by Tash Aw
In Beijing, she had made a fool of herself. Sitting with Walter on a bench on the edge of a canal with the walls of the Forbidden City as a backdrop, she had become tired and teary, alarmed at how rapidly she had lost her composure. She thought that she had mastered her emotions, had dealt with everything that happened with her father a long time ago. Her frantic work routine, her multiple award-winning businesses, her yoga—all these things had helped her pack away the messiness of the past in neat little trunks, but suddenly they had been strewn across the space of her memory, swirling around as if carried by swift-flowing floodwater. She had leaned over and placed her head on Walter’s chest, expecting him—needing him—to wrap his arms protectively around her; when he did not, she clutched at his shirt with one hand, sobbing silently. His body felt hot and damp and unmoving. And after a while—she wasn’t sure how long exactly—when it was clear that he was not going to embrace her, she pulled away from him, still breathing in short heavy breaths, her nose runny and slightly sniffly. He was looking at her with a faint smile on his face: He found this funny, she thought.
It took her a few moments to gather herself; her cheeks and eyes felt puffy, and her carefully styled hair stuck to her face in wisps. She remembered the breathing techniques she had learned in her various forms of exercise, from tai chi to vinyasa to half-marathon running, and after a few minutes was able to calm down again. But what she could not shake was the acute embarrassment, the feeling of having exposed herself as someone lacking in grace and strength—and, above all, as someone needy. Need equaled shame, she had always thought; to need someone was shameful, the opposite of respect. Even the word itself sounded weak, wheedling: “need.” The thin, elongated vowel signaled an emptiness of the imagination—the cry of a damsel in distress or a hapless child who needed protecting. He had been so keen to dig out stories from her past, as if he had wanted to humiliate her by making her remember all the things that made her weak, as if he was trying to put all her fragility on display for the entire world to witness. She struggled to understand why he was doing that, until she realized that it was not his fault but hers: She was the one who couldn’t deal with the past; it was nothing to do with him.
Love, of course, was out of the question—why had she ever thought that might be possible?
By the time they got back to the hotel, after a taxi ride that seemed extraordinarily complicated—the driver had lost his way—she was sufficiently in command of her emotions to be able to make a joke or two. Lucky they made it back, she said; she was worried that the cabdriver was going to abduct them and take them to Tianjin to sell their kidneys to underworld gangs. Walter laughed politely, and they took the lift back up to their rooms in silence, staring at the ascending numbers, feeling that the count from one to five had never before seemed so long. He got out and stood looking at her as the glass doors closed. As the lift carried her up and away, she wondered if that would be the last time she saw him.
Back in Shanghai, she was glad for his text saying that he would be very busy in the coming days leading up to his charity concert for the Sichuan earthquake orphans and that he would not be able to see her much. It suited her that he was otherwise occupied, for it gave her time to reassert her boundaries and restore her independence. Whereas just a short time ago she had found her businesses limiting and suffocating in their narrow scope, she now found them reassuring in their cheerful familiarity. When she saw the new ads her team had produced for the FILGirl clothes range, she smiled at the images of small children playing in sunlit fields. The posters shone with garish primary colors: The sun wore a smiley face, the pastures were plastic-y green, and the robin that perched on one of the children’s fingers looked stiff and flightless. It was rudimentary, almost tacky in its effect, but its simplicity made Yinghui feel happy. The girl in the middle of the picture wore a colorful pinafore printed with red flowers; she smiled openmouthed with wonder and delight, reaching out to touch the unmoving bird. Yinghui spent all afternoon discussing which posters should be used for their next online campaign. The entire team sat for three hours drinking tea and eating egg tarts that Yinghui had bought.
Elsewhere, even the niggling problems that had been plaguing the Thai spa seemed no longer to be a source of worry but a chance for Yinghui to apply herself to what she did best—the resolution of tricky situations. It turned out that the former manager had left for good, as girls often did nowadays, without any satisfactory explanation. Yinghui was obligated to spend several days in the spa, personally reorganizing the schedule and calling each employee into the office for an interview, during which she reminded them of the terms of their employment. She even had to fire one girl, who admitted to stealing nail varnish and body cream from company stocks. She spent a few long hours in the stockroom, counting each carton of shampoo as if she were a small-town shopkeeper, and on a few evenings she made sure she stayed until after closing time to verify the smooth conclusion of the spa’s working day up to the very last minute.
She found the ritual of such mundane tasks comforting; the act of ticking off each tiny item from her to-do list felt richly satisfying, even empowering. She went to yoga twice a day that week, at lunchtime and in the evening, feeling a measured calm at the end of every class as she lay on the mat in the dimmed, silent space, a sensation of solidity and strength rising from her stomach and spreading into her chest and shoulders. She liked the intensity of these sessions, and even the yogic rituals and chanting that she had never really believed in now felt grounding. She slept well at night, and when she received a call from Walter inviting her to go to a bar to listen to folk music, she tried to keep calm. He wanted to smooth over the awkwardness between them, she told herself, to confirm that their relationship was a friendly yet thoroughly professional arrangement; and yet she could not quite ignore the passing thought that he wanted to make up for his over-intrusive questions in Beijing, and that he still wished for a more intimate relationship with her. It was silly to expect anything more of him than just business, she told herself, but a tiny grain of possibility had seeded in her head once more and she found it impossible to dig out.
