‘It’s okay. Maybe it’s better if I’m dead. Maybe I deserve it for –’
‘Stop talking and rest. You’ll feel better in a day or two, you’ll see.’
‘I’ve always wanted to get married but I don’t think that’s going to happen, do you? I wanted three children. Two girls and a boy.’
I couldn’t think of anything to say or summon up the will to lie so I stayed silent.
‘Wang Di, promise me that you’ll tell my family if I die in here… Tell them that I miss them. Promise me.’
‘Don’t talk like that. Rest. Shh.’ If not for the wooden partition between us I would have started smoothing her hair the way my mother used to smooth mine when I was little and ill. Her fever broke the day after and she returned to herself, her smile, her quiet rectitude. It was as if she had never said any of it.
Kevin
You find things you’re not ready to see when you go looking. I was nine when Ah Ma came to live with us. My mother said that she was getting old, that it was the right thing to do with my father being the only child and Ah Ma being his only parent. She found a job soon after that and I was left alone with Ah Ma in the afternoons. It was then that I started looking inside drawers, opening doors that were meant to be shut tight. Every afternoon, I sat cross-legged at the coffee table with my schoolwork and waited for her to fall asleep in front of the radio. It was the fan and the afternoon heat that did it, made her eyes flutter-flutter until they were closed. The minute I heard her making little puffing sounds in her sleep, I would get up and go to the top cupboard in the kitchen for a handful of iced gems and switch the TV on, putting a cartoon on on mute. The day I decided I was too old for daytime cartoons, I snuck into my parents’ bedroom and looked into their bedside tables and the drawers in their large wardrobe filled with used and forgotten handbags, brown paper document holders, photo albums. Here is a list of things that made my heart thump when I found them:
1. A picture of my mother standing next to a man I didn’t recognize; my mother is smiling in a way I haven’t seen her smiling before, her lips are stretched so high up that her eyes are almost closed and the man is looking not at the camera, but at her. I stared at the man’s face in an effort to memorize it, so I would know if I ever met him.
2. My father’s bank passbook. The last entry had the numbers 623.84 on it. I knew nothing and had never made a cent in my life but the first three numbers put out cold, invisible beads of sweat on my forehead. I would recall the numbers 623 several times in the next few days and each time a dull ache would open up in my stomach and I would have to close my eyes and wait for the feeling to go away before I continued reading or watching TV or trying to eat.
3. A stack of nude magazines in the drawer unlocked by a key I’d found. I flipped through them all, pages bursting fleshy-beige and pink, and put them back exactly as I found them, dog-eared, newest issue at the top.
These were things I’d never known existed. Like the way I read about this ugly, ancient fish, all spikes and jaw – how scientists thought that it was extinct but it wasn’t. Except I never knew about it and learning about it made me start to wonder what else I didn’t know existed. Like the thousands of books I would never finish reading (or want to), and the millions and millions of other books out there in the world that I would never even know about. And it was this not-knowing that made me sit down and want a hot drink. This not-knowing when it came to my parents; things I’d never thought about, even if they were clear as day, clear as the fact that my parents had their own parents, had their own childhoods and histories. And then one day you open a drawer and out come all the secrets that have just been sitting quietly, waiting to be found, even though you never thought about them, never suspected they existed in the first place.
