by Tash Aw
He had not left the apartment for five days, not even to walk to the convenience store at the end of the street to stock up on bottled water and instant noodles. The apartment felt too warm and cosseting to leave, and the weather outside too harsh. Realizing he had stopped going out altogether, his ayi came every other day now, leaving him enough food and water to live on—more than enough, it turned out, for she worried about him—so he did not have to venture out, did not have to see or speak to anyone, which suited him. If he happened to be in the living room when he heard his ayi unlock the first of the heavy double doors, he would retreat to the dark safety of his bedroom, knowing that she would not enter his lair. He would lie in bed and chart her movements by the sounds she made: the breathy exclamation on entering the overheated apartment; the running of the tap in the kitchen; the expressions of shock and even mild revulsion when she discovered and disposed of leftover food festering on the kitchen counter; the clink of porcelain; the scrape of chairs on wood floors; the gentle tread of her feet as she dusted the coffee table. And, finally, the moment of relief when she left the apartment, pulling once, twice, three times at the door, which always snagged on the rug as she closed it. Then he would be alone again.
Occasionally she would leave him a note asking if he needed anything else, and he would scribble a reply—all still fine—and leave it with some cash on the kitchen table. He was thankful she came, but he could not bear the thought of interacting with anyone, not even someone as unobtrusive as a bespectacled middle-aged ayi.
All around him he could hear the sounds of families preparing for Spring Festival—children’s footsteps upstairs, the occasional burst of excited chatter, the rumble of wheeled bags heavy with treats being dragged along the corridors. He began to hear people singing along to their karaoke machines, sometimes a family chorus with croaky old voices mingling with cartoon-happy children’s voices, other times a lone female voice, surprisingly pure and sad, falling flat from time to time. He hated this voice; it wriggled into his head and cut into his innards, forcing its way into his space as if it wanted to be close to him. It was not like the other noises, which were impersonal and distant; this voice was intimate, intrusive, and he was thankful it never lasted very long. He did not know where any of these noises came from, for they echoed strangely, rebounding in the walls and pipes.
He thought about what his own family was doing at that precise moment—their New Year celebrations were a well-rehearsed ritual, comforting in their predictability. In the family mansion they would be taking delivery of inhuman quantities of food, and the caterers would be setting up for the open-house party that would take place over the first few days of the festival, following the family dinner on New Year’s Eve. His mother would play at being stressed by the pressure of organizing affairs, even though her distaste for physical work meant that she rarely performed any function more strenuous than making phone calls to the florist or confectioners, leaving the servants to deal with the deliveries and setting up of tables and chairs. In recent years the family had even taken to having the New Year’s Eve dinner in a hotel—the servants were getting old, his mother had said, and they simply couldn’t trust getting a young Filipina or Indonesian maid (she’d heard such horror stories: family heirlooms being stolen, phone bills full of calls to Manila, people being killed in their own homes). So the family would book a private room in the Chinese restaurant of a fancy hotel, twelve of them sitting in near-silence around a big table laden with food that would remain half consumed at the end of the evening. How lucky we are to have a family like this, his father would say at the conclusion of the meal. He’d said that every single year Justin could remember. But those extravagant banquets of bird’s nest and shark-fin soups, whole suckling pigs, the finest New Zealand abalone, and strange sea creatures he hadn’t even recognized—perhaps they were all in the past, now that his family was ruined. He wondered if they were having more-modest celebrations, or if they were celebrating at all. He imagined bitter recriminations: mother blaming father, brother blaming mother, grandmother blaming uncle—for the loss of their fortune, for the loss of their eldest son.
But he was deluding himself. They would not be blaming one another for their misfortune; they would be blaming him. He had disappeared, he had let them down, he would not answer their calls for help, he was selfish—that was why they were in this mess now. It was a line of reasoning he had heard many times before, so often that sometimes he, too, believed it. It was all his fault.
