THE FLOWERS IN the garden droop. Their leaves shrivel under the equatorial afternoon sun. Yang picks up the garden hose and hopes he is not too late. He makes a mental note to go to the nursery to pick up some plant food. He had not noticed the garden falling to such a state, even though he spends many nights in it.
He goes to the garage, now emptied of cars, and down to the temperature-controlled cellar. He reckons the cellar is worth a bit of money. If he sold it, there would be enough to start whatever business Ming is thinking of. Seeing his family provided for would make up for his lack of happiness. The money he got from Miss Law should be kept for the family’s living expenses, without their knowledge. He could always drink cheaply at the Barnhouse. He dusts the bottles with a feather duster hanging on the wall and checks the temperature of the air-conditioner. Without the cellar, they could save on electricity bills.
He returns to the garden and picks half a dozen slightly happier-looking hibiscus flowers, then shouts to his mother who’s in the kitchen that he won’t be home for dinner. Flowers in hand, he walks to the main road and hails a taxi to the Kong Meng San Temple.
The taxi driver asks if Yang is going to pray to the gods.
“No. Visit my father.”
“Oh. While you are there, go and pray to Buddha. Don’t mind I say ah, I think you don’t look very good. Young people these days got many problems. But the Almighty Buddha can give us peace.”
Yang notices a pendant of the Almighty on a red string, hanging from the rear view mirror. “You go there often?”
“Every Sunday. But if I can’t find anyone to rent the taxi, I have to drive myself lor. What to do? Don’t work seven days, how to survive? I hear the prime minister himself also go there. They say the abbot there is reborn from a disciple of Buddha.” The taxi driver smiles. He stops at a red light and pulls a bread roll out of a plastic bag. “Don’t mind I eat my lunch ah?”
“Sure.”
“Aiyah, so busy all day, no time even to go to toilet.” He laughs and sinks his greyish teeth into the roll.
From the back seat, Yang stares at the taxi driver’s shock of black hair and turkey neck. He reckons the driver could be only a few years younger than his father. His profile and those smiling lines around the eyes are signs of a tacit acceptance of the things life throws at him: lunches on the run, being cramped in a vehicle ten hours a day, the exhaust and stress of the road.
“You have any children?” Yang asks.
“Got, but married late so they still in school. One studying university so got to work harder. My old woman always sick, so I told her not to work anymore. Can’t earn very much helping out in a hawker stall. So now we wait for our daughter to graduate lah, so she can support the family lor. What to do, I have no much education, but Heaven is kind to me. Give me good children, and I still healthy.” He laughs again and continues his lunch.
The words sting Yang. The taxi driver believes unreservedly that if you work hard to bring up your children, they will care for you when you are old. The man believes that he may be poor, but he is enriched by a loving family. Has the taxi driver, who must have ferried thousands of passengers, seen so little of the world that he does not know there are people who do not think they owe it to their parents for what they have? That they blame their parents for what they don’t?
Approaching the temple, Yang sees its spreading, glittering roofs. He smirks at the stone statues on the roofs. If only all his inadequacies in life could be fixed by unquestioning acceptance of his lot. The taxi stops at the side gate. He pays and thanks the driver, who reminds him to pray to the Buddha.
He strolls past the halls housing a pantheon of gods and goddesses, and enters the four-storey columbarium. It is stacked from floor to ceiling with rows and rows of shelves, like a library. He locates his father’s tablet in one of the pigeonholes on the second shelf from the top, and places the hibiscus stalks in front of his father. Behind the tablet is a cobwebbed urn containing his father’s ashes. He reads the Chinese inscription on the tablet, glorifying the dead and blessing his journey back to his Maker. Yang sees his father smile at the flowers. He looks at his father’s neighbours to the left and right, top and bottom. From their photos on the tablets, he wonders whether his father gets along well with them. His father was a neat, immaculate man and liked his nearest if not dearest to be the same. But then they are not really here, Yang tells himself. The urns and the tablets are for the living to make amends to the dead. In reality the dead are elsewhere. That is why they don’t mind their remains being kept in holes on dusty shelves in some airless room in a temple.
