by Ho Sok Fong
An Yah stood outside and carefully slotted the door panels into the notches in the doorstep. When she had finished, she shook out her arms, feeling as though she could hardly lift them. Even her mother-in-law, the shop’s original and longest-serving resident, had given up on them eventually. Yet every morning when she opened up the shop, An Yah lifted the panels out of their slots and carried them over to lean against the wall. Then, at closing time, she carried them back again. Since Big Man had been gone she’d had to do it all by herself. The panels were thick and solid and who knew how heavy. Her daughters struggled to manage just one.
I should tidy up, thought An Yah, worrying that there would be nowhere for her second daughter to sit when she arrived. But she was so tired. She sank into a chair on the walkway outside and watched the sun set through the trees opposite the door, its light marching slowly along the gravel road. A whole day of selling things, doing the inventory, restocking, checking the accounts. It was exhausting. The children had grown up and moved out, so she could be a little more relaxed about finances, and since Big Man had passed away she’d been expanding the stock. Now, merchandise flooded from the shop all the way to the little kitchen at the back, and had taken possession of the sofa and armchairs that no one ever sat on anyway. Goods occupied almost all available space, leaving only a tiny patch of floor for her to sweep every day. The rest she left to the rats and the cockroaches.
Her second daughter pulled up outside the shop. She parked her white car in the street and stepped out holding an assortment of grocery bags.
“I bought you horseshoe biscuits,” she announced.
She pushed the panels open and sneezed as soon as she came inside. “What’s that smell?” she asked, setting down the bags. With the doors closed, the hay scent had intensified. Even though she didn’t have a particularly sensitive nose, she was instantly guided to the source and cried out in surprise: “When did this turn up? Didn’t you throw it out ages ago?”
An Yah didn’t hear her. She had gone into the kitchen to prepare dinner. Her daughter drew a bucket of water from the tap and started wiping down surfaces in the shop. When An Yah came out to tell her the food was ready, the shop floor was soaking wet. Her daughter was kneeling in front of the chest, digging out dark clumps from the bottom and sniffing them.
“What are they?” she asked, dubiously.
An Yah stared for a while. “Who knows.”
“I didn’t think we still had any of these chests. It’s in quite good condition…”
“Have it, if you want,” said An Yah.
Her daughter was still puzzled. “But didn’t you sell it to that Indian junk collector?”
An Yah couldn’t remember what she might have sold or thrown out. She was old, she forgot a lot of things. It was only natural. But what she said was, “You’re never home, what would you know?”
They ate in near silence, the only sound coming from a soap playing on the television. An Yah had cooked the vegetables from Wood’s delivery that morning. Carrots and broccoli. She had even cut the carrots into little flowers. Every so often, she or her daughter glanced at the television. The commercials came on. They chatted half-heartedly, in an uneven back-and-forth. An Yah found her daughter’s questions tedious. Her daughter felt the same way about hers.
“You don’t eat much,” said her daughter.
“I’m old,” she replied.
A little later, An Yah asked, “So your work’s all in English?”
“Yeah,” said her daughter.
“How do you say ‘old’?”
“Ohh—”
“Ouuuuu—er—!” An Yah drew out the sound. Her daughter continued to eat and glance at the television.
“Sounds like an old dog,” said An Yah.
That night, she tossed and turned, listening to the steady breathing of her daughter. At three in the morning, she got up to go to the bathroom and heard a noise coming from the shop. It sounded like a rat gnawing on something. Worried it might be gnawing on her stock, she took a flashlight and went to investigate.
It was too dark to see. The scent clung to the tepid air—could it be attracting the rodents? The flashlight was dim. She skimmed the beam over the counter, then a line of shoes and plastic sandals, a pile of boxes. Nothing unusual, until it landed on the chest. Her mind drifted backward, as if fast asleep, sifting through yesterday, the day before, and she found herself wondering: How is this thing still here? The beam continued to rove the room, briefly illuminating the door. It was tightly closed. The yellow circle of light flitted across the floor at the front, showing up the crack in the cement, full of grime that sweeping couldn’t touch. Little children liked to poke their fingers inside, as though hoping to unearth treasure. Something caught in her nose. She sniffed, and there was the serpentine trail of the scent again. All of a sudden, she understood her daughter’s shock at seeing the chest: it was true, she had thrown it out. She remembered now. She shivered and turned back into the bedroom, where she lay down and pulled up her quilt.
She still couldn’t sleep. Sadness crept through her body and she started to cry. I don’t want to be alone, she thought, over and over again. Life keeps on going but there’s no joy anymore. The floorboards felt very cold. She knew there would be no response to her crying. She refused to move in with her daughters and their husbands. Their marriages had enough problems without her adding to them. But the loneliness was terrifying. In the darkness of the universe, her fate had been decided. She felt her strength wither. Life was an infinite sea of bitterness. She thought: If I fall asleep and never wake up, that’s fine by me. Dawn was approaching by the time she finally drifted off.
