“Maybe.” Yang looks at the inspector in drunken amazement. It is a high price to pay for a few million dollars, yet he knows it’s always about face and disgrace. Never about the crime and the hurt.
“You believe your father was guilty?”
“Guilty as sin.”
The comrades with whom Pa had shared his prison cell, his ideals. Perhaps they too have come back to settle scores with him. Some are smiling in their graves. But to him, it was more diabolical to lose your honour than to lose all your soulmates.
“What was he guilty of?” the inspector asks, his tone gentle.
Yang closes his eyes and sees his great-great-grandfather, legless, ashen white in that Qing robe and hat, flying at him. He jerks open his eyes. “You’re trying to trip me up. I thought you were here about my father’s death?”
“I was, and you have been most helpful. Get a taxi home.” The inspector pats Yang on the shoulder again and leaves.
*
When he dropped out of law school in England, Yang rang his father to say he did not want to be a lawyer dealing with the cheating upper crust and reptilian low life. To butter up his father, he said he wanted to continue in the family tradition of working for the people. Chow Sze Teck had basked in the glory of a long line of public service, starting with his great-grandfather who was a minister under the Qing Dynasty in Guangdong province. Never mind the fact that the great-grandfather was serving an inept and greedy emperor. Chow relished showing off the sepia-toned photograph of the tall, emaciated man in a courtly brocade robe. When Yang was a child, he had dreaded looking at the photo, at the sunken face in the black, brimless hat with a long, thin bunch of straw sticking out at the back and the pigtail below it. These were the trappings of the quintessential Chinese ghost. Be that as it may, the Qing nobleman had been sanctified in the family’s ancestral shrine for several generations until they had moved into the East Coast house, where the spooky altar did not fit in with the expensive marble and aquarium decor. The altar table was donated to Bright Hill Temple and the photograph of the apparition kept in the family album.
Chow was bitterly disappointed that his two-year investment in his wilful son had gone down the drain. But his soft spot for Yang saw to it that he paid from his modest salary for a humanities course in London. He was to lose his dear son forever to a plethora of -isms, including vegetarianism and alcoholism.
Born with smouldering bedroom eyes and full, womanly lips, Yang was used to having his way as a child. The boy grew tall like a basketball player, though he disdained sport. Chow was torn between love and anxiety for Yang. He worried that his son might grow up to become either a good orator or a notorious entertainer. A stranger would not have suspected that Ming and Yang came from the same parents, and Chow Sze Teck loved them both for different reasons. Ming was everything a Confucian gentleman should be, a good son and an obedient young man. By the same definition, Yang was a ruffian, clever and provocative, echoing the wild streak in his father’s younger days as a rabble-rouser.
When Yang moved to London from Birmingham at the age of 21, his free and inquisitive spirit absorbed ideas of all hues. At the hostel where he lived, posters of the US escalating its bombing of Vietnam and the My Lai massacre infuriated him so much, he never felt more alive. At the street protests against the American government and talks at the London School of Economics, he unearthed his bond with the human race. But at one forum where the speaker analysed how the other half of the world dies, the population myth and the Third World debt, he felt everyone in the lecture theatre turning to look at him for being a son of a wealthy bureaucrat in a poor country. ‘But you imperialists fleeced us dry,’ was his mental retort to the imagined stares. At LSE, he picked philosophy as his major but was more interested in reading about the torrid love affairs of Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault than existentialism and post-structuralism.
He saw that the climate in his own country of revering authority was due to the overhanging clouds of the ancient Chinese belief that it is unseemly and unprofitable to question authority. Yang was sorry about the state of affairs in his country but was too patronising to want to go home to change anything. Once when he was back for the holidays, he found the country in the midst of a transformation from a slumbering trading port to a combative industrial town. The workplace was like a war zone. People were swallowed by their work and their minds responded only to new money-making opportunities.
So he stayed on in England after his studies. The lure of the pubs and parks, free speech and free love proved irresistible to a young man who had been hungry for too long. He worked as a reporter for a small-circulation magazine on Third World development projects with First World aid money. His editor told him they were on a starvation wage so they could put themselves in the shoes of their subjects. He went a step further, going off meat to show his commitment to the hungry masses.
But it was at The Rose that he found the two great loves of his life, booze and Katherine. Each reinforced his attachment to the other. The first was more straightforward. It quenched his thirst, too much of it gave him only a hangover and he could pay for it with the money his father sent. He saw no contradiction between his drinking with his vegetarianism, claiming that if God didn’t want humanity to drink, Jesus wouldn’t have performed the miracle of turning water into wine. But Katherine was more potent than the stiffest drink. The fun-loving, moody, politically- and sexually-idealistic Irish woman had overflowing love and lust for the cute, honey-coloured Yang. One night when he violated their sacrosanct pact by going on top of her, she theorised, just when Yang was about to come, how it was gender and class, not race, that was the issue. Living with Katherine dragged his life into a downward spiral of hitting the bottle, which made him crave his emerald-eyed lover even more.
