However, our unblemished record has recently been tarnished by a few individuals who have abused their positions in the ministry. The court has found the three former officials of the ministry guilty as charged and meted out the appropriate sentences.
The former permanent secretary, as the most senior executive of the ministry, should have led by example. He instead colluded with his subordinates to commit the heinous crime of awarding public tenders to contractors who paid the largest bribe. Chow Sze Teck took his own life in March this year when he was guilt-stricken by the gravity of his crime. The ministry regrets that he resorted to such a drastic action instead of submitting himself to the law of the land.
In order to recover the money received in this unlawful manner, the government has directed the CPIB to look into the personal assets of each member of the Chow family.
Armed with a search warrant, six men make their foray into the East Coast mansion of the late Chow Sze Teck. They arrive in an unidentified car and a van. The hunters are dressed in shirts and ties, as if they hope to blend in with the surroundings. They introduce themselves as officers from the CPIB to Mrs Chow and Yang, and produce a search warrant. The man who says he is the assistant director and team leader distributes black plastic bags, the type used to line rubbish bins, to his team, which then fans out to different parts of the house.
Chow Yang stops the assistant director in his tracks. “The CID have already had a go at the house. What is it you hope to find that the CID didn’t?”
The assistant director straightens his tie. “Mr Yang, I’m sorry for the inconvenience my colleagues and I are causing you and your family. The CID search was related to the death of your father, whereas our present search, as I’ve explained earlier, is to establish the total assets of your family.”
As he speaks, he invites Mrs Chow and Yang to witness his men rifle through drawers and cupboards, tipping part of their contents into the bags.
“And you can’t do that by having the banks and registry of land titles do a computer search?” Yang asks.
“Yes, we have already done that for bank accounts and properties in Singapore. For example, we know that ownership of this house has recently been transferred to you.”
Alright, so you know a great deal about me, Yang smirks. “I have already put that down in the disclosure of assets.”
“Oh yes, and I’m very grateful for your cooperation. But as with airport customs, passengers still have to have their luggage checked physically. Computer searches of assets held in other countries, or not registered under the names of the family members are really needles in a haystack, even if we can get the cooperation of foreign agencies. So we still have to rely on our own resources.”
Mrs Chow, who is observing an officer going through her jewellery, interjects, “I bought those with my own money. You’re not taking them away, right?”
“Don’t worry, Mrs Chow, we’re more concerned about higher value assets.” The assistant director tells his subordinate to return the jewellery to the dressing table. Mrs Chow is both assured and peeved by the remark.
Yang is now outside his bedroom, watching the search of his study desk. “And why might you be interested in my scribblings? These are my scrapbooks containing my random thoughts and photos of naked girls. It appears to me you are looking for more than hidden assets.”
“Mr Chow, the search warrant authorises us to seize any information, accounts, documents or articles that may help us in our investigation. We hope to have your fullest cooperation and that you will not obstruct us in our work.” With that, he orders his staff to empty the drawers into the plastic bags.
Yang folds his arms and looks on. When the search becomes predictable, he goes downstairs to the bar and fixes himself an orange juice and vodka. He swivels on the bar stool and gazes vacantly at the Japanese carp in the fish tank. His mother continues to watch and cringe every time her lovingly arranged furniture is turned upside down or her late husband’s books and folders are thrown into the ugly plastic bags. The CPIB team is more tenacious in their search than the CID beagles who were investigating a death by unnatural causes a month ago. Where cupboards are locked, the CPIB officers wrench them open with crowbars, as they do with the filing cabinets in the senior Chow’s study. The sound of metal driving into metal reminds Mrs Chow of her teeth being extracted in the old days of cheap, quack dentists. One officer, who sports a crew cut and looks like a body-builder, is particularly meticulous. He tucks his tie into his shirt as though he is about to commence an elaborate meal. He gropes underneath desks and chairs for hidden buttons that might yield secret compartments.
The search party moves downstairs and Yang suggests they do not break anything valuable, otherwise they would have difficulty in paying for it.
“You must have also inherited a fine wine cellar with this house,” the assistant director observes.
