They took the city quickly. Overnight, it seemed. The way it went reminded me of the time stray dogs broke into our chicken coop and I lay in bed, blinking awake, knowing something had changed while we were all asleep. The rooster hadn’t woken us up that morning and the air was still, unpunctuated by soft bird sound. When I entered the yard to collect the eggs, I found just one hen, half dead, its wings torn into a new shape, and called for my father. There was nothing left to do but watch as he picked it up gently in both hands and snapped its neck. That night, my mother put the cheapest parts of the chicken – its throat and back – into a soup. The rest she sold, then bought three chicks to replace the ones we lost.
This time, again, it was the quiet that hinted at what was to come. It was the first morning of the Lunar New Year but the only thing that came to mind as I woke was that we had slept through the night – an entire night uninterrupted by the wail of sirens or the whirl of planes above us. It was the quietest New Year I had ever known. No firecrackers or the distant music of dancers visiting the wealthier neighbourhoods with their white and gold lion costumes. No children going from door to door wishing their neighbours a happy New Year, smiling wide in anticipation of an ang bao filled with a coin or two. The night before, we had dressed ourselves in our cleanest, newest clothes, eaten reunion dinner without much comment, and wished my parents happy New Year at midnight. My mother had given each of us an ang bao and I had pressed my fingers around the edge of the coin within until the red envelope tore.
The quiet persisted throughout breakfast. As soon as my father had finished, he got up and headed for the door.
‘I think I’ll go and see if I can get some news,’ he said, jerking his chin towards the direction of the village elder’s home. ‘Maybe it’s over. Maybe the ang moh got rid of them.’ He tried to sound hopeful but the cords of muscle in each side of his jaw twitched as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. ‘Why don’t you make some tang yuan? I’ll be back in time for lunch.’
As we waited, my brothers and I rolled uneven, marble-sized globes of glutinous rice dough and lined them up on the table as a pot of sweet ginger syrup simmered above the charcoal fire. We worked silently, letting our hands move along to their own spell, all the while keeping an ear and eye out for my father.
He returned an hour later, just as we finished washing our hands and wiping off the table. My father pressed the top of his head with a flat hand, smoothing his grey hair forward. I knew what was coming but strained to hear it anyway. His voice was so soft the bubbling from the pot almost drowned him out.
‘They’ve surrendered. The Japanese have taken over.’
They renamed the island Syonan-to and pushed the clock forward an hour so that we were on the same time zone as Tokyo. For us, the people living away from the city centre, there was little change. A different currency. A different flag. Superficial things.
That first week, a neighbour stopped by to talk to my father. ‘Aiya – first we had the British, now we have the Japanese. This is just a handing over of power. Nothing more.’ The man shook his head.
My father’s face was turned away from me but as he responded with a tight, wry laugh, I could picture his eyes – cold, unconvinced.
‘At least the bombings have stopped,’ the neighbour said as he left.
At the end of February, we were all at home when we heard a voice, tinny and faint at first, that grew louder over the course of minutes. From the window, I saw a man in plain clothes, walking up the street with a loudspeaker held to his mouth. ‘All men aged eighteen to fifty must report to the police station at nine in the morning. Failure to show up will result in heavy punishment.’ He said this in Mandarin first, then repeated it in various dialects, passing the houses in an easy stroll, as if he were the rag-and-bone man drawing attention to his trade.
My father left just after dawn the next day, saying he couldn’t bear to sit around and wait and that it was a long walk anyway. My mother made him take a change of clothing and some boiled rice wrapped in banana leaf, all bundled up in a square of cloth, and wept as he left.
She wept again when he came home that evening, his face dark and lined, as if he had aged years in the course of a single day. The first thing he did was to take his shirt off and lay it on the dresser. There were marks on the left sleeve, slightly smudged but it was evident that they were characters in Japanese.
‘Don’t wash this,’ he told my mother, looking at me to ensure that I heard him as well. ‘Make sure the stamp remains on the sleeve.’ Then he went to the large basin and washed his face, letting the water drench his arms and undervest, yellowed from age.
