He looked up. I stopped myself, squashing the thought dead. Like an ant under my finger.
‘Kevin,’ he began, ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’
‘Huh?’
‘You know. A job, a profession. You’re twelve years old. In secondary school. Time to start planning what you want to do.’
‘I want to become a journalist.’ The thought had fallen out of my mouth as if it had been there all along, waiting and waiting for someone to ask the right question.
My mother looked up as if someone had just pinched her. She looked at my father while he rubbed his head, the way he does when he’s confused. ‘Oh. That’s funny… That’s what I wanted to be when I was young.’
‘What happened?’ I said, and wanted to take it back at once, it was as if I had just asked THEN WHY ARE YOU A POOL CLEANER. ‘I mean…’
‘Oh. No money to go to university. What to do…’ He shrugged.
My mother was still looking at us in the way that meant like father like son and feeding Ah Ma soup at the same time.
‘Like it?’ my mother asked.
Ah Ma nodded and the movement spilled soup out of the not-working side of her mouth.
‘Tissue paper, tissue paper!’ my mother yelled, not using her Hospital Voice.
My father and I just stood there, gaping. By the time we unfroze, a nurse was at her bedside, dabbing at her face and gown. Tissues flew.
The minute the nurse went away, Ah Ma started to cry.
‘What’s going to happen to Ah Ma?’ I asked the question again over dinner. Rice, sambal kang kong, the soup that Ah Ma had drunk and spilled.
My parents continued eating, but a bit noisier, as if wanting to drown me out.
I asked again, ‘What’s going to happen to Ah Ma?’
Clink, clink, clink, slurp.
I set my chopsticks across my bowl.
‘What’s wrong with you? Finish your food.’
‘I just want to know…’
‘A little too salty, this,’ my father said, poking his chopsticks in the stir-fried greens.
‘It’s the sambal – the prawn paste I used in it must have been extra salty. Boy,’ she turned to me. ‘Eat your vegetables.’ She gave me a heap of kang kong, enough to bury the rice in my bowl.
My father snipped off a bit of omelette and reached across the table to drop it on top of the greens. ‘Na.’
That was when I realized that this was something else I wasn’t allowed to talk about. Along with ‘Why does Albert not have a father?’ and ‘Does Pa not have a father? I’ve never heard you talk about him,’ and ‘Why did you have me so late?’ (This last one I found out just last year, when second aunt drank herself silly on one glass of champagne at her daughter’s wedding and rambled on about my parents having tried and tried for years to no avail, and were ready to give up when ‘pop!’ I came into the picture.) And these were only a number of the many things I wasn’t supposed to bring up. The problem was nobody had given me a list detailing all the forbidden topics. Lists helped to make things clear, to line up the thousand and one thoughts that I had in my head. I needed one to show me what it was I wasn’t supposed to say. The heading would go OUT OF BOUNDS or WHAT NOT TO SAY. Under that, I had my fourth entry: ‘The maybe-possibility that Ah Ma might die.’
Number five would be ‘Death, in general.’
‘Boy, what are you doing? Your food’s getting cold.’
It was as if nothing was different. As if her chair wasn’t there, empty and pushed in against the table.
Finally, I said, ‘Do your hands feel more, after you go blind?’ Because this was an okay thing to talk about and I wanted something (anything) to fill in the quiet. After I asked the question, I could hear the chairs creaking, my parents wriggling their bums as they relaxed again into their seats.
My father chewed on the end of his chopsticks for a moment before replying, ‘I don’t know. I guess so.’
‘But doesn’t that mean that your skin feels more, and if your skin feels more maybe things hurt more? Or is it a superpower you can turn off and on?’
‘I can see you pushing your food around, you know,’ my mother said. ‘And you’re not going blind.’
That was all they talked about the rest of the dinner. I even forgot about my grandmother and the hospital, for a minute.
