by Tash Aw
For several months after we moved, my mother continued to work at the factory. ‘Not for long,’ she told me, ‘Uncle Kiat is going to find me better work down in Klang. He’s got friends in town, people who run businesses. I could even work in an office!’ It was clear from the start that whatever Uncle Kiat did for a living was unconnected to the life of the village, just as the house itself felt different from the others around it. Even though it wasn’t a new house, its efficiency made it feel fresh – doors and windows that worked, framed by metal that wasn’t rusting. Inside, white-painted walls, a ceiling fan that spun without wobbling or stuttering. The cleanliness of it all made it seem almost suburban, as if it didn’t belong in the village.
Uncle Kiat would still be in the house when I left for school, wearing only his red Liverpool FC shorts that he never changed. Sometimes he’d still be in bed when I left, other times he’d have just woken up – he seemed in no rush to get to work. When he did finally leave he’d drive to Klang, where he was a supervisor in a factory near the port that made rubber gloves. ‘From Telok Gong to the rest of the world,’ he once boasted. ‘Germany, USA, Korea. Go to a hospital anywhere in the world, you’ll find our gloves. Even China can’t compete with us.’ There were boxes of them throughout the house, half a finger of a glove sticking out and inviting you to pull it out like a sheet of tissue paper. Uncle Kiat wore them all the time to clean the house. He was always cleaning, wiping the edges of the window sills or climbing onto a chair to brush the dust off the blades of the fan. I’d never seen anyone else in the village tidy their house with such determination and precision. No one else had as much time or energy to devote to domestic chores as he did. If you come home after a night at sea or doing the late shift at the factory, the last thing you want to do is tidy the house.
What I couldn’t figure out was his work routine – why the world’s mightiest manufacturer of rubber gloves didn’t demand his presence on a regular basis. I’d grown up with people who worked in factories. I knew the rhythms of their days and nights, the way their shifts changed according to the seasons and public holidays. But Uncle Kiat’s days were regular only in their irregularity – the only thing I knew for sure each day was that I could never tell what time he’d be leaving for work, or if he’d be leaving at all.
Deciphering his routine was important, because I needed to reduce my time with him to a minimum, if not eliminate it altogether. Sometimes I’d arrive back from school and he’d be sitting in front of the TV, shirtless and still in the same shorts he’d been wearing that morning and in fact the night before. He’d look up briefly without acknowledging me and turn the volume up even louder on the TV, so that the gunshots and explosions of the cops-and-gangsters shows he liked would vibrate through the walls. Even when I shut the door I’d hear the screeching of brakes, the crunch of metal on metal as if there were real-life car chases going on just outside, threatening to smash their way into my room at any moment. I’d put my head under the pillow, but would still hear the noise. Leave me alone! I screamed one day. Leave me the fuck alone! I wanted to flee, but I was trapped in the room by the noise, which formed a barrier that made it impossible for me to leave.
I was staying out later and later, heading home only when it got dark and I could be reasonably sure that my mother would be there too. At first she’d be worried that I’d stayed out so late, and would give me extra portions at dinner. ‘Where have you been? What have you been doing?’ she’d ask. ‘Nothing,’ I’d reply. ‘Just roaming around.’ Which was entirely true. That was what I did, sometimes with other kids but often on my own. But soon, when she realised I was fine, that I wasn’t getting in trouble, she was relieved to have a bit of time without me. I’d come home to find her and Uncle Kiat already in front of the TV, dinner cleared away and the table wiped clean with the disinfectant Uncle Kiat favoured. The smell of it was always in the air, the special perfume of the house. Other homes had the odour of joss-sticks, or of food. In that house it was bleach. My food would be on a plate under a net cover in the kitchen, and I’d eat it alone, standing at the sink and looking out of the window at the back of the boatsheds. ‘Don’t forget to tidy up when you’ve finished,’ my mother would shout over the noise of the TV.
