How We Disappeared

by Jing-Jing Lee

  ‘Do you think I’ll ever get married?’ she asked.

  I didn’t want to hurt her but I didn’t wish to lie to her either so I said, ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘I want three children, not seven like my mother. And all girls. I would hate to wash dishes all my life and end up with someone like my pa.’ There, between us, was the unspoken knowledge of her father’s quick temper. The way he disappeared for days on gambling binges, only to return when he was clean out of money. In the days after his homecoming, Mrs Yap would visit and cry over cups of tea while my mother rolled a hard-boiled egg over her fresh bruises to take the sting and colour of them away. ‘What about you?’

  There was a pause as she smiled. The look on her face struck me as strangely knowing, as if she was privy to something I wasn’t. It only became apparent to me what it was much later. This knowing had nothing to do with experience, but a conviction of her own desires. While I bargained with housewives and maids during the day, she was in the thick of downtown, working in a bustling kitchen next to cooks and waiters and delivery boys. From that, she seemed to have secreted away a kernel of private knowledge: the kind of men she liked, and the kind she didn’t. I was only a year younger than her but still a child by comparison, unburdened by longing.

  ‘No. Not yet. I want to leave the kampong and go into the city. Maybe I could do that first.’

  ‘How?’ Her eyes were round, incredulous.

  ‘I could get a job. A proper one. Where they pay you a salary at the end of every month. I don’t mind being a tea girl for a while and sharing a room with other women. And maybe… Maybe I could go to night school.’ I stopped there, hearing how foolish I sounded.

  Some people, treated poorly, grabbed any chance they could to lash out at anyone within touching distance. Yan Ling wasn’t one of them. She waited a little before replying and her words were soft, hesitant, an effort to cushion my hopes. ‘You will be so good at school. You’re clever. Not like me. I’m going to be stuck washing cups and dishes at the eating house all my life.’

  ‘Aiya, don’t be silly.’ I said, wanting to change the subject.

  ‘You’ll learn so much. Then you’ll find a job you like and meet a nice man and marry him. Don’t forget me then. I’ll still be a village girl who knows nothing. The only gift I have is knowing if my mother’s carrying a boy or a girl. It’s a boy this time. Again. You can tell from how high her belly is.’ She stopped and looked at me. ‘Promise me you’ll come back and visit.’

  We hooked pinkie fingers. The way we had done the first time we met. My family and I had just moved in and I had spotted her walking past our new place several times, looking in as I swept dirt out of the front door. She was always next to her mother or carrying a brother in her arms. A week later, I ran into her behind the public outhouse. She was crouching with her back pressed into the wooden wall, a finger pressed to her mouth. I only saw the cleft carved deep into her top lip when she took her finger away.

  ‘Yan Ling!’ someone was shouting, a woman. ‘Come here this instant!’

  ‘Why are you hiding?’

  ‘Shh… I spilled my brothers’ milk.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Wait. You won’t tell?’

  ‘No… I don’t even know you.’

  ‘My name is Yan Ling. Now you know me. Don’t tell.’ She had extended a hand, then stuck out her pinkie.

  ‘Wang Di,’ I said, and we shook hands like that, with our little fingers. I waved at her before running home, past the woman, who was holding a bamboo whipping cane in her hand.

  That was more than ten years ago. We walked to market together most days, and most days we slowed down as we passed the neighbourhood school, a single wooden building, low and twice as long as it was wide, with a signboard over the front door. We did that now, watching as teachers and children from our kampong and beyond walked in. The students walking in were wearing khaki bottoms and white cotton shirts – dusty and rumpled because it was a Friday and most of them owned no more than one of each. I watched the boys walk in, a circle of pale yellow on the backs of their shirts from sweat and play.

