In the end, I told myself that my parents had lost too much to banish me as well. My mother clung on to the hope that my brother might return one day and though I knew Yang was gone for good, I said nothing to her. My mother’s version of the truth – that her eldest son was stranded in another country, was surely making his way home – was the only one she could live with after my abduction, after the death of her parents in China.
‘Such a pity that you never got to meet them, your nai-nai and ye-ye. Both of them passed away in the same week, first my mother, then my father. I only got the letters months after the fact,’ she said as she chopped up sweet potatoes, tops and all, for dinner. ‘I made my own funeral offerings to them with what little we had and prayed for their reincarnation. I also prayed for you and Yang, that they might help deliver both of you back home…’ Here her words trailed off, as if she were still bargaining with her parents in her head – just one more favour, one more before you move on and take the shapes of your new lives. ‘I knew that they were ill but there was nothing I could do. All they needed was some medicine, I think. If I’d had anything to spare…’
It was this. Her guilt and the thought that I would never know if I didn’t ask now. ‘But what about the money? Didn’t you get anything? From the…the Japanese?’ I could hardly say it. The words.
‘What money? What are you talking about?’ Then it dawned on her, what I was referring to, and she put the blade down as if making a point. Shame or anger crawled up her neck, splotching it pink. ‘Don’t think for a second that we got anything from the Japanese. Even if we did, we would’ve given it back if it meant that you could be returned to us.’ Here, her eyes darted left and right. Whatever it was, the thought winged away as quickly as it’d appeared. My mother left the kitchen and I picked up the knife, a chipped, unwieldy thing, the cold metal a rude shock in my hand.
I let this fresh revelation steep in me for hours, let it gather in the pit of my stomach, believing it gone until I tried to close my eyes that night and found that I couldn’t. The fact that my family had gotten nothing, that I had suffered for nothing, was less a surprise than an additional fact that I had to live with.
Years ago, my father had made a dusting motion with his hands when he mentioned how daughters were meant to be married off, how his family name would, thankfully, continue with Yang and Meng. I was, in the words of my parents during their most desperate (poorest) moments, useless. Disposable. In my little cell in the black-and-white house, I had comforted myself with the thought that my time there might give my family some relief in the way of much-needed cash for food or medicine. That there, at least, I wasn’t absolutely useless. That it might make the difference between life and death for them. That was how I bore it, the rapes, the unforeseeable beatings, the humiliation of never having a choice when they told me to sit up, open wide, lie down and shut up. It was how I stayed my hand from reaching for the bottle of antiseptic and tipping the clear liquid into my throat, how I put the dress on every morning after my shower instead of ripping it, twisting the cloth until it became a pale-blue noose.
Did I do it to myself? Was it all me?
I was left to wonder what I’d been doing then. What reason I could give – if anyone asked or found out the truth – for doing what I had done in the black-and-white house if it hadn’t been for my family.
This voice, my own, became another voice out of the chorus I had to listen to at night, when the quiet of the house and the village gave way to whispers, altogether as loud as a bell tower in my head, I heard over and over again – Mrs Sato’s; the murmurs of the women around me, so soft they were nearly mute; the numerous men, at once faceless and distinct, and their deep laughs, thrumming through their bones and flesh and skin as they stepped into my room.
For the rest of the time I lived with my family, my mother and I spoke no more about Yang. All of them, Meng, my mother and father, avoided being alone with me, as if they were afraid any intimacy in number would encourage an outpouring on my part. I was, for most practical purposes, a person in quarantine; my sickness was without cure and kept eating away at me until I could hardly see anything of myself. All I could see when I looked at my reflection was Fujiko and it wasn’t long after my return home that I broke the only mirror my family owned, a cheap plastic thing kept in the main room, which I had to step on in order to shatter. When it finally did, the little frisson of pleasure faded much too quickly and I had to put my foot down in the shards to ease the pain I couldn’t reach. My father had walked in then, and looked at me as if watching one animal ravaging another. His face one of blank horror. It was then that I knew my parents might never again see me for who I was. My father said hardly anything to me at all unless it was by way of my mother; the things he did say were confined to the topic of food, either in a single directive: ‘eat’ or a question: ‘have you eaten’ or ‘aren’t you going to eat’ when I stopped midway through dinner. He couldn’t save me then, and must have felt helpless for years. Now that I was back, it seemed he was determined to make sure I could survive, albeit in the most elemental way, by bringing home food from the kitchen garden and making sure I ate. There was no malice in his demeanour, but his eyes flickered, lost, whenever they had to meet mine. There was only one way they could deal with this, one last thing they could do to secure my future.
‘I think it’s time to find you a match,’ my mother announced one evening over dinner. ‘Auntie Tin will take care of it.’
I said nothing and looked up at my father. His eyes were dull but he pulled the corners of his mouth up into what he thought was an encouraging smile. I simply nodded.
