by Chan Ho-Kei
Why? Why? Why?
Why? Why? Why?
Why can’t they leave me alone?
Is God punishing me?
Even without looking at the date, Nga-Yee would have guessed that this was after kidkit727’s post appeared on Popcorn. She still deeply regretted how oblivious she’d been that weekend not to have noticed that Siu-Man was seriously struggling, leaving her to face this tsunami of internet criticism alone.
April 15, 2015 01:57
More and more people are talking about me at school.
The way they look at me is so frightening.
They all believe that guy’s nephew.
Those terrible things he said about me.
I don’t take drugs. I’m not a hooker.
But I know my classmates don’t believe me.
At this point Siu-Man had been leaving more and more posts in her Facebook journal, always after eleven p.m. and sometimes in the small hours of the morning. Only now, two months after Siu-Man’s death, was Nga-Yee finally seeing her sister’s terror. Had she been lying awake all that time, suffering this unspeakable pressure alone? When Nga-Yee crept out of bed to read yet more vitriolic comments on the household computer, had Siu-Man actually been lurking in the doorway, watching her helplessly from behind? She’d seemed so strong—was that just a charade for the benefit of her big sister? Had she blamed herself for creating yet more trouble?
Nga-Yee had no way to find out. All she knew was that despite her promise, she hadn’t been a pillar for Siu-Man to lean on.
April 18, 2015 01:47
I overheard people talking about me in the bathroom.
Maybe they’re right.
I’m cursed. I just drag others down.
I don’t have the right to be friends with anyone.
I don’t have the right to be happy.
I don’t have the right to exist.
Those words, “the right,” were like a lead pipe crashing down on Nga-Yee’s soul. She wanted to hold her sister by the shoulders and tell her that she absolutely had the right, that no one could stop her from living happily, and even if she couldn’t find any friends, Nga-Yee would always love and support her with all her heart.
April 25, 2015 02:37
Dear Stranger, By the time you see these lines, I might no longer be here.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about death every day.
I’m so tired. So very tired.
I have this nightmare every night: I’m in a wilderness, then dark things start chasing after me.
I run and scream for help, but no one comes to rescue me.
I know for certain that no one is coming to rescue me.
The dark things rip me to shreds. As they rip off my limbs they laugh and laugh.
Such horrifying laughter.
The most horrifying thing is that I’m laughing too. My heart is rotten too.
“This … this really was Siu-Man’s suicide note,” Nga-Yee sobbed, her right hand curling tightly around the phone. The counterfeit note had used Siu-Man’s actual writing, word for word, from just ten days before her fatal leap on May 5. She hadn’t committed suicide on a moment’s impulse—this was already on her mind in April.
Nga-Yee hadn’t noticed. She’d thought her sister was on an even keel.
April 27, 2015 02:22
I’m ready to collapse.
At the school, in the street, on public transport, I feel suffocated.
Every day, I can feel thousands of eyes full of hatred boring into me.
They all want me dead.
I have nowhere to run.
On my way to school and back, I think if the MTR platforms had no barriers,
I would step in front of a train. An end to everything.
Maybe it’s better if I die. I’m dragging everyone down.
“Oh!” With this last line, Nga-Yee realized how wrong she’d been. After finding kidkit727’s last messages to Siu-Man, she’d thought that was what pushed her sister into suicide. Looking at these entries, she finally understood her sister’s state of mind.
It was true that kidkit727’s words had been a catalyst, but not the ones Nga-Yee had thought—not Are you brave enough to die? or have no right to go on living. No, it was something from the second message:
You’ll be a disgrace to your classmates.
That was what Siu-Man feared most: dragging other people down. She thought she’d held her mother and sister back, and perhaps her friends too—Kwok-Tai and Lily particularly. The brouhaha over her court case and the subsequent Popcorn post had roiled up the whole school. Siu-Man must have felt like an extra piece in a jigsaw, as if her existence were an unwanted blot on an otherwise perfect world.
It was also true that Nga-Yee had never once told her sister how much she meant to her.
April 29, 2015 02:41
Before I leave this world, I have to apologize to my best friend.
Or I should say my former best friend.
Every day in class, I look at her.
She doesn’t show it, but I know she hates me.
She ought to hate me.
My carelessness hurt her deeply.
After that, we stopped speaking.
I have no right to be her best friend.
Maybe that’s good. I won’t hold her back any longer.
The next entry confirmed what Nga-Yee had been thinking: the person Siu-Man thought hated her was actually Lily. The other lines in the fake note were manipulated by N, but these were real.
May 1, 2015 03:11
When I’m no longer here, my classmates will be relieved.
They won’t have to put on masks and play-act in front of me.
The teachers made them stop talking about it, so they do it in secret now, more than ever.
They think I took away their peace. Everyone’s uneasy now.
Especially that girl. She must wish I would drop out.
I heard her telling her followers I should stop coming to school.
I’ve tried to catch her eye, but every time she looks away quickly.
She must hate me.
And I know what she’s done in secret.
She calls me boyfriend-thief, drug-fiend, whore.
I know it’s her, though I have no proof.
She told this nephew everything. Her or her followers.