Yang pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes his father’s photo and tablet. He sweeps dust and cobwebs off the shelf, then wipes his hands on his pants. Death equalises all men great and small, minister or taxi driver. At the end of their days, they are all given equal space, space enough only for a sparrow to build its nest. The only difference is the number of visitors each gets. Yang has the certainty that the taxi driver, when his time comes, will have many friends and relatives visiting. Something he can’t say for himself. He sees his own face on the tablet in front of him, overgrown with cobwebs. He decides he will have his ashes scattered into the sea to feed the fish. Then maybe he would have a chance to be born as a fish in his next life, instead of something lower.
A novice in a grey robe and hemp shoes burns joss sticks at an altar near an open window, silhouetted against the sunlight. Yang looks down the aisle of dust and ashes, the living and the dead and the living dead. His eyes mist. He approaches the novice and asks to see his master. The bald teenager points him to a room on the stair landing. Inside the room, Yang bows to a monk and they fall into a quiet conversation. Except for his lips, Yang notes that not another muscle of the monk’s body moves. He is as calm as Yang is not. Yang gives the monk some money in return for regular blessings for his father and the cleaning of his altar. The monk promises to chant sutras on the first day of every lunar month for his father, on condition that Yang makes a contribution to the temple every year. Yang agrees and makes another deep bow.
At the doorstep, he turns. “When we die, do we really get to meet our ancestors?”
The monk smiles. “Leave it to Fate.”
He steps out of the columbarium, into the sunlight, and watches the turtles paddle in the pond. Vegetable scraps float on the water’s surface. He strays into the Hall of Great Compassion. In front of the statue of the Bodhisattva, he kneels and lowers his head. He closes his eyes and sees Miss Law. If he had met his Goddess of Mercy earlier, he reckons he would have been spared the pangs of learning to become an adult. Then again, he realises that perhaps gods and goddesses are all around him except he had been too pissed to recognise them. He gets up, shoves some money into a donation box and leaves the temple through the side gate.
*
His mother is surprised to see him home early. He tells her to get everybody and they will all go out to dinner. Mrs Chow says Hoong is visiting her children.
“How’s her case against that arsehole?” he asks from the bathroom where he is washing his face.
“Still like that lor,” Mrs Chow stands outside the bathroom, wondering what has got her son so high she does not smell alcohol on his breath.
“Give Ling and Ming a call and see if they want to eat at the East Coast Seafood Centre.”
As his mother goes off, he calls after her, “Thanks.”
Mrs Chow squints at her son and goes down the hallway to the study to ring her children. When Yang emerges from the bathroom, droplets of water on his dehydrated skin, she tells him Ming says “No mood” but Ling says “Okay.”
*
The seafood centre built on reclaimed land is alive with the sounds of conversation and the cracking of crab shells. The rush of white waves against the extended shoreline blurs the hard edge of human endeavour. At the Kheng Luck Restaurant, Ling announces that she and Matthew will leave for Australia soon.
“But you al
l not married yet,” protests Mrs Chow.
“That’s just some paperwork. Easily done.”
Mrs Chow sighs. “The one who should stay, don’t stay. The one who should not stay, stay.”
Yang’s voice rises as he replies to her. “Ma, you still worried about Hoong. I’ve never seen her better. She should have left that bastard long ago.”
Ling nudges her brother in the ribs. “Gee, never seen you so worked up over other people’s affairs.”
“Learnt it from you. Dare to be angry and dare to do.” Yang winks at his sister and picks up a meaty crab pincer for her.
“I’m not like that anymore. I’m going back to Sydney because I dare not do.”
“Do what?”
Ling looks out to the beach where a man is waist-deep in the water, casting a net. “Dunno. But I dare not even try.”
“What are you talking about?” Mrs Chow demands.
Ling studies the anatomy of the crab claw on her plate.
“Is there something you know?” says Yang.
Ling looks at her mother and brother, who have both stopped eating. Her neck is stiff and under the table, her feet feel cold.
