I saw less of Mrs Sato. Our time in the bathroom got cut short and we were watched more closely than ever by the caretaker, who seemed unnerved by the quiet suffusing the house. I refused to let Cheng Xun out of my sight and it took more than a week before Jeomsun could convince me to let her hold him while I cleaned myself.
It was one morning, as I watched Jeomsun rock Cheng Xun in her arms that I realized how little he looked. I’d refused to see it but it was clear now that he hadn’t grown much in almost two weeks and was eating half of what he used to when he was just a few days old. Instead of feeding, he slept or else nuzzled blindly, pushed his fists into my chest, as if wanting to burrow himself back into the quiet.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ I whispered to Jeomsun. The yellow of his skin was in his eyes as well, and had spread downwards, to his chest, and belly, even the soles of his feet. Jeomsun refused to look up. She had noticed it, I realized, and hadn’t wanted to alarm me.
‘I don’t know. Has he been eating?’
‘Very little. His appetite seems to be getting poorer and poorer… What should I do?’
‘The doctor. Ask Mrs Sato for him.’ She sounded shaky, from hunger or from fear of what she thought was to come, I couldn’t tell.
I tried to get Mrs Sato’s attention that day, shouting out whenever I saw her sandals pass under the door. She paused once, then went on, as if she hadn’t heard me, as if I weren’t there at all.
In the space of a few days came a shift in the air that seemed absolute. Instead of the caretaker’s footsteps and the tap of her cane, I was woken up by the sound of engines roaring past the gates. This continued all morning. We were simply left in our rooms to wait while footsteps passed back and forth in the corridor. No breakfast. No letting us out to go to the bathroom. Only the scrabble of rummaging and the shuffle of drawers opening and closing in the kitchen and in the front room. A little later, I smelled smoke. Burning paper. This was the end, I thought. This was how I was going to die. I hammered at the door for a long time and heard the other girls’ voices, their cries, until the smell of smoke faded along with the sound of boots outside.
The low whirl of activity in the house wound the air tighter, tighter. There was a roll of thunder. Then rain – a sound as familiar as my breath in my lungs. I guessed the time to be three in the afternoon.
Jeomsun shouted in Japanese, something pleading, urgent. Other voices joined in. The girl next door begged to be let out. She needed to use the bathroom, she said, and couldn’t wait anymore.
No one replied.
At twilight, Mrs Sato opened my door to push a bowl of rice across the floor.
‘What’s going on out there? Is there any news? Please, anything.’ Maybe I could push past her. I could try, at least.
She froze as if I had spat at her, then drew her arm back. The baby was in my arms and I turned away so that only the tips of her nails caught the side of my head. My ear was ringing and there was blood on my fingers when I touched my face.
‘You want news? They bombed us.’ Her chest was heaving. I would see Mrs Sato, decades later, whenever I came across pictures that showed the bomb’s sweep of destruction, what it did – simultaneously final but lingering. A wildfire that left nothing behind. But I didn’t care then. ‘My home town, gone!’ This last word, she screamed, slamming the door after her. The baby stirred, then stretched its mouth into a wide, red yawn.
The day it happened, the air was hot and still, waiting to break with rain. We had not heard anything for an entire morning. I was sure we were going to die like this. Forgotten and alone in our individual tombs.
Weak as she sounded, Jeomsun refused to give up. ‘Is anyone out there?’ she asked, in Japanese and then in Mandarin.
‘Can we be let out? Please, we need water,’ someone else said. No one used the words ‘leave’ or ‘home’ – as if the thoughts themselves were too painful to put into words. It was a fragile hope, one that we were afraid to bring out into the open. I said nothing; I didn’t want to wake the baby. That yellow cast on his skin seemed deeper, like a stain that was refusing to wash away. He slept heavily most of the time and I found it increasingly difficult to rouse him for what little milk I could provide.
