by Tash Aw
“So sorry, but I have to rush off now. Good to see you again, a real surprise. Here’s my card if ever you need to get in touch.”
He accepted it with both hands, and she realized that the formality between them was entirely appropriate: They were strangers to each other now. “Wonderful,” he said, slipping the card into his pocket. “Great. I will call you.”
But she knew, as one always does in these situations, that he would not call her.
As she sat in bed that night, she allowed herself one minute to remember how Justin C. K. Lim and the rest of his family had looked all those years ago, how they had behaved.
Just one minute, and then she would put them out of her mind.
She checked her BlackBerry, replying to the emails that had come in earlier that day—all the fascinating projects she was going to begin in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
HOW TO
MANAGE TIME
When I was thirteen, I was sent away to live with relatives in the far south of Malaysia, at the opposite end of the country from where I had been born. Do not be alarmed—this sort of displacement is quite normal among underprivileged rural families. My mother had died a few years earlier, and my father, unable to care for me properly, decided to ask my great-aunt to take me in. He had to move away from our village to seek work in Kota Bharu, where he lived in one room above a tire-repair shop. It made sense for him to be free of me.
My great-aunt lived and worked on a small pineapple farm about thirty miles north of Singapore. The peaty soil of the region was famous for producing the best pineapples in the country, but ours were an exception to the rule, being meager in size and acidic in taste. Nothing I did seemed to improve them—not the addition of buffalo manure or even the chemical fertilizers I found on a lorry parked by the road one day (there was no one about and far too much fertilizer for any one person to use, so I helped myself). Even at that age I found the lack of a satisfactory solution very frustrating. Why couldn’t I make those pineapples big and sweet? I worked on the farm every day after school—it was my way of earning my keep and it kept me out of mischief, said my great-aunt. I do not have fond memories of this period, because it involved failure: the only failure I have encountered in my life thus far. To this day, even a brief encounter with hard unripe pineapple (of the kind one routinely encounters on airplanes) is enough to send me into quite a rage.
Life in the south was not a thing of beauty. It lacked the soul of the north, the wilderness, the poetry. It is surprising how one’s childhood days can be troubled by the finer concerns of the spirit, filled as they are with the anxieties of youth. I was picked on at school, teased for my accent, which I was never fully able to lose—the unconscious warping of “a”s to “e”s or “o”s, the dropping of the ends of words, the addition of unfamiliar emphatic words. My speech marked me as foreign and, unsurprisingly, I became known as a quiet boy who said very little. I spent much time lurking in the background, so to speak, watching from the sidelines and never thrusting myself into the spotlight. By remaining in the shadows, I learned to observe the workings of the human spirit—what people want and how they get it. Everything that I was to achieve later in life can be traced back to this period, when I began my apprenticeship in the art of survival.
All that earnest study of the cut and thrust of life meant that I did not have time to miss home at first. I did not suffer from any longing for my homeland in the north, with its strange, warm dialect and melancholy coastline scarred with brackish streams that ebbed and flowed with the tide. It is only now, when I have the luxury of time and rich personal accomplishment, that I can sit back and appreciate a certain sentiment for the village in which I grew up. This does not, however, mean that I am someone prone to nostalgia. I am certainly not encumbered by the past.
Like most people in our position, we lived an industrious but precarious existence. My great-aunt had worked part-time in a factory on the outskirts of Johor Baru that produced VHS players for export, but, being in her fifties, she was soon laid off and had no work other than to tend to our farm and we were therefore forced to be inventive in the way we made our living. Nowadays I hear liberal, educated people refer sympathetically to such ways of life as “hard,” or even “desperate,” but I prefer to think of it as creative. I had just turned thirteen and thought that if we had more money I would be able to return home.
I began to sell pineapples on a disused wooden stand by the side of the road that led to the coast, hoping to ensnare day-trippers from Singapore on their way to Desaru. Knowing that our pineapples were sour, I sold them cheaply, and in the first few weeks I managed to make a little money. But even this began to trickle away as people realized the low quality of my wares. So one day I bought a supersweet pineapple in the market and cut it up in pieces, offering it as proof of my own fruit’s tenderness. A number of people fell for it, and only one couple complained on their way back from the coast. I feigned innocence—I couldn’t guarantee that every pineapple would be sweet. They showed me a pineapple cut in half, and I recognized its dry pale flesh as one of mine. They insisted I give them five pineapples for free, and when I refused, the woman called me names and her companion ended up hurling the pineapple at my head. I ducked, but it caught me on my ear, making my ear swell like a mushroom. Soon afterward, I abandoned the stall and got a job waiting tables at a local coffee shop.
I did not see my father for nearly four years. I received news from him occasionally, when a letter would arrive via my great-aunt. He would talk about the Kelantan River bursting its banks in the monsoon season, the kiteflying contests that year, the secondhand scooter he had bought, things he had eaten in the market—uninteresting news of daily life. Once he told me he had bought me a large spinning top, which awaited my return, but when I finally went home there was no further mention of it.