I took to going out only in the morning, before dawn. Sometimes I saw the night-soil man – stooped, old as water – carrying his full buckets from the outhouse and bringing back the empty ones. He would cross to the other side of the lane whenever he saw me and I thought at first that he was shunning me too, until he nodded one morning as I passed. Then I realized he had always done it, that people had always crossed the street to avoid him. Then another thought: that there were people who didn’t know who I was, what I had done. It was during one of these walks that I stopped in front of a house with teal-blue shutters, just like ours. I knew without knowing how that it was Huay’s. It seemed to be empty; there was no sign of life; no chickens roaming in the front yard, no guard dog barking. Not a sound inside either.
I went to my mother as soon as I arrived home. ‘Ma, do you remember Huay? Family name Seetoh. They had a little shop. Lived in the west of the village.’ The girl who had been taken along with me. The girl who did not come back.
‘Yes, of course.’ She didn’t look at me but concentrated on tapping out spoonfuls of ground coffee into a pot. ‘They bought a shop space in Ang Sua and moved there.’
‘Where? Do you have an address?’
‘Oh, no. I don’t know. It happened very quickly. Why do you ask?’ There was a grainy edge to her voice, warning me away but I made fists with my hands and watched as she lit a match and dropped it into the charcoal stove.
‘The girl… She was there too. In the camp.’ My face started to burn and I couldn’t tell if it was from the heat of the fire or from my words. ‘That’s where I got to know her. Huay and another woman. Jeomsun. They were my friends. We were –’
‘Auntie Tin is coming this afternoon,’ my mother said, working the fire roughly, making it spit. I took a deep breath to continue but she turned around and said, ‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t tell anyone. Not me or your father or any of the neighbours. Especially not your future husband, no matter how kind you think he is. No one must know. You need to forget her, Huay, and the other girl. They didn’t exist. You understand?’ She reached out and I backed away, thinking she was going to strike me. But she gripped my arm and pulled me forward, as if trying to shake me awake. ‘Understand? It’s for your own good.’
I nodded then wiped my face, rubbing the wet between my fingers until my hand became clammy, the
n damp.
‘Why don’t you go and wash? You need to look nice for Auntie Tin.’
I nodded again but went to bed instead. Remained lying there until the matchmaker arrived, just after breakfast. My mother had to come and get me, leading me out as if I were a puppet on strings.
Auntie Tin did not smile this time. ‘I’m not going to lie to you. It wasn’t easy but I found someone who’s interested.’ She paused to look at me, knitting her brows as if to add think before you reject him. She was the first one to hold my gaze since I got home and I looked back defiantly, wondering if my eyes were still red and how much my face told. The gold and jade on her arms were gone, leaving her strangely naked. Her cheeks were thinner and there were a few strands of grey in her curled hair but she hadn’t changed otherwise. I nodded.
‘He’s a bit older than you and a widower, but he’s reliable. A tailor. Hardworking. I usually don’t do this for the men but he had a picture and he gave it to me, to show you.’ Auntie Tin brought a palm-sized, black-and-white photo showing a man in his thirties from the chest up. His face was open, and there was a dimple in the corner of his mouth, as if the cameraman had caught the beginning of a smile. He wore a pair of dark-rimmed glasses, but his eyes shone through them clearly, looking right into the camera. I didn’t know anything else about him but I thought I could guess what his voice might sound like. He would have stories for me – ones that I would listen to and ones that I would not be ready for until years and years later.
I nodded at Auntie Tin. ‘His name?’
‘Soon Wei. Chia Soon Wei.’
Kevin
Time is a funny thing. Or time is relative, like I read somewhere. A relatively funny thing – how it speeds by when you have something to look forward to or when you need to get something done desperately (like trying to finish forgotten homework on a Sunday night by the light of a torch under your blanket, or when your Chinese-language teacher catches you in a lie and you have to see her at remedial class in three weeks). How it slows down when you have nothing to do. Especially when you have nothing to look forward to, to see how close you’re getting. Like walking in a big empty field and never getting to the edge of it. When you have both of that, both wanting and not wanting for minutes to go by, time wobbles. If I squeeze my eyes shut I can almost see it, moving in front of my eyes and under my eyelids in a white wave.
This was how time went for the next two weeks: slowly, when I was alone during the day, then much too quickly once the sun had set. I wanted time to keep still, for night to stop tipping over into morning but it kept on ticking and tipping and ticking, until my two weeks were up and it was the Sunday before the start of remedial week. I acted as if it were like any other Sunday, that it wasn’t the day before End Times, and accompanied my mother to the market. I was waiting for her at the aquarium stall when Albert sauntered up next to me. There was a cobalt and crimson Siamese fighting fish, with a tail longer and wider than its body. Fanned out, the fish filled up most of the space, no bigger than a coffee can. I was watching it and ignoring Albert when he started tapping on the tank, making it dart and peck at his finger each time it met the glass.