  Yan Ling stopped walking and put the end of her plait in her mouth again. ‘What do you think they do all day?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t tell her about the time I had crept in close after the bell had rung and crouched under a window, listening as the roll was called. Everyone was speaking in crisp Mandarin, not the dialect that we used at home. After all the names had been shouted out, the teacher read out a poem:

  Before my bed, the moon is shining bright,

  I think that it is frost upon the ground.

  I raise my head and look at the bright moon,

  I lower my head and think of home.

  I didn’t tell Yan Ling that I recited the poem to myself sometimes as I was walking back from market and that I could only guess how much I was missing out, that I thought it must be like being blind and not knowing how much I wasn’t able to see, all the colours and shapes of things that I could poorly imagine.

  We were about to leave when a neighbour waved at me from the doorway of the school building. I waved back, a little too late – she had already turned away to talk to one of her classmates. I tried to recall her name but what came to me were my mother’s words, ringing loud in my ears. They adopted her from another family – couldn’t have their own, you see. My only thought then had been, why not me? before a thin acid of betrayal flooded my stomach, shaming me into pinching myself. Still, I couldn’t help thinking of her as the younger, luckier sister I’d never had, and watched out for her every time I passed the school. There were books in her bag, books in the crook of her arm. Her school shirt was fresh, so white it was blue. I heard her laugh before she went inside. If I’d been her, I thought.

  At the start of December, Yan Ling’s mother came over with a box of kueh and announced that her daughter (‘No, not the older one, no. Yue Qing, the pretty one’) was getting married. Her smile was triumphant. This time, she didn’t stay for tea but lapped up my mother’s good wishes and my brothers’ excitement over the pastry box.

  ‘So? When is it happening?’ I asked Yan Ling that Sunday.

  ‘In February, right before Lunar New Year.’ She tried to look unconcerned, gazing from me to the palm trees that stuck up twice as high as the tallest houses. Pedlars passed with their wares, balancing aluminium canisters filled with soup across their shoulders. The weekends meant little to me, except the possibility that the produce would go quicker. For Yan Ling it meant nothing but more work. She washed dishes for a row of stalls along the street and on weekends they piled up all day until evening fell. Often she only got home after dark with her shoulders fallen in from hours hunched over the public tap, her hands red from scouring bowls and plates.

  ‘Do you think I’ll end up a spinster? Like a Samsui woman?’

  I thought about the women, new migrants, who stuck close to each other, as if they were still back in Samsui. The way they kept their hair brushed into one rigid pigtail. I often saw them working at construction sites with their scarlet headdresses, their faces smudged grey with dirt, the flesh on their bones scant and darkened by the sun.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘You know, there are rumours about them – taking blood oaths never to marry. My mother says there’s something wrong with women like them. That they’re unnatural.’

  ‘You’ll find someone, don’t worry.’

  She made a sound of disbelief and touched her lip. I’d asked her once if the cleft hurt and she shook her head. A minute later, she changed her mind, saying, yes, whenever she saw her reflection.

  My tongue went dry, gritty. I chewed the inside of my mouth to make it water. ‘Follow me,’ I said, and ran ahead until I got to a fenced-in orchard. I spotted a tree close to the perimeter and sniffed the air. There they were: yellow globes dotting the green canopy. A breeze shifted the branches and they bobbed, nodding to me, yes, yes, yes
. I handed Yan Ling the eggs and vegetables and went to the tree. It was a young one and would be easy work. I grabbed one branch with my right hand, pushed my foot into a hollow and hoisted myself up. I grabbed a higher branch with my left hand and pulled upwards again until I was wedged between trunk and limb, and reached, plucking the one closest to me, fat and yellow as a monk’s robe. As I slipped down the trunk, I heard a man shout. ‘AY! What do you think you’re doing? Stop!’

  ‘Quick,’ Yan Ling said, ‘Let’s go!’

