I don’t think anyone believed me. After a few seconds, when it was clear that I wasn’t going to explain just who these relations were, they went back to what they were doing, but quieter, staring from time to time. I could feel my face turning red so I stopped, got up and went into my room. As though they might be able to see what I was writing just from looking at my face.
I try to be careful. Sometimes, after I finish writing these letters, I fold them away or burn them. I tell myself that someone will find and read them and realize what I have done. That I was tempting fate. Lately, one of the sisters has taken to asking whom I’m writing to. She tries to look over my shoulder as she passes by, sucking the air from between her teeth. But I know she is illiterate so I don’t bother to shield the sheet of paper I’m writing on. Read it if you want, I told her once, pushing my chair back to allow her to look. She’d walked away, sucking even louder on her teeth. I should take more caution; all it takes is a letter reader and a coin or two. That’s what you would do, I think, if you received this letter one day and found yourself unable to read it. Then I tell myself that I shouldn’t be writing to you. I shouldn’t be thinking about sending these letters but I can’t stop myself. After everyone else in the room has fallen asleep – the boy in a corner of our bed and the other five women in the room – my words run wild in the dark until my voice is all I hear and I have to get up and go to the kitchen with sheets of paper and a pen. When I’m done writing, I tuck the letters under the mattress, right beneath my pillow and fall asleep the moment I close my eyes. One day I might be brave enough to send them, or to turn up on your doorstep with the boy. One day I might be ready to let him leave me.
Sincerely,
Anonymous
17th June 1946
Chia Soon Wei,
This will probably be the last letter I write to you. Or one of the last. (Sometimes I forget that I never send them anyway, or want to but never will.) It’s been a few months since I wrote and a few things have changed. I’m no longer living in the zhai tang – the same sister who tried to read my letters began to watch me and ask me questions. She started asking them in private at first, wanting to know which village I lived in before the war, where in China my parents or grandparents grew up, what happened to my husband. I told her that I lived in Bukit Timah, and that my family came from Shantou, and left it at that. But neither of my answers made her happy and she made that little sucking noise with her teeth again as I walked out of the room. She waited a few days before repeating the questions, this time from the other end of the dining hall with everyone seated and eating. The clink and murmur of mealtime dwindled to a low and I felt as if someone had pressed a hot cloth to the back of my neck. My answers came out stammered, and in the warm, crowded dining hall, they sounded hollow and unfinished. A silence hung at the end of my words and all around the room, dark eyes and busy mouths were waiting, waiting for me to go on. But I said nothing, I couldn’t, and went back to feeding the boy his rice porridge. The sister sat back and chewed, her jaw working in a rectangle like a goat’s.
I spent the next few mornings at the market, asking around about work. In the end, someone told me that a family she knew was looking for a nanny. I went that very day and got the job on the spot. The parents are wealthy, English-speaking Hakka people; they wanted a Chinese-speaking nanny for their two children. I’m picking up quite a bit of English from the children and their mother though I can’t read or write it of course. My favourite part of the job is reading them Chinese-language books and then going home with the stories in my head so I can tell them to the boy. My salary allowed me to move out and rent a shared room in Chinatown. I felt bad leaving but I knew I had to. It was the only way to stop the questions that were bound to come from the rest of the women.
It’s harder now, here, but easier, in a way. I live in the second-floor room of a shophouse with five other people; labourers, mostly, women who finish their day with dirt under their nails and dust on their clothes, and one amah, who wears a white-and-black uniform and sometimes brings home leftovers from her employer’s rich meals. Everyone has a plaid or floral curtain covering their bunk and it is behind this curtain that I’m writing. The landlady helps to mind the children (there are three in the shophouse building, including one of her own) during the day, and in the evening everyone makes their own food. The first day I was there, I asked if they paid for cooked meals and they hushed me, told me the landlady would suck me dry. Instead, I share a paraffin stove with my room-mates and trade ikan bilis, sambal, and halves or quarters of salted duck eggs. In the evenings, when it’s cool enough not to have to fan ourselves, the landlady plays her records and all of us stop what we’re doing to listen to ‘Rose, Rose’ or ‘Shangri-La’. The women talk about wanting children and tell me how lucky I am to have a little boy. ‘He’s going to take care of you in a few years,’ they say, and I want to ask why they put their hair up, why they chose not to marry but I don’t. There wasn’t any need to anyway, because Poh Ju showed me the burn marks down the side of her arm. A river of shiny, stretched-out skin. ‘Hot water,’ she said, peering over her own shoulder, a look of mild surprise on her face as if she hadn’t seen it before, or hadn’t looked at it closely for a long time. ‘I ran away the next day.’ She told me I would hear the other stories soon enough. Everyone had a good reason to be there.
I miss nothing about the zhai tang, except for the garden and my plants.