Before, I would not have said anything. Would have walked off, or pretended that I wasn’t bothered by how he was taunting the creature. Instead of shrinking away though, I remembered the way Albert had sat outside his flat for hours, begging to be let back home. One night his mother had left him there as, one by one, all the lights in the building opposite went out. It was close to bedtime when Ma went over to talk to Mrs Goh. Before he went back in, Albert had looked at my mother with a mixture of gratitude and fury – as if he hated being seen like that, his face puffed and shiny from his tears. Sometimes this was who I saw. Not Albert the class bully, but Albert who was sometimes made to kneel outside, who came to school with cuts from the bamboo cane all over his arms and was sometimes made to chew a handful of bird’s-eye chilli for speaking out of turn. After all that had happened last week, I saw him for who he was – no more than a child, like me, subject to the whims of the adults around us, to the world. We knew nothing.
‘Stop that,’ I told him now.
‘Stop what?’ But he did, putting his hands in his pockets. I waited for him to start shouting names at me. Instead he continued standing next to me. I saw his glance sweep the top row of goldfish, then down to the little mud-coloured ones at the bottom, meant to be dropped into the tanks of predatory fish as live feed, and I knew that he was reading the names. Arowana, kissing gourami, guppy.
After a minute he asked, ‘Did you finish your homework for Lao Shi?’
It took me two seconds to get over my surprise but I said no, there was so much. I’d only done half.
‘Me too… I hope she doesn’t get too mad. She’s scary.’
I could only nod. His mother came over then, her arms weighed down with plastic bags, two of Albert’s siblings at her side. He turned to me and waved goodbye, slapping his flip-flops hard against the wet floor so that brown water splashed up around our feet.
Monday arrived. I had been up half the night dreading the alarm clock. It felt like I had just fallen asleep when it started to beep and I pressed the snooze button so many times that my mother had to come in and pull the covers from me.
When the van pulled up in front of the school gates, I had expected Lao Shi to be standing by the main entrance, arms folded and waiting for my parents to drop me off, or for her to call me out the minute she stepped into class. Neither of those things happened. She didn’t even look at me. Not once. Not when we did listening exercises and dictation, not even when it was my turn to read aloud a paragraph of text. I made mistakes, tripping on words, skipping some entirely because I couldn’t identify the characters, but she corrected me, calmly, quietly, as she paced back and forth in front of the room. When I sat back down, I started wondering if it had even occurred in the first place. Maybe it was all in my head – my grandmother’s confession, the letters, me going to Lao Shi for help.
I had almost made it until the end of the morning, was packing my bag when it happened.
‘Lim Wei Han, please stay behind after class,’ she said, scribbling something in her notebook.
This is it, I thought, hoping it would be over quickly, whatever it was. A caning. Or writing I will not lie a thousand times. I would gladly take any punishment as long as it did not involve phoning my parents. Please, Ah Ma, I thought, do this for me and I will get you your favourite kueh every Sunday for the rest of my life. I waited for everyone to leave the room before I went up to Lao Shi with my head bowed, fingers braided behind my back. Looking sorry always helped.
A rustle. She’s getting her ruler out, I thought.
‘Here.’
I looked up to see her holding out a plastic folder. Flapping it in her impatience.
‘Go on, take it. And close your mouth.’
I could see the lightly-yellowed paper through the clear plastic, the decades old creases in it now almost smoothed out.
I think I said thank you. I’m not sure I did.
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to find out and I don’t want to know,’ she said, one foot already out of the door, ‘but the national archives might be useful. They have a website and a good search engine. It’s all in there.’ She pointed at the folder I was clutching to my chest. Then she was gone.
The library was cool and absolutely silent. The only other people in there, besides the librarian, were two girls, sitting in front of a book about dog breeds, turning the thick pages together.
I took a seat at the other end of the reading table and got everything out of the folder. Something felt different. I turned the first page and saw that there was a sheet of foolscap tucked behind it, brand new and crisp clean. The words on it were in English, written in Lao Shi’s flowing script. I flipped through the rest of it and saw that she had inserted her translations after each letter. I read all of it. All the way to the end. It was only then that I found the last page,
one that I had overlooked. It had been written on the back of the original letter.
‘Oh,’ I said out loud, making the two girls and the librarian look up; the librarian put her index finger to her lips.
The ink on this latest letter was bright blue and new. This was the last letter Ah Ma had written. After I had read it, I went to the computer terminal and typed in the web address that Lao Shi had written down for me. In the search bracket, I typed in Chia Soon Wei and pressed enter. The screen blinked, then, 6 Audiovisual and Sound Recordings. I clicked on the first link. It took me through to a page with information about the content – the date: 26/02/1983; what it was – audio recording; what it was about: Interview with Chia Soon Wei On His Experiences During the War. Below, in the synopsis bracket: Mr Chia Soon Wei, whose family was massacred by the Japanese during World War II, recounts his experiences during that traumatic period.
But there was nothing I could click on to listen to it. Instead, it said, No preview available. Contact us to request for access to the full recording.
I clicked on all six links. None of them provided a clip that I could listen to. When I clicked on Contact us the screen blinked again and sent me to a page with a telephone number and an address. I copied everything down in my notebook. When I stopped and looked around me, the girls were gone and it was beginning to get dark outside. The clock showed five past four.
‘It’s going to rain, boy. Better leave now if you want to stay dry,’ said the librarian.
How We Disappeared Page 27