Lion City

by Ng Yi-Sheng

  “Control, this is Papa Zero. Yod Hey Vav Hey has left the nest at oh oh hundred hours, over.”

  Behind her, she hears a voice. It’s Ci.

  “Kamusta ka,” he says. He holds up a plastic bag full of yellow fluid. “Double-boiled soup. With ginseng. My mother in Guangdong says it’s good for the baby.”

  “You darling,” Prudencia says. She knows she’s not supposed to eat or drink on the runway, but at this hour, who’s watching? She sips it up with a straw, keeping her eyes on the skyline in case of an unexpected visit.

  “You ever thought you’d be doing this work?” Ci asks, after a while.

  “Me? No. But it’s not so bad. I couldn’t do this in a regular air terminal, you know? Jet engines, they’ll destroy a baby’s ears.” She rubs her belly, and begins singing an old hymn she remembers in Tagalog.

  When she gets to the hallelujahs, Ci asks, “You are Christian?”

  “Of course.”

  “In China, we used to believe in 毛主席, in Chairman Mao, in Communism,” he says. “Now we don’t believe in anything anymore.”

  They’re silent for a while. Indoors, they can hear the sound of a machine, burnishing the floor with wax.

  “Poor Nabilah. Still on duty.”

  “Shouldn’t Hla Myatt have taken over by now?”

  ‘You don’t remember? On Tuesday she got eaten by the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea.”

  “Oh yah. Such a waste.”

  Another pause. Prudencia’s baby kicks, and she guides Ci’s hand to her shirt so he can witness the little miracle.

  “Do you think you will raise your child to be Christian?”

  “Yes, of course. It is good, you know? It is always good to have something to believe in.”

  And it’s 0455. Nabilah is in the locker room, towelling off from her shower. She knows she should go home. But her next shift is in another five hours, and taxis are expensive at this time of the morning. She wonders if anyone will mind if she spends the night asleep in the surau.

  Once she’s finished straightening her hijab, the Buraq appears again, stepping out from the women’s cubicles.

  “Have no fear,” it tells her.

  “Go away. You’ve got the wrong person.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “I’m an ordinary woman. I’m not like the guests here. I can’t cross between Heaven and Hell. I have no right.”

  The Buraq follows her out through the staff exit.

  “Then stay,” it says. “Live your life without knowledge, and lie satisfied in your tomb. Billions do this. They accept the destinies they are dealt. They do not aspire to greatness. They change nothing. Nothing has to change.”

  Nabilah peers into the creature’s eyes. Then she lifts her leg, climbs onto its back and grips its bridle.

  And without ceremony, by the light of the morning star, the two of them disappear.

  Food Paradise

  So this happened a few months ago. I went to see a Taoist medium in Middle Road, because I was having anxiety related to my writer’s block and quarter-life crisis, plus a couple more things that aren’t one hundred per cent relevant to this story. She sat me down at her folding table in the five-foot-way, looked at my palm and threw these old Chinese coins out of a tortoiseshell tumbler. And then she told me something quite strange.

  “Young man, in your past life, you were a bowl of laksa.”

  This wasn’t what I was expecting. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. You see, I’d been having a series of bad dreams where I was lying at the bottom of a deep metal pot, sweating and steaming, and there was a long sharp something, I guess it was a spoon, poking at my insides. I’d had visions, when I was exhausted from running, or coming off a really intense orgasm, of my body dissolving into a mass of stringy bee hoon. And then there was the fact that as a kid, I’d been deathly afraid of chopsticks.

  But I guess I looked a bit, you know, if not actually disturbed, maybe just a little shell-shocked at the WTF-ness of it all. So the medium tried to comfort me, saying—and I’m translating badly from Hokkien here—“Don’t worry. It’s very normal.” Something like, “The Christians and the Muslims, they say only people have souls, but actually, a lot of things can have souls. Animals, plants, demons, gods. Even a mountain or a river. Even a temple or a house.”