As he stood at the window and looked at the strange frozen shapes of the city—the glass-ice trees, the streets scarred by snaking tracks of snow—he thought of the family holiday he once had in Sapporo, when he was about thirteen, old enough to understand that the vacation was happening under a cloud of discontent, that it was not a holiday but an escape of sorts. It had taken place over the New Year period, the decision to leave for Japan made late in the day, when preparations for the usual celebrations were already well advanced. There had been no explanation for this hasty change in plan, which triggered a frantic search for the children’s wool sweaters and down jackets in the storeroom and the attendant anxiety as to whether they had outgrown the clothes since their trip to Canada the previous year. His mother simply said, “I’ve always wanted to spend New Year’s in a snowy place.” In the coded language of their family, full of unaired grievances, her firm statement of intent spoke loud and clear to Justin. Something was not right, and this something was compelling enough for them to leave home over the holiday.
The snow that blanketed Sapporo felt permanent, comfortably settled on the long straight avenues and the mountainous landscape around it. The freezing air raked the lining of his nostrils, burning its way down his throat and into his lungs; his lips and fingertips became sore and chapped, and his thin tropical blood felt powerless against the cold. And yet he was not unhappy; the omnipresent snow had a way of silencing the unspoken troubles that had arisen in his family, dampening them, calming everyone. His younger brother did not take so well to the cold; he whimpered softly and became sullen and uncommunicative, refusing to venture out of the hotel room. Justin observed the way his mother and father avoided each other—she lavishing extra attention on the younger of her two sons while her husband worked on his papers even at breakfast, concentrating on undecipherable sets of accounts while he ate his rice porridge, rarely looking up at the rest of the family. “I’m going to take Mother out to dinner tonight,” his father said one morning, without looking up from his paperwork, and Justin recognized this statement to be a sort of apology, or at least as much of an apology as his father was capable of offering. There was a cry from his brother, aged six—the start of a tantrum over being forced to finish his eggs—then he began to scrape a piece of burned toast noisily, the black powder scattering on the cream-colored tablecloth. No, his mother replied, that would be too much hassle; the young one needed looking after. Justin listened for signs of regret or gratitude in her voice but could discern nothing other than the turbulent silence that descended on his family in times of anger and dispute. Outside, the sky was clear, the winter light glassy, pale. He thought how fortunate he was to be in a foreign place, for somehow the problems of his family seemed easier to bear when they were far from home, in an unfamiliar land shrouded in snow.
With his mother clinging more and more to her younger son and his father disappearing for long stretches to work, Justin was left to discover the wonders of Sapporo with Sixth Uncle, who had come on holiday with them as he often did, partly to help with the children but mainly to organize the logistics of traveling in a foreign country—booking tickets, sorting out the best hotel rooms, moving the family swiftly through airports, finding good restaurants. He always seemed to know people everywhere they went—contacts he’d met through business, or friends of friends of friends, who were always willing to help show them around or lend a car and a driver. He was “good with people”—affable, insistent, often daring in his humor, occasionally
foulmouthed but always unthreatening in his chubbiness. He would flirt with hotel receptionists and sweet-talk directors of airline companies; he always got what he wanted. The youngest of the uncles, he was only twelve years older than Justin—barely in his mid-twenties at the time, though already very much a man, someone whom Justin recognized as inhabiting his father’s world, not his, in spite of the childish banter that passed between Sixth Uncle and him.
They visited the Snow Festival, just the two of them. It felt like an adventure, striding forth into the bitter cold, deliberately walking through the snow and feeling it seep through their boots, leaving behind the younger brother, who was too small and weak, and his parents, who were too old and slow. “I’m going to have my ass kicked for leading you astray,” Sixth Uncle said, and laughed as they walked around the fantastic ice sculptures. “Your mother is going to bite my head off when she sees her dear little son frozen to the bone. Hey, look at that—remember that?”