They all have big mouths.
But who cares.
Soon, I’ll give them what they want, and disappear.
“She’s talking about—the Countess?” Nga-Yee muttered.
“The person she thinks spilled the beans to Shiu Tak-Ping’s nephew? Probably,” said N. “When the Countess said your sister shouldn’t come to school, that may not have been malicious—she might have meant she shouldn’t have to face all that nasty gossip. Sure, her handmaidens did go around spreading those rumors, but if the Countess herself wasn’t as vicious as she liked to appear, this must have been hard for her too—to empathize with your sister but not be able to show it.”
Nga-Yee scrolled down to find the final entry, written one day before Siu-Man killed herself.
May 4, 2015 03:49
Dear stranger, this may be the last time we speak.
I’m so tired. I can’t keep pretending I’m fine.
Especially in front of my sister.
I know she’s pretending too.
Why should the two of us keep faking it? Let’s just end it and rip off those masks.
When I’m gone, she can be happy again.
Mr. Stranger, my name is Au Siu-Man. I’m the girl who caused all that fuss online.
If you don’t know who I am, you can easily Google it.
I didn’t write my name as an accusation. After all you don’t know me, and I don’t know you.
I just wanted a stranger to hear everything I’ve suffered as proof that I once existed in this world.
By the time you read these lines, I might not any more.
“How could I possibly be happy with you gone?�
� Nga-Yee screamed at the phone in her hand, sobbing inconsolably. No technology on earth could send this cry to Siu-Man as she sat writing those words. Nga-Yee didn’t care that N had copied some of these lines into his fake suicide note, like a grotesque collage, in order to mislead Violet, nor that a random mod may have read these posts. All she wanted was to tell Siu-Man that her suicide would only bring more pain to her sister.
She couldn’t deny that she’d spent those weeks pretending everything was fine, even as she’d worried nonstop about Siu-Man. That time seemed like happiness compared with losing her—at least she’d had someone to worry about.
“Did you know about this all along?” she growled at N, trying to stay calm. By the time of their first visit to the school, N had had Siu-Man’s phone for two days; that was two weeks ago. Even if he hadn’t yet known who she was referring to, he’d have read why she’d wanted to die.
“Yes.”
“But you kept it from me?” Her voice was full of rage, ready to explode.
“You didn’t ask,” said N callously. “People are always blindly searching for answers, but it turns out they didn’t ask the right questions to start with. Miss Au, you hired me to find the person who posted on Popcorn attacking your sister. You never said I should also investigate Violet’s motives or your sister’s reasons for killing herself.”
“But—but you knew—”
“I knew how important these would be to you, but I didn’t say anything?” he interrupted. “Yes, but even if I ‘knew’ that you’d do anything to get your sister’s last words, that was just my subjective view. You didn’t ask about it, so why would I go out of my way to prove something that was none of my business? If you wanted the whole truth—well, that’s not what you said when you came to me. Besides, your sister chose to write her thoughts on a secret Facebook page precisely so her family and friends wouldn’t see it after she died. I was just respecting her wishes, and you’re upset with me?”
Once again, his twisted logic silenced Nga-Yee.
“And besides,” N went on, “I gave you plenty of hints about your sister’s state of mind. Didn’t I say you ought to have known more about her friends? Didn’t I ask how the sister in your mind was different from the reality? If you’d asked me at the time, of course I’d have told you the truth. But you ignored it. And now you blame me for not speaking up sooner?”
Thinking back, Nga-Yee had to admit that N really had said those things to her. She was shocked, and also full of regret. She couldn’t agree with everything he’d said, but she had definitely neglected something very important: both before and after Siu-Man’s death, she hadn’t truly cared about what her sister was feeling, nor tried to probe her innermost thoughts.
“I asked you how much pocket money your sister got,” said N placidly. “That’s when I knew that you might be close to your sister, but you had no idea what she was thinking.”
“Huh?”
“You gave her three hundred a week. After subtracting MTR fare and lunch money, that’s hardly enough for a secondary school student to live on these days. You know how much prices have gone up in the last few years. Twenty-odd dollars used to buy you a decent boxed lunch, but these days thirty isn’t even enough for a plain bowl of noodles. You think your sister liked having sandwiches for lunch every day? She was just choosing the cheapest option. Where do you think she got the spare cash to have coffee with Kwok-Tai and Lily?”
“Siu-Man was never materialistic like that! She’d never starve herself just to afford a fancy phone or—”
“Who said fancy anything? I’m talking about ordinary social life. If her friends wanted to hang out, then even if money was tight, she’d have to save up enough to go along rather than pouring cold water on their plans. Isn’t that what people do?”
“If she’d asked for more pocket money, I’d have given it to her!”
“Your sister wasn’t just worried about keeping up with her friends, she also knew the family’s finances were tight—that’s why she didn’t ask.” There was a hint of mockery in his voice. “You know what your family went through—and you’d better believe your sister was aware of it too, even at her age. She saw how much you and your mother suffered—and that’s why she was so insistent that she didn’t want to hold anyone back. But you didn’t see what she was going through. You thought everything was just fine.”
“You’re guessing.”
