by Tash Aw
That was why he found himself at this party full of kids high on tequila and the anticipation of ivy-clad colleges; that was why, as usual, he was sitting at the edge of the room trying not to be noticed—the dull older brother of the mercurial C.S., the one who’d left school at eighteen after barely scraping through his final year. He knew all the people at the party, for he had grown up with them. He watched as two boys pushed each other into the swimming pool, noticed how a boy and a girl crept into a shadowy recess of the garden, framed by a pair of spreading palm trees; he caught sight of another pair sneaking upstairs separately, boy following girl after a gap of thirty seconds, hoping their assignation would not be noticed. But nothing escaped Justin: It was his job to take in the details of human weakness; it was his job to put things right.
When Yinghui arrived, it was already late; the initial excitement of the party had petered out and people were beginning to settle down in little cliques. Justin saw her making her way up the snaking Balinese-style stepping-stone pathway, her taut calves illuminated by the garden lights housed in low stone pagodas. She wore Bermuda shorts and walked with a slouchy gait, her body held loosely, as if she were bored and did not really want to be there. Her hair was cut on the short side, messily finished, and made her head look square; across the front of her body she wore a small cloth bag on a strap, a Himalayan-type pouch decorated with colorful beads.
“She’s going to London, right?” a girl said to her friend as they saw Yinghui arrive.
“Yes,” said her companion, “she’ll be able to buy lots of lesbian clothes there.”
She stood in the middle of a square of lawn next to the swimming pool, looking around and scanning the thinning crowd. Her eyes caught Justin’s for a half second before she turned away; then she made her way to a small group of people and eased her way next to C.S. He exclaimed theatrically in a high-pitched look-at-me voice, fueled by oversweet rum punch, and leaned in to kiss her on both cheeks. Justin did not know where or when C.S. had learned this affectation; he’d never seen anyone else do it in real life.
Over the next few years, she and C.S. would come home during the vacation, each visit more splendid in their coupled isolation than the last, as if every term abroad had brought them closer to each other and more divorced from the rest of the world. Justin would often come home from work to find them slouched on the sofas, reading the papers, occasionally commenting to each other on a news item—always in a bored, mildly disaffected manner. Once, Justin had just sat down with a can of Coke and turned on the TV when Yinghui let the papers fall to the floor with a sigh. She lay back, gazed at the ceiling, and sighed again. “It’s all so shit,” she said.
“What is?” Justin said.
C.S. was stretched out on the same sofa as Yinghui, his ankles entwined with hers. He did not look up from the book he was reading. “You know that’s what it’s like in this country, sweetie, you’re never going to change it.”
“Look,” Yinghui said, staring at the news on the TV. Justin had been about to change the channel but now he paused, the remote control resting discreetly by his side. “Watching the news is like reading a novel—it’s pure fiction. Look at him, that fat-ass minister, behaving as if he really cares about the floods. That check he’s handing over is to buy votes, not pay for a new bridge.” She looked briefly at Justin, as if he were somehow implicated in it all. Floods, corruption, suffering: It was his fault. He changed the channel and found the football.
“Don’t know why you stress about these things, babe,” C.S. said. “It’s not as if any of this is new, is it? You grew up in this shit; you of all people can’t say you’re surprised by it.” The book he was reading had the words Western Aesthetics on the cover, but Justin could not make out the whole title.
Yinghui sighed again and turned on her side, scrunching up a cushion to make a pillow under her cheek as she gazed idly at the TV screen. “Yeah, I guess. It seems worse now, that’s all. People don’t give a damn anymore. All they do is make money, hang out, and watch sports.”
They spoke as if Justin weren’t there; they barely looked at him.
They traveled widely, in Europe as well as in Asia, each time coming back with a fund of stories, the dizzying wealth of which they would hint at by keeping silent. When asked what the newly unified Berlin was like, they would simply say, “Just … amazing,” without elaborating, leaving Justin taut with anticipation. Rome? “Has issues.” St. Petersburg? “Beautiful but … complicated.” Occasionally they wrote articles about their travels—Yinghui had a piece published in the New Straits Times which detailed her views (mainly negative) on the architecture of Gaudí and her general dislike of Barcelona; C.S. contributed an essay to The Star titled “Schopenhauer in a Bangkok Brothel,” which all their friends read but did not understand.
They had started going to India—voyages that swelled even further their already considerable air of mystique. They came back wearing interesting clothes made from colorful printed cotton, which they had bought in a village in Rajasthan and transformed into fantastic flowing kurtas in Delhi. C.S. carried a goatskin satchel given to him by a man they had helped with a punctured tire on the road to Jaipur; Yinghui had an amulet given to her by a local soothsayer. Everything had a story; nothing was ever just bought in a shop. Even their ailments seemed exotic, with names no one had heard of before—when, once, they came back twenty pounds lighter after a bad bout of food poisoning, they shrugged and said, “Oh, only a little Campylobacter jejuni.” On more than one occasion, Justin heard people ask them what India was like, whether it was poor and dirty, or else exotic and colorful, to which they merely sighed and shook their heads without deigning to reply. They also started doing yoga and sometimes made references to “when we meditate.” Every time Justin saw them, their faces glowed with the satisfaction of being perfectly and utterly together.
