by YZ Chin
BRIGHT AND CLEAR
Mother asked the question I had been dreading all morning, when she finally admitted that we were lost.
She started with a sigh. “Lost again. I just have such a terrible sense of direction. So, you still a lesbian?”
“Unfortunately, I am still seeing Meena,” I said, stressing words where appropriate. “I can’t just change who I am, you know, much as I’d love to.”
“Oh really? You used to date boys in secondary school. Now you date girls. So, if you can change one way, you can change the other way, right?”
“Maybe we should stop,” I said, not wanting to meander farther down unfamiliar little mud roads. But my mother misunderstood. Her lips clamped, and her butt shifted on the driver’s seat. The car moved on. Pebbles sent flying by rubber wheels hit the underside of the old Proton Saga and clanked gratingly.
Mother, tapping the steering wheel, told me to help her find our way. Annoyed that she had been predictable enough to ask what I’d dreaded her asking, I said, “If Dad were here we wouldn’t be lost.”
“Well, we’re going to see my parents, not his,” she replied.
“He always drove before,” I shot back, and was immediately unsure of my point.
Outside the car was an army of orderly rubber trees, each ringed by neat diagonal wounds that bled dirty white, like the eraser in my pencil box from when I first learned to write.
“You think those are the same trees we passed earlier?” Mother asked.
“I think we should ask that woman for directions.”
Mother looked at the advancing figures and shook her head. “She’s Malay.”
“So?”
“So? Why should she know where a Chinese cemetery is lah?”
“If we were in our taman and this woman asked you where the nearest masjid is, wouldn’t you be able to answer her?”
Mother slowed the car. The woman paid no attention, but her goat looked at us briefly. I cranked down my window. Squeaky.
“Kak, can you tell us where the Chinese cemetery is?”
She looked up, her face impassive. She lifted a finger, twisted her body, and pointed. Then, wordlessly, she adjusted her tudung and prepared to leave.
“Nice goat,” I said.
“Goat? What?” Her eyeballs pushed out. “Not mine lah. Why would I have a goat?”
We wound our way up hilly slopes and weaved through rows and rows of gravestones, some more erect than others. The sun scorched us. Mother carried the fruits, incense, and cold roast pork. I carried large bags of folded paper money, fingers massaging the lighter in my pocket.
Mother walked in front and got us lost among the tombstones. She sweated and swiveled her head about, trying to find my grandparents.
“Ow!” She stubbed her toe on someone else’s gravestone. A Mr. Szeto’s.
“Sorry,” she mumbled to the dirt ground. She turned around to look at me sadly. “You’re right. If your father were here we wouldn’t be lost.”
Her concession made me feel so guilty I almost believed that she had said it to play victim. But her bowed back reminded me that I had been rude to her when she had called me almost every night when I was in London. She had wanted to talk about the divorce and her menopause, but I’d had no patience for her then. I did not want to be reminded of being a woman.
I took a couple of quick steps and held her elbow. “I see them, over there.”
Like every year before this, I silently rememorized my grandparents’ given names and swore never to forget them. Grandfather’s name was much more vivid than Grandmother’s; the paint had not had as much time to chip away.
We went through the motions, and it was hard to tell how upset I felt, traditions being the great neutralizer of emotions in my case. Around us, the hill swayed and slid with the combined weight of all its graves. Mini pyres burned elsewhere, lit by other families. Each family followed its own customs: some ate fruits meant for the ghosts lingering about, while others warned against touching any food. Grass tried to grow everywhere and over and under everyone.
The swimming fire and smoke finally made my eyes water. Lifting my arm, I beckoned Mother to join me where I sat on the neighboring gravestone.
I told her about that day when I was all alone in our old house. Rain hammered on the zinc roof of our neighbor’s chicken coop, and the racket somehow made me conscious that I was bored. I started rifling through my father’s filing cabinet. “You know, the one he keeps our tax stuff in”—I looked at Mother. She shook her head, and my disdain rose again. How clueless she had been, about her own life.
