by Lu Huiyi
“The problem is that you’ve given up on yourself,” his mother said one day. It was the kind of casual remark that had a high chance of becoming the prelude to a big fight, and Beng sensed danger even before she had finished her sentence. The problem, really, was that she would never understand. She would never understand that in his mind, he had tried his best to forge a life outside the slums, away from the blacklist, away from the disappointed glances his mother shot his way, but even in his imagination it appeared just as crude and disappointing and mundane.
It probably wouldn’t help very much to tell her that, so Beng just shrugged and said something non-committal and a little awkward. What he did want to tell her, though, was that at the end of the day, people were all just out to use each other. And maybe he wasn’t of as much utility as this new world demanded, and maybe his mother had adapted and was doing better than he was, but what was the point of being useful when he would never be the user but only the used? But Beng didn’t think that these thoughts would make her feel any better, and so he prudently refrained from sharing them with her.
He was beginning to believe that the ugly simplicity of his world was sufficient unto itself; it didn’t need an explanation.
“Maybe you’re thinking too much,” he told her instead.
“So what are your plans?” Huat asked, having waited a tactful span of eighteen hours after Beng had been fired.
(Huat wasn’t very good at waiting.)
“Plans?” Beng asked, slow and dull.
He was sitting with his back against the wall, irritable from the afternoon heat and batting listlessly at flies. Huat slid down to join him.
“Yeah,” said Huat, undiscouraged. “You going to look for more work?”
“Not sure if there’s a point.”
“Most of the big companies are under the Gahmen, now.”
“And none of them are going to hire me.”
“There’re a few small shops, near the printing press. I could ask—”
“How’re things at the press?”
Huat shrugged.
“I dunno,” he said. “They say they’ve got a new project so I might get a bit more work. Hope so.”
“Can’t you get something at one of the Gahmen factories? Ma could.”
“They don’t like hiring degree-holders,” said Huat matter-of-factly. “I’ve been applying, though. See how. You shouldn’t give up, though.”
“They don’t want me,” said Beng. He knew he sounded like a petulant child and it made him angrier and more unreasonable. “I don’t want to keep trying if they don’t want me.”
If it was Grandfather, he would have laughed outright. If it was Mother or Father, they might have reproached him for not thinking more of the family, and for not trying hard enough to make money to feed them all. But Huat always believed in fixing himself before fixing anyone else, so he didn’t say anything like that.
“We’ll figure it out,” Huat said.
Beng laughed. It sounded hollow even to himself.
“You think so?” he said.
“We just need to make ourselves useful,” said Huat, with that easy confidence he put on whenever he thought he had to be strong for somebody else. “It’ll be fine.”
It took a long time, but eventually Beng came to terms with the fact that everyone had different gods to worship.
It was funny that he had taken so long to figure that out, since the proof had always been right under his nose. It came in the form of his father, who lived his life in reverent, all-consuming worship of things and dreams.
Father had always longed to be rich, and the further they got from being rich, the more he wanted it. But to be honest, Beng wasn’t too sure what Father would do if he did get the fortune and wealth that he so fervently sought. If he had woken up to find that he did have more money to his name than he had any idea how to spend—and assuming they didn’t get mugged and killed for it before the day was out—he probably wouldn’t quite know what to do with himself. Even before the Revival, the family had never been all that well-to-do. At this point Beng suspected that the longing for a get-rich-quick miracle had become more of a pleasant hazy abstraction to Father, than a concrete pursuit in itself. The pilgrimage had become more interesting than the destination itself; he might even be a little disappointed if he were to succeed.
Grandfather wasn’t expected to work, and he didn’t expect to either. He whiled time away smoking whatever he could put into his old-fashioned pipe, going around talking to new neighbours or beggars or anyone who would entertain him. They were initially a little concerned about his safety during his little gadabouts, but came to the realisation that in this new world, the safest people were people like Grandfather, too old and too penniless to be worthy of hurt or harassment or exploitation. Where they might have been mugged or abducted or killed for a fistful of notes, Grandfather could roam freely, unbothered and unmolested.
After his brief failure of a job, Beng spent much of his time housebound. Someone had to figure out the meals and set things in order, after all. Admittedly, nobody had asked this of him. Mother and Father had expected him to go out and find new work instead, if Beng was to be honest with himself about it. But he had grown up fancying himself as a copywriter or an administrative pencil-pusher or something nice and comfortable, and the great factories and heavy work that now ruled the economic landscape left him feeling dreary and reluctant. It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried—but nobody had any use for him out there. He didn’t fit. So Beng went on with his various little domestic duties, with a muted consciousness that sometimes rose into vastness to tell him that no, there had to be more, surely the world was designed for him to be a little more than this.
It took a while, but most of the family gradually came round to the idea that this was it—that this was home. They might not have liked it, but the alternative was far more demoralising—and if they couldn’t help thinking of it as something of a shithole, at least they had the common courtesy to not run it down in front of each other. Father, however, had no such delicacies. He spent all his time in the slums wishing he was somewhere else.
