A Certain Exposure

by Justin Ker

  “Oh, like that ah.” Lay Choo thought it over. “Eh, we are cooking dinner, some of our colleagues coming to eat, you join also lah.”

  In place of the chimerical date, there would be a relative’s flat, and a room full of middle-aged shoe shop staff. Brian would once have declined on autopilot. Some buried limbic centre still signalled to him: no. But he looked across the table now, at his brave, hopeful aunt, who had put out her hands from the merest toehold and hauled herself totally into his life, and he knew he was looking forward to it.

  “Sure,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  JUNE 1993

  IN THOSE DAYS Sentosa lay between times. Its old Malay name of Pulau Blakang Mati, the Island of Death from Behind, was falling away forever, after two decades of tourist board investment, laying the bright hard infrastructure of a cable car line, cycle paths, a monorail system. The military fort built by the British, its virgin artillery retired, was now a staid museum. For some years it had housed a reluctant living exhibit, left-wing dissident Chia Thye Poh; but recently, almost thirty years after his initial arrest, and still without a charge to his name, he had been allowed to return to the mainland, leaving behind only wax figures and bored schoolkids. History had just about slipped away.

  But there were still almost twenty years to go before the island’s confident reinvention as a bubbly playground for the super-rich. Only much later would tinkling video advertisements on international flights hope to catch the Russian or the Chinese eye with rhapsodies about manicured waterfront apartments, free from capital gains or estate taxation. In 1993 no one had planned for the luxury casino or the Hollywood theme park that would offer safe moneyed substitutes for dreams. There was no hint of the coming wild-caught dolphins, with their fading ocean memories, made to turn tricks and grace corporate websites.

  For now, Sentosa was a haphazard affair. The kitschy attractions that dotted its surface almost randomly had clearly been conceived in the cubicles of harried civil servants, desperate to bulk out the lists of bullet points in their draft memoranda on Leisure & Recreation. How else to explain the bumpy elevator ride, with flashing red lights, grandiosely dubbed Volcanoland? Or the mini golf course composed of eighteen largely identical rubberised oval patches? Despite this flaccidity, the island was popular enough, especially with teenagers. Its beaches were blandly pleasant, if small, and its well-paved paths saw a fair amount of use.

  “Seriously, man, I get that she’s sort of smart,” Ming Wei was saying, as he dug his feet into the sand. “In that arty kind of way. Can talk very cheem, lots of highfalutin words, that type. But there are so many Ashford girls who are hot and smart lorh. So many smarter ones than her some more. She only got him because she is willing to be so—shameless and aggressive. Damn sad.”

  Brian leaned back against the tree and looked out across the sea. He was rather tired of this. Once Ming Wei set the little attack dogs of his attention into motion, they did not seem to rest until everyone else was bored into feigning agreement. The matter at hand was, as it had been for some weeks, the hideous breach in the rightful order of the universe caused by Andrew and Hwee Leng dating between castes. On the one hand, a brilliant, sporty, popular Ashford guy, destined for greatness; on the other, a thickset, loud-mouthed, acne-scarred weirdo from that pasture of mediocrity, Marine Parade Junior College. It was worse than an injustice: it was a violation of the natural laws of economics. It was market failure. Someone had to be punished for it; and so far, that person had mostly been Brian.

  Initially Brian tried to deflect this sort of talk by reminding Ming Wei that he, personally, really rather liked Hwee Leng. She had, in fact, been Brian’s friend long before she became Andrew’s girlfriend. But this was in vain. Ming Wei wasn’t talking about friends: you could be friends with any girl you wanted, if being friends with girls was your sort of thing; though Ming Wei himself always suspected most guys were just using the nebulous idea of “friendship” as flimsy cover to get closer to their targets, even if some of these guys tried to delude themselves otherwise, probably largely to save their own face when they were ultimately rejected—but anyway he digressed. He wasn’t saying nobody could be friends with Hwee Leng; he’d even admit that she said the occasional amusing thing. But Brian was surely objective enough to see that when it came to relationships, his brother was—by every measure imaginable—way out of her league.

