by Tan Twan Eng
“It’s always been a convenient name for the ragtag collection of territories the British had obtained control of,” I explained before Hamid could reply. “First there were the Federated Malay States, each one headed by a governor and situated on the west coast.” It shocked me that such ignorance among the Europeans sent out to administer Malaya was still common; no wonder the Malays had had enough and wanted the Mat Sallehs out. “Then there were the Non-Federated Malay States,” I continued, “ruled by their sultans with assistance from British advisers. And then there were the Straits Settlements—Malacca, Penang and Singapore.”
“And all stolen from us Malays,” Hamid said.
“Who were too lazy to have done anything with it,” Emily said. “You know very well, Hamid, that we Chinese built up the tin industry. We established towns, and we brought in commerce. Kuala Lumpur was founded by a Chinese! Don’t pretend you didn’t know.”
“Hah! We were far too clever to want to spend our days slaving for the Mat Salleh in the tin mines, unlike you orang China.” Hamid leaned forward with his plate. “Eh, Emily, some more of your belachan please.”
The discovery of tin in the Kinta Valley in the eighteenth century had compelled the British to ship indentured coolies from southern China to work the mines, as the Malays preferred to remain in their kampongs and till their own fields. The Chinese immigrants came with the intention of returning to their homeland after making their fortune. Many had stayed on, however, preferring the stability of life in a British colony to the wars and upheavals in China. They established families and fortunes in Penang, Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur, and opened the way for more of their countrymen from the southern ports of China. These immigrants soon became part of Malaya. I never wondered about it, just as I never thought it strange that I should also have been born beneath the monsoon skies of the equator, that with my first breath I would inhale the humid, heated air of the tropics and feel immediately and forever at home.
Magnus rubbed his one good eye with his knuckles. “I remember a couple of years ago I was sitting in my study, listening to the evening news,” he said. “What I heard made me despair.” He turned to Crawford and Toombs. “Your Mr. Attlee, giving official recognition to that fellow Mao’s government in China, while the communists were killing hundreds of us in Malaya every month.”
“Don’t forget there’s an election in a couple of weeks,” Crawford said. “We might get Winston back.” Magnus simply grimaced, looking singularly uninspired by the prospect.
“If you do,” said Frederik, “he’ll inherit Mao on this side of the world and Mau Mau in Africa.”
“You’re terrible-lah,” said Emily, covering her laugh behind her hand.
“What Yun Ling mentioned just now, about old countries dying—well, she’s right,” Magnus said. “There isn’t one that’s older than China, and look at it now. A new name, and a new emperor.”
“Emperor Mao?” said Frederik.
“In all but name.”
“For goodness’ sake,” Emily said. “Let’s talk about something else, can we not? Has anyone here read that new book by that Han Suyin? She came here for a visit last year, you know. Eh, Molly, is it true, they’re going to make a film of it? With William Holden?”
Lunch was winding down when one of the servants came out from the house and whispered to Magnus. He got up from his seat and went in through the kitchen, the ridgebacks padding after him. He looked troubled when he returned to join us a few minutes later.
“That was one of my assistant managers on the telephone,” he said, looking around at all of us. “CTs torched a squatter village in Tanah Rata an hour ago. Chopped the headman up with a parang. They forced his wife and daughters to watch. I’m not trying to get rid of you lot, but a six o’clock curfew’s been put into place.”
Enchik Hamid sprang to his feet, crumbs scattering from his lap. “Alamak! My wife is alone at home.”
The others got up too, and I realized that the high commissioner’s murder had frightened them more than they cared to admit. Magnus and Emily showed the guests out while I remained in the garden. I walked past the statues of the two sisters and stopped at the low stone balustrade, leaning over it. On the terrace below lay a formal garden where oak leaves were scattered on the lawn like pieces of an uncompleted jigsaw puzzle. A peacock chased its mate across the grass and their tail feathers raked over the leaves. To one side of the lawn was a rose garden, the bushes planted in a spiral pattern.