It was the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which they had seen during a previous holiday, but made entirely of snow. Elsewhere there was a life-size pyramid and a faithful reproduction of the Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto; there were fearsome ogres and cuddly polar bears and a herd of long-necked dinosaurs; Mount Rushmore with different, unrecognizable heads; Eskimos and penguins; a tropical landscape of palm trees and a beach with sun loungers—all glowing with the pale white-blue of snow and ice. They threw snowballs at each other, as people who are not used to snow always do, and if they tripped and fell they just lay on the snow, feeling its strange powdery-crusty texture beneath them. Justin no longer noticed the cold; his fingers were swollen and numb but impervious to the biting frost, and he felt a growing strength in his legs as he ran along the edge of a perfectly flat snow-canal that led to a Dutch windmill.
“Little bastard, you’ve got a lot of energy,” Sixth Uncle wheezed as he caught up. “Your grandmother keeps telling me I need to lose weight, but thank God I’m a bit fat, because it protects me from this damn cold.”
They found a small restaurant, a dimly lit place hidden down a nondescript alley—a tip from a local acquaintance, Sixth Uncle said, guaranteed to be the best food in the area. The warmth of the room felt delicious, the air humid and wood-scented. They ordered too much food, as was the custom of their family, and Sixth Uncle had a bottle of sake that seemed too big for one person.
“What a great holiday this is,” Sixth Uncle said as he refilled the tiny cup; he misjudged the size of it, and the sake spilled onto the smooth lacquered surface of the table. “Thank goodness you’re around, though; otherwise it would just be your shit-boring parents.”
Justin smiled; Sixth Uncle was the only person he knew who spoke of his parents in this way—irreverently, whatever respect he had for Justin’s father well hidden under layers of coarse humor.
“How on earth did such boring parents bring up a happy, strong boy like you? If you were a couple of years older I would let you drink some sake while no one’s looking. Hey, maybe I could slip it into your teacup? No, no, that would be too bad of me. Not even I would do that to my favorite nephew—though you’ve always been very grown up for your age, so I wouldn’t give a shit about getting you drunk. Only thing I’d worry about is your dragon-tongued mother. Oh, my God, speaking of getting drunk, I think I’m already pretty wasted.”
Justin toyed with a piece of lamb that was drying out on the helmet-shaped griddle in front of him, slowly sizzling to a crisp alongside a charred piece of corn. Sixth Uncle had told him that the dish was called “Genghis Khan” because the grill was modeled on the exact form of an ancient Mongol armored helmet, but Justin had not believed him—Sixth Uncle was full of amazing, unbelievable stories. Often Justin had thought that these stories were Sixth Uncle’s way of enlivening the heavy atmosphere at the dinner table, for he was the only one who would say anything amusing (and Justin would be the only one to laugh), but recently Justin had begun to realize that Sixth’s Uncle’s anecdotes were aimed at him. He had sensed a growing connivance, Sixth Uncle reaching out to him tentatively, for reasons he was not able to fathom. He was glad of the jovial company but troubled by the lack of clarity; in spite of Sixth Uncle’s almost comic façade, he, too, operated within the family’s unspoken language, in which one was somehow expected to understand all that was not articulated.
“Do you know what I’m going to do when I retire?” Sixth Uncle continued. “I’m going to buy a stinking huge farm in Tasmania and never come back. People tell me property is dirt cheap over there. I can get a massive ranch with sheep and cows and live happily ever after.”
“But, Sixth Uncle, you don’t know anything about sheep or cows.”
“How difficult can it be?” Sixth Uncle poured another overfilled cup of sake and looked at the clear beads of liquid on the table. “Must be easier than dealing in property.”
There followed a silence that made Justin anxious: one of those moments just before someone said something important. In his family’s unsaid-said ways, he understood that this was a preparation for an announcement of some kind, the delivery of news that would mark a turning point—perhaps something relatively minor, but a shift nonetheless.
“Do you know what people in the business call me? ‘The Fixer.’ Sometimes they call me ‘The Enforcer,’ but I don’t really like to hear that. ‘The Fixer’ sounds better. Even the family calls me that sometimes.”
Justin nodded. He had heard his father refer to Sixth Uncle’s pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to problem solving, the way he could always untangle a sticky situation.