  I think I said, “Dan si laksa bo so siang meh?” or “Isn’t laksa a bit different?”, because I didn’t actually have the vocabulary to go into the semantics of this: how when you get down to it, you’re essentially talking about this cocktail of dead prawn and coconut parts, smooshed together for human consumption. And the noodles. I mean, what do they make the noodles out of. Rice? Wheat?

  And the medium gave a look like this, like I was slow and she was both sorry for me and a little impatient, and said, “Anything well made can have a soul. A great painting, a beautiful statue, a perfect meal. A good bowl of noodles can be as much a work of art as the Mona Lisa.”

  So that night’s dinner was difficult. We weren’t having anything special: just chicken chops with cabbage and pork rib soup and rice. But it was a family recipe, and I couldn’t help wondering if the broth and cabbage leaves my parents were spooning into their mouths were alive, loaded with memories and mania like mine. I managed to force a few morsels down my throat and shifted the rest about on my plate, and when my father said, “Don’t waste food,” I just said I was cutting down on carbs and left the table.

  Later, I called my boyfriend. “I’ve got bit of a crisis,” I told him. “I just found out I’m the reincarnation of a bowl of laksa.”

  “Mmm?” he said, which is the way he responds to everything.

  “Yah. Apparently, if you cook something just right, it enters the cycle of samsara. And now I’m scared that I’ve been basically eating conscious beings all my life.”

  “Mmm.”

  “So I’m a cannibal. I’m worse than Hitler. I’m Idi Amin or something.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Are you listening to me or not?”

  “Yah.” He doesn’t talk a lot, my boyfriend.

  “You’re not shocked? I mean, you don’t think it’s weird that you’re dating a former piece of hawker cuisine?”

  “No what. It’s very common,” he said. This is how I found out that in his sect of Hinduism, it’s general knowledge that food can have a soul. That’s why his family abstains from meat and garlic and onions on certain holy days. It’s not even written in the scriptures: it’s something you just know.

  “Okay, that’s great. So what do I do?” I asked.

  “Wait wait wait,” he said, and I could hear his fingers clicking on the keyboard of his office computer, because he’s not a wannabe writer slacker like me and that’s how late he works every day. “Okay, there’s a support group for this kind of thing. Thursday got meeting. Serangoon CC, 7.30pm. I’ll send you the link.”

  So, thanks to my very resourceful boyfriend, a couple of evenings later, I found myself in a community club’s multi-purpose room with a sticker on my shirt reading, “YI-SHENG/LAKSA”. The group was called “Soul Kitchen”. I wish I was kidding. There weren’t a lot of people there: just ten of us or so, mostly Chinese, although there was one Malay guy who looked pretty embarrassed to have a sticker with the words, “AZMAN/BABI GULING”.

  There was also a facilitator from my boyfriend’s temple, whose sticker said, “SANGEETHA/OKONOMIYAKI”. She had us arrange the chairs in a circle and share our personal stories about how we learnt about our past lives as food items, the struggles we faced with our formerly suppressed memories, and…I think it was, “how we accepted the gift that we had been given, to live this life as human beings: the eaters and not the eaten”?

  I soon found out I was pretty lucky. Obviously, unlike Azman, I didn’t have this whole crisis of faith, halal versus haram thing going on. But I also didn’t have the PTSD-like symptoms that almost everyone else had of actually entering someone’s jaws and being c
homped to death and dissolved in digestive fluids. I mean, this was a core part of everyone’s testimonies but mine, regardless of whether they’d been pandan cake or pasta puttanesca: the moment of having their very flesh ripped apart by teeth and tongues just like their own today.

  I did, however, have a pretty urgent problem I needed to share. Basically, ever since I’d discovered my former life, I’d been starving. I hadn’t dared to eat my maid’s or my mother’s cooking, or the food from the food courts near the library where I’d been doing research. I couldn’t stomach the idea that I’d be destroying another being, sucking out its spirit and ravaging its corpse. So I’d been sustaining myself on things like Coca-Cola from vending machines, Oreos and Pocky from Cheers, rubbishy convenience store shit that basically made my teeth ache with their blandness. What else could I do? Every time I looked at a plate of duck rice or ban mian or Indian rojak, I just felt guilty, OK? Was it speaking to me? Was it maybe crying out to be rescued from its fate?