There had been reams of mortgage documents, electricity bills, bank statements, train schedules—such things. And underneath them all, wedged against a back corner, was a black plastic bag with handles. Inside I’d found about a dozen VCDs. Their covers showed me what my father desired sexually, and when I came across the schoolgirls in uniform I had to think about my blue pinafores. How could I have not?
I told my mother how I sat down in front of our TV and watched most of Dad’s collection. I told her that I’d found myself turned on, and when I got up to go to the bathroom I’d looked down to see moist patches.
It was a horrible story. I didn’t deliver the punch line, but it was there, evident and blatantly false: I was queer because of Dad. I watched Mother’s face. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to see. Only later in life would I learn to regard my preference of anger over sadness as problematic. Right then, surrounded by graves, all I wanted was for my mother to hate my father.
Mother got up and went back to the grave we were visiting. She closed her eyes and started whispering to her parents, and suddenly I was terrified. What would I do when it was my turn? I was ignorant of the ceremonial steps performed in cemeteries.
On our way back we got lost again. For the fourth or fifth time, we passed the rows of rubber trees, more orderly than graves and human lives. I didn’t stop Mother when she started telling me all about Taiping, as if I were a tourist. How it almost became the capital of Malaysia before the honor went to a nowhere place at the cross-streams of two dirty rivers. How Taiping had fallen from glory, its claim to fame sad relics of a colonial past. How that confused its dwellers, made them unsure of how to gossip, how to be friendly, what kind of food to like, whether to be full of hope or devoid of it.
A car pulled up next to us, and its driver asked if we knew how to get to the clock tower, “the oldest one in the country.” Mother, suddenly cheerful, said, “You’re going the wrong way. Gostan, gostan!”
TAIPING
Dawn at the foot of Maxwell Hill was chilly enough to conjure memories of Cameron Highlands, where they grew strawberries and roses and other such improbable Western things. Now that was a hill that had truly been elevated to a proper tourist attraction. The Cameron Highlands had a dedicated website that looked pretty good. On the website, you could look up tour companies and choose among hotels ranging from two to five stars. Maxwell Hill had no web presence, only one accessible road, and an abundance of mosquitoes to greet visitors. Here, the choice for tourists was whether to leave windows shut in rental houses without air-conditioning or to open the windows and collect insect bites as souvenirs.
The retired assistant branch manager, being a believer in the afterlife, wondered how the dead white men respectively felt. Sir William Cameron went on his native adventure and discovered his highlands on elephant back. In contrast, Sir (William) George Maxwell arrived, took up his colonial post, and just like that, got a hill named after him by sitting behind a desk.
Sir Cameron must be declared the victor, thought the retired assistant branch manager. After all, no one was proposing to erase the marks of colonization from Cameron Highlands. Whereas Maxwell Hill had been rebranded Bukit Larut, a name that made the uninitiated think of boulders, trees, grass, and mud melting into a hilly puddle. Funny that it was Sir Maxwell who first proposed turning Sir Cameron’s highlands into a resort, starting years of construction that ended in
carefully manicured rose gardens, pesticide-sprayed strawberry farms, and hotels that printed long lists under a section named “amenities”—ordinary household things like hairdryers and electric kettles. As of the twenty-first century, the Highlands were a hub of foreign tourism, while Maxwell Hill shimmered like a mirage of a ghost town behind its latest name.
Although to be frank, if you’d asked the retired assistant branch manager, he would have said Maxwell Hill was the true winner. He’d always said he preferred unspoiled natural beauty to commercialized family fun. A simple man, he called himself.
Perhaps that was why he felt such affinity for this town, when he should have perhaps resented it. It was a place he had not seen until well into adulthood, when he started taking a bus down to court the woman who would become his wife, bear him a child, and then leave him in his twilight years. Taiping was the site of old dreams: unburied, unforgotten, in your face daily under the prickly heat of the tropical sun. Almost became the country’s capital, it did—until an upstart fishing village situated between the two warm thighs of Gombak and Klang rivers snatched the title right from under Taiping’s nose.