After a while, the questions stopped. I felt the others tense, their ears keening for the faintest sound: the creak of a door; a light knocking against the windows in the front room; a rustling. It was just the wind, of course, and rats going through the kitchen cupboards. The tree outside, its branch tapping on the wall.
Finally, somebody said what should have been obvious since dawn.
‘They’re all gone. They’ve left us.’
‘Everyone, try your doors,’ said Jeomsun. There was something in her voice I had never heard before – not from her – a desperation, a pleading.
All around me I heard the thud of door against jamb, and the other women saying, ‘No, it’s locked, it’s no use, we’re going to starve’. I tried my door as well. It was locked.
Mrs Sato kept an orderly house.
Two nights passed before someone came to us. I had gone through all the tins I had stolen from the kitchen, the saved up little wrappers and twists of paper in my room. Found half a sweet potato. A tangerine that I had kept aside and half forgotten, the flesh leathery with age.
It was morning when I heard the familiar rattle of a truck, the grind of brakes on tyres. Then, men. Speaking Japanese. I felt the usual dread settle into my stomach. The baby was still asleep; I held him tighter and shut my eyes, wishing the outside away.
Then someone unlocked all the doors and threw them wide open. I had to turn my eyes away from the light pouring in. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that there were soldiers standing in the corridor, five of them, weapons at their sides.
A man yelled, first in Japanese, then in Chinese, ‘OUT! OUT! OUT!’ He banged on the wooden counter to make his point. I wrapped a piece of cloth around my child, got up as slowly as I could to prevent him from stirring, and stopped at the doorway to look around before taking a few steps out, expecting any second to be seized and thrown back into the room. Jeomsun was in front of her door. Her face was pale and unreadable. I wanted to tell her it would be fine, whatever happened it would be okay. I wanted to at least mouth the words to her but the same man shouted again, and there was a surge. All of us moved into the reception area. The front door was wide open and I could see the truck, still running and churning out exhaust, and the woods beyond it.
‘Go,’ the man said, not shouting this time but simply saying it, gesturing towards the door.
Someone moved, I couldn’t see who, my eyes were too much focused on the exit and the soldiers standing around it – their backs and shoulders tight, as if ready to spring. Someone moved and then all of us did.
‘Go!’ His voice cracked at the end of that single word.
I made sure my baby was held tight enough and I ran.
In a moment I was narrowing my eyes against the sun, and then opening them wide, because of the world outside the iron gates and my surprise that it was all still there. For a few seconds, there was nothing else but the scuffle and gasp of flight. Then, two gunshots, just behind. A woman’s voice. One clear, unrestrained scream. For a split second I thought about Jeomsun but I didn’t stop. I ran, making my way off the road and heading straight for the green instead, past the tall, wild grass, into the trees. I ran with both arms wrapped around my child, felt only then the coolness of his skin, his limp body, the shards of dry, fallen fruit embedding themselves into my feet.
Kevin
53 Chin Chew Street. I repeated the address so many times that morning – to the information lady at the bus station, to the bus driver, and then to several other people along the way, store proprietors and elderly men and women doing tai chi in a bit of green, open space, who looked like they could navigate the streets of Chinatown blindfolded, that the words started to sound strange, like a noise a baby might make when they are just learning to talk. To make sure I h
ad remembered it correctly, I played the tape of myself saying those words, that name. Another thing I did was to cross my fingers the way Ms Pereira did sometimes in class when it threatened to rain at the end of the school day. I did it every time I passed a shop that had its doors sealed shut, rust eating away at the metal gates. There were other images that worried me – buildings with their insides out, walls cracked and torn open to reveal wires and pipes, waiting to be plastered and painted over, made into the hotels and restaurants and spas that made the older shops (traditional, Chinese-medicine clinics, one-dollar stores, clan association headquarters with their unlit, smoky interiors, eating joints with just a few tables crammed into a spartan space) look like they had stayed still for centuries.
