by Judith Huang
Sofia and the utopia machine
a novel
Judith Huang
ISBN: 978-981-47-8581-5
First Edition: May 2018
© 2018 by Judith Huang
Author photo by Viva Photography. Used with permission.
Published in Singapore by Epigram Books
www.epigrambooks.sg
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Part 1
Chapter 1: Chinese New Year
Chapter 2: The Chair
Chapter 3: Isaac
Chapter 4: The First Letter
Chapter 5: The Island and the Sea
Chapter 6: Paradiso
Chapter 7: Uncle Kirk
Chapter 8: The Utopia Machine
Chapter 9: Face to Face
Chapter 10: Hyzid & Leela
Chapter 11: On the Run
Chapter 12: Clara
Part 2
Chapter 13: The Fisherman
Chapter 14: The Voids
Chapter 15: Novena
Chapter 16: The Sibyl
Chapter 17: The Pirate’s Wife
Chapter 18: The Island
Part 3
Chapter 19: Ha’shan and the Star
Chapter 20: In the Cell
Chapter 21: The Boar
Chapter 22: In the New World
Chapter 23: In the Belly of the Beast
Chapter 24: The Inquisitor
Chapter 25: The Engine
Chapter 26: The Rescue
Chapter 27: The Mari Kita
Chapter 28: The Feast
Part 4
Chapter 29: In the Beginning
Chapter 30: Julian
Chapter 31: Night Flight
Chapter 32: Whitley Detention Centre
Chapter 33: Escape
Chapter 34: Valley of the Gods
Chapter 35: The Oak Bed
Chapter 36: The Funeral
Chapter 37: The Fragrance Returns
Acknowledgements
About the Author
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For my parents, who were always there for me;
and for Xuwen, who always believed
in this book even when I didn’t
there is no eden, there is no jerusalem
this is wasteland, this is utopia
this is monte carlo, this is your and my casino
this is my inferno, this is your paradise
Yeng Pway Ngon, “On the Operating Table”
translated from the Chinese by
Alvin Pang & Goh Beng Choo
Part 1
Chapter 1: Chinese New Year
“Sofia, you are so tall now! Stand up, stand up and let me see,” Auntie Rosie said. Auntie Rosie was Clara’s older sister, but she was so matronly and there was so much of a generation gap between them that Clara somehow appended “Auntie” to Rosie’s name when she thought about her. Auntie Rosie was a very persistent woman. There was no turning down her invitations, and experience had proved that the consequences of not going to her gatherings were far more severe than bearing with her company for a few hours.
“Wah, they grow up so fast, ah!”—she addressed Clara now—children under the age of 16, like Sofia, were usually props in such conversations, to be marvelled at and ranked against each other rather than talked to. “Such a pity your Peter couldn’t see her grow up! She looks so much like him!” Auntie Rosie was all smiles and sympathy, as though Peter had died instead of merely being gone. “She so tall already, nothing like my Pei Pei, short short one, and so lazy some more, always dunno what to do… Dunno how they can even be cousins!”
“We must really find you a new husband, huh?” interjected another clucking relative.
“Yar lor yar lor, while you are still young! Nah!” Rosie took an ang pow out of her purse and pushed it into Clara’s palm. Clara took it uncertainly. Without warning, the woman had taken hold of her elbow, steering her towards the snack table. “Come, come—must eat. You are all skin and bones already! We need to fatten you up! Work too hard, lah, you!”
The thing about Rosie, Clara reflected, was that she really wasn’t being unkind. Clara only found her rude because of her own years of tertiary education abroad, which made the local attitude of all-pervasive intrusiveness seem so grating. She couldn’t just tell them to mind their own business, or be affronted by what they said.
Everyone’s affair was everyone else’s in this country. If you saw schoolchildren making out in their school uniforms, as an upstanding citizen, you took holos of them and sent them in to the media outlets. If you were single, everyone from your distant relatives to your boss to your cleaning lady crowdsourced your love life. They were, in fact, being polite and caring.
“Too old already lah!” She smiled ruefully at the repeated offers to help her “find husband” before edging towards the pyramids of mandarin oranges in a bid to stuff her mouth so full she would have a valid reason not to talk.
Auntie Rosie’s netbox was blaring some inane sitcom. Loops of holographic cartoon rats—the zodiac animal of the year—pranced around the living room, holding mandarin oranges in their paws, while people poured Coke into glasses and crunched on peanuts out of shiny Thumb-brand plastic packets. Red and gold decorations in the shape of ingots and coins festooned the living room, indicating Auntie Rosie’s wishes that she would strike it rich in the new year. Clara wondered at herself and her relatives. The same blasé middle-class rituals continued in the living rooms of every Midlevel flat. Worrying about their brand name schools with this or that special proto-genetic enhancement programme (PGEP), where the best dim sum and spa package deal was, or the damned new ultramegaplex, which, as far as Clara was concerned, looked exactly like the last one, full of the same chain stores.