There was never any news of jobs or money—the very reason we had to move away from home. There was no indication of how he was planning our future, no sense that he was aware of the passage of time. I had never been aware of this myself, but now, hundreds of miles from home, I could almost hear the seconds of an invisible clock ticking away in my head. I had gone to live with my great-aunt thinking that it was a temporary event and that I would soon be back home—just until my father “got settled.” That is what he told me. After a year I realized that my residence in the dull flatlands of the south was not going to be as fleeting as I had hoped. One learns quickly at that age. Like all children, I had never before appreciated what time meant—the years stretched infinitely beyond me, waiting, impossibly, to be filled. But all of a sudden I began to feel the urgency of each day. I counted them down, saddened by how much I could have been doing with every sunrise and sunset, if only I had been at home.
I waited for my father to think of a plan that would reunite us in our village, but, incapable of understanding that time was not on his side, he left me waiting.
You must appreciate that time is always against you. It is never kind or encouraging. It gnaws away invisibly at all good things. Therefore, if you have any desire to accomplish anything, even the simplest task, do it swiftly and with great purpose, or time will drag it away from you.
Four years. They passed so quickly.
5.
REINVENT YOURSELF
THE FIRST RULE OF SUCCESS IS, YOU MUST LOOK BEAUTIFUL. NO ONE had taught Phoebe this secret, but she could tell by simple observation that successful people always looked good. Just by looking at the women hurrying along Henan Lu, running for buses or reading their magazines in the metro at rush hour, she could spot the few who were on life’s upward curve. At first she did not really think about the connection between appearance and achievement; she could not even imagine such a link. But then she kept noticing more and more women who looked immaculate in their dress, and, what’s more, she noticed that they often carried bags that looked as though they contained serious life items instead of beauty accessories. Often, these impressive-looking w
omen would take out papers or a book from their sleek bags and read them in the bus with an air of purpose, and even if they were reading mere novels, Phoebe could see that they were absorbing the contents of the words the way high-achieving people do, all the time working, working, in a way that was steely yet elegant. It reminded her of a girl at school who always came first in class, the way that girl read books with a determination that no one else had. All the teachers said she would go on to great things, and, sure enough, she got a job as a quantity surveyor in Kuantan. Gradually, Phoebe realized that the reason these women looked so beautiful was that they had good positions in life; she could not deny that the two things were inseparable. Which one came first, beauty or success, she did not know.
She started taking notes on the type of clothes they wore, how they styled their hair, even the way they walked. When she compared this to her own way of dressing and behaving, it became clear why she had not yet been able to find a decent job in Shanghai. No one would look at her and think, That woman is going to astound the world with her abilities, we should give her a job. No, she was not someone you would even look at twice on the bus, never mind give a job to.
She knew she was not a mediocre person, but she looked like one to the outside world. This was not her fault, she thought; it was also because of where she lived. Every day she was surrounded by mediocre people who dragged her down into their sea of mediocrity. She had found a room in an apartment block not far from the river, which she had thought would be beautiful and prestigious. A girl she had worked with in a mobile-phone-keypad factory in Guangzhou had a childhood friend who had gone to work in Shanghai, and she had a good job working in an office. The girl’s apartment was just one room, but it had a small washroom and a space to prepare simple meals. The girl’s name was Yanyan, and in her text message she said that Phoebe could stay there for free until she got a job—surely it wouldn’t be long before Phoebe found a good position. When Phoebe looked at the address, she saw that it was close to the center of town, a nice area near some famous attractions that foreign visitors loved, and by the banks of the river about which people wrote love songs. The room was on the tenth floor, so she imagined magnificent views of this great metropolis that would inspire her with the spirit of high achievement. Every day she would wake up and breathe the intoxicating air of excellence.
But when she came out of the subway station, she found herself in a low-class shopping center full of small shops that sold everything in bulk—clothes, mushrooms, teapots, pink plastic hair clips, fake sneakers. She stood for a minute trying to work out the right direction. In front of her was a row of shops with makeshift beds outside them—there were people stretched out on each one, everyone getting a tattoo. She walked past them, looking at the huge rose being tattooed on a man’s arm, its petals reaching around his biceps; an eagle on the nape of someone else’s neck; a manga kitten on a young woman’s ankle. As Phoebe crossed the road toward the apartment block, the pavement was black with grease from the dozens of stalls selling skewers of grilled meat and squid. It was hard to walk properly because of all the discarded skewer sticks, which made her feel unstable in her heels.
