by Ho Sok Fong
Another turn in conversation. A return to the original topic.
“That’s what it’s like in Ah O’s house now. You know, ‘we’ll keep on living together but you pretend not to see me, and I’ll pretend not to see you.’ If something goes missing, act like you don’t know who took it; if the window’s broken, act like you don’t know who did it. If someone empties out all the drawers, slashes all the clothes, and the chicken soup ends up as dish-soap soup—well, the house must be haunted.”
“You see,” said my mother, “even in that situation, life goes on.”
The light above her head flickered off and on. The butterflies on the shade kept turning black. I imagined a naughty child hiding in the corner, playing with the switch.
I knew this Ah O they were talking about. He was the short man who ran the motorcycle garage near our house. People said he was too stupid to finish primary school. That he couldn’t even write his own name. But if someone made a joke about how dumb his first wife was, he’d sigh, then laugh, then say, “You’re right, she’s totally useless, she doesn’t get this is how it works. I feed her and I clothe her and she just stays at home picking fights with me. I never even say anything back. So useless. She just can’t let it go.”
“Ah O’s kind of stupid, isn’t he?”
“His mom really likes the mistress he brought home.”
“She goes around telling everyone how hard-working this new woman is, but her daughter-in-law makes such a fuss. Apparently the daughter-in-law never stops yelling, and her son never has a bad word to say back.”
“What? Come on, how could his mom not be disgusted by the whole situation?”
“That’s just how it works!”
The world is such a strange place. This disgusting pattern just keeps on repeating. I felt myself getting angry—of course the one with all the power didn’t need to argue! When you’re the one with the torturous monologue droning through your head all day and night, of course you need to shout. You have to get it out. Men don’t hear that voice. They keep going just as they please, not hearing anything at all.
“Here, have some water.”
The old woman handed us each a cup of mineral water. We pierced the plastic film over the top with our straws and fell silent to sip it.
More time passed, and the hairdresser reappeared. She had changed into an outfit with a maroon sequinned jacket and reapplied her lipstick, as if on her way out somewhere.
“It’s been half an hour,” my mother reminded her.
“You’re right,” she said. “You should be about done.”
She went to stand behind my mother and carefully began unraveling her hair from the curlers. It hung limply down her neck. I had a clear view from where I was sitting, and could sense the hairdresser’s panic. A hair clip clattered into the dish on top of the cart.
The other women must have noticed too, but no one made any comment. If there was no way it could be covered up, then they would say something. From the back, my mother’s hair was obviously ruined, but it wasn’t so apparent from the front. I felt a stab of sympathy, but thought that if I kept quiet the hairdresser might be able to fix it. She had better try, before she headed out anywhere.
She wasn’t smiling, presumably because she was worried. Her hands were working at lightning speed, like a student scrambling to finish an exam paper. Within about ten minutes, she had replaced all the curlers and slathered on an even thicker layer of lotion. She wrapped the big white towel back around my mother’s head.
“So I have to wait longer?” asked my mother.
“Another half an hour should do it,” mumbled the hairdresser. She looked exhausted. She was still young, but I had the feeling that those shadows on her face never went away.
“Curly hair suits you,” one of the women said to my mother.
My mother rested her eyes. Or maybe she was genuinely trying to sleep. I was cold and hungry, and it struck me that the hairdresser probably was too. We all were. It wasn’t easy money, this hairdressing business. Streaks of shadow danced across the window, some dark, some lighter, creating a kind of optical illusion, making me feel like I was standing outside, looking in on someone’s life. Sometimes, the radio added to the confusion. I couldn’t tell whether the wail of a siren was from an ambulance or a police car, and whether it was coming from the radio drama or out in the street. Couldn’t tell at all.
The radio drama ended and a jingle bounced through the air. A presenter cheerfully announced, “Dear listeners, it is now thirty minutes past twelve.” One by one, the women got up and left, saying they had to make lunch.
The old woman emerged from the kitchen.