And what was Taiping to do, except make the most of it? It preserved its claim to fame by continuing to lock animals and people up in the country’s oldest zoo and the country’s oldest prison, respectively; by erecting a plaque commemorating the country’s first railway station; by letting the sun polish colonial planes, cars, cannons, and statues in the courtyard of the country’s oldest museum. All this so that bored teachers could chaperone sweaty kids in school uniforms on weekday visits to the town, coming with discounted group tickets and leaving behind Rota snack wrappers. Meanwhile, parents eager to take glamorous vacation photos with their kids drove to cool places like the Cameron and Genting Highlands, sites of elegance and opportunity, not of decayed glory. Where they could pose in their sweaters, windbreakers, and jackets. Paying money for the luxury of experiencing Cold, which was representative of something else.
Other places developed. Taiping preserved. Here, he was surrounded by objects standing in for his wife’s presence, like how hills stood on all sides of the teardrop-shaped town, not in an embrace, but the way you would cup a palmful of water in order to trap a twisting fish.
Lately, he had been trying to make a list of reasons why he loved Taiping. He wasn’t trying to convince himself—he knew, in his bones, that the way he felt was true. But other people required articulation, particularly when they asked him how things were going between him and his wife, or why he was staying on in that empty house all by himself. It was just like on their wedding day, when he’d known in his gut that he wanted to marry her, but other people had wanted him to list his reasons anyway—three, just three, they’d demanded. He stood among his groomsmen, her blockade of bridesmaids barring his way to her until he could pass their challenges, everybody laughing, having a grand time. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a trickle of red snaking down an exposed drain running along the periphery of her parents’ house. Blood from the freshly slaughtered chickens that would become part of the banquet, provided he could indeed successfully explain, in verbalized words, why he wanted to marry her.
Be brave, he exhorted himself, puffing his chest out. So silly now, to think that was how courage manifested for someone like him, a small-town transplant from another small town.
A shiver brought him back to the foot of Maxwell Hill. Light fog foreigned the familiar sight, wrapping his beloved hill like bandages. He walked in through the open halves of the rusty gates, hunching a little against the wind.
Not a mile in and he could already hear the monkeys overhead. He looked up to see a mother with an infant strapped to her chest swaying on the thick electricity cables. How useful those cables were to the families of monkeys. It was almost as if the cables had been installed to provide overhead catwalks and simian flyovers, so that the monkeys never had to share the road with humans. How some of them lorded this over the humans! Those who cowered underneath the monkeys’ bald butts, fearing droppings.
He took his favorite shortcut, which branched off the main paved road near a wheezing rivulet that struggled to cast itself down a pile of rocks. Then he was in the jungle proper, and it was like a door had closed behind him. Suddenly the sky darkened and birds cried out louder. Underfoot crunched twigs, pebbles, and insects—mostly ants of a reddish-bronze cast that gave them a man-made sheen in this jungle setting. He saw those ants every day he came up this hill, even when his calf was bothering him and he stuck to the main road, paved and easy, meant for jeeps carrying tourists who wanted views at the top without the climb. He saw the ants scurrying even in the rain, when the shortcut’s barely visible dirt path became slippery, and he hiked up as if suspended in space, arms slightly spread, about to topple backward.
In contrast to the ever-present ants, the leeches had appeared only twice since he’d started coming to this hill, which is to say since his wife had left him. Even then, the leeches never showed themselves, instead making their presence known after the fact with the lurid marks they left. He had not known they’d gotten him until he reached the second pavilion, where some of his fellow hikers rested.
“Hey, you’re bleeding,” the former construction worker said, mopping his face with the shirt he’d just taken off. The second pavilion, situated halfway up the hill, was his handiwork. He’d collected money from Maxwell Hill frequenters like the retired assistant branch manager, and when he’d gotten enough for the wood, cement, and roof tiles, he’d labored until the pavilion had taken root and sprung up between jungle and paved road.