In the entrance hall there was a small wooden booth where two watchmen sat, drinking tea from their plastic flasks. They did not even look up when Phoebe walked in; they did not care who came into the building. The floor was pale, with a covering of dust, and streaked with black marks that Phoebe could not identify. On the walls there were patches of cement where the crumbling brickwork had fallen away and been hastily filled in. The wooden notice boards and the metal pigeonhole letter boxes were old and had not been changed for at least fifty years—their green paint looked almost black. The place was dirtier than some of the factory hostels she had lived in. As she waited for the lift to take her up to her new life, she felt the heavy weight of dread descend upon her shoulders. There were hundreds and hundreds of apartments in the building and only one lift, and as she waited, a crowd began to gather around her, everyone starting to push forward. These people were not the sort of neighbors she had imagined. She had envisaged herself surrounded by the kind of women she saw on TV, well-dressed modern Shanghainese, but instead she found a crowd of old-age pensioners dressed in revolutionary clothes, stern padded jackets, and shapeless trousers that matched their expressionless faces, which seemed to have crumpled inward. No light shone from their eyes, no feeling sprang from their gazes, and when Phoebe looked at them she felt a shiver of fear run down her neck: It was like looking at an abandoned house where everything had been kept as it was in the past, the clocks ticking, the furniture clean and shiny, the plants watered, only no one lived there; they had long since gone away. Even the younger people seemed old and worn down by unknown cares, their clothes as uninspired as their faces.
They shuffled past Phoebe as the lift neared the ground floor, their shoulders and arms jostling her. She watched the numbers light up on the counter, and as she did so she felt as though her life was also descending—4, 3, 2, 1. Soon it would be zero. As the lift doors opened, she saw that it was tiny and filled with cigarette smoke, so she decided to take the stairs instead. She had only her small bag with her—she had learned to travel light. Even so, she was soon out of breath, because the stairs were steep and the windows that lined the stairwell were open and let in the dust and pollution from outside. There were pipes everywhere, and some of them were leaky. Where they dripped onto the floor, there were crusted brown patches that looked like mushrooms sprouting from the concrete.
As she climbed the stairs she could see more clearly out the windows, could gaze down at a giant construction site taking shape right next to the apartment block. Huge steel columns jutted out from the hole being dug for the foundations. Beyond it there was a shopping center, painted in coral pink and blue. In the daytime, its neon signboard looked like scaffolding, and it was hard to read what it said: SHANGHAI LITEFUL FASHION SHOPPING MARKET. The signboards that covered its entire length advertised cheap clothing brands that Phoebe had never heard of before, the colors gold and bright green and yellow. Nothing matched. The streets below were dark with a mass of people waiting for buses or emerging from the shopping center—it must have been a wholesale market, where you could buy anything from skirts to electronic goods to dried food very cheaply. Even from where she was, she could hear the thumping of music and the cries of advertisements from loudspeakers. She paused and looked at the scene—at the thick wriggling river of bodies so dense and colorless that it was hard to make out each human being. She could be anywhere in China, she thought. In fact, she could be in any no-value town in Asia. She had known so many of them, and they all looked like this.
But maybe her room would be nice. Maybe her view would not be of this no-place city that she was now staring at; maybe she would look out at the river instead and wake up every day to views of Shanghai.
She reached the top floor. The corridor was long and stretched into the gloom—she could not see the end of it. There were dozens of doors, each one a separate room. She walked along the corridor, counting down the numbers until she found the right one.
Why are you always so doubtful? Phoebe Chen Aiping, do not allow yourself to be dragged down by your childish fears.
The door was protected by a metal grille, just like all the others. Phoebe reached between the bars and knocked on it, but there was no answer. She knocked again and waited. Perhaps Yanyan had unexpectedly been called out to an important meeting, even though she had said it was her day off. It was often like this with busy people who had important jobs; they had to respond to unexpected events at short notice and be flexible—they were successful because they were able to deal with stressful situations by using their skill and talent. The door opposite opened and an old woman peered out, glaring at Phoebe and looking at her from head to foot. Phoebe wondered how she appeared to the old woman, whether she looked acceptable, a decent upstanding person paying a visit to a friend, or whether she looked like someone with shady
intentions, a potential criminal. She reached into her handbag for her phone and rang Yanyan’s number. She heard a phone ring on the other side of the door, and a few moments later she heard the locks being undone from the inside, three of them, heavily bolted.
“Why didn’t you call out and say who you were?” Yanyan mumbled as she opened the door. “I thought you were the man coming for the gas bill again.” She seemed sleepy, and her hair was a mess, as if she had just woken up, and she was dressed in her pajamas even though it was nearly midday. She let Phoebe in and went to sit on her bed. Phoebe thought maybe she was very tired from working very hard at her important job. She was wearing fluffy slippers in the shape of smiling puppies, and her pajamas were printed with sunny flower faces that grinned at Phoebe. There was only one small bed in the room and a small chair piled with clothes.
“I’m so tired,” Yanyan said, kicking off her slippers and leaning back against the wall with her knees drawn in to her body.
It was true: She looked haggard. “You must be working very hard,” Phoebe said. She did not know what to do, whether to sit on the bed or not, so she just stood in the middle of the tiny room. When she looked around, she saw a small cooker on one side of the door and a washroom cubicle on the other, so small that she was not sure there was enough space to stand and have a shower between the toilet and the wall. There were no decorations in the bedroom, apart from a small TV balanced on some shelves that held cooking utensils and a jar of pumpkin seeds. On the wall hung one of those calendars that fast-food chains give away free of charge at the end of the year if you are lucky and are there at the right time. The pages were open at June, four months ago.