In those first months my mother would sleep in the same bed with me as she’d always done. ‘See? Nothing’s changed,’ she’d whisper as I fell asleep. In the night, when I stirred, I’d look across and see her sleeping on her side, facing me, her mouth pursed slightly as she exhaled – a sight I’d known since the beginning of time. But despite her assurances I knew that things were different – how could they not be? – and so one night when, thinking I was asleep, she got up and left the room I wasn’t surprised. It was confirmation of how our life was beginning to reshape itself – the mattress giving way slightly as she rose from the bed, the door clicking shut as she closed it behind her, the warmth of her presence when she returned later in the night. Was she gone for one hour, or two, or eight? I never knew for certain, but at some point, when it was still dark, she would return, and by the time I woke up properly in the morning she was always there, just as she had been when I’d fallen asleep the night before.
After about three months, my mother quit her job at the factory – or maybe she was fired, I’m not sure. ‘Can’t stand that place any more,’ she told me. ‘When you’re big, you’re not going to work in a place like that.’ She got a job in an office down in the port area, much further away from the village than she’d ever worked, but the distance from home seemed to free her. Each day she’d set off on her scooter as if she were travelling abroad for the very first time – briskly, but a little hesitant too, as if unsure of what lay in wait for her. But that sense of discovery soon gave way to the same fatigue she’d known – we’d both known – in her years working at the fish factory, replaced by the boredom of routine. It was some time before I found out that she was a janitor, not a book-keeper or sales manager or any of the other things she could have been, and thought she might have been. I saw her name badge once, attached to the end of a ribbon that she would have hung around her neck. Her photo made her look older than she was – all the promise squeezed out of her life, an idea that started to gather on the edges of my own brain, like the shards of frost in the freezer that grew thicker every month until they formed a dense crust. The idea that my mother’s life had run out of possibilities. Her life frozen. When she was not even forty years old. Under her name were the words Hygiene and Sanitary.
Now, when I think about it, what strikes me isn’t the idea of my mother emptying waste bins in an office block under the white glow of fluorescent lights. I think of the impossibility of that happening now, when every janitor in the country is a foreigner. People like my mother – what would they do for work? Maybe by a process of natural promotion she would have become the book-keeper she’d always dreamed of being. One layer forms underneath you and pushes you up towards the surface, just like the geographical formations I was learning about at school. But maybe not, maybe she would have just ended up exactly as she did.
It was around that time that I began to notice that my mother had virtually stopped spending time with other people in the village, and that, by extension, I rarely went to other people’s houses. I don’t mean that it was a particularly social kind of village – not the way you would understand it, at least. You didn’t invite people round for fancy meals, but you’d often drop in on neighbours when you needed something – a length of string, a screwdriver, some salt, whatever. You’d meet them in the street and they’d say, ‘I’ve just boiled some barley-tofu drink, come and have some,’ and you’d spend the next half-hour catching up on news. My mother had been especially social in that respect. When I was very small, riding on the scooter with her, I’d become aware of how ready she was with her greetings, how open she was to other people, even those she barely knew, like a new bus driver or a neighbour’s relative visiting from another part of the country. She was always slowing dow
n to wave to someone, and if anyone called out to her she’d stop altogether. My first memories of the village are of observing it from the scooter, sitting in front of my mother, cradled in her lap and reaching out for the handlebars as if I was steering it myself. The number of times I heard people say, ‘He’s growing up so quickly,’ or ‘Watch out – soon he’ll be stealing that bike and riding down to KL with it!’ I noticed the warmth in their voices, even when they were breathless and defeated by a night at sea, or a day at the factory, or working with the nets under the sun.
At that age – four, five, six – you don’t understand every word, and you don’t remember what you hear, but you sense the impression of the voices. Brightness. Jealousy. Affection. Danger. And when people spoke to my mother it was almost always with a sort of tenderness mixed with surprise, as if they were intimately tied to her, and their meeting on the street was a special occasion, even though they saw each other all the time. Looking back on it now, maybe what I heard as warmth was in fact pity. Or relief. Young woman like her, bringing up a small child all on her own, husband probably gone for good. Poor miserable thing. Thank God we’re not in that position. Whatever the reason, I knew one thing: people liked my mother.
