by Jeremy Tiang
He struggles to find a happier memory. The jubilation when Siew Li was released, that’s always good. Watching her re-enter the world, taking her place in it again. Being with her, properly, without a table between them—it felt special now, like they had to treasure it because they’d waited so long. “Were you about to give up?” she asked him once. “Or would you have waited forever?” And of course he said forever, but it was impossible to know. He introduced her to his parents, afraid they would say something about her background or her imprisonment, prepared to defend her.
Jason had always been one of those people with a plan—initially marked out for him by ambitious parents (the right schools, the right clubs), and later the well-defined path of the civil service. Siew Li was an aberration, but at the time it felt exhilarating, to be with people trying to change something outside of themselves. Mollie was standoffish at first. Then perhaps inevitably, they became friends. Siew Li took to coming earlier than announced, so by the time Jason emerged from his room, they were comfortably ensconced on the sofa, chattering away slightly too fast for him to follow. Siew Li assured him that she hadn’t said one word about her ideology, not to worry, and Mollie claimed to be talking only about clothes and music, nothing embarrassing.
There was talk about Jason going away to university, to England, like all the other clever boys. He made it clear he’d rather be here, with Siew Li, and his parents were secretly relieved. Money was not as plentiful as it had been—the Japanese had run their factory into the ground during the occupation, and it was a struggle to get the business back on an even footing. His father was certain he did not want his son to take over the company—it was a lamed creature, and besides, his child was destined for better things than trade.
In the end only Siew Li’s name became a sticking point. His mother addressed her variously as Sue and Sally, only trying to wrap her tongue around the flat Chinese syllables after Jason put his foot down. “Hurry up and get married,” she finally said. “Then I can just call her daughter.”
•
They did get married, and had the twins. Jason tries to remember this as a happy time, but with the distance of years it is overshadowed by what came next. There must have been a good few months, maybe as long as a couple of years, when everything proceeded as it should. Janet has left a selection of old family pictures by the hospital bed, in the apparent belief that this will make him forget how they have fallen apart since, and Jason cannot recognise himself in them. He sees a painfully young man, awkward, bespectacled, hair carefully slicked down. Beside him is a girl, her eyes fierce. They each have a baby in their arms.
He would like to have a period of time to cling onto as purely good—but is he just fooling himself? He knows the tragedy of happiness is that you often don’t recognise it till it’s gone, but surely never having had it in the first place is worse? When he thinks of himself as a young man, a young father, it feels hollow, tainted.
At the time it was pleasant enough, coming home and hearing about Siew Li’s day, kissing the twins, marvelling at how they changed. There was so much to do, it seemed, to keep the household running. Mollie visited often, even after she got married. Then she was pregnant, excited to have her baby meet its cousins.
The conversations of those days are now impossible to recover. He remembers them never fighting, the babies never being difficult. Surely that couldn’t be? Siew Li had settled down, her radical days behind her, her English improving through regular use. She was still working for a union, but not agitating, just carrying out very sober contract negotiations. Which was fine, he was as staunch a supporter of workers’ rights as the next man. She got wrapped up in politics, campaigning during the election, but this was supposed to be a democracy after all, and it wasn’t like she was standing for office herself.
His father was in the process of winding down the family business. It was too labour-intensive, having roomfuls of women hand-stitching beads onto dresses. The modern taste was for imported frocks, cheaply machine-sewn printed fabrics. The fast girls around town, the ones who read the European fashion magazines, all knew what they wanted—the New Look. Modernity; soft, clean lines; subtle luxury after the dull, discoloured war years. No one wanted to take on the business, so eventually they sold off the premises and got what they could. There was enough money for his parents to live off, but not much more.
When Siew Li departed, his parents’ mouths clamped shut. The effort not to say I-told-you-so was visible in their clenched jaws, and he knew he could rely on them for dutiful support, but nothing else. They would take care of the twins while he was at work. They would not tell him he hadn’t been foolish, that loving Siew Li hadn’t been a mistake. At first they tried to introduce him to other girls from good families, but he tartly reminded them he was still married, and they backed away.
It was an awful day. He’d had a frantic phone call at work to say Siew Li had gone out with a friend and never come back. He’d rushed home to find Mollie in tears, the children howling. They turned on the radio and heard there’d been more arrests, though when they went to the station, the police swore they didn’t know anything. “We wouldn’t mind speaking to her, though. Let us know if you see her,” said a sergeant, and he thought like hell, like hell I’ll turn her over to you.
Yet she was gone, and so was that other woman, Lina. Their office was locked up tight, and no one knew anything. He felt implacable rage, unfairly, that she should be able to just disappear like that. He was stuck here, there was nowhere he could vanish to. All of them, with their grand plans. They’d stolen her, and she’d let herself be taken. Why hadn’t he been enough for her?
The next weeks were unbearable. He showed up at work, but sat in meetings glowering into empty air. His boss didn’t have the authority to send him home, and so put him on filing duties instead. This just fed his bottomless rage. Relegated to busywork, as if he were already useless! He’d had their future planned out, their fortunes set to rise along with the new country’s. All she’d had to do was play along. Was even that beyond her?