  I said all that to the group, probably in less eloquent words, I don’t remember what. But when I got to the end of my monologue, I noticed Sangeetha’s expression. And she was biting her lip, trying not to laugh.

  “Thank you so much for sharing,” she said. “I sympathise with you. We all sympathise with you. But it’s okay. Look.” And here she dug into her bag and drew out two clear plastic containers: one filled with white noodles, and the other with creamy orange gravy.

  It was laksa. She popped off the lids of the containers, so the spicy-savoury smell filled the room.

  “You see? It’s not crying. It was never alive in the first place.”

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “This one I da-paoed from the hawker centre near work. I know their business model. They buy the noodles, premade. They buy the gravy, premixed. I think it’s from a factory in Malaysia. They add some prawns and fishballs and tau pok and pretend they made it themselves. Try and see.”

  She dipped a plastic disposable spoon into the sauce and held it in front of my face, like it was infant formula or something. And it would have been rude of me to refuse, so I screwed my eyes tight and swallowed.

  And it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, either, but the coriander and coconut cream and ginger were in there, somewhere. I tried it with the noodles, and it was completely palatable— way better than the junk food I’d been keeping to so far.

  “Everyone does it now,” Sangeetha went on, as I poured the gravy across the white strings and scooped forkfuls up to my mouth. “It’s mass-produced. It’s safe. Just avoid the expensive restaurants and the stalls that ended up with Green Book Awards and Michelin Stars. You’ll save time and money. No queues, no fuss.” And by now everyone else was unpacking their suppers as well: cheeseburgers, nasi lemak, cai png.

  “Don’t torture yourself,” she continued. “Times have changed. Nothing in Singapore will ever taste as good as we did.”

  Things went back to normal after that. Mostly back to normal, anyway. I ate out a lot more. I didn’t trust my mum not to put love into her cooking, or my maid, really, because she’s been with us for twenty-nine years, so she probably doesn’t hate us.

  At first, I kept to chain eateries, like BreadTalk and Pepper Lunch and Saizeriya, but soon I realised Sangeetha was right. We like to boast about our food, but there’s no great art to it: whether it’s being dished out by the lao ban niang or her bored PRC helper, it’s just work, right? Mass production. It’s a commodity, to be traded among hungry customers for a profit.

  I stopped attending the Soul Kitchen discussions. Rather than try to escape the memory of laksa, I found myself drawn towards it instead. I got to know the variations. My favourite is Katong laksa, the very lemak one with scissor-cut noodles you eat with a spoon. But there’s a charm to the sour Penang assam laksa as well: it’s fundamentally a different species of food, with tamarind and shredded fish and mint leaves and pineapple. And then there’re those soupy laksas from Thai Express, which come in exotic colours like red and jade green. You know, the founder boasted that he’d cut half the ingredients from the original recipe? Saves on his bottom line.

  My boyfriend wasn’t actually very supportive of this hobby. He thought I was being perverse, going to some far-flung hawker centre to see if their claypot laksa was really as mediocre as the ratings claimed. I had to explain to him that he couldn’t understand, since he didn’t have laksa heritage himself. And it wasn’t cannibalism, either. I think my line was, “These foods are forever dead, but I’m alive.”

  “Mmm,” he said.

  “I’m going to take that as approval,” I told him.

  He just sighed and started playing with his phone. “You do what you want. But I don’t think you get the point of this.”

  “This what?”

  “This birth and rebirth. This life. So what if you were once food? That’s finished. That one was your last-time life. What are you going to do with this one?”

  We didn’t fight. We don’t, in general, like conflict. But I fucked him harder than usual that night. And when I climaxed, I saw myself, a supreme being of seafood and noodles, rising above all other laksas, anointed by the wheel of existence to join the blessed echelons of the human race.