At first I thought the noise was coming from a lorry struggling up a steep road somewhere over the next ridge. It grew louder within seconds, exploding into a bone-penetrating rumble as an airplane flew over Majuba House, circling the tea fields.
“A Dakota,” Frederik said, coming out from the house to join me.
The door near the plane’s tail opened and a brown cloud spilled out from it, breaking into pieces an instant later. For a second I thought the aircraft was disintegrating, its body flaking away. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Safe conduct passes and notices, urging the CTs to surrender,” Frederik said. “Hell of a mess to clean up when the wind blows them over the tea, Magnus says. The coolies complain bitterly.”
The Dakota banked around a hill, the noise of its passage gradually sputtering away. Sheets of paper eddied toward the house. I went to the far end of the lawn and plucked one from the air. I had heard about these notices issued by the Psychological Warfare Department, but I had never seen one till now. Printed on it was a pair of photographs, placed side by side. The first showed a bandit at the moment of his surrender, scrawny and malnourished and dressed in rags, his face all cheekbones and buckteeth. “Comrades, my name is Chong Ka Heng. I was once a member of the Fourth Johor Regiment,” I read aloud. The other photograph was of the same man, grinning and well fed, looking like an office clerk in a smart white shirt and black pressed trousers, his arm around the waist of a plain but smiling young Chinese woman. “The Government has treated me well since I surrendered. I urge you to think of your family, of your mother and father, who all miss you. Give up your struggle, and return to the people who miss you.” The offers of amnesty and rewards were repeated in Malay, Chinese and Tamil. The paper was thin and light brown in color, as though it had been soaked overnight in the dregs of tea. “Odd choice of color to use,” I said.
“It’s deliberate. Makes it less conspicuous for a bandit to pick it up.” Frederik cleared his throat. “Magnus lets me use one of the bungalows. It’s on the other side of the estate.” He added, after a pause, “Come and have a drink?”
“The curfew’s on.”
“We’re already inside the estate.”
“Not today, Frederik,” I said, crumpling up the notice. “But thank you, for driving me back this morning.”
Pain started up in my left hand when I returned to my bedroom, throbbing in time to my pulse. My fury at Aritomo, which had abated during the party, resurfaced. The nerve of the man, making me come all the way from KL only to turn down my offer so quickly and with hardly any serious thought given to it. Bloody Jap. Bloody, bloody Jap!
Opening the bedside drawer, I took out my notebook. It was heavy, thickened by the newspaper clippings I had pasted in it. I turned the pages without really looking at them; I knew their contents by heart. When I had worked as a research assistant in the war crimes trials, I had collected newspaper reports about the trials in Tokyo and other countries the Japanese had occupied. I knew intimately the offenses the Japanese officers were charged with, but I still read the clippings regularly, even though I had long ago accepted that there wasn’t a name that I recognized or a familiar face in a photograph. There was never any mention of the camp where I had been imprisoned.
Inserted between the pages at the back of the notebook was a pale blue envelope, the address written in Japanese and English. It was light as a leaf when I held it up. The envelope marked the page where I had recorded the last conversation I had had with a convicted war criminal, a week b
efore I left for Cambridge. I remembered the promise I had made to the man, the promise that I would post his letter for him.
Slowly, the pain in my hand subsided. But it would return. The servants’ voices came faintly from somewhere in the house. One of the peacocks called to its mate. I slotted the envelope back between the pages, closed the notebook and went out to the terrace.
I stood there for a long time, looking toward Yugiri. I stood there until evening submerged the foothills of the valleys and Aritomo’s garden sank away from sight.
CHAPTER SIX
Following the high commissioner’s murder, Magnus and Frederik went about supervising the workers as they repaired the fence protecting the house. They set up a pair of spotlights along the fence, facing them outward. Having heard from someone at the Tanah Rata Golf Club about an incident in Ipoh where CTs had lobbed a hand grenade into the dining room of a rubber estate manager’s bungalow as his family was sitting down for lunch, Magnus decided to have the windows covered in a thin wire mesh.