“Hey relax. I’m only saying I wish I could do something for Hoong instead of running away again.”
Yang sounds unconvinced. “Even if you can’t do anything for her, you don’t have to go back to Sydney.”
“Whoa, is this some outpouring of love?” Ling attacks the pincer with a cracker.
“What’s wrong with staying here? You all always like that. Never listen to anyone,” grumbles Mrs Chow.
Ling uses both hands to tackle the crab, then sucks at the juice noisily.
She does not say, “I don’t want to go but I can’t stay.”
Neither does she say, “I want to go back to stealing chickens and borrowing the neighbour’s bicycle to ride to Changi Prison with Yang, and watching what’s going on behind the concrete walls.” Like the mainland film Memories of Old Beijing she saw recently where a little girl befriends a thief and later witnesses the arrest of the thief during the Cultural Revolution. It’s so much less painful to see other people struggle in the barbed wire. Throughout her adult life she has been alternating between being behind the wall and on top of it, trapped in the wire. Only as a child was she totally outside the four walls, a voyeur of other people’s sufferings.
Yang calls a waitress and asks for a beer, his first in many days. Ling wants one too. So as not to aggravate her mother, she resists reaching for her cigarettes in her bag. Yang scans his sister for signs driving her to leave the country, when the reason she did so eight years ago is now gone. He suspects she could be still angry with Pa, with all of them, for abandoning her to a life abroad.
Believing it’s what his father would have wanted, he makes a last-ditch attempt to dissuade his sister from leaving. “Miss Law in Hong Kong has given us some money—”
“I don’t want any of that blood money!” Ling bursts out.
Yang involuntarily knocks his glass over and glares at the beer spilling across the table. He feels the urge to hit Ling. What noble sentiments to despise the money. His rage surprises him, as is his range of emotion that night.
How many more deaths did their father deserve? His property in Hong Kong could be untainted. You don’t prosecute a man for compromising his soul but you do when he sells privilege.
Yang says slowly, “Pa will be very sad if his children reject the money he exchanged his life for.” He now fears even the chanting he paid the monk to do for his father will not be enough to compensate for the negative feelings his children have towards him.
Mrs Chow dabs the rims of her eyes with a handkerchief discreetly amid the chatter and clinking glass from the surrounding tables. One by one, she sees her children’s lives disintegrating in the wake of her husband’s death. In a perverse way, she is grateful her husband is not around to see the destruction he has left behind. She has been going to the Middle Road temple to pray not for wealth or health, but that the gods will have pity on her children and not punish them anymore. If she could be granted that, she has promised she would move into the temple and serve the deities for the rest of her old age.
Ling reaches out to hold her mother’s hand. “Sorry.”
“Go and visit Father before you leave,” Yang says to his sister. “And take Matthew with you. Pa will be very glad to see you settling down at last.”
“I will.”
Yang looks at his sister. “I hope you’re doing this for love.” He says this without cynicism.
TWENTY-THREE
MATTHEW VACUUMS THE floorboards and sucks away the cobwebs hanging from the ceiling of the one-bedroom unit facing the Pacific Ocean in Sydney. He winces at the overflowing ashtray, empties it into a plastic bag and takes the rubbish out to a wheelie bin near the entrance to the block. He remembers fondly the rubbish chutes in Singapore’s HDB flats. He could toss out any number of rubbish bags from the convenience of his kitchen on the 20th floor. He looks with disgust at the dirty dishes piled up in the sink but Ling has prohibited him from washing every single item right after use. He has to accumulate the dishes till the end of the day and do one big wash to save water. He has also been warned not to wash the dishes under a running tap but to fill the sink. And he thought he could leave rules and regulations behind him now he is in a free country.