Whenever he was in Yinghui’s presence, Justin felt nervous and unintelligent, which frustrated him because, in the rest of his life, he was neither—he knew that much about himself. Conversation with her was difficult; his views and observations on life seemed not worth mentioning. If she asked him a question, she would fix him with a firm stare, holding his gaze as she awaited a response. Any thoughts that he might have formulated would begin to feel flimsy, and he would hesitate; but she would not fill in the silence the way more sociable people did, would not alleviate his awkwardness with giggly platitudes. Instead, she would merely wait, looking him patiently in the eye, until he managed to stammer out some banality. She said little by way of small talk—everything was aimed at acquiring information.
“What do you think of this latest scandal involving the Port Authorities? All that land being sold to government cronies at cut-rate prices?”
“Um, it’s really bad, I guess.”
“Bad. Hmm. I see.”
He got used to being witness to the intellectual intimacy she and C.S. shared, a closeness so intense that it cut them off from the rest of the world, as if only they knew the words to the elaborate song they were singing; even if Justin managed to learn the words and the rhythms, they would always be ahead of him.
“Corruption is quite comforting, really,” C.S. once said as they drove down to the coast. “I mean, it suits us, suits the Asian temperament. Westerners aren’t comfortable with it, not just because they have stricter rules in place but because something in their nature prevents them from appreciating it. They’re more, hmm, how shall I say … rigid. Less malleable. Do you know what I mean? It’s got nothing to do with being more principled or honorable. It’s a question of, like, souplesse—blowing with the wind. I’m not saying it’s right, and I definitely don’t agree with it, but, let’s face it, it’s part of our nature.”
“Yeah, I guess I would go with that,” Yinghui added, reaching across and idly stroking C.S.’s hair. Justin could see them in the rearview mirror, their heads thrown back to catch the breeze fluttering through the half-open windows. “It’s like the Chinese a
nd gambling. We can’t get rid of that character flaw. There’s a certain beauty in living that way—quite poetic, I think, to live with something that you despise and to know that it will destroy you, but at the same time recognizing that it’ll always be part of you. Don’t you think, Justin? Hello, anyone there?”
He nodded. “Um, ya,” he said. Sitting in the driver’s seat with no one beside him, he felt like a chauffeur; he had not even demurred when they climbed into the backseat together, leaving him to drive. Their “coupled-ness” was unshakable; there was no point in resisting it. As he looked at them in the rearview mirror, their eyes shaded by jet-black sunglasses, heads tilting toward each other, Justin felt old. He was only twenty-six or twenty-seven, barely more than six years older than Yinghui, yet he had a job and an office, his life already so firmly entrenched that he would never be able to change it. C.S. and Yinghui still occupied that wonderful terrain on the other side of the fence between youth and adulthood, Justin thought, and he envied them because their lives would always be colorful and full of change, even when they were no longer young in age.
Only once did he succeed in making Yinghui laugh, and even then he couldn’t be sure if it was intentional. He had just returned to the capital after a long drive up the East Coast, all the way to Kota Bharu, where he had been inspecting some family concerns—a vast housing development in the countryside for the new middle class, who wanted to leave their flimsy timber-and-concrete dwellings to live in neat, clean streets of low brick houses bounded by chain-link fences. It had been a tiring trip, and not particularly productive, but vital nonetheless. Palms needed to be greased—one or two officials who had the potential to be uncooperative—and cordial relations maintained. Justin had traveled up there with Sixth Uncle to host a dinner or two, discreetly handing out expensive gifts before making the all-day drive back down to KL. When he got home, he found Yinghui sitting on the front step of the porch, a large sheet of paper spread out in front of her, on which she was making rough drawings.
“Plans for my café,” she said. “Not sure if it’ll ever happen, but it would be fun, I think. C.S. needs somewhere to host his literary gatherings, and I could bake the cakes. Can you imagine—me, baking cakes? That would surprise everyone. But I kind of like the idea.”
“What about the business side?” he asked. She did not seem to Justin to have a clue about finances or the simple mechanics of making money, and it panicked him to imagine her running a business. Her world was entirely cerebral—she inhabited the books she read and had no concept of providing service in return for money. She would lose everything.
“That’ll just sort itself out, won’t it?” she said, laughing. “C.S. says that if I want to do it, I should go ahead. He says business is fundamentally simple when you strip it down to its basics. Once deconstructed, you can see that it’s philosophically unchallenging. That’s why no businessman is ever a great genius.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, how was Kelantan? Beautiful?”
He nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. She held his gaze steadily in her wide-eyed fashion, expecting him to elaborate—waiting for further details, waiting. “Beautiful,” he repeated. He searched his brain for thoughts that had occurred to him during his trip there, but all he had seen was a huge residential project of cheap, boxy houses, and the only people he had spoken to were local officials with whom he had made small talk about food and fishing. “Backward,” he said suddenly. He did not know where the word came from or if he actually thought that Kelantan was backward, but he was glad nonetheless that he’d come up with an observation.