I’m sure you want to know how he’s doing. The boy is fine. He is healthy and finally gaining weight after years of eating rationed food and root vegetables. He doesn’t speak much, even though he must be around five years old now. Sometimes he wakes up in the night to scream and no milk or food or rocking will calm him. The other women in my room don’t mind. Or they don’t show that they do, which is good enough for me. One of them has a little girl of her own and she says it’s because of the air raids from before. That it will pass. I don’t ask her where her husband is and she doesn’t ask me. No one does. Whatever they (my room-mates, strangers, the hawkers I buy my groceries from every week) think, it is something charitable and I get offered extra powdered milk, and leftover cuts of meat and bone from the butcher’s wife when he is in my arms.
I want to ask how you are. But since I am the only one who reads these words, maybe I could say this: You are better ever since the war ended. You are living with your parents again, perhaps in their fishing village at the shore, or helping out with their pineapple farms that are doing so well now that people are starting to have more money to spend on food. You are still young and there is a woman next door with clear, round eyes, and dimples on her cheeks. She smiles at you whenever you pass each other on the street until you get the courage to ask to visit her at home one evening, you have nothing to lose anyway. Her parents like how hard you work, leaving home at five every morning and only coming home at six, and they nod when you ask them for their daughter’s hand. You set up home with her, maybe even building it with your own hands. There is a large front yard for herbs and a mango tree, and an extra bedroom for the children you will have.
This is the least I can wish for you.
Sincerely,
Anonymous
2nd January 2000
To my son,
If you’ve read this far, it would mean that you now know much more than I have told you in the last fifty-eight years. So much happened during the war but there are some things I have been brave enough to do, and some things that I just couldn’t face doing.
When I made up my mind to keep you, or rather when I realized that I couldn’t return you, I wrote these letters. I started the first few determined to send them out to Chia Soon Wei, whom I believe to be your father. And then I wrote because I couldn’t not. The same as when I kept you…because I couldn’t not. I didn’t throw the letters away either even though the threat of you finding them was enormous, especially when you started to read and write, because I wanted to use them to explain myself to you somehow.
I thought I could do it. I told myself that I had to tell you the truth when you turned eighteen. You had every right to know. When you reached your eighteenth, I changed it to twenty-one. Twenty-one turned to twenty-five. Eventually I stopped bargaining with myself. Like I said, there were some things that I just couldn’t face doing.
My only hope was that you would stumble upon this after my death and I’m glad you have now. I hope that it’s not too late and that you will forgive me someday.
Your loving mother
It took me ten minutes to run all the way home. The clouds were just beginning to break – a drop here and there – when I arrived. I got the shoebox out from the chest of drawers, found the piece of paper with the telephone number on it and dialled, thinking all the while that the roar in my ears was coming from my own head, my heart. I wanted to get it out as soon as I could, so when someone finally picked up, a woman, I said it straightaway – asked if she was Mrs Chia. She didn’t understand me, so I asked again, in Chinese. She said yes, so I told her who I was and who I might be to her. She gave me her address and I asked if it would be okay if I went to see her that evening. After putting the phone down, I looked out of the window and realized what it was, the noise. Just the sky. Falling open.
Part Three
Wang Di
Sometimes you don’t realize that you have been waiting for something, sitting patiently for years and years, like looking out for the postman when you are expecting an important letter. You don’t know until it arrives on your doorstep and stares you in the face. There is wanting and there is a kind of waiting drenched in hope. Like Wang Di’s name, ‘welcoming a brother’. The wait for someone who didn’t exist yet. Who might not ever exist, but was longed for.
She had been waiting for so many years that it was almost no surprise when the boy called. The coming rain had driven her home, the sureness of it in the metal of the air, in the sound of the trees, the dry ache in her bones. When she heard the phone ring she was still turning her key in the lock and it took some time for her to slip out of her shoes and reach the phone, so she fully expected to hear nothing by the time she said hello. But when she did and she heard his voice, she could tell who he was even before he told her.
‘Hello? Is this Mrs Chia? The wife of Chia Soon Wei?’
‘Yes, yes,’ she’d breathed.
‘I think – I think I might be your grandson.’
He didn’t sound sure. But she knew who he was. The Old One, she thought. Or more accurately, a form of him. You can meet someone’s aunt or nephew or cousin and wonder how these two people could be related, they were nothing like one another. And you could meet two people and see at once which parts of them were exactly the same. (Their eyes, the way they talked and walked, she told him much later.)
When they agreed that he would come and visit straight away, Wang Di didn’t want to hang up for fear that the boy was just an elaborate daydream or he would get off the phone and change his mind about coming to see her. So she sat there listening to the phone go boop boop boop in her ear for a minute before she got to her feet, wishing that someone else could have been there to tell her if this was really happening. She stood up, sat down again, and stood up to go to the kitchen. She filled the kettle and forgot to put it on the fire. Dropped freshly laundered clothes in the washbasin before realizing that they were clean. ‘Oh, stupid, stupid,’ she said, rescuing an undershirt and a pair of trousers, poking a finger at a blue-and-white blouse that was darkening wet. ‘I could have changed into that,’ she sighed, pinching her collar to her nose to see if it smelled old, of heat and sweat. ‘Stupid,’ she said again.
