Kevin
I unfolded the letter and saw that it had a single handwritten line on the page. In Chinese. I folded it back up. Already, I could feel cold pinpoints of sweat beading on my forehead and under my arms. I unfolded it again and squinted at the sentence. It didn’t make sense. Or it did make sense but the first word looked strange, wrong. It was a word I hadn’t seen before, alien and spiky like an ugly fish with too many bones; not knowing it made the following characters meaningless. I squinted at the three words – just three on the entire page, hovering near the top like birds on the wing, ready to swoop down and land any moment on a branch – until my eyes started to water. I turned over to the other side, again and again as if expecting to find a clue, something else that I could make out. Nothing. Then I got out the Chinese dictionary from my bookcase. Except I didn’t know where to start. I flipped through it front to back, back to front. I copied the word out onto a piece of paper, writing it out several times, making it larger and larger each time:
Until I couldn’t see the word anymore, I could only see lines and strokes and slashes – a pile of dry twigs waiting to be lit into a bonfire. Finally, I closed my eyes and wished my grandmother were here so I could ask her what the word meant. Except I wouldn’t be doing this if she were still alive, and if I were, she would probably give me a smack on the head for going through her things and reading her letters. It was no use. When I opened my eyes again, I saw that my thumb was covering the first character, so that what was left was 不起.
‘Mm, 不起’, I said out loud, and then, quickly, ‘对不起!’ I jumped to my feet and waved the letter over my head, making it crackle in the air. ‘I’m sorry’ it read. She was apologizing to someone. But to who? And for what?
I took the second envelope and tore it open. This one was longer but not by much.
對不起, 可是我不能放棄他。他是我的一切。 求求你。。。
Again, there were a few words I had never seen before, this time, I realized what they were: traditional characters instead of the simplified characters I learned in school. I covered up the unknown words straight away, or tried to guess what they meant from what they looked like. I already had the first three words so this message was easier. All I had to do was to look up some other words in the dictionary, the ones I should know but wasn’t sure about. In the end, this was what I had: I’m sorry but I cannot give him up. He is all I have. Please…
It came back to me then, how she had said ‘please’ that day at the hospital – ‘qiu qiu ni’– right before she closed her eyes. I thought about her writing these words, about the years and years she had spent, scared, waiting to be found out, until she couldn’t keep it in anymore. This was what I was thinking when I opened the next envelope. This one was different, looked more like the letters we’d been taught to write in class, not just a scrap of paper with a single line dashed across it like a hastily written note. There was a date at the top – 28th December 1945 – and it was properly addressed and signed off with just two characters at the bottom. Not Ah Ma’s name, I knew, because her name started with 林, Lin, just like mine, just like my father’s. This consisted of just two words: 無名, the first of which I couldn’t even read. I couldn’t read the words at the top either, the name of the person she had written to, but the three characters looked familiar. I went back to the MISSING notices and found the same name in the Chinese version. There. There it was, the name. I reached for the recorder, pushed the button and said the three words as clear as I could.
Then I had to look up the rest of the words in my dictionary, trying and succeeding sometimes, trying and failing other times, before writing them down in English. It was fifteen minutes before I could be sure of what she’d written, before I could put down my pencil and read my translation in its entirety:
You don’t know who I am but I am the woman who took your child.
I’m sorry. Please forgive me.
For the next few moments I could only hear the sound of my heart and her words ‘I am the woman who took your child’, ringing again and again in my ears. My hands were shaking when I drew out the next letter from the envelope and held it close in front of my face, the flutter of the page making little sighs and creaks, as if her words were coming back to life, struggling to breathe. This one was longer again, the words marching black across the page, taking up half of the white space. Too difficult, I thought, dropping it into my lap before opening the next envelope, then the next. Each one was longer than the one before. When I had unsealed the last envelope, I stopped and looked down to see my lap covered with sheets of white paper, all of them still holding the creases in them, some slithered down onto the floor around my feet as if trying to get away. All around me, pages and pages of words, pressed close to each other, as if in a hurry to get out of her pen and onto paper. There were dates on the rest of the letters and as I picked them up and set about putting them in chronological order, I realized it would take me a long time, much too long, to get them translated.
The phone rang and I had to run out of my room to pick it up.
‘Boy?’ It was my mother, ‘Have you eaten?’
‘Yes,’ I lied. My stomach made a noise then, a grating, curling sound and I looked at my watch and saw that it was past one.
‘Have you started on the maths worksheets yet?’
‘Um –’
‘Make sure you finish the pages I folded down. It looks like a lot but just do it a page at a time. Take a five-minute break when you’ve finished one –’ she stopped and I could hear her muffle the receiver to say something to a colleague. ‘So don’t forget… I’ll go over the worksheets with you when I get home. If you need my help, you just need to ask, okay?’
‘I know, Ma.’
I hung up and went back into my room. The first two letters had already given me clues, which needed remembering. I took out my tape recorder and pressed the record button and spoke into the side of it, ‘Chia Soon Wei, 53 Chin Chew Street.’