  Last week, another weird thing happened. I’d caught a movie at Balestier, which was the only place it was still showing, and I figured I’d grab supper somewhere close. It was pretty late by then, but I found myself a deserted kopitiam which still had a couple of stalls open, including one selling laksa, so I was set. I paid my five dollars, grabbed my cutlery, took my tray to the table, and dug in.

  As soon as the first strand of noodles touched my lips, I could tell something was different. It wasn’t that the laksa was alive—there was still a manufactured, generic flavour behind the notes of belacan and coconut. No, what was happening was a wave of recognition was creeping across my taste buds, throughout my entire alimentary canal, racing to the limits of my body until it popped up all over the skin of my arms as goosebumps. This was a recipe as intimately familiar as the smell of my own breath. This was where I was from. This was my birth.

  I turned my head to look at the stall again. I’d barely even looked at the owner when I’d placed my order, but there he was now, already standing over me, a decrepit old man in his, I don’t know, sixties, seventies, eighties? And his eyes were gazing directly into mine, and he was saying the following words in Hokkien.

  “Wa eh kia.” My child. “Wa ji lei kia nia.” My only child.

  I sat there, silent and still, while he placed his hands on my shoulders. He was surprisingly strong, with wiry muscles beneath the wrinkled, liver-spotted skin of his arms.

  And again, I think I’m translating badly, but what he said was, “I made you when I was young. I made you like my father taught me. I made you like I had made ten thousand before you, and I have made a hundred million since. But I always knew no one else would be like you. My child, my only child.”

  He folded his arms around me. I let myself melt into them. The words came to me as if scripted.

  “Father. Wa si an zhua eh see?”

  “Die? You did not die. I knew mankind did not deserve you. So I offered you on the altar, praying that the gods would accept you as a gift. For what would be better in life than the creation of a single soul?”

  He coughed then, a hard racking cough, and his hands gripped me tighter. “Your father is old. But now you have come home, and you will grant him one last wish.” His fingers began unbuttoning my collar. “I made something perfect once, but did not taste it. Let me know what I have created.” And with that, he sank his teeth into my breast, and began to feed.

  It was past midnight when everything was over. I left his stiffening body at the kopitiam, cleaned myself up, and called for a Grab. Slumped in the back seat, I let my eyes rest for a moment and found myself in a dream.

  I was no longer a mixture at the bottom of a pot. Nor was I myself. Instead, I was something else, some other being
, far larger and more complex than I was now, spread across hills and water bodies. A city, perhaps, or the land itself, and I was dying. I could see my soul escaping me, like a drawn-out breath, soaring beyond me into the heavens. This was not a past life, I understood, but a future one, or perhaps even the present. I was not the spirit that was to be reborn, but the shell left behind.

  I woke. From the dark cocoon of the taxicab, I could see the junction of my street. My stomach started to rumble. And I wondered, with all I had in the kitchen, if there was anything I could make.

  Suburbia

  In light of recent rumours, the Ministry of al has agreed to issue the following statement to the press, dated ary 20 :

  We did not discover the city.

  There was no city in the first place. How absurd, to imagine that a lost civilisation might lie hidden beneath the old Chinese cemetery at .

  Surely, were said civilisation to exist, a) historians would have noted it,

  b) archaeologists would have exhumed it,

  c) conservators would have preserved it,

  d) the Tourism Board would have opened it as an exciting new heritage destination,

  e) activists would have highlighted it in their Statement of Concern regarding the redevelopment of the grounds of cemetery, dated ber 20 .

  We did not choose to ignore the aforementioned Statement of Concern, proceeding with construction in the early morning of ber 20 .

  We did not cordon off the area overnight. We did not hire black market labourers so as to bypass bureaucratic process.

  We were not motivated by profit, nor were we influenced by the fact that our Permanent Secretary’s daughter-in law sits on the board of Construction and Civil Engineering.

  Eyewitness accounts of bulldozers and labourers with jackhammers have been proven by the police to be fabrications with seditious intent.