Then she gave up and gave in. Stood by the door to keep watch. When he appeared at the far end of the corridor, squinting at the numbers on the doors, she unlocked the gate and threw it open so he could see her. And he did, walking up to her determinedly, with a bowlegged gait, stopping only to shed his flip-flops and leave his umbrella outside the door. He walked straight in. The way someone might if they were used to how it looked inside her apartment. The way the Old One had, closing one dark eye to the mess. It didn’t matter. The boy didn’t care. He smiled. It was only when Wang Di tried to smile back, the corners of her lips trembling with effort, that she realized how nervous she was.
Watching him standing in the middle of the apartment she realized her legs were getting noodly-soft and she wanted to pull him to her and hold him there. She wanted to laugh and weep and cover her face with her hands, or at the very least, hold on to his arm as they talked. But she did none of that.
Instead, she cleared her throat for the fifth time and said, ‘My name is Wang Di.’
‘My name is Kevin. Kevin Lim Wei Han.’ He stuck out his hand.
She stuck out hers. A plump, warm hand and a rough, twisty-barked one met. They shook. Wang Di didn’t want to let go but she did.
‘Do you want something to drink? Milo?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
She ran into the kitchen, rummaging and tipping things over until she found the green Milo tin. A chocolatey malt smell filled the kitchen. Ten cardboard-tasting biscuits next to the hot mug. When she got back, he was standing up, looking at the news clippings that the Old One had cut out, that she had put up again on these pristine new walls just days ago. The woman in a traditional Korean dress stared back at them.
She could hear the Old One’s voice in her head, so close that she had to open her own mouth and spit out his words. ‘That,’ she pointed, ‘is a review of a book about comfort women. And that one is an article about how the comfort women in South Korea have been demonstrating. But they’re dying, the witnesses, one by one.’
He had nodded and nodded and looked at her with eyes just like the Old One’s. Like he understood everything. Right then.
They sat back down again and it was all she could do to stop herself from smoothing his hair, and later, from staring as he ate all the crackers she had laid out. Wang Di smiled just watching him eat. It was only when she quietened down, got used to the fact of the boy being in her flat that she noticed the little tape recorder in his hand. When she asked him what it was for, he looked at the gadget as if seeing it for the first time.
‘I’m using it to remember things. Like a daily journal. It’s not that I’m going to forget this,’ he said, ‘or anything that you say. It’s just…a habit. Like I can’t help it anymore.’
She nodded. She knew all about habits that couldn’t be helped.
The boy drank the last, sweetest dregs of his Milo and swallowed. ‘I’m here because my grandmother told me… She said she took my father from his parents during the war. She told me this and then she passed away.’
She bobbed and bobbed her head to make him go on.
‘But she did it to save him. She thought his parents were dead.’ He picked up his school bag from the floor, unzipped the top and got out a bundle of letters, spreading them out on his lap to show Wang Di. ‘She wrote all of these. She wanted my father to read them after she died but I was the one who found them instead…’ Here he shrugged, a gesture that made him look older than he really was. Then he took out a picture and pointed at a face in it. ‘And that one. That’s my father.’
Wang Di wanted to tell him that the picture looked like a facsimile of the one Auntie Tin had given her – and how much the man in the picture looked like Soon Wei when she met him for the first time. She remembered him walking into her parents’ home, dipping his head out of shyness. She wanted to say all this but a thickness had filled up her throat and she found she could only smile and nod, smile and nod; the tears gathering up behind her eyes, blinding her.
Kevin waited until he was sure the tears in her eyes were gone before he took a deep breath. ‘Was it – did you lose a child? During the war?’
‘Yes.’
‘So it’s true. He’s my grandfather. And you’re my grandmother.’
Wang Di shook her head. ‘It wasn’t your father I lost. Soon Wei and I never
had a child together. I was his second wife. His first wife died in the war. I – I don’t know how she died. I never let him tell me.’
‘Oh,’ the boy said, looking unsurprised, as though he were used to things not going his way, was, at his age (ten? eleven? Wang Di guessed) already sober to the fact of disappointments, of little things never quite adding up, of questions never getting answered, and never having any control over what was going to happen.
It made him seem older beyond his years, old and young in a way that children looked sometimes, when they smiled as little as Kevin did. It had only taken her more than fifty years, she thought, and what was fifty, when the words of the people you grew up with mattered so much they formed the breadth and depth of your life, shaped the path ahead of you. All of it had begun with her waking to the world, the name she had been given. The fact of her upbringing. And then, after the horror during what was supposed to be her best years, how her mother’s words, the shame foisted on her by herself, her family and everyone around her, had dictated the silence that shadowed her every move after the war. And it was this that made her try to explain it all to Kevin the way she would have in the very beginning with her husband if she’d had the courage to.
It was near evening when the boy stood up. He said he had to leave. Wang Di nodded, of course, of course. Then, ‘Does your father know all this?’
‘No. I did this on my own, mostly.’ He stopped then, the realization and the following pride of what he had just said spreading through his chest, up to his face in a slow smile. ‘I’m going to tell my father though. He will want to know. Can I – can we – come back to visit? After I tell him? I’m sure he’ll want to talk…’
‘Yes, of course, of course.’
How We Disappeared Page 29