They went to a bar-café called état d’âme, which occupied a cramped space on the ground floor of a small warehouse in Hongkou, not far from the artist colonies and galleries by Suzhou Creek. The room was full of young men and women who looked like hippies who had arrived too late on the scene, and had Yinghui seen any of them out on the street they would have seemed anomalous in the fast-forward glitter of Shanghai. But here, in their midst, it was she who felt incongruous, dressed in her sleek black work clothes—a trouser suit and high heels. She made polite conversation with Walter and the café owner, a man in his twenties with long hair and small round glasses—she had become good at this sort of professional relating, striking the right note between cordiality and distance. They listened to a boy singing simple love songs while he strummed a guitar or played a keyboard. He was not a great musician, but his voice was delicate and haunting; he held each note perfectly, not seeming even to breathe, the sound simply emerging from his mouth like birdsong. The low, slow melodies he sang unnerved her—they spoke of naïveté and innocence, and yet he sang them as if all that youthful joy was now dead. It felt as though he wanted to share his pain with her, deliberately trying to wound her with his loss. She looked at him and recognized a sort of hollowness in his eyes. She felt a shivering note of panic rise in her throat—the same sensation she had experienced in Beijing with Walter. She breathed deeply, as she did during her meditation classes, and eventually she was able to calm herself.
“How old is he?” she whispered to the café owner.
“I guess about my age—twenty-five, twenty-six? He used to be a pop star.”
He looked about fourteen but seemed ageless in his sadness.
Walter leaned over and said, “I want him for my concert—he will really help boost publicity.”
After the performance, Yinghui wanted to take a cab home, but Walter in
sisted on giving her a lift. She debated the wisdom of accepting his offer but decided that it would be better to go along with his proposal, in order to show that she did not find their situation awkward—that they had reestablished their boundaries and were comfortable with each other.
“I need to stop by the spa,” she said, suddenly remembering that she had left a stack of CVs from girls applying for the now-vacant post of manager. It was no bad thing, she thought, for it would add a businesslike note to the end of the evening, reminding him—in case he was in any doubt—that she had work on her mind and that she intended to go home to continue working. She wanted him to know that she was not holding out for an intimate late-night drink with him. She was not lonely.
The streets were quiet and they rode smoothly, gliding along the avenues and cutting through the lanes without fuss.
“Wow, very stylish,” he said as they drew up in front of the spa.
“Yes, I had that carving specially brought over from Chatuchak Market in Bangkok—cost a fortune in freight.”
“Worth it, though,” he said. “Shall I come in with you?”
“No, don’t worry, I’m just going to pick something up—I’ll be literally one minute.”
The spa was dark, but she could see a thin sliver of light at the back, where the office door was ajar. As she approached the building, the light went off, but she could see someone within. She pushed the front door and found it unlocked, and then she saw the former manager hurrying toward the entrance. Phoebe stopped when she saw Yinghui.
“Phoebe,” Yinghui said, “what are you doing here?”
Phoebe shook her head. “Nothing.”
“The girls said that you had left for good—you should have returned your keys if that was the case. Do you know that your being here constitutes trespass?”
“I left something behind. I just came to collect it.”
“If you’ve stolen anything, I will not hesitate to contact the police. I have your ID and all your details on file.”
Phoebe shrugged and said, “I don’t care.” She was clutching something in her hand, but in the half darkness of the doorway, Yinghui could not make out what it was.
“What’s that in your hand?” Yinghui demanded.
“It’s the thing I came to collect. It belongs to me, not you.” She opened her hand briefly: On her palm lay a key ring—a small cartoon cat with a blue face, lifting some noodles to its whiskery mouth with chopsticks. She closed her fist again and made to push past Yinghui but hesitated. She looked at the car, which was parked with the engine running. A streetlamp cast a pale yellow glow on it and lit Walter’s face in profile, throwing a shadow across his cheek. Phoebe stared for a while—apprehensively, Yinghui thought, as if it were a police car. And the thought suddenly crossed Yinghui’s mind that Phoebe was an illegal, a girl from the provinces who had faked her papers.
“Really,” Yinghui said, “you were very irresponsible by leaving with no notice. And making up all those stupid lies about your mother or grandmother being ill or whatever. I had faith in you, but you’ve shown me that you are just the same as everyone else here. I can’t trust anyone.”
Phoebe stared into the distance without responding, as if impervious to what Yinghui was saying. “What’s the matter with you?” Yinghui said.
“Nothing,” Phoebe mumbled, her voice barely a whisper.
Yinghui thought, This girl has no emotion at all. It frustrated her to think that she had misjudged Phoebe so badly; she had rarely, if ever, suffered from errors of judgment. Whenever Phoebe had spoken to her, Yinghui sensed a mutual understanding between them, as if they were both tuned in to an obscure wavelength being broadcast from abroad. And yet she had been mistaken. “Do you think you were right in abandoning your job? You were doing so well; everyone liked you. I thought you were different, better than the others. You let me down.”
