Ministry of Moral Panic

by Amanda Lee Koe

  Does that mean she’s religious?

  No, it means she’s in a gang.

  Well, I wouldn’t say no to that.

  She’s walking over now, with three identical boys in muscle tees and baggy jeans and flip flops, tattooed arms and hair dyed the colour of harvest wheat—ah bengs. The Bear doesn’t know that you don’t point at girls like that.

  She speaks in Mandarin.

  Why are you two talking about me?

  What makes you think we’re talking about you.

  Don’t give me any bullshit—I saw him pointing at me.

  He said he wants to fuck you.

  Kaninachaocheebyenabei—

  The ah lian slaps me, and the ah bengs are unloosed on the Bear like a pack of dogs.

  I don’t hit back. I adjust my spectacles, and after casting me a hard look under her mascara and false lashes, she stands beside me without animosity. We watch the fight casually, the Bear on the ground and the ah bengs kicking his face in. They stop when the sambal stingray hawker shouts, Wa pat den wa hor police liao, mai luan luan lai! She removes her kitten heels, slings them in hand, and they run towards the car park.

  His eye is like a grape that’s been stepped on, and he’s groaning.

  Sledge.

  Yes?

  It hurts.

  I know.

  I help him up, he’s heavy—as a bear should be—and we get into a cab. We don’t wait for the police.

  In the cab, he leans his head on my shoulder. On the radio is a silly, upbeat Chinese song, popular with teenaged girls here several years ago. The lyrics go, I love you, loving you, like the mouse loves the rice grain. It doesn’t sound half as stupid in Mandarin, in the saccharine voice of the Taiwanese pop star.

  Inexplicably, the Bear begins feeling me up. I don’t stop him.

  When the cab reaches his hostel, he reaches out for his wallet to pay but I say, Uncle, one more location, to indicate that I am not getting out with him. The Bear staggers out of the cab with his beaten face. I shut the door, and the cab driver pulls away.

  Clementi Woods

  Once, a frog that lived in a well bragged to a turtle that lived in the sea.

  “I am so happy!” cried the frog, “When I go out, I jump about on the railing around the edge of the well. When I come home, I rest in the holes inside the wall of the well. If I jump into the water, it comes all the way up to my armpits and I can float on my belly. If I walk in the mud, it covers up my flippered feet. I look around at the wriggly worms, crabs and tadpoles, and none of them can compare with me. I am lord of this well and I stand tall here. My happiness is great. My dear sir, why don’t you come more often and look around my place?”

  Before the turtle from the sea could get its left foot in the well, its right knee got stuck. It hesitated and retreated. The turtle told the frog about the sea.

  “Even a distance of a thousand miles cannot give you an idea of the sea’s width; even a height of a thousand metres cannot give you an idea of its depth. In the time of the great floods, the waters in the sea did not increase. During the terrible droughts, the waters in the sea did not decrease. The sea does not change along with the passage of time and its level does not rise or fall according to the amount of rain that falls. The greatest happiness is to live in the sea.”

  After listening to these words, the frog of the shallow well was shocked into the realisation of his own insignificance and became very ill at ease.

  In my dreams, the Bear says: Come with me, I’ll pull you out of burning houses. I’ll fashion you a canoe from wood, in my father’s tool shed. This is the Chinese parable I tell the Bear in return, to explain to him that I can never leave, not because I think the most of my environs, but that my environs have become me.

  In my dreams, the Bear says, sadly: So you’ll never leave that island of yours?

  In my dreams, I reply: You were the closest thing to leaving.

  Six months after the Bear leaves I get a parcel in the mail, wrapped in brown paper, tied in white twine.

  It’s a flapper dress, and except for a small discolouration at the hem and the loss of a few beads at the neckline detail, it is Roaring Twenties perfection. How could I, an ordinary Asian girl on a humid island, ever wear it?

  As I crush the brown paper out slides a photograph. Louise Brooks hair, a cloche hat, a slouchy silhouette, shin-high socks. She has his eyes. Or rather, the Bear has her eyes. On the back he’s written: I’m sorry we didn’t get to go to every park on your island.

