by Jeremy Tiang
Did the outside world know she was here? Was her salary still being paid? She wondered if there was leave for this, or if she’d lost her job. She could have asked her father to find out, but didn’t want to face his disappointment if she had, and worse, the sadness he would feel in bringing her the news. She asked the guard for newspapers, but they never materialised. Could she have her violin, then, to pass the time? No, they told her, this wasn’t a holiday camp. But what do you want me to do all day? She received no reply.
The questions grew more esoteric. Her aunt Siew Li was a known terrorist. Was that how she had become radicalised? “I've never met her.” Then who radicalised her? “No one radicalised me.” But she agreed with Marxist theory? “I don’t know a lot of Marxist theory. Did he call for armed uprising? I don’t agree with that.” Was her ideal society a classless one? “I suppose, but isn’t everyone’s? Is it Marxist to think everyone should have a fair chance?” She shouldn’t ask them questions, her job was to answer questions. “I’m trying. I’ve answered all your questions, haven’t I?” She had, but not all her answers were good ones. “I’ll try harder.” Good, try harder. “I will.”
•
The first time they mentioned Jessica, she felt a thrill of recognition, as if she had been waiting for this all along. It was inevitable—everyone she’d had more than a passing acquaintance with had been brought up and forensically examined. Was this person left-wing? Was this other? Who was it who recruited her? She tried to answer neutrally, and not incriminate anyone else. Was being left-wing bad in itself? She didn’t know any more.
They talked about dangerous socialist ideals. “But the PAP used to be socialist,” she said, mildly. What was she talking about, they wanted to know. “The PAP called itself a socialist party.” Really? Was she sure? “Oh yes. I mean, they even worked with the Communists to start out with.” Ah, no—the voices grew certain, they were on surer ground here—the PAP only worked with the Communists to bring them under control, to keep our country safe from them. “Well, sure, but even after they’d locked up all the Communists they kept saying they were socialist, until they had to leave Socialist International. In the seventies.” How did she know all this? “I read books.”
For the most part, they weren’t interested in talking about ideas, only people. They had a big file, full of lists. Every classmate she had ever had, people she was—as they put it—known to have associated with, obscure relatives she had never even met. Each time they were able to process a name, cross it off the list or circle it for future questioning, she felt a hum of satisfaction round the room, as if they had whittled a little more away and were circling closer to the truth.
And so they came to Jessica. Who was she? “We shared a dorm room at university.” Why did she need a dorm room? “Lots of people have one. Sometimes we studied late, and it wasn’t always convenient to go home.” She must be a rich girl, to stay in dorms when she had a perfectly good bedroom of her own. “I wasn’t the only one, most people in halls could stay with their parents instead. The buses aren’t very frequent, it can be hard to get to school for an early lecture.”
It was Cheng Mun doing the questioning that day. “Stella, we have information—” She was familiar with this formulation. That meant someone else had told them, or else they simply suspected something they wanted her to confirm. “You’ve had an unnatural relationship with Jessica Lim.”
She stalled. “Unnatural relationship?”
“Please, Stella.” Cheng Mun looked pained. “Don’t pretend you don’t understand. Are you a lesbian? Is Jessica Lim your girlfriend?”
“Does it matter?” No response. Stupid question, she should know by now that everything mattered. Had they spoken to Jessica? “I suppose,” she began, picking her words carefully, “we might have experimented a bit. Young girls often do. I don’t know if you could say we had a relationship.”
“I’m not here to judge you, Stella. We’re just concerned that if someone knows about your unnatural relationship, they could use it to blackmail you. Is that what happened? Did someone blackmail you into joining this conspiracy?”
“No, of course not. It was hardly anything.”
“You shared a room for two whole years.”
“She’s a very dear friend.”
There was a kind of grim satisfaction as he took his next few notes. She tried not to reveal anything of herself beyond a kind of bland wholesomeness, and her interrogators seemed aware of this game, constantly on the alert for any chink of personality she let slip.
“Are you still a lesbian, Stella?” She had no answer to that, and found that she couldn’t meet his eye. “Do you have a girlfriend now?” She could at least shake her head to that. “What happened to Jessica?”
“She’s married to a nice man now, a teacher. I went to their wedding.”
“Do you ever wish you could become normal, Stella?”
“I am normal.”
“Stella, you’re supposed to be a good Catholic girl, remember? What would your God say about this?”
“God is compassionate. I think God wants me to be happy.”
“Doesn’t God want you to be obedient first?” She said nothing. “Stella, what would your father say if he knew what you’ve done?”
She could say nothing to that either, but to her horror she felt her eyes twitch, and then her nose. Tears threatened to spill, but she was afraid to wipe them away in case he hadn’t noticed them. She stayed very still, feeling his eyes probing away at her skull.
He leant back. “Enough for today,” he said, not unkindly.