Now that I was older – pushing eleven, I guess – I rode on the scooter with her less often, so it took me a while to sense the loosening of her contact with our village, or the changing nature of her relationship with people she’d always been close to. I put it down to her job, more time-consuming those days even than before. She had little time to spend with me, let alone others. She was tired. She was getting old. But most of all, she was spending whatever free time she had with Uncle Kiat. Often they would just sit in front of the TV the whole evening, but sometimes they’d go out – I never knew where. At first there was a display of concern. ‘Tonight, Mama and Uncle Kiat have to go out, OK? You promise you won’t be frightened? You won’t be scared to stay at home alone?’
‘It’s OK,’ Uncle Kiat would say in an exaggeratedly manly voice. ‘He’s a big boy, he’ll be fine. Won’t you?’ He’d pat me on the back, a bit too roughly, more like a blow than a gesture of affection, and I’d say, ‘Sure. Don’t worry.’
Soon I recognised this as an elaborate performance, more for themselves than for me. They knew I’d be all right. Back then kids were different. At ten, eleven, twelve, we knew how to look after ourselves. But very swiftly, even this pretence stopped, and when I came home late in the afternoon, when the sun was just beginning to lose its vigour, the house would be empty, and I knew it was one of those days when my mother had finished work early and planned an outing with Uncle Kiat. Their absence felt deliberate. Like a statement of something they couldn’t bring themselves to pronounce in words. Or maybe they couldn’t even articulate what it was. But I knew: they preferred it when I was out of the picture. It was easier for them when they didn’t see me, or have to explain the changing ways of adult life to me. I wasn’t so much a burden – how could I have been? I was hardly around those days, my life was breaking off from theirs, even from my mother’s – as a reminder of their guilt. I didn’t know what they’d done to feel guilty. All I could feel was that they were guilty. Of something. And every time they looked at me, they felt it too.
The first Chinese New Year after we moved in with Uncle Kiat, my mother went with him to visit some of his relatives who lived on the east coast, not far from Kuantan. They were fishermen too, my mother told me, people just like us. Nice people. How do you know? I thought. You’ve never met them. They were away for three days, and during that time they left me to stay with neighbours. They were good to me, they gave me tangerines from Taiwan and an ang bao of five ringgit. On the second day, a visitor – someone from the village who I’d known forever – asked about my mother.
‘How is she? We never see her these days. She’s spending New Year with Kiat?’
I nodded. ‘In Kuantan.’
‘She OK?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Happy in the new house?’
‘Yes.’
She picked up a newspaper and started to flick through it. The other kids were unfurling some firecrackers out in the yard. Someone shouted, Go out in the street! Get away from the house! ‘Huh,’ the neighbour said as she looked at the newspaper. ‘I always knew.’
I left the room and ran to join the other kids out on the street. One of them had tied the string of firecrackers to a tree trunk and was dragging it across the dirt. It looked like a sinewy red animal tethered to the tree, limp and about to die. I pushed my way through the crowd gathered around the fuse and seized the cigarette lighter from the boy who was holding it. In one swift motion I flicked it alight and held it to the fuse. The other kids dispersed like smoke carried on the wind, screaming with joy and terror. He’s nuts, that guy! I held the lighter steady and waited for the fuse to catch. Even when it started to fizz and sizzle I remained crouched by it, making sure the purple flame of the lighter didn’t blow out. Get out of there you’re crazy you’re gonna die! the other kids were shouting. I watched the tiny sparks run the length of the fuse. Don’t run, hold steady, I thought to myself. I imagined the firecrackers exploding in my face, the hot smoke singeing my skin, ripping it. Don’t run. At the very last moment I leaped away. The brilliant eruption of colours, so close, too close, blinded me for a few moments, but I didn’t shut my eyes. The other kids were laughing, cheering, screaming wildly. ‘Ah Hock is mad!’
We stood watching the remains of the firecrackers strewn across the street – charred bits of paper, black and blood-red, like pieces of skin. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air for a long time.