She woke to her daughter’s yelling. The room was filled with brilliant sunshine. She scrambled up, alarmed by the noise, and hurried downstairs, where she picked her way around the scattered goods and arrived at the doors. Her daughter had pushed them open and was standing outside, staring in horror at the metal air vent that ran along the top of the shopfront. Someone had cut a large hole.
She told her daughter about the disturbance in the night. Evidently, the culprit had been scared off his nighttime activities by her flashlight.
“Something could have happened,” said her daughter.
They called the police, but since there was no real damage, the police were unconcerned.
“No harm done,” said one officer, a tall man with a booming voice. “Nothing taken, no one hurt. Nothing for us to do here.”
The two officers who had responded to the call were very big, and their presence made the shop feel very small. With the chest there, space was even more restricted. One of them stood on the doorstep, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, exhaling clouds of smoke into the shop. His eyes were fixed on one, lonely flip-flop that had fallen inside the chest. Neither policeman was in uniform; they wore their own checked cotton shirts, and somehow this relaxed attire made them seem even taller and sturdier. An Yah looked toward the door and saw them silhouetted against the light outside, casting enormous shadows across the floor, shrugging their hulking, gorilla-like shoulders.
She was unhappy with their comments, but said nothing.
“You’ve been very lucky,” said the one without a cigarette.
“No damage. He didn’t get inside. In the kampung down the road, thieves will even steal the water meter from your outside tap! Those things are worth seventy, eighty bucks. They’ve taken them from so many houses, we can’t keep up. Best not to keep valuables outside.”
The two of them paced back and forth in front of the door and then went to inspect the hole. The smoker dropped his butt on the floor and ground it out with his foot. He stared at the hole for quite some time, hands on hips, then scratched his chin and muttered, “Huh. Impressive. That metal is thick.”
Then he sniffed. “What’s that smell?” he asked, turning to face An Yah.
The other one had noticed it too, and held his nose raised like a dog’s. They came inside, sniffing enthusiastically unt
il a breeze blew through the shop and the trail went cold.
“What is it?” they asked one another.
An Yah felt her irritation rise. They were useless. She regretted having called them. These bastards were only good for stirring up trouble, not for resolving anything. She shouldn’t have stayed up all night fretting over nothing; it had clouded her judgment. She had no idea how to reply to their question, but her daughter stepped in: “Our fridge is broken.”
The policeman seemed doubtful. “Is that so?”
Without waiting for a reply, he marched into the kitchen. An Yah’s pulse quickened. She couldn’t take her eyes off the chest. She knew she shouldn’t look at it, but the more she told herself that, the less power she had to look away. The policeman came back out, shaking his head at An Yah, chuckling.
“Towkay, your fridge isn’t cold. Much longer and your vegetables will be ruined.”
She instantly relaxed, nodding obediently. For a few weekends in a row, none of her children had come over and she hadn’t bothered to cook. With every delivery from Wood, the contents of the fridge had grown, until she’d completely lost track. It was crammed with shriveled produce. Tomatoes, radishes, cabbage, old tofu.
“How about I give you some?” she said.
Satisfied that they’d done their job, the policemen strolled out of the shop. As they left, one turned to An Yah.
“You know,” he said, “this kind of thing isn’t really a police matter. Next time, take a look around yourself. If there’s less than five hundred ringgit’s worth of damage, best to let it be.”
An Yah watched them cross the road and disappear down a side street. Then she and her daughter set about moving the chest into the kitchen. It wasn’t an easy process: An Yah had to clear away piles of merchandise, and then the two of them had to half-drag, half-carry the chest along the newly cleared route.
“Last night I suddenly remembered why it’s so heavy,” said An Yah. “This isn’t Dad’s gramophone chest, it belonged to your granny.”
“To Ah Nei? You mean we had two?” Her daughter was surprised. She clasped her hands to her face and sighed with relief. “I thought you had thrown it away and then regretted it, and secretly gone to get it back.”
“Why would I do that? There’s too much stuff here as it is.”
“That’s what you’re like, though! You never throw anything away. You live in a glorified trash heap!”
“Nonsense.” An Yah was getting angry. “Now you’re just nagging.”
“The whole house is full of junk!”
“If you don’t like it, don’t come over!”
Her daughter did not reply.
The wood of the chest was in perfect condition, not rotten at all.
“If Ah Nei were here, she’d hack it up for firewood…”
“Things like this are always turning up in this house…” said her daughter.
The house had been home to so many dead people.
An Yah knocked on the bottom layer of wood inside the chest. It sounded hollow. The nails were firmly in place. She hunted around the kitchen for a claw hammer to pry them out, pushing aside towels and cleaning rags drying on a line. When she opened the drawers, cockroaches and geckos scurried out in all directions.