After work, he’d stop off at the kopitiam for a consoling bottle of beer or two, then show up to collect the kids late, eyes bloodshot. One time, he showed up after ten, and his mum said, kindly but firmly, “You might as well leave them here, you’ll just be dropping them off again in a few hours.” This was the closest she’d come to a rebuke. “Why not just let us take care of them until you can cope again?”
Some weeks later, Mollie showed up at his flat. Without saying anything, she opened all the windows wide, found a broom and dishcloth, and started meticulously cleaning the place. He watched her from the sofa, a detached part of his brain noticing how hard she had to scour the grime. It hadn’t taken long to get ingrained. She drank from the tap, lapping like a cat, but otherwise took no breaks until the place was set to rights, grunting a little when she had to bend or stretch. He shouldn’t let a pregnant woman pick up after him, he thought, but couldn’t make himself move. She didn’t ask him where anything belonged, and he wouldn’t have known anyway. It was all Siew Li’s system.
Three hours after she’d arrived, she flopped down next to him. He wondered if he should thank her, or if she was angry with him. This isn’t fair, he thought. I’m the one left behind.
“This won’t do,” she finally said. He turned to look at her, but no response seemed possible. “Did you have dinner?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
She rolled her eyes, stomped into the kitchen, and came back with a slice of white bread thickly spread with strawberry jam, right up to the edges. “Eat.”
He took a cautious bite. She’d toasted the bread just a little, so it had a faint crunch but remained pale. It was delicious. He was famished, he realised. While he chewed, she went back to the kitchen to get him a glass of water.
“What’s going to happen?” He didn’t realise he’d said anything till, belatedly, he heard the words leave his mouth.
“I can�
�t tell you that.” Mollie smoothed her skirt. “Maybe she’ll come back, or maybe she won’t be able to. Siew Li’s a good person. She didn’t look like she planned to leave with Lina. Didn’t even take anything with her. Something must have happened, suddenly. She must have had her reasons. I don’t think we ever knew her, really.”
“Obviously I did, I think I knew my own wife.”
“This isn’t school. You don’t need to have all the answers.”
He sank back against the cushions. She took his empty plate and glass into the kitchen, came back and stood staring at him from across the coffee table.
“I’m not here to say the obvious things. You’ve already heard them from Ma and Dad. Be strong for the children. You’ll find someone else. I mean, it’s all true, sort of, but I know it’s not helpful. And maybe you won’t find someone else.”
“Thanks, thanks.”
“Well, you might not want anyone else, I don’t know. If Barnaby got run over by a bus tomorrow—he might, he’s terrible at crossing roads—I’d be sad, but I’d keep going. For Stella.”
“Stella?”
“The baby. It’s a girl; I’ve decided. I’d probably marry another guy eventually, because they’re useful to have around, but in the meantime I’d just keep going.”
“So I should just keep going? Excellent advice.”
“You don’t have to listen to me if you don’t want to, and I can’t really help. You’re in pain. It might never stop hurting. But try to let her go. Forgive her, if you can. For your own sake. I know it’s not easy, but if you possibly can, I wish you would.”
He nodded, suddenly feeling very tired. Mollie was a good person. Would he ever have her moral certainty?
After that conversation, she never brought any of this up again, but was simply there, never stepping away. For so much of his life, she’d been his annoying little sister. Now he knew her quiet presence was loyalty.
Siew Li’s letters started coming, all addressed to the children, not a single one to him. As if he’d never existed. He read them anyway, every word, saw the pictures of her in her new life. It was as Mollie said, she’d been forced to flee. Still, he couldn’t forgive her the abandonment. Was this unfair? He couldn’t stop feeling that if she’d done something different—he couldn’t say what—they’d still be together.
His life shrunk to a tiny point. No one at work had ever been particularly friendly with him, and now it was worse. He wasn’t a pariah exactly, but the situation was strange enough that no one quite knew what to say. It was the same meeting old classmates—Siew Li’s name had been in the papers, and everyone knew she was a fugitive. One chap made a joke about Communist honeypots, and Jason almost bit his head off. They sought him out less after that.
So there was just Mollie. The bank wasn’t far from his office—she’d call now and then to say she was downstairs, come out and have some lunch. After work, she’d come round with packets of food, knowing he’d probably not bother eating otherwise. They’d eat in warm silence, then sit on the sofa listening to the radio, or else she’d play with the children as he watched, easier with them than he would ever be. She saved him, in those first two years after Siew Li. Having her there was an anchor. Who knew where he’d have drifted to otherwise? And if she’d been around longer—
Here again the endless circles of thought: if Siew Li hadn’t left, if Mollie hadn’t insisted on staying at her job, if Barnaby had been enough of a man to stop her, if the Indonesians had chosen another building—all the decisions, big and small, that could have saved him if any one of them had been different. All those years like a dark corridor growing steadily narrower, returning to Mollie’s death, the point at which the last fragment of his self fell apart, the moment he gave up hope of ever being whole again.