“Emily said you haven’t seen our clinic,” Magnus said while I helped him nail a sheet of wire netting over my bedroom windows. The netting made the room gloomy, and I switched on the light. Two days had passed since Aritomo had turned me down, but I was still resentful about it. “Go take a look,” Magnus went on. “Our nurse quit last year—said it was too dangerous to work here. Emily decided to run it herself. She trained as a nurse, you know, before she saw the light and married me.”
I was reluctant to visit the clinic, but I knew I had to, if only to give Emily face. The whitewashed bungalow was a short walk from the workers’ houses. A Tamil man slouching on a chair grinned at me when I entered the waiting room. Emily sat behind a low counter, her lips moving soundlessly as she counted out pills into a bottle. Through an open doorway I saw a room with two beds behind a partition. The bare legs of a woman were sticking out from one of the beds.
“That’s Letchumi,” Emily said, glancing at me.
“She’s the one bitten by the snake?”
Emily tilted her head to one side. “Oh, yes, it was the night you arrived. She’s doing fine now. Dr. Yeoh gave her an injection. Maniam, eh, Maniam! Ambil ubat.”
The coolie in the chair stood up and came to collect the bottle of pills from her. She made him repeat her dosage instructions in Malay before she let him leave. Turning back to me, she pointed at the boxes of medicines stacked in a corner. “These came in today. I ordered more, in case the CTs attack us.” She shook her head. “Ironic isn’t it, that Gurney was killed by them?”
“In what way?”
“That man sat on his ka-chooi for days after the CTs attacked that estate in Sungai Siput. He did nothing.”
“He did declare a nationwide state of emergency.”
“Only because the planters made him do it. Magnus got everyone here to sign a petition. You people living in the cities”—she hawked a derisive noise up her throat—“I don’t think you even realize there’s a war going on.” There was some truth in her allegations. “One thing I’m happy about,” she went on, “at least Magnus no longer wastes his Sundays running around in the mountains with his friends.”
“What do they do, hunt wild boar?”
“Have you not heard the stories? They say that the Japs in Tanah Rata buried a pile of gold bars somewhere in these mountains before they surrendered.”
“That’s just a rumor, surely.”
“They’re like schoolboys-lah, looking for buried treasure. If you ask me, I think they just like being away from their wives.” She opened a cupboard and began packing away boxes of sanitary napkins. Waving a box at me, she said, “I hope you don’t think I’m a busybody, because I’m not. But I’ve always been curious—how did you cope, when you were a prisoner?”
“Many of us stopped menstruating.”
“It happens. The terrible conditions, not enough food.”
“Even after I was released, my blood didn’t flow for two, three months. And then one day when I was in my office, it came back, just like that.” It had caught me unprepared and I had had to ask my secretary for something. But I remembered the relief I had felt afterward. I could finally accept the fact that the war was truly over. My body was free to return to its own rhythms again.
The smell of disinfectants in the clinic raked up the beginnings of nausea in me; it must have been obvious because Emily looked concerned. “You want some Tiger Balm or not?” she asked.
“This place, the smells . . . they remind me of hospitals.”
“Sayang,” she said, shaking her head regretfully. “I was hoping you could help out here.”
“I won’t be staying here for long.”
I left the clinic, glad to get out into the sun and fresh air again. Returning to Majuba House, I found a rolled-up bundle of papers on my dressing table: the maps and photographs I had left at Yugiri for Aritomo to look at.
The siren calling the workers to muster was sinking away when I left the house the next morning. I stood outside the garage, rubbing my hands. The world was gray and damp. The sound of steady crunching on the gravel came to me a minute later, and then Magnus emerged from the mist, the ridgebacks close behind. On the previous evening I had asked him to show me around the estate but he still looked surprised when he saw me. “I didn’t think you’d be able to wake up this early,” he said, opening the back door of the Land Rover for his dogs. I caught the glimpse of a revolver in a holster under his jacket.
