Wang Di was sure she would never see him again. She stood outside, watching his back receding down the corridor. There was a ping and the boy waved one last time before stepping out of sight and letting the lift take him down with it.
Kevin
When the lift opened, I saw her right away – she was watching the corridor from behind her grill gate, and opened it as soon as she saw me. I almost fell over a pushcart, then a mountain of cardboard boxes because my glasses were all fogged up from the damp and heat of the walk. After I wiped the lenses and put them back on, I saw that the one-bedroom flat was mostly filled up with boxes and rubbish bags brimming over with random items – an empty aquarium, turned upside down, a set of children’s books. I followed her as she moved through the narrow space, pushing things out of the way, nudging a box closer to the wall, kicking a bag under a table. Then she swept her hands around her in an arc to say sorry for the mess and I smiled and shook my head and smiled some more.
The old lady was small, smaller than my Ah Ma, but mostly because her back was curved, like she had bent over for years and years and there was no way for her to unbend anymore, she was stuck like that. She stood in front of me and pointed to herself. ‘My name is Wang Di,’ she said.
‘Kevin. Kevin Lim Wei Han.’
We shook hands. It was the first time an adult had introduced herself like that to me and I had to repeat it to myself to try and keep it in my head.
‘Sit, sit,’ she said in Mandarin, removing a stack of fashion magazines from a chair.
Then she went into the kitchen and put a kettle under the tap, got out two melamine cups. Her teaspoon scraped the bottom of the tin, making me taste metal in my mouth and when she fanned out a handful of biscuits on a plate, her hands shook. I wondered if they always did that or if she was just nervous. As nervous as I was. Then she put everything on an upturned cardboard box and sat down opposite me. While she did all that, she kept her eyes on me, squinting and rounding them in turn.
I pretended not to see and tried not to stare at all her things scattered around me. The boxes and stacks of paper. The blue fabric wardrobe in a corner that had a cartoon print of cats and dogs on it. Her bed, the frame made of rusted metal, just an arm’s stretch away. Instead, I tried to figure out how I could say the things I wanted to say.
Then she got up again, brought back a framed picture, and put it into my hands. A black-and-white photograph of a man who looked strangely familiar, but who couldn’t be. He had glasses, with lenses almost as thick as my own and something else familiar. My father’s eyes, I thought. His straight mouth.
The old woman touched the photograph, and then pointed towards the altar. To the lit, red candles, a plate of apples and oranges, and incense sticks in a tin, smoking away to nothing.
I wanted to tell her I knew he was dead but the only words within my reach sounded harsh, wrong. ‘My grandmother, too,’ I said in the end.
She nodded, her brown eyes grey at the edges of her pupils, as if the colour were bleeding out.
I dunked the biscuits in my drink and stared at the oily swirls that rose to the surface, willing the words to come. She was tapping on the side of her cup with her fingertips and it was clear that she wanted to say something as well so I looked around me to give her time.
Something on the wall caught my eye and I had to get up to go to it. Clippings, I saw, taped up, from a Chinese newspaper, and a photo of two elderly women.
‘Comfort women. They want people to know what happened to them.’ She said this in a mixture of Mandarin and Hokkien, the way I turned to English when I couldn’t find the words in Chinese. The word she used was wei an fu, and I was glad I knew a little about it from the historical programmes they sometimes had on TV.
I nodded. In response, her eyes got shiny and she dropped her head. I realized then, what she meant to say, so for the rest of the time I was in her flat, I made sure not to look away from her so that she would know she didn’t have anything to be ashamed about.
We sat down and I explained how I’d found her, showed her the letters that Ah Ma had written and never sent out. All this in Mandarin, and in stops and starts because I couldn’t always find the right words.
Then I remembered the photo, the one my mother had cropped with a pair of kitchen scissors so she could slide it in behind the clear plastic compartment in my wallet. It was taken a few years ago at the Chinese Garden. The four of us at the foot of a bridge – me standing in front of my parents and grandmother. All of us squinting, half smiling, none of us quite ready for the camera. What the camera hadn’t captured was how my parents had held hands in the garden, and how I had let my grandmother hold mine as we walked along man-made streams and trees and rocks.