I always knew.
I couldn’t get the neighbour’s words out of my head.
When she and Uncle Kiat came back from Kuantan my mother rushed up to me and gathered me in her arms. She held me tightly and didn’t let me go for a long time. I wanted to surrender to the familiarity of her, the deep comfort of her embrace, I wanted to cry with relief and happiness; but instead I found that my body was rigid and unresponsive as she hugged me. I wanted her to go away again, leave for some place far from me.
‘Leave him be,’ Uncle Kiat said as he unloaded the car, carrying a basket of fruit into the house. ‘He’s happier on his own.’
In the weeks that followed, my mother made a special effort to spend time with me, with and without Uncle Kiat. We rode all the way to Tanjung Harapan on her scooter, just the two of us, and sat on the low stone ramparts eating a small picnic of slices of fried Spam and bread. We watched the tankers and container ships cruise slowly towards North Port, the colourful containers stacked on top of each other like pieces of Lego. Beyond the green-grey water, the line of low mangrove trees on Pulau Klang looked as soft as a thick green rug. It was late afternoon, the sun was just beginning to sink, and young couples began to appear, holding hands and strolling along the path that traced the water’s edge. Groups of young men horsed around on the huge rocks that protected the shoreline from tides and wayward ships; they leaped from one boulder to another, pausing sometimes to pick up empty whisky bottles which they’d fling out to sea. A group of Indonesian workers on their day off had made a little fire in a metal drum nearby, and were cooking pieces of food over it – I couldn’t tell what it was because the smoke was too thick, a column rising straight into the sky. There was no breeze at all that day, but it wasn’t hot.
My mother stared out at the sea for a long time without saying much. I reached out and touched her hand, and though she clasped mine tightly, she didn’t look at me. For a few moments I felt as though she was about to tell me something, but she remained silent. The sun had sunk almost to the crests of the mangrove trees when we gathered our things to leave. I sensed a sort of finality – the end of yet another period of my life, but not yet the beginning of the next.
Once, we went with Uncle Kiat to the movies in Klang. It was my first proper outing in the city, or at least the first I can remember. He bought us a box of Famous Amos
cookies that my mother rationed carefully, passing me one at a time and waiting for me to express my gratitude sufficiently before handing me the next. ‘Say “thank you” to Uncle Kiat,’ she’d prod if I didn’t do so, and I dutifully obliged. I must have thanked him fifty times that day. The film was Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and Uncle Kiat laughed loudly throughout, throwing his head back to release a full-throated roar. ‘Shh,’ my mother said, giggling and pretending to smack him on the shoulder. I couldn’t understand why he found the movie so funny. The story of ordinary kids who suddenly found themselves reduced to the size of insects terrified me, and I spent most of the film with my hands in front of my eyes, screening out the worst of the horror. One moment you have a normal family life, next moment you’re being chased by a giant scorpion and taking refuge in a worm hole. No one notices you. You’re so tiny your own dad sweeps you up like a piece of dust and dumps you in the trash like the piece of garbage that you’ve become. ‘Look at them!’ Uncle Kiat pointed at the screen as the kids tumbled into the huge metal container. I didn’t find any of the film funny, and I hated Uncle Kiat for laughing so much. The man in the seat in front of me was asleep, his snoring clearly audible. ‘Wei, old man, wake up!’ Uncle Kiat barked at him, and laughed. ‘Aiya, leave him alone,’ my mother said, but she was giggling too. She held Uncle Kiat’s hand, and they leaned in towards each other as if they were about to kiss, but didn’t.
To avoid looking at the screen, or at my mother and Uncle Kiat, I watched the man, fast asleep with his head tilted to one side and his mouth hanging open. He wasn’t so old, about the same age as Uncle Kiat. He looked peaceful, completely docile, and I wished that he was the one sitting next to my mother instead of Uncle Kiat.
On the drive home, my mother turned to look at me in the back seat. ‘Wasn’t that the best day of your life?’ she asked.