•
After a while, they seemed to trust her, and Cheng Mun even allowed her into his office. “No point going to the cold room,” he smiled. “Much more comfortable here.” He made her coffee. He only had instant, but it still felt like a special treat, a hot drink made just for her. She watched childishly as he stirred in the condensed milk, then placed the mug in front of her.
He let her drink in silence for a bit. When she seemed relaxed and settled, he began. “Stella, we know you’re not a Communist.” She nodded. They must know she was no danger, or they would not be treating her so gently. “You’re not a bad girl. But we think you’re naïve. And that’s risky, it’s very easy for people to make use of you.”
“I don’t think anyone is making use of me.”
“Of course you don’t think so. They won’t make it so obvious.”
“Are you still talking about the church? No one would do a thing like that.”
“Stella, you don’t know the people we’re talking about. They will infiltrate anywhere, yes, even a church, in order to achieve their objective. I know you don’t want to believe me, but some of the people you think are your friends are actually manipulating you to get what they want. Of course you’re too young to remember the Emergency.”
“We talked about it in history. I know what happened.”
“I was there. We saw what these Communists would do. For them, it’s like a religion. That’s why Communists don’t believe in God, they have their own gods. Every day we would read in the newspaper, so many people killed. They shot police, plantation owners, anyone who got in their way. And they also did this—not just openly fighting the state, they also joined legitimate organisations and tried to subvert them from within.”
She was silent, absorbing this. “But that sounds like a thriller, not my life. All we do is have meetings. I make the tea.”
“Stella, you have a good job, why would you get involved in this? If you spent more time on your work, you could be a department head in a few years.”
“I don’t want to be a department head. I like teaching.”
“Is that what they told you to say? Because you would earn more money as a department head? Stella, you mustn’t be ashamed of that. We live in a meritocracy. If you earn more money then it’s because you’re clever, you work harder than others. Why do you talk about being fair all the time? Do you think some people earn
too much?”
“I never said that.”
“But you complain that these maids, these people you are trying to help, they earn too little. If some people earn too little, then some people must be earning too much. Am
I right?”
The feeling of helplessness that she felt in each session was growing on her. Was that really what she was saying? It was impossible to argue. Every word that came from her mouth could be turned round to condemn her further.
“Stella, I know you mean well, you’re doing this out of the kindness of your heart. But these things you’re doing can be used to destabilise the government. People in your group are talking about organising protests. Holding rallies to raise awareness. Can’t you understand that Singapore is a small country, we can’t allow anti-establishment forces like this to proliferate?”
“We’re not anti-establishment.”
“You think Singapore has always been like this,” he went on, as if she had not spoken. “We used to be poor. In one generation we have improved so much. Look at our airport. Look at our housing. They’ve just opened the new MRT network. When you get out, you’ll be able to ride on it, and think how far we’ve come. Why are you attacking our progress? Why do you want to throw all this away?”
He seemed genuinely angry. She carefully put her coffee, now cold, barely touched, on the edge of the desk. “I couldn’t see suffering and not do anything about it.”
“You think these people are suffering?” His face was an ugly sneer. “Foreign workers. They come and tell you all kinds of sob stories. You think they don’t laugh at you behind your back for believing them? And then you fight for all kinds of rights for them. What rights do they deserve? They’re already lucky that we let them in here. We pay them more than they could ever earn in their own country.”
“Even if you’re right, that’s just a difference of opinion. It doesn’t make me a traitor.”
“Stella, still so stubborn. I must say I’m disappointed in you. I’m trying to explain to you that this is how the Marxists work. The United Front. They will get all these workers on their side, until they have enough support for their so-called uprising. And then blood will flow and they will bring down the government. Do you want to be part of that?” She shook her head. “Then go back to your cell and think hard whose side you are on.”
Later that night, she heard music—a choir, singing hymns, from some distance away. Was it people from her church? She tried joining in, but her singing voice was rusty from lack of use, so she just listened, her face pressed against the cool cement of the outside wall. After a few minutes, she saw flashing lights dip in through the narrow window. The bark of a police loudspeaker, and then silence.
•
The nature of time seemed to change. When she was in the questioning room, it seemed to stand still or jump at random. Sometimes she was surprised to get back to her cell and find it was dark. Other times, she’d ask how long she’d been there and it was only a couple of hours. They could have been lying, of course, but she didn’t think they’d stoop to that.
She was in court, they brought her there blindfolded again. The judge handed down a detention order, as expected, and she was back in her cell. Mid-Autumn came and went. She was given a mooncake with her lunch and allowed an extra family visit. “Do you celebrate the Lantern Festival?” Devin asked, as if testing how Chinese she was. Then she was in court again. The detention order was extended.
Siew Li and Mollie popped into her cell now and then, mostly silent, holding her hand when she felt unwell. She tried to conjure up Jessica too, but that wasn’t very convincing, maybe because the real Jessica was outside, and it was too easy to imagine her walking freely through the open air, pushing a pram through the Botanic Gardens, living a whole life that didn’t include Stella. Better to stay in the dark with the dead, let her aunt and mother comfort her.
