by O Thiam Chin
Life in primary school was much tougher in ways both anticipated and unexpected. Tien Chen managed above-average grades that never called for undue attention, though he didn’t like anything he was taught. What surprised him was how swiftly his classmates split into groups by interests and preferences while leaving him out completely. Shunned without any reason. He did not mind the teasing, and was more than able to fend for himself—he was tall for his age, with a stout frame, and was nimble in his movements. The girls he could safely ignore with a glare or snicker; the boys he would scuffle with in the toilet or in corners of the school field. He learnt to fight decisively—landing a well-placed punch on his opponent that cut off any potential response—to avoid prolonging these sessions. In no time, everyone was giving him a wide berth and leaving him alone. His reputation as a loner spread, and he grew gradually into this identity, carrying it with as much pride as he could muster.
Through his primary school days, Tien Chen saw the world around him as a place where he had to stay alert at all times, always aware that things could change in an instant. He had no friends, and took to his solitary state with very little fuss, a badge of unearned honour. He stayed quiet in class, keeping his eyes on the chalkboard, refusing to participate in his classmates’ antics: passing little notes or comic books around, or scribbling on the back of someone’s uniform. Tien Chen was rigidly attentive to whatever was happening around him, his body ready to spring into action. He sat upright, his arms on the textbook, his fingers twirling a pencil in perfect circles. He had constructed a social hierarchy of his classmates in his mind and he knew his place in it, as well as exactly who was admired or bullied or shunned. This awareness did not ruffle him, only served as a point of clarity, a useful piece of knowledge, like knowing the life-stages of a mosquito or the process of photosynthesis.
In upper primary, Tien Chen developed a keen interest in science as his innate curiosity about the natural world grew—a world which pulsated with moments of fascination and beauty for him. As a reward for scoring high marks for his science exam in Primary Four, his father bought him a thick volume, The Big Book of Plants and Animals. Tien Chen kept the book by his bedside and would read it every night before he slept. Taking cue from this nightly reading, his father continued to buy books for him, first as gifts and presents, then as a fixture in his weekly expenditures. He even allowed Tien Chen to choose his own books when they were at the neighbourhood bookstore: Electricity and Its Uses, The Key Functions of the Human Body, Rainforests of the World, The Ancient Mysteries of the Pyramids.
Tien Chen knew how much the books cost and how they taxed his father’s meagre monthly salary, yet he knew his father derived a sort of paternal pleasure—delight?—from doing something to help Tien Chen’s education, and so Tien Chen did what he could to reinforce this belief. He treasured these books immensely—for they were tangible proof of his father’s affection for him. Occasionally, Tien Chen would catch his father flipping through the pages while cleaning up his bedroom. His father, as far as Tien Chen was aware, only knew Chinese; he’d only attended school for a few years before leaving to work full-time to support his family. In the evenings, after dinner, Tien Chen would sit beside his father on the sofa with a book as the latter flipped through the Lianhe Wanbao, each comfortably and silently immersed in his own world of words and pictures.
Like any young boy, Tien Chen had his share of secrets. He loved to burn things that nobody wanted, items of little to no value. Paper, cardboard, dry leaves, branches, discarded plastic bags. He would take a box of matches from the altar in the living room and put it in his shorts pocket. Several times a day, he would reach in to finger the coarse surface of the side panel. When he was alone, he would take out a matchstick and strike it against the edge of the box, watching the maroon tip flare into a bright, noisy flame. Sometimes, he would bring the flame to the things he wanted to burn, one item at a time; occasionally, he simply watched the matchstick burn itself out, shrivelling into a black twisted shape. He liked how the flame, as if being agitated by something he could not see or feel, flickered and moved swiftly down the thin wooden sliver, the heat reaching out to bite him. He did not mind the pain—it only hurt for a brief moment.
At home, he would take whatever he wanted to burn—a torn sheaf of paper from an unused exercise book, a pizza-delivery pamphlet, an instant-noodle wrapper—to the rubbish chute in the kitchen. He would place the item on the inside of the chute, which opened to a V, and hold a lit match to it, transfixed by the transference of flame as it leapt onto the surface of the material, dancing across it, and reduced it to grey, flimsy ashes. When everything was burnt up, he would pour water over the ashes and close the chute. His father never caught on to what he was doing, and Tien Chen was careful to cover his tracks.
His love of starting fires grew over time, though he never allowed it to get out of hand. Tien Chen knew the limits of what he was doing, and was wary of drawing undue attention to himself. It was something deeply personal, and he could not see how anyone else would understand. Tien Chen burnt all his primary school textbooks after he completed his PSLE; he told his father he had donated the books in a charity drive conducted in school for underprivileged students. His father had not suspected anything.