“What would you do first, if you woke up one day and found Grandma’s gold bracelets next to you?” he would ask. He asked these kinds of things all the time.
Beng’s late grandmother’s wedding trousseau had been lost when the house was reclaimed, and it wasn’t safe to go back for it. Solid gold was the currency to defeat all other modes of exchange; Father had never fully gotten over the loss.
“Buy toilet paper,” Beng said matter-of-factly. They were squatting in front of the entrance to their little hut, a little pile of scrap items laid out at their feet. Beng picked through the things Father had brought back from his daily walks. Sometimes Father managed to acquire a bit of food, or something tradable, but mostly there were a lot of useless things that he would never allow Beng to discard, like scrap metal bits and spoilt tools and gears and machine parts. Beng often thought that if Father was going to occupy himself with scavenging, then he should at least try to get hold of things far more useful to the family, but that was beside the point. The point was that they had recently descended from rationing some kind of miserable half-ply nonsense to deplorable states of hygiene, and there was this old woman who peddled decent tissues and such just around the corner.
Father shrugged blithely, more interested in the chance for him to respond, than in anything Beng had just said.
“I would buy a house. A real one,” he said in placid enjoyment, as though the big houses and nice places were not solely in the hold of the powerful, the criminal and the cruel.
Beng could probably have replied by breaking into gangster rap, even, and Father would have said the exact same thing. But it seemed kinder to allow Father his delusions. There were, after all, few things more tragic than a middle-aged man.
“Investing in property is always wise,” said Father, who needed no encouragement to keep talking. It was as though homes
were but snack packs in supermarket discount racks, ripe for the taking. (But there were no more gleaming supermarkets and no more discount racks, just raspy-voiced peddlers and heavily-guarded little stalls. This was of no consequence to Father.)
He picked absently at a hole in his singlet.
“Then you let your money work for itself. If your grandfather had had the common sense to do that, back when the family had money, then we wouldn’t be here, like this, today.”
“It wasn’t him—it was the Deprivation,” Beng said.
“Maybe it was,” Father conceded easily, shrugging. His point wasn’t about Grandfather, anyway. He had slid into the oily-voiced blustering of someone who thought himself in possession of exclusive financial advice. Beng was embarrassed by the blind faith that Father had in their capacity to earn, and glad that nobody was near enough to hear him. “But you are young. You must think differently. You cannot think like a beggar. You must think like the rich. They dare to do things. You must dare to do things.”
Most of this was gibberish, of course, because the rich people nowadays were not businessmen or politicians first and foremost, but ruthless gang leaders and members of the shady underworld, whom the masses spoke of and brushed shoulders with when forced to, but knew better than to mess around with. The world was different now. They had said, in better times, that the job landscape was swiftly changing, but nothing could have prepared anyone for a transformation like this.
What was more important, though, was that Father was wrong. Father was wrong about Beng being like a beggar. Beng didn’t think that he thought like a beggar. He mucked around and did what he could (however little) for food and shelter, but he did not beg. Beggars asked for things. There was nothing he was particularly in search of—nothing he thought he would be successful in searching for anyway.
And Father was wrong on another count, for he did do things. Just not things that required a substantial amount of daring.
Just then, Mother shuffled out of the door, bleary-eyed.
Father made a tut-tutting sound, because it was past noon and not the kind of time Father expected people in his house to be waking up at. The Kohs were early risers, Father liked to say—an idea he had inherited from Grandfather and never quite lost his attachment to. Generations ago, they had been part of a long and honourable legacy of chicken farmers, who took pride in raising roosters which always crowed right on schedule. But Mother, a bride from a different dialect group, wasn’t really part of the Koh clan. Even in better times, she had liked to wake up gloriously late, long after everyone had had breakfast and gone marketing and trudged halfway through their days.
Granted, she woke up late now because she often worked night shifts at the factory, so it was now a matter of circumstance more than lineage. Unfortunately, Father was not the best at understanding circumstances.
“So late!” he snapped gruffly, tensing up in a way that was strangely reminiscent of an angry rooster puffing itself up.
“You bring money home, then you talk,” Mother shot back, watching him with something a little supercilious and hard in her expression.
They had a little outdoor cooking area right outside the hut, because fire hazards were all the rage nowadays. Mother made a beeline to it. She lifted the lid of a pot and wrinkled her nose at the tepid porridge within (Beng did the cooking, but there were good days and bad days and burnt-solid-blocks-of-porridge days), and then helped herself to it anyway.
She was dressed in a worn terry cloth nightgown—someone’s luxury buy from years past, now nearly threadbare but probably cherished more than it had ever been. Her face was a little greasy and dewy. She used to have a somewhat costly skincare regime, and had clung on to her creams and products till the very last drop. In recent times she had found herself all kinds of substitutes, taking risks with the sap of dubious-looking plants and old butter and the like. In this get-up, skin wet and raw and body thoroughly swaddled, she resembled an over-large infant.