Then I went into the kitchen. From the fridge, I took out the tiffin of food my mother had prepared the night before – white rice, stir-fried choy sum, three slices of luncheon meat – and gave it a minute in the microwave. I ate standing up at the counter, with my textbook and my worksheets spread out on the table. I could not start. My mind kept going back to the letters and my mother’s voice, over the phone – if you need my help, you just need to ask.
When she came home that evening, it looked like she had been walking through a wind tunnel. Her hair, pinned back when she left home at eight this morning, was now loose, dangling off the back of her head like a strange bird. When I said hello to her she spat tendrils of black out of her mouth before saying hello back. In her right hand she had her work things stuffed into a cotton shopping bag and in her left, two plastic bags plump with takeaway packages. Her shoulders were tilted to the left from the weight of her office bag. She looked like a broken balance scale.
‘So, how was your day?’ I smiled and took the food from her.
She looked at me with one eyebrow raised to say what’s wrong with you. ‘Well,’ she began, in a way that sounded like if you really want to know, ‘There was an accident at the harbour. Now all the shipments have been delayed and I have to send emails to all the clients explaining the… Anyway, my boss said I could bring work home otherwise I wouldn’t be here now.’
‘Oh… Where’s Pa?’ The letters were jammed into the back of my shorts and I was ready to show them to him. Look what I found, I would say. And then I would hang about as he started to read them.
‘Parking the car. He should be up any moment.’
My father came into the room just then and my mother went to him straightaway. ‘Hungry? Do you want the roast chicken or duck? I got both because I wasn’t sure what you wanted. Oh, and I got an extra thing to share. Your favourite, oyster omelette.’ She said all this in the voice that she had been speaking to him in ever since my grandmother died, the same voice she had used wi
th him when he went to his Dark Place years ago. She rubbed his back and waited for a reply.
His face was more grey than human-coloured and for five seconds, he just stared straight ahead. ‘Anything. I don’t really feel like eating,’ he said, walking into the bedroom.
I would make a note of it later, on another tape. Warning sign one: when he says he doesn’t feel like eating. Warning sign two is when he gets that blank face – the face like he’s wearing a mask, flattening every emotion into nothing.
‘I have something to ask you. About Ah Ma.’
‘Shhhh. What about Ah Ma? Keep your voice down.’ She looked at the bedroom door, as if expecting my father was going to spring out any moment. I wanted to tell her not to worry. I didn’t think he was in the mood to sneak about and eavesdrop on a conversation he didn’t know we were having. (Warning sign three: when he starts to move incredibly slowly.)
‘I wasn’t shouting.’
She continued saying shh as she dropped her bags onto the couch and went into the kitchen.
I followed after her. ‘But I just wanted to ask –’
‘What? What did you want to ask about Ah Ma? Your father’s not having such a good day…’ She paused. ‘Or week. Better not talk about something that will upset him. I’ll set the table. You go and fetch him.’
I made a face. This could take forever. Just last night, it had taken my mother fifteen minutes to get him to the dining room. When we were finally seated and eating (not my father, who seemed to be chewing but not swallowing), I got the letters out, put them on my lap and looked down at them to practise my speech. I found some letters here that I couldn’t read. Hm, what could this possibly be?
‘Boy, what did I tell you about reading when we’re having dinner?’
‘But it’s not.’ I took a deep breath, then put everything on the table. Literally. Now or never, I thought, nudging the letters away from me so that my father could see it. But he had his head down, as if he were reading from something on his lap. ‘It’s not a book.’
My mother leaned over then and eyed the top page warily. ‘Is that Chinese? I know I promised to help you with your homework but I haven’t read Chinese in ages. It’ll take me half an hour to read one tiny paragraph.’ She dipped a fat oyster into chilli dipping sauce and popped it into her mouth. ‘Maybe your father can help you. Right? Your Mandarin is so much better than mine.’ She nudged my father’s arm with her elbow.
‘Huh?’ My father grunted. One look at his face and I knew he hadn’t been listening. A second, closer look at his glazed-over eyes told me that giving him the letters would be a bad idea. My mother was dropping pieces of food onto his plate but he didn’t react. Instead, he seemed to be having a private conversation with his meal.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘It can wait.’
That night, I dreamed about walking in Chinatown, through an open market. I went past a stall offering dried and salted fish, another red wooden clogs. There were rows and rows of vegetables, dewy-moist and spread out on top of a cardboard box, and rolls of cloth which a spectacled man was hawking from the back of his bicycle. I had just spotted the ice-cream man, was thinking about getting an ice-cream sandwich when I felt a hand, cold and bony, around my wrist.
‘There you are. I thought I’d lost you.’ It was my grandmother, except she was wearing someone else’s face – her eyes were more hazel than black, and her hair was dark and cropped close to her face. ‘Come on, hurry up,’ she said, pulling me towards the five-foot way with one hand as she ripped posters off the pillars and walls. ‘MISSING’ they read. And then I saw my father’s face, a stern black-and-white photo of it in the middle of each poster. ‘MISSING’ the posters kept screaming. But the more she tore and ripped and clawed, the more of them appeared, tiling the walls ahead of us. My grandmother kept on, until she became a whirlwind of movement, dragging me through the street so quickly that my feet lifted off the ground eventually and I was just sailing above her, watching.