Likewise, right after he took his O-Levels—and not knowing how he had fared for his examinations—he tossed his books and study materials into the fire. He brought them down to the grass field beside his block, where there were large soot-darkened cylindrical burners for burning joss paper. Standing as close as he could to the pyre, the heat an unbearably intimate thing, he watched as the pages of his History textbook curled into tight rolls as the flames swept across the words and photographs—rubber trade in Malaysia, the Japanese Occupation, the state of emergency in Singapore in 1948—reducing them to heaving black feathers. He fed the books to the fire one by one. Back home, with his skin still tingling from its proximity to the fire, he noticed the hair on his knuckles and forearms were burnt into screwy twists, the tips gelled into pin-headed nobs. The smell of his singed hair was something he could never quite describe—charred, faintly synthetic, like burnt plastic—though he found it oddly familiar, personal.
The only things he did not burn were the books his father had bought for him, though he had tried once when he was nine and had only just discovered his fascination with fires. He had picked out a tattered book on dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period, the dog-eared pages already coming loose from the spine. He had barely brought the matchstick to the cover of the book when he felt a strange, sharp twist in his guts, and had to put out the budding flame with his bare hand. The act of saving the book left a red mark on his palm, which faded after a few days. There were other things he could burn, tons of things that were worthless, useless, even pointless.
As an adult, whenever Tien Chen tried to remember how and when he had first started burning himself, he would recall this childhood attempt to burn the dinosaurs book: the initial rush of excitement, followed almost instantly by an equal and confounding mix of guilt and relief. The pain—a sizzling tingle that crawled under his skin—had an immediate, sobering effect on him, sharpening his senses so acutely that he no longer felt temporal. His whole existence was reduced to the small patch of reddened skin the fire had licked. Even though the pain was intense, Tien Chen was undaunted by it. And the relief, when it came, was unlike anything he had felt before—as if he were tearing through a thick, sticky membrane and leaping into sudden light, the air flooding his lungs.
Two weeks after the first incident, he tried it again, bringing a lit match to his left thumb; the flame teased his skin with several flickers before it bit firmly into his flesh. He gasped, but held on till the match burnt itself out. The pain blinded him momentarily, until he took a long breath and felt the surge of relief inundating him. A blister formed where the flame had touched him, and in the days that followed, he would finger it tenderly, nudging the sac of pus under his skin, trying to rekindle the
memory of the fire-sting in his head. He did not find this strange, or apportion any meaning to it. The act and his response to it were merely physical, he reasoned, and he only wanted to relive the sensation again and again. It was a private matter, a small part of his life that he could hold on to. He could not quite understand the significance of his actions, though he felt intensely—almost obsessively—for them.
Naturally, he kept this from his father, who had not suspected anything. Tien Chen was careful not to make his wounds too visible. He always allowed an existing burn to heal first, to develop a scab, before he burnt himself again. He restricted himself to certain parts of his body that were either common areas for injuries— palms, elbows, knees, heels—or completely hidden, like the inner thigh and pelvis. At first, he used matchsticks; later, in secondary school, he started using lighters. With the former, Tien Chen could always endure till the matchstick burnt out, but with the latter, he had to break away when the pain became too agonising, holding out till the very last moment before he was overwhelmed.
From all this, he learnt to exercise and exert self-control, and to discern when the desire to burn himself was just a whim, and when it was something he desperately needed to clear the chaos of thoughts in his head. When he held a flame to his skin, his mind dissolved, and all that existed was a gulf he could easily slip into. While he still enjoyed burning things and possessions that were worthless to him, deep inside he was aware that they were two entirely separate fixations, each bearing its own merits and inexplicable pleasures, and he took great care not to confuse one with the other.
Because of the nature of his father’s work, Tien Chen was alone at home most of the time. Besides reading, Tien Chen devoted a good part of his time to cleaning the flat and putting away anything he could burn in a corner of the storeroom. The pile of unwanted stuff never grew beyond the weekly hoard of Chinese newspapers, flyers and unopened letters. He liked things to be in place, arranged in a certain way, kept under covers or in storage. As a result, the flat stayed utterly clutter-free. His father never said a word about his efforts, but Tien Chen could sense his approval in the approbative gaze sweeping across the almost bare living room. Tien Chen took a fair amount of pride in the knowledge that he was doing something that helped to keep their lives in order—neat, tidy, manageable.
Up till the time he joined the workforce after serving his national service, Tien Chen led a solitary life with very few demands. He tried dating a fellow classmate once, in his first year of polytechnic: a short, stout girl who was chatty and outgoing, but the whole thing petered out after two months. The girl left him, citing a clash of personalities— “you’re just too quiet and aloof”—and he had remained apprehensive about getting into another relationship after that. He could not grasp the benefits of being in a relationship—the endless talking, the amount of time spent in another’s presence, the meals and walks and movies. During the months of dating his classmate, Tien Chen had felt a constant sense of restlessness and anxiety, uncertain whether he was doing the right thing or saying what needed to be said at the right time. The gaps between her words were the hardest to fathom. He never knew what she truly meant: did she want something, was she happy or unhappy, was it a yes or no or maybe. The only time he felt a sense of relief was at the end of each date when he finally dropped her off at her doorstep. Of course, he had not minded the touching and kissing, but it came with a cost he was not sure he could keep up for long. So Tien Chen was neither surprised nor upset when the girl initiated a break-up; it had felt as if he were finally freed to pick up his life once again, to have all his senses returned to him.