The retired assistant branch manager looked down at his bloodstained socks. A violent fear spasmed in him for just a moment, then vanished. There was no pain. The culprit was long gone.
Later, washing blood off his ankles under a tap fed by spring water, he thought that he would like his death to go the same way—painless, with a retroactive realization. How peaceful it would be, to go about his daily rituals as always, walking, hiking, eating, not thinking about his wife, when suddenly an angel would flap its wings and say to him, “Hey, you’re dead.” And he would look down and try in vain to find the tiny wounds.
Since then, he’d been on the lookout for leeches every time he hiked. And every time he crossed paths with the retired construction worker, sweaty in the pavilion or running errands on the streets of Taiping, he would ask, “Did the leeches get you this time?” After which he would regurgitate his story of once spotting a wild boar, snorting and in heat, deep in the jungle near a seldom-used shortcut.
How funny people were, always fearing—and yet yearning for—the elusive and harmful. Ceaselessly talking about them, and never about the daily appearances of ants and leaves. Since the retired assistant branch manager had developed eye floaters, he’d seen the leeches maybe half a dozen times before realizing that they were just spots in his eyes. And what did that say about him?
Today he was alone on the shortcut. Most people, even if they wanted to earn their views, trudged up the main paved road and called it “hiking.” He did the real thing and tried to go as fast as he could. The last time his daughter had visited him, she’d asked him to show her what he did every day. He’d intuited that she wanted to see how he spent his time, in order to tell how sad or healed he was. That, in turn, would allow her to calibrate her guilt and, potentially, her frequency of visits.
So he chose his favorite shortcut, wanting to impress her. In his excitement, he forgot her body-image issues, and how mercilessly she’d been taunted in sports periods all through primary and secondary school. It was a beautiful day. Tree canopies filtered away the heat of the sun, random rays of light lending the soil a mottled, magical feel, shimmering the whole earth when tree branches jostled with wind. The shortcut weaved through the jungle and passed by a waterfall—really just a mild, short stack of clumsy, tumbling water, but he liked to call it a waterfall anyway. He was eager for his daughter to round a bend and come up ag
ainst the surprise of the water. He hadn’t known he was walking too fast until he turned around to point out the waterfall to her and she wasn’t there.
When he backtracked and found her, she was wheezing, sitting hunched over on a fallen trunk. What should he say? He didn’t want to embarrass her.
He thought for much longer than he’d have liked, staring down on her crown. At last, he said, “It’s a nice day for hiking.”
“You’re . . . so fast.”
“It’s only because I do this every day.” He was the embarrassed one, after all. “If you came every day, you’d be faster.”
“Huh. That’s true. I drink beer every day, and I get better and better at it.”
He chuckled, then fell into one of his usual silences after someone else’s witty remark. Long ago, he’d given up on trying to devise equally witty comebacks or follow-ups. He’d labeled himself a simple man, and that had been that.
“I don’t think I can go on anymore.”
“There’s a waterfall right up there. Just a few steps away.”
“A waterfall? Really?”
“Well . . . a small one.”
She looked up at him with what he understood as pity. Then, mercifully, she got up and followed him—exaggerating her stumbling, it was true, but also exaggerating her wonderment when the admittedly modest waterfall trickled downward in front of them, her eyes fixed on the hike’s reward, as if she were enchanted by its beauty, as if she were lost in meditation of nature’s art.
He paused for a break, leaning one palm against a nearby tree. He remembered that he was supposed to be coming up with reasons he loved Taiping.
Well, for one, this was where his daughter had been born and raised. For almost a decade, he’d taken her every year to midautumn festivals at the lake garden, guiding her hands on the surface of dark waters as they launched paper boats with mini candles in place of masts. They never made wishes or anything like that. It was just tradition, something that people did on a specific night each year. Overhead, the full moon shone so bright it almost pulsed, as if fed by the feeble man-made candlelight floating upon the lake.