“We’ve got nothing to eat,” she said to the hairdresser.
The hairdresser opened a drawer and rummaged around. The old woman, my mother, and I watched as she closed it and anxiously opened another, and then another. Eventually, she gave up.
“I’m going to pick up the boy, so I’ll buy something on the way. I’ll be back soon.”
She picked up her handbag and rushed out. The three of us stood at the door like we owned the place, watching her hop onto her red Kancil scooter. She was wearing a pair of silver stilettos but moved as fast as someone fleeing a haunted house. Or maybe that was just how it seemed to me—after all, this was the second time she’d vanished right before our eyes. The scooter bounded off like a deer released from a cage.
Time, time. Time is hair. Light and mirrors. Dozing and nodding off. The sticky weight of the afternoon, the grumble of the radio.
“I’ve lost track,” said my mother. “How long has it been now?”
“I don’t know.”
“She’s still not back. Didn’t she leave just after twelve? I thought the primary schools let out at half past one.”
“I don’t know. Maybe the school’s far away, or she stopped off to do some shopping first.”
“But how long before she comes back? Aren’t you hungry?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“What’re you looking at?”
“Money,” I said, offhandedly. I was examining the table. Rich people seem to enjoy this thing of collecting low-denomination bills and using them as decoration. There were dozens of currencies from all over South East Asia—one ringgit, five pesos, three hundred baht, five hundred thousand rupiah. Heads of state, founding fathers, and other historical personages were pressed flat and harmless beneath the glass, covering the whole of the tabletop, their faces frozen in eternal, stately smiles. Their eyes looked off to unknown places far beyond the salon walls.
My mother glanced at the table. “It’s cold in here,” she said, hunching her shoulders. “Aren’t you cold? Much more of this and I’ll freeze to death. I’m going to get some sun.”
With the white towel still wrapped around her head, she opened the door and stepped outside.
When the old woman reemerged from the kitchen, we were the only two left. She told me that her son had collected the notes on the table.
“He traveled all over the place. They’re from when he went abroad on business.”
“What does he do now?”
She turned her stout little body to face me. There was shock in her filmy eyes, but also something else that I couldn’t quite place.
“You didn’t hear? You really are out of the loop, aren’t you.” Her eyes moistened. “He died in a car crash. He was drunk and drove into a tree.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“You see this house? Bought with the insurance payout. Belongs to my daughter-in-law and grandson.”
“Your daughter-in-law…?”
“The woman who was just doing your ma’s hair.” She lowered her voice. “She was my son’s mistress.”
I could tell that I didn’t need to ask any more questions, just listen. I pretended not to be too curious. Maybe she just wanted to talk about her son. That’s what mothers do: pull old tales from inside their rib cages and tell them to strangers. As if all it would take is
one willing listener to bring a dead person back to life.
“He went to Indonesia on business and brought her back with him. He had a wife, but she was in Singapore and never knew anything about it. Then when he died, she came rushing up here. As soon as she realized the situation, she started screaming and yelling and kicking up such a fuss. It was terrible! Fifty years old and throwing tantrums like that, I’d never seen anything like it. No one could reason with her.”
She paused for a moment, blinking furiously, trying to hold back her tears.
“We all told her to forget it. What good would it do? He was dead. My son was so good to his mistress,” she continued. “He really loved her.”
So the spacious, comfy house was a payment for the hairdresser’s youth. When she had first met him, in that distant city, she must have been so young and unworldly.
The house was beautiful. In the glare of the midday sun, purple bougainvillea climbed up the pillars to the roof, as though trying to take over the building. A line of orange bird of paradise flowers was in full, spectacular bloom. A gutsy, rule-defying happiness seemed to be hiding inside the flourishing leaves and flower stalks, waiting for scissors to come and cut it off.