  We ran past the orchard, past empty fields, until we reached the first noodle hawkers already serving their first customers, their faces hidden in bowls steaming with broth, stopping only when we got to the heart of the market, tight with hawkers jostling their pushcarts against their neighbours’. We went past servants with their starched white blouses, and mothers with babies strapped to their backs, and said good morning to the garlic and ginger man with his baskets full of ginger roots large as hands and the fruit seller with his piles of tangerines and melons waiting to be picked. Everyone was calling out for customers with croaky morning voices. The itch of dried shrimp and chilli in my nose. I pulled Yan Ling into an alley behind a row of shophouses and she watched as I pierced the skin of the mango with my fingernail, pulled back the soft leather and held it out to her.

  ‘No, no, you’re the one who plucked it. You should start.’

  The sharp sweetness of the mango made my teeth hurt. I held it away from my clothes so that juices dotted the floor.

  ‘Na.’ I passed the fruit to her. She took a cautious bite, and a second, larger one. Then looked up and grinned at me, revealing all of her front teeth up to the gums. For the next few minutes, we crouched, passing the fruit back and forth until all that was left was the pit, a white heart.

  I slept soundly that night and woke only when my mother shook me. When she did I forgot who I was for a second and reached out with my arms, like a child. I had dreamed about the wail of sirens. It sounded so real, I wanted to tell her. The words were in my mouth, were almost spilling out when I sat up and realized it was still in my ears, the siren’s howl circling above like an enraged animal. Then a thrumming in the clouds and then a sound like too-near thunder, the ground shifting.

  ‘Ma?’

  ‘Get up, get up. We have to go to the shelter.’

  It was four in the morning. War had begun.

  Kevin

  An endless whoosh-whoosh in the depths of my pocket, and some more when you think you’ve heard enough. Then when you’ve gotten used to the whooshes, the sound almost becoming a sea-sound, a wash of noise you can fall asleep to, you hear the voices.

  Sometimes it’s Albert and his friends, calling out for me, except instead of shouting my name, they shout words like, ‘chao ah gua’ and ‘retard’ and ‘sissy’. The first time I turned around to see who it was, Albert nearly went purple laughing. Most of it, most of what they do, cannot be captured on tape. Things like standing behind me at morning assembly and spitting in my hair when we are all reciting the pledge, yelling, ‘We, the citizens of SingaPORE, PLEdge ourselves as one united PEOPLE,’ so that the Ps land wet on my neck. Things like stepping on the backs of my shoes so that I lose one and they start kicking it to each other, making a game of it. Things like that. Once, they kicked a soccer ball at me. When I play the tape back, I can hear the smack of it against my head. But mostly there’s the whoosh-whoosh of me going to the little garden near the school’s back gate, then a hush when I sit down and eat my lunch. The shush of the afternoon rain against the ground or a window, which I recorded hours of, trying to get the rumble of thunder on tape, except it’s usually so low and far away that it never gets captured (although I think I can hear it if I strain hard enough – a ghost of a sound). You can hear the school bell ringing but you can’t feel the hurt of it on my ears through my pocket, all the way from that little tape. The sour little pinch of being quickly forgotten by David, my best friend from primary school. Forgotten because my grades were too crap for me to get an Elite Secondary Education (not that my parents would have the money to pay for it even if I did) like he is getting. Of our phone calls getting shorter and shorter because David is too busy hanging out with his new friends, while my only companions during lunchtime are the koi in the fish pond. This would be something he would have liked – the tape recorder. I can imagine how we would have messed about saying stupid things into it just to hear how our voices sounded – exactly like us and nothing like us at the same time. But it is no fun when there is no one else to listen to your own crazy words with you so I put the recorder on when I need to, when there’s something that needs remembering. People say things all the time without thinking and then they forget about it (like David, when he said we would keep on going to the arcade every Friday afternoon, like we used to). Then when it comes up again I can play it back to them and say ‘Remember? this is what you said,’ and ‘See, I told you,’ and ‘Hear that, you were raising your voice after all,’ because sometimes people (my parents) don’t realize they are shouting and I have to put my hands over my ears, which only makes them louder still. It’s like their ears are switched off to their own voices. Other times, I put the recorder on when there are important things I need to remember. Like what my parents talk about in the van when they think I’m asleep in the back (‘I think we had him too late.’ ‘What? No, lah.’ ‘I’m just worried. You know, sometimes I don’t understand half his homework.’); the thing Ah Ma – my grandmother – said to me just before she died (‘I found you! Pease don’t baneme… Ifoundyou and tookyouawaay’).