  “And it’s not just I say one, okay,” he said. “Senior Minister also agrees with me.”

  “What?” The improbability of Singapore’s pre-eminent elder statesman weighing in on his brother’s teenage love life startled Brian out of indifference.

  “Don’t you know about this? It’s always in the news. It’s a threat to the survival of the country!” Ming Wei laughed. “Too many high quality men marrying low quality women these days. Graduate guys go for non-graduate women, graduate women don’t get married. It’s bad for the breeding pool. Only dumb women have kids, you don’t get enough smart kids, and society goes downhill. So Andrew has a duty to Singapore to choose the right girlfriend! He’s got valuable genes, cannot waste.”

  Brian waved a hand irritably. “Aiyah, what are you talking about—what marriage, kids, genes? People are in JC only, who is thinking about this kind of thing?”

  “Joking only lah. But my point is this. You have to have standards—and even Lee Kuan Yew thinks so lorh. Your brother is so zai, he should look for the right girl.”

  Technically, zai denoted steadiness in the face of pressure, but as Ming Wei meant it, it was so much more. It was a statement of a guy’s holistic worth, and it was the central organising principle of the social world. In addition to the basic unruffled air, you had to be good at school (but not a nerd), good at sport (but not a brainless jock), and good-looking (but not to care about it). (Ming Wei acknowledged only these criteria, though a standard array of class and racial prejudices hung behind them like so much suffocating wallpaper.) It was bad form to speak of zai other than as praise for a peer, because it was the antithesis of zai to admit to striving for it, or to worrying about how one stacked up; but Ming Wei had no doubt that secretly, or not so secretly, everyone did. They had to: it was everything. To be zai was to merit respect. And girls.

  Girls were never, themselves, zai. A guy could demonstrate the refinement of his taste through a preference for girls who possessed good school pedigrees, and who were therefore certifiably smart and accomplished. But despite his facetious invocation of Lee Kuan Yew’s eugenicist dreams, Ming Wei saw little value in female achievements in themselves. Girls certainly didn’t get points for being yammering smart alecs of the Hwee Leng variety, especially when they looked like she did. If Andrew had picked up some polytechnic ah lian who was unable to string together a sentence in English, but who had big doe eyes or big tits, it would still have shaken his dignity, but it would at least have made some sense. Whereas consorting with the likes of Hwee Leng was a pure and senseless slap in the face. Andrew embodied the smart guy made good, the smart guy who was cool. Did he think so little of his own claims—and, by extension, those of all underserved smart guys everywhere—that he would settle for so little? Ming Wei took it personally.

  No one properly shared Ming Wei’s outrage. At school his tirades were received with distant sympathy, and with amusement that Andrew, so famously aloof with girls, had finally succumbed, and to such a creature, too. But, without seeing her themselves, the others had to reserve judgment. The grating intensity of Hwee Leng’s personality was difficult to convey secondhand; and if Ming Wei could not supply a smoking gun, such as obesity or disability, it was always possible that she was not quite as ugly as he claimed. No, the only person in any position to fully appreciate the problem was Brian, and he was gallingly insensible of the horror he had helped to bring about.

  Brian had met Hwee Leng about a year and a half earlier, when they were sixteen going on seventeen, both newly arrived at Marine Parade Junior College. He belayed her on a climb at an early Outd
oor Club meeting, they got to talking, and they became friends. It was simple. Left to himself he would never have noticed anything unusual: he met her before he met the general view of her about school. She never struck him as “scary, like quite bossy like that” (Darren) or “trying way too hard to make up for being an ugly chick” (Ravi). He didn’t transmit these opinions to her, but she knew about them anyway.

  “People like Ravi don’t like me,” she told him once, “because I know where I am in their stupid little Venn diagrams and league tables of the world, but I won’t just roll over and accept it. I don’t pretend their garbage makes any sense. You’re a relief, Brian, you don’t make all this continual fucking commentary, like we’re all horses running in the Turf Club.”