When we first arrived, we had rung a bell. The old woman came out to escort us along the fence at the side of the garden, then through the salon door. Few people would have noticed this tiny side door, because it was blocked by a washing line and a leafy canna lily. If you did happen to come close, it looked like a misty mirror. You would see the quiet street flowing across its vacant, reflective surface, and you might wonder what was happening inside. If the police walked past, they would see only their own uniforms and the twinkle of their badges. They wouldn’t guess that on the other side of that mirror-like door was another mirror, big and wide and faced by empty chairs. Hairdressing salons always have too many chairs. The hairdresser hid her salon well. Of course, the set-up was perfectly ordinary. In residential areas, many homes have window glass like this, to protect against the sun. Inside, we only had to open the door and we could hear the hum of the funeral prayers on the next street, repeating over and over without pause. It occurred to me there might be a radio hiding beneath the bunches of flowers, there to broadcast the sound all day long.
Lake Like a Mirror
IF SHE’D SWERVED any harder, she would have crashed right into the lake. In the eerie twilight, the deer seemed to come out of nowhere, darting silently into the road. Of course she’d been startled. And for a few seconds all she’d wanted was to run—throw caution to the wind, shake off gravity, be gone.
In recent years, she’d be watching students bent over their desks, pens softly scratching, and a scene from the nature channel would float into her mind. A herd of elk in long grass, nestled meekly against one another. She had no idea how they grew or reproduced but, ever since that program, she thought of them often. Their chestnut fur and affection for each other. How they were wary by nature, and never spoke—at least not that humans could hear—and liked to chew on leaves. They probably had fleas, there was no way around that; every animal does. But, then again, maybe none of this was true. Maybe it was all wrong. It wasn’t based on anything, and biology had never been her strong suit.
No one ever broke the rules. Hushed chatter rose from the desks, occasionally crescendoing into the crash of an ocean wave, or the clamor of a wet market. Sometimes a question would leave the students deathly silent. Sometimes an eager voice would pipe up and shatter it.
“I don’t think things are as bad as the protagonist makes out.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The narrator is so fixated on her own suffering, it’s way too heavy-handed. The novel opens with ‘Fear torments me, making me almost lose my mind.’ Right from the start, it’s just one crazy woman ranting to herself.”
“But the tone is very detached. What’s your basis for calling it heavy-handed?”
“I actually like the victim,” someone else chimed in. “Maybe she enjoys the misery. Do you think it’s easy to write from a victim’s perspective?”
“It’s an easy way to win sympathy from a reader.”
Bursts of laughter, sighs, some students nodding, others shaking their heads.
A brief debate. Whispers over the desks from those who didn’t participate. She waved her hands to quiet them down, pressing lightly on the air, as though conducting an orchestra.
“Do we have to rush to a conclusion? Are there clear answers, or could it be that the ending is left open to interpretation?”
She liked talking to them. Their voices filled the seminar room, rising and falling like bouncing cicadas.
“But is it so difficult just to say what happened? Why does it have to be so ambiguous?” said one student.
“This is why I hate metafiction,” said another, picking up her books and hugging them to her chest as she walked out. “It’s too hard to understand.”
Even the sighs and complaints sounded like the low moan of a plucked string.
There was a telecom tower outside the window. Through the slits in the blinds, it looked small and far away, like a tiny decorative sticker that kept sliding into her line of vision. When the pollution was bad, it was hardly visible, but in the evenings, driving home along the expressway, she could see it clearly in the distance, tip flashing boldly. An inland lighthouse, high above the sea of lights below, alone and cheerless in its corner of the night sky.
Our lives depend on it, she’d think to herself, every so often. Imagine that. Without it we’d be so much lonelier. But the tower itself didn’t know. It sent out hundreds of thousands of messages, every single day, and it had no idea.
For a long time, she’d been careful to steer clear of trouble at work. She was thirty-five and had been in her position at the university for four years, but still felt like a baby just learning to crawl. The most she ever spoke was while teaching. And sometimes she wondered what those docile young elk took away from her seminars. Another day rolled past, and what had she said? Had she been careful enough? Could someone have misinterpreted her words? Had she been true to herself? She’d been running through this checklist since her very first day.