‘There.’ I put my thumbnail right below his face, though it was obvious.
The old woman brought it close to her eyes. She peered at it for the longest time and when she looked up again, she had tears in her eyes. She blinked and rubbed at them, turning away a little. ‘He looks so much like the Old One when he was young. Just without glasses.’
‘I wear glasses,’ I said, stupidly.
The old woman hesitated, then held her hand out. I took my glasses off and gave them to her. ‘Yes,’ I heard her say, ‘your lenses are almost as thick as his.’ Her face was a blur but I could hear the rustle of a handkerchief, make out a smudge of white being brought to her face. I let her hold on to them for a little longer so she could cry without feeling embarrassed, and to let myself ask the question I had been wanting to ask. I didn’t even have to close my eyes the way I did when jumping into a pool or waiting for a doctor to plunge a needle into my arm.
‘Did you…’ I began, ‘did you lose a child during the war?’
I waited and waited. The air slowed and turned thick hot in the flat. I heard the gasp of air as she breathed in, then, ‘Yes.’
I opened my eyes. I thought about my Ah Ma taking my father, still an infant, and running through the woods. I thought about telling my father that he still had a family.
Then she said, ‘But it wasn’t your father I lost. You’re not my grandchild. You can’t be.’
‘But –’
‘I was the Old One’s second wife. His first wife died in the war. I – I don’t know how… I never let him tell me.’
Then she got up and went away, behind a wall of boxes. I heard her rummaging about, opening cupboard doors and closing them again before she came back with a tin of butter cookies. She placed it on the upturned box in front of me. The lid was so rusted over and dented in places that she had to slide her fingernails under it to wrench it open. In it were spools of coloured thread, needle cases which held needles of varying sizes. The old lady scrabbled underneath all of that and got out two things: a leaflet, which I recognized at once, and a bundle of letters bound together with pink raffia.
‘Could you?’ She pushed all of them towards me. My hands were shaking when I went through the small stack of letters. I flipped past two before seeing it – my grandmother’s handwriting on the front of the envelope. The note inside was so short that I had little trouble reading it.
Chia Soon Wei,
My name is Lim Mui Joo. I saw your posters in the city today and I felt I had to write to tell you how sorry I am. I lost my family as well. Everyone. I wish you all the best and all the luck in the world for your future.
Lim Mui Joo
I looked up and swallowed. My Ah Ma, I wanted to say. Mui Joo must have been her birth name. Instead, I swallowed again and took a sip from the mug in front of me. I continued staring into the mug until the old lady touched my arm and pushed the leaflet towards me.
I picked it up, cleared my throat, and read. ‘My son was lost on 12 Feb 1942. Seventeen months old. Last seen in Bukit Timah.’
‘This was the Old One, my husband…looking for your father,’ she said, shrinking into herself even more and covering her face with her hands. Fingers ropy and twisted, the joints in her thumbs much too large. I imagined
her wheeling her pushcart along, putting an arm into the mouths of public dustbins to root around for empty drink cans the way I’d seen elderly people do sometimes. I always wondered where they lived, if they had families to go home to, if they washed their own clothes – always spotless – the old way, scrubbing them in the kitchen the way Ah Ma used to until Pa threw her washboard away. It was several minutes before she moved again, before she let her hands fall from her face. ‘All this time… He tried to tell me once but I wasn’t ready. It was selfish of me. I could have just let him talk. But I didn’t. It was always about me. Even in the last weeks of his life, his last days, it was about me. I never thought to ask him. I talked and talked and I didn’t even finish. Now he’s gone –’
I thought if she kept on crying like that, she would lose the colour in her eyes completely. The picture of her husband was still in her lap, and she gripped the corners of the frame now with her fingers as if she wanted to reach into it and pull him out.
