Fox Fire Girl

by O Thiam Chin

  In thinking about him, her mind pulled out yet another loose memory: Hai Feng.

  • • •

  When times were unbearable, Yifan would recall the words of her mother: Eat your sorrow. Three simple words she took great comfort in; words that never failed to lift her spirits when she was feeling down. She remembered the first time her mother whispered these words to her while trying to calm her down. Yifan was 10 years old, and had been whipped by her father for secretly stealing and smoking his cigarettes. Since then she had pulled these words out of her memory on many occasions, especially during the hard times when she transitioned from adolescence to adulthood, from Ipoh to Singapore.

  By nature, Yifan had a cheerful, well-adjusted disposition, and rarely gave herself to long bouts of melancholy or sadness. She knew, of course, the ways that the world could break or change a person, permanently and indefinitely, but she had always been adaptive to such forces, having learnt from a young age to change herself in order not to succumb to things that were beyond her control. She had her share of hardships, and was wary of taking on another’s. What did she know about another person’s life or circumstances, and what could she possibly do to effect real change? It wasn’t up to her.

  Still, she liked to listen to other people’s tales, and it seemed enough to just listen, to bear witness to their stories. People were very willing to talk about their lives if you gave them half a chance, pouring their hearts out as if the act of telling these stories was as vital as eating or breathing. Everyone had something they wanted to say about their lives. People seemed to want to wrap every moment of their existence within the skin of a story, with a beginning, middle and ending, neat and tidy and predictable, as if their lives could be sequenced to pattern by will. Every experience could yield a seed that could flourish into a fully-grown tree, into a story ripe for telling.

  Yifan had listened to enough stories throughout her young life to wear a person’s heart out, but she had never allowed them to become more than just stories. They were a jumble of things both made-up and real—facts, imagination, fantasy, memories—and nothing more. Stories are stories, she told herself, you make out of them what you will, and that’s all there is. She thought that the truth of a story lay in the listener’s belief in the storyteller, and Yifan believed in the stories she had been told the same way she believed in Monarch butterflies, or a forest fire ravaging some distant land— as something real and plausible, but also fleeting, out of reach.

  In thinking about stories, Yifan often wondered which were the ones she wanted to remember about her own life. Where should she begin? She could not put her finger on which events marked the point in her life where things really started to matter. Her childhood in Ipoh? Her schooling days? Maybe an episode involving her family?

  Start from your earliest memory, someone told her once, the one you cannot forget, even now. But what was her earliest memory? She had an old photo she still kept with her: she as a baby, sitting on a rattan chair in a white singlet, staring vacantly into space. What did she know about the child in the photo from the features that had long disappeared from her own face, the fat cheeks, a button-nub of a nose? The photo had been taken when she was two, something her parents did for each of their nine children—a rare investment of time and money, given how poor they were back then. She had taken the photo with her when she left Ipoh, one of the few mementoes she kept from a period of time she did not remember any more.

  Could memories be substituted with stories then, she wondered, as the means through which the mind worked, breaking each experience down to a handful of images, and building it up again as a loose stream of narration? Yifan knew it was easy to confuse story and memory, to differentiate between what really happened with what was fabricated. People always wanted more from their lives, and when they didn’t get it, they would make something up as a way of redemption, a means of escape. Yifan understood this well. She, too, had made up her life in as many ways as she could think of, to give it the varied shades it lacked, to provide her with the cover under which she could make her own escape.

  When Yifan listened to the stories of others, she cared little about how they were told, or what they would reveal about the person telling them. She was more interested in being within the story she was listening to, in order to exist in that state created by the storytelling: pure senses, immaterial. Immersed in these stories, she could shake the skin off her very self, and take up that of others.

  When she was younger, she used to get scared by the idea of living in another skin, seeing everything with new eyes, and feeling things that were not hers. How much of herself would she have to give up to imagine the death and pain and sadness of others? How much would she gain? Sometimes, when someone’s story had truly got to her, Yifan would wander through her days unfocused and unhinged, her mind snapping in and out of various daydreams.

  Her mother used to chide her for always being lost in her own world, not seeing where she was going or doing. But where else could I be, she wanted to say, except inside my head? Even if she was lost, Yifan knew she was lost in a tight, private place inside her that only she knew, a place forever sealed off from other people. A sanctuary, and also a gaol, of her own creation. It was a space she guarded staunchly.

  Yifan often found remembering her own past an exasperating, even tedious act. When she made a deliberate effort to recall events from her past, she would draw up snippets from her memory that were vague and disjointed; yet sometimes when she was preoccupied with a task, her mind would suddenly spin a contiguous reel of a near-forgotten episode that she could neither make head nor tail of. Why that particular memory, she often puzzled, and was there any significance to it? Had she unconsciously brought it up?

  She often tried to ascribe some meaning to each recollection. Perhaps she was feeling lonely and thinking of home, or maybe craving for affirmation or recognition. She needed to know that there was logic to it, something inherently coherent and rational about how one thing connected to another. It took some time for her to realise the fallacy of that belief. There was no way to bridge what she thought she knew with what had actually happened in the past, caught in the constant flux between wanting to remember and the desire to forget.