  The dress is jammed to the back of my cupboard, but I can’t stop thinking about it.

  I take the picture of the Bear’s grandmother to the neighbourhood saloon and tell the hairdresser auntie this is what I want. Wah, where you get this photo? she wants to know as she takes it from me with long nails the colour of aubergines. From a photo album in Salvation Army, I say.

  Eh, pantang! She says the Malay word for bad luck and drops the photograph back in my lap. As she reaches over for a nylon gown to lay around me, I see her clasping her hands together towards the small red Buddhist altar she has in the corner, the golden bodhisattva idol on a lotus flower.

  She botches the haircut, right before my eyes, and I let it happen. She shows me the back view of her handiwork with a large round mirror, and tells me how this bob with dipped ends is very fashion now ah girl, auntie give you the best. My hands gripping the photograph of the Bear’s flapper grandmother are turning white. I pay and leave.

  When I get home, I put on the flapper dress slowly, careful not to snag it. It fits like a dream. I take a Polaroid—the old Polaroid, not the Fuji Instax variety—of myself in the mirror. The flash obscures three-quarters of my face, the camera the last quarter.

  I remove the dress, pull on shorts and a t-shirt, take the lift down. I have the flapper dress and the photograph of the Bear’s grandmother with me. The large metal prayer bin isn’t in use, it isn’t a Buddhist or Taoist-observed day of the month. I drop the dress and the photograph into the prayer bin. I buy a matchbook from the provision store under the block, light all the matches, one by one, let them fall in. I don’t wait to see it burn up. Home, I pick up the Polaroid and write on the border:

  Where am I going to get another boy here who understands that I want to get married with a 99-cent thrift store ring?

  As I drop the addressed and stamped Polaroid off in the mailbox the next day, I think to myself that if I were the Pennsylvanian mailman and one hot afternoon I stopped to breathe, to see this, I might fall a little in love with me, for all of one minute—checking the postage stamp: all the way from Singapore, where’s that, on the Southern tip of China?—before I went on my way, past the deserted town roads and the blue, blue skies.

  Two Ways To Do This

  ZUROTUL WAS MADE for love, only she was born in the wrong environs for love to occur.

  She had come through the cargo hold of a ship rather than a plane because this was cheaper—she wouldn’t have to pay off the placement fee for as long as if she’d taken a plane. She’d sat in a corner and, at some point, threw up in her own lap; there were still bits of tempeh on her skirt though she’d tried her best to clean it off onto the exterior of a gunny sack stuffed with tubers.

  She wasn’t one of those who sought city life, who wanted something better, larger. She was happiest in the padi fields and she worked harder than the old family ox. But she’d been bathing in the river when the four men came, and when they were done with her, she lay naked and sacked on the mud of the riverbank, shaking uncontrollably. They were laughing as they left, and the last man turned back briefly to give her a kick in the ribs as a parting shot.

  Step up.

  A Chinese woman who could speak Bahasa Indonesia was asking for her name, taking her weight and height. She’d lost much weight after the rape. The woman peered at the scales and muttered that she’d bump up the figure on paper—too heavy or too light and they’ll think you eat lots of rice. Then they won’t want to hire you. They were gi
ven lawn-green polo shirts to change into. The shirts read Happy Maid Employment Services Pte Ltd on the back. There was a collapsible banner right outside the agency’s storefront with the picture of a local celebrity on it; the one who cross-dressed for comedic skits on talk shows, made inane movies and, most recently, cheated on his wife. He was grinning. He had one arm around a smiling maid in an apron, the other held in front of his chest in a thumbs up.

  Zurotul would never go home—it was no longer home. When she told her father what had happened, his face had remained impassive. Then he told her to marry her rapist. But there were four of them, she said. He stroked his beard as she sat at his feet, waspishly contemplating the complication of chronology: how should the prospective husband then be ascertained? Her mother was crying silently. That night, she packed up a scant little bundle and left before dawn broke, holding in the urge to kiss the hands of her sleeping mother and her five siblings.