Didn’t they have better things to talk about, to think about? But she was being unfair. She had been stung by the petty humiliation of the ang pow. It reminded her that, as far as everyone here was concerned, she was single. What her sister had meant as a sisterly kindness had put her firmly in her place.
She knew she cut a strange figure at any family gathering—37, with a teenage daughter, working at a job so secretive she couldn’t make small talk about it, and most of all, the inexplicable missing husband. She felt the whispers behind her back, the ones full of malice and worse, the ones full of pity.
“PhD, you know, from Harvard and MIT or Mitch-chee-gan or somewhere, and she had a child so young… I know, right? Dunno, dunno, rumo
ur only. Sometimes I worry about that girl, I wonder what it must be like, living with no father. Clara ah, she not young already…but like that, very hard to find husband leh…”
Clara simply gritted her teeth. Sometimes, during these events, she would go to the bathroom and just lock herself in there for a few minutes to catch her breath. Then she would straighten up, clean up her face, reapply her lipstick and stride out, the confident but weird auntie once more.
But not this time. Because this time, when she walked out of the bathroom, she found Auntie Rosie talking to Sofia, and something in her just snapped. It was a line that had been crossed.
*
“So, no ang pow from your father again this year ah, Sophie? You didn’t get a message or anything? These men are so weird sometimes. Scholar, and was such a good boy some more… But grow up already become like that.” Rosie gave Sofia a wide, dangerous smile.
“Hiyah, you know that kind… He was from the Voids mah. Some more, I heard he is Catholic, his church like cult like that. As they say, leopard cannot change its spots,” said another relative wisely.
Sofia had gone beetroot red. “I don’t know where he is,” she said, truthfully. “Maybe he couldn’t send message from there.”
Rosie’s eyebrows shot up. “So you mean he hasn’t talked to you since…how old?”
Sofia was trapped. “Eight,” she mumbled. Now everyone was listening. She tried to inch away towards the drinks, but to no avail.
“Well, you know, you can tell your Mama that if she really need help, my good friend Ah Kiao works in SDN… Your mother very proud one, better you ask her than I ask her…”
“Damn right!” said Clara, her temper shot through the roof. “You leave my daughter alone, okay? Bitch!” Before she knew what she was doing, Clara had sworn at Auntie Rosie at the top of her voice. Auntie Rosie looked like she had been slapped. The dumpy little woman stood there, stunned.
Then she rubbed her face and said, “Huh—you…you… You go America, think you big shot or what! I older than you okay! Really boh dua boh sui!”
Sofia was still confused about what was going on. She was in the middle of pouring herself some Coke.
“Sofia, let’s go!” said Clara through gritted teeth. When Sofia didn’t move, Clara knocked the glass out of her hand, smashing it to smithereens. She hadn’t meant to—Sofia had flinched. The shards clattered on the tiles. Now they really had the whole flat’s attention. After a long minute of stunned silence, Auntie Rosie burst into tears.
“That cup was Mama’s one! How dare you break! You don’t care about me never mind, you don’t care about your own mother? You are really heartless, you know… You think got so many degree, very great is it?! I know you look down on me! You think I dunno what you do in that lab-bor-ratory—you think I dunno! I tell you, you will pay! You will pay! You leave now, you don’t come back! You never, never come back!”
Amongst the gasps and titters, Clara grabbed an angry Sofia by the wrist, tucked her purse under her arm and made for the door. Soon they were zooming on an escapod towards the MRT station, scaling down two hundred floors in a blink.
*
Sofia grew more and more annoyed as Clara dragged her along, shoving her way through the sea of people, all frantically making for the door of the train to get to or away from their reunions. Why had she made a scene like that? Why had she embarrassed her in front of all their relatives? Why had she made this irredeemable break from the rest of their family? And underneath it all was the larger, more pertinent resentment, of course: that Sofia considered it Clara’s fault that her father had left. It was her choice, wasn’t it? Who else’s could it be? Hadn’t she driven her father away, and wasn’t that why she had to face the indignity of the interrogations about his absence?
Elbows jostled, mandarin oranges held tightly by the fists as body squashed against body, occasionally squeezed when the train made a sharp turn. Sofia felt her underarms puddle with sweat. The crush of bodies, a mixture of hair products, juice from the oranges and sour sweat made the ride unpleasant. By the time they got home, Sofia was livid. The moment they had an inch more breathing space, she shook her hand out of Clara’s vice-like grip and ran to her room.
“LEAVE ME ALONE!”
“SOFIA!”
Sofia slumped onto her bed, which produced a long, metallic screech. She knew her mother was in a bad mood too, but she didn’t really give a damn.
“SOPHIE!”