The only thing my father said at dinner was this: ‘It’s a good thing Yang and Meng are still children.’ Yang was fifteen and looked it, while Meng, at ten, was small for his age.
For the next few months, my father would wear the shirt every time he left home, even if only to go to the public tap for water. When it became unbearably soiled, he took a pair of scissors to the sleeve, cut out a square of cloth with the Japanese symbol on it and wore it pinned to his chest whenever he stepped out of the house. After the war, my mother found it tucked into the pocket of one of his trousers. She put it into the bucket we used for burning offerings to the dead and watched as the fire slowly took it.
That night, I listened to my parents talk when they believed that we had all fallen asleep. It was the first time I’d heard my father whisper and I only caught slivers of conversation through the curtain that separated their sleeping area from mine and the boys’. His words merged with my half-formed dreams so that I woke in the morning heavy with dread.
‘I had the strangest nightmare, Ma,’ I began when I sat down at the kitchen table.
My mother pinched her lips together as I described it to her – soldiers, hooded figures with pointing fingers, lines of men being led onto trucks.
‘No dream,’ she said, when I was finished. ‘They took half the men at the reporting station. Half of them. Put them onto trucks and now they’re God-knows-where. A number of our neighbours were taken. The Tiongs, both father and son; and the Tans; and that man who owns the pig farm. They’re going after the business owners, and those who work for the British… At least that’s what your father said.’
‘The Tiongs? You mean Mr Tiong next door? But they’re not business owners. They’re like us.’ I gestured around our home the way my father had a few weeks ago, pointing out the dignified squalor surrounding us – the hand-sewn curtains, the one, seldom-used candle that lit up the hut when dusk fell.
‘I know, that’s what I said to your father. He told me they were picked out from the line by someone wearing a hood. Holes cut out for the eyes…like an executioner. Choy choy choy,’ my mother spat. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. Anyway, no one knows where they are. Anything can happen.’
She turned away to light the fire under the pot of congee. ‘Don’t let your father know that I told you this. He already left for work because he couldn’t sleep.’
At 10:00 a.m., my father returned home. ‘The store is closed. I waited for an hour and asked the other shop owners in the street but no one knows anything.’
He tried again that afternoon, then every single day for the next two weeks until one morning he arrived to find all the stock – chairs and tables and cabinets that he had lovingly sanded and oiled – thrown outside in a heap and the shop shuttered and chained. There was talk that his boss had been taken away during the round-ups (the sook ching, or purge, as it came to be called years later) for donating to China’s resistance efforts. There was no notice, no one to go to with his questions, so he gave up and started looking for a new job. My father never found out what had happened to him.
It was this need to put rice in our bowls again that pushed our family routine back to what it was before the invasion. My mother resumed her laundry rounds, and I went to market with my eggs and vegetables for the first time in a month. The night before, my father instructed both of us to k
eep our heads down and bow to each and every soldier we came across. He repeated this again as we left home early next morning but it seemed little had changed until we approached town. There were barricades at every turn. At each one, sentries rifled through my basket, then waved me away. The closer we got to the centre, the more I saw of them. Soldiers, passing in their cars. Soldiers, inside jewellery shops and tailors’ getting measured for suits. Walking in pairs, making sure everyone – especially the men – looked compliant enough. I kept my head down and stared at their boots, only looking up once I was clear of them. My first day back in town made me feel like I’d entered another country. Out of almost every window hung makeshift Japanese flags cut from white dust cloths. The red and white of the flags, the sound of cloth flapping in the breeze, all of this gave the street the outward appearance of a parade, and it only served to make the unnatural hush seem even sharper, more malevolent.
I was never there for long. An hour in and all of my produce would be bought up. The eggs were always the first to go. I didn’t know it but the other market stalls and grocery shops, the ones that relied on deliveries from the shipyard along the Singapore river, were suffering, their stock thinning as the warehouses in the city emptied.