‘Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe there’s still a chance.’
My father was never one for telling stories. I remember asking him for one, when I was five or six, when my grandmother still lived on her own in a flat a few streets away. One day my kindergarten teacher asked if everyone got bedtime stories and I had looked around me to see my classmates nodding and nodding. The thought of this new thing had clung to me until it burst out that night as my father was shepherding me into bed.
‘Can you tell me a story?’ I said.
‘A story?’
‘Yes.’ About dragons and seas and monsters and kings, I hoped, and lions and fairies and other worlds.
My father scratched his chin. ‘I have a story about how your ma and I started going out?’ he said, his voice going up at the end. He didn’t wait for my reply but simply started telling me about how he had gone in to fix a shipping company’s air conditioner one day and my mother, then a receptionist, had given him a mug of coffee and a biscuit, and asked if he wanted to grab a bite to eat, her lunch break was in ten minutes. ‘And I said, why not?’ He was up and walking away when he turned around. ‘Oh, I forgot: the end.’
After that night, whenever he was in a good mood (which was not always – maybe once a week), he would sit and tell me stories about pontianaks and tree spirits until my mother told him to stop, they were making me cry in my sleep. Otherwise I asked questions which he would try to answer. Questions like, ‘What do you remember about the war?’ (Not very much, just a victory parade in which he could only see legs.) And, ‘Where did you get that scar on your arm?’ (He didn’t know. He’d always had it.) The last question I asked was, ‘What do you remember of Grandpa?’ I remember the nibbling pain that I felt in my stomach when he looked away, as if he hadn’t heard me. When he did turn back, after a while, his face was blank.
‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘I’ve never known him.’
The following night, he had come in but we were both silent when he pulled the thin blanket up to my shoulders and left the room. I knew then, that both of us were agreeing to something, that this was as far as it would go, this short-lived ritual of ours. That it was no more.
The hour or so between my arrival home and my parents’ seemed to stretch on forever. When they finally came back, I made myself sit still as my mother started on dinner in the kitchen, as my father took a long shower before sitting down in his usual seat at the corner of the sofa. The news was on when I went to him, the shoebox cradled in my arms like a stray cat I’d just brought in from the rain. ‘Pa,’ I said. ‘I want to tell you a story.’
At first my father thought I was going to read him something from a book. One of those stories that was supposed to teach you an important lesson at the end of it. It could have been the way I started: ‘You know how sometimes people aren’t the people you think they are? But actually it’s okay because they become the actual people they are actually pretending to be in the end?’
I had practised this but of course it sounded mad outside my head. The way things do. Like a picture I want to get down on paper but ends up looking nothing like it.
I began again. This time I went slowly and told him about Ah Ma, about what she said at the hospital. Then I stopped for a few seconds to let him absorb what I’d just said, the way the maths teacher leaves the room sometimes after explaining a mathematical rule. He would announce ‘I’ll leave you to absorb it a little’, and then leave the classroom to come back five minutes later smelling of cigarette smoke. I’d expected my father to look surprised. To get up and leave the room. I’d expected him to protest and say that I was mistaken or that I was making things up. But he did nothing like that, just sat back in the sofa and listened.
I went on to tell him about the letters. And the newspaper clipping. Once I got there, all the words spilled out faster and faster. I talked about Lao Shi and the man in Chinatown, and how they helped me find the old lady. She was there, still living, but he wasn’t anymore. I paused to take a breath and my father said, ‘Who?’ His first word in ten minutes.
‘Gran – your father…’ The moment I said that I started to think I might have been wrong. I might have made a mistake somewhere. The old lady could just be another lonely old person sitting in her flat and wanting company. But now my father’s mouth was open, his eyes large. His whole face spelled out ‘HOW’. So I showed him the things in the shoebox. The letters and the tape with Ah Ma’s voice on it. I took everything out to convince him. But it was for myself as well.
With both hands, my father sifted through the papers, then stared, as if he didn’t know where to start.
‘How did you –?’