She grabbed a pillow and covered her head with it. She hated this time of year.
“SOFIA!”
Everything told her she should love this time of the year, but she hated it. She hated it with a passion. Everyone else was so happy—their lunch boxes stuffed with Chinese New Year goodies, their wallets full of brand-new vintage-style banknotes issued especially for ang pows, and the megacineplexes blasting the obnoxiously cheery music to ring in the new year. But not for her. And not for her mother. Somehow all this made their lives seem sad and lonely, even though everything was fine.
As far as Sofia could remember, her mother had always disliked going to family gatherings. Some, such as the Chinese New Year’s Eve gathering at Auntie Rosie’s, were just not optional. But even then, her mother avoided all the other aunts, uncles and cousins Sofia didn’t really know.
Sofia felt envious of her classmates, who would talk about sleepovers or shopping trips they had had with their cousins. Some travelled with their extended families, piling all together into the high-speed rail north to exotic beaches in Thailand. Her wealthier classmates even did moon trips with their cousins during the longer June and December school holidays.
Sofia, on the other hand, barely knew any of her cousins or extended family. She and her mother might as well have lived on a different planet, a planet of just two people, who didn’t even like each other that much. It was somehow her mother’s fault, she thought. She was the antisocial one. And now she had embarrassed her in front of the entire clan. They were surely going to gossip about them even more now. Sofia flicked through her holos on her netbox, the device hovering at about eye level around her. Another boisterous Chinese New Year jingle blasted through the speakers.
“Gong xi, gong xi, gong xi ni!”
Sofia batted the floating netbox onto her bed violently. The device, programmed to detect extreme frustration, packed itself into a small, hard case and scuttled out of reach. And then she slammed the door of her room, even though she knew her mother would be there in two seconds to swing it open, but it was more for punctuation than an effective parent repellent. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the coming tirade.
But then it didn’t come. Five minutes, ten, twenty… Then she heard something far worse coming from the other side of the door—the muffled but unmistakable sound of her mother sobbing. Softly, she crept to the door and opened it a few centimetres. Her mother was on the sofa, her body shaking. The sounds she was making didn’t sound human. They sounded like the moans of a wounded animal, like nothing Sofia had ever heard before.
Sofia was scared, but she steeled herself and opened the door wider. Very quietly, she inched her way towards the shaking creature. When she got to her knees, it suddenly engulfed her with its hands, and buried her in a mixture of heat and tears. Then she started to cry as well, without understanding why.
As her mother held her in her arms, Sofia felt a growing resentment. She didn’t understand any of this. She didn’t understand why her mother was crying, and why she was crying herself. Weren’t adults supposed to deal with this kind of thing? Why was her mother inflicting this on her? Why the sudden display of emotion? She felt indignant. She didn’t want to see her mother like this.
“Please, Ma, please… Stop crying.”
Clara bit her lip and pulled away from her. Sofia felt her shudder a little.
“You’re right. I need to get to the office.”
It’s a public holiday, Sofia said to herself, but bit the thought back because frankly, she was
glad to see her mother go. She wanted the flat to herself for a bit.
As the latch of the gate clicked, Sofia picked her way to her little bathroom. She pushed aside the grey accordion door. Her face was sticky, and the tears had left little trails of salt, which made her feel disgusting.
After she had washed her face, she looked at herself in the mirror.
Her eyes were puffy, her nose red. She was going to be 15 soon, and she still didn’t like the way she looked. Her eyes had potential, she decided; they were a lovely almond shape and very lively, although obscured somewhat by her glasses, which were round with silver frames. But her ears were a bit crooked. And her mouth was too wide. She had absolutely no idea what to do about her hair, which stuck out at weird angles and looked greasy no matter how much she washed it. But worst of all, she had another giant pimple right in the middle of her left cheek. She grimaced, and started picking at it irrationally, even while she overcame the last of her sniffles.
She felt very hot and sticky, despite the cool water she splashed on her face. She considered getting onto her holosheets on her netbox, but then thought better of it. She felt very, very tired. The best thing to do would be to go to bed early, she decided.
Wriggling rapidly out of the uncomfortable red Chinese New Year dress Clara had forced her to wear, she changed into a ratty primary school PE T-shirt and a pair of cooling FBT shorts. The shirt was getting tight around her chest. She fidgeted a bit, then flopped herself onto her bed.
Sofia wished she could remember her father better. What she could remember seemed so fleeting, barely clinging to the edges of her consciousness, and the vague blur of memories seemed more insubstantial the more she tried to dwell on any one specifically. It terrified her that she might lose all memories of her father. Even his face was a bright blur in her mind, and she simply couldn’t bring up any memory of him and her mother really interacting. She couldn’t ask her mother. There was a huge taboo around the topic in their house. All her mother would say about him was that he left when she was eight, although for what reason, and where he was now, was a complete mystery.