“In every generation of our family, there needs to be a fixer. Before me there was Third Uncle, whom you never knew. Without him, the family business would have gone bust several times over—your grandfather was a clever man, but he wasn’t streetwise at all. The family needed someone to look after the more practical side of things so that the glamorous stuff could happen. The small details are important too, that’s what Third Uncle told me. I learned everything from him. And after me it’ll be your turn.”
The small window next to their table offered a view of the narrow alley; above the doorways of the alley, lamps had come on. Justin could not see the sky, but he guessed that the snow had made the evening draw in. A flag sign fluttered above an entranceway; amid the Japanese characters, he recognized the Chinese name for Hokkaido: North Sea Island, a place marooned in the cold north.
“Your father says it’s not normal for the eldest son to do the work I do. He wants you to sit in a fancy office, the way he does, or look after the money in Singapore. What a shit-boring job that is! But what choice do we have? Look at your brother—he’s a sweet kid, but already you can see that he’s too weak, spoiled rotten; he’ll never have what it takes to look after the harsher things in life. At his age you were already much more mature, you were different. Remember a few years ago? When you fractured your ankle or leg or whatever and for a few days you were hobbling around? Your father got mad because he thought you were pretending. And then you forced yourself to walk normally and no one knew anything for months, until the doctor said, My God, I think he’s fractured his leg. I thought, Wow, this kid is tough! No one said so, but everyone was impressed by your bravery. And I guess it’s because of—okay, let’s just say it—your background.”
Justin nodded. He tried to read the signs above the doorways in the alleyway outside; some of them were written in traditional Chinese script, and it was fun trying to make out the names. WHITE BIRCH MOUNTAIN VILLAGE. BRILLIANT PLUM TEAHOUSE.
“But, you know, you have been raised as the eldest son, you’ve never been treated as anything other than the number-one brother, so whose blood you are exactly is not important. We’re not so old-fashioned that we care about these things. It’s only—like I said, it explains why you are different from your brother. And better than him, frankly. Yes, we should just say it! He’s going to become a lawyer or accountant; maybe he will look after some small part of the business, like the tea or rubber plantati
ons. Or maybe he’ll do what your dad does now—sit in the office and watch the money coming in and sometimes play with the accounts before going off for golf. That’s for pussies. You are different. You’re stronger. That’s why you will have to carry more responsibility.”
That he was different was undeniable, as was the fact that he was the eldest son. At times he wondered how someone who was not born of the family could also be treated to its privileges—and now its responsibilities—but his family did not question it and neither, therefore, did he. They had been clear about the situation from the start, had not lied or sought to protect him from the truth: They had taken him in, the infant son of a distant relative, a poor girl from the provinces who had been abandoned by her husband and could not cope with a baby. It was someone so distantly related that she might not even have been a relative, though in the old Chinese way she was referred to as “cousin,” and in today’s terms, in a family more modern than his, the process by which he came to live in his new home would be called “adoption” rather than just “taking in.” His birth mother had emigrated to Canada and, had he wanted to, Justin could easily have asked about her, perhaps even asked to see her. But he felt no filial curiosity; his bloodline offered no lure. His family had raised him as their own, and not only as their own but as the highest of the male cousins—the eldest son of the eldest son—a position not usurped even when his younger brother came along. His place within the family had always been indisputable, despite his provenance. And for this he would always be grateful. He would always obey the family and fight for them and never fail them; he did not need Sixth Uncle to tell him so.
“You should hang out with me; I’ll teach you a thing or two. Your dad wants you to start learning the business soon. With property, you have to begin with the basics. See that chef over there, slicing the fish as if he’s creating some fucking work of art? Well, he started life as a kitchen porter, collecting scraps of garbage and dumping them outside for the rats to eat. Our work is like that too. You want to build apartment blocks all over Vancouver and Melbourne? Want to reclaim a bit of Hong Kong harbor so you can build a new office tower? First you have to learn the shit that I have to deal with. All the goddamn shit.”