Her face opened up into a smile. “Beautiful and backward. I like that! What a great description. The poetic gene must run in the family.”
From then on, every time she described a place she’d visited—some parts of Indonesia or India—she would say, “Beautiful and backward,” and nod knowingly to Justin. Sometimes she would say, “As Justin says, ‘Beautiful and backward.’ ” The three of them even began to describe people they met as Beautiful and Backward—the glamorous trophy wives of rich men in KL (“there goes another B&B”). For a while Justin felt part of Yinghui’s life, as if she had finally taken him into her world. He knew that he only hovered on the periphery of this world, but it did not matter; it was enough for him.
Around this time he was charged with the dealings of the New Cathay Movie Theatre, the first and most famous of the dozen or so cinemas to have been built in KL during the 1920s and ’30s. Already, most of them had been forgotten, falling into a state of disrepair or torn down in the beginning of the boom years that had begun in the eighties and carried on steadily, but the New Cathay still stood. Small fig trees sprouted from cracks in the masonry on its roof, the ornate plasterwork of scrolling leaves that adorned the façade was cracking in many places, and the handsome columns that flanked the cinema were streaked with lines of black moss where the moisture leaked from the drainpipes. Whereas once it had always seemed splendidly bathed in sunlight, it now lay permanently in the shadows, crowded on all sides by the high-rise office blocks that had sprung up around it.
Yet, in spite of its dereliction, the New Cathay continued to screen films every day of the week, as if refusing to acknowledge the changes taking place around it. Audiences had dwindled, of course, and when Justin stopped by early one Friday evening to see for himself how dire the situation was, he found only one other person in the audience: an old Indian man, who had fallen asleep despite the pounding music of the Bollywood film that was showing. Justin stayed for fifteen minutes, watching the colorful images dance across the screen, before wandering back out into the street. Office workers dressed in smart gray slacks and white shirts were hurrying to dinner, high-spirited in anticipation of the weekend; teenagers in uniforms were rushing to catch their buses home after an afternoon of hanging around the shopping malls. No one showed any interest in the New Cathay.
It had not always been like this. Justin could still remember when, once a month, his parents would take C.S. and him to the New Cathay to see a film on a Sunday afternoon—that rarest of treats: a family outing. Even as recently as the late seventies, the New Cathay would show the newest films, despite the establishment of big modern cinemas elsewhere in town. Justin remembered watching King Kong and—could this be right?—Star Wars at the New Cathay, in addition to the numerous Chinese classics in the great tradition of the Shaw Brothers studios. But the films were immaterial. What he loved was sitting in the best seats—in the middle of the front row—his newspaper cone of steamed groundnuts in one hand, a bottle of Fanta in the other; his parents silently staring at the screen, as if they were young lovers; a sense of togetherness, away from the silent disputes; the old Indian jaga who would give him bags of rambutans from his garden after the movie. Those evenings represented for Justin an illusion of stability, of ordinariness. It was not long, of course, before Justin was old enough to see these outings for what they were, a temporary relief from the unvoiced unhappiness that lay underneath, but still he would go along with the pretense; each time, he would gratefully accept the bag of rambutans, even though he didn’t especially like them, for they were part of this small ritual of normality.
His family had acquired the cinema in the late 1940s, when postwar fatigue had not yet been replaced with pre-independence fervor, when nerves were still raw and money scarce. There had been rumors that the New Cathay had been used for Japanese propaganda films and now no one wanted it. The owner had fled to Thailand during the war and did not want to come back, and the only person who had any money to buy the place was Justin’s grandfather, one of the few Chinese to have survived the war with his fortune intact, if not—this was always said in hushed tones—actually increased. Once bought, the cinema was smartened up, its fine masonry restored and repainted, the seats inside replaced with vinyl-covered ones from America. For a decade, maybe more, from the mid-fifties until just after Justin’s birth, it enjoyed a second heyday, with audiences streaming in n
ightly to watch Technicolor films in modern comfort. But by the time Justin was old enough to be taken on those family outings, the cinema was past its prime, and, throughout the eighties and into the nineties, the huge multiscreen cinemas in the giant shopping malls ensured the demise of the New Cathay.
“We can’t hang on to it just for sentimental reasons,” his father said one day at a family meeting convened to discuss it.
“Yeah, I agree,” said Sixth Uncle. “It hasn’t made a single sen since 1971. No kidding, not one bloody sen. We’ve been subsidizing it for too long. For what?”
“For the sake of heritage,” Justin said. “For tradition. It goes back a long way in our family.”
“Tradition my foot,” Sixth Uncle said. “Who gives a damn about history in this town?”
“All right, all right,” Justin’s father said. “Son, you are right; it is valuable in that regard. But we have to face the facts—the cinema is right in the middle of town. If you were to look at a map of KL and mark its epicenter, it would be directly where the New Cathay is. It’s the most valuable real estate in the country.”
“So what? Do we need the money that badly? Who’s going to buy it, anyway?”
His father exchanged glances with Sixth Uncle, and their tiny interaction did not escape Justin. In his family’s unspoken/spoken way of communicating, he knew that something significant would soon follow.