At the age of 34, when one more drink would drown him, he decided to start his so-called life again. He said goodbye to England and Katherine, and returned home, to the boundless happiness of his father. That was two years ago. He found his country in the midst of a revival of “Asian values.” Confucius was being resurrected on the altar of policy-making at the Istana, the government house where Cabinet meetings were held in secret. The political leaders reckoned that the last decade or so of industrialisation had brought with it undesirable Western values which destroyed the social fabric of the Asian nation. They set up the Family as the fundamental unit in society. Sons were to obey fathers and fathers to obey rulers in order to maintain harmony. Yang saw his father as a born-again Confucianist.
Without gainful employment, Yang spent his time teasing his father about his new religion. “But your bosses have ignored Confucius’ warning that as soon as the emperor forgets his function and begins to rule for his own sake, Heaven would withdraw the decree from him and give it to someone more worthy,” he said one day, after pulling a book from his father’s library.
“Haven’t they been taking care of the people’s welfare?” Chow said. “Look at all the flats my ministry has built.”
“Okay, but if the emperor is no longer doing so, the people should censure him, and if he’s still unrepentant, the people should remove him.”
“Don’t talk like that. You can be arrested for sedition.”
“I always thought Confucius was seditious.”
Chow realised too late that he should never have sent his son to that Marxist-infested London School of Economics, putting it in the same league as the Red Guard who torched priceless books by ancient sages. But two years later, he himself was to get into trouble with the authorities for his own misdemeanour, rather than for his son’s.
NINE
THE PRIME MINISTER’S office releases to the media the CPIB report on its investigation of malpractices at the Ministry of Housing. The report says the CPIB has spent 17 weeks interviewing building contractors and suppliers who have been awarded housing projects by the ministry in the last 10 years. The bureau, the report says, has also interviewed members of the tender selection
committee and examined tender documents received by the ministry. It adds that it has also become necessary for the CPIB to scrutinise the personal assets of several senior officials at the ministry.
The key findings of the report point to four staff members at the ministry, the highest-ranking being the late permanent secretary, Chow Sze Teck, who had received “gifts” and “donations” totalling $33 million in the period 1976 to 1985. The report confirms that the CPIB has gathered sufficient evidence to indict the implicated staff at the ministry and the contractors. The prime minister’s office says in its press statement that the trial will come before the High Court soon.
The newspapers reproduce the statement and the CPIB report verbatim; no questions were asked nor points clarified. Such is the standard of investigative journalism of the day. The grapevine in the coffee shops, on the other hand, is asking about the many more millions of dollars being stashed away by ministers but not yet, or that will not be, reported.
*
“I don’t know why you’re still going on about it. The court has taken over.” Chow Hoong, still wearing her dark sunglasses, flings her handbag onto the seat facing Lim Siew Kian. The inspector phoned to request an interview at her home but she insisted on meeting him at the coffeehouse at the Hyatt instead.
She is in a lavender skirt suit and high heels that match her bag. She has the posture of a gymnast and the aloofness of a cat. She smells like a hundred musk roses, so much so that the inspector has an irrepressible urge to compliment her. Instead, he says, “I’m sorry to drag you out. I know you have given birth to a baby girl recently.”
She remembers meeting him at her father’s funeral and hates him for reminding her of her older boy kicking his baby sister during her father-in-law’s eulogy. “So what can I do for you?”
“Yes, Ms Chow—”
“Mrs Chin, if you don’t mind.”
“Yes, as I was saying, the court will be hearing the corruption case. But I’m looking into the death of your father.”
“What about it?” A waiter comes to take her order and she asks for iced lemon tea without looking at him.
“You believe your father obtained those drugs on his own and no one else had been involved?”
“I don’t know.” She raises her immaculately trimmed eyebrows, pencil-darkened to highlight their arches. Her gaze remains on the tall buildings outside the glass panes of the coffee shop.
“You don’t seem particularly concerned about how your father died. He had no medical record of insomnia or depression, so he could not have obtained a prescription of a large dose of diazepam, not to mention the morphine.”
“I know you have suggested that Yang got the drugs for Father. That’s ridiculous. This brother of mine is too weak to do anything when he’s drunk and too bone lazy when he’s not.”
“I see Mr Chow Yang has not endeared himself to you.”
Hoong looks down at the inspector, then away. Now more than ever, she wishes she were an only child from a poor and respectable family, with no dirty money and free-loading siblings to embarrass her in front of her in-laws. Her husband is the best thing to have happened to her in her 32 years. She loves him, potbelly and all. Just when they have two beautiful children to seal their domestic bliss, her father’s episode had to erupt like a boil. Whenever she sits with her father-in-law, the minister of finance, and his wife at dinner, she feels their eyes on her, as if she were a child whose gambler father has sold her to a teahouse.