It was in March that the first of the soldiers came. There had been murmurs, talk about them going from village to village, taking whatever they wanted – mostly food and supplies. I had heard enough from passing neighbours and the nervous whispers between my parents late at night to know that it was a near certainty. I didn’t know, not then, that they had sacked an entire village during the invasion. That they had stormed Alexandra Hospital the day before the British surrender, had raged through the buildings, going from room to room, drunk on bloodlust, shooting and bayoneting doctors, nurses and patients. Even those lying on the operating tables had not been spared.
I didn’t know it that morning so I was fearful but darkly curious when I saw their vehicles approach, telling myself that my over-wild imagination created scenarios far worse than what could happen in reality. I soon learned that I was wrong, of course.
The entire kampong fell silent as the trucks came up the road. Even the dogs – wild ones that roamed the village, scrappy things that barked and howled at anything, a falling branch, a shout – even the dogs fell silent at the approach of the trucks. No one spoke until a mechanical whine cracked through the air. A loudspeaker being turned on. There was the sound of a throat being cleared, then a male voice. This time, the man spoke Chinese and Hokkien, and interpreted now and again for the Japanese. ‘Everyone – men, women, children – gather outside right away!’
‘Stay behind me,’ my father said as the truck stopped close to our hut. ‘And bow. Bow deeply. Don’t look up. Whatever you do.’
My father unlocked the door and made us trail behind him. ‘Keep bowing,’ he reminded us.
I did as I was told. From that angle, I saw their boots, laces fraying at the ends, daubed with mud.
‘Get into a single line! Closer, closer!’
While most of the soldiers went into our homes, two of them kept guard, pacing in front of us. I stayed bowed the entire time but the shine of wood caught my eye – it was the wooden end of a rifle and it had a delicate inscription carved into the grain. I watched it as it moved from left to right, and back again. Then the soldier halted, spinning the rifle around so that the knife that stuck out of the barrel caught the sun, flicking light into my face.
Everyone stood still as the men worked, moving back and forth between the attap huts and the two trucks. Twenty minutes was all they needed. For twenty minutes, the air was filled with the clatter and thud of objects being thrown into the back of the trucks, the squawk of chickens being startled. There were a few shouts then the motor sputtered to life again. We waited until the sound of the engine had faded away before straightening up and going back inside.
We returned to find boot marks trailing across the floor, all over our hut. The kitchen ransacked.
‘They took everything,’ my mother said, her mouth an ‘O’ of shock.
All the sugar in our cupboards, all our long-grained rice. Even the flour that we had recently used for the tang yuan. All three of our hens, although they had missed one egg, hidden beneath a pile of dried grass dotted with fresh droppings. Our mosquito nets had been ripped out of the ceiling. Even the rattan mats that we slept on were gone.
To replace what we had lost, my mother accompanied me to the market the following day. While I laid out my paltry wares on sheets of newspaper, she went from shop to shop, looking increasingly anxious as she came out of each one empty-handed. Eventually, she crouched down next to me. ‘No one has any rice or noodles,’ she said, ‘not even flour. Or salt.’
My mother took a deep breath and looked up and down the street. ‘Stay here. I’m going to talk to Mrs Chang over there. Find out if she knows anything,’ she said, and left for Auntie Chang’s porridge stall, a pushcart that I often passed.
Ten minutes later, when I had almost finished the day’s selling, I heard shouts. Someone saying please, please. Another voice barking an unfamiliar language.
The crowd moved away from the source of the noise, in my direction, and I stepped up onto the sheltered walkway to get a better look. From where I was, I could see a group of soldiers two bus lengths away, descending upon a young man, yelling and slapping his face.
‘Aiyo, someone forgot to bow again. Happens every day,’ said a woman next to me, almost dismissively.
But the soldiers didn’t stop. One of them took out a pistol and aimed it at the man, making everyone around them step back. The crowd started to disperse. Shoppers, sellers with their carts all moved away, wanting to be elsewhere. Someone trampled on the few stalks of vegetables that remained on the newspaper I’d spread out on the ground. I stayed for as long as I could, waiting for my mother to reappear until I was shoved back along with the tide of people. I would go around the block and double back to look for her, I decided.