It was this last thought that was pinging around my head when I went into the bedroom that day on tiptoe and crossed the invisible line that separated my side of the room from hers. As soon as I did that, I expected to hear her scold me, asking what I was doing snooping in her things. I could still feel her in the room, had to look over my shoulder twice just to make sure I wasn’t being watched before I started. The top drawer was a mess and took me fifteen minutes just to sort it out into different piles of objects: hairpins, numerous and ticking like armour-shelled insects; almost five dollars’ worth of loose change, which I pocketed; a bank passbook with holes punched through the front and back (meaning that the book was finished, invalid, no use to anyone anymore); palm-sized bottles of tiger balm and ointment, which stained the wood brown and red; and jumbo packs of tissue paper, some opened and half used. And then in the drawers below, her clothes, silky and static. Now and then, the fabric caught on the ragged ends of my bitten nails and when I pulled my hands away, threads hung on, stretching out a ghostly cobweb. In no time, the neat folds in her clean laundry, necklines perfectly centred and facing up, were messed up so I decided to take them all out. I removed two drawers’ worth of clothing, even her cotton undergarments. Nothing. For a few seconds I sat there, surrounded by a pool of grey and blue cloth, the only colours I ever saw Ah Ma wearing, wondering how I was going to get everything back the way it was supposed to look. There was just one left. The last, bottom drawer jammed halfway so I had to reach in with my arm, making the same scrabbling sounds my grandmother had made in my dream as she felt around, like a rat locked in a wooden chest. It was here that my fingers touched cardboard and I came back out with a shoebox rustling with paper. I closed my eyes as I lifted the lid. When I opened them again, I saw a bundle of letters tied together with a length of raffia and a large, well-stuffed envelope so crumpled it looked like it had been put in the wash. I tipped the envelope upside down and shook. What fell out covered most of the tiled floor, blanketed the space in between my half of the room and what was once my grandmother’s. Some of it slid away to hide under the beds and writing desk so that I had to crawl and reach for it. When I thought I had everything, I separated the contents of the envelope into two piles.
In the first pile were letter-sized rectangles of paper, with Chinese characters occupying the top three quarters of the sheet, and English words filling the rest. There were twenty-seven sheets of paper like this, all exactly like each other, all with thick black headings. ‘失踪!’ it said, at the top of the Chinese portion, the strokes of the characters urgently whipping through the space. My eyes skipped below to the bottom.
MISSING!
My son was lost on 12 Feb 1942. Seventeen months old. Last seen in Bukit Timah. Any information, please write to 53 Chin Chew Street.
There was a name below that and I could see where the writer had paused – at the corners and beginnings and ends of each letter – where the ink had bled all the way through to the back of the paper. Some of the notices didn’t have any corners, the top or the bottom or both, as if they had been ripped off a wall. Some still had the remnants of dried glue on the back, folded down so they wouldn’t stick onto everything they touched. I looked through all twenty-seven of them; a few had mistakes in the English crossed out by the writer, but most were printed perfectly in the kind of handwriting that would make my teacher’s face glow and fill out with satisfaction. The second pile had news clippings from years ago, torn straight from the English and Chinese language paper. There were too many for me to read through at once but the headlines stood out, thick and beetle-black. Both the clippings and the handwritten notices had the same subject. I imagined Ah Ma flipping through the paper every morning, eyes darting over the pages just in search of these words. I imagined her walking to the market, young and unrecognizable to me, tearing the handwritten notices from the wall the moment she saw them. The words ‘失踪’ (‘Missing’) rang in my ears as I riffled through all the news clippings. I found only one in English.
Thousands Still Missing
The number of people who disappeared during the Japanese Occupation and remain unfound is estimated to be in the thousands. To this end, the Colony has established a department to
help trace the whereabouts of those reported missing during the war. Relatives of those missing may submit an enquiry at the Missing Persons Department located within the old Supreme Court building within business hours during the week. The department is also in charge of referring cases to the police when foul play is suspected.
After reading the article, I untied the raffia bow around the letters. Counted twenty-two, all of them in small, sealed envelopes. A couple had stamps on them, but not the rest. There were no postmarks on any of them. The address, always the same, was written in Ah Ma’s hand and it made me think about the first time I saw her write, how surprised I was when I saw her lined, sun-stained hands cradle the pen the way someone might cradle a fine blade, how her words curled onto the page, round and smooth. I didn’t think about it. I wasn’t thinking about it when I slipped out the first letter, the one at the bottom of the stack. I wasn’t thinking about it when I pushed my forefinger into a gap in the seal and tore it open. No one would know, I thought. And I was right, no one could know that it wasn’t already opened when it was all found out, months later. I would open just one, I told myself. Just this one. I took the letter out. It was light and almost see-through, like a single leaf pressed within the pages of a book and forgotten about for years and years. The letter was folded into thirds and it crackled under my fingers as I smoothed it out.