“They’re very young. They may look like adults, but inside they’re still children. In many ways, they don’t yet know right from wrong, or understand the potential consequences of their actions. As their teachers, we have to be extremely careful what we say.”
This was said with such seriousness that she almost wanted to laugh. But no one else in the room seemed to find it amusing. Several teaching contracts had expired, and would not be renewed. This was announced at the meeting. Announced, not discussed: the committee had made its decision. Very little was said. Items were read out and token comments were added, as usual. It was a routine affair, during which no one would object and nothing would change.
The colleague beside her sighed softly. She heard him shift closer. “Better not go causing problems around here,” he whispered. “Don’t be like them. Sued, fired … Didn’t you start at the same time as her? Did you know her?”
She said that she wasn’t sure. Maybe in passing.
At the front, the chair was still giving his earnest speech.
“Respect other people. Know where the lines are, and make sure you stick to them. You need to be vigilant, because your students are sensitive, and so are we. Very, very sensitive.”
She flipped through the meeting notes on her lap.
A slogan from the government’s public service department was printed along the bottom of the last page: “In service to our country and its people.”
Her parents had also been public servants. Her mother a primary school teacher, and her father a primary school headmaster. From time to time, the same slogan had appeared in their house, emblazoned on a new mug or towel or umbrella or fountain pen or folder; souvenirs from training courses her parents had attended during the school holidays. She’d never thought much of it. The umbrellas would break, t
he towels would get moldy, the mugs would smash. Now, for the first time, she felt like the sentence was trapped in her chest, as hard and unyielding as a stone.
“Remember: it’s your job to be more sensitive than they are.”
I am very sensitive, she thought. It was a feeling like a thorn buried in her forehead, ready to work its way out through the corner of her mouth and pop the bubbles of chat and laughter that hung in the air. She carefully avoided it, wary of snags, but still felt uncertain. Most days, she parked under a shady tree; most days, she sat there in the driver’s seat, staring into space. Windows rolled down and the world outside them surging like a sea. But she was inland, all was still. No waves. A light breeze blew through the parking lot, rippling the surface of the Biology department’s fishpond.
She had an excellent memory. She could churn out names, dates, and author biographies without thinking, and would write them in long lines across the whiteboard. It intimidated people. Perhaps it was even too excellent a memory, because everything she heard stayed with her. It took a long time for her to let things go.
“We all have to learn to forget what isn’t worth remembering,” said her mother.
“All I have is a pile of things I need to remember,” she replied.
She reminded her mother, who was killing a fish, that the fish was already dead; that she couldn’t kill it twice.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” said her mother, slicing open the belly and scraping away the innards. She remembered how once, when she was little, she had asked why fish couldn’t close their eyes. Her mother had said that fish saw everything, and that was why eating them made you clever.
“In the end, aren’t we all just fish on someone’s cutting board?”
“Go back to your books!” snapped her mother. “You must have better things to do. Make yourself useful!”
She went onto the balcony to keep her father company. He was smoking, looking out at the familiar view, and his face lit up at the sight of her. There was a Chinese primary school on the hill opposite, producing intermittent bursts of clarinet music. Today, she liked it, although her mother claimed to have heard sparrows that were more rousing. Every so often, names were called out over the speakers. “Huang Weixing, please report to the office.” Or: “Ye Yunxin, Ye Yunxin, where are you?” And everyone in the surrounding area would hear these names, and know that these people were being looked for. She imagined a teacher standing before a rank of students, yelling into a megaphone. She imagined those Chinese schoolchildren lined up as straight and orderly as soldiers. A tiny Communist Party—that’s what she and her classmates at the convent used to say. She didn’t know any of the Chinese kids. They were just voices floating down the hill, sometimes drowned out by the shrieking of other nearby children or the sound of the television. She didn’t know why she’d been so resistant to becoming a primary school teacher; it would have been much simpler than her current job. So much more relaxed.