  Some days she would wake in the holding dorm and smell rancid breath shot through with cheap toddy hanging over her. She’d hasten to the bathroom, splashing cool water on her face, brushing her teeth till her gums bled, anything to stave off the nausea. She’d look at her face in the mirror, touch her own reflection.

  There are some women, whom, having been raped, or whilst being raped, wish to die. Zurotul wasn’t one of them. Even as they were taking turns with her, from the back to the front to the back again, the fluid shape in the middle of her mind shifted from a piteous anguish to a gladness that, thus far, they weren’t threatening to take her life, and that in all likelihood she would survive this. The sky was very beautiful that dawn, and she found she was able to take comfort in this. She stopped clawing at the men even as they pawed at her crudely. Her pupils were dilated and she found she had an almost preternatural sense of sight and sound. Somewhere a bird was making a low, insistent hooting call for a mating partner. Her body was moving beneath her and she was no longer resisting. Her arms were open like the Madonna, her gaze skyward.

  Smile, no teeth.

  They were having their pictures taken for potential employees to look at. They were told to smile faintly—nothing too gregarious. There was a girl who didn’t want to have her picture taken, who was afraid of the camera, as if it were a gun. Soul-snatching, she muttered over and over in Jawa Serang, each time the flash went off.

  Zurotul took the hand of this girl, and stroked her head. This girl had lice in her hair when she came, and the maid agency had sheared her head, terrified of a dorm-wide infection. The crew cut felt good under Zurotul’s hand. The girl was coaxed into having her picture taken, even offering up a watery smile directed at Zurotul, who stood beside the porky Chinese man with the camera.

  Following this, Wati adhered herself to Zurotul like a barnacle, blabbering to her about her village and her family and her apprehensions all day. Wati was young; she had not yet known men. She climbed into Zurotul’s bunk at night and held her tight, with an earnest innocence.

  One night, six days in, Zurotul said gently in Jawa Serang: Wati, you know this is temporary, right?

  What is?

  This place, this bed. Me.

  Wati, who knew nothing, thought Zurotul was being cruel, and chided her before bursting into tears and crawling back to her bunk bed.

  Zurotul’s first instinct was to follow Wati into her bed, to comfort the girl whose crew cut had grown out into small tight ringlets, which were quite comely. Then she considered the life that lay before her, and it seemed almost impudent to think about forming attachments to anything; why would she start now? She was now a maid. She would perform chores—clean up after someone, tidy a house—but love was not on the cards. The agents had said as much: no boyfriend, or you get sent home. No handphone unless your ma’am and sir say okay.

  In the village, she’d had a cluster of friends who twittered like hens about nothing in particular and she’d played games with her siblings involving cotton pods and saga seeds and twigs and hemp rope. She was always the one listening, always the one twirling the rope, never the one jumping. Sometimes when she thought about it, it felt reasonable to her that she was raped—someone needed something, and she was in a position to give it. She wondered, if it’d been only one man raping her and if her father had similarly suggested her hand in marriage, would she have complied with his wishes? She thinks she would have, and then always, she tries to quell the brimming thought there, because if it spills, the question is this—would she have learned to love her rapist?

  This is how you cradle a baby.

  Absurdly, they’d been given naked baby dolls, moulded of cheap plastic, peach-coloured, with false eyelashes that fluttered shut over coloured irises when you cradled them at an angle.

  Zurotul held the featherweight approximation of a child patiently, remembering fondly her younger sister as a baby, how she would fan a dried banana leaf to keep her cool, how her sister tried to locate a nipple on her when she held her near her chest. Wati was standing loftily away from her, holding the doll in an awkward position. The Chinese woman was walking around with a clipboard, adjusting the crooks of their elbows and wrists to best support the doll.

  Soon they were versed cursorily in domestic chores—the ironing of clothes, the boiling of water, the operation of a vacuum cleaner, the scrounging of a sink, the folding of long-sleeved shirts—as well as basic English phrases: good morning, sir, good morning, ma’am, sorry, yes, I don’t eat pork, I don’t understand, could you explain again, I understand, sorry, sorry. They were rounded up to sit in a neat row on the faux leather-padded benches at the reception area of the agency, where prospective employers might find favour with their appearances.