I turned a corner. That was when I saw the wooden poles in the ground. At first I thought it was a strange Japanese custom, a totem symbol or a marker of sorts until I got closer. And then I saw the heads of the men. Three of them, each spiked onto the top of a pole.
I fell backwards, dropping everything, then I got up and ran, not thinking about where I was going. I ran, only slowing down when I was out of the city.
My mother was home when I arrived.
‘What happened? I was looking for you.’
‘I – I was looking for you too. Ended up walking another way home. My basket. I lost my basket,’ I said, reaching into my pockets to check for the coins I’d earned that morning. Still there.
‘I’m just glad you got home safe. Are you okay?’ She made a movement as if to take my arm, but stopped and showed me what she had in her shopping basket instead: a bag of flour that would make enough noodles for one meal and little more, and a packet of salt that fit in the palm of her hand. ‘Hardly anything left in the shops. No rice or sugar. I got this bit of flour for five times the usual price.’
Soon after, we found out that deliveries had been dwindling ever since the Japanese raised their flag over Singapore. The limited farmland on the island could only yield so much – most of what was produced went to the Japanese army, who had, in the three weeks since the takeover, laid claim to everything. Rice, the most precious edible commodity, was being diverted from our warehouses to their army kitchens and stores. What was left – broken grains, mostly – they dealt out to the rest of us. My father would receive a ration card that week and with it we would be able to buy rice, flour, sugar and salt once a month. All of which would dwindle until my father was bringing home mere fractions of what we needed, and my mother had to make do with drawing salt from dried shrimp and old jars of pickled mustard greens, and substituting the bulk of our food with tapioca, which flourished even in the hard ground behind our home.
Over dinner, my mother talked about what she had seen at th
e market. ‘I heard the man was trying to get some rice. He tried to steal some when he found that they had raised the price in all the shops.’
My father looked at Meng and Yang, pointing his chopsticks at them. ‘You boys be careful. The Japanese police caught looters this week, punished them. And as if that wasn’t enough, I heard they displayed the looters in town.’
I looked up then and the sudden movement made my father turn to me. ‘What? Did you see something?’
Much later on, I often thought about what would have happened if I had told them what I’d seen that day. How the heads had still looked like they belonged to someone, and the blood had attracted swarms of flies so thick their hum seemed to breathe life back into the men. How there had been mud in one man’s hair, as if it had been kicked about in the dirt for fun. And the littlest of mercies: their shut eyes. I wondered if it would have made a difference, if my telling them about this horror, witnessed up close, would have propelled my family into exercising more caution. But I didn’t say anything. Not that day.
Kevin
‘Come here,’ she said.
I could hear the squeak and stretch of the foam mattress as she tried to push herself up with one arm, her good arm, but I didn’t want to turn around, not yet. I stayed facing the window, counting until I was ready. Then I smiled and turned around.
‘Ah Ma, you’re awake!’ I looked at everything in the hospital ward: the beige equipment, the beige tables on wheels, the beige bed frames, anything but my grandmother’s face as I helped her sit up. Saw her birdlike shoulder as I circled her arm with one hand, my fingers almost meeting my thumb. Kept on not looking at her as I helped her sit up. Then I did – and I was sorry. Her thin hair needed combing and I knew she would be ashamed if she saw her own reflection; the white and grey strands sticking up and out to the left, unravelled from the bun she usually kept it in. I hoped she didn’t see it in my face, how bad she looked. Her eyes were hard and fever-bright, her skin now tighter than ever around her cheeks and forehead so that I could almost see right through to the flesh under her face; the veins running up into her head, the eggshell white of her bones. She smelled of old skin covered up with the floral scent of talcum powder, which someone, probably my mother, had dusted over Ah Ma’s neck, down into her back and front, so that the top half of her torso looked ghostly, like it belonged to someone else. I wanted to look away again but she craned her neck towards me, her mouth puckered leftward into a beak.
How We Disappeared Page 8