I didn’t try to answer him because I knew he wasn’t really asking a question. Instead, I left him alone to let him absorb everything I’d said, stopping the tape that I had been using to record what I was telling him and handing him the player so he could listen to what Ah Ma had told me, that day in the hospital. Just as I had. I left him, went into the kitchen for some water because my throat was paper dry and found my mother standing there, half hiding by the doorway like a girl playing hide-and-seek (not very well).
‘Did you hear everything?’
She nodded yes.
I drank my water, holding the glass with both hands because I was shaking a little, and got ready to be scolded for having put my nose where it’s not supposed to be, for having run around the island on my own like I had.
‘Come here.’ And what she did next was this – I went to her and she put her arms around me. The last time she did that… I couldn’t remember the last time she did that. And she pushed her face into my hair and held us both there. For a while I could hear nothing except the beat of my blood in my head because she had her hands on my ears. It got too warm standing together in the kitchen like that but I didn’t care.
Wang Di
As Wang Di opened the gate for the boy the second time that evening, she thought about the few times in her life she had bought a lottery ticket, about the unexpected fortune she had hoped to bring home. She’d imagined saying to the Old One, ‘See? We got lucky. It could happen to anyone.’ She wished he were here for this now. This windfall, she thought as she stepped back, welcoming the boy, his father and mother into her flat.
It was just as Wang Di thought it would be but quieter. The boy had called again a few hours after he’d left and passed the phone on to his father. Neither of them said much on the phone; he’d hemmed and hawed before asking if it was okay to visit that evening, if she wasn’t too busy. Wang Di laughed (wincing as she heard herself – too loud, too shrill) and said please, please come. All three of them arrived just fifteen minutes later, with plastic bags of fruit and ang ku kueh, ruby red, in a pastry box. She tried to do everything right, to remember to offer them tea, to keep her tears in and not to let her hands shake too much. She didn’t want to scare them away. And he had sat there, knees and hands together. Almost bowing as she got out the biscuit tin again and extracted the piece of paper that she had showe
d his son earlier. There were a few photos of the Old One from when he was in his forties and she fanned them out on the table so everyone could get a look. Then she handed the tin over to the man, Yong Xiang, and watched as he sifted through the reels of coloured thread and unfolded scraps, an IOU slip, a few receipts with the print on them entirely faded. The bottom of the tin was lined with paper and he pushed a fingernail along the edge until he got hold of the border, and lifted it right up. He knew immediately what it was; he had received a piece of paper just like it a few days ago. This one, though, was decades old, the paper leaf-thin. Under Cause of Death someone had typed and crossed out and typed again – war casualty. Chia Jin Lian was just twenty when she died, closer in age to Kevin than he was now. This realization made his face go still and it was a moment before he could speak again, could manage half a smile and say to his son, ‘Look, Kevin. It’s your…’ His mouth hung open as he scrabbled for the words. Next to her, Kim looked from her son to her husband and back again.
‘It’s your biological grandmother. Her death certificate,’ she said, the clarity of her voice shocking and soothing at the same time.
Nobody spoke for a while until Kim picked up the photo, holding the black-and-white snapshot, the one Auntie Tin had given to Wang Di so long ago, to her husband’s face. ‘You look like him,’ she declared. Everyone else looked from the photo to Yong Xiang’s face, growing pink from the heat and the tumult from all this information, and nodded sad and silent yeses.
Then Wei Han brought out the letters, the newspaper clippings, and the notices – exact replicas of the one she had just shown them.
‘I found them after my grandmother passed away,’ the boy said.
Wang Di held on to the sheaf of papers, turning them this way and that, and smiled. ‘I can’t read them. Never went to school.’
‘Oh, I could read them to you if you like,’ said Kim. And she did. Stopping in places to swallow a little, her throat cracked from the effort of telling. When she was done and Wang Di looked up again, she saw that Yong Xiang was standing by the window. He seemed to be looking at something far away. No one spoke for a while.
How We Disappeared Page 30