  I started recording things partly because of Ah Ma and partly because the optician told me last week that I was going to go blind. He said it when I finished reading the letters on the chart. It didn’t take long. I climbed up onto the big chair and covered first my left, then my right eye with a piece of cardboard. With each eye, I got as far as the first letter at the top, E, and only because I remembered it from the times before. In fact, I couldn’t see any of the letters. I couldn’t even see the edge of the poster where it met the wall.

  The optician said it again in front of my mother, when we were out in the bright business part of the shop, with the rows and rows of glasses looking out at us, all of them winking in the light. ‘Keep it up and you’ll go blind, little boy,’ he said and smiled; he wasn’t even going to try to hide the dollar signs in his eyes.

  I wanted to ask ‘keep what up’ but my mother was already saying how could it be possible, I had my prescription changed just last year.

  ‘Less than a year ago, wasn’t it, Kevin?’

  I lifted my shoulders up the way my father did whenever she asked him what he wanted for dinner.

  ‘What is it now? Minus what? Seven?’

  ‘Seven point five. Both eyes.’

  ‘At least they’re the same. Balanced.’ I said.

  My mother looked at me and then back at the man. She leaned forward and whispered, as if sitting further away from me and lowering her voice meant that I wouldn’t hear her.

  ‘But he’s only twelve! He’s not really going blind… Is he?’

  ‘I’m almost thirteen!’ I corrected her. Twelve years and seven months, to be precise. But both of them ignored me.

  ‘No, lah, miss,’ said the glasses man, trying to flatter my mother. ‘Joking only, joking only.’ He was still smiling.

  My mother did not smile back. She looked exactly the way she did when she had to go to school to talk to my form teacher, after the school nurse saw the bruises on my legs – blots of black and purple and yellow – and pointed out the one on my back during the annual check-up.

  I was only eight years old then, and my form teacher was one of those who felt that she had to bend down to talk to her students. The lower she bent the sorrier she felt for them, I realized. The teacher was almost squatting when she said, ‘How did you get them?’

  ‘I don’t remember except for that one.’ I pointed to the one near the hilly bumps of my s
pine. ‘That one is from when I walked backwards into a table.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She chewed the end of her Bic pen and asked again. Her voice was pillow soft and I could smell the cough drop she was hiding in her cheek. ‘How did you get these bruises really? Don’t worry. You can tell me.’ She put a hand on my shoulder. I could feel the sweatiness of her palm even through my shirt sleeve.

  I told her what I’d said before.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said again, and left to get Miss Tan.

  After school, I had to wait outside the nurse’s office while both of them asked my mother questions.

  They talked for a few minutes before Miss Tan opened the door. ‘Kevin, tell me how many fingers I’m holding up.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay what?’

  ‘Okay, I’m ready. Hold up your fingers.’

  ‘I am already –’

  ‘Already what?’

  When we were in the bus, my mother shook her head and said, ‘I thought you were just really clumsy.’

  We went straight to the opticians. Afterwards, she brought me to the mini-mart close to home and told me I could pick out three items. I was so surprised when she brought me to the mamak shop below our flat and said, ‘You can pick any three’ – meaning I could pick out no-use-things (like balloons and ice-pops and Polo sweets that I ate only because I could whistle through the hole in the middle) – that it had taken me twenty minutes to decide on a Hiro cake and two erasers, one with the English flag on it, one with the French.