn’t ride her scooter any more. The car was blue, and it travelled without the need for wheels. Everything was different here.
A whole lifetime later, when I was in prison, I’d remember these childhood dreams that spilled over into the following day and made my waking hours seem shorter and easier to bear. I’d try to recreate that haze-like state in my cell, try to hang on to those wisps of sleep, but it never worked. The noise of the other men shouting, washing, eating – it ruined everything.