Here it was, Chin Chew Street. I held my breath as I followed the numbers up the road, exhaling only when I got to 53. Hung above the doorway was a large black signboard with faded gold leaf within the grooves of the Chinese characters. There was a mannequin standing in the entryway, and, next to it, a wide work surface for samples to be rolled out on, examined and cut to the desired length. It was an old shop, one of those that smelled of stale jasmine rice and incense smoke and didn’t seem to have working electricity; the only light seemed to come from the entrance and the picture windows at the back. The tiles on the floor were thumbnail-size and varied from shades of turquoise to peacock blue, and bales of cloth filled the shelf lengthways, threatening to spill and unfurl onto the floor. An old man was sitting in the back, hunched over a black-and-gold sewing machine. Every now and then, he made it purr, moving a long strip of cloth away from him as he did so. Then, without looking up, he raised his hand to say that he would be right with me and could I wait just a bit.
I stood with my hands hung by my sides. My palms were sweating so I wiped them on the sides of my school shorts. I wondered what to say, what to ask, how to react if this was him.
Even from where I stood, I could tell that he was quite old, in his early eighties and his back was slightly curved from bending over his sewing machine. I could see him sitting like that for decades and decades and was surprised when he stood up, at how straight his back was, how steady his stride. He stepped out from behind his sewing machine, draped a length of measuring tape around his neck, and peered at me.
‘Hello, are you looking for something? Or do you want something made?’
He knows, I thought, he knows.
‘Ahem. Erm. This might sound a bit strange and I hope you don’t mind me asking but is your name Chia?’
The old man cocked his head to the side and leaned forward so that I looked straight into his right ear. It was large and the ear lobe dangled fatly. The kind of earlobe that, according to my grandmother, meant you were rich or were bound to get rich. ‘What? Little boy, you have to SPEAK UP!’ He shouted these last words as if I was the one hard of hearing, then sighed elaborately before saying, ‘Some days are good, other days are bad.’ He shook his head and cupped a hand behind one ear in anticipation of my speech again.
‘YOUR NAME! IS YOUR NAME CHIA?’
‘CHIA? NO, MY SURNAME IS TAN.’
‘Oh.’
‘WHICH CHIA ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?’
I thought about telling him never mind and then leaving to go to the nearest bus stop. I could get on the first bus out of here and forget about all of this. I looked around and saw that a couple was sitting outside a cafe across the street, staring and not even trying to hide it. The old man was still waiting for an answer so I took a deep breath, filling my chest.
‘CHIA SOON WEI. HE USED TO LIVE HERE. AT THIS ADDRESS.’
‘OH!’ he said, his face and eyes bright wide and open now. ‘CHIA! HE USED TO WORK FOR ME! DELIVERING CLOTH AND PACKAGES TO PEOPLE, DOING SEWING JOBS THAT I GAVE HIM. THAT WAS BEFORE THE WAR.’ Then his voice softened, and he slumped a little, as if the effort of remembering tired him.
‘They had a child, I remember. I never met his family then but I remember him giving out red eggs during the baby’s full month celebration. But things changed when the war got closer. I had to let him go because the shop wasn’t doing so well. It was a tough decision but I had to do it. To save my business. He moved out of the city and into his parents’ village, I think. He came back after the war, thinner, looking older than he was, needing work and a place to stay. I gave him his old job back and let him stay here for a while’ – he pointed at the door leading to the back of the shophouse – ‘but he moved away after a few years. His wife was in poor health and they wanted to be somewhere quiet.’
‘And the boy?’
Fingers pointing skyward, he waved his hand, meaning no more, nowhere, nothing. ‘We never spoke about it… And to be honest, I was afraid to ask.’ A look of regret came over his face before he glanced up in surprise, ‘How did you know it was a boy?’
‘I – When was this? When did they leave?’
‘Oh, about forty years. Almost fifty,’ he said, closing his eyes. ‘So many years. Gone so fast.’
Fifty years ago. I had to swallow before I asked him the next question. ‘Do you know where he is now?’