•
In the sickly light of the false dawn, Jason uses his fingers to count off the events leading up to MacDonald House. He knows them all so well; they glide through his mind like rosary beads.
The first bomb went off at Katong Park, on 24 September 1963, a day after the Malaysian Federation was formed. Marine commandos landed with instructions to destroy the Britannia Club on Beach Road, but found too many people in the building to work unobserved. Unwilling to leave without accomplishing anything, they walked to the park where they blew up the first car they encountered.
The next incident was at Vaughan Road, a little before Christmas. Others followed, so many that they came to seem commonplace. An explosion at Meyer Road shattered all the windows of the Ambassador Hotel, and a year later another caused minor damage to the Raffles Hotel. In between, there were false alarms, mistaken reports of troop landings all over the peninsula, rumours of commandos parachuting in and blanketing the east coast.
It was like a game, at first—long enough after the war for people to enjoy the whiff of danger. (“It feels like living in a novel. A thriller,” said Mollie, when the news first broke. She was fascinated by the whole affair.) Yet despite the new safety measures, life had to continue for the economy to keep growing. There was so much money to be made in this new country, dazzling new buildings and wide roads funded by the ships that streamed in and out of the harbour, the planeloads of brightly-clothed visitors with full wallets. The Tourist Board waited with impatience for the British to withdraw so their military base, already surrounded by every imaginable security feature, could be turned into a fine new airport. (And Jason was busy, in his corner office, completing the paperwork for these transformations.)
The merciful thing about this time was that no foreigners were killed. With no resources to speak of, none of the rubber and tin that fuelled Malaysia, none of the oil which sent Brunei into its careless spendthrift decline, Singapore depended on its fledgling hospitality industry. This was a different Singapore, an island of white beaches and coconut trees. MacDonald House, constructed in 1946 by Palmer & Turner, was the first large office building of the post-war era, one of the tallest on the island. Perhaps its very prominence made it a target for the saboteurs who didn’t know the island at all, and so headed with their fatal cargo for the bank that stood out proud and red against the grey storm clouds.
More than forty bombs in a year and a half, but the one most people remember even now was at MacDonald House. This explosion was surprising not for the mere fact that it happened, but for the success and efficiency with which it was brought off. True, had detonation been delayed ten minutes, a score of mechanics from the workshop next door would have been enjoying their coffee break in the alleyway beside the bank; and true, the culprits made a particularly amateurish job of covering their tracks (and they were killed for it, and Jason waited outside the prison for their deaths). But people had died and property was damaged, and that was seen as evidence that the conflict was deepening.
Konfrontasi was drearily familiar, after the real war with the Japanese and the false war of the Emergency; they were once again in an unreliable world. Bubbling through the murk of Indonesia’s foreign policy came the idea that the new Malayan Federation would be dangerous, that it was a contrived creation of neo-colonial forces, the nekolim.
Sukarno was in charge, having reclaimed his country from the Dutch. He filled his country with a giddy unreality, a sense that there were no boundaries for them. He proclaimed Tahun vivere pericoloso, the year of living dangerously. At a public rally he shouted, “To hell with your aid,” his voice resonating with justified anger, his audience roaring with him. It was just before monsoon season, the air chokingly hot. The crowd heaved, gilded with sunburn, cheering when Sukarno proclaimed he was tired of busybodies telling him how to run the country. Where had it got them? Their money was hardly worth anything, he shouted, flinging fistfuls of rupiah over the crowd.
They’d burnt their bridges now. Having seen off the white men, they turned their attention to their Asian neighbours. Some said Sukarno simply wanted to distract his citizens from their own problems, their hunger, their children not in school. Others thought it was the F
ederation who induced it, needing this external threat to shore up a shaky alliance. It was a time for grand adventures. No one could afford a proper war, it was far too soon after the last one. The small skirmishes and localised terror kept everyone on their toes.
In the end everything fell apart anyway. The alliance failed, and Singapore was ejected from Malaysia on 9 August 1965, and was admitted into the UN a month later—Indonesia having resigned at the start of the year in a fit of pique. Konfrontasi ended six months after that when General Suharto seized power from Sukarno in a bloodless coup. There were no more bombs for a long time after that, and soon no one remembered the excitements of those years except the families of the dead. (Mollie. Oh, Mollie.)
•
Madam Ngoh dies sometime in his sixth week of hospitalisation, or perhaps the seventh. He has stopped keeping track. If he leaves, there will be plenty of time to find out where in the year he is. If not, it won’t matter. Although he hardly spoke to Madam Ngoh, he finds himself missing her intensely. She was here when he arrived, and they have devised little rituals. A nod first thing in the morning, a private smile when lunch is particularly inedible. He knew she was gone halfway through the night, when her breathing stopped, without warning, no slowing down. One minute she was rattling in and wheezing out, just like always, and the next a terrible silence.
The nurses are, as always, kind but uninformative. We can’t tell you anything, Mr Low, they coo. You aren’t her family. But isn’t it sweet that you care, Mr Low. We’ll be sure to pass on your condolences.