  Brian did not usually introduce his friends to his brother, but Hwee Leng had asked to speak to Andrew to get advice on universities abroad. Every year, Ashford graduates spilled out into colleges across the globe on the lion’s share of Singapore government scholarships, with many more wealthy enough to self-fund their way. Rumour had it that Ashford sent more kids to Harvard than did any other school in the world. In this hothouse of anticipation, a thicket of support had sprung up: alumni were at hand to answer questions about every institution, and a separate teacher advisor assisted with each destination country. The corridors filled with the sound of British and American admissions jargon: “SATs”, “UCAS”, “Early Admission”, “need-blind aid”. Marine Parade’s smaller band of hopefuls, like Hwee Leng, did not have access to such resources.

  They first met one Saturday evening at McDonald’s. (Hwee Leng would later wince at this detail, but it made perfect sense: it was air-conditioned, and they could stay as long as they liked without being chased away.) Andrew, fresh from a badminton victory, had his doubles partner and classmate Ming Wei in tow.

  “You going for a government scholarship?” Ming Wei managed to ask, between mouthfuls of burger, within fifteen seconds of Hwee Leng sitting down. He was a tall boy with a lean build, an expressive mouth, and large hands which he tended to wave generously as he spoke.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “One of those ah! Father-mother scholarship. Lucky, lucky. What course are you going to do?”

  “I’m not totally sure yet, but probably sociology.”

  “What! Sociology?” The word lengthened, in his mouth, into something unreal. “What are you going to do with that afterwards? Teach?” His voice peaked in disbelief. “And your parents are paying some more? Wah, don’t you think it’s a waste of their money to do something without a good career path? Like that might as well go to a local uni. Are you in the arts stream now?” (The arts stream, in the Ashford cosmology, was a dustbin for also-rans, who couldn’t handle the genuine intellectual rigour of the sciences.)

  “Yes, actually. Do you need to know all my teachers’ names also? My address and IC number? I had kaya on toast for breakfast this morning—quick, you should be writing this down.”

  Ming Wei drew back in mock fear. “Relax, woman, people are just curious only, what’s the big deal.”

  Things between those two had remained on more or less the same footing in the two months since then, even as—to Brian’s surprise—Hwee Leng began calling their home and asking to speak to his brother; and Andrew started to spend long late hours in the small corridor where the phone sat; and they both suggested hanging out as a group. For Brian, who lacked Ming Wei’s detailed sexual ideology, the main strangeness of it lay in suddenly seeing so much of his brother socially: something he hadn’t done, as far as he could recall, since they had been eleven or twelve, before Andrew had been inducted into his bright new world.

  The subjects of Ming Wei’s lecture, as he browbeat Brian on the Sentosa beach, were shuffling side by side along a footpath, which formed a small ellipsoidal loop a little to the northwest. It was a fresh, breezy day—unusually good weather for June—and Hwee Leng, her spirits high, was inevitably talking.

  “You want to feel sorry for him,” she said. “It’s not fair that people are so mean about all these things that aren’t important, like him being short, and his hair and his ugly bag and all that.” (Here she meant Chinh, a notorious figure of fun in her school, who had once been tied to the goalpost at one end of the basketball court. He might have stayed there all night if a cleaner hadn’t happened to spot him.) “But he really makes you not want to care. My classmate Michelle is one of the few people who is nice to him, and yesterday he said to her, just out of the blue, Michelle, you’re shallower than a fat girl should be.” (Michelle had burst into tears.) “After that kind of thing, I just can’t feel any more sympathy. I mean, yah, just because he’s a jerk doesn’t mean other people should be jerks to him, but—he doesn’t do himself any favours.”

  “That’s hard,” Andrew said. “When there are both good and bad reasons why he doesn’t have friends.”

  “Exactly. The bad reasons stay bad reasons, even if there are also good ones. And the other way around.”

  Hwee Leng risked a quick glance, searching Andrew’s face. A month on and she still didn’t know how to reckon it, her good luck with this boy, its delights suspended in a tense, crackling field—like static—which she felt herself always crossing. She felt safest talking: she knew he thought her clever (and she agreed); she sensed he approved (which she approved in turn). That meant a lot, after a lifetime—or so seventeen seemed—of being told, by just about everyone around her, that she made everything way too “complicating”. He listened; and this was such a rare token of regard, so simple and so great.