I decided then that this was what I should do as well. Not thinking. Not talking. I could start tonight. I would pretend that it was normal that Ah Ma wasn’t around. But I needed something to distract me. That was when I remembered what she had said and decided to pick up her cassette recorder. It was just lying on top of her bedside table, gathering dust. There were more empty cassette tapes in the drawer beneath, my father had gotten her a whole box of them because she didn’t want to or didn’t know how to rewind and record over things.
I figured I had to collect sounds to remember by if I was going to be blind. That night, I punched little holes in a piece of paper with one of my mother’s sewing needles. Then I closed my eyes and put my fingers over them. I tried and tried for minutes and felt nothing. Just maybe-bumps here and there. Maybe-bumps because I wasn’t sure if I made up feeling them or if they were really there. When that didn’t work anymore, when Ah Ma started tiptoeing around the edges of my thoughts again; the tubes stuck into the top of her wiry hand, the smell of the hospital – a kind of clean that was scarier than comforting, I reached for the recorder and spoke with my Inside Voice:
THINGS I DON’T HAVE TO SEE ANYMORE IF I GO BLIND
Ah Ma’s half-frozen face
The other sick people in her hospital room
The way Pa walks, with one hand on his back, after cleaning extra dirty pools to pay off the hospital bills
Ma, when she eats dinner with her eyes closed after doing overtime at the shipping company
Public toilets
The way the boys in my class smile all crooked when I walk past them
Lao Shi’s scary hair when she doesn’t tie it up
I felt better. Just for a few minutes. I played the tape over and over again to drown out the noise of my own thoughts about Ah Ma. About what I should have said to Albert when he called me all the different things that he called me, until I fell asleep.
Chinese class is four times a week, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Monday to Thursday is when Lao Shi puts her hair up. On Fridays, she lets it loose and the black, thick curls fall around her face and down her back. They make her thin face look even thinner. Fridays are when she shouts about the homework she corrected during the week. The black cloud around her head shakes and trembles. White flecks of spit form at the sides of her mouth when she starts to tell us off.
‘Ni zhen de shi bai chi,’ she says, shouting the last two words. ‘Oh, you really are an idiot.’ This is what she says when someone does their homework badly. Or, ‘Ni mei you yong tou nao – You’re not using your brain.’
She said it to me once and I was quite glad. I took it to mean she believed there was something in my head that could be put to good use, if I wanted. When there are assignments missing, she starts in on all of us even though it might be just one or two who didn’t hand in their work.
‘You think I get a bonus for marking more work? Ungrateful, lazy, inconsiderate, all of you!’
She says this in English to make sure that the really weak students, the ones whose parents speak Mandarin only during Lunar New Year with distant relatives and even then just the few stock phrases wishing good luck and prosperity, understand her as well. Sometimes, after Lao Shi is done shouting, she leaves the classroom, slamming the door shut behind her, and I can breathe again. No one talks or moves when she is gone because she can be back quicker than we hear her (she moves like a cat for someone so tall; she’s the tallest woman I know). Sometimes she comes back and her face is changed, the way someone’s face can be changed after they’ve been to the sink and washed the day away. Other times she comes back with her long, wooden ruler and put
s it to use, not on the girls though, that isn’t allowed. Just the boys and recently, just Albert. I try not to look when the ruler makes a fat thwack on his palm because she calls you out and gives you one for looking happy as well – ‘What are you smiling about? Get over here.’ Once or twice, she didn’t come back. The entire class simply waited in silence until the bell went and then we put our things in our backpacks, everyone moving in slow motion, in case she returned and we looked too happy to be leaving.
I was in that class on a Friday when it happened; the last day of school before the June holidays. She was telling us about her office hours during the break, saying that she would be around all morning from Monday to Wednesday and to come with questions if we had any when someone knocked and put her head around the door. Lao Shi went outside and there was a lot of whispering for a moment before she came back in, wearing a different sort of face. The face she had when I saw her giving a stack of textbooks to a girl who couldn’t afford them (the only one in class who was poorer than Albert and me). For a few seconds I could see what she might look like as a next-door neighbour or a friend of my mother’s. She had that face on now. Instead of feeling comforted, I felt my bladder being squeezed like a water balloon.