But there are compensating factors. He loves the sea and having the time to enjoy it rather than rushing to work in the morning, missing his breakfast, having to perform as a bureaucratic diplomat and a diplomatic bureaucrat. For too long he had been doing things expected of him. He is the only child in his family with a university degree (albeit an arts degree), and his mother and grandmother would sooner jump down from their 20th-storey flat than see their pride and joy “living off” a woman. They are modern Indian women. They no longer expect a dowry from their prospective daughter-in-law, but to see her bring home the bacon is tantamount to the castration of their Matthew Precious. But he loves cleaning the flat, cooking his spicy mutton and waiting for Ling to come home. So before he left Singapore, he told his family he had a job offer in Australia. After he settled in, he would bring the family over, he promised. There, they could buy a four-bedroom house with a garden for his grandmother to potter in. He did not tell them about Ling. Neither was she prepared to meet them. He believes in converting his family in small doses, much like when they first moved into a HDB flat. His grandmother and mother insisted on a low-floor unit to avoid taking the lift. Now they love the views and breeziness of the higher floors.
He goes to the bathroom and pours a large amount of disinfectant into the toilet bowl and leaves it there to do its job. He stands in front of the mirror, tousles his hair and says, “G’day mate, how’s it going?”
“Yeah, Plugger is great, but I hate Aussie rules.”
“Oh, I…er, work for the Singapore High Commission in Canberra. And my wife, she is an academic.”
“Yeah, yeah, pretty good. See ya around. Cheers, mate.”
He uses a damp cloth to clean the mirror and dries it with some toilet paper. He goes out to the living room and wipes the coffee table top, TV and video player. He likes the flat to look minimalist so there are fewer surfaces that collect dust. While he is preparing dinner in the open-plan kitchen, Ling returns from the university. She throws her bag on the floor, turns the TV on and collapses onto the couch.
“Holy shit, I’ve not only got a husband, but a chambermaid. That’s value for money.”
“You must have done something good in your last life to deserve me.”
“What’s for dinner?”
“Do you mind leaving your shoes outside?”
“But this is Straylia.”
“So you want fish and chips or curry and rice?”
“What about curry chips?” Ling titters and turns to the news on ABC. She stretches out on the two-seater couch, feet on the coffee table. She tilts her head back on the head rest. With her e
yes closed, she gropes around for a ciggie then stops, knowing Matthew hates her smoking in the flat. She smells cumin and garam masala being fried with onions, garlic and ginger. It’s not from a takeaway and she won’t have to eat by herself. She looks forward to the Easter holiday. No teaching and they can spend all day by the beach, maybe drive down to the south coast, whatever. Who needs to plan when you’re not alone? And Matt, he asks so little of life. Maybe that’s why he can accept her. Better get him to watch his waistline. All that milk and butter and beef are sending his weight and cholesterol through the roof. His mother and grandmother treat him like a demi-god. But here, he cleans the toilet and empties her ashtrays. To think he waited for her all those years and this is what he gets.
Matthew yells across the kitchen counter, “Dr. Chow, if you would deign to lay the table, dinner will be served in a sec!”
Ling jumps up. She takes two plates from a cupboard and spoons out rice from the rice cooker. Matthew dishes out his concept of fusion food.
“Mmm, yum. Another secret recipe from your mum?” With a fork, Ling lifts a piece of lamb from the bowl of red curry.
“It’s my own creation.” Matthew scoops a hearty portion of the lamb curry onto his rice and a smaller scoop for her. She piles their plates with garden salad. He pours chilli sauce onto the lettuce and tomato then attacks his food with gusto. “Not too bad, even if I say so myself.”
Ling notices he still eats his rice with a spoon. She puts her fork down and picks up a spoon. She mixes the curry with the rice and takes a big mouthful. That afternoon, when she left the NSW library and was walking along the sandstone buildings of Macquarie Street, she saw the usual people in sharp suits strutting down the pavement. But she did not feel dowdy in her cotton made-in-China jacket, and had no qualms holding up traffic at a pedestrian crossing. The driver of a Mercedes-Benz tooted his horn and she stood in front of the car and gave him the finger. She strolled to Hyde Park and felt the expansiveness around her. She had as much right to occupy space and breathe the air as the next person. She went into a café and asked for a table for one. As she sipped her café latte and ate a brownie, she watched the world. She chatted up the waiter and didn’t apologise anymore for being Asian, a woman or for being on her own.
Death of a Perm Sec Page 17