The questioning started to feel circular. She was very consistent in her answers, and hoped they believed her. It was easy to be consistent if you stuck to the truth. Sometimes they mentioned Jessica, which was upsetting, and sometimes her dead mother, which didn’t bother her as much as they seemed to think it would. What did they want? She began giving them all the names they wanted, it didn’t matter, her stepmother said they’d been to her room and taken her diaries, her address book, all the loose bits of paper that looked important. They’d even been through her wastepaper basket.
It was a confession they were after, it seemed, but she had to say the right things. She maintained that there had been no conspiracy, or at least none that she had been aware of. Then how had she been exposed to Marxist ideas? “I haven’t been exposed to Marxist ideas.” How would she recognise Marxist ideas, if she hadn’t read any Marx? “I don’t know.” So she could have been exposed to Marxist ideas. “I suppose it’s possible.”
Devin was asking the questions, which usually meant they were going to be difficult. “Stella,” he said. “Do you know how long you’ve been staying here with us?”
As if she were a guest. “I’m not sure exactly. A few months?”
“Five months, Stella. If you were pregnant, you would be showing by now.” He chuckled, and then his eyes hardened. “But of course you can’t get pregnant, can you? How can you get pregnant if you only play around with other girls?”
She said nothing. There was no point reacting, this was just one of the random jibes they would fling at her from time to time. The pointless cruelty of a bored child poking a caged animal.
“Stella, all your friends have confessed. They’ve all betrayed you. There’s no point denying it any more. You’re only making trouble for yourself. Who are you trying to protect? No one is protecting you.”
She felt, more than any other emotion, sheer exhaustion. “Which friends?”
“Jackson Cheng, your ringleader. Kevin de Souza. That girl from your church, Frances Ling.” And he went on, listing people she had heard of and people she hadn’t. So many people detained? She lost count after sixteen. “I don’t know most of them,” she said.
“Do you know where these people are now, Stella?” She shook her head. “Packing their things, ready to be released. Soon it will be only you left, Stella. I get paid to be here, I can go home in the evening to see my family. But you?
“Why do you keep saying you don’t know them? When we show them your picture, they said yes, she’s part of the conspiracy.”
“That’s not true.”
“How many times must I tell you, Stella? These people are so good at infiltrating that you can be working for them without knowing it. What was it that made you join the group?”
“I was concerned for the foreign workers. I could see that they weren’t being treated well. We had a maid at home. She had one day off a week, and that was considered quite generous of my family.”
“A lot of people have maids, Stella, and they don’t become Marxists. Who invited you to join the group?”
“I can’t remember exactly. I was talking to some people over coffee after service, and a couple of them volunteered.”
“Was Charlie Jay in the coffee shop?”
“He joined us sometimes. I can’t remember if he was there that day.”
“So isn’t it possible that he was the one who invited you
to join?”
“It’s possible. Why does it matter?”
“Stella, I thought schoolteachers were supposed to be clever. If Charlie Jay was the ringleader, then of course this is how he would recruit people. Do you think he would be so obvious, come up to you and say, hey, do you want to be a Communist? No, he is more subtle.” He pronounced it sub-tel. “He knows you have a kind heart, so he tells you society unjust this, society unfair that, and before you know it you have been radicalised by him.”
“I don’t think I’ve been radicalised.”
“But you always say, society treats these people badly, society neglects those people. That’s how Marxists talk. If you’re talking like this
, then it must be because someone has infected you with left-wing sentiments.”
It was always like this, the circularity, the dead-end logic. She felt her brain rebel, refuse to think of another argument. What was the point? And perhaps placing her in this state was their goal. A further prison in the mind.
“Then say that’s what happened. Why don’t you let me go? If I didn’t know what was going on, if I was innocent, if you say everyone else has already confessed, why do you still need me?”
“You have to confess as well, Stella. A proper confession. Everything you’ve done. You’ve already been here for so many months. If we let you out now with nothing, it will look like we made a mistake. The old man will lose face. Do you think he’ll be happy about that?”
She said nothing.
“It’s your choice. We can apply for another detention order if we need to. We’ll get it. You’re a danger to society, we can hold you for as long as we like. You don’t look rehabilitated to me, Stella, you aren’t being very co-operative today. Do you know how long Chia Thye Poh has been in detention now? Twenty-one years. And we’ll hold him for longer, because he’s stubborn and won’t confess. He says, how can he renounce communism if he’s not a Communist? But only a Communist would be so stubborn. He was young when he came in, now he’s not. Do you want to be like him? It’s up to you, Stella. Everything is up to you.”
•
Her cousin Janet came to see her one weekend. “I brought you biscuits,” she said without preamble, patting a blue tin of butter cookies. “And your dad said you want books. I brought you The Screwtape Letters and this Peter Marshall one. Don’t write in it, it’s Winston’s.”