I knew what was coming but I still jumped when she looked at me and said, ‘Wei Han, pack your bag. Your parents are coming to pick you up.’
Her voice was polite and even. The way she had spoken to the other teacher, but even softer. I felt everyone watching as I put my stationery and books in my backpack and I knew that Albert’s eyes were on me, hoping and hoping that I was in trouble. I would have chosen to stay if I’d known what was coming. I would have chosen to get on the school bus at the end of the day and have Albert lob paper bullets at me, or stomp on my feet, or seize whatever he took a fancy to – a packet of chocolate Hiro cake that my mother had dropped into my bag, or my pencil case. I would have happily taken the bus and then got off with him at the foot of our apartment block; have him push past me to get into the lift on his own while I waited for the next one or simply walked up six floors, all the while wishing I were taller, broader, or at least had perfect sight. I would have chosen to go through all of that each day for the rest of my time in this school, because I knew what it meant to be gently called out of class like this. I didn’t want to leave.
Wang Di
‘You know what the problem is? It’s too late for us.’ The baker snapped the two halves of his metal tongs together as he waited for the old lady to decide. ‘Too late for change. Too late for moving from one building to another. They think that people our age – sixty, seventy years old, can still adapt to a new building, a new neighbourhood.’
Wang Di had told the baker about her morning – half of it spent trapped in her new bathroom with its fancy, folding door. She had struggled with it for ten minutes before sitting on top of the toilet, debating whether or not to pull the red pull-for-help cord. She was about to do it when she kicked at the door out of desperation. The thump echoed through the flat and the folding door folded, creaked open. She stepped out of the bathroom. Sat down on the closest chair she could collapse onto.
‘Isn’t this easier?’ The housing officer had said a year ago as he brought Wang Di and the Old One to the new flat – the flat that was ‘in the same neighbourhood, still Ang Sua, Red Hill’, or so he kept saying. Wang Di had asked if the distance was walkable, she wanted to be able to visit the shops while they still stood but he had said, ‘better not, especially with uncle’s bad leg’ and suggested they take the bus instead. She had asked how much the bus fare would be but he didn’t know. After that, they had lapsed into a strained quiet during the fifteen-minute drive, most of it spent in thick traffic. The new building, 6A – cough-syrup orange – had lifts that stopped on every floor in the building. Except the housing officer called it a studio. She had tried saying it but had got stuck on the first syllable: Suh-tu-dio. The suh-tu-dio was a one-roomer as well, and the elderly couple trailed behind the man as he showed them the apartment, making the most of the only two doors in the narrow space (one that led to the storeroom, the other to the bathroom) by opening and closing them and touching everything – the light switches, the taps, all the windows.
It would take her time to unlearn decades of memory. This was not how she thought the end of her life would be like: on her own, in a flat that was stark white and much too quiet, stripped of the things she’d been used to for most of her life. I will get used to this, she thought. I’ve got used to worse. It was this last thought that made her get up and leave her strange apartment. Once she was out, she kept on walking. Her knees still felt weak and she had the feeling that if she stopped, she would fall and never get up again. So she walked past the coffee shop next to the building filled with food stalls she had never eaten at, manned by people she didn’t know, and started on the long stretch of road that was Jalan Bukit Merah. Wang Di kept to the shade of the wide-branched trees, her feet crunching on their fallen leaves as she passed pairs of Filipino maids pulling market trolleys behind them, passed uniformed children camel-backed with school bags, passed yawning house-dressed women and elderly Indian men in lungis walking their dogs, and armies of white-shirted men and women heading for bus stops or the train station. Walked for half an hour, at least. When she was nearly there she stopped for just a second to look up at her old pink-and-yellow building, then crossed the street to get to the bakery on the ground floor. Her feet were aching and it felt like the sun had scorched a hole on the top of her head but she knew why she was there. What she had to do.