  To Yifan, her past was quicksand that swallowed everything in sight, and in order to gain proper footing, she needed to give herself something to hold on to, a structure that could stand on its own. So she constructed her own past out of all the fragments she could remember, and in doing so mastered it, like a wild beast on a leash. She would tell her own story in whatever way she wanted, and every part of it would be true and unequivocal and valid. Her past became something pliable and malleable, something she could mould into any shape or form she desired, to add to or subtract from or fatten by her own effort, with her imagination. In this way she freed herself of her past and the murk of her own history.

  As a young girl, Yifan knew enough to hide behind her words, to present a front to the people around her. It was not something that was intentional at first, though it gradually took on the permanence of a screen, to block out unwanted meddling or questions. When her friends commented on the old ugly school bag she’d had since she started primary school, she told them that her parents were simply too busy with work to buy her a new one (it was a handmedown from an older sister; they could not afford a new bag for her); when they saw the scars on her arms and legs, she said she had accidentally fallen into a thorny shrub on her way home after being chased by a wild kampung dog (her father had a savage, unpredictable temper when he drank, which everyone in the family was acutely attuned to, though it did nothing to prevent the beatings).

  School constantly presented her with tests that she had to find ways to manoeuvre around; every question about her family was deflected with a blank or neutral reply, one that invited no further follow-up. Yifan knew her family was poor; her parents were fruit plantation workers, and their meagre combined income was barely enough to feed a brood of nin
e children. It was a fact so ingrained in her psyche that it was as incontrovertible as the shape of her eyes or the length of her fingers. It had not bothered her, though she had seen on several occasions the pitying glances from her classmates; she wanted more than anything to never feel she lacked anything, to be reduced to an object of such vain and pitiless judgement.

  Outwardly, Yifan cultivated an easy, submissive demeanour, one that drew people to her. But inwardly, she had shaped herself into someone who had learnt not to leave anything to chance, to hold people at bay no matter how friendly or accommodating they were towards her. She kept her smile on all the time and was always quick to offer a reply, a reason or an excuse. Her classmates came to trust her and to tell her their stories, and it was in the role of a confidante that she knew she had an upper hand, that she could make people feel indebted to her. Yifan listened closely to her classmates, not because she was interested in them or their lives, but to look out for signs of weakness, for their inconstancies and follies. She promised to keep their secrets, to say not a word. And when there was a need for some form of reciprocity, to keep their friendship in balance, Yifan would spin something from the random dregs of her life and, after telling it with sufficient earnestness, would swear the other person to secrecy.

  Yet, back at home, Yifan was a completely different creature all together. She withdrew into herself amid the noisy, overwhelming bustle of her family, like a rodent slipping back into a hole, seeking safety. She took up her prescribed role of mousey sister and obedient daughter. As the youngest child out of six boys and three girls, her parents did not expect much out of her, just as long as she stayed out of trouble, and out of sight. She kept under the radar and rarely made herself visible. When her siblings got into fights with one another, she would choose not to take sides, feigning disinterest or indifference. Growing up, her two older sisters often teased Yifan and reminded her that she was an accident, that their parents had not wanted any more children but were very careless (“And too poor to get rid of you,” one had whispered under her breath, meanly), and so they’d had no choice but to have her.

  Sometimes, in her daydreams, Yifan wondered what she would be if she wasn’t born—would she be a soul without a body, waiting somewhere to be reaped for life, or would she be nothing, a void that did not exist? What would that be like? Yifan closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself not-existing, to strip her mind clean of any consciousness. But it was impossible to do so; even the emptiness that lay behind her closed eyelids was weighted with an irresistible force, pulling her back into the fixed, unyielding confines of her body.

  If there was any consolation to her childhood, it was Yifan’s mother. Demure and diminutive, her mother was a shaky, unsure shadow against the bigger, more menacing presence of Yifan’s father. Perhaps it was the luck of being the youngest; her mother doted on her the most, even when she was stretched to a breaking point by the constant demands and badgering from the older children.

  When her mother got a day off from work and they were alone, Yifan would crawl into her lap as the latter sat and split the watermelon seeds between her teeth and told her stories. Most of the time, Yifan could not understand or follow the thread of the stories, especially when they were about her mother’s past—distant relatives she had never heard of, and places and events that seemed to exist in a different time. But when they were tales about animals, and sometimes people, her ears would prick up: the ancient tortoise that transformed itself into an island to save a band of shipwrecked sailors, the friendships between a snake and a girl, a wolf and a shepherd, the wise elephant that travelled a thousand kilometres to summon the rain. In the tales that involved people—mostly children— Yifan would imagine herself not as the hapless, helpless humans who could not save their skins even if they wanted to, but as the wise animals that often intervened in the nick of time, to offer assistance, and to give fully of themselves. Their sacrifices and their transformations—always permanent, always irreversible—often seemed wild and grand in Yifan’s eye, compared to the inconsequential, feeble actions of the humans. She wondered whether any of the animals would have done anything differently if they had another choice. Often, she would fall asleep in her mother’s lap as she turned over these details in her mind: island, fur, scales, relentless rain. Her mother’s storytelling continued long into Yifan’s childhood, and when it finally stopped, these stories had already taken root in her, sinking into dark, fertile soil.