Wang Di
During the next few days, Wang Di fought to push thoughts of the cemetery out of her mind but it came back to her as she ate and watched TV, as she made her collection rounds. Not even the noise of rush hour, the blare of cars telling her to get off the road, was enough to drown out the voices (the brothers’, Soon Wei’s, her own) in her head.
At night, her dreams came with greater urgency. In some of them, she was stumbling through Kopi Sua, looking for her husband’s face in the whorls of the trees. The rest were about her friends from the black-and-white house. Snatches of memory: crouching in the bathroom and letting Jeomsun plait her hair. Huay showing her a bottle of medicine the doctor had given her, tipping it from end to end so that the liquid in it sloshed musically back and forth, sending them into giggles. Children again. How they had stopped, the spell broken by the sound of male laughter outside the building. The fact of where they were. Wang Di almost welcomed these dreams but she always woke feeling as if she were the only one left in the world.
And I am. Leng could read. So could Huay. If only they were still around, they would be able to help.
So she decided. Once or twice, she tried to strike up a conversation with the neighbours as they passed each other in the corridor but she could not get beyond the initial ‘hello’ and ‘bye-bye’. Their interaction would last two seconds and the neighbour would be gone, scuttling sideways out of the lift before the door had fully opened, slamming the mailbox shut and leaving before she could make a comment about the weather. At first Wang Di wondered if there was such a thing as being too elderly for a granny flat. Most of the people living in the building were couples, the rest were widows who had outlived their husbands and now filled their time with grandchildren and mah-jong and line-dancing in the park. But at seventy-five, she was just about the average age of the people living there.
‘Maybe it’s my clothes,’ she said to the Old One, looking through her wardrobe of blues and greys and blacks. Everything mended and patched multiple times.
She found out just what it was upon arriving home with her collection one afternoon. There was a gathering of sorts outside a neighbour’s door – a clutch of three women, two of whom were putting on their shoes, already waving as they said their goodbyes in Mandarin.
‘Thank you for the pandan cake. It’s all too much but I’m sure the grandchildren will love it.’
‘No problem. Thank you for tea. It was so nice to –’
‘Oh,’ one of them said, spotting Wang Di and putting a hand on her friend’s arm. All three glanced over, and then, just as quickly, dropped their gazes to the ground, at their hands, before looking up with stiff smiles.
‘Good afternoon,’ Wang Di waved.
No one responded. They went on nudging each other until the one in front, the tallest, youngest-looking of the bunch, said hello, her pasted-on smile fading as Wang Di approached with her cart. She had missed the weigh-in today, as she sometimes did, and had to return home with her gleanings – a pile of cardboard stacked as high as a table, a bagful of drink cans that she had fished out of the bins near the hawker centre. The cans were making soft tink-tink sounds as she negotiated the cart past the women. All six eyes glued to her and her collection.
‘Excuse me,’ Wang Di said, as the women pushed themselves up against the wall to make way for her.
They said nothing.
When she was in front of her door, she heard someone whisper, ‘See? That’s who I was talking about. Cardboard Auntie.’
She moved through the rest of the day, dimly aware that she was going through the motions. First brewing tea and forgetting it. Then making dinner and finishing it before realizing that she had no idea what she’d just eaten; the only taste in her mouth was of bitter salt.
When she opened her eyes, it was morning. For a moment, between stepping fully out of a dream and opening her eyes, she saw Huay, then Jeomsun, the scar on her cheek dark with rushed blood. She was about to say something when she felt hands, unseen, pinning her down so she could only stare up and around her, at the blank walls; the ceiling, speckled with blood, that seemed to loom endlessly above.