“Perhaps you might like to liquidate the cellar?” asks Yang.
“I may not be very much older than you, but take my advice: don’t be ruined by alcohol like your father.”
“Jolly good of you to say so. But what makes you think it was alcohol that ruined my father?”
The assistant director shakes his head and rejoins his team. So he knows about that little drinking-on-the-plane peccadillo, thinks Yang. What else does he know?
The body-builder officer squats on his haunches and looks around the grotto where water used to cascade. He gets up, walks towards the aquarium, rolls up his sleeve, dips his arm into the tank and stirs up the pebbles at the bottom, looking for a safe deposit box key that is not there. The assistant director gives his subordinate a dismissive look, goes out to the garden and stamps his feet on the soil.
“My father loved his hibiscus. He would be very upset if you destroyed his plants.”
“That won’t be necessary,” the assistant director says.
“I hope not. After all, you’re looking for hidden accounts, not bodies, aren’t you?”
The assistant director ignores Yang’s remark, and walks towards the garage adjoining the house.
Yang confronts the assistant director. “By the way, I didn’t get your name. I don’t think you have shown me your ID?”
“I’ve already shown you the warrant issued by the court. That is sufficient for us to do the search.”
“But how do I know you’re from the CPIB? If it’s not too much of a bother, I would like to see your badge.”
Without the backup from his colleagues inside the house, the assistant director removes his identity badge from his breast pocket.
“I’d guessed as much.” Yang shoves the badge back to the owner. “You are entering my house under false pretences, Mr Chua.”
“The other men are all from the CPIB. As for me, you should know very well that ISD officers do not require any warrant to do an arrest, let alone a search.”
Bastard. “So what has my family done to incite the interest of the Internal Security Department?”
“You should also know very well, Mr Chow, that I’m not obliged to satisfy your curiosity.”
Arsehole. “You are turning my house topsy-turvy and I don’t even have the right to know the reason for this honour?”
“Maybe you do, Mr Chow.” He strides to the back of the house into the garage, flings open a car door and slams it shut again in an exhibition of authority.
Yang plucks a flower from a hibiscus bush and grinds it into the ground with his foot.
In the evening, the six men leave the mansion, taking with them 27 plastic bags and the family’s shredded faith in their patriarch. As they load up the van, Mrs Chow notices the neighbour’s maid, who is walking the dog, do a double take.
*
In the temperature-controlled cellar below the garage, Chow Yang runs his fingers along the racks of wine and spirits. Dust clothes each bottle. A lone bulb shines through the coloured glass of the vessels, revealing the liquid of languor. He wipes the dust off a few bottles with the edg
es of his T-shirt as though he were cleaning his armoury. He decides to re-arrange the bottles left on the racks in a haphazard fashion by his father. He is divided between arranging them by the year of production and by category of alcohol. The task lifts his spirit and he goes about blithely grouping and regrouping the over one thousand bottles on the cement floor, wiping them with his T-shirt as he goes. He finally settles for arranging them by vintage, in descending order, within each category. He gives dinner a miss and asks his mother to keep some food in the wok for him to eat later.
When he cannot find another clean corner of his T-shirt, he ambles up to the garage, crosses the backyard into the kitchen and grabs a tea towel from the maid who is drying dishes. At the doorway, he turns back to get a goblet and a corkscrew from the glass cabinet. He polishes the best of his loves until they gleam in the yellow light and puts them in their place on the racks, but not before he picks a 1976 Grange Hermitage to toast himself on the fine job he is doing.
Three hours and as many bottles later, he has hand-written a catalogue of his father’s collection that is now his, containing details including the winery, brand name, type of grape, country of production and vintage of each bottle. The catalogue more than compensates for the loss of his scrapbooks confiscated by the ISD that day, the crinkled pages of quirky poems, occasional journaling of non-events and other entries that make sense only to himself. After the accomplishment, he feels he could win a trivia quiz on vineyards of the world. He feels he could triumph over all evil elements, particularly those within him. He sees his life measured out in glasses of red, white, pink and a chiaroscuro of liquid poetry. He is secure in the knowledge that he has not been entirely abandoned and has something to live for. He creeps to the kitchen again, finds some detergent and a brush with a long handle and returns to the cellar to give it a scrub. He goes up to the kitchen for the third time that night to get a mop to dry the floor.