‘I’ve only lived in the new flat for three days. Time,’ she told the baker, ‘just needs time.’
‘But that is precisely the problem. Time. We have none! Ah, except you, Mrs Chia. You are what…only?’
‘Seventy-five.’
‘Ah, see? You’re a gin na compared to me. Just a child.’
She said nothing but waited to catch his eye before she continued. ‘Since I’m here, I just wanted to ask… You’ve known us, the Old One and me, for a long time. Did he ever tell you about his life before we moved here? You know…during the war.’
‘The war?’ The baker’s face expanded in surprise, then he snapped the metal tongs again as he frowned. ‘No, I don’t think so. He didn’t really – oh, but he did tell me where he used to live before: Bukit Timah.’
‘Yes, but was there anything else? Did he ever mention anything to do with February?’
‘February? You mean like a birthday or something? No, nothing like that. But I know he worked for years in town. Told me he moved because it got too crowded and dirty.’
Wang Di straightened up. ‘Do you know where? Which street, I mean?’
‘Sorry,’ he shook his head. ‘Only so much this head can hold.’ He looked away, kindly rearranging the pastries on the counter before him as she flushed and dabbed at her forehead with a cotton handkerchief. When she was done, he asked, ‘Are you okay? How are you coping with the move?’
How am I coping? Wang Di thought. Then a flash of memory. The trees in front of her window, almost as tall as the buildings around them. Her trees. The dark-green scent of their leaves mixed with the sting of exhaust. She turned around to look at them now. Soon they would be gone. Torn out of the ground like weeds. But to the baker, she said, ‘I’m okay. Same, same. Going back to my rounds tomorrow.’
‘Maybe you should stop. Not good to keep on walking around like that in the heat. You know, the island is getting hotter, with all the buildings. All concrete and steel and glass. How not to get hot?’
Here she brought out the little speech she always gave everyone when they asked. A face-saving speech. Little lies that made up a big lie. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Nothing to do. I’ll get bored sitting at home.’
He nodded and made sympathetic noises. ‘Oh, I know, I know.’
But when Wang Di tried to pay, Teo held out the bag and waved his hands at her. ‘No need, no need.’
It was
in the last few years living in their grey and broken down flat in Block 204 that Wang Di became Cardboard Auntie. She had just been dismissed from her cleaning job at the hawker centre for being too slow and had put off going to the bank for some time. She waited two weeks, until what remained in her purse were a few silver coins and a safety pin that pricked her finger each time she reached in to scrabble around, hoping for a lost cent, or a dollar note, folded and wedged into a corner. When she got her bank passbook back from the cold, smiling teller, she pinched it tight in her hands until she arrived home. Then she went into the kitchen and opened it to the last printed page.
$92.77.
This was how much they had left, the two of them together. She at seventy-two years of age and the Old One at ninety. Wang Di stared at the page until the numbers started to shift and bloom into different shapes. She pushed a fingernail into the paper, scoring a slight curve into the blank space beneath the digits.
On her first day, as the red-eyed koel sang its woeful koo-wooo koo-wooo from a treetop, Wang Di reached her arm into the bins around her neighbourhood, called through quiet storefronts or knocked on back doors to ask if they had any used cans and unwanted boxes. It took getting used to, took learning, like everything else. On good days, she received up to ten dollars from the collector. If it was raining, she considered herself lucky if she got two.
It wasn’t long before she started to bring her gleanings home. The Old One looked away every time she returned with one more item: a small glass bottle, a collection of bottle caps. Stuffed them into the kitchen cupboards and drawers, underneath the bed, on top of their slanting wardrobe. As if to fill up the empty corners of their lives, the quiet between them, to leave no room for thought.
How We Disappeared Page 6