  But she couldn’t shake the apprehensive sense that she wanted too much. The world lit up when he was near, and he was often near; what more could she ask? It was ungrateful to feel so wretchedly deprived by the half-metre (that was the current gap) between their hands. She could and did lob every finely worded opinion fearlessly across, but she couldn’t discharge this tingling weakness in her fingers. When they were together, the thought of his skin seized her constantly, sometimes with an urgency that felt like pain. She’d made a move a few precious, unsatisfactory times—a hand on his knee, her head on his shoulder, timid hugs as they’d parted—and Andrew hadn’t discouraged her exactly, he hadn’t demurred or moved away, but he never returned her gestures either.

  She didn’t know what to make of this. Her sexual experience to date consisted largely of periods of blank agony, in which she brushed her lips against the back of her hands, and dreamt formless dreams of skin and bone; and also of irregular incidents, which she didn’t like to think about, of unsuccessful, solitary probing in the dark, breath anxiously withheld, her hands pulling back quickly at any sharpness of sensation. The dynamics of mutual desire were a mystery. She formed uncharacteristically flat theories: Andrew was too polite, perhaps; perhaps he had higher things on his mind. She had never been thought pretty, and it made a certain kind of sense, to her, that he might be happy to enter into an intimacy, to accept her bright, crystalline conversational offerings, without finding her physically compelling. This might be the best she could reasonably hope for. She was in his space on sufferance, on grace; she had no right to be wanted. She should not complain.

  (She would never have offered Brian such dreadful advice.)

  Andrew smiled at her now, but only for a second: as she returned it his gaze was already flickering off and away.

  “Why don’t we go sit over there?”

  He indicated a large square picnic table, framed by thick, backless benches on each side. As they approached, Hwee Leng hovered strategically at one corner, wondering how she should best position herself to make any physical contact seem natural. But Andrew slid himself into the middle of the far side, so that the most she could do, without embarrassment, was shuffle along the adjoining edge, until they were sitting in a sort of L shape.

  “Something kind of weird happened to me the other day,” Andrew said, tracing a clover pattern on the table with his fingernail.

  “Oh? What?”


  “It was about a week before term ended.”

  “You didn’t mention anything before.” They’d spoken at least five or six times since.

  “It’s a bit of a funny story,” he said. “I’ve been—quite disturbed by it. Thinking about it quite a lot.”

  She waited. She had no concept, she realised, of what might disturb him. After a few more moments’ scratching, he spoke.

  “There’s this Year One, I don’t really know him, but he came to me at the start of the year. He had some kind of problem with Orientation Week, he didn’t like the activities. I think he just wanted to talk about it to someone on the Council. Anyway, after that he went away.” He looked up at her briefly, then returned his attention to the imaginary clover. “Then the other day Mr de Souza—the Head of Discipline—asked this guy to help me pack the flags away after assembly, and when we were in the store room, he brought this thing up again.”

  “What thing?”

  “He had this problem with Orientation, he didn’t like it, he felt like people were forcing him to do tau pok and stuff like that. Anyway, it was going to be his birthday soon, and he said some guys in his class were going to bring some deep heat, you know, that cream stuff for when your muscles hurt after sport. When you put it on, it makes your skin feel like it’s burning. And—” He coloured here. “—he said they said they were going to put it on his dick.”

  “That’s horrendous!”

  “Yeah, he wasn’t very happy about it.”

  “Of course not! That’s terrible! Did he go to a teacher?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, it’s kind of normal, you know. As in,” he went on quickly, seeing her face, “I think they’d already done it to a lot of other guys in his class, so it’s not like—it’s supposed to be just for fun.”

  Hwee Leng shook her head angrily. “I don’t believe that for a moment. Maybe some stupid guys with some stupid idea of being macho think it’s fun, but if he doesn’t want it, then it’s just—screwed up.”