“I don’t need much sleep,” I replied.
On the short, rattling drive to the factory, he gave me a quick explanation of how the estate was run. “Geoff Harper’s my assistant manager,” he said. “We have five European junior assistants watching over the keranis in the office.”
“And out in the fields?”
“The estate’s divided into thirty-five divisions. Each division’s supervised by a kangani—the conductor. Below him are the mandors —the foremen. They’re responsible for their work gang: the pickers, weeders, sweepers. Watchmen make sure there’s no thieving or idling. And I’ve posted Home Guards to watch over them.”
“There were some children outside the factory when I went past it yesterday.”
“The workers’ children,” Magnus said. “We pay them twenty cents for every bag of caterpillars they catch in the tea bushes.”
The factory was the size of a wharf-side godown. The coolies were already lined up outside. Kretek cigarettes cloyed the air with the scent of cloves. Magnus greeted them and a senior kangani called out their names, marking them off against a list on a clipboard. It reminded me of roll call in the camp.
Magnus consulted with the assistant manager Geoff Harper, a short, burly man in his fifties with a pair of rifles slung over his back. “All the workers showed up today?” Magnus asked.
Harper nodded. “Rubber price was low.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way.”
“We had an ambush last night on the road going into Ringlet. A Chinese couple,” Harper said. “The bastards—pardon me, miss, the CTs—left their bodies hacked into bits all over the road.”
“Anyone we know?”
“They were visitors from Singapore. They were driving back from a wedding dinner.”
The tea pickers marched off to the slopes. I trailed behind the workers entering the factory. “Grinders, rollers and roasters,” Magnus said, pointing to the huge, silent machines lined up inside. The smell of roasting leaves dusted the air; I felt I had pried open a tea caddy. Workers wheeled out racks of tin trays covered with withered leaves curled up like insect larvae. The machines started up a second later, pounding the factory with their racket. Magnus beckoned me back outside.
We went onto a track between the tea bushes. The dogs trotted ahead, noses to the ground. “What has the price of rubber got to do with your workers?” I asked.
“Geoff checks it on the radio every evening. If it goes up, we know some of our workers will leave to work in the rubber plantati
ons. Most of those who left before the Occupation have returned, but we’re always shorthanded.”
“You employed them again, after they deserted you?”
He turned to look at me, then resumed walking. “When the Japs came, I told my workers that they were free to leave. Their old jobs would be available to them once the war was over. I told them I’d keep my promise if I were still alive.”
The ground steepened sharply, straining my calves. Tendrils of steam uncurled off the tops of the bushes. Glancing behind at me, Magnus shortened his stride, which only made me push myself harder to keep up. I was breathing hard when we reached the top of the rise. He stopped and pointed to the mountains.
They had broken out of the earth three hundred miles away to the north, near the border with Thailand, and they stretched all the way to Johor in the south, forming a vertebration that divided Malaya in two. In the tender light of morning, the mountains had the softness of a scene on a silk painting.
“This always reminds me of the week I spent in China, in Fujian province,” Magnus said. “I visited Mount Li Wu. There was a temple there, a thousand years old—so the monks said. They grew their own tea, those monks. They told me that the original tea tree had been planted there by a god, can you believe it? The temple was famous for the flavor of its tea, a flavor not found anywhere else in the world.”
“What sort of flavor?”
“To preserve the innocence of the tea,” he said, “only the monks who hadn’t reached puberty could pick the leaves. And for a month before they started picking, these boys were not allowed to eat chilies or pickled cabbage, no garlic or onions. They couldn’t touch even a drop of soy sauce, otherwise their breath might have polluted the leaves. The boys picked the tea at sunrise, just about now. They wore gloves so their sweat wouldn’t taint the flavor of the tea. Once picked and packed it was sent as tribute to the emperor.”
“My father thought you were mad to go into tea planting.”