‘Stop, Ah Ma!’ I called out. I was feeling motion sick, airsick. I called out until she slowed down and stood still.
‘Here,’ she said, handing me a piece of chalk. ‘Now, write.’ We were standing in front of my empty classroom, right in front of the blackboard. It had been scrubbed clean and was waiting to be filled with words. ‘Write,’ she repeated. When I didn’t move, she shook her head and wrapped her hand around mine, guiding me to form the word ‘wo’ in Chinese – me. We wrote and wrote, slowly cramming every square inch of the board with 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我 我. We wrote until I couldn’t feel my own hand any longer, until her hand, wound fast round mine, felt like my own.
‘When will we be done?’ I asked.
‘When we finish.’
I turned my face to look at her and there she was again, just as I knew her, face dappled with age spots, lined around her eyes and mouth. ‘You’re back.’
‘Not for long, ah boy, not for long.’ She let go of my hand for a moment, leaving me to write 我 我 我 我 我 on my own while she reached over to push a button on her tape recorder. I watched the tape band roll forwards and spool around the empty reel.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, still writing. I wanted to stop writing to see what would happen but I didn’t dare to. ‘What are you recording?’
Ah Ma kept quiet but tilted her chin to mean this, whatever, everything.
It was clear when I woke up what I had to do, who I had to ask for help, but it was three full weeks until I had to go for remedial classes. I couldn’t wait that long.
The thing about wanting someone to go away is that they know it somehow, they feel it, and everything they do slows down – their speech, the time they take over breakfast, even putting on their shoes. My mother took five minutes explaining how I was supposed to heat up my food, and my father had his shoes on and was ready to go when he realized he didn’t have his keys or wallet with him. Once they were out of the door, I changed into my school uniform and packed my bag for the day – pen and paper, the recorder, and a plastic folder with all the letters tucked into it.
It was after nine when I arrived and there were rumblings within the walls. If I stood still, I could hear a high note from a flute, the tap-tap of a snare drum from the music room where the symphonic band was practising, trying to get a gold at the nationals this year. I went to the reception area, past the principal’s and the administrator’s station, where I had to sit and wait for my parents just a few days ago, until I got to the door labelled ‘Staff Room’, and knocked. When no one came to the door, I opened it and went in, walking past tables strewn with papers and stacks of exercise books. Some had photos pinned up on the low cubicle walls and a few had corners crammed with toddler-sized soft toys, half-deflated balloons, teacher’s day cards signed with multi-coloured signatures from years before. There were posters on the walls with pictures of rivers and snow-capped mountains and long, steely bridges with captions below like ‘BE THE BRIDGE’ and ‘A teacher ignites the fire that fuels a student’s thirst for knowledge, curiosity and wisdom’. There were desks with heads bent over them but no one looked up when I walked past. I saw her from a distance, hunched over, a vicious red pen in hand. Unlike the others, I could see the surface of her wooden table, glass-topped and shiny. I wanted to turn and walk back out but I reminded myself of the letters in my bag.
‘Lao Shi,’ I said as I approached her.
She looked up, eyes owl-like behind her reading glasses. She took them off, replaced the cap on her pen and said, ‘Wei Han?’
I saw her eyes alight on the blue square of cloth pinned to my left sleeve which I had to wear for another forty-one days. For Ah Ma.
‘Do you have questions about the homework?’
She seemed to be in a good mood, I thought, relieved. I reminded myself to smile as I brought the letters out of my bag and held them out in front of me with both hands. An offering, a gift. ‘Lao Shi, I have problems reading this,�
�� I said, speaking in Mandarin the way we were supposed to in her class.
She put her glasses on and took the pages from me. ‘What’s this?’
‘These are old exercise sheets I found. I’m trying to read more to improve my Chinese… Except it’s written in traditional script and I can’t. It’s quite difficult. A lot of the words aren’t even in my dictionary and I don’t know where to start.’
I had rehearsed the story on the bus ride, during the walk from the bus stop to the school gate. It had sounded reasonable in my head, good even, but now that the words were out in the air, I realized it stank of nonsense from start to finish. I had to keep myself from snatching it from her hands and running out of the staff room, out of the school building, all the way back home. The seconds slowed down as I watched her leaf through what I’d given her and I felt the space that my words had taken up bubble up between us. It took up so much room that eventually, Lao Shi had to sit back in her chair. She sighed, dropped the sheaf of papers on her desk. ‘This is not a story.’
My face turned red and I tried not to stammer when I said yes, it was, it was a reading exercise I found from an old exam script.
‘Who are you trying to fool? I can call your mother and ask her about this, you know.’
My neck and face went hot. ‘I’m sorry,’ I reached for the copies. But she waved my hand away and gathered up the pages, lining up the edges and corners before putting them into a cotton tote crammed with books and files.
How We Disappeared Page 20