  A childhood story Yifan remembered: in a village, there was a fox who was a vegetarian, because of his beliefs. The other foxes were at first fascinated with his dietary decision, but gradually came to ignore him, treating him as an eccentric, an outcast. The vegetarian fox did not mind what the others thought of him, and was more than happy to go his own way, and eat whatever was growing in the forest behind the village: durian, pomelo, mangosteen, guava, starfruit. He was able to make many new friends among the other animals, now that he wasn’t hunting them. But he was often hungry, even though he always ate his fill of fruits at every meal. One day, one of his new friends, a squirrel, came to him and presented him with a nut. “I know you have been losing weight. So I want to give you this nut that I’ve been keeping for a special occasion,” said the squirrel. The fox politely refused, but the squirrel insisted, thrusting the nut into the fox’s paws. “Eat it, and you’ll know why it’s so special,” the squirrel added.

  The fox waited for his squirrel friend to leave before he cracked the nut open and ate the flesh inside. He chewed softly and swallowed and waited for something to happen. His stomach felt light and airy as usual, emptied out. And then suddenly he felt it: the slow throbs of a growing pain. He started to shiver and scratch himself all over. His thick fur fell out in patches, and his skin constricted. He felt himself shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller. When the shivering finally subsided, the fox ran over to the river, anxious and nearly out of his mind. He peeked into the water and saw his new reflection. He had transformed into a squirrel! And he could not be happier. He ran back to his village in his excitement, wanting to tell the others the good news, but the moment he entered it, one of his neighbours, an elderly scholarly fox with a monocle, jumped on him and ate him alive.

  Yifan recalled chuckling at the end of the story when she first heard it. Her mother smiled and stroked her face and hair. Don’t be like the fox in his foolishness, her mother said. You don’t have to go around telling people everything that has happened to you, whether it’s good or bad. It’s good enough you alone know; you don’t have to share everything with everyone, you hear? Yifan nodded in blind assent, even as she was still trying to wrap her head around the story.

  While Yifan’s mother was able to shelter her from much of what was happening in the family, there were still things that Yifan could not help but notice. Because her parents worked side by side throughout the day in the fruit plantation, they were silent around each other at home, each tending privately to his or her own tasks, him with his newspapers and repairs around the house, her with her cooking and cleaning. If they had something to say to the other, they would relay the message through one of the children, who would pass it along. Because she was always in close proximity to her mother, Yifan was often asked to relay messages to her father. To approach him, Yifan had to summon a certain amount of courage in order not to stammer or trip over her words. Her father barely acknowledged her sometimes, and would dismiss her impatiently with a quick word or a toss of his hand even before she was done with the message.

  Yifan never knew what made her parents stay together despite their apparent differences (her father’s quick temper, her mother’s passivity, their mutual indifference); if one had shown the other any act of kindness or love, Yifan never saw it. Once, late at night, when she was 11, lying on a mattress, she heard muffled noises coming from her parents’ bed. Raising her head, she stared at the moving mass under the thin blanket, and for a brief moment, she thought her father was hitting her mother again, someth
ing that occurred with a dogged regularity whenever he drank too much or lost money at the weekly gambling game in town. But the noise she heard was different, one that did not quite sound like a person in distress. Then moments later, when Yifan saw the rise and fall of her parents’ bodies, she sank back onto the mattress, pulled the blanket over her head and closed her eyes, her throat thickening with balls of spit.

  When Yifan sensed that the movements on the bed finally died down, she heard her mother getting up and walking softly out of the bedroom. Yifan crept out from under the blanket a few seconds later and trailed her mother. Stationing herself in a dark corner of the kitchen, with a half-obscured view of the toilet with the door ajar, Yifan watched her mother clean up with a damp rag. In the harsh, fluorescent light of the toilet, her mother’s body looked worn and saggy, interlocking varicose veins streaking across the broad flanks of her thighs, green and red and black like thick threads, her breasts with dark-ringed aureoles drooping heavy and useless. Yifan crossed her arms as the pinched nubs of flesh on her chest ached, feeling oddly shamed but also thrilled for what was happening to her body. She’d had her first period just three months ago, and was aware of similar changes occurring in her classmates: tight white singlets to hide the budding growth of the breasts, faint wisps of hair in their armpits, the fleshing-out of hips and buttocks. Her classmates were open and candid about these changes, and Yifan paid careful attention to what they were saying, mentally ticking off any changes they had against hers. She was also keenly aware of the stares of some of her male classmates that stayed a beat longer on her body, as if they were attempting to pick it apart to find something they weren’t sure of themselves. Hunching her shoulders and keeping her eyes low, Yifan made every effort to stay in the background; she needed the space and privacy to understand what her body was doing, even though the understanding was slow and often muddled, inadequate.