Other people’s kitchens weren’t so stuffed with cupboards. Big Man’s uncles had made these ones. Aside from the big display cabinets, all the furniture in the shop was at least fifty or sixty years old. The little stools, the long sideboard used for ironing, the ancestral shrine. The wood was old and hard, exceptionally sturdy, varnished to a high shine, all as heavy to lug around as those doors she carried in and out, every morning and evening.
“I sold one off, this one was probably under Ah Nei’s bed or something. How it got out here, I have no idea. I was confused. I forgot which one it was. I just assumed it was the one your dad kept his gramophone in.”
Finally, she found an ax in the back of a drawer.
“Stand back,” she warned her daughter.
And she started hacking the chest apart.
Summer Tornado
THE FERRIS WHEEL PAUSED in its rotation for one, electrifying minute, and Su Qin’s basket was right at the top. Sunday afternoon, dazzling sunlight, glittering halos all across the park. Viewed from the summit of that enormous, steel-boned loop, the carnival below was a heady whirlpool of swirling, billowing colors, spinning too fast for her to focus. Her body felt as if it were about to break apart and scatter, like a sheet of paper blowing through a metal grate, ready to be snatched by the wind. The wheel was hardly a rollercoaster or a flying saucer ride, but still, icy terror poured down from the crown of her head. It was as if all that empty air had tied her up and now held her teetering over the sheer drop, and if she could just look up toward the sky there’d be something there to save her, but no matter what she tried, she couldn’t lift her head to see it.
“Today, there will be, changes, I, we, we must—”
The sentence cut off there. The wheels of the cassette tape kept turning, click-click, like a rolling skull, click-click, its vacant eyes seeking the spinning world outside. Su Qin wanted to say something else but all she had to offer was blankness. She couldn’t turn it into voice. When she was left alone, when she felt abandoned or as if she needed to take charge, she would tell herself stories. But now, trying to talk into the microphone, she was ridiculous. She tried to force out a sound: Oh—
Her own voice, recorded, played back. She’d never understood why people seemed to resist her, until she heard herself through the headphones. Her voice was tight and anxious, as if a snake were hiding inside it, hissing between the sentences.
She had attempted to change her accent but couldn’t, and on top of that a certain stubborn timbre remained, like scales sticking to the ends of her words. She drew out her I and listened as it slowly morphed into an O. The tape deck’s batteries were running down and the stretched syllable sounded like an animal howling in a cave. During the parts of the tape where she hadn’t recorded yet, the machine rustled quietly.
Her first ten years abroad she’d been hopeful. She’d gone to work in Singapore after graduation and, a few years later, followed a man to Taipei to get married. Back then, she had believed that if you didn’t take risks things would always stay the same. Nothing good would ever happen. Wonderful things awaited you, as long as you were careful enough; as long as you held the tray steady and didn’t let them slide off and smash.
She had worn her orange flip-flops to the park. A sunny orange, allowing her to stride out with confidence. This would be a fresh start. They would forget the past. Old misunderstandings were just lingering shadows, that was all, and they would disperse soon enough.
For the past few days, she had been plagued by a nagging sense that everything was turning to dust, a thought that ticked like a clock inside her body. It was especially acute at night, just before she fell asleep, when the wind whistled past her twelfth-floor windows. From that height, nighttime Taipei lay beneath her like a flashing neon mask, inviting her to leap down and grab it. But a voice in her head would rise to soothe the sleep-crazed ramblings. It was strong and assured, a lifeline thrown down to someone drowning in a swamp. It came from so high up that she couldn’t see the source, dangling there to remind her: You still haven’t… Still hadn’t what? There were many things she “still hadn’t.” But, it seemed to say, if you look on helplessly as the rope vanishes from your hands, of course you’ll continue to drown—and then what?
Two years of feuding, and all the things they’d kept hidden had been dragged into the light. But today would not be just another outing. She was not going to keep muddling along like this. She was going to make an important decision, based on an important test.
Her body was starting to sag and she felt self-conscious in her swimsuit, so she pulled a shirt out of her backpack before leaving the basket. Then she stepped out and rejoined the clamor. Watery gurgles clashed against the giant metal spokes and technicolore
d sunlight magnified inside splashes from the pool. Shouts and laughter clung to the summertime humidity and swelled through the park. The dripping-wet crowd jostled and pushed. Everyone was grinning, barely able to see through the water streaming from their eyes.
She had not been in the water yet. She was wearing a straw hat. Brilliant sun scattered across every living creature. There were the people she had been waiting for; she followed them. There was that voice she heard every day, hanging in the air in front of her feet. That tone which said, We’re completely at ease. We accept each other as we are, no need to change. Now they were stepping across the sand and hurling themselves into the water, there they went: a husband, a son, a daughter. Inexplicably wild with delight, racing into the man-made waves. She found herself wading in after them. Suddenly, she was part of a big group of strangers, all encased in colorful inner tubes, holding their breath as they awaited the thrill of the next big wave. Her body felt weightless, too insubstantial to capsize, but the collective pretense was that the waves might drown them. It’s fine, she thought. With this many people, we’re more likely to be crushed to death.