Phoebe continued to gaze with hollow eyes out into the night, ignoring what Yinghui was saying. “En,” she grunted after a while.
“En, what?”
Phoebe said, “This is not a good situation.”
“I agree. I think you should give me the keys and leave at once.”
Phoebe handed Yinghui the keys and looked at her. She smiled and said, “Boss Leong, thanks for everything.” And then she went out the door, turned left sharply, and walked briskly along the pavement, close to the row of buildings, like a mouse scuttling in the shadows, until she reached the first corner, when she disappeared from sight.
Yinghui went into the office and retrieved the dossier she wanted, locking the door behind her as she left. When she got back to the car, Walter was typing on his BlackBerry, his head bowed, frowning in concentration.
“Sorry about that,” Yinghui said. “I ran into the errant ex-manager, who’d snuck in unnannounced—probably to steal things, though she denies it.”
“Oh, really?” Walter said, looking up. “I didn’t even notice.”
“Well, anyway, she’s gone now—for good, hopefully. These people are all the same. Hey, you look tired. I can easily catch a cab home, you know; you don’t have to drive me all the way back.”
“No, really, it’s fine. I just got a bit stressed by an email I was typing.”
They drove in silence, but Yinghui did not feel awkward. It was good that she had reestablished her personal and professional boundaries with Walter, she thought; that evening had proved that she could indeed master her emotions in the face of upheaval.
As Yinghui got out of the car, Walter promised that he would be in touch very soon to arrange a meeting about their future project, which he was looking forward to greatly. He said he would call within a few days, a week at the latest, because he could feel that this was going to be an amazing project and that they should start work in earnest.
HOW NOT TO FORGET—
PROPERTY CASE STUDY,
CONCLUDED
We took the bus down to Kuala Lumpur. The rains had started early that year, and the stretch of road down to Kuantan got flooded, forcing the bus to take a detour. We rode long hours through the night. When we stopped at Kuala Lipis, we bought some curry puffs and mee Siam that later made my stomach churn, knotting my insides until I was bent over in pain. My father, however, was in high spirits—he kept talking about what he would do with his business once we got approval to keep the building. He would take out another loan and invest in a mechanized cleaning system to process the birds’ nests—that would be cheaper than hiring Indonesian migrant workers, the way other people did. The birds’ nests would be more hygienic and aesthetically pleasing and would therefore command a higher price, and the quality of his product would be such that he would even be able to get an ISO 9000 certification for it. He would start a chain of shops, bearing my name—his legacy to me. He spoke about these ventures as if they were a real possibility, as if the hotel belonged entirely to us and was bursting with nesting birds—as if it were not empty and boarded up and about to be torn down.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked.
“Nothing.” My stomach was twisted on the right side, and occasionally there would be a shooting pain in my kidneys.
“Serves you right for eating so many curry puffs,” he said.
He talked through the night, detailing his plans as we rode slowly over the potholes and pools of floodwater collecting in the middle of the road. Outside, the rain had lightened to a steady drizzle; as the road cut through the unending plantations of rubber and palm oil, the headlamps of the bus cast a stark pool of light that suddenly illuminated the military-straight rows of trees before leaving them in darkness once more. Slowly, as dawn began to break, my father finally fell asleep. We were just entering the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, with its vast flat housing estates of small single-story link houses separated by chain-link fences, each one indistinguishable from the other; the factories that made tires and refrigerators and VCR sets; the cheap Chinese groceries starting to open their heavy metal shutters, the s
hopkeepers hanging combs of ripening bananas along the tops of doorways, as if they were decoration. I had not slept all night and I was beginning to feel drowsy, the cityscape appearing misty and dream-shrouded in my fatigue. The twisting, stabbing pain in my gut continued, and when we finally pulled in at the bus station I had to rush to the toilet, simultaneously nauseous and diarrhetic.
My father had an address written down on a piece of paper he kept in his shirt pocket, a page torn from a school notebook, folded and refolded many times and now beginning to get soft and rumpled with the sweat from his shirt. We walked for a long time—the city was full of hot concrete, the air unmoving—before finding the address, a modern high-rise block, twenty-eight stories all told, dressed in steel and shiny blue-green windows that reflected the clouds and the sky and hid the people who worked within. In the smooth paved forecourt and at the very top of the building, there were big red letters announcing its name, the kind of signage that would remain lit throughout the night: WISMA L.K.H.
I thought the security guard was going to stop us at the door, but he did not—he allowed us to walk through to the reception desk, where two old Chinese men studied us as we approached, their faces betraying no emotion at all. One of them had been reading the Nanyang Siang Pau—I can still remember its headline: USSR SHOOTS DOWN KOREAN AIRLINES 747. The thin rubber soles of my Fung Keong sneakers kept squeaking on the polished terrazzo floor as we walked across the lobby; it seemed to be the only noise present.
My father introduced us and stated our purpose in visiting Mr. Lim—there he had to take out the piece of paper from his pocket—Mr. Lim Chee Huat, the man in charge of the property division.
“Do you have an appointment with the managing director?” one of the men asked.