“Yes, I’m guessing. Don’t forget, you were the one who asked for my unverified hypothesis.” N’s expression was stern. “One Direction too—I bet your sister wasn’t even into them. She just made herself listen to their music so she’d have something to talk about with Lily. You went through her stuff when you were looking for her phone—wouldn’t a real fan have some CDs or music magazines? I knew there weren’t any, because when I brought up One Direction with Lily, you had no idea what we were talking about. It wasn’t such a stretch to deduce that your sister had worries about fitting in.”
It was true, Nga-Yee realized.
“Miss Au.” N sighed gently. “This may not be what you wanted to hear, but you and I are the same: we enjoy being alone. We love our isolation. Rather than waste time on pointless social interactions, we’d rather focus on the things we find important. You had no friends at school, because you wanted to take care of your family. Now you’d rather read books than spend time with your coworkers. We’re fine going our own way and leaving the world behind. But you have to understand that your sister wasn’t you. She felt peer pressure. She cared about fitting in with people her age, doing what they did, down to pretending to share their interests. That’s probably why she agreed to date Kwok-Tai, though the way that turned out made things even worse.”
“What are you talking about?” Nga-Yee stared at him. “Are you saying she didn’t actually like Kwok-Tai, but agreed to go out with him?”
“Kids these days declare their love and start dating—but how often are both sides equally willing? One person probably just goes along with it if the other one doesn’t totally disgust them. Everyone around them is dating, so they feel the need to do it too. And given your sister’s situation, she might have thought this was her chance to turn her life around—”
“What do you mean, her situation?”
N stroked his chin and hesitated for a few seconds. “This is just conjecture, but I think your sister actually had a crush on someone else.”
“Who?”
“She deleted all the pictures of her schoolmates from her phone except for one. She probably couldn’t bear to get rid of that one.”
Nga-Yee stared at him in shock. “Lil—Lily Shu? You’re saying Siu-Man liked girls?”
“I’m not necessarily calling her a lesbian, but she certainly had feelings for Lily. Maybe she didn’t know exactly what those feelings were. Don’t you think it makes sense? That she’d pretend to like a certain band to get closer to someone? That she’d scrimp on her lunch to spend more time with someone she liked? She knew she couldn’t actually be with Lily, and that’s why when Kwok-Tai asked her out, she thought it might be a way of ‘correcting’ her ‘unnatural’ tendencies. Yet she ended up hurting the person she actually liked, and in the end she had no one at all.”
Blood rushed to Nga-Yee’s brain, and she grew dizzy. If Siu-Man had come out to her, she’d have accepted it once she got over the shock. What bothered her was that she hadn’t known that this was worrying Siu-Man. How could she not have seen that Siu-Man needed her? Siu-Man must have seen something of herself in Laura Lam, and that’s why she’d so eagerly teamed up with Kwok-Tai to take Violet down. Maybe Lily’s casual homophobia was what told her she had no hope. And perhaps that’s when Jason took advantage of Siu-Man’s despair to lure her to the karaoke bar—and she’d been so desperate for someone to talk to that she’d agreed, only to land in even more trouble.
“I—I thought I was a good big sister. I gave up my studies so she could have a brighter future.”
“There you go
again.” N frowned. “You did this for her, but did you ask what she wanted? Don’t you think your noble gesture might have weighed on her, making her feel like she couldn’t breathe? A lot of people do this, endlessly giving of themselves, but isn’t that just their need for control? Have you ever stopped to think what family actually means to you?”
N took Siu-Man’s phone from her and tapped it a few times. “Your sister kept only one classmate’s picture. But she did have a picture of her with two other people.”
When he handed the phone back, on the screen was a selfie. Siu-Man’s face took up the left side of the screen, and on the right, just stepping out of the bathroom and drying her hair with a towel, was Nga-Yee. Standing nearby was their mother, making dinner. Nga-Yee and Mom were in mid-conversation and hadn’t noticed Siu-Man sneaking a photo. This must have been when Siu-Man was in year one, not long after she got the phone. Siu-Man was grinning with satisfaction—not because she’d taken the picture without them noticing, but because she’d successfully captured a moment in the life of this family she loved, and the ordinary moment was now an image to be preserved.
Siu-Man treasured her family. Even this ordinary day, with the simple meal they were about to eat, was enough to fill her with joy.
Tears came to Nga-Yee’s eyes, and she thought her heart would burst from guilt. This picture and those Facebook posts were making her think that Siu-Man’s suicide could have come from the same impulse that made Nga-Yee give up her university place: a sacrifice. She’d always thought of her sister as carefree and cheerful, but now it seemed that was just a pose to make Nga-Yee and their mother happy. And now Nga-Yee knew why she’d been so dead set on ferreting out kidkit727—she still loathed the despicable person who’d launched this attack on her sister from the shadows, but there was someone she hated even more: herself.
The need to make a living had caused Nga-Yee to forget about something even more important. Earning money was a means to an end: to support the household and let her family live happily. But capitalist society lulls us into believing our wages are a goal in themselves, turning us into slaves of money. We forget that as crucial as money may be, there are even more important things that we can’t afford to lose.