Though her father provided everything she needed materially, she had been little more than an inconsequential daughter waiting to be married off to a good family. Old Chow felt he had discharged his parental duty famously by finding his daughter a match made in heaven, not exactly the son of a mint owner, but close. Not that he needed a reason for not including his daughters in his will. While women in the old days learned only embroidery, he had given her a university education!
To return the compliment, Hoong has since her marriage considered herself a Chin and not a Chow, considered her father a distant uncle who occasionally bought her lollies when she was a child. But her mother has always been dear to her. When she was young and her father a petty trade unionist in a fledgling political party, she was such a pretty little thing that her mother took her shopping and bought her flouncy frocks and showed her off to the aunties. When the school’s powdered milk programme made her vomit, her mother bought fresh milk every day from the Cold Storage supermarket, patronised in those days only by the rich and the expatriates. But Chow had told her and Ling that they were no princesses and had to help their mother with the cooking and washing. When television first arrived, the boys could just drop their chopsticks after dinner and plonk themselves in front of the set to laugh their heads off over Looney Tunes and I Love Lucy while the girls stood at the kitchen sink doing the dishes. Her pride was restored only when relatives preferred to pinch her plump cheeks and went gaga over her instead of Ling.
Her mother is the only one in the world with whom she could commiserate about the unfortunate events that have befallen them. Because her mother’s birthday fell during the interrogation of her father, the usual birthday dinner at a shark’s fin soup restaurant, the only occasion when her mother is the centrepiece of the family, was forgotten. Hoong made it up to her two weeks after, the day her father died, by taking her to a Shanghainese tailor to order a silk cheongsam, followed by an emperor’s banquet dinner at Tung Lok. Together with her mother, she has wept for what her father endured. At the same time, she secretly upbraids her father for casting another shadow on her married life.
From her father-in-law she heard that her father had been in big trouble, that the ISD—the Internal Security Department—had been alerted as the case involved national security. The whole thing is spiralling out of control; maybe the United Nations would step in next, she thinks. Her husband has been reticent throughout, his single comment being “power corrupts,” leaving her to wonder if he was alluding to other people besides her father. Or did he think ‘like father like daughter’? As the investigation stretches from weeks to months, her husband talks less and less and Hoong feels her father-in-law’s stare weigh more and more heavily on her. And now, she has to deal with this pesky inspector rubbing salt into her wounds.
“You know, even the opposition MP has raised the issue about the drugs in Parliament,” the inspector continues in his well-modulated voice.
Hoong’s tone climbs a pitch higher. “That man is a lunatic. You should know better than to follow his absurd line of enquiry.”
“Perhaps the minister for finance does not think it is an absurd line of enquiry?”
“How do you know what he thinks?”
“Do you want to know what he thinks?” The inspector notices the sunlight bouncing off the gloss of her generously lipsticked mouth.
“Leave my husband’s family out of this,” she snaps.
“Okay. But do you ever wonder why they are trying so hard to gag him when there does seem to be a need for an independent commission of enquiry to look into your father’s death?”
“I don’t know. Maybe that man is an idiot.” She lifts the glass of iced lemon tea to her lips and gulps down half of it.
“You seem adamant that your father should have died of his own accord. Is there something you refuse to come to terms with?”
“Look, just let my father rest in peace. He had suffered enough and he paid dearly for his folly. Let’s just forget the whole damned thing, okay?”
“Even if someone can clear your father’s name?”
She lowers her gaze. “Who?”
“I need time.”
“Until you do, Mr Lim, I hope you will not give me any false hopes, and please do not call me again at home.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I have your other contact numbers.”
“Well, I’m hoping you won’t have to contact me again. My mother-in-law doesn’t like to be disturbed.”
“Yes, Mrs Chin,
I understand.”
Hoong grabs her handbag but hesitates, as though waiting for a last-minute epiphany. Then she stands and adjusts her tight skirt, which has crumpled and risen a few inches while she was seated, and leaves the inspector to pick up the tab. The inspector watches her disappear through the doorway of the coffee house, marvelling at the svelte body she has been able to regain after having two babies. He shakes his head. The fragile comeliness of Hoong leads the inspector to grieve over a 3,000-year-old moral tradition striking a chord with a modern state. The prime minister, for all his Cambridge education and his incompetence in the Chinese language, is a traditionalist. He regrets sending huge numbers of women to university, then to gain high-flying jobs, only to have them end up over qualified and unmarried, disrupting the country’s procreation scheme, or worse, marrying down and diluting the nation’s gene pool. Chow Hoong has heeded the PM’s call for women to marry and marry their equals, and breed at their prime child-bearing age.
Death of a Perm Sec Page 5