Father watched her eat for a few moments.
“What’s for lunch?” he asked her.
She stared at him as if confused why he would be asking her this, and then looked at Beng by way of delegation.
“I found this in the stuff you brought back last night,” Beng told him, producing a can triumphantly. It was dented and a day or two past expiry, but it was meat—and fatty meat at that! Father smiled with the fierce pride of a hunter.
Mother shrugged and waved a slender hand (calloused and scabbed, but still white and slender) in gentle dismissal.
“I’m going out for lunch,” she said.
“Going out?” the two of them echoed blankly, because no café or roadside eatery would serve a meal that didn’t cost the family all its earnings for a fortnight.
She went right on eating in infuriating nonchalance.
“Where are you going?” Father asked.
A long pause. Mother examined her fingernails. Father stood his ground. There was an awkward minute or so of one-sided anticipation, before Mother raised her head and looked faintly surprised to see Father still eyeing her, expectant and waiting.
“Out,” Mother said, coolly.
The tension in the room was suddenly palpable. Beng half-expected one of them to break out into a mating dance—or a fight.
“Out for what?” said Father.
“To eat lor,” said Mother.
“This will cost a lot,” Father began.
“I put in extra hours at the factory,” Mother said, but the subtext that I BRING HOME THE BACON BECAUSE YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE A JOB was so strong that it might as well have been displayed in neon flashing letters before them all. Father was visibly quelled, but not so much so that he could not make one last-ditch attempt.
“But we have braised pork tonight,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the single tin, and suddenly Beng thought that it was he, in his ratty singlet and too-high shorts, who was most like a beggar, pleading for scraps of affection at the expense of the masculine pride of the patriarch, something he had set so much store by for much of his life.
It was a shame that Mother was not the kind of woman who could be seduced by tinned pork.
“I’m going out,” she insisted. Beng wondered who had invited her, and what for. Mother had few close friends, even in better times, and they weren’t exactly the kind of people who could afford social engagements and gatherings anymore anyway. Maybe she was moving up in the world, suddenly and in tentative bursts, in a way that the family could not quite keep up with. Was it their fault for not having worked like she had, for lingering and scavenging and lacking her daring? All Beng knew was that she was going out—but she had always been the one going out, to the drudgery of factory work, to the catcalls on the street and the dust of the fallen city—and they had no hold over someone like that.
Father knew he had lost. He rose involuntarily as she climbed gracelessly to her feet, gathering the folds of her robe around herself, and cut an incredibly sad figure as he stood behind, watching her go back indoors to prepare. His shoulders sagged in embarrassment and defeat (though those, to him, were pretty much the same thing).
In practised oblivion, Mother went breezily through the narrow room, picking up scattered accessories and belongings with an air of mild reproach, and dropping fragments of meaningless conversation like largesse. Soon, she was ready to go, and her façade of good cheer could finally be shed. She was out of the house in an instant (she almost ran), and the tin door flapped noisily in the light breeze in her wake. Beng gathered up the bits and bobs, unsure of what to say.
“She’s going to see that man,” Father said darkly, ashamed and angry.
Right in his line of vision, squashed in between their hut and the neighbouring one, was an altar. They had begun by cramming bulky keepsakes that they could not bear to throw away in that sliver of space—a folding chair, a box and such—but somehow Father had made himself an altar of odd things there instead. It was an ill-fitting addition to the cramped,
shabby quarters, a rubbishy, teetering affair constructed of stray planks, and furnished with idols and figurines and carvings he’d picked up on his scavenging walks—most either Buddhist or Taoist, and some from other faiths because risk diversification was a good thing in an uncertain climate. There was also a wooden sculpture of the Merlion, hiding amidst the party like a spot-the-difference game-piece. Grandfather, one of the most irreverent cynics Beng knew, mocked the arrangement every now and then, but to Father, this was one of the most precious aspects of the slums. Standing where he was, at the very edge of the pathetic little scene, Beng didn’t know if Father was waiting for her to return, or staring at his altar, as he was sometimes wont to do.
These weren’t her gods—she with her ability to see and seek and go further than the rest of them.
She had no use for gods like these, and no use for the drab indolent existence of their worshippers. And no matter how faithfully Father might maintain his shabby altar, they weren’t his gods either, but a mere proxy for his idols of wealth and fortune and the possibility they would bring for him and his own.
People all worshipped different gods, but every shrine was built on the hunger for possibility.
What was Beng’s god? He did not know. At seventeen he was gangly and awkward and lacked daring, a far cry from the strapping strong son that Father had probably hoped to live vicariously through. But he recognised this with very little self-disgust, if at all. Beng knew, had always known, that he wasn’t marked for greatness. He wasn’t good for much. But somehow, he had always believed that he was enough. That he wasn’t helpless. Beng believed that if he persisted long enough, and worked hard enough, he would be able to carve a path out of even the most trying situations.