He forgets about his dinner in the wok. Having worked up a sweat, he goes to soak himself in a warm long bath scented with lavender oil. He rests his head on a neck pillow and smiles at himself stewing in his own sour juice, as his British friends used to say. They also teased him for having all the modernist writer’s angst without the writer’s release of wit. The smell of lavender sends him back to the small flat in London he shared with Katherine, who used only lavender soap in her showers. He thinks of Katherine and his father and regards them as coming from two different planets. Katherine and he were similar in many ways. Neither of them liked themselves much. All those nights when they went on an uninterrupted bender followed by obligatory sex, followed by a rush to the bathroom to throw up, seem now to him to have arisen from a disgust of their own bodies. Their inability to love themselves was what bonded them, or was that also the reason for their falling apart?
They had hung out often at The Rose with her Irish friends who liked to call themselves nihilists but whom he thinks are nothing more than the cane toad pests destroying native animals and plants in a national park. Except for Katherine, who worked as a part-time researcher with a local branch of the Labour Party, the others were unemployed and unemployable. Among her friends, Yang liked Gary, who was often teased as being Gary Glitter’s alter ego. Gary hated the inane style of the pop singer, but was too easy-going to protest, and would even gyrate his flabby hips to amuse them. Yang smiles as he recalls fondly how Gary had often said, “Doesn’t do anybody any harm to give your pals a good laugh.” Gary was sacked from his job after misquoting the chairman of a public-listed company about his liaison with a gay man. The newspaper paid 50,000 pounds as compensation, ran an abject apology and made sure Gary did not get another job in the industry. Gary had since seen it as another sad example of the discrimination against the Irish people.
But Judy was more annoying, Yang thinks as he scrapes off the grime that lines his nails. Lavender oil clings to the sides of the tub. Always looking vaguely pissed and spouting clichés on the absurdity of life, Judy had given up on any serious employment as she believed that would only perpetuate a rotten system. Her two years swishing and sloshing empty beer mugs at The Rose was the pinnacle of her career, for she believed that if religion was the opiate of the masses, then alcohol was the antidote. Yang wonders if he disliked Judy because he saw too much of himself in her. Since knowing Katherine and her friends, he had fallen into the habit of doing nothing, not even taking part in the demonstrations against apartheid in South Africa, preferring to spend the money his father sent him on alcohol. Because he held only a temporary visa, when the magazine he was working for folded, he did odd jobs painting people’s houses, mowing lawns and waiting on tables at Chinese restaurants. On days without work, he spent long nights in Katherine’s arms and even longer days at The Rose. His black hair and eyes and light brown skin were always conspicuous wherever he went in London, and his difference was magnified in an English pub. On a good day, Judy would nick a lager for her friends. On a bad day, Judy saw Yang as an easy target. Yang remembers one time at the pub, Judy shouting across the bar at him, “Just because you’ve got a fuckin’ rich daddy, you could work for nothin’ with that fuckin’ magazine that has rightly busted. I stand here all day and I don’t earn enough for a joint!”
Gary had looked at Yang, his greyish green eyes turning bloodshot. “What’s she going on about?”
“I don’t fuckin’ know.”
That provoked Judy further. “I say it’s criminal for people to get rich at the expense of others. I say this system is sick. It makes me sick to see rich nations sending conscience money to those poor fellas in Africa and Asia. And before you can say ‘May God bless you, my child’, some fuckwit ministers would’ve lined their pockets with our aid money.”
“You’re damned fucking right, mate. Stop all aid. Ban the bomb. Abolish all religions,” said Yang. In an attempt to numb the pain, he then had one of the stiffest drinks of his life, a triple scotch neat.