Wake up, wake up, wake up. Wang Di pushed herself up to sitting and looked around her. Her home. Her things. The view of the other building outside her window that she was just getting accustomed to.
She was aware of her heart, loud in her chest. As loud as it had been a few months ago when she told the Old One about what happened in the black-and-white house, the way she had to hold her hands to her chest to try to calm herself, and how, in the middle of it, she forgot and let them fall to her lap, palms up like an open book, how he caught them there.
June 1943 – November 1944
In the long months that followed, I watched as the rashes on Huay’s body turned to sores, then healed to form faded marks up and down her limbs. She seemed to get better for a week or so before lapsing again into episodes of fever and sickness. This cycle repeated itself until my dismay at her illness turned to dread and a frustration that I kept to myself, the thought that she must be doing something wrong, that she wasn’t trying hard enough to recover. Jeomsun and I didn’t talk about it, but when her hair started falling out we took to fashioning it every morning to disguise the thinnest spots on her head. Each time her fever returned we saved what we could from our meals, or kept the morsels a few of the kinder soldiers occasionally brought so we could bring them to her in the mornings. These gifts Huay took with a gratitude that bordered on shame. When they cut our rations again (giving us soup with broken grains stirred through at night, down from a half bowl of rice) and we had to stop hoarding food for her, I wanted to apologize but left it. There was nothing to explain. Among the three of us was a silent understanding about how we should take care of each other: the three of us before the rest of the other women, and then, within that, each of us before the other.
The doctor’s visits were another source of worry. I was certain Huay would be declared unfit and taken away sooner or later, but he seemed not to see or care too much. Then a small triumph. ‘Did you hear them fighting? The doctor told Mrs Sato to give us more food. Said the soldiers weren’t happy with the state of us. Mrs Sato said she couldn’t do anything about it – she said the food was all going to the soldiers fighting overseas and that she couldn’t afford to buy things from the black market. They went on and on for half an hour like that, at least.’
I thought about the bottles of saké that Mrs Sato had taken to drinking in the evening, in plain view of anyone who chanced to be in the front room. Couldn’t afford it? ‘So what happened in the end? What did they decide?’
It became clear though, how their argument had ended – along with the soup at night, the caretaker gave each of us a half bowl of dirty rice, strewn with grit and chaff, but edible. The change was conspicuous. For the first time in months, my stomach did not grind at night and sleep came easily. I woke up still hungry, but not desperate. And though we didn’t have the chance to talk, not that morning, Jeomsun and I exchanged a look as we passed each other in the hallway, what her eyes said was clear: it’s fine now – we’re going to be okay.
The act of dispensing this largesse (forced as it might have been) seemed to suffuse Mrs Sato with a looseness and cheer she didn’t possess before. More and more, she would saunter in mid-morning, displacing the caretaker, who’d had to step in to count out change and dispense condoms in her absence. On these days, Mrs Sato would become rowdier as the day wore on. We all heard her. Late at night when the men had left, she would start singing to herself until the rickshaw arrived to take her away.
On New Year’s Day, she brought in a record player and sang along to the songs as the men goaded her on while waiting for their turn. She stayed past the close of the doors at ten, talking to the caretaker, her speech getting slow and slurred so I knew she was drinking. Then, a few minutes of silence. I thought her gone when my door unlocked and the caretaker’s face appeared, lit by the orange glow of a kerosene lamp.
‘She wants you,’ she said – the first words of Mandarin I’d ever heard her speak.
Rubbing my eyes, I got up and followed her down the hallway, into the kitchen. Mrs Sato was slumped over the table, a small bottle of saké in front of her. Her make-up had slid off from the heat of the day and her normally perfect up-do was slightly askew. For the first time, there was a softness in her face, the beginnings of a few lines on her forehead.
How We Disappeared Page 18