He still dated once in a while, in the final year of polytechnic and in the army, but he never allowed these dates to develop into a serious relationship. Early on, his father had asked once or twice about his life outside of work, and each time Tien Chen had told him plainly that he wasn’t seeing anyone. His father never pressed further, only saying that these things took time, and that there wasn’t a hurry to find someone if he wasn’t ready. And since Tien Chen was relatively happy with the way he was living his life then and rarely felt the need to complicate it, he remained single through his early twenties. Hell is other people, he reminded himself, why bother?
For a while, Tien Chen believed what he had told himself about what he needed or didn’t need from other people. Then one day he set his eyes on a young woman, a zi-char stall helper who had just started working in the same kopitiam as his father. Tien Chen first noticed her when she approached him with a laminated menu. As she was highlighting the specials, Tien Chen could not help but study the deep dimples punctuating the sides of her mouth. She spoke Mandarin with a Malaysian accent. After ordering a plate of beef hor fun, he asked her where she was from. Ipoh. He wanted to ask a few more things, but she had already turned away, walking back to place the order with the chef.
He took his time with the plate of beef hor fun, and watched the woman as she went around the kopitiam, taking food orders and serving the dishes. Something pressed hard against his heart, a terribly new and foreign feeling. For the rest of the week, Tien Chen had his dinners at the kopitiam after work and ordered food from the young woman. He would stay until his father knocked off from work, and together they would walk back home. You’re not sick of the food at the kopitiam ah, his father said, always eating the same thing. Tien Chen shook his head and said nothing. What could he tell his father when he was still trying to figure out why he was so irrationally and compulsively drawn to the young zi-char stall helper?
During every meal at the kopitiam, Tien Chen took great pains to appear casual when he asked the young woman simple questions, so as to mask his interest in her. Forthcoming and artless, she gave brief, tidy replies that always ended with a slight smile. He liked the sound of her voice; it reminded him of a breeze caught between the shadows of leaves: soft, supple, lulling. He found himself greatly stirred by it, having heard nothing like it before, something so otherworldly, so mysterious. It sounded silly when he thought about it, but how else was he to explain the profound effect it had on him? At night, lying in bed, he would conjure up her voice and imagine what it would take to possess it. He wanted to hold it—this object of infinite, unspeakable beauty—close to him, for he felt like he was the only one who could behold its true worth, who could hear it for what it was.
No, this is too silly, he reasoned, too goddamn silly.
“So what do you want to eat today?” she would say as she stood by the table with a writing pad in hand, waiting for him to decide. Each time, Tien Chen hesitated before uttering the name of the first dish that popped into his head. When the woman left with his food order, Tien Chen would pick up the Chinese newspapers he had bought at a newsstand at the bus interchange and pretend to scan the headlines. But his eyes were constantly on the woman, tracking her movements and noting her gestures, trying to sift her voice out of the cacophony in the kopitiam.
By the end of the third week, Tien Chen drummed up the courage to ask her out as he was paying for his meal. The young woman smiled as she considered his suggestion briefly, and agreed. He arranged for a meal on her day off—lunch would be better for me, if it’s okay with you, she said—and offered to pick her up from her place. She declined the pick-up—too inconvenient—and proposed to meet him directly at the venue.
They slowly warmed up to each other over lunch, proceeding from topics about work and leisure into discussions about family and personal interests. From the conversation, Tien Chen learnt about her family background (too big, too many mouths to feed, my parents really had a hard time taking care of us) and found out why she had to come to Singapore to work (the money is good, and I really want to broaden my world, to see other things, other people). At the mention of other people, Tien Chen suddenly turned morose, though he masked it with a long sip of water; he did not dare to probe further on this, and since Yifan—he chanted the name privately, engraving the crisp, honeyed syllables into the grooves of his mind
—had already moved on from the topic, he could not possibly bring it up again without rousing her suspicion.
Yifan was 24, four years younger than Tien Chen but by all appearances, she looked hardly a day older than 18. What’s your secret, Tien Chen asked teasingly, and Yifan broke into a spell of giggles, shaking her head. By the time they finished their meal—they had ordered two rounds of dessert—they were talking and laughing freely, like close friends.
I really like your voice, said Tien Chen, as they walked to the train station where they parted.
What do you like about it? she asked. Are you making fun of how I speak? With that, she let out another laugh.
After that, Tien Chen had his meals at the kopitiam whenever he could, even on weekends. He would spend hours there, nursing several glasses of coffee, waiting for any opportunity to talk to Yifan. A week after their first date he had asked Yifan out again and brought her to a highly-regarded restaurant. She had chided him lightly for being too extravagant for her tastes, and said she much preferred low-key places with affordable prices. He went along with her suggestions: to him, the meals were only a pretext to see her and spend time with her. He liked how she was slowly becoming comfortable with him, evident from the easy banter that went on without a break. There was never a dull moment in their conversations: everything seemed lighter and brighter in her presence. He lapped up her words, as if they were a special source of nutrient that fed something famished and empty inside him. He had never felt the same way with the other girls he had dated, this desire for intimacy that pushed him towards the edge of a greater unknown, this burgeoning sense of love that was all teeth and hunger.