“Cut the crap. You only mouth those slogans because it makes you look good in front of Kathy. But you don’t really care, do ya? You don’t care for nothin’, and your excuse for a life is nothin’, just a lump of shit.”
“Un-fucking believable, you of all bitches saying that,” Yang burbled. “At least I’ve done some useful work at the magazine. You spend your time indulging in your own self-pity and blame it on the fascists, the liberals and the communists.”
“Christ All-bloody-Mighty, what do ya know about suffering? You’re just a privileged piece of shit with a filthy rich dad to—”
“Leave him alone, Jude,” Gary interjected. He grabbed Yang by the shoulders and pushed him off his stool, but not before Yang had clutched his glass and thrown it at Judy. Gary dragged him out of the pub amid a shower of abuse.
When he woke the next morning, Katherine was rubbing a sweet-smelling oil into his body with her own. She playfully applied a few drops on his still slumbering penis and caressed it till he got a magnificent erection. He was full of gratitude and tender feelings and believed that life was worth all its troubles just for this woman. He pulled her up to kiss her but she averted her head and buried it under a pillow.
Yang closes his eyes and feels Katherine sitting on top of him in the bath. He adds more lavender oil to the water and strokes his member, thinking only of her naked body but not her face. But the harder he tries not to see her face, the more he sees the patronising look in her eyes. She had given him that look every time he lapsed into bourgeois habits or slipped up with a sexist stereotype. When he wanted to get a second-hand Citroen, she took him to a motorbike shop. One time, when he called the models on the Chanel fashion show on TV dumb blondes, she had given him a lecture on how women are not born women, but become such.
The bath oil smells good, endorphins are flowing and Yang is almost happy. He touches himself as if to wipe off the abuse he has subjected it to over the years. He sees Katherine turning to face the wall after he had come and wanted to hold her badly. She did that often enough to make it a hab
it, but he rationalised that she just wanted to give each of them some space after the intense closeness (though not intimacy, now that he thinks about it as he lies in the calm of the bath). Then he hears Katherine telling him to stuff it. “You think I’m just another white woman in there for a good screw.”
“Hey, what have I done?”
“What are we doing here?” She got up and sat on her side of the bed. “We’re either fucking our brains out or doing some rubbishy work outside and I’m—I seem to be always telling you this and that, and I don’t know if you agree with me but you never say much. Have I been overbearing? Have I been suffering from verbal diarrhoea, or what?”
“I don’t mind. I like to hear you talk.”
“Fuck. I’m sick of hearing my own voice. And I’m not your blasted nanny. It’s about time you grew up.”
Yang had hated her at that moment, the damned bitch. “Kathy, what do you want of me?”
“That’s the trouble. You seem to be doing things just to please me. Your vegetarianism, your activism…do you even believe in them?”
“Of course I do,” Yang retorted, but being wet and sticky, was feeling vulnerable. “But I’m also doing it so we have something in common to do together. All couples do that, some have babies, others go to the park and enjoy the great outdoors. What’s wrong with that?”
“But what do you want for yourself?” she asked, with exasperation.
“How is one supposed to know such things? Do you know what you want?”
They stared at the threadbare carpet on the floor of their cramped bedroom for a long time. Then she said, “Maybe not. But I know this is not it. We’re not even good in bed.”
A week after Katherine had moved out, Yang went to a 24-hour fast against world hunger at Hyde Park. It was a chilly autumn morning and sodden clouds stole over the sky. Some part of his subconscious told him the fasting would cleanse, or at least starve, whatever nasty traits in him were responsible for Katherine leaving. He had been out of the protest circuit for a long time, so he felt alone in the sprawling, motley crowd of hippies, anarchists, artists, politicians, smooching couples and families. His detachment from these well-meaning people terrified him. Could what Katherine had said be true? That his activism was only due to peer influence, to make himself appear more like a thinking adult rather than a selfish child? At that apocalyptic moment, the thought of self-immolation crossed his tortured mind. It would serve the dual purpose of making a fiery statement about world hunger as well as ridding existence of a parasite that probably contributed to the malnourishment of Third World children.
Death of a Perm Sec Page 9