  The woman walked in right before the man—in fact she was holding his hand—but it was only the man Zurotul saw. If she’d seen the woman, she would have noticed the supercilious curl of her lip, the perfect perm, chestnut-coloured, with no dark roots showing.

  But it was the man she saw, that spoke to the capacity for love she’d always, always held inside her. His face was unremarkable, a little horsey, but in the sea of lawn-green polo shirts, his eyes had immediately clapped onto hers, and for no reason in particular, he smiled a winning smile at her. His teeth were large and yellow, but it was the decisive generosity of the smile that took her in, that pulled her under, in waters she’d thought would remain placid forever, the impassive calm of the lake as she was raped. It was the sort of smile someone might lavish upon his returning lover or child at the arrival hall of an airport terminal, after a long absence. She held her breath as he surveyed the rest of the room, as his wife sat down on the stool before the counter—the sweeping gaze he’d cast the rest of the maids with was cursory; he’d not extended that same smile to them.

  They went through paper profiles together. From the way the wife’s jaw moved and the expression on the agent’s face, Zurotul could see she was asking hard questions. The man had a patient expression on his face. After a third of an hour, the agent called out the names: Wati. Zurotul.

  Wati’s hair had grown out, bunching around her head like a Southeast Asian Botticelli cherub. Zurotul found herself adjusting the rubber band that held her hair. The wife stepped around them gingerly, asking the agent questions in English. The husband lingered—it seemed—with a sort of decorum that implied that they—the prospective maids—were human, rather than fruit or livestock up for inspection, and for this Zurotul was grateful. She found herself thinking too quickly that she would do anything for this man. She imagined the great and simple pleasure it would be to lift his well-worn bedroom slippers by the bed to sweep under them; to lay out matching socks on leather work shoes she’d have polished to a shine the night before.

  The wife turned to the husband to say, Well?

  The husband indicated with a hand—rather than a finger—his choice: Zurotul. Wati had taken to placing her hands slightly akimbo, as if this might be a pageant of sorts. Zurotul left her arms limp by her sides as she smiled nervously at the husband. />
  The wife said: Well, I prefer the other. She pointed to Wati with a manicured index finger. The husband opened his mouth to ask why, and Zurotul saw the large teeth. The wife folded her arms and cocked her head.

  She looks fresher. That one looks used.

  Ma’am, this batch of domestic helpers are all new, the agent said quickly. They come straight from West Java and we train them on-site.

  The wife rolled her eyes.

  I don’t mean it literally. I just don’t like her face.

  Zurotul could not understand what was being said, and her nails were biting into the sides of her thighs. She looked at Wati, whose hands were still on her hips.

  The wife and the agent turned towards the husband, expectant. Whatever you say, dear, he said. The wife, satisfied, turned her back on the prospective maids, and settled back down on the stool. The man looked at Zurotul for a moment. She’d seen the look before, but she wasn’t sure where.

  The husband and wife signed papers. Neither Zurotul nor Wati could sense conclusively what the decision was, until the agent told Wati to go pack her belongings. Later, over dinner, Wati sauntered into the crowded back kitchen like a homecoming queen. The other unchosen maids were congratulating her, hugging her in turn and whispering well-wishes into her ear.

  Zurotul was made for love, but she was also born to lose. What surprised her wasn’t that she wasn’t picked; what surprised her was that she still had it in her to want things. She’d felt earthly desire ebb—from her heart through to her limbs, into the soil, and she knew, finally, at some point, to leech into the lake—as she had been raped. As the dawn segued into a clear, humid morning and she lay motionless for hours, she knew then what it was like to be a vessel. Life would be easy from then on, because she’d been given to know what emptiness was. This is what Theravada Buddhist monks give up verbal speech for. This is why Hindu ascetics put up one arm for ten years and allow it to atrophy. The piety of transcendence conferred upon Zurotul through utter violation—not the violation in and of itself but the verity that after the most painful and demeaning thing in the world had happened to her, she was still there—not devotional apotheosis; by a crime of opportunity—that the four men had probably already forgotten about, that no one in her village was going to be punished for—not self-cultivation.