He shook his head no. I felt my feet getting heavier, sinking into the ground. This was it. A dead end. My mouth opened, as if on its own accord, and I heard a croak rising from my throat.
‘Are you okay, boy?’
The old man came closer, stepping over the threshold of his shop and reaching out with his arm, as if he thought I was going to fall over. I shook my head, and put up my hand at the same time. ‘Yes, yes,’ I mouthed.
‘Why don’t you come in? You want some water? Or I could make you a cup of tea. Or Milo.’
I thought about the stories my mother had raised me on, stories about bomohs, witch doctors, how they gave children sweets and sugary drinks to reel them in. And strangers who would lure children into vans and then sell them across the border. I remembered her face as she said heaven knows what happened to those disappeared children. Heaven knows, she said, her eyes stretched round. Then I looked at the tailor with his tape measure, and the parting in his hair that shone brightly pink. I thought about the soft-boiled egg that my mother had put out on the table next to the bread and jam, and regretted having left home without eating anything.
The man came back with a glass of water and three chocolate biscuits on a plate, and went away again while I drank and ate. ‘Here,’ he said, setting down a stool so insistently that I felt compelled to sit. He perched across from me, in a chair dragged out from behind his work table. ‘I really wish I had asked. It was obvious though, that he had been through something during the war.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know exactly. He never told me but it was easy to guess. Lots of things happened to lots of people during the occupation. Didn’t your grandparents tell you stories?’
A wash of memories, of all the things my grandmother used to talk about, rushed through me. Nothing, not one word. I shook my head, no.
‘Most people prefer not to bring it all up again. I was lucky, nothing bad happened to me or my family. Those three years and eight months weren’t so bad for me, in fact. Many Japanese officers came to me regularly to get tailor-made clothing for themselves and dresses for their girlfriends. We lived quite well during the occupation. Despite everything…’ He shook his head, looked as if he was about to say more, then changed his mind. ‘What’s that?’ he said, pointing at my left hand.
I looked down to look at what he was pointing at, was surprised myself to see the dull grey machine whirring away. ‘Oh, this is going to help me remember things when I can’t see so well anymore.’ I tapped on my glasses; the thickness of it made a dull tik-tik against my fingernail.
He nodded again before he asked, ‘Why are you looking for Chia?’
Because he could be my grandfather, I thought. Because finding him could save my father from spiralling down into the dark. ‘My grandma just passed away and I think they knew each other. Do you think you might have their address? Or teleph
one number somewhere?’
‘My condolences…’ he said, bowing a little. ‘I can ask my wife. She’s the one who manages our address book but she’s not here right now. It’s all so long ago…’
‘Oh. Okay.’ I blinked and swallowed, not knowing what to say anymore. ‘I guess I should –’
‘This is important to you.’ He fixed me with a gaze so direct that I had to look down and pretend to fuss with my hands. ‘Wait,’ he said, before fading away into the depths of his shop. He came back with a notepad and pen. ‘Write down your name and phone number. If I find something, I’ll give you a call. I can’t promise you anything though.’
I nodded, letting him know that I understood. Forty years ago, fifty. He’s never going to call, I thought, listening to his sewing machine stutter alive as I walked away.
I arrived home in the afternoon shouting, ‘I’m back’ – before remembering that no one was there, not my parents, not my grandmother. It felt strange stepping into the quiet apartment on my own, as if I had just come back from a trip away, much longer than a single morning.
All the rest of the day, I waited by the telephone, jumping up every time it rang. My mother called in the afternoon to make sure I hadn’t set fire to the apartment. Twice, I picked up the phone only to get Albert shouting abuse in my ear (‘Chao ah gua! Retard!’). At around six, the phone rang. When I said hello there was a pause, and then the crack and shuffle of the receiver being passed from one ear to another. Albert again, I thought, and was ready to put the phone